Time Braid

26. Ambush

Disclaimer: I don’t own Naruto.

All things considered I wasn’t surprised that Sasuke wouldn’t tell me the full details of his plan. Something the old me had done had left him terribly wary of trusting me, and as much as I hated to admit it I couldn’t guarantee that he was wrong. It didn’t help that I wasn’t especially enthused about his grandiose scheme.

Oh, I had no problem with sacrificing myself to save the world if it was really necessary. But neither would Naruto, and Sasuke should have known that. Some was terribly off about this whole situation, but no matter how much I tried I couldn’t make sense of it.

“I think he wants to sacrifice himself,” Hinata said when I asked her opinion. “He doesn’t talk about his past very often, but I’ve picked up hints in the years that I’ve served him. He did terrible things in his quest for power, Sakura.”

“Believe me, I know,” I told her. “His Sharingan is fully developed, Hinata. I’m not allowed to talk about what it takes to do that, but it’s… disturbing, at best. It was designed to tempt mortals into utter depravity, not empower heroes.”

She nodded grimly. “Exactly. At first he simply wanted to avenged himself on his brother, but when he finally succeeded he found that Itachi was a victim as well. He turned on Danzo, on Madara, on the whole village of Konoha, casting a wider net of blame with each turn until the whole world was his enemy. Then one loop he enacted Madara’s Eye of the Moon Plan, and discovered exactly where it led.”

Hinata paused, and frowned minutely. “I’m not certain what happened next, but I don’t believe his loop ended immediately. He knows all of the demons that are active in our world quite well, and his knowledge of demonic secrets is considerably greater than mine. Considering the lengths I went to in my own search for such knowledge I suspect he must have worked for them for many years.”

I shivered. “That’s bad. Yeah, they like to tempt people into arrangements like that. Promise to leave the people you care about alone as long as you do a few things for them, and slowly turn up the heat until you either give up in despair or turn into a monster. Not that he’d have far to go.”

Hinata froze, and regarded me intently for several long moments.

“What?” I asked, confused.

“When he… trained me,” she said slowly. “It was years before I could so much as think something like that. I would hesitate to say it even now, though I won’t dispute the statement. How? Your training was much more severe than mine.”

“I’m the world’s foremost medic-nin, Hinata,” I said quietly. “Minds are harder to heal than bodies, but they aren’t beyond me. I’m not exactly sane right now, but I’m beginning to see things as they really are again. Sasuke’s goals may be noble, but his methods are… not right.”

She nodded silently. “I have tried to convince him of that,” she remarked after a moment. “But he refuses to listen.”

She hesitated.

“Sakura, I… I know this excuses nothing, but… I tried to convince him not to make me betray you. I have not had a friend in many years, and when you proved willing to risk so much for my sake… I begged him to let me ask for your help, instead. But he refused, and I… I have found some room for leeway in how I go about fulfilling my orders, but I can’t simply refuse one.”

“I know, Hinata,” I reassured her. “Believe me, I know. I can’t even seriously imagine disobeying a direct order, no matter how misguided it was. I would have done the same if our positions were reversed, so I can’t blame you for doing as you were told.”

“I do,” she replied. “But perhaps one day I will have the opportunity to repay the debt I owe you. Rest assured that if such a thing does come to pass, I will not hesitate to do so.”

Hinata had taken my summoning contract back, and on reflection we’d both decided we didn’t need to mention anything about that incident to Sasuke. Showing it to me had been a terrible risk on her part, since if I’d had a moment of disloyalty I could have taken it and run to Naruto easily. I was sure Hinata knew that, which made me wonder why she’d taken the chance. Did she really feel so guilty about her part in my capture that she’d skirt the edge of her orders like that to repay me? Or was it something less obvious?

I was too busy to wonder for long. Once the fine-tuning of Sasuke’s transformation template was complete he set me to training for my own part in his master plan, which quickly grew to consume my every waking hour.

Somehow Sasuke had worked out a pattern that convinced Nagato to help him with his plans, after a confrontation among the Uchiha that left both Madara and Itachi conveniently dead. But it was a tricky series of manipulations that took several weeks to play out, and couldn’t even be started until well past the start of a new loop. Naruto was sure to try summoning me the instant my loop reset, so the first thing I had to do was find a way to prevent him from succeeding without help from anyone else.

