Sakura set herself against a tree, trying to ignore the drying blood on her hands and hoping to disappear from view entirely as she watched Ryoko serving tea and talking to the other Konoha ninjas that had come upon them.
In the time between when she had left and Ryoko had slowly not limped into camp with the other two older shinobi, she'd had another encounter with ninja that had ended badly. Once again, they had given some sort of threat, and she had reacted.
Over-reacted in her opinion. Or at least half her opinion.
She was digging her hands into the wood of the branch underneath her in order to keep from moving forward.
Maybe it was worse right now because she had a personal issue with Ryoko, but she didn't want the girl killed. She only wanted her to know her place.
But at the moment, she didn't trust herself to know where to stop.
Instead, she turned away before Sasuke could wake up. There was no telling what she would do when that happened.
She leaped away not heeding much of anything save a need to be away, counter to that part of her that wanted to have it out with Ryoko. At least the other voice wasn't saying about killing Ryoko, but she still couldn't trust herself.
The pink-haired kunoichi moved recklessly until she was too tired to go further, or at least so tired she thought she couldn't go further.
She stopped to sit down and take a deep breath, and smelled...
...SMELLED!...
...the people following her.
It wasn't anything she wouldn't have smelled normally, not the way she was starting to realize that she could see better in the dark than she used to be able to. But she was aware of it, and she wouldn't have been before.
"Whoever's out there, stay away from me," she called out. "I don't have any scrolls and...it's...it's not safe."
Someone stepped out into view.
"Looks like we have a little rabbit whose lost her team," he said. "Let's say we see about playing."
Sakura stood up and swallowed as she listened to the sadistic nature of the voice. This wasn't like the other team that had made the misfortune of threatening her. There was real malice.
She hesitated as they came in, but the leash was slipping whether or not she wanted it to or not.
"Please," Sakura said, one more time.
Shikamaru turned a corner and froze upon seeing the broken and shattered form of a Takigakure ninja staring sightlessly up into the sky. He staggered back in surprised for a moment looked up into trees.
"EEE!" Ino shrieked as she turned the corner and joined Shikamaru.
"What is it did you see a..." Choji froze as he turned the corner himself and saw the body standing there.
"Quiet down!" Shikamaru snapped in a low voice.
"Is she..." Choji started to ask.
"Dead," Ino said with a chill, looking up toward trees. "She fell, think it was an accident."
"Not unless she was accidentally stabbed first," Shikamaru said. "And where's her team, did they just leave her like this? No, some other team killed them and took their scroll."
"I don't think so," Choji said, pulling a scroll out from where it rolled into the nearby brushes.
"You mean there's some lunatic out here just killing people for the hell of it?" Ino asked, nearly frantic.
"And on top of that," Shikamaru said taking out his team's scroll. "It's the wrong kind of scroll for us."
"Let's get out of here," Ino said.
Shikamaru nodded and stood up.
"Let's take the scroll with us," he said as they picked up and moved on, cautiously.
Anko could feel Orochimaru nearby, but she hadn't yet found the man. He was hiding and doing it well, but that only made sense. The longer it was taking her to hunt for the man, the more she was realizing that it was very likely that he'd have to want her to find him.
The Anbu teams had made contact with her early the previous morning, and now they were all looking for the intruder, with the possibility that it was Orochimaru or one of his disciples.
The fast teams should have been reaching the tower by now and she was going to need to be there soon. To make sure everything went appropriately for the teams that were there waiting for the next phase of the test.
No sense giving the over-eager a chance to assassinate their competition in between tests.
She was going to give the search one more hour before leaving it to the Anbu teams, and had already told them as such.
The sounds of screaming and fighting rose up periodically in a number of places, but it wasn't giving her any clues. That was normal for the test, after all.
Ino and Shikamaru discussed what to do as Choji sat in a low tree branch above them snacking.
"Is that Sakura?" he asked.
"Huh?" Ino and Shikamaru asked.
"What would Sakura be doing here?" Ino asked. "She's not even on a team."
"Well, she was watching the nervous girl talk to Neji and Lee from last year's rookies," Choji said. "But now she's off and running that way."
Ino and Shikamaru leaped up join him and watched caught a last look at a pink-haired girl leaping off through the trees in the distance.
"What the hell is she doing out here?" Ino gasped. "She could get hurt in a place like this."
"And we can't," Shikamaru asked with a sigh and shaking his head. "We'll have to get her and make sure she stays with us until we get out here. I'll bet she's trying to help Sasuke. What a pain."
"Really, to do something so reckless just to impress my Sasuke," Ino said, shaking her head.
Shikamaru turned and gave her a narrowed look.
They went off in pursuit of their former classmate, without apparently gaining any ground on her. Slipping higher into the branches for a better view of the area ahead of them, and Shikamaru froze as he hit the branch first and saw what was happening ahead.
