“Good thing the stars are out,” Sakura said, mostly to herself, her hands on the grips. The bike didn’t have a light of any kind, but thanks to the bright stars, she could clearly see the path of the pillar. But just as she uttered that, the area abruptly grew darker.
“Hm?” Suddenly, droplets of water were spraying her face.
“Pwah! Cold!” Naruto yelped.
“Looks like we’ve entered a cloud,” Sasuke remarked.
The tiny drops of water beat at their bodies from all directions like scattershot, and in no time at all, the three of them were drenched. Each drop was a tiny bit of mist on its own, but the speed they were moving made them sting. Worse yet, as they rode further into the cloud, the droplets changed into pellets of ice. Now they really hurt.
“Cumulonimbus cloud maybe,” Sakura mused. “There weren’t any clouds over the training ground, so it must have drifted in from somewhere.”
“This is bad! Believe it! If it rains down there, Master Kakashi and Commander Yamato will—”
A dazzling light flashed inside of the cloud and quickly disappeared. Static electricity began to crackle around Sasuke’s and Sakura’s hair. The cumulonimbus cloud appeared to be developing into a thunder cloud.
A cold sweat popped up on Sakura’s already wet forehead. “This is maybe not the time for us to be worried about the masters down below.”
Ba ba boom!
They heard an ear-splitting roar, and then the area was enveloped in a pure white light before a bolt of lightning hit the bike. Naruto and Sasuke immediately flew up off the seat, but in different directions. They shot past each other, jerking the oxygen tube taut.
“Whoa!” Naruto grabbed Sasuke’s shoulder and pulled his friend toward himself as he tossed a kunai into the Rasenro to create a foothold that just barely held the two of them. His face grew pale. “Where’s Sakura?!”
She had dropped down with the bike after it was knocked flying by the lightning.
“It’s fine. She’ll come up soon enough,” Sasuke said evenly and turned his gaze downward.
Vrrr!
The bike and Sakura raced up the pillar. She picked up Sasuke and Naruto as she passed by and charged upward once more.
“Sakura! You’re okay!” Naruto said in relief. “I was freaked that you maybe fell down.”
“I can handle a little something like that,” she replied, while next to her ear, her hair burned with a crack. Sparks of static electricity bounced around her head. “Looks like another hit’s coming. We might be fine, but I don’t know how much this bike can take.”
The cloud lit up once more, and the air crackled. It was only a matter of time before they were struck by lightning again.
“I’ll cut it.” Sasuke put a foot on the wheel and stood up.
“What?!” Sakura cried, in surprise. “You can do that?”
“Did you forget the other name for Chidori?” Sasuke replied and kneaded his chakra in his hand. He produced a lump of earth, and in the blink of an eye, he’d sharpened its outlines to form a kunai. Ting! The earth turned into glass. He’d applied an Earth Style technique to change the ratio of elements included in the earth to fashion an impromptu kunai.
The hand that clutched the glass kunai began to make a chirping sound and sing with electricity.
As if taking the bait, the cloud was blanketed in white light, and lightning struck the bike once more.
Crack crack crack!
It was too loud and bright, and Sakura didn’t know what was going on. When the echoes of the thunder faded from her eardrums at last, drawing out a long tail, she looked back and saw Sasuke with his foot on the wheel like nothing had happened.
“You cut it?” she asked, stunned, as she blinked eyes dazzled by the light.
Perhaps temporarily deafened by the roar, Sasuke didn’t respond, so Naruto answered on his behalf, “He cut it.”
Thanks to the Byakugan, he’d seen everything. A few seconds before the discharge, Sasuke tossed the kunai, and the tip of it severed the lightning bolt. Exposed to that incredible electrical heat, the kunai was instantly destroyed, but the glass, with its insulating properties, had indeed cut through the lightning. The bolt was ripped in two, and these remnants were lured away by Sasuke’s Chidori, one forcibly pulled toward the sky, the other toward the ground, before they vanished entirely.
Naruto smelled burning. He glanced back and saw that Sasuke’s hair and cloak were singed.
Whoa, he really did that, Naruto said in his heart, duly impressed.
Sasuke’s Chidori had truly cut lightning.
Naruto, Sasuke, and Sakura weren’t the only ones fighting without their feet on the ground.
Sai, a member of Team Seven, was also dashing through the sky. Although unlike Naruto and the others who were moving vertically, Sai’s movement was horizontal.
He had been ascending steadily since he approached the mountains, so that he was now at an altitude of nearly 16,500 feet.
“Are we still not there …” Sai flopped forward against the yadonaki goose.
Headache, trouble breathing, extreme fatigue. All symptoms of altitude sickness. Without an oxygen tube like Naruto and his team had, Sai was, to be blunt, in a living hell.
No matter how strong he might have been as a shinobi, he still couldn’t live without oxygen. In contrast with Sakura, Kakashi, and even Sasuke, who had chosen routes without dramatic altitude increases to allow their bodies to adjust as they made their way to the Land of Redaku, Sai had ascended to that same altitude in mere hours.
“Haah … Hah! Koff! Haah …” He couldn’t breathe. Pain rocked his head from the inside, dulling his thinking.
The Land of Redaku … is too far …
After two hours spent looking dejectedly out over the mountains, a town made by human hands appeared at last in a small plain surrounded by exposed rock, and his cold sweat stopped.
“There it is …”
The yadonaki began to glide down toward the settlement.
The men’s washroom was in chaos.
The man in glasses who had opened the stall door dug deep inside to brace himself while he took a punch to the gut and then threw a daring knee into Choji’s side as the shinobi tried to slip past. Behind him, Shikamaru was wedged between Choji as he came flying back and the toilet pipes and cut his ear and cheek. But Nohto behind him had even worse luck and cracked his head against the porcelain toilet while still unconscious.
It was a free for all.
“These guys are tough! What’s going on?!” Glasses yelled.
But Long Hair was tangling with Shikamaru and didn’t have time for chitchat. They tumbled around on the floor, each stealing the top spot from the other over and over.