The following morning…
"More training?" Sasuke said impatiently. "If the village isn't destroyed, then we ought to hurry back to the Uchiha District and find the Stone Tablet as soon as possible! We need to learn the information inscribed on it, or we'll continue being at a disadvantage due to the information gap!"
Unfortunately for Sasuke, Sakura had no intention of returning to the village just yet. Before anything else, she needed to remaster chakra control. If she didn't, then every time a fight dragged on, or every time she needed to travel long distances, then she would become bloated and blow up like a hot air balloon…
…and that was why she had once again swapped bodies with Naruto, and was currently undergoing water walking training with her Shadow Clones in the giant earthen teacup she had made yesterday. Hopefully, this would be the second and last time.
"Oh man, you should've seen her," Naruto chortled. "Sakura-chan got super huge yesterday, like even fatter than Chōji? It was hilarious—"
"Only a crude moron like yourself would be so crass as to care only about appearances," Sasuke said haughtily. "The only thing that matters to me is what Sakura's got on the inside…"
"A lot of fat?" Naruto quipped.
Sasuke glowered at him.
"Just so you know, I wouldn't mind if Sakura weighed even a hundred kilos," Sasuke said humbly. "I bet you wouldn't even look at her if—"
Naruto jerked his thumb skywards. Try higher, his eyes seemed to say.
"—two hundred kilos?" Sasuke said, frowning. "With or without, the… chest?"
Naruto grinned and shook his head, repeating the gesture.
"Three hundred!?" Sasuke said, his face turning white as a sheet. "That's… a bit much."
"You should see your face!" Naruto guffawed, causing the massive, meaty orbs attached to Sakura's upper body to bounce