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Chapter 64 - Arc 4 - Brawling in the Streets: A Sneak Attack
🕑 Added 2024-07-28 13:23:22 +0000 UTCHey guys. My new roommie arrived, that's been expensive. Almost $400 spent so far settling him in, my poor wallet...
That being said, patreon has seen a massive gain in people recently. I dunno if it's luck, an algorithm moment, the changes I've made to Patreon to make it more accessible, or all three.
What I do know, is that if we continue to grow like this for even a few more weeks, the $300 goal is achievable. That would also allow me to start taking time off work, and really focus on this story. (An extra chapter, for one) Which'd be a dream come true.
Thank you for all those that are supporting me, and enjoy the chapter.
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They come out of thin air. Maybe they would have been visible if the air around her wasn’t already littered with weapons and wavy from the heat she’s ignoring below her. Maybe if she’d been watching anything but the people she was freaking out, she would have spotted their hazy reflections in the dimming light.
Maybe it’s Genjutsu, maybe they have magical stealth, whatever the case, she’s surprised to find three daggers slamming into her from multiple different directions.
She’s also surprised that they hurt. Feeling an invincible high, it’s shocking to suddenly notice a piercing of her flesh out of nowhere. In front of her, and two behind her, forming a triangle of pain that shocks her core for the moment it takes her to react. She doesn’t even recognize what they are before she’s punched one in the face hard enough to shatter it and send bone fragments in all directions. It’s not human, gray bone tinted with age to be a little darker than one might find in class falls to the ground in front of her. She destroyed one with a single blow, watching what was a moving skeleton stop in an instant makes her feel strong again, but not as much as the pain makes her waver. She spins on her heel, using a move kakashi forced into her to pick up her sword on the way and slash it all the way around. She’s happy she dropped it in such a way it stuck into the ground and stood straight up for her, otherwise she’d be swinging air.
They’re gone, instantly. Weak and lacking in agility, the skeletons are sliced in half like nothing, and for good measure she throws a stomp down to crush their skulls when they hit the ground, smooshing their faces directly into the hot magma below. She’s not sure when that’ll stop being an attack and start being a natural force that can very much hurt her, so maybe having a need to move now is a blessing in disguise, that could have truly sucked. “Alright.” She checks herself over, removing the three daggers stuck into her flesh, and noticing they’re all high quality blades. She pockets them all with a little smile. They hurt, which means that despite their weakness, those skeletons are greater than the foes up above.
They didn’t hurt much though, barely even getting through her armor and catching her by surprise, which implies they’re genin power, and she takes half damage from those attacks.
All in all, a check reveals she’s only lost like twenty HP, which is almost nothing in the grand scheme of things for an entire battle like this. Sneak attacks normally do extra in games, she has to wonder if that’s accurate here.
Neji sounds like he’s still fighting, but the weapons have stopped coming her way, which implies either the weak enemies are in retreat and he’s fighting more of these skeletons - something she is sure he is more than capable of - or he’s finally gotten their attention. She’s sure he’s more than capable of handling that too. She’s just not worried about him, and chasing down fleeing enemies isn’t something she’s feeling at the moment, so she stretches instead of rushing in to help her superior. It feels good to feel strong for once. Confidence runs through her veins. It makes her blood run hot and turns her smile into a beam of self assurance.
“Aaahhhh!” Tenten’s scream on the other hand, ruins all of that and has her sprinting
Tenten doesn’t have any magical durability tricks, and she isn’t in armor. Neji can probably see through whatever made them invisible, but Tenten can’t, and they only need a few lucky shots to kill her. She finds herself moving onto a trash can, onto a wall, kicking off onto another wall, and then pushing herself up to climb on top of the roof. It’s ridiculous, but she’s a ninja, screw civilian standards.
A look around reveals that yes, some of the genin are escaping.
[14/20 Genin Killed]
And Neji is fighting skeletons, six of them in fact, and doing a very good job of it. It seems that unlike the Genin, which were hard targeting her, the skeletons decided to stop Neji and Tenten from killing the Genin, mostly.
There’s two more already dead by his side, which means he started the fight with eight, and he’s dancing through it like he’s at a show and approaching a beautiful display to be applauded from all around. She still has almost zero worry about him. Taking him in took half a second, she can thank her crazy high Mind for that.
Turning towards the scream, she can see Tenten is a lot worse off. She’s clutching her throat, blood spilling from her lips, the roof covered in what she’s lost, while three more skeletons stab at her, again, and again-
She recognizes this scene all too well, Tenten’s dead. There’s no one but Tsunade in the world that could save her in the time she has with the tools at play, medical ninjutsu just isn’t advanced enough for anyone else.
