Time Braid

22. Confrontation

“I wondered why you did it, you know,” I said conversationally. “Did getting marked by Orochimaru every loop drive you crazy? Did you get caught in Itachi’s Tsukuyomi too many times? Was I just that much of a pest? What happened to you, to turn the boy who believed in justice into a man willing to torture his teammate? Did you really never realize that I would have done anything for you if you’d just asked?”

He frowned minutely, in that infuriating ‘I’m too cool to actually show any emotion’ way that he’s always been so fond of. “You wouldn’t understand,” he said coldly. “And you should have known better than to rebel. I’ll have to train you more thoroughly this time.”

I shifted to my adult form and cracked my knuckles. “Give it your best shot, you bastard. I’m not the helpless little girl I used to be.”

“It doesn’t matter,” he said confidently. “No matter what training you’ve undergone, no matter how strong you’ve become, you cannot defeat me. All your jutsu are useless against these eyes.”

His eyes changed, but not into the pinwheel I’d expected. The higher-level versions of the Sharingan are a very individual thing, and the kaleidoscopic loops of his eyes told a story of madness and loss and the blackest despair. The Perfect Mangekyo was in there, along with a half-dozen other horrors of ultimate degradation. The Lord of Misery had taken great delight in crafting the Sharingan so that only the most depraved of mortals could command its greater powers, and apparently Sasuke had taken that as a challenge.

A moment later I was naked, bound helplessly to an X-shaped frame of cold iron while something hot and slimy slithered around my ankles. But we were in the false garden I’d erected in my jungle, not the true heart of my mindscape.

Sasuke appeared before me, and tipped my chin up so he could look into my eyes. “My skills have grown considerably since last time,” he told me. “Then, I could only make you fear me. Now, I can make you love me as well. This time, I shall not release you until you worship me as your god.”

Dozens of slimy tentacles began slithering up my legs, while a forest of animated chains tipped with oddly-shaped blades extended down from somewhere above us. A whisper of genjutsu carried a message of despair and the futility of resistance to my heart, while a more subtle weave hinted at the sublime joy to be found in complete surrender. If this was his opener, he could probably actually carry through on that threat.

Against anyone but me.

I mustered my courage, and laughed. “Not this time, Sasuke. You see, I’ve worn those eyes you’re so proud of. I’ve been a demon of misery, and I know their secrets.”

“Then you should know that demonic power will only make you more susceptible,” he observed coldly.

“But I’m not a demon right now, am I?” I said. I send a warning thought to my other aspect, and shaped myself to fit my words as I went on. “I am the youngest child of the line of Bishamon. I am a mortal who has glimpsed Heaven. I am love, and courage, and hope. I am Sakura’s aspect of light,” I sang defiantly, as my chakra flared with golden sparks.

“…and your eyes have no power over me.”

My bonds dissolved as my clothing reformed around me, and Sasuke stepped back with an utterly stupefied expression. Then I ejected us both from my mindscape, and grinned at him.

“Now,” I said eagerly, “let’s see how well you fight without your little magic cheat codes.”

His eyes swirled. “Your mind may be protected, but what about your body?”

The black flames of Amaterasu licked about me momentarily, but his corrupted mockery of the sun’s flame found no purchase on my soul. I launched myself forward at full boost, and a sharp thunderclap echoed across the clearing as I momentarily broke the sound barrier. His dodge was just an instant too slow, and my fist grazed his shoulder. The impact sent him spinning back through the massive tree behind him in a cloud of dust and splinters.

“How?” He groaned as he pulled himself to his feet.

“Your combat ‘precognition’ works by reading your opponent’s mind to see what he’s about to do,” I explained. “You can’t read me, so you’ll have to make do with your own skills. So, are you a real taijutsu master like I am, or did you just copy a few styles and rely on your eyes to make up the difference?”

This time he was expecting me, and he had time to flick a spread of shuriken at me as I charged. I wove between them and left a shadow clone in my place while I body flickered into the trees behind him. It was a good thing I did, since my clone found out the hard way that his sword was charged with lighting chakra. The first time she parried it the shock disrupted her, but I used the moment of distraction to switch my chakra nature to fire. I’d wanted to get earth as well, but I found I couldn’t quite manage two elements without losing the state of mind that made me immune to the Sharingan.

