“Eee! Let go, stop. Ah, aah. Ah, aaaaaaaah!!”
“What the hell are these things?! Where’d they come from?!”
“Stop. Stay away, don’t, don’t. Aah, stay back, stay—” The confused cries of prisoners.
Mysterious—and enormous—monsters crawled out from the massive rift in the courtyard and attacked anyone nearby.
Suddenly being slaughtered, the prisoners began to scream in terror.
“What are they?! Where are they coming from?!”
After being resurrected in the secret basement directly below the courtyard, the dragons had pushed through the ceiling to make their way outside. But the prisoners had no way of knowing all of this and had absolutely no idea what was happening. All they could do was run for their lives.
The spinos came out after the pteras. They were small dragons, about the height of a human being. They made optimal use of their maneuverable bodies as they jumped up and bit into heads and faces. One bite was enough to satisfy them, however, and they quickly moved onto their next target while the head-injured prisoners writhed in agony on the ground, mortally wounded but still alive.
The residential building was a hovel to begin with, and it collapsed easily under a barrage of headbutts from the pachycephalors. The prisoners who were slow to flee were crushed in the ruins of the building, but that was perhaps a more fortunate death. At the very least, they died without fear and extended suffering.
The pachycephalors had thick, hard, dome-shaped heads that they lowered as they charged their prey in straight lines. A fleeing prisoner tripped and fell, and the prisoners behind him all stumbled over his prone body and fell like dominos. The pachycephalors rushed the pile of fallen prisoners, some dozen people, trampling some, headbutting others. All of them died instantly.
The ones who survived this moment continued to flee until they reached the wall that surrounded the observatory and found that they had nowhere left to run.
“Dammit.”
The wall on the south side was already half destroyed thanks to the hard head of a pachycephalor, but it was still almost entirely intact on the north side. One man tried to climb it using the person near him as a stepping stone but was clawed back down.
A pachycephalor took a menacing step forward and crouched down.
“Ah! Aaah! I’m done for!” A prisoner slumped down on the spot in despair, while another wept and beat at the wall.
The pachycephalor pushed its iron-hard head forward and charged. The men silently braced for their deaths.
“Oh yeeeah!!”
In tandem with this sudden cry, the wall behind them crumbled and fell away. And the doctor from the infirmary came racing through from the other side of the dust cloud.
The prisoners poured through the hole in the wall. Screaming and yelling, they scrambled to be the first to get outside.
The pachycephalor froze in confusion, and in the next instant, it took a powerful blow to the jaw and hit the ground.
Sakura turned to the main building as she shouted for the prisoners to escape to the outside of the wall.
The dragons would still come after them whether they fled or not, but they had a better chance at survival by running than they did clumping together up against the wall.
She could hear moans and cries of pain everywhere and saw many writhing in pain, on the verge of death. As a medical ninja, it was almost impossible to simply walk by them, but in that moment, her call to duty was to save the many over the few. She had to choose sacrificing these lives for the sake of saving the most prisoners as possible. She had to find Zansul right away and make him release the jutsu, or there would be even more casualties.
She had no extra time for the stairs, so she concentrated her chakra in the soles of her feet and ran up the wall, heading straight for the director’s office. She kicked out a window and climbed inside, but there was no sign of anyone in the room. She checked his desk and bookshelves but couldn’t find any documents related to the reanimation jutsu.
“Where on earth …” She frowned and then decided to search with a fine-toothed comb from the fourth floor all the way down to the basement.
As she slipped down the long corridor and descended to the third floor, she encountered a group of prisoners huddled on the landing. They had apparently arrived here in their flight from the rampaging dragons outside.
“It’s too dangerous in here. You need to escape through the wall. Run as far away as you can.” Sakura urged the prisoners outside and then checked the rooms on the third floor from one end to the other. The observation room, reading room, the guards’ private chambers. Zansul was nowhere to be found.
She had to find him. The number of victims would only increase with every passing minute.
She hurried down the corridor and turned the corner, where she bumped into someone.
“Jiji!” she said.
