Naruto: God of Shinobi

Chapter 34: Sakura’s Growth

The roots of the ancient tree rose around them like the ribs of a buried creature.

Thick. Pale. Old. They curved upward in arcs that met above the hollow space beneath, forming a room that had not been built but had become one anyway, over decades or centuries of the tree growing around the particular shape of the earth below it. The canopy above was dense enough that the light came down in scattered coins, green and weak, shifting slowly as the branches moved in the wind. The air was cooler here than the open forest. It smelled of damp wood and earth and the kind of stillness that belonged to places that had been standing longer than anyone remembered.

Sakura sat with her back against the largest root. Her knees were drawn up to her chest. Her arms rested across them. Naruto lay to her left, his head on a bed of leaves she had gathered, his breathing slow and even. Sasuke lay to her right. The black lines of the Curse Mark were stark against his pale neck. The pattern of them had not faded.

Twenty-four hours. Maybe more. She had stopped counting.

She looked at them. Both of them. Unconscious. Helpless.

Dependent on her.

She thought about the past four months. Not the missions. Not the techniques. The change. The specific moment in the destroyed clearing when Naruto had taken the scroll from Sasuke's frozen hand and turned and put it in her hands instead. Not an order. A statement of fact. He had trusted her to hold it. He had not looked for someone else. He had looked at her.

She had not dropped it.

That was the moment. Not the kiss on the bridge, which she had thought about more times than she was willing to count and which she had decided meant different things on different days. Not the rejection in the field, which had stung in a way that she understood now was the sting of someone realizing they had been chasing the wrong thing. That moment in the clearing. When he looked at her and gave her something that mattered and walked away to face a Sannin without looking back.

She wanted that feeling again. To be trusted like that. To be the person someone looked at when the situation was real.

She had trained for it. She had woken up early and stayed up late and punched trees until her knuckles bled and walked up walls until her chakra gave out and read scrolls from the library until she could recite them without looking. She had done it for herself. She could say that honestly. But she had also done it for him. For them. So that the next time something like the Land of Waves happened she would not be crouching in the bushes while her teammates bled.

She looked at Naruto's face. Pale. Still. The whisker marks on his cheeks were the same as they had always been. The blond hair was the same. But everything else was different. The way he moved through a room. The way he spoke, which was direct in a way that had nothing to do with the loud directness of the boy she had graduated with. The way he had killed the chuunin on the road to the Land of Waves without changing his expression. The way he had stood in front of Orochimaru in the destroyed clearing and said his own name like it was a declaration.

Four months ago he had been the dead last. The boy no one took seriously. The class clown who could not pass a written exam.

She did not have a word for what he was now.

She touched her own chest. Her heart was beating fast. She acknowledged it and set it aside. It was not useful right now.

What was useful was this. She had been trusted with two people. She had carried them out of a bowl in the ground and through a forest full of things that wanted to kill her and found a place that was hidden and defensible and she had held it for twenty-four hours. She had done that. Her. Alone.

She did not want to be the girl who sat in the back anymore. She did not want to be the girl who competed with Ino for a boy's attention. She did not want to be chasing anything.

She wanted to be a real kunoichi. She wanted Naruto to look at her the way he had looked at her in the clearing. She wanted Sasuke to stop looking through her.

One problem at a time.

She leaned her head back against the root. She closed her eyes for a moment. Just a moment.

She heard the rustle.

One leaf against another leaf.

Small. Contained. The sound of something that was trying not to make a sound and had not entirely succeeded. She had been listening to the forest for twenty-four hours. She knew the rhythm of it. The wind moved through the upper canopy in long slow passes and the leaves it moved sounded like water. What she had heard was not that.

Her hand moved to her kunai pouch. Slow. Not making noise. Her eyes stayed on Naruto and Sasuke.

She stood. Her legs pushed back against the objections. She looked at Naruto once. She looked at Sasuke once.

"Please do not die," she said. Quiet. To both of them. "I need you to not die."

She reached up. She gathered her hair. She tied it back with a strip of cloth torn from her sleeve, the motion quick and efficient, the motion of someone who had rehearsed it because she had understood that the moment would come and she wanted to be ready for it when it did.

She stepped out of the cave of roots.

The clearing outside was small. Ringed by the root system, the ground covered in dead leaves and moss, the light dim and green. The shadows at the edges were deep and specific. She stopped in the center. Her hands were at her sides. One of them was on her kunai.

"I know you are there," she said. "Show yourselves."

The kunai came from the trees.

Fast. Silent. Not thrown wildly. Aimed. At her throat, which was a deliberate choice made by someone who knew what they were doing.

Her own kunai came up. The blades met. The crack of it was sharp in the quiet clearing. The attacker's kunai spun away and buried itself in a tree trunk to her left.

