Sakura landed atop a tall pine tree and gathered nature energy from her surroundings, entering Sage Mode. Glowing blue bands radiated from the lotus mark on her forehead and snaked down her neck, hugging her skin as they crisscrossed across her bust and coiled around her limbs.
Her senses began rapidly extending in a bubble around her, but in the depths of winter, nature was fast asleep. As a Shikkotsu Forest Sage, she could use plants' and mushrooms' subterranean connections to extend her sensing range, but the cold deadened these connections. The same went for the Zetsu Network's root-based connections, slowing down their communication speed.
"Byakugan!"
The Mind's Eye of the Kagura and her sage senses allowed Sakura to perceive her surroundings in a sphere around herself, but the Byakugan could converge that unfocused sensitivity into a cone, vastly increasing her perceptiveness in a single direction!
Thick, knotted veins bulged around Sakura's white eyes.
Sakura knew the enemy was coming from Konoha, and she also had a fairly good idea where they were heading next. After stealing a pair of Hyūga clan Byakugan, Toneri would need to assimilate them, which would take a few hours, at the very least. He would need a safe place to do so, making it likely that he would attempt to return to the moon through the Moon Cave, which meant that the area she needed to sweep was a straight line connecting both locations!
"Found you," Sakura murmured.
Autonomous puppets clad in dark, flowing ninja robes were flying in formation straight towards her. Several carried unconscious bodies in their arms as they flew, and from the quality of the victims' chakra, as well as the fact that their eyes shone like a lighthouse's beacon in the night to Sakura's sight, she knew they were all members of the Hyūga clan.
Without warning, the puppets swerved in mid-air and began flying north-east towards the Land of Hot Springs. Alarmed, Sakura leapt from her pine tree and set an interception course, but the enemy instantly altered their trajectory to evade her.
"They know I can see them…!"
…
The Ōtsutsuki clan was synonymous with the Byakugan, so it was understandable that Toneri would know how to deal with his own kind. Ōtsutsuki were opportunistic parasites, their entire lifecycle depending on the cannibalisation of lesser clan members; naturally, they had evolved to be wary of each other's powers.
Ever since Sakura's Byakugan had been elevated to the level of a Kekkei Mōra, her ocular prowess and the purity of her pupil power had surpassed even Hanabi's, allowing her to see further than any ordinary Hyūga.
However, that was not the extent of the dōjutsu's power.
The chakra she radiated from her eyes to perceive such distant sights was so intense that she could briefly stun weaker foes at short range simply by looking at them. Simply staring through their bodies was enough to shock the average shinobi's chakra pathways, the equivalent of bombarding them with hours' worth of X-rays in a single instant.
Naturally, this was not nearly as stealthy as the ordinary Byakugan.
Whoever she was looking at would feel as though they were being both stared at by a dangerous predator and cooked by the sun's rays at the same time, so it wasn't especially surprising that Toneri's fine senses had detected Sakura looking at him in the heart of the puppets' formation.
…
"Stop right there!" Sakura roared as she bounded through the snow towards the puppets. "Ōtsutsuki!"
Halos of snow exploded outwards from the craters that formed with each of her steps, the dispersed snowflakes almost instantly turning back into water as brilliant lightning chakra discharged from her chakra cloak when she leapt away.
"Go," Toneri said calmly, gesturing for a contingent of his puppets to intercept her.
The prominent veins ringing Sakura's eyes faded as she swapped back to the Sharingan, the three black tomoe spinning into the yaezakura-petal pattern of her Eternal Mangekyō Sharingan within her scarlet irises. No matter what, she had to land the Kotoamatsukami on him; the moon was the Earth's first line of defence against incoming waves of Ōtsutsuki invaders, and she needed him as a lookout.
"SHA!"
Sakura tore through the first wave of puppets as if they were made of rice paper. They had made the mistake of landing on firm ground to meet her in melee combat, where she could leverage her Sage Mode-enhanced speed combined with Lightning Style Chakra Mode to blitz through them.
"I am assuming direct control," Toneri said impassively.
With nothing more than a thought, Toneri took command of each and every one of his puppets, manipulating each of them individually. He kept them floating just out of range of Sakura's maximum jumping height, positioning them between her and the floating puppets carrying the Hyūga clan members he had kidnapped.
"Coward," Sakura spat, jabbing an accusing finger at him. He kept his eyes tightly shut, making it impossible to hypnotise him through eyesight. "Why don't you come and fight me without hiding behind hostages and puppets?"
"In due time," Toneri said coolly.
Once the Tenseigan fully matured, he would be more than glad to meet her in single combat at the end of the world, when the moon fully disintegrated due to the Earth's gravity and its debris rained down upon the earth.
Sakura leapt, lunging at him, but the Ōtsutsuki puppets unleashed hundreds of glowing green chakra globules, forcing her to switch to the Rinnegan and use its repulsive and attractive powers to change direction in mid-air to avoid them. She was far better at flying than before, but in the end, this was merely a clumsy child's imitation of true Ōtsutsuki flight.
"Fine, then," Sakura said coolly, floating herself away from the puppets to hover at a safe distance. Giant pink wings emerged from her back as she summoned her Perfect Susano'o, which she was far more comfortable flying in, before swapping back to the Sharingan. "Since you won't fight me on your own, I'll make it so that you have no choice but to do so… Ame-no-Uzume!"
From the beginning of the fight, Toneri had kept his eyes closed, despite acquiring a brand-new pair of Byakugan. This made it impossible to directly land a vision-based genjutsu on him, but he was far from blind; he was linked to the Giant Tenseigan Energy Vessel at the heart of the moon, and the puppets were in turn linked to this vessel.
"The Ame-no-Uzume, eh?" Toneri said lightly. "Your genjutsu won't work on me."
The ability to control chakra was innate to the Ōtsutsuki.
From birth, these aliens were already perfectly capable of controlling their own chakra. By default, they were also born with the Byakugan, which allowed them to see inside their own heads. Combined, these two traits rendered them pretty much immune to genjutsu, which was a purely human invention.
In Sakura's opinion, however, it was not impossible to hypnotise Ōtsutsuki clan members, provided she first targeted the parts of their brains that controlled chakra, thereby cutting off their ability to break out of illusions.
In Toneri's case specifically, there was the added challenge of targeting him through his connection with his puppets; she wasn't sure whether the Giant Tenseigan would purify her chakra along the way, but for the hostages' sake, she at least had to try.