Was being ‘light’ a chakra nature? I’d consider that later.

I breathed fire at him, and he countered with the same technique. For a moment we strained against each other, each trying to push our jet of flame to be a little stronger than the other’s. But our chakra was too evenly matched for that contest to yield a victor, so I flickered behind a tree and pulled out my kunai instead. When the flame subsided I switched to a new position and flung myself at him, only to realize in midflight that I was attacking a lightning clone. I replaced myself with a leaf on a nearby branch, leaving behind another shadow clone to take care of his distraction, and sensed something flying at me from behind.

I had a dozen kunai out on chakra strings by then, so I parried instinctively as I turned. I found the air full of little rod-shaped bits of lightning chakra, which I have to admit is an interesting weapon. Good thing I’d picked fire, since they gave him an easy way to disrupt earth techniques.

Sasuke was throwing a lot of those things, but he only had two hands and I had lots of kunai to parry with. I bounced into the trees and around as he tried to get a hit in, and returned fire with a few hundred shuriken clones to keep him from getting too comfortable. Then my clone finished with his, and sent a grand fireball his way. He did a replacement to evade it, and I locked onto his landing spot in the upper branches and met him there.

Close combat was a gamble, but I was betting my superior speed and his shoulder injury would make up for the fact that his sword was electrified. Unfortunately I found that he really was a taijutsu master, and it was a more even fight than I’d hoped. His skill was actually better than mine, his physical conditioning on a par with Gai, and his lighting techniques were a major pain in the ass. But my dancing kunai could attack from every direction at once, and he couldn’t begin to match my physical enhancements.

We traded a flurry of blows, he desperately trying to dodge my fists and parry all of my blades while I struggled to avoid all of his attacks. He knew how to cut chakra strings, but then again all I had to do was wave a hand near a falling kunai to re-attach one. He took several shallow cuts in the space of a few seconds, and only one of my knives was thrown out of reach.

He opened the first three of the Eight Gates, enough to get a decisive physical boost without burning himself out too quickly. I matched him and opened two more with a grin, knowing I could manage the stress on my body easily. Superior skill or not I was so going to kick his ass.

Then he activated his cursed seal, and suddenly I had problems. As a genin that thing had made him a credible threat to jounin. Now, it made him even faster than I was and almost as strong. I tried to disengage, but he managed to graze me with his sword. My muscles spasmed uncontrollably, and he flowed into a fancy spinning cut that separated my head from my shoulders.

Ok, he was one scary bastard. But so am I, and I wasn’t going to die that way again. I spun out a chakra string to touch my dying body, animated it, and used its hands to grab my head and put it back where it belonged. By the time Sasuke realized what was happening I’d healed myself and body flickered a couple of trees away.

“Nice try, Sasuke,” I commented. “But you’ll have to do better.”

His eyes narrowed. “What sort of monster have you become, Sakura?”

“Monster?” I laughed. “Do I look like a monster?”

“We all become monsters in the end. Summoning Technique!”

He bit his thumb and slammed his hand into the branch beneath him, and a summoning array began to spin out. I was tempted to flash in and hit him while it was forming, but he was probably ready for that. So instead I shifted my chakra nature to water, and flickered back to the edge of a nearby pond.

His summoning produced a flock of winged snakes, which he sent soaring towards me as he followed at a more leisurely pace. I danced back onto the surface of the pond as they encircled me, and flicked a few shuriken wrapped in invisibility illusions at them. They dodged, confirming that they weren’t your garden-variety summons. Sasuke took flight, which startled me for a moment until I realized he was using those hand-wing things the cursed seal had given him rather than an air technique. His hands flew through a series of seals as he moved, forming some kind of fancy target-seeking electrical attack. Perfect.

As the lightning bolts formed in his hand I dumped half my chakra into the pond, making the whole mass of water mine. It leaped into motion with a shriek of displaced air as I worked it like a giant Rasengan, forming a ball of furiously whirling water streamers nearly two hundred feet across. The flying snakes were torn to bits in an instant, and Sasuke’s technique grounded out as he hurriedly replaced himself with a rock on the shore.

