Uzumaki

Target

Satsuki couldn't help but feel slightly overwhelmed at the sheer height of the trees before her. They stretched far higher than anything in the village, and the wire walls alone made her uneasy with the warnings wired onto them. The canopy of the thick-trunked trees was so thick that it may as well have been a ceiling.

'Forty-Fourth Training Ground'

"Four," Naruto said, face dropping. "Too many fours... we're going to die..."

Satsuki rolled her eyes, and hit Naruto gently on the back of the head. "Shut up, idiot."

"Hmph! Don't tell me the name Forest of Death doesn't make you a little scared!"

Sakura huffed. "You two had better not argue!" she said. "I won't be able to deal with five days of your bickering."

"Satsuki's just tryna be a hard-ass!" Naruto said, but it didn't take much to see that he was trying to reassure himself more than anyone else. "It does look scary, right, Sakura-chan?"

"I dunno about that..."

'Sakura-chan too...?'

"Well, uh, I was just testing you to see if you'd agree. Nothing about this is scary, not after that guy we had for the written test! He was scarier! I'm Uzumaki Naruto! I can take this!"

Naruto was a bad liar at best, but this was possibly some of his worst work. He wasn't good at going into his own bathroom at night, let alone a large forest filled with poisonous, over-sized, and carnivorous organisms.

"We've got a scroll of Earth," Satsuki said. "When we go in, we've got to get a scroll of Heaven as soon as possible."

Naruto waited for the true meat of Satsuki's plan to shine through.

"And then we run."

His stomach dropped.

"Is that our plan?" he said, the hesitation in his voice showing.

"Do you have a better one, Naruto?" Sakura said warningly, folding her arms.

Naruto looked at the colossal trees, huge gates, and heard the worryingly loud tapping of a centipede's legs.

"Uh... no," he said. "Sounds good."

--

The three of them ran like there was a demon hot on their heels.

Although Sakura had been informed of the over-sized animals and worryingly high fatality rate in the Forest of Death, nothing prepared her for the sight of a skull peeking out from underneath the trunk of a tree.

Her breath quickened, her palms sweating, and Sakura swallowed nervously as they ran forward.

'Don't think about it. Gotta move, Sakura. Can't think. Move. Don't think. Move.'

They jumped from tree to tree, scroll safe in Satsuki's pocket, hands and feet and bodies pushing off with strength and energy from every branch they hit, until, after half an hour, Sakura spoke.

"If we carry on like this," she said, heaving for breath, "I'll be exhausted..."

Satsuki nodded. "Let's stop and plan for a moment."

Although they stopped in a small clearing to relax, Sakura was very aware of how on end Satsuki appeared to be; her eyes scanned the surroundings quickly, calculating before she spoke.

Naruto shrugged. "We haven't seen anyone yet," he said. "That's good, right?"

Neither of them responded immediately, with Satsuki looking anxious before she spoke. Her eyes flitted to the dark of the wood that light could not penetrate.