"Er…" Sakura said awkwardly. "It's not what it looks like, I swear."
Except, it was exactly what it looked like.
Akimichi Chōza, Aburame Shibi, and Princess Sāra gaped in disbelief at the sight before them. They had caught their Uchiha companion red‑handed, her fingers sunk into the unconscious Hero of the Hidden Sand's sideboob, in the throes of what could only be described as a salacious and quite sapphic groping session.
Sakura discreetly pocketed the scroll she had found concealed between Pakura's breasts.
[Beep! Pakura's breast chakra has been obtained! Deriving Plasma Style jutsu from Scorch Style data… Task 1% complete.]
"Oh, so you, er… defeated Pakura, eh?" Minato said just as awkwardly. "Mind you, you were only supposed to distract her."
"WAIT!" Sakura said hurriedly, seeing Minato draw a kunai. "There's no need to kill Pakura, I've already defeated her!"
Minato paused. Lady Tsunade had told him to trust Uchiha Konan unconditionally, but Pakura was too dangerous to let live. She had already claimed the lives of countless comrades, and she would continue to do so for as long as she lived.
"I know executing a prisoner might be difficult to stomach, but this is war," he said quietly. "There had better be a very good reason for this. We don't have the means to hold someone of her skill safely."
Sakura nodded vigorously, and Minato sighed. He sheathed his special kunai and slapped a sealing tag on Pakura's forehead. "Seal!" he shouted, performing a hand sign. Spidery-looking black runes spread out from under his hand across Pakura's face from the tag, before sinking into her skin and vanishing.
"Her chakra will remain sealed as long as the tag sticks," he said. "Now, we just need to tie her up so that she doesn't remove it, but you should keep an eye on her, nonetheless. The first thing most shinobi are taught are rope escape jutsu."
…
With Pakura safely contained, Sakura allowed herself a sigh of relief and started treating the others' wounds. Escaping Sunagakure's border patrol had taken Minato's band quite a distance from their planned route, and they had ended up taking refuge at an oasis to nurse their injuries and fill their water gourds.
"It certainly is reassuring, having a medic on the team!" Chōza said, as Sakura healed the bloody gashes on his back. "As expected of Lady Tsunade's disciple, eh?" he added jovially. "Why don't you join our unit, once we're done with this mission, Konan-chan?"
"No can do, Chōza," Minato called. "I promised I'd take her back to her clan head once we'd finished up with our mission."
The green glow around Sakura's hands faded. Chōza was all better now!
"Nonsense!" Chōza shouted in reply, laughing raucously as he clapped Sakura hard on the back, sending her stumbling. "Oh, sorry, I forgot you weren't one of the guys… I didn't mean to hit a lady so hard…"
Sakura's foot snagged on something protruding from the ground as she tried to catch her balance, and she tripped. Arms pinwheeling, she fell face first into the sand, her plump breasts cushioning the impact. Yelping in pain as the hot sand scalded her cleavage, she quickly jumped to her feet.
"I'm getting some serious déjà-vu," Sakura muttered to herself as she dusted herself off. She peered over her breasts and looked down. "I tripped on an exposed palm tree root, this time… huh."
Now that she was thinking about it, this oasis seemed awfully familiar… and this palm tree, too…
"AH!" Sakura blurted out.
She dug into her pockets and retrieved the bundle of coupons Teuchi had given her, checking the dates: they were valid for the first week of March, twenty years from now… Her eyes widened in realisation. This was the oasis where she had stopped on the way back from Suna's Chūnin Exams! The reason she had found a coupon from the future in that old metal box, buried somewhere around here… was because she had buried it there herself!
"What are you looking at?" Minato's voice suddenly rang out behind her.
"Nothing!" Sakura yelped, hastily shoving the coupons into her cleavage.
Minato smiled at her, and Sakura shot him a suspicious glance. He hadn't seen what was written on them, had he? Sakura scurried under a nearby palm tree to take shelter from the sun, and gathering chakra in her palms, she quietly performed the Area Scanning Jutsu. As expected, the metal box she had found the pile of chakra metal in was nowhere to be found… so where was it?
Sakura produced the scroll she had found nestled in Pakura's cleavage.
Fingers trembling, she unsealed it; out popped a metal box identical to the one she had found buried in the desert a few months ago… or rather, twenty years from now. She peeked inside. As expected, the fortune in chakra metal gears and springs was there, meaning the Ichiraku Ramen coupon was the only thing left to add to the pile.
"What was the message again, System?" Sakura whispered, taking out a pencil.
[A little gift of chakra metal, it should be enough to suit your purposes. P.S.: Take a good look at the coupon.]
Sakura scribbled the message onto the back of one of the coupons, using the metal box as a makeshift writing surface, and she slipped it inside, before sinking the box into the sand where she had found it the first time around, using Earth Style nature transformation.
"I wonder why Pakura was carrying around such a fortune in chakra metal on her to begin with," Sakura muttered to herself. "Actually, that's not even the biggest question I should be asking myself, is it? I'm the one who buried that box, that much is obvious… but the message… I copied it word for word… from whom? Myself? But then, who came up with the message in the first place, if it wasn't me?"
Sakura's head began pounding, her eyes blurring with overlapping visions as hushed, indistinct voices whispered in her ears.
"Ngh…" she moaned. "My head… feels like it's splitting apart…"
[Beep! Host, your nose is bleeding.]
Sakura mechanically raised a hand to her face. She wiped her upper lip with the back of her trembling hand and examined it blearily. It was slick with blood.
"Best not to think about such things too hard, eh?" Sakura groaned. "Oof… I'm going to lie down…"
The System beeped in agreement. Its paradox-avoidance algorithms were running at full power to format any contradictory data it had heard that might induce bugs in its coding. Some mysteries were best left unsolved.