Luckily, Sakura doesn’t need medical ninjutsu. She has cheats.
She’s in her pack for a quarter second, and hucking a canister at Tenten the next, while darting over on footsteps made of wind. It hits the poor girl in the face, which’d normally be considered a bad thing, but that means it gets her attention when it lands in front of her and rolls back to her after clanking off the side of the roof. Tenten grabs at it, while Sakura’s feet land on the roof, and a moment later her feet are through a skeleton.
Offensively her targets are terrifying, but defensively, sword rends through bone, muscles crush them, and her body moves on its own into a spin kick that would probably have made Lee mildly appreciative if he was here to see it.
He’s not though, it’s her, and a bunch of dead skeletons, and Tenten bleeding out while scrambling to try and get the canister working. Sakura crouches low, grabs her from behind, pulls her against her chest, and uses her hands to grab the girls’. She does her best to steady her friend’s shaking grip, and ignores the slippery nature of the flowing fluids spattering the canister. She can’t focus on the fact that Tenten has seconds at best, she won’t think about the fact that she is dying in her arms while she tries to help her. One finger lands on the top of the canister, the other holds it in place with Tenten’s help-
And the spray begins. Green and floral, it smells distinctly of flowers, and strongly too because Sakura shouldn’t be able to smell anything but decay and heat and blood. She helps Tenten focus it on her throat, but that’s not enough.
Even as her jugular closes, she knows there’s a dozen other stab wounds that’ll kill her just as fast, and they already used the entire canister on just that.
Wandering minds make her wonder just how much HP Tenten has, and if having higher HP can actually make you easier to kill from things like blood loss, but that wandering mind is forsaken a moment later when Sakura pushes the girl onto her stomach, forcefully pinning her beneath her, and reaches for another canister.
She sprays, desperately.
Empties it, tosses it to the side-
And grabs another.
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“I think she’s fine, Sakura…” Neji’s hand lands on Sakura’s shoulder, shaking her out of her stupor. “I am grateful to see you can lose your cool and overdo it when it comes to healing your allies as well.” The scene is oh so similar to just that of earlier today, and yet, he finds himself smiling instead of wanting to vomit.
Seven canisters lay on the roof to the side, and Tenten’s genuinely never looked healthier. She’s practically glowing. “Are you sure?” Sakura asks him, red eyes wavering, brimming with tears that make her look both so vulnerable, and so innocent. If he hadn’t been her teammate for the last week, and hadn’t seen all the carnage she can create, he’d think she was just a little girl.
“Yes, Sakura.” He can’t help it, his fingers land on her scalp, and waywardly brush through her silky hair. She’s taken good care of it in recent times, nothing like how she looked when he visited her class to check on Hinata that one time. She had been scraggly to a fault, not a bit of girly nature in her. She’d been an outcast in her own friend group, and was so busy chasing after that Sasuke guy that she didn’t even realize Hinata wanted to be friends. Of course she wouldn’t have had to realize anything if Hinata would stop being a pathetic whelp not even worth her own air, and be forward with something for the first time in her entire life.
He hates her so much.
But seeing Hinata in Sakura in some very real ways, he can’t help but think that maybe it’s not Hinata he hates, it’s what she’s cost him.
It doesn’t matter right now, he’ll have time to consider much after this mission. So much has happened, and he’s done so much thinking. Sakura is a force of nature, every team should take her on a mission once. He’ll be saying as much to the Hokage during his report.
“Some got away,” he says, as Sakura lowers her head and accepts the nimble touches like they make sense and aren’t at all a weird part of his brain malfunctioning, “I was thinking of giving chase while you and Tenten make camp. She’ll need time to recover from this, mentally.”
“No.” Sakura denies, shaking her head at him.
“No one goes alone, for anything. That was too close.”
“Sakura, I feel like I’m a lot less likely to get snuck up on than-”
“No one goes alone, for anything.” Sakura growls at him. A feral animal deep inside of her refusing to even listen to him for a second. Those pained eyes dare to glare at him, and he finds his airway tightening.
He’d like to scold her, remind her that he’s the team leader, but he can’t.
Not while looking at those tear filled eyes, mournful over his teammate, over his friend.
She saved Tenten’s life, he can allow her to disrespect him this once.
“Fine, let’s set up camp, Sakura.”
Comments
Christopher Cummins
I do love it
Dopplerdee
Oh noice Neji is getting some introspection
Kim Carragher
Sakura is building a harem, I fear.