Floating in the heart of the maelstrom I was immune to both of his elements, but I wasn’t going to give him time to come up with another strategy. I sent the whole mass of my Cutting Water Dance rushing up and into the forest after him, forcing him to dodge and retreat while I shed a mist cloud around us to limit his vision. Of course, to a ninja of his caliber this just made it obvious I was about to pull some kind of tricky ambush tactic while his sight was obscured.

So I didn’t.

Instead I kept my concentration on the Water Dance. It was a little slower than he was, but with dozens of water streamers coming at him from every direction at once it was still tough to dodge them all. Every parry and near-miss showered him with water, making it impossible to use lighting jutsu, and with my chakra filling the air around him he wasn’t going to be getting away with a replacement or body flicker. Meanwhile the shadow clone I’d spun off before took advantage of the mist to suppress her presence and sneak up on Sasuke, since the Sharingan can only penetrate illusions it can see.

Somehow he detected her in time to take her out with a neat little thunderclap jutsu, which blew apart the nearest water streamers as well. But she’d only been a distraction anyway. It was about thirty seconds before the paralytic agent I’d added to some of those first flying water droplets began to take effect. Then he stumbled, and one of my cutting streamers severed the Achilles tendon of his left leg. Another laid open his right arm as he tried to recover, before he realized what had happened.

His wings folded around his body, buying him a few seconds to form seals as I sliced them to ribbons. Then an immense gout of fire washed out in all directions, vaporizing the water streamers around him and threatening to collapse my technique.

Instead of resisting I let it happen, switching my nature back to fire as he spent most of his remaining chakra to blow my watery weapon away. As the blast began to dissipate I cranked up my fire resistance and charged right through the flames, ignoring the pain of flash-fried skin to land a solid punch that broke ribs as his cursed seal began to fade. I spun into a kick that took his legs out from under him and slammed a Rasengan into his belly as he fell.

He went down hard.

I slapped my hand down on his chest and locked up his muscles with a paralysis technique. Then, panting with effort, I paused to heal myself. I was nearly out of chakra, but was quite pleased I hadn’t had to tap my storage seal.

“I suppose this is where the torture begins?” He asked, a lot more calmly than I would have expected. I opened my mouth to reply… and stopped, frowning.

I had no desire to torture Sasuke. I’d been furious when I first saw him, but now… I wanted to stop him. To make sure he didn’t do it to anyone else. To understand why he’d done it, so I could make sure his analogues didn’t go down the same dark road. But killing him wouldn’t accomplish anything, and I felt no desire at all to hurt him in the name of revenge.

Why the hell not?

Oh, of course.

“Well, crap. Apparently universal benevolence is part of the price for this power.” I sank to my knees beside his prone from, and frowned. “My desire for revenge seems to be missing at the moment.”

He chuckled. “There’s always a price. What did you make your deal with?”

“Myself,” I said absently. My chakra was mostly gone, but the golden sparkles were much thicker than before. Was that a different kind of power, something my techniques couldn’t use? I formed a little ball of chakra in my hand, and tried to separate the colors. It wasn’t even hard. The normal human chakra subsided back into my body, leaving behind a tiny bead of gold.

“Not unless you’re a Bright Kami, Sakura,” Sasuke disagreed. “I thought you were smart enough not to believe their lies.”

I shook my head. “You mean those nice, friendly kami who just want to help us when they aren’t condemning people they don’t like to be tortured for all of eternity? Hardly. They tried to recruit me, but I turned them down. My place is here in shadows, with the blood and the fear and the screams of the dying, standing back to back with my loves against the world.”

The golden energy in my hand flared brighter at the words… no, not the words. The feeling. Was it driven by emotion, then? I shook my head, and extinguished it.

“But what about you, Sasuke? Have you gotten your vengeance yet? Was it worth losing everything else to have it?”

He shook his head weakly. “Information is a ninja’s greatest weapon, silly girl. I’m not going to tell you my story.”

