When Sakura went into the Hokage’s office with Sai, Kakashi and Ino were waiting there. Ino looked exhausted somehow.
“Ino, you’re here too?”
“Yeah, I had something I wanted to try, so I went to the communications office with Master Kakashi, but…”
“Communications?” Sakura looked doubtful.
“Well, Ino said she wanted to try and see if we could contact Sasuke directly from here with her Mind Transmission Jutsu,” Kakashi replied, from behind his desk. “So we tried it, but…”
“Didn’t work,” Ino said, shrugging her shoulders. “Maybe we could have made it happen if we had a rough idea of where Sasuke is, but searching the whole world randomly definitely didn’t work. I’m kinda beat.” She stuck her tongue out. The Mind Transmission Jutsu used by the Yamanaka clan required a fair bit of concentration, which made it hard to use for extended periods of time.
“Anyway, what are you two doing here?” Kakashi asked.
“I wanted to talk to you,” Sai replied.
“Oh?”
“It’s about the fake Sasuke. It just might be that the Anbu is involved.”
“What?” Kakashi’s eyes grew narrow.
“Sakura told me,” Sai continued. “The fake Sasuke people are seeing doesn’t just look like Sasuke, he even has Sasuke’s chakra, right?”
“According to Gaara.”
“Sakura said chakra can be extracted from hair or skin. The chakra that the counterfeit Sasuke’s cloaked in might have been created like that.”
“Hair or skin,” Kakashi murmured, thoughtfully. “That might indeed be the missing piece.”
“No, it’s just a theory, okay?” Sakura panicked a little at Sai racing ahead of her. “If that’s how they did it, that still doesn’t explain how a copy of Sasuke is strolling around without Sasuke’s knowing it.”
“Well, a hypothesis is a hypothesis,” Kakashi noted. “So how does the Anbu figure into it?”
“My informant said something that’s been bugging me. He said that people from the Konoha Anbu were investigating the Final Valley, and the bridge where Sasuke and Master Danzo fought, right after the Great War.”
“The Anbu were?”
“Yes. He said that the Anbu were taking bits of dirt and stone from the place.”
“What would be the point of taking things like—oh!” Halfway through her sentence, Ino understood.
Sakura had a flash of insight at about the same time. “Right,” she half-said, half-murmured. “They wanted things from Sasuke.”
“Exactly.” Sai nodded slowly.
“It definitely would have been easy to find bits of Sasuke’s hair or skin in that place,” Kakashi said.
And his blood, Sakura added in her heart.
The Final Valley was where Sasuke and Naruto had fought so desperately to decide the last battle. They had each lost an arm in that fight. So there was no doubt that blood and tissue had been left behind there.
And the bridge where Sasuke fought Danzo—just as with the Final Valley, it would have been possible to find Sasuke’s hair or blood there. If it had been collected immediately after the Great Ninja War, there would have been a greater “freshness” to Sasuke’s tissue.
“However,” Kakashi noted. “I’m no specialist, but wouldn’t it take some serious work to separate out Sasuke’s hair or skin or whatever from the rubble they brought back, and then extract his chakra from it?”
“I think it would be an overwhelming amount of work,” Sakura said. But the Anbu had probably done that work.
She tried to remember the Final Valley then.
The fighting was over, and Naruto and Sasuke were lying on top of the massive fallen statue. Sakura treated both of their arms, while Kakashi watched over them, smiling. And then, they left the valley with a sense of hope for the new era.
The Anbu went down into that valley after Sakura and the others left. They scraped up dirt and picked up bits of rock. Looking for traces of Sasuke…
If that had actually happened, Sakura could only feel a sense of discomfort at how incomprehensible the work was.
“But what are the Anbu trying to accomplish by having a fake Sasuke seen all over the place?” Ino asked.
“I have no idea. But if this idea we’re talking about here is right and they did make a fake Sasuke, then…Master Kakashi.” Sai turned toward Kakashi. “This might explain the fact that the men who attacked me were cloaked in Tailed Beast chakra.”
“So you’re saying the Anbu are collecting tissue and the like from jinchuriki and getting the chakra of Tailed Beasts from that?”
“Don’t you think it’s a possibility? Both cases share the fact that the attackers were cloaked in another chakra.”
“That man who’s always with Kido, Magire—he’s a medical ninja. It’s not inconceivable for him to be researching this sort of technique on Kido’s orders.”
“W-wait a minute. Don’t leave us out of this,” Ino interjected.
Sakura was also confused. She couldn’t exactly see where they were going with this conversation. “Um, what are you talking about, ‘Tailed Beast chakra’?”
“Oh, I’m sorry. Hmm. How can I explain it?” Kakashi scratched his head before clapping his hands together. “Oh! Well, anyway, the three of you are on the same team now.”
“What?”
“Huh?”
