After eight gruelling hours, Sakura finally finished operating on Jiraiya, healing his innumerable wounds (all twenty-one and a half of them), reinflating his collapsed right lung and stabilising his condition, all at the modest cost of leaving him completely bald. In hindsight, it was a good thing Ino had eaten so much on her behalf; she had not been able to afford even a single break during all those hours.
In any case, Jiraiya would need at least a month or two to recover, though Sakura doubted he would ever regain his former strength. She had been forced to excise part of his right lung after it began to necrotise, meaning he would run out of breath far more quickly than before…
…but otherwise, he would be fine.
"Phew," Sakura sighed, mopping her brow with the back of her hand. "Come on, Guy-sensei, it's your turn."
"I can still hear them operating… how can they not be done yet? What if Lee doesn't make it? No, what am I saying? Of course Lee will pull through. His training will never let him down!" Guy pressed his ear to the wall, muttering to himself with manic anxiety. He looked as though he might explode; and when he could hold on no longer, he cupped his hands and hollered at the top of his lungs through the wall, "FIGHT, LEE! I KNOW YOU'LL PULL THROUGH! FIGHT! FIGHT! FIGHT! FIGHT, WITH YOUR SPRINGTIME OF YOUUUUUUUUUTH!"
Despite having been dosed with enough anaesthetics to kill a horse, Guy was still quite lively.
"Do I have to knock you out in order to make you behave, Guy-sensei!?" Sakura yelled, stamping her foot. "I distinctly remember telling you not to raise your voice in the…"
Sakura's voice trailed off as the distinct sound of raised voices carried through the wall from the main operating theatre next door, where Lady Tsunade and her team were working on Lee.
"… you idiots?" Tsunade's voice muffled voice shook the walls. "…middle of a… come… later!"
Curious, Sakura walked up to Guy-sensei's side and pressed her ear to the dividing wall.
"It is the Daimyō of the Land of Fire's order," a man's voice faint voice filtered through. "The Hidden Leaf is suspected of planning a coup d'état against the country."
The wall trembled.
"That's preposterous!" roared Tsunade. "The place I need to be is here! How else can I be expected to coordinate the Land of Fire's defences!? The Daimyō can't possibly think—"
"I'm afraid you have no choice in the matter, Lady Tsunade," her interlocutor replied coolly. "The Hidden Leaf might answer to the Hokage alone, but you answer to the Daimyō, and he requests your presence immediately."
Sakura's eyes widened in shock.
Lady Tsunade couldn't be accused of high treason, that didn't make any sense! Summoning her away from the village, at such a critical juncture? What kind of moron had made that decision? Did the Daimyō want his country to get invaded again!?
BOOM!
The walls shook violently again.
Sakura quickly unsealed Guy's detached forearm from its scroll. Since Guy had insisted that he didn't want any plates drilled into his bones, she stuck his forearm onto his stump with some bone glue. Working quickly, she then painstakingly reattached his major blood vessels, nerves, muscles and tendons, before sewing him back up and giving him the old Mystical Palm Jutsu treatment.
All in all, the procedure had taken about half an hour. It was just a standard limb reattachment surgery; nothing too challenging for a seasoned Medic-nin like herself.
"Good, looks like the blood's flowing properly," Sakura muttered to herself. She rubbed his palm lightly and watched as a faint flush of colour returned to his skin. "Just stay here for a bit, I'll be back in a moment to check your reflexes once the drugs wear off… And I'm being completely serious when I say that if I come back to find you doing press‑ups or any sort of exercise involving your arms and I find that your forearm fell off, I'm suturing it to your forehead."
Hearing no more sounds from the neighbouring room, Sakura hurried out of the operating theatre, just as an exhausted Lady Tsunade stepped into the corridor to take a breather.
"Lady Tsunade, what happened?" Sakura asked. "That sound—"
"An envoy from the Daimyō," Tsunade sighed. "He insisted I should leave my patient and come with him immediately, so I had to knock him out a little bit."
"Is that really okay?" Sakura said, shocked.
Tsunade smiled wearily. "It's the best kind of medicine for fools who won't listen to reason. It'll be fine, so long as we make sure to hypnotise him into thinking he tripped while going down the stairs."