Nagato had devised an anti-summoning seal array with his usual incredible degree of skill, but it wouldn’t do me any good unless I could find a way to recreate it as quickly as a normal ninja could work a summoning technique. I’d never attempted anything like that before, and my first few days were an exercise in frustration. It was a big seal array, complex enough that drawing it normally would take hours, and Nagato’s trick for working around that required more chakra than I could easily muster. My initial experiments with animated blood and chakra-infused water were a complete failure. Manipulating large amounts of chakra-infused matter is tricky enough under normal conditions, but the fact that seals both consume and interact with ambient chakra made it even worse. It could take months of practice to reach the point where I could build such a complex seal array that way, and I really didn’t want to test Sasuke’s patience.

Then I realized I was being an idiot, because I already had a technique capable of creating massively complex physical structures on demand. So I re-worked the anti-summoning array to handle being drawn in three dimensions instead of on a flat surface, and turned it into a transformation template.

Sasuke actually looked faintly pleased when I reported success after less than a week, and I felt a thrill of pride.

“Show me,” he said.

I beamed, and activated my new transformation. The array appeared instantly, a maze of softly-glowing blue lines that covered most of my body.

“I can do it separately, or make it part of my normal transformation from child to adult forms,” I reported. “Doing it this way also means I’m not stuck inside a static diagram, and it’s tied directly into my chakra system so it’ll function as long as I’m alive.”

“Excellent,” he said. “I wasn’t expecting you to succeed so quickly. I assume you can remove it the same way?”

“Yes, sir!” I chirped, barely able to contain myself. My master had praised me! I couldn’t remember the last time I’d felt so happy.

“Hnn. Could you do this with other seals? A summoning reversal array, or perhaps the Heaven Seal?”

“I can do it with anything I understand,” I replied proudly. “Did you want me to build a reversal array to pull Naruto to me when he tries to summon me? I’ll have to anchor it to something pretty massive when it activates, but I think I can make that work as long as we’re in the same world at the time. Oh, and I think I must have studied Orochimaru’s seal research at some point. I know a bunch of ways to re-engineer the Heaven Seal to get different effects, or even draw on different power sources.”

“Interesting. Do the summoning trap first, and make sure you can switch between that and the anti-summoning array quickly.”

The summoning trap was a tricky piece of work, but in less than a month I had a design that I was confident would do the job. I had to create it in a compressed form that completely covered my skin, which wasn’t much of a fashion statement. But it only took a few seconds to activate, unfolding to cover the ground around me in a maze of sweeping curves a hundred yards across. Sasuke kidnapped and brainwashed a version of Yugito from another world to have her test the array’s resistance to bijuu-level brute force, and it worked beautifully.

Sasuke used his dimension-travel technique that way quite a bit during our preparations. Apparently he’d spent several years cataloging dozens of alternate worlds he could easily reach with his Sharingan abilities, and he frequently used them as sources for exotic materials and research subjects. His time travel was much less useful, a fact which puzzled Hinata.

“I don’t understand why we need such an elaborate plan to ambush Naruto,” she complained to me one day. “I’m sure Sasuke knows where the looping Naruto’s world is. So why can’t he just take us all there a few days before the Chuunin Exam starts? Then we could make our preparations, and attack as soon as the child version of Naruto gets replaced by the looping one.”

“If only it were so easy,” I chuckled. “You have to remember that the Sharingan was designed by demons, and the last thing they want is for a Sharingan user to be able to undo their mistakes. So the time travel power sounds really impressive, but it’s actually crippled to keep it from being used as an undo button. You can’t open portals into the past or present. Your portals open into possible futures that may or may not ever happen. You have to pick futures that are at least a few weeks out, and you can’t see how your own actions will change things. Stuff like that. It’s really only reliable for finding out about distant events that are pretty much inevitable, like the Red Moon thing.”

“I see,” she replied thoughtfully. “That explains many things.”

We lapsed into companionable silence for awhile, me working on a variant of the Heaven Seal for Hinata while she perfected another of her tricky seal-implanting water-spike jutsu. Her form was as flawless as ever, but polishing those elemental seal techniques seemed to take her a lot more effort than I would have thought. The ones I’d seen her use in our sparring were as smooth as anything I could have done, but if it took her months to master a new one how had she ever developed such an arsenal of them? Unless…

“Hinata, how old are you?”

