“Aaah!” Naruto cried out after pulling the lever on the goggles and looking over his shoulder. “It’s raining.”
“I knew it. So that’s why the pillar’s slowing down.” Sakura worked the clutch to fine tune the bike’s speed. “They’re using up their chakra to keep the pillar strong enough to handle the rain.”
“At this pace, we won’t make it to 660,000 feet before time runs out,” Sasuke noted.
“No, we’ll be okay,” Naruto said to the Uchiha couple in front of and behind him. “Master Kakashi and Commander Yamato said they would handle it! I’m sure those two can make it work somehow.”
“Right.” Sakura’s expression softened. “They always have, after all. They’ve overcome impossible situations before. And this mission is pretty rushed, with a lot of moving parts. But I’m sure Master Kakashi and Commander Yamato won’t let us down.”
Even as they spoke, the speed of the pillar’s growth was steadily dropping. Not to mention that the pillar itself had begun to shudder slightly, and its surface was getting brittle and peeling away.
“Actually … This maybe looks not so good.” Sakura’s gut feeling was timed impeccably—the extension of the pillar at last ceased completely.
The bike couldn’t stop suddenly.
“… !”
Sasuke immediately ended the supply of chakra, but the engine didn’t stop right away. The bike charged toward the end of the discontinued pillar and shot up into the air.
“Aaaah!”
“Master Kakashiiii?! Commander Yamatoooo?!”
They had two options when the pillar stopped growing. They could go back down with Sasuke’s Susano’o, or they could turn around deftly in midair and ride down the pillar. Whichever they chose, the mission was over.
Sakura tightened her hands on the grips and tried turning the bike, while Sasuke started to call Susano’o.
In the next moment, the pillar began to shoot up again.
It grazed the front wheel of the bike, and not missing her chance, Sakura used chakra control to bring together the surfaces of the pillar and the tires.
Bam!
The bike landed heavily on the vertical wall. It wobbled for an instant, but quickly righted itself and started racing upward.
“That was close. I thought it had stopped,” Sakura said, wiping away a cold sweat. “But it seems a little different from before?”
Until that moment, pillars of wood and pillars of earth that Yamato and Kakashi were individually responsible for had alternated and twisted around each other as the structure stretched into the sky. But now there were four pillars winding around each other. Three of earth and one of wood. No. There were two earth pillars, and the other one was sand.
“This chakra …” Sasuke said.
Naruto grinned happily. “It’s Gaara and Kurotsuchi!”
“Took you long enough.”
“Listen, you! You call us the day before the mission, you should be thankful we’re even here at all!” Kurotsuchi glared up at Kakashi as she poured chakra into the Rasenro, her hands pressed to the ground. “We just happened to be outside the country on a diplomatic mission, so we could come right away, but … You’re about the only person who could just give us a call so easily like this!”
“Naruto’s up there?” Gaara said, looking up at the sky with one hand on the ground. “Riding a lump of metal to charge into a cumulonimbus cloud. As reckless as ever, I see.”
“Right?” Yamato grinned wryly.
With the assist from Kurotsuchi and Gaara, the Rasenro had regained its strength and was stretching higher into the sky at a stable speed once again.
Yamato’s wood pillar, Kakashi’s and Kurotsuchi’s earth pillars, and Gaara’s sand pillar. The four of them wound together like braided hair and rose into the sky, supporting each other as they went. It was a structure more stable than when it had been just the two pillars.
“So why does Naruto want to go 660,000 feet up into the air?” Gaara asked. “There has to be a reason, right?”
“Aaah … I can’t tell you that.” Even at this late stage, Kakashi was keeping his cards close.
Kurotsuchi looked even more annoyed. “We’re here helping you out, and you’re not going to tell us the story?”
“Come on, relax. Once this is all over, ask Naruto yourself.” Kakashi let her anger glide off him, and Gaara chuckled.
“I suppose we’ll do that then,” the Kazekage said, sounding like he was having fun, and smiled as he looked up at the growing pillar.
Shikamaru changed his appearance with the Art of Transforma-tion and fled onto the crowded dance floor. He turned on the portable terminal hidden in his coat and entered passcodes one after another.
0018, 0081, 0801, 0108 …
“Hey, look there! There’s a huge person!”
“For real! He’s massive!”
The drunk patrons saw the enormous Choji and assumed incorrectly that he was part of some kind of promotion.
Choji had dealt with the poison by expanding, but that meant that he couldn’t move for the time being. If he took one wrong step at that size and weight, he’d bring the whole building down.
I’ll have to figure this one out on my own.
Shikamaru coolly continued to try passcodes. He’d already run through half of the possibilities, but he still couldn’t unlock the device. It was nine forty-five p.m. Finding the club and the unexpected fight with the two men who turned out to be shinobi were unexpected delays. He was out of time. He had to get this firewall down.
Choji turned himself into the mascot of a popular photo-taking spot. Glasses went outside to look for Shikamaru, but Long Hair stayed in the club and was leaning over the railing, scanning the dance floor.
You’re fine. Your face and body are different now. Just act naturally, and he won’t find you, Shikamaru told himself and kept inputting passcodes.
His performance and his Art of Transformation were indeed perfect. He was even skillfully hiding the unnatural movement of operating the terminal inside of his coat by doing it in time with the flow of people and the beat of the music. If Long Hair had been a normal bodyguard, he would have no doubt decided that the shinobi who assaulted Nohto had fled from the club. But unfortunately, Long Hair was the careful, persistent type.
He got up on a table, pulled a shuriken out of his pocket, and tossed it at the ceiling. The metal carved out a gentle arc in the air, spun around, and stabbed into the fixture attaching the mirror ball to the ceiling.
Snap!
The fixture broke, and the mirror ball dropped toward the packed dance floor.
“That jerk!”