A dizzy spell hit Tsunade and she staggered, but Sakura caught her just in time, and Tsunade leaned against her disciple, closing her eyes. Relief filled the older woman's body as strength left her limbs; she had seen from Sakura's expression that she had managed to save her old friend.
"You shouldn't have told Kakashi about your vision," Tsunade said quietly, hugging her disciple's stiff body lightly. "The last thing Team 7 needed before a critical mission was a distraction… but I'm glad you did speak up, Sakura."
A wave of guilt washed over Sakura.
"Normally, when I win a bet, it's an omen that I'm about to lose something precious," Tsunade went on, brushing Sakura's pink locks away from her downturned face. "Come to think of it, this is the second time my good luck hasn't turned for the worse. Maybe you're my lucky star, Sakura… though don't get used to me saying things like that."
Assuming Tenten would take matters into her own hands, Sakura had waited until the very last moment to warn Kakashi of Jiraiya's fate. If only she had spoken up sooner, offering any sort of plausible explanation, Guy‑sensei and Lee‑kun might never have been hurt so badly, and Jiraiya might not have returned riddled with holes…
Assuming Tenten would use her foreknowledge to prevent deaths was a mistake Sakura wasn't about to repeat… but the question remained: why had it taken Guy‑sensei dragging her along to make her act? Sakura couldn't make sense of her motives any more… not that she ever truly had.
"About this Hiruko person…" Sakura said hesitantly.
"You don't need to worry about him coming after you," Tsunade explained, breaking off from the hug. "I've read his experimental notes, and unless he's made a major breakthrough with his Chimera Technique, his choice of Kekkei Genkai is extremely limited. If he tried to absorb you— an inconsistent mass of bloodlines in the shape of a girl— his carefully constructed foundation would lose its harmony and detonate."
A look of excitement appeared on Sakura's face.
"Then, if we could just identify his victims, we could determine which four bloodline limits he's already acquired," she said, "and all we'd need to do is match their attributes to the eight trigrams and five basic natures to deduce his final target. Then we could set up an ambush and…"
Tsunade shook her head. "I already know Hiruko's final target. It's the Sharingan."
Sakura's eyes widened in alarm. Sasuke had left the safety of the village, and without permission, too!
"And it's not Sasuke, either," Tsunade sighed. "Hiruko's target is Kakashi."
Sakura let out a sigh of relief, but a short one.
"This is rather tricky," she said thoughtfully. "The Hidden Leaf's forces will be spread thin guarding our borders against the other four Great Villages after Hiruko's declaration of war, and to make matters worse, we don't even know where he's hiding. But neither can we allow someone powerful enough to project their image across thousands of kilometres to attack the village directly… hmm…"
This was quite the pickle, indeed.
"Sakura," Tsunade said suddenly. "Everyone carries their own Will of Fire. Tell me yours."
"Eh?" Sakura blurted out. "Why now, all of a sudden?"
Tsunade waved her hand. "Don't worry about it, just tell me."
Sakura looked pensive.
"You shouldn't have to think that deeply about it," Tsunade snapped, poking Sakura in her left breast with a finger. "What does this, right here, tell you?"
When she had first transmigrated into this dangerous world, Sakura's first goal had been to survive until the end of the story. Then, as she grew stronger, she gained the ambition to become the strongest kunoichi in the world as some sort of placeholder goal, because a true man should aim for nothing less than world domination… but for some reason, she had never thought too deeply about her Will of Fire. It was as if it went without saying, but…
"I want to protect everyone," Sakura said softly. "Naruto, Sasuke, Kakashi‑sensei, Lady Tsunade, my parents, all my patients at the hospital, the villagers… they all taught me how fleeting and precious life is. So, I won't let anyone die… but I won't give my life to do it, either!"
Tsunade gave a self‑deprecating smile.
"Heh, how naïve, this world isn't that gentle to let you have it both ways…" she chuckled, before letting out a sigh. "Even so, I hope you never lose that determination... hold on to it with all your strength, because once it's gone…"
Without warning, Tsunade drew back her fist, and before Sakura could react, since her vision was still quite blurry, stars exploded behind her eyes. She crumpled into her teacher's arms, incomprehension and betrayal clear in her eyes as they rolled back into her head.
"…you can never get it back. I hope you can forgive me, Naruto, Sakura, Sasuke…"
…were the last words Sakura heard before the darkness claimed her.