Naruto had changed clothes, wearing a long-jacket, floppy hat of an unfamiliar design, and a shirt and pants combination that looked utilitarian.
Sakura wasn't sure what to make of the change of appearance, and was being exceptionally wary of Naruto anyway.
Sasuke was frowning at the task ahead of him.
Burned trees, lines of earth that had exploded outwards, slabs of cooled lava, areas where there were no trees or grass because it had all exploded and shredded the landscape.
"What a mess," summed up Sakura.
"Okay, I got this," said Naruto, reaching into a pocket and pulling out a scroll.
"What are you doing?" asked Sakura, ready to turn around and start running.
"Do you know how my magic works?" asked Naruto, flipping the scroll open and then spreading it across the ground.
"You mean all those explosions?" asked Sakura, taking a step backwards and eyeing the scroll nervously.
"Right," said Naruto. "Energy is all around us. There's our chakra, there's something called 'nature chakra', there's natural energies running through the dragon-lines, and there's even energy in apparently solid bits of matter like those rocks."
"Okay," said Sakura, following this. "So?"
"Getting something to explode is easy, you take a bit of that energy and release it," said Naruto, scribbling something out on the scroll with a brush. "One of the problems that Jiji had me hold off on practicing this stuff was that making things stable - that's a lot trickier."
"You said something like that earlier, how you weren't allowed to practice," admitted Sakura.
"Right," said Naruto, finishing up a set of squiggles. "So instead I spent a lot of time working out things for when I could practice. Like this!"
"It's not those 'clothes destroying moths' again, is it?" asked Kakashi, concerned for his mask.
"It better not be," grumped Sakura, getting closer to better make out what Naruto was doing.
"They wouldn't do anything about the rock," said Naruto, finishing his preparations with a flourish. "Though this is a variant of that jutsu."
Sakura watched as the two circular designs drawn in the center of a lot of other squiggles began to move, despite being simple ink on paper.
Ka-CHUNK! went the fabric of reality.
A square of complete blackness formed. Naruto gestured and the square moved. When it contacted the mass of hardened lava, it slid through as if meeting no resistance at all. As it passed, the rock was simply gone wherever that blackness met it.
"That's odd," noted Sakura after waiting for someone else to say something and not getting any response. "What IS that and what's happening to the stuff it contacts?"
"Portal to a sub-universe, I think. Near as I can tell it's completely empty," said Naruto, sounding a bit distracted as he directed the square.
"A sub-universe? Like a storage scroll?" asked Sakura.
"Nah, this is something else. A weird little pocket-universe kind of thing," said Naruto. "Now hold on. This is kind of tricky to maintain and it would be bad if it destabilized."
"How bad?" asked Kakashi.
"Bad. Really really bad."
"How bad?" asked Kakashi.
"Sort of 'we'd need to be several miles from Konoha to avoid having a massive crater inside the walls' level of bad."
"Impossible," said Sasuke.
"Or it could just be 'explosive tag' level of bad," admitted Naruto. "I did say I needed practice."
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(Posted Tue, 03 Jun 2014 17:15)
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