“Damn it, Sasuke!” I growled. “Why do you always have to do things the hard way? Fine, if you’re that desperate to have me as an enemy I’ll play along.”

I slapped my hand down on his forehead and started a memory copy. His eyes went wide.

“Oh, no you don’t!” He hissed.

And detonated his chakra.

He hadn’t been as low as I thought. The explosion took out a good-size chunk of the Forest of Death, but my other aspect was well outside the blast radius.

“Are you alright, Sakura?” Naruto asked. “That can’t have been easy.”

“I’m just pissed that the only technique I have for countering his Sharingan makes me too damned nice to take revenge properly,” I insisted. “God, I feel like one of those vapid trash-novel heroines. If you ever hear me say I forgive him just put me out of my misery, ok?”

“I’d do it for you if I could,” Hinata offered. “You know I’m good at vengeance.”

“Hey now, that’s not what’s important,” Naruto said, pulling me into his embrace. “You’re the one I care about, Sakura, not him. Besides, you won.”

I chuckled. “I did, didn’t I? I spent so many years terrified of what would happen when we met again, but I beat him. What a relief!”

“There’s one thing I don’t understand, Sakura,” Hinata asked. “If it wasn’t a normal crossover loop, how did he get there?”

I sighed. “His Sharingan is fully developed. He can use it to rip open holes in the fabric of space, but his eyes don’t give him a way to navigate. Most Sharingan users would just turn that into a long-distance teleport technique, but he’s powerful enough to punch all the way through to an adjacent alternate world if he wants to. I’d guess he can’t control which world he ends up in very well, and there’s an infinite maze of them to get lost in, but that’s still disturbing. Give him a few years to work out the math and he might end up being able to visit any of us whenever he wants.”

“Damn,” Naruto exclaimed. “I hate to point this out, but for all we know he’s already done that. We need to find a way to warn the other Hinata. No, warning her wouldn’t help. We need a way to get me to her.”

“I can’t,” I protested. “I’m sorry, Naruto, but there’s no way I can summon you across loops right now. Your chakra is so massive I’d just end up pulling myself to you instead.”

“Ok, then can you get her here?” He asked.

I hesitated. “Maybe. If she’s willing to cooperate. But I’d have to let her sign my contract, and I haven’t had any luck manifesting it outside my mindscape yet. I don’t know that she’d trust me enough to come into my mindscape to sign it, and I’d be taking a huge risk if I let her in. If she found my inner mindscape she could turn me into a vegetable in about five seconds, and it could take me decades to recover.”

“Yeah, I get that,” Naruto said. “I don’t want you to take that kind of risk either. But this is Hinata we’re talking about. Can you at least talk to her, and see if she’ll listen?”

“I’ll see what I can do.”

Fortunately my Hinata had some idea of how her counterpart’s loops usually went, and what she might or might not do to the Sakura in her world. That still left a lot of variables to consider, and for the first few days I found nothing. Trying to summon a version of myself who didn’t actually exist was a complete waste of chakra, but at least it gave me a definitive ‘no’. No child-Sakura who just noticed Hinata seems kind of scary. No Sakura who’d been publicly embarrassed after the written exam, in any of a dozen ways carefully chosen not to spoil Naruto’s chance at passing. No Sakura who’d been tortured and crippled and left hanging from a tree surrounded by that Sound team’s mangled bodies.

Yeah, the looping Hinata really didn’t like me.

Once I’d exhausted the obvious options I spent a few hours thinking about how she might have reacted to her encounter with me, and probed a little further afield. That didn’t work either, but it kept me busy until after the preliminary round of the exam. Then I tried ‘a Sakura who just saw Hinata beat Neji like a drum’, and got a response.

I’d gotten the hang of targeting my summons better, so she didn’t appear in midair this time. She stumbled as if she’d been walking, and looked around wildly. I’d decided to do my work in a sealed-off area of my mindscape that looked a lot like my favorite training ground out in the real world, just in case I got a Sakura who wanted to be violent. To her eyes it probably looked like the real training ground seventeen.