"Well, well," a voice said. "You are not as girly-girl as I expected."

Kin Tsuchi stepped out from behind the tree. Dark hair. Sharp eyes. A needle threaded with fine wire held between two fingers. The Hidden Sound headband at her forehead. She looked at Sakura the way people looked at things they had expected to dismiss and were now revising.

She was smiling. It was not a kind smile.

Kin attacked without preamble.

Not with the needle. She came in fast with her hands open, her fingers reaching for Sakura's throat, the movement smooth and practiced and carrying the weight of someone who had done this before and expected it to work the same way it had worked before.

Sakura's forearm met Kin's wrist. The impact jarred up to her shoulder. She did not stop. She twisted her body and drove her elbow toward Kin's ribs.

Kin caught it. Her palm met the elbow. Her other hand came up immediately after, fingers clawed, reaching for Sakura's face.

Sakura ducked. The nails passed through her hair. She heard the sound of it, the faint snip of nail through strand, and pink fell to the ground and she did not look at it because it did not matter.

Her fist came up and connected with Kin's stomach.

The air left Kin's lungs with a sound that was both audible and specific. She stumbled back one step. Two.

Sakura did not let her recover. Her knee came up. Kin blocked with her thigh and the impact was hard enough that Kin winced and adjusted her stance. They circled. Their breathing was audible. Their eyes were on each other without interruption.

Kin was good. Her taijutsu was clean in the way taijutsu was clean when someone had been trained in it properly, no wasted motion, the weight shifting at the right moments. She had been trained by people who knew what they were doing.

Sakura had been trained by Kakashi. By a jonin who had drilled her on footwork until her legs gave out and on blocking until her arms were too heavy to lift, who had not made exceptions for the fact that she was twelve years old or for the fact that it hurt. She had been trained watching Naruto, who moved differently from anyone else she had seen, who invented his techniques and then reinvented them. She had been trained watching Sasuke, who moved like water moved, which was continuously and without hesitation.

Kin threw a punch. Sakura slipped it. She countered with a punch to Kin's shoulder.

Kin threw a kick. Sakura caught it. She twisted. Kin spun in the air and landed hard on her side.

Sakura was on her before she could rise. Her fist came down. Kin rolled. The fist hit the ground and the ground cracked under it and Sakura registered the pain in her knuckles as information and nothing else.

Kin scrambled backward. She was on her feet but not comfortably. Blood at her lip. Her hair wild. Her eyes had changed. The dismissal was gone.

Sakura stood over her. Her own lip was split. Her knuckles were raw. Her forearms were bruised from the blocks. She was breathing hard.

But she was standing.

Kin looked at her. Something moved across her face. It was the expression of someone revising an assessment they had arrived at too quickly.

"I did not expect that." Kin said.

"Kin."

The voice from the trees was cold.

Zaku Abumi stepped into the clearing.

The tubes openings on his hands were visible even in the dim light, the modified limbs that were the source of his technique, the mechanism that turned compressed air into a weapon. His face was hard. His eyes moved from Kin to Sakura to Kin again and the expression they held when they landed on Kin was not concern.

"Pathetic," he said.

Kin's face flushed. She said nothing.

"You could not handle a little girl."

"She is stronger than she looks."

"She is a nobody. You are a disappointment."

He raised his hand. The tube opening on his palm glowed with chakra. He was not pointing it at Sakura. He was pointing it at Kin. A small correction. A reminder. The kind of reminder that was also a threat.

Kin went still. Her eyes went wide. She took a step back.

"Zaku. No…."

"Zaku."

Dosu’s voice came from the shadows at the clearing’s edge. Quiet. Calm. The bandaged figure stepped forward, his metal sleeve hanging at his side, his face unreadable beneath the wrapping. He looked at Zaku. He did not raise his voice.

"Focus," Dosu said. "The girl is not the primary objective."

Zaku’s hand lowered. He looked at Kin with the expression of someone filing something away for later. Then he turned to Sakura.

Dosu turned to her as well. His bandaged face gave her nothing to read.

"You fought well," he said. "But you are alone. And we are three."

Zaku stepped forward. Both arms raised. The tubes were glowing.

"Now," Dosu said.

The blast was almost invisible. She could only see the air distortion but it wasn’t enough, she wasn’t fast enough to react to it yet.

She had seen it before, on the second floor of the exam building, the way the air itself became the weapon, the compressed pressure moving faster than anything she could track. She knew what to look for. Not the blast. The stance. The angle of the arm. The brief glow before the release.

She dropped.