She paused, and turned an unreadable expression on me.

“It is difficult to be sure,” she pointed out. “My training did not cost me nearly as many memories as yours did, but there are substantial gaps. Also, in my younger years I often went for long periods without attempting to count such things. But I know I began extending my loop not long after our first encounter, and I can remember seeing the end of the world twenty-six times. Usually that takes three or four years to happen, but if Madara is killed it sometimes takes as much as a decade for one of the backup plans to succeed.”

I didn’t bother to hide my surprise. “Well over a century? No wonder you’re so good! But why did you run so many extended loops? I remember doing that a few times, but it gets lonely after awhile.”

She smiled faintly. “At first, I had a rival to surpass. Our first encounter made quite an impression on me, and I was determined not to lose my Naruto to you.”

“I don’t remember that very well, but I’m pretty sure I never wanted to take him from you,” I protested.

“I know that now. But it was years before I began to restore some balance to my life, and only then did I begin to suspect the true motivation behind your remarks. By then I had discovered the end of the world, and I was certain that somehow the time loop must be related. So I kept going back. I trained until I could resist the insanity of the red moon, and defeat the demons that roamed the world after mankind’s fall. The lower-ranked demons are not immune to the Yamanaka interrogation techniques, and I learned many things from them. But I never did find an answer.”

“You were looking in the wrong direction,” I told her. “I don’t know why, but I remember being convinced that the Bright Kami were the ones that arranged the time loop. I think we’re supposed to save the world, though I’ve no idea how.”

“I had begin to suspect as much. Let us hope that our master’s plan is the correct path, then.”

Hinata returned to her practice with her usual calm serenity, but my own doubts continued to trouble me. I wasn’t at all sure Sasuke’s plan was a smart one, but what could I do about it?

Healing Nagato was tricky but doable, and it easily doubled his chakra. Raising his bodies as soulless flesh puppets and synching their natural chakra to his was even trickier, but using living puppets instead of corpses did wonders for his control. The whole process took three days of exhausting work on my part, but Sasuke pronounced the results well worth the effort. Personally I didn’t see how we were going to get this version of Nagato into the past with us for the fight, but whatever.

Sasuke had several effective methods of kidnapping Yugito Nii, who was a pretty good kunoichi for her age but lacked any special mental defenses. He brought two versions of her back from one of his frequent trips and broke them in a matter of hours, then had them spend several weeks training against each other in bijuu form. Then he had me do a memory copy on the more stable of the pair, and save it to use after the next reset.

I wasn’t terribly surprised when he did essentially the same thing with a young Naruto, and had him train against the twin Yugitos. But he took them to a different location for their training time, and carefully ensured that neither Hinata or I had more than a bare minimum of interaction with him.

There were several others. A young girl named Yakumo, that I didn’t remember ever meeting before. Anko, who somehow resisted his training attempts for nearly three days. Hana, who barely held out for an hour. TenTen and Temari, who were so much weaker than us that I didn’t see what he could possibly want with them. There was even a civilian girl I vaguely remembered from that ramen stand Naruto used to love so much. He spent a few days on some, but weeks on others, and I really started to wonder what was in the memories he had me copy.

Bit by bit the pieces were coming together, and I began to guess at his plan. Somehow he expected to have Nagato’s assistance capturing Naruto, which gave us some of the most powerful missing nin in the world as jutsu fodder. With our own efforts added in that was a far stronger force than I thought it would take to beat Naruto, but Sasuke wasn’t so confident.

“You’ve never seen him fight seriously,” he chided me when I expressed my doubts. “Naruto is the most dangerous man in the world, Sakura. I’ve seen lesser versions of him defeat Pein at the age of sixteen, with nothing to rely on but a few weeks of sage training and an elemental Rasengan. The real Naruto, the one in the loop, will long since have achieved his full potential. If we do not arrange our trap with perfect finesse and overwhelming firepower he will crush us all, and take you back by force.”

“Yes, sir. But, if he sees he can’t win, what’s to stop him from just resetting his loop to escape?”

“Naruto’s greatest flaw is his inability to admit defeat,” Sasuke told me. “With you as my bait, he will willingly dare any odds.”

I should have been thrilled to play such a key role in my master’s plan. But instead, I found myself feeling vaguely ill.