“What the heck?” She exclaimed. Her eyes locked on me, and she stepped back nervously. “Who are you?”

“Relax, Sakura, you’re not in any danger from me,” I reassured her. “I’m you.”

She looked me up and down, and raised a skeptical eyebrow. “This must be quite a story.”

“I made a summoning contract with myself,” I explained with a smile. “It lets me pull in other versions of myself from alternate worlds. If it worked right you just finished the second stage of the chuunin exam, in a world where Hinata beat Neji instead of the other way around.”

She suppressed a shudder. “I don’t see how anyone could beat Hinata,” she admitted. “Maybe Orochimaru, or the Hokage, but not any normal ninja.”

“That’s what I thought,” I said. “It sounds like she’s the Hinata I’m looking for, and yes, she’d be a kage-level ninja by now. So, want to sign the Sakura summoning contract?”

An hour later we stood in the streets of her Konoha as the sun sank towards the horizon. I’d made a body for myself to avoid putting my counterpart in danger, and made myself fifteen instead of twenty so as not to rub Hinata’s nose in the fact that she was stuck in a child’s body.

“This is not a good idea,” the local me insisted as I made my way towards the Hyuuga compound. “Hinata is one scary girl, and she doesn’t like me at all. She told me if she ever saw me hit Naruto again Kakashi-sensei would never find my body.”

“Hmm. He’s harder to fool than you’d think,” I mused. “But Hinata can be pretty sneaky. She might be able to pull that off.”

“You’re not helping!” She growled at me.

I laughed. “Sorry, I forget how serious this must seem to you. Look, I know she’s a badass bitch, but so am I. Besides, I’m not here to fight her.”

“Why are you here, then?”

The soft question came from an alley just in front of us. Hinata stepped into view, and my local counterpart stopped and backed away with a gasp. I just smiled.

“Nice cloaking technique,” I admitted. “I didn’t sense you until you were well within attack range. I have a message for you from Naruto.”

Her eyes flicked from me to the girl behind me, and she made a shooing gesture. “Run along, little girl,” she said firmly. “The adults have to talk.”

Wisely, the local Sakura left.

Hinata body flickered to the roof of a nearby building with perfect finesse, leaving only the barest hint of a chakra trace to indicate where she’d gone. I followed, and found her waiting with that flawless composure the Hyuuga are so famous for. Despite her youthful appearance she was every inch the elegant noble lady, and I saw no sign of the frantic possessiveness that had dominated her actions the last time we’d met. Instead she was cool, distant, perfectly controlled, and ready to burst into violent motion at the slightest hint of danger. My heart ached to see her treating me as an enemy, no matter how I tried to remind it she wasn’t my Hinata.

“How can you be here at the same time as her?” She finally asked.

“I found a way to make a summoning contract with myself,” I explained. “So I can summon the Sakura in your loop, have her sign the contract, and then let her summon me here. She can’t hold enough chakra to bring my body, but I’ve gotten good at making those.”

“So if I kill her you can’t come here.” Her eyes narrowed slightly. “Is explaining this another olive branch? Why?”

She wouldn’t believe the whole story, and she’d probably know if I lied. Gods know the Byakugan is an incredible lie detector, and I’d never tried to work out a way to fool it. But I didn’t have to explain everything. “The short version? He loves you. He also loves me, and I love him. I don’t want to fight with you. It would only make him disappointed with us both.”

“You said that before,” she observed quietly. “You said, ‘he loves you’, and also ‘you’d better get sane’. Which perplexed me at the time, for I considered myself quite sane. I have since learned better.”

“Good,” I said seriously. “I… respect you, Hinata. It hurt, to see you like that. Which reminds me, I owe you an apology. I should never have questioned your devotion to Naruto.”

“True,” she said. Then she sighed softly. “I see that you speak the truth, though you keep back many secrets. Promise me you will not lie about anything he says, and I will hear your message.”

“I’ll do more than that. I promise that I will not attempt to deceive you in any way about what Naruto wants me to tell you, now or in the future, unless you release me from my vow.”

As I’d expected that familiar sense of finality settled about me, and I knew I couldn’t break my promise. But Hinata’s eyes widened fractionally in surprise, and I realized she could somehow see that my oath was binding.