The blast passed over her head and hit the tree behind her. The bark did not splinter. It exploded, a section of the trunk two meters across simply ceasing to be intact, the wood flying outward in pieces that embedded themselves in the trees across the clearing.

She threw a kunai. Zaku’s arm came up. He easily dodged the kunai. He fired again. She rolled. The ground where she had been erupted, dirt and moss and root fragments throwing themselves upward and outward. She came up running. She closed the distance. She threw a punch at his face with everything she had.

Zaku caught her wrist.

His grip was the grip of someone whose arms had been rebuilt for a specific purpose and that purpose included holding things very tightly. He twisted. The pain was immediate and specific and went past the level that pain was usually information and became something closer to a sound inside her arm.

She bit her lip to keep from screaming. She did not let herself scream.

He pulled her close. The open hand came up. It was inches from her face. She could feel the pressure building in it, the chakra condensing, the air preparing itself to become something that would not leave much of what it hit.

"You are nothing," he said.

He fired.

She turned her head. The blast caught her shoulder. The force of it threw her backward with the particular totality of something that did not negotiate with the body it was striking. She hit the ground hard. She felt her shoulder before she felt the ground. Then she felt the ground. Then she stopped feeling her arm.

She tried to stand.

Her legs had a different opinion about that. They were present. They were hers. They were not currently interested in standing.

Zaku walked toward her. He stepped on her ankle. Not with his full weight. With enough. Something in her ankle shifted in a direction it was not designed to shift and the sound it made was specific and wrong.

Sakura screamed. She had been keeping the screams somewhere else and this one got out. It went into the clearing and the clearing gave it back and she stopped it as fast as she could.

"Get up," Zaku said. "I am not done."

He grabbed her by her hair. He pulled her up. Her feet barely found the ground. His other fist came into her stomach with the weight of someone who was not rationing the force. The air left her body completely. She tasted blood at the back of her throat.

He dropped her. She fell to her knees. Blood dripped from her mouth to the leaves and the leaves held it.

Zaku raised his foot.

She caught his ankle.

She did not plan it. Her hands moved before the decision was made. Her fingers closed around the ankle and held. Her fingers were wrong, at least two of them, the joints swollen and bent past the angle they were supposed to hold. But they held.

Zaku looked down. The expression on his face was the expression of someone encountering something they had not modeled.

"Get up," she said.

Not to him. To herself.

She pushed herself up. Her legs shook. Her vision had edges she did not usually have. Her useless arm hung at her side and her broken fingers held his ankle and she stood. Not all the way. Far enough. She stood far enough to be standing.

"Why do you not stay down?" Zaku said.

His voice had changed. The contempt was still there. But something else had appeared behind it. Something that had not expected to appear.

Sakura spat blood onto the leaves. She looked at him. Her eyes were clear. Everything else was wrong but her eyes were clear.

"Because I have something to prove."

In the canopy above the clearing, Rock Lee stood on a branch and did not move.

His hands were clenched on the bark. His eyes were wide. He had seen the blast hit her. He had seen her ankle. He had watched her fall and he had watched her reach for the ankle that was about to kick her and he had watched her stand.

He wanted to jump down. He wanted to land between her and Zaku and he wanted to put Zaku through the nearest tree, which he was capable of doing and which would solve the immediate problem.

Something held him back. Not caution. Something else.

The way she was standing. The way she had refused to let herself scream. The way she had said the words not to Zaku but to herself, a reminder to herself from herself, the way you reminded yourself of something when you were in danger of forgetting it.

She was fighting her own battle.

He waited.

Tenten watched Lee from a branch ten meters away.

She saw the posture of him. The hands on the bark. The forward lean of someone whose body had already decided to move and was being held back by something above the body's level.

"She is going to die," Tenten said.

"No," Lee said. "She is not."

His voice was certain in a way that was not optimism. It was the certainty of someone who recognized something specific.

Neji stood on a higher branch. His arms were crossed. His pale eyes were directed at the clearing below without urgency, the gaze of someone watching something unfold according to principles they had already accounted for.

"The Sound ninja are stronger," Neji said. "Objectively. Her technique is not sufficient to overcome that gap."

"She is not trying to overcome the gap," Lee said. "She is trying to survive until she does not have to."

Neji looked at him. Then he looked back at the clearing.

The girl with the pink hair was still standing. One arm useless. One ankle wrong. Blood on her face and on the leaves at her feet. Her hair had been tied back and pieces of it had come loose and were hanging across her face and she had not moved them because her hands were occupied with other things.

She was still standing.

Neji looked at her the way he looked at things that did not fit his existing models. Not with warmth. With the particular attention of someone whose model was good and who had just found something the model had not accounted for.

"Interesting," he said.

---

Next time: The Curse Mark Activates – The Uchiha Bloodline.

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