“I definitely want to take a ride on that!” Boruto cried. “I’ll get Mitsuki or Shikadai or someone on the back and race around the village!”
“It’s not safe riding around the village,” Naruto retorted as he stepped out of the house. The fact that he’d raced through the alleys and lanes of the village with Chihare riding behind him was a secret. “Where’s everyone else?”
“Sasuke went on ahead to the training ground. Master Kakashi and Commander Yamato might be a little late,” Sakura said. “I guess they were up all night practicing. Said they used all their chakra and their energy, so they were dead asleep until just a little bit ago.”
“Yeah?”
Sakura noticed Naruto’s face stiffen slightly and smiled. “What? You nervous?”
“Of course not!” Naruto denied the charge overenthusiastically, yanked the goggles he had around his neck up above his forehead, and straddled the bike behind Sakura.
Chihare had been gradually making improvements to her design, and now there was a speedometer and a brake lever that hadn’t been on the prototype. The biggest change was the conversion device added to the engine. Chakra in the cartridge was changed into Kizahashi gas to supply fuel to the tank, dramatically increasing the mileage. It could now go about two thousand kilometers on one fully charged cartridge.
“It’s got brakes now, huh?” Naruto noted.
“Yup. But it can’t stop suddenly. You have to slow down and then come to a stop.” Sakura put a foot on the pedal and pulled the lever.
Vrrr!
The engine roared to life, and the bike pulled forward in a stable movement. Thanks to the tweaks Chihare had made, it was much more pleasant to ride than it had been on his last trip.
“Dad’s so lucky …” Boruto watched them go, enraptured.
The bike arrived at the training ground in no time flat. Sasuke wasn’t the only one there—Kakashi and Yamato had also arrived, but they looked sleepy, like they had just woken up. They were putting their backs together, pulling on each other’s arms, doing stretches.
“I need to hook you up to some supplemental oxygen,” Sakura said. “Naruto, Sasuke, show me your stomachs.”
Both men did as they were told and lifted their shirts. Sakura inserted an IV needle into the chakra channel next to Sasuke’s bellybutton, and followed it with one in a vein on his side.
The needles were connected through the pluripotent applicator hanging from his belt. It would change the chakra collected from the channel into oxygen and supply that directly to his bloodstream.
Since Naruto couldn’t supply chakra himself, she connected him to Sasuke’s chakra channel as well.
This was the ultra-compact oxygen supply device that Chihare had stayed up all night making.
“No matter what, the two of you make sure to stay together. If the tube comes out, Naruto will lose his oxygen supply.”
Sakura painted quick-drying cement on the base of the needles to fix them in place. Now they’d be able to breathe even two hundred kilometers up in the air. In theory.
The tube connecting the oxygen device on Sasuke to Naruto’s vein was about two and a half feet long. Naruto felt the ground shift under his feet a bit when he thought about how his life now depended on this long, skinny thing. He stared down at the needle stabbed into his side.
Gotta make sure to stay right close to Sasuke …
“Let’s go over everything one more time now that we’re all here,” Yamato called out to the others, having finished his warm-up exercises.
“The plan is for me and Kakashi to create a pillar of wood and earth. You three run the bike up that pillar. If you go at exactly 125 miles an hour, the point you reach in an hour will be 660,000 feet in the air. If you’re going to knock the satellite out of the sky at just the right moment, you must maintain that pace. You can’t go too fast or too slow.”
“We prioritized strength when we worked this technique out, so while I can’t say it’ll be a smooth ride up the surface of the pillar, do the best you can with it, okay?” Kakashi said.
Sakura nodded. “Okay.”
“So once the satellite approaches, get Naruto to use the Byakugan and get close to it. There’s a seal on the ultra particles’ vessel inside, but Team Ino-Shika-Cho and Sai are going to take care of that for us, so it should be unlocked by the time you reach the satellite. Handle the details as they come,” Kakashi said lightly.
“Same thing as always,” Sakura said. No matter how many simulations they ran, they couldn’t predict exactly what might happen. Everyone was used to adapting and reacting in the moment.
At last, it was time.
The three shinobi got on the bike. In the lead, hands on the grips, was Sakura in charge of chakra control. Naruto rode behind her, assisting with their approach to the satellite with the power of his goggles, and Sasuke sat behind him to supply chakra to the engine.
The system bike had been conceived as a two-passenger vehicle, so it was a tight squeeze with the three of them on the seat. Wedged in between the married Uchihas, Naruto tried to make himself smaller.
“Eight fifty-nine. One minute.” Sakura looked at the pocket watch and counted down.
Mission start was nine sharp.
“Three … two … one …”
Instead of saying “zero,” Sakura tossed the pocket watch.
Yamato and Kakashi exchanged a look and slapped the palms of their hands against the earth.
“Earth Style!”
“Wood Style!”
“Rasenro!” they shouted together.
Zwwm!
Pillars of earth and wood shot up toward the sky, intertwining and alternating with each other. With no time to be awed by the beautiful helix, Sakura kicked hard at the pedal of the system bike.
Vrrr!
The vehicle bucked at the sudden acceleration and, with three people on its seat, raced vertically up the Rasenro pillar.