“You!” She breathed. “What are you, Sakura?”

“A little less kami than you are dragon, Hinata,” I replied. “Just enough that my promises bind me if I mean them. So now you know that the worst I can do is fail to relay a message, and even then I can’t do it to deceive you.”

She bit her lip, the way my Hinata did when she was troubled and thinking hard. “And the message?”

“First, he wanted me to tell you that he has come to love every version of you that he’s met in the loops, and he looks forward to seeing the true and eldest Hinata someday soon. You don’t have to do anything else to earn his approval, Hinata. If you can reach him, he’ll be waiting for you with open arms.”

She trembled slightly, and a single tear fell to run slowly down her cheek. Knowing what I now knew about Hyuuga customs, I pretended I hadn’t seen.

“Second, a warning. The looping version of Sasuke has mastered the most depraved levels of his bloodline, and found a way to travel physically between the loops. Fortunately he has to navigate the whole infinite labyrinth of possible worlds to find us, so he can’t just surprise us at will yet. But not long ago he found my loop and tried to break me again, and if I hadn’t found a defense against his eyes I’d be his slave now. We’re not sure if he knows about you or not, and I certainly didn’t tell him, but please take whatever measures you can to protect yourself.”

“My eyes are as strong as I can make them, but I will consider what else may be done.” She paused, and took a deep breath. “Will you show me your defense?”

Ouch. It must have cost her to ask that of me, and I hated to deny her. “It’s based on my bloodline, so I don’t know if you could learn it,” I said. “I can split myself into two aspects, and shift attributes of my mind between them. The Sharingan is actually a demonic weapon that feeds on the victim’s pain and misery, so I was able to make myself immune by shifting all the parts of myself that it could affect to an aspect that wasn’t physically present. If you think you might be able to learn something like that, I’ll be happy to try to teach you.”

She gave me a measuring look, and shook her head slightly. “No, that is not within my ability. Not until I find my name, and perhaps not then. Was there more?”

“No, but if you want me to carry him a message from you I promise to do so faithfully.” I smiled at the faint hint of surprise in her eyes. “I told you, I don’t want to be your enemy. I think I may even have a way for you to visit him soon, if you’re willing to trust me a little.”

She bowed her head, and for a moment I thought her Hyuuga reserve was going to crack completely. But she wrestled her emotions back under control with only a slight tremble.

“Thank you,” she breathed. “If you can do that, I may be forced to forgive you. But what then?”

“That’s up to Naruto,” I replied. “But I’ve been friends with the Hinata in my loop for a long time now, and I think I understand you a little better than I used to. I know that your feelings for Naruto are at least as deep as mine, and losing him forever would hurt you even more than it would me. I could never do that to you, Hinata. I think he wants us both, and I can be happy with that.”

“And if he chooses me instead?” She asked gravely.

“I…” I was sure he wouldn’t, but gods, just thinking about it hurt. Still, she deserved an honest answer. If Naruto chose Hinata I was sure he’d get both versions of her whether they merged or not. What would it do to me, if I lost both of my loves at once?

For the first time, I realized that loving like a celestial wasn’t necessarily a good thing. If my feelings for Naruto and Hinata had been something like my old crush on Sasuke or my affection for Ino I could eventually get over them, and move on. But they weren’t. If they rejected me now, after our bonds had grown so strong, I didn’t think the pain would ever fade. I imagined for a moment what it would be like, to feel that loss for the rest of my life as strongly as if it had happened yesterday.

“It would kill me,” I admitted. “Oh, I’d wish you well, and try to look happy at your wedding and be a good friend afterward. I might even succeed, for awhile. But it would never get any easier, and I wouldn’t want to spoil your happiness by hovering around being hurt and pathetic. I think eventually I’d have to arrange to die heroically, or take a long trip and permanently disappear, or something along those lines.”

She regarded me steadily for a long minute, but her eyes weren’t quit as cold as they’d been before.

“As you pointed out before, I’ve only known you as a child,” she said. “Perhaps I should give you a chance.”

