Several fierce collisions thundered through the air before the forest finally fell silent again.
Sakura started walking in the direction Kido had flown off.
Her opponent was flat on the ground in a slightly open area of the forest, broken and beaten.
Slowly, without letting her guard down, Sakura approached him. He seemed to be unconscious; the Tailed Beast chakra was gone, and he was back to his uniformed appearance.
At that moment, she heard Ino’s voice from above her head.
“Sakuraaaa!”
Lifting her face, she saw three birds and then Sai and Ino dropping down from their backs, followed by Kakashi, Naruto, and Hinata.
“Master Kakashi… Guys…”
“Sorry we’re late,” Kakashi said.
“You manage okay, Sakura?” Naruto asked.
“Yeah. Somehow.”
“Nice work taking him down alone,” Kakashi said, looking at Kido.
“Although I’m just barely standing,” Sakura said, with a wry smile. In fact, her chakra was almost entirely depleted. “What about Magire?”
“Me and Ino, we managed,” Sai replied.
“He can’t move because of my paralysis drug,” Ino added. “But just in case, Sai’s clone is standing guard.”
At that moment, the supposedly unconscious Kido let out a faint groan. “Kakashi…?”
“Don’t do anything stupid. If I see you moving even an inch, I’ll cut you down,” Kido informed the other man, coolly.
They could hear Kido clicking his tongue softly.
“So this guy was trying to make some kind of weird drug, yeah, Sakura?” Naruto asked.
“He was. Using your hair and Sasuke’s.”
“Creepy!” Naruto stuck his tongue out.
“A Tailed Beast drug and a sharingan drug, hmm? It’s definitely creepy, but if something like that got out into the world, it’d be more than a little hassle. And if the bad guys could just power up so easily, controlling them’d be serious work too,” Kakashi said, and shrugged.
“But we stopped the sharingan drug at least,” Ino said.
“And the Tailed Beast drug too,” Sai said. “If we search their hideouts, we should be able to seize all of that too.”
“I suppose so. All that’s left now is to hand them over to the interrogation—” Kakashi abruptly cut himself off and narrowed his eyes sharply.
“Master?” said a puzzled Sakura on behalf of them all.
“I’m getting a Mind Transmission voice from the Barrier Team,” Kakashi said, before putting a hand to his forehead and conversing with the Mind Transmission sender.
“Got it.” Once he was done the conversation, Kakashi turned to Sakura and the others. “Several people wearing Anbu masks apparently slipped out of the village.”
“The Anbu?”
Kakashi nodded and turned his eyes on Kido. “Your subordinates?”
Kido smiled thinly. “In all my safe houses, I’ve placed receivers linked with my chakra and life signs. It’s set up so that an emergency alarm sounds if my chakra decreases significantly. The standing instruction for my subordinates is to leave the village immediately when it goes off. With the drugs.”
Kakashi clicked his tongue. “Well prepared.”
“You sure it’s okay for your subordinates to run?” Sakura asked. “You’re going to be put in prison, you know.”
“I take responsibility for being defeated in battle. I will submit to imprisonment. But in exchange, my subordinates will spread the Tailed Beast drug outside the village. The ninja world will be destroyed, and public order will fall at once. And that will be my gratification.” Kido chuckled.
“Where are your subordinates headed?” Kakashi asked.
“Do you really think I’d answer that?”
“I don’t. So sleep for me for a bit,” Kakashi replied, and chopped at the back of Kido’s neck with the edge of a straightened hand. Kido fell unconscious. “We’ll go after them right away. Barrier Team said they broke the barrier on the north side of the village and went out there. Sai, your birds.”
Nodding, Sai called in the birds on standby in the sky.
“Just in case, Naruto and I will leave clones here.”
“Understood.”
Kakashi and Naruto wove signs and used their clone jutsu.
“Take care of this,” Kakashi instructed the new clones before jumping onto a bird with Sakura and the others.
They were split up in pairs: Sai and Ino, Kakashi and Sakura, and Naruto and Hinata. The birds rose up into the air and started toward the north.