While Sakura and Ino were baffled, Sai merely noted calmly, “It’s certainly very likely we’re chasing the same enemy. In which case, it might be better to share information and work as a team.”
“Enemy?” Sakura parroted.
“Tsumiki Kido from the Anbu,” Sai said. “And Magire. I’m targeting them now.”
In investigating the attacks on the daimyo and his advisor, Sai and Kakashi had landed on these two as likely suspects. There was a very real possibility that the attacks had been scripted and performed by the Anbu with the aim of obtaining a budget increase. While he was looking into this, Sai had been targeted for assassination. And the assassins had been cloaked in Tailed Beast chakra.
“Tailed Beast chakra,” Sakura murmured.
“So then,” Ino said. “Kido and his gang maybe collected Naruto’s tissue in the Final Valley too? And they extracted the chakra of Nine Tails from that…”
“But the chakra cloaking the men who attacked me only had one tail.”
“Maybe the number of tails doesn’t matter,” Sakura said. “I mean, when Naruto was getting his tails at first, he had a different number of them at the different stages of seal removal.”
“Oh, this is good. The way you’re talking like this. This team’s pretty impromptu, but it looks like it’s going to work out well,” Kakashi said, a casual remark that seemed out of place.
“Please don’t tease us, Master,” Ino said.
“Yes, don’t,” Sai chimed in. “However impromptu this team might be, Sakura and I were originally on the same team, and I’m completely comfortable having Ino join in. Right, Ino?”
At her name, Ino’s face turned red. “R-right! Easy win here!”
Knowing how Ino felt about Sai, Sakura giggled lightly.
“No, no, I’m sorry for teasing you. To be honest, I’d like to join you myself, get out there and run around, but ever since this thing got plopped on my head, it’s not so easy for me to just take off like that,” Kakashi said, patting the Hokage hat. Then his face stiffened. “Of course we should be going after Kido and Magire as suspects, but I’ve generally allowed the Anbu to operate under their own judgment, so part of the responsibility for all this definitely lies with me. And for that, I have to apologize to you.”
Sakura and the others stared at Kakashi as he continued. “I intend to immediately review the Anbu organization. All the energy I want to use out there with you, I’ll use to rack my brain on that. So you three take care of Kido and Magire.”
“We will,” the younger ninja replied in unison.
∞
“So no Ino-Shika-Cho combo, but Ino-Saku-Sai instead, huh?” Ino said.
“Sounds pretty awful,” Sakura retorted.
“Who cares if it sounds bad?” Ino threw back. “As long as our teamwork is good.”
After leaving the Hokage’s office, the three had decided to move to the roof of Konoha Hospital for the time being to discuss what to do going forward.
Sai nodded. “I’m going to keep watching over Kido.”
“And us, what should we do? Maybe it’d be good if we checked into Sasuke’s fake?” Ino said, looking at Sakura.
“Probably. But I also feel like we should get some more evidence on whether the Anbu were really collecting pieces of Sasuke. Right now, all we have to go on is what the informant told Sai.”
“Oh yeah,” Ino said. “But how are we supposed to do that?”
“I was thinking that if the Anbu were collecting Sasuke’s hair and blood, there might be other places besides the Final Valley and that bridge.”
“You mean that they would have been examining other places too?” Sai asked.
“Right. I don’t think the Final Valley or the bridge had such a huge amount of hair or blood for them to extract chakra from. So maybe they collected it from a bunch of places.”
“So, like, where?” Ino asked.
“If we expand our scope to outside the village, I don’t know either,” Sakura admitted. “But if we limit it to inside the village, then the first thing that pops into my mind is Sasuke’s house. And then Nakano Shrine. Places like that.”
“Hmm, those two places do have potential,” Sai remarked.
“And if they wanted even fresher hair from Sasuke, there’s probably a strong possibility that the Anbu went to the shrine over his house,” Sakura said.
“Mmm, but I wonder.” Ino crossed her arms and stared off into space. “Would they really go all the way over there to look for hair? I think it’s pretty likely that they managed to bring back blood from the Final Valley, but finding Sasuke’s hair at Nakano Shrine would be pretty tough.”
“They go and look for it, and if it’s not there, it’s not there. But I think they went to look at least once. Right after the Great War.” Sakura proposed that they ask around to find out if anyone had seen the Anbu in the vicinity of Nakano Shrine at that time. “If someone did, that’s circumstantial evidence at least.”
“Okay! So let’s do that.” With Ino’s agreement, the plan for all three was decided.
“We should meet regularly and share whatever we’ve learned,” Sai said. “If we collect every scrap of evidence, no matter how small, it’ll lead us to Kido eventually.”
Sakura and Ino nodded their agreement, and the hastily put-together team got to work.
Working was good. She felt much better working than sitting in her room moping. And she was working for Sasuke’s sake.
This thought was what kept Sakura going.