I carried several messages between the two over the rest of the loop, but my efforts to make my summoning contract tangible bore little fruit. Bringing something physical into my mindscape wasn’t any easier, although I did manage it with a single drop of my own blood. I tucked that carefully away in a hidden compartment beneath my workshop, thinking it might come in handy some day.

I was obviously missing some important detail there, but none of the information sources I had access to in Konoha shed any light on the matter. I was brooding over it at the library one day when Naruto decided my life wasn’t complicated enough yet.

“Hey, Sakura,” he greeted me as he bounced up with his usual energy. “I’ve got someone you need to meet.”

I sighed. “What now, Naruto? I’m a little busy trying to figure this thing out for Hinata, you know.”

“Yeah, yeah, I know you’ll come up with something. Anyway, this could be a clue about the big fate jutsu, but he says he wants to see you and Hinata first. Come on!”

I let him drag me away, still protesting half-heartedly. The instant we were out of sight he wrapped his chakra around us both, and suddenly we were in a training ground halfway across Konoha. I stopped, looking around in surprise as Hinata joined us.

“Naruto, was that your dad’s Hiraishin technique?” I asked.

He shrugged. “Not sure. He didn’t write it down anywhere so I had to re-invent it, and my version probably isn’t the same. But it’s great for avoiding long trips. Hold on tight, now!”

With that he called out enough chakra to level Konoha, wrapped it around us, and… made us be somewhere else? The mechanism was completely different than Body Flicker, at any rate. But now we were standing on a mountainside, on a terrace overlooking an immensely long staircase decorated with giant statues of frogs.

Frogs.

“Is this Mount Myouboku?” I asked. “I thought that was supposed to be on one of the summon worlds?”

“Nah, it’s just on the other side of an ocean from Konoha,” he corrected. “Now come on, the old geezer is waiting on us!”

He pulled the two of us up a final flight of steps into an audience hall built for giants, where an ancient toad the size of Gamabunta sat reading from a scroll as big as a house. He set it aside and smiled down at us benevolently as we came in.

“Ah, the child of prophecy has returned,” he said in greeting. “And you’ve brought your guardian dragon and the Sage of Insight. Good morning, everyone! Would you care for tea?”

I glanced out the open doors at the sun, which was maybe an hour short of setting, and hoped this was just an act. Then I thought about what he’d called us, and suspected that it was. Who was this ancient toad, anyway?

“Hey, old geezer!” Naruto replied airily. “Yeah, tea would be great. But you said you’d tell us about the fall of the gods and the demonic fate if I brought the girls.”

“Yes, yes, nasty business that was,” the great toad replied. “Those young hotheads just kept pushing until it all fell apart. I tried to warn them, you know. Ah, but who listens to an old toad?”

Suddenly, I understood why we were here. It had never occurred to me there might be people still alive who’d witnessed whatever happened back then, but Naruto had gone and found one.

“We will,” I said confidently. “We aren’t gods. We know we don’t know what we’re doing, and the stakes are very high. Please, sir, will you help us figure out what to do?”

He chuckled. “So that’s how it is, eh? Well, I may not have your answers, little lady, but you can always ask your questions.”

I hesitated, and Naruto nodded encouragingly at me. “Go ahead, Sakura,” he said. “I’m not as dumb as I used to be, but you understand this stuff better than I do. I’ll jump in if I think of something you miss.”

“Ok,” I said. “In that case, can you tell us anything useful about this demonic curse that seems to cover the world? I’ve only recently become able to see it, and it’s rather unnerving to realize that it could be influencing anything I do.”

“Ah, you’ve seen beyond the veil, have you? Yes, the first time is always upsetting. Especially now. But the dark powers can only whisper temptation in your ear, you know. They can’t make you listen.”

“I suppose not,” I allowed. “Free will, and all. But they seem to be awfully good at corrupting everyone who can be tempted, and then using them as pawns to pull everyone else down too. It’s not just us I’m concerned about, sir, it’s the whole world. Isn’t there some way to counter their technique?”

The ancient toad leaned back and contemplated me for a long moment.

“Do you think you can make the world a perfect place, Sakura?” He asked gravely.