Sakura again had that impression of two sets of emotions in her head as the first ninja came in at her.
He came in with a short wakizashi rather than a kunai and slashed out at her. In a move she'd only witnessed or read about, Sakura sidestepped the attack and caught the attacker's weapon hand with her own. The attacker's own overconfidence made it easier for her to disarm him and take the weapon for her own.
Sakura knew that ninja were expected to kill, and expected that killing this one was truly necessary to her survival. But the brutal pleasure she felt at driving his weapon into his own chest, slipping between the rib cage to impale the heart was nothing she expected or wanted.
Turning her eyes away from the look on the man's face as she twisted the knife, she found his team members coming in, faces enraged. At least until she snapped the wakizashi blade in her hand and tossed it across the field to strike into the chest of one of the two attackers.
The last paused and stared in turn at each of his comrades and the scared-seeming pink-haired girl that had just killed them, shortly before a predatorial smile replaced Sakura's expression of disgust and terror for just a brief second before she launched herself forward at the faltering third ninja.
He recovered himself briefly as Sakura pounced and he slashed outward with a kunai knife stabbing it into the pink-haired girl's hip as she landed on him. He had a close up look of green-slitted eyes that looked at him with fear and pity or a slight desire and blood lust.
Then she started to tear him apart.
"No, stop it," she shouted helplessly at the same time she was thinking. "They would have killed me. So I killed them. They deserve this."
If it was just we or us or you, Sakura might have been able to latch onto the idea of someone using a possession jutsu on her as a tool. But everything that came, even the anomalous ones were...were hers.
"As the last ninja died brutally screaming," Sakura shivered violently, forcing herself up and away from the dead bodies and trying to limp into the trees.
"Did, did you see that?" Ino asked in shock.
"I did," Shikamaru said weakly, trying to process what he'd just seen.
"When did Sakura learn how to do...that?" Choji asked.
"Oh, this is a real a pain," Shikamaru said, before turning toward Ino. "What do we do?"
"That's...that's not Sakura," Ino said. "It couldn't be. If it is...Why are you asking me?"
"Because it's Sakura," Shikamaru told her pointedly.
Ino swallowed and thought back to not so many years previous, before she and Sakura had become enemies. She remembered protecting the pink-haired girl from bullies, and doing everything together for several years.
Before they'd both decided that they like Sasuke.
What she'd just seen wasn't the Sakura she knew. There had to be an explanation for this.
"Well," she said. "We are a capture team, aren't we? It's just...that person."
"Right," Shikamaru said. "Let's do this."
Sakura reached her feet despite the pain, surprised that any part of her could still think clearly or think to stand after that injury.
She was proven right when her leg refused to obey her desires and simply crashed her back to the ground. As she hit her back, which still was inflamed with whatever had been done to it, she gasped out, almost forgetting not to scream and draw attention.
In trying to stand again, she put most of her weight on the good leg and hopped her way towards a try in order to fashion herself a crutch.
And the knife was still stuck in her leg.
She reached a fallen log and stopped there to sit and catch her breath and give the wound better attention.
The pink-haired ninja reached to the kunai in her hip and carefully removed it with a quick, straight pull that came with a short yell. Immediately one hand was pressing down on the wound and the other was reaching for something to make a bandage with.
In looking up, she saw Ino stepping out into the open.
"Who are you?" Ino demanded angrily. "Drop Sakura's face and show yourself."
"Ino," Sakura said, feeling the viciousness and desire for blood rising up within her again. "Go away. Now! Something happened to me! I...I can't stop myself. When they threaten me...it keeps happening."
Her hand held tightly around the kunai she had just drawn from her own leg.
"Please, go away!" Sakura said, starting to stand up.
"I'm not buying that, psycho," Ino snapped bitterly. "Sakura's not even supposed to be here."
"It's happening again," Sakura said, glancing around. "Go, go! I'll be killing you, Shikamaru and Choji next."
"I am no..." Ino started to say just as Sakura lunged outward toward her, kunai in hand.
The crazed pink-haired apprentice got barely halfway to Ino when she stopped cold. Snarling for a moment and then breathing in relief, she had looked down and seen how much thicker her shadow was and following that to see Shikamaru standing there maintaining his shadow possession.
"Well, Shadow possession," Shikamaru said. "A success. Okay, Ino, now!"
"Who ever you are," Ino said. "We're taking care of you right now."
The blonde genin frowned as she formed a circular hand-sign and aimed for the trapped Sakura.
See other episodes by Thrythlind
(Posted Sat, 11 Sep 2010 13:30)
Questions? Problems? Suggestions?
Send a mail to addventure@bast-enterprises.de
or use the contact form.
らんま1/2 © Rumiko Takahashi
All other series and their characters are © by their respective creators or owners. No claims of ownership of these characters are implied by the authors of this Addventure, or should be inferred.
The Anime Addventure is a non-profit site.