“Doc? You’re okay. Sure am glad for that.” Jiji let out a sigh of relief. “But what is this? What’s going on? I seriously don’t know which way’s up. Where’d those huge monsters come from?”
“It’s the director’s work,” Sakura explained quickly. “He used the fossils to revive the dead and brought back the dragons. I have to find him and get him to release the jutsu.”
“If you’re looking for Zansul, he was in the courtyard a minute ago.”
“What?” She stared at Jiji in surprise. “He’s outside?”
Use of a high-level jutsu like Edotensei required a stable environment. She had assumed that the user would be hidden away from prying eyes somewhere in the observatory. But it seemed that she had misread the situation.
“Thanks, Jiji. You should hurry and get out of here too.”
“Yeah, I’ll be doing that.” Jiji nodded but then yanked hard on Sakura’s arm.
Caught off guard, she staggered and fell against his chest and felt an abrupt, sharp pain in her spine.
“What … ?” Sakura dropped to her knees and slumped forward.
The kunai stabbed into her back clattered to the floor.
“Sorry, Doc.”
Thump!
Her heart pounded heavily, and the core of her being shuddered. Her pulse throbbed in her ears, and her feet and hands were suddenly freezing cold. In contrast, her insides seized like they were on fire. She felt like all the cells in her body were boiling.
These symptoms.
They were the same as when Sasuke was poisoned by Meno.
“You were … working with Zansul …” Sakura could only move her eyes. She glared up at Jiji.
“I was. Even after we learned you were working with Sasuke, we strung you along. We couldn’t solve the mystery of Map of the Heavens ourselves.” Jiji crouched down and pulled the vessel with the ultra particles from her pocket.
“Give that … back …” She desperately forced a numb, trembling hand to clutch Jiji’s ankle.
She couldn’t let him have the ultra particles. She’d promised Naruto that she would return with Sasuke and a clue.
Jiji clucked his tongue and kicked her in the face. Sakura slammed into the wall, causing her head to split and crack. The shock of the impact raced up her spine all the way to the top of her head. She was less and less able to move by the second. Forget standing up; it was all she could do to keep breathing.
“Hah … ! Haah … !” she panted.
“Personally, I really do think you’re great.” With dark eyes, Jiji peered at her face and went on apologetically. “You remind me of my girlfriend—your voice, the way you move. I do honestly feel bad you’re going in this place. But you’re not Margo.”
He wove signs in front of his chest, and the earth shook beneath them.
The rupture in the courtyard ripped open even further, tearing up the almond tree by the roots before it could welcome its first blossoms with the coming spring.
An enormous snake-like creature covered in scales crawled up from a hole in the ground.
“What is that …”
Huddled together, the prisoners looked up at the monster, so massive that it nearly blocked the moon from view. The head and neck attached to the snake torso were at least ten meters long together, matched on the other end by a tail of the same length.
A titan, the most powerful dragon in all of history, gazed down on the four stories of the observatory.
Awakened from a sleep of tens of thousands of years, the enormous creature raised its head to the heavens as if stretching. Its long tail swung out and tore through the residential building, knocking the heavy roof tiles up into the air like droplets of water that then rained down on the area.
“That thing’s so ridiculously huge that it destroys everything near it with even the smallest movement,” Jiji remarked. “It wasn’t revived until the very last.”
The gigantic beast brought a foot down with an earth-shaking thud, and the entire observatory shifted suddenly. Unable to bear the weight of the mammoth creature, the building’s foundations had crumbled.
The room bent and twisted, and cracks raced across the ceiling. Before her eyes, the fissure snaked all the way out to the hall. The plaster walls peeled and fell away like wafers.
Jiji set a foot on the window frame, and the massive beast lowered its head to welcome the ninja. He jumped down onto it and looked back at Sakura.
“Later, Doc.”
The ceiling boards disintegrated, and the pieces rained down on the prone Sakura.
“ … !”
With her body ignoring her desperate commands for it to move, she was swallowed up by the rupture in the floor and slammed into the stairs a story below. Roof tiles hit her in the face, a falling wall pinned her down, and her field of vision went black.
With Sakura still inside, the observatory collapsed with a roar.