“Of course not,” I replied immediately. “I wouldn’t know where to start. I’ve always felt that if I can just leave the world better off than it would have been without me, I’ll have done my part. But I’m afraid that evil is terribly close to winning forever on our world, and having some massive fate jutsu constantly trying to corrupt everyone can’t be helping.”

“Ah,” he said, as if I’d just answered some difficult riddle. “But you see, it has always been this way. The powers of darkness spin their curse of despair over the world, and the powers of light reply with their blessing of hope, and in the balance between them mortals work out their own fates.”

I stared at him. It made a horrible kind of sense. Both sides of the cosmic struggle would try to influence mortals to their side somehow, regardless of the situation. Each side would try to counter the other in any given arena, and tugging fate in opposite directions would mostly lead to a deadlock. But there was one little problem with this picture…

“But, sir,” I said, “right now, on our world, there is no blessing of hope.”

If he’d had eyebrows he would have raised one. “Are you sure?”

“Give me a moment,” I said, and sank into a meditative pose. Calling up my true sight was getting easier, but it still took a few minutes of concentration during which I lost awareness of my surroundings. When I came back to myself a much smaller toad was serving my companions tea while Naruto chatted amiably with the toad sage.

“I’m back,” I announced. “I see… yes, I still see a technique made of black chakra covering everything in sight. I see the blue glow of our chakra, and the spirits in the air around us, and the heart of the mountain below us. I see the green of natural energy all around us… wow, this mountain is much brighter than Konoha. Hmm. I see a lot of other things I don’t understand at all. The structure of matter, the curvature of space around the world… no, that’s only a metaphor, isn’t it? The truth is… clouds of possibility interacting in phase space? But every interaction goes every way, we just can’t see it? Wait, then is time itself just an illusion? Ow, now my head hurts. Sorry, I’m still getting the hang of not looking too deep. Anyway, the point is I don’t see any gold chakra at all, aside from the little trace of contamination in my own aura.”

The ancient toad gave me a concerned look. “Child, you haven’t just glimpsed beyond the veil, you’ve torn it aside completely. Come back to us, please, before you lose yourself.”

I blinked, and let my sight lapse back to normal. “My name is Sakura,” I sang experimentally. “Hmm. I’m fine, as far as I can tell. Doing that here isn’t nearly as bad as the time I did it between worlds. But if it’s that dangerous I’ll remember not to do it lightly.”

“I see,” he said speculatively. “Well, if the blessing is gone you’d better call those slackers upstairs and tell them to turn it back on.”

Now it was my turn to raise an eyebrow. “Just like that? I’m sure they want to, so there must be some rule stopping them. Can any random mortal really make a request like that?”

“No,” he said sadly. “It would have to be… oh… the chief kami of our world, I suppose, or a designated representative. That would be… well, no, he died. Then… hmm… none of Amaterasu’s tribe are left, so… yes, and the heroes died out… hmmm… yes… I suppose that would be it, yes.”

I waited politely for several minutes while he stared off into space. Naruto’s patience ran out before mine.

“Well?” He asked. “Who do we need to talk to, old geezer?”

The toad started, and I wondered if he’d managed to fall asleep with his eyes open. “Eh? Oh, yes. The lines of succession are all broken, Naruto. I believe any uncorrupted kami of this world could claim the Throne of the Gods now. But mind you find one with pure gold chakra! Half blue won’t do. Oh no, half blue won’t do… heh heh.”

Astoria had told me herself that our gods were all dead. For a moment it seemed hopeless. But there must be another way, or they wouldn’t have gone to so much trouble to set up this situation.

While I was lost in thought Hinata spoke up for the first time. “Honored Sage,” she asked, “why is it that the Curse of Despair can’t affect Naruto?”

“Only two things can repel the curse,” the great toad muttered. “The blessing of hope, and the mandate of heaven. If you don’t have one you must have the other, yes? Ah, but I’m tired now. Perhaps another time, children?”

“The mandate of heaven?” I asked as we made our way out of the temple.

Naruto laughed. “I guess even the gods want me to be Hogake, huh?”