The place Sasuke had brought us to was a ruin. It had been a great city once, with wide streets and soaring towers of white marble, built atop a high plateau overlooking the sea. But it had been deserted for centuries, and now only a few buildings still stood.

“Welcome to the city of the gods,” Sasuke said sardonically.

Hinata powered up her Byakugan, and I looked around with interest.

“Really?” I asked. “I always assumed that was in the spirit world or something. How did you find it?”

“It doesn’t matter,” he said shortly. “We’re here because some of the seal work still functions. The palace is still defended by a number of powerful constructs, which will ignore humans but attack anything bearing the Kyuubi’s chakra. There is also a youki suppression field that will dissipate much of the Kyuubi’s power if Naruto enters it. I expect he will destroy both during the course of the battle, but they will weaken him considerably in the process.”

He pointed towards the largest of the intact buildings, and went on. “That building is the focal point of the remaining defenses. Sakura, I expect you will spend most of the battle there healing our wounded, which should also serve to prevent Naruto from destroying the building with one of his army-killer techniques. Come.”

He darted forward across the rubble, and Hinata and I followed without comment. This had been a beautiful place, with tall buildings covered with decorative pillars and statuary surrounded by ponds and gardens. But someone had fought a massive battle here, with the sort of techniques only the most powerful ninja could manage. The ruins were pocked with craters and ovals of glassed rock, and there were strange bones everywhere. Many looked human, but there were far more with monstrous features. Things with horns and tails and giant claws, dog-like creatures bigger than horses, giants that must have stood a hundred feet tall. There was even a pair of dragons, their bones still covered with steel-hard scales, twined about each other as if still locked in combat.

We entered the palace through the front doors, and passed a pair of forty-foot statues covered in a fine tracery of seals that told me they were actually animated constructs of some sort. But they ignored the petty humans creeping past their post, deeming us no more worthy of attention than the bats that nested in the vaulted ceiling or the rats that scurried about in the corners of the once-grand structure. There was a large entry chamber, a larger waiting room, and then another pair of guardians flanking the open doors to what could only be a throne room.

That vast chamber could have swallowed the Konoha stadium twice over. Dim light from rows of shattered windows high overhead revealed an endless expanse of smooth white marble inlaid with sweeping geometric patterns. The three of us crossed the room in silence, passing rows of tall white pillars carved to resemble trees. A dais at the far end of the room supported a massive throne, also of white marble, inlaid with another intricate golden tracery of seals.

Here we found the only sign of combat. There were a pair of skeletons lying on the floor behind and to the sides of the throne, clad in metal armor of a style I’d never seen. Their heads were neatly separated from their bodies, and their posture and the lack of incidental damage to the surroundings said they’d been caught completely by surprise. Sprawled on the floor just in front of the throne was another skeleton, unarmored, and stretched out as if he’d been desperately trying to reach it. The smashed ribs in his back said that someone had blown his heart out from behind with a move remarkably like Chidori.

“The Throne of the Gods,” Sasuke confirmed. “Possibly the most powerful artifact in the world, if only there were someone left who could use it. But this is the center of the city’s remaining demon wards, so this will be our command post. Both of you explore the area thoroughly, we’ll need all the home-field advantage we can get.”

Our preparations lasted another month. I rehearsed my own part three times, and spent days racking my brain for more ways to eke out an advantage. I wanted to spend a few more weeks repairing my mindscape properly as well, but Sasuke vetoed that idea.

“Naruto is hardly likely to attack you with mental techniques,” he pointed out, when I asked for permission to attempt the project. “Your chakra has recovered to an adequate level to carry out your part in the plan, and considering how it will end it hardly matters if you recover your remaining memories at this point.”

“Yes, sir.” The reminder that we were essentially going to die if we won wasn’t exactly welcome, but my tentative efforts to suggest that there might be another way had been dismissed out of hand. So all I could do now was try to make his plan work. For some reason I found that I was distinctly unhappy about the idea of fighting Naruto, but I wasn’t about to let that terrible future Sasuke had shown me actually happen.

Hinata shared my determination, though I knew fighting Naruto would be even harder for her. Fortunately Sasuke understood that much, so he’d given her a different assignment.

“Your first priority will be to guard Sakura,” he’d told her. “Naruto is no fool, and he will find some way to reach her. Exotic clones, or constructs, or perhaps even an ally. They will attempt to reach Sakura, and I feel confident they will have some plan for either disabling or controlling her. The two of you must work together to ensure they do not succeed.

