Sasuke scowled at the shrubbery. How could Naruto have so much power and still be defeated by something as trivial as the need to pee?
"Ahhhh, that was a lot…" Naruto sighed, zipping up his pants as he emerged.
Sakura yelled at Naruto for being crude, but Sasuke had more important things on his mind. Naruto's leg pouch was on the wrong leg and he was favoring his left hand.
Sasuke calmly stepped up behind Naruto, and then there was nothing calm about the backhanded blow that took the imposter in the jaw and sent him tumbling against a tree some yards away.
"Sasuke!?" Sakura gasped, stunned.
"Do you think I could hit the real Naruto that hard?" Sasuke snapped.
"Unlucky," Naruto drawled. He got up and a puff of chakra smoke revealed a masked ninja with a Hidden Rain headband.
Sakura froze, trying to understand what was going on. The clash of kunai on kunai brought her out of it, and she realized Sasuke and the enemy (!!!) ninja were fighting.
"Sakura! Stay focused!" Sasuke yelled. "There could be more of them around!"
The Rain nin jumped into the trees with a gangly acrobatics that made him look more like a marionette than a person. Sasuke followed. He had just gotten a kunai under the nin's guard when he spotted a bright orange blotch on the ground.
Naruto looked up calmly. He was tied fairly securely, well beyond what a normal human could get out of no matter how hard he struggled. Even the immensely strong Rock Lee or the Akimichi clan would have trouble with their arms tied like that, utterly destroying any possibility of applying leverage to the bonds. Naruto had been neatly subdued.
There was no way one ninja had done that to Naruto without more noise. "Sakura!" Sasuke yelled again.
"Lucky," grunted the ninja Sasuke had stabbed. He grabbed Sasuke by the wrist and hurled him to a branch. "I thought blondie might be a bit much for just me. Be a good boy and hand over the scroll."
Sasuke wondered what was so lucky and glanced at Sakura. She was caught by another Rain nin, with a third holding a kunai to her neck.
Sasuke hung his head. "I can't believe it. Already?"
"Unlucky for you," the ex-Naruto mocked. "Your scroll?"
"I thought we'd be able to keep the secret longer." Sasuke looked the Rain nin dead in the eye, his Sharingan active. Even as the nin looked, startled by the dojutsu, Sasuke's left eye grew a second tomoe, giving him a total of three. "I guess we'll just have to make sure you can't tell anyone."
"Kill the girl!" the nin ordered, voice panicky. Sasuke lunged at him, and this time instead of a graze Sasuke wedged his blade into his chest, just missing his heart. Sasuke kicked off the ninja, sending him into freefall while Sasuke himself bounded up to a branch, blood-soaked kunai in hand. It wasn't a fatal wound, but that ninja would need to spend at least five to ten seconds tending to it or he could bleed out if Sasuke nicked one of the large arteries by the heart. He still managed to throw a few shuriken and a kunai with an explosive tag, but Sasuke avoided these easily.
That left the two with Sakura to deal with in these few seconds, but Sasuke wasn't worried about that. No human could have gotten out of those binds, but Naruto wasn't human.
Seconds earlier, Naruto watched Sasuke and the Rain nin exchange kunai above him with a measure of dispassion that belied his apparent helplessness. The Rain nin were very, very good at ambushes, but Sasuke had this guy outclassed. This wasn't time to reveal more of his nature. When the Rain nin mentioned being Lucky, Naruto changed his mind. Sasuke wasn't in trouble, but that left Sakura wide open!
The binds on his arms and legs were very good. Without better leverage, the strength of his human body wasn't close to what he needed to break loose. Naturally he couldn't weave signs either. But he still had options. He took a deep breath and grasped the chakra fueling his human disguise. A bit of will strangled the flow for a moment, interrupting the super-henge. The ropes holding him exploded from his body as for a bare moment they tried to contain a vastly larger beast, then Naruto was there, human as ever, standing up and rubbing his wrists.
"Itee," Naruto grumbled. "Rope burn." He got up and rushed over to Sakura.
The nin holding the kunai to her throat didn't have a chance. Suddenly blondie's hand was around the kunai, which was crumpling in a way kunai really shouldn't, and yanking on the weapon didn't budge it an inch. He had just enough presence of mind to let go and reach for another one when Naruto's other fist entered his field of vision and punched him through the face. Then he was too busy flying head-first through the underbrush to really care too much about scrolls or exams.
Sakura, never one to admit that Naruto was better than her, used the absence of blade at her throat and the shock in her captor to employ some of the academy taijutsu. He was holding her from behind so she bunched up her shoulders and pushed out her elbows to free her arms, grabbed him just below the neck, kicked backwards to upset his center of gravity, and pulled forward to throw him up and over her shoulder onto the ground. Then for good measure she kicked him in the head.
Sasuke took stock of his teammates and decided that they didn't need his help, which was a very good thing in his book. He turned back to finish off his own foe, but that nin had apparently decided to run before bandaging up his chest. He frowned. Sakura beat her opponent better than he did his. That wasn't a good thing at all!
Sasuke hopped down to the forest floor and looked at Sakura's victim. "Search him for a scroll," he said shortly. "Naruto, where's the other one?"
Naruto pointed down a path of destruction in the underbrush. "Last I saw him, he went that way."
Sasuke snorted. Well, at least he hadn't been the only one to let an enemy get away. He followed the trail nearly three dozen yards until it intersected a tree trunk far too big to be moved by a ragdolling human body. Said human body was embedded in the living wood a good three inches and looked like it had been limp when it hit. Probably a good thing; the man was in for enough pain when he woke up without having to experience the impact as well.
Sasuke revised Naruto's opponent from 'fled' to 'removed from battle and then some in a violent fashion.' He also found the scroll buried in the trunk, a second Heaven scroll.
Naruto looked at the scroll and sighed. "All that work and we didn't even get anything out of it."
"Idiot," Sakura grumbled. "We got a spare scroll."
"So?" Naruto asked. "We need one of each. I don't think we can get bonus points for having two."
"Naruto, what happens if we stumble on a team with two Earth scrolls?" Sasuke asked.
"Then whoever wins has two pairs," Naruto said reasonably.
"I thought dragons were smart," Sasuke grumbled.
"Nothing could make Naruto smart," Sakura opined. "Naruto, what if we traded scrolls with that team?"
Naruto thought that over. "Oh."
"Now he gets it."
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(Posted Sat, 20 Aug 2011 02:20)
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