Sakura stared at Naruto's womanly chest with a hungry look in her eyes.
"Why are you… what are you looking at me like that for?" Naruto said defensively, instinctively folding Sakura's arms over her chest, making her forearms dig deep into her sweater puppies. "This is your own body— ooh, that feels good, they're so tingly…"
Naruto ordinarily loved getting attention in any shape or form, but this was the look of a predator eyeing up its prey… Sakura's gaze sent chills down his spine, in a way that was both terrifying and electrifyingly exciting…
"Sorry, I couldn't help it, ya know?" Sakura said, shifting uncomfortably as she tried to conceal the Kusanagi no Tsurugi raging in Naruto's orange trousers. "Your body's reacting on its own, ya know?"
Kakashi couldn't get enough of his disciples' interactions with their bodies swapped; it was just too hilarious to watch! Though Sakura herself didn't seem to have realised it, she appeared to have acquired Naruto's verbal tic… maybe it was a neuropsychological trait that Naruto's body had inherited from his mother, Kushina?
"All right, let's not get carried away," Kakashi said, clapping his hands to turn his students' attention away from each other. "Naruto, you stay here, Sakura, you're coming with me; you'll only get distracted if Naruto's hanging around you."
"Okay~!" Naruto sang. He couldn't wait to get his hands on these monsters…
The sun was already beginning to hang low in the sky as the day slipped into late afternoon, bathing the Land of Fire's countryside in orange. Kakashi and Sakura approached a small copse that neighboured a razed field of buckwheat. The shadows of the trees were already lengthening as the day drew to an end… though just a month ago, they would have been even longer.
Without her noticing, time had flown and March was already drawing to a close.
Despite the chaos and untold devastation that the war had unleashed upon their homeland, nature only seemed all the more determined to revive after winter. The sky was filled with swallows returning from their migrations, swooping here and there as they hurried to fill their stomachs with insects before sunset, while bumblebees buzzed between the wildflowers that had sprung up in the buckwheat fields the invaders had destroyed.
Springtime was here, and Sakura's namesake, the cherry blossoms, were in full bloom.
"The village may be safe now, but the Land of Fire took the brunt of the war, y'know?" Sakura sighed as she caught a falling pink petal in her palm. "The planting season is almost upon us, but these fields are salted and burned… there's going to be a famine, believe it."
Kakashi, who'd been having a hard time keeping a straight face while Sakura waxed poetic in Naruto's body, instantly sobered up. The war may have ended, albeit in an unsatisfactory manner for all parties involved, but there was still work to be done.
"Then we'd better get to it," he said, tilting his head towards the woods. "You already know the tree-climbing exercise..."
Sakura nodded and closed her eyes, turning her attention inwards.
'Kurama,' she called softly. 'You've been listening in, right? I need your help.'
'…'
'Kurama?'
All of a sudden, Sakura found herself standing in water up to her ankles before the Nine-Tailed Fox's cage. The seal's inner world was no longer quite as gloomy as it used to be, and the spell tag pasted over the cage door that had once locked the fox behind bars was no longer in place.
'How did you come to learn that name?'
Sakura froze as the fox's gravelly voice echoed through the chamber. She'd accidentally let slip the Nine-Tailed Fox's true name in front of him, and judging by his reaction, a mix of curiosity and wariness, that tsundere had not yet revealed his name to Naruto, which meant she couldn't have heard it from him… she'd messed up!
'I…'
To make things worse, the seal's inner world was the same as having their spiritual energies intertwined, which meant no falsehoods could be uttered in this place… but that being said, that did not mean she could not conceal her intentions by misleading the other party and withholding context from the truth.
In the future of the original timeline, when Ōtsutsuki Isshiki assaulted the Hidden Leaf Village, the Nine-Tailed Fox would test Naruto's resolve by hinting that using Baryon Mode would result in both their deaths… when in actuality, only the Fox himself would die from the annihilation reaction caused by the collision of their chakras, since Naruto was still flesh and blood, at the end of the day!
'I saw it,' Sakura said simply, referring to having watched the anime.
'…'
'…'
'How much have those eyes of yours seen?' Kurama said warily as he gazed at her through the bars of his cage. 'Who… no, rather… what exactly are you?'
'Who do you think I am?' Sakura countered.
This gave Kurama pause.
Though the Sage of Six Paths had endowed him with sentience, the Nine-Tailed Fox was still half of the Ten-Tails, a being who had once been fused to Ōtsutsuki Kaguya, and as a result, he still conserved fleeting memories of what had come before… and it scared him.
'You are Ōtsutsuki, but at the same time… you are still the human girl who accompanied Naruto all these years… that is why I asked,' Kurama said at last. 'Your existence confuses me.'
'I have been called many names… Haruno, Uchiha, Manyū,' Sakura said softly. 'But at the end of the day, there's really only one name I want to have… Uzumaki Sakura.'
The Nine-Tailed Fox stared at her with a wide eye filled with shock. He opened his enormous maw, displaying his many long, shiny teeth… and then the air boomed with his laughter. Naruto trusted Sakura with all his heart, and Kurama trusted Naruto, so…
'Ha… haha… ahahaha!' Kurama cackled.'Fools, the both of you! A match made in heaven! Very well, I'll place my trust in you, just as Naruto trusts in you! I'll help you with your training, lass! Maximum difficulty it is!'
Sakura opened her eyes.
"Ha!" she shouted.
Sakura clasped her fingers together in the tiger seal as she attempted to extract chakra from Naruto's cells, but Kurama instantly interfered, just as he used to when Naruto was younger. It was already difficult enough to mould the desired amount of chakra when one's cells were flooded with vitality, but add the Fox's will to her spiritual energy, and it was almost impossible to accomplish the task with any degree of precision.
To put the difficulty of the exercise into perspective, it was like driving an excavator up to the ocean and trying to scoop only one millilitre of water into the bucket, while a bodybuilder sat in the cockpit and constantly nagged at you, pushing random buttons and wrestling you for the controls… all without accidentally driving into the ocean, scooping up more water than necessary, or giving the passenger a very deserved smack.
"Here goes nothing!" Sakura shouted.
She planted her foot in the closest tree… and with a loud crack, the poor tree snapped in half.