“My intention is for our allies to weaken Naruto sufficiently to make him vulnerable to my mindlock genjutsu, but it is possibly they may fail. Hinata, if that happens you and I will fight him together. Your task will be to disrupt and drain his chakra while I hold his attention. Sakura, you will concentrate on healing our fallen allies so they may return to the fight. You will enter the fight against Naruto only if I explicitly order you to.”

“Yes, sir.”

I woke immediately as my loop reset, and covered my body with the swirling curves my anti-summoning array before I even opened my eyes. Then I swung out of bed and dressed hurriedly, for once doing it the hard way. I was going to need every drop of chakra I had today, and even something as minor as body flickering my clothes on was a waste I might not be able to afford. I was concerned enough that I’d even stayed in my hated child form, since I wasn’t supposed to actually fight anyone.

Sasuke appeared in the room as I stowed the last of my spare shuriken, and held out his hand. I took it, and he pulled us both across the space between worlds to Naruto’s loop.

We’d considered using a different world, but anything involving summoning and Naruto was bound to be so difficult it was best to take every shortcut. The barren, flat-topped hill Sasuke took me to was in northern Sand Country, close enough to Konoha to make summoning easy and lightning-fast.

There was another Sakura waiting for me there, a confused younger me from one of the other loops who was just waking up and wondering where she was. I knelt beside her and dumped a copy of all my memories into her head.

She gasped, and then held her head and groaned.

“Ow,” she complained. “Taking that many memories at once hurts. Um, ok, ambush plan, right?”

“Right,” I agreed. “Here, take these memory bubbles and get going.”

She took the whole collection I’d built up with Sasuke’s victims, and turned to stumble off down the hill.

Sasuke reappeared with an unconscious Hana in his arms, and handed her to me before vanishing again. I restored the memories I’d taken from her in the last loop, after he had finished her training. Then I woke her. She sat up quickly, looked around, and nodded to me before taking up her position without a word.

Within minutes Ayame, TenTen, Temari and even Anko were assembled, processed and taking up their positions. Sasuke appeared with Gaara, and I applied his memories just as I felt the first tug of Naruto’s summons brush against my seals.

“He’s starting,” I said.

Sasuke frowned. “That long a delay? He must have an ally, then.”

That was obvious enough, so I just nodded. Sasuke had determined some time ago that his loop and Hinata’s reset to exactly the same moment, and mine did as well. It stood to reason that Naruto’s was the same, and it was mostly habit that had led us all to wake up at different times for so long. But controlling when you wake up is an easy trick for any ninja that wants to bother, and we’d both ended the last loop prepared to wake instantly. Naruto would have done the same, so he’d been up to something while we were working.

“Try to find out who it is, but be careful they don’t catch you,” he ordered, and body flickered halfway across the hilltop. He paused to rip open a time portal, but didn’t go through. Instead he left it there and headed down the side of the hill at high speed, cloaking his presence as he went.

Naruto’s summoning pressed against my seals, groping blindly for something it couldn’t quite latch onto. For me, this would be the tricky part. I gave Sasuke a slow count of twenty to grab the younger me and get far enough away to avoid notice, while the team around me reached their positions and set up their various parts of the ambush.

Then I transformed again, switching out the anti-summoning array for my reverse-summoning trap. The seal array flowed down my legs and across the bare stone around me as I felt the touch of Naruto’s summoning, expanding quickly to cover most of the hilltop. There was a tug, and my vision went dark as I was pulled into summon space. But by then the seal array was anchored to thousands of tons of solid rock, and while Naruto might have the power to summon the entire hill that wasn’t what his technique was configured to do. I dangled in summon space for several seconds, surrounded by a cloud of blue swirls that slowly stretched as I was pulled towards Konoha. But the array held, and that was all the time it took for it to fully deploy and power up.

Then the seals flexed like a giant spring, and I snapped back to the hilltop. The shock transmitted back through the summoning technique, a sudden tug that was amplified as my array grabbed hold of that connection and pulled.

The connection went taut, and then slack.

“Incoming!” I shouted.