“Honestly. Right up to the very last of it, he’s giving me headaches,” Kakashi said, with a sigh.
“You think we can catch them?” Ino said, uneasily, on top of the bird next to him.
“If they increase their chakra with the Tailed Beast drug, they’ll be able to travel pretty fast,” Sai noted. “It’s iffy.”
“Hinata, if you see anything, say something, okay?” Naruto called out.
“Okay!” came Hinata’s reply. Before long, she cried out. “Ah! Toward our ten o’clock! I can see a fire!”
“A fire?” Kakashi asked.
“Yes. And some people on the ground…”
The row of birds changed course and flew ahead even faster.
Finally, the scene became visible to Sakura and the others as well. Several people were collapsed in the grassy plain below them. Around the bodies, they could faintly make out smoke rising up.
“What is that?!” Ino cried out.
“We’re going down!” Kakashi said, and the birds lowered their altitude.
Sakura and the others leapt off the birds’ backs onto the ground and raced over to the scene.
The people collapsed there were Anbu ninja. None of them were dead, but all of them had totally disrupted chakra and their awareness was clouded. Meaning genjutsu had been used on them.
Genjutsu…?! Sakura gasped and sent her eyes racing around the area.
She felt like she saw a human shadow momentarily cut across the forest at the far reaches of her vision. A glimpse of a back in a turban and a coat.
Sakura almost cried out. But in the time it took for her to blink, the figure was gone. She squinted and strained her eyes, but she couldn’t sense any aura or chakra.
Just my imagination?
No. It can’t be…
She heard Ino speaking. “So what is this? What happened?”
“Mm. Somehow…apparently, someone caught up with them before we did and finished them off for us,” Kakashi said, crossing his arms.
“Finished them off for us?” Ino asked.
“You guys know, don’t you?” Kakashi asked Team Seven, grinning playfully.
“Yes.” Sakura smiled, and Naruto rubbed the bottom of his nose with a chuckle. Sai also grinned brightly when he got it.
Traces of Fire Style jutsu. The Anbu members attacked with genjutsu. And—maybe it had just been her imagination, but—that figure she saw for an instant from behind.
“What?! You don’t mean Sasuke?!” Ino shouted.
“Well, that’s probably it.”
“The real one? Seriously?”
“Pretty sure that was the real one,” Kakashi said, laughing.
“What? Then why isn’t he here?”
“He probably went back,” Sai said. “To his traveling.”
“No no no, that’s just cold. I mean, the village is totally not far from here, right? He could at least stop by. Right, Sakura?”
“Right,” Sakura replied, but strangely, she didn’t feel sad about it.
After not reacting at all to this whole thing, practically telling them to handle it themselves, Sasuke came back in the end. She was happy to know this.
On his way back to the village, Sasuke came across the Anbu members cloaked in the Tailed Beast chakra. They fought, and he won with his Fire Style and genjutsu.
If he used his sharingan, he could read his opponent’s memory.
So he probably read the memory of one of the Anbu there. So when he learned about the decisive battle fought by Sakura and the others against Kido, he took in the fact that Kido’s chakra suddenly dropped, and figured out that these Anbu were fleeing the village.
If the big boss Kido had been defeated, then there was nothing left for him to do. He would go back to his journey. And then Sasuke left this place…
This was how Sakura imagined the events that had so recently taken place there.
“I dunno.” Naruto shrugged. “Doing what needs to be done, and then up and disappearing, that sounds pretty much like Sasuke.”
“It really does.” Sakura giggled. But she was glad to just be able to feel these lingering echoes of this “Sasuke-ness.”
“But, you know, since you guys took down Kido and Magire, I figured it was about time for me to step up. And then Sasuke comes along and steals my thunder here.” Kakashi shook his head regretfully.
“If you’re having digestion trouble, Master, did you want to run back home?” Sai said. “We’ll be taking the birds, though.”
“Oh, I’m not going to get all worked up just for the sake of it,” Kakashi replied, immediately. “That’s more Guy’s style.”
They all burst out laughing at the Hokage’s light tone.