An adult Naruto appeared right in front of me, almost close enough to touch. Not knowing what he’d do to me if he had the chance I dropped my connection to the seal and backed away quickly, wishing I could body flicker out of his aura. His eyes focused on me, and went wide with surprise.

“Sakura-chan!” He shouted excitedly. Then Gaara’s sand hit him.

I’d fought Gaara enough to know that even his full power was barely going to slow Naruto down, but that was all we needed. Naruto vanished under the wave of sand for a split-second, and I saw Gaara smile faintly. But then the sand blew apart in an explosion of wind, and there were six of Naruto where the original had stood. Two charged Gaara, two spun to meet Anko and Hana’s attacks, and the other two went after me.

I was already sprinting for the time portal, knowing I wasn’t going to outrun Naruto in this form. Fortunately I didn’t need to. TenTen and Temari rose to block the clones that pursued me with a barrage of wind and weapons, and they wasted valuable seconds pausing to subdue the two genin without hurting them. I noted out of the corner of my eye that the same tactic was working on the other clones as well. All of the ninja in this ambush were people Naruto cared for and would be reluctant to hurt, especially since they were mostly girls. This had been important, since there wasn’t time in the first minutes of a loop to capture and brainwash anyone especially powerful. Even Gaara had been pushing it, and he was the weakest of the jinchuuriki.

But the problem with fighting Naruto is always that he isn’t a man, he’s an army. More clones appeared all over the hilltop in little puffs of smoke, including a trio right around me. I dove left, surrounding myself with a swirl of cutting water that dispersed the clone in my way before he realized what was happening. A touch of super-strength let me leap away from the other two, passing over a rock that Anko had stuffed a roll of explosive tags under for just this contingency.

I expected the clones to run over the tags so I could blow them up, but the way they circled it made it obvious they knew the trap was there. Surprising, since Anko is actually really good at setting traps and it was a type that would normally be undetectable until the tags were primed. I threw a storm of shuriken clones at them as a distraction as I bounded away. What was I missing?

When I’d been with Naruto we’d had our own version of Hinata, and she could have seen the trap easily. But I hadn’t seen her appear with him, and I was sure I could see through any invisibility technique she could use. Besides, the summoning reversal should have only caught Naruto. To come with him she’d have to be part of him…

“Oh, crap,” I realized. “She’s in his mindscape, looking out with her Byakugan. Well, this could get fun.”

I reached the time portal seconds ahead of the lead clone, and Ayame darted between us to stand in front of the portal with her arms spread wide as I dove through. Since she had explosive tags wrapped around her chest and a manual detonator in her hand this would probably keep him from following me for a few seconds. He was really going to be pissed now, but that was just what we wanted.

The time portal led six months into the future, but Sasuke hadn’t gone through it. Instead the plan was for him to hold it for a few minutes until Naruto chased me through, and let it close. Then he’d spent the next six months methodically assembling the real ambush force, which would be prepared for us both to reappear at the other end of the portal. It was a brilliant ploy, and I was sure Naruto would have no idea what he was walking into.

I passed through the portal and rolled to my feel on the edge of the City of the Gods. Three steps, and I leaped to the top of a marble pillar that rose from the ruins nearby. I suppressed my presence and replaced myself with a rock a hundred yards away, which got me out of immediate danger of being caught. But I knew what was about to happen, so I didn’t stop to look around. Running wasn’t fast enough, so I wove a chain of replacements and body flickers towards the palace as I renewed my anti-summoning seals.

Naruto stepped through the portal looking pissed as hell, and the biggest explosive Deidara had ever built detonated right under his feet. The blast was big enough to level a town, and for a moment I was afraid it had killed him. By then I was half a mile from the portal, but even at that distance the flash warmed my skin and the shock wave blew me right out of the air. I flipped around an especially massive pile of rubble and took cover for a few precious seconds while the dust settled.

I could still feel Naruto’s presence.

I peeked around the rocks to see him walk slowly out of the fading fireball, wreathed in a cloak of pure blue chakra with two tails twisting in the air behind him. I’d seen this before, when Sasuke was teaching a younger Naruto to draw on the Kyuubi’s chakra. But then the aura had been red.

“Naruto has as much chakra as a bijuu?” I stared in wonder. “Wow, I guess Sasuke was right about how dangerous he is.”

“Sasuke!” He roared, his voice much louder than it should have been at this distance. “I’m coming for you, you bastard! Hand over the girls now, and maybe I’ll just beat you to death with my bare hands!”

A swarm of Deidara’s burrowing explosive insects erupted out of the ground around him, while hundreds of flying ones rose from the surrounding ruins to dive at him. It was a perfect target for a big, expensive area attack, and Naruto took the bait. Just three hand seals, and a storm of cutting wind hundreds of yards across rose up to surround him and bat the attackers from the sky. A lot of them detonated, filling the air with smoke and flying debris. They probably couldn’t make out what was happening in there from the palace, but I saw one of Deidara’s clay clones emerge from the earth right behind Naruto and move to attack. Deidara was amazingly stealthy for someone who loves explosions so much, to the point where he could probably walk up behind your typical ANBU and stick an explosive note to his back without being noticed.

But my suspicions were confirmed when Naruto escaped with a replacement, leaving behind… Hinata?

She looked perhaps nineteen, a few years younger than the appearance my partner had settled on for her transformation template, but that wasn’t the only difference. Her taijutsu was filled with a fierce energy completely at odds with the controlled elegance of my partner’s style, but almost as effective. In three swift motions she broke the technique animating Deidara’s clone without detonating it, and it slumped to the ground in a harmless blob of clay.

She turned and danced across the field of animated mines, spinning out a half-dozen shadow clones and disarming everything that came within reach, to rejoin Naruto just as he bit his thumb and slammed down a summoning.

I checked my anti-summoning array nervously when I saw the familiar motion, but this time I wasn’t the target. The girl that appeared looked exactly like my adult form, and the way she took in the situation at a glance told me she’d been waiting for that summon. She turned to her Hinata with an easy smile that made my heart ache, and asked a question as Naruto put a hand on her shoulder.

I recognized that gesture. He was giving her a chakra feed, but not Hinata. I wondered for a moment where they’d gotten a version of me that could do anything useful, as I watched her create a living body for her Hinata. She’d beaten Deidara’s clone while inhabiting a shadow clone body? Well, I could see that, Hinata’s taijutsu is all about not getting hit after all.

“I must have left Naruto a memory bubble,” I realized. “Ok, so that’s really the Sakura from his loop, overlaid with my memories. She doesn’t have any chakra to speak of on her own, so all I have to do is break that link and she’ll be helpless. I can handle that, no problem.”

The other Sakura’s aura suddenly flared into visibility, a column of blue power shot through with gold sparks. Their Hinata turned to face me, and I saw a tracery of seals filled with golden chakra around her eyes. A Tsukuyomi defense? I’d never thought of trying something like that.

Then the other Sakura asked something, and her Hinata pointed right at me. They nodded to each other and vanished, as Naruto called out another swarm of clones to deal with a fresh wave of Deidara’s constructs.

The girls were coming for me, and they were both prepared to go through Sasuke to get me. Naruto was just the decoy. I felt the sinking sensation of knowing the other side just put one over on you, as I realized Sasuke would never consider that possibility. He was still assuming Naruto was the real attack, and if I didn’t let him know otherwise…

I ran.

They were half a mile away, but if they were as fast as I was that was too close for comfort. It was three miles to the palace, and even that was within the range of Hinata’s Byakugan. I wasn’t going to lose them in the rubble no matter what I tried, and even if I could beat them it would take far more chakra than I could afford to spend right now. So I ran, weaving leaps and replacements and a few judicious body flickers into a chain of flickering movement that would get me to my destination in less than a minute. Assuming Naruto didn’t just cover the whole city in clones. Where the hell was the next attack?

A thunderous roar behind me told me the next stage had finally started. I glanced over my shoulder to see four copies of Yugito unleashing their Nekomata on Naruto. Each of them spat a gigantic bolt of pure chakra at him, blowing away his clones and gouging out deep craters in the rubble.

Naruto’s dragon form rose from the smoke as the pack of feline bijuu moved to surround him.

“Is this the best you can do, Sasuke?” He roared. “You think a bunch of little kittens are going to stop me? Dragon Sage Mode!”

I paled, and paused for a moment atop a crumbling pillar to look back again. My chakra senses confirmed that he wasn’t bluffing.

“Oh, holy hell,” I muttered. “He can channel sage chakra in dragon form? Sasuke, there’d better be a lot more ambush you didn’t tell me about.”

I turned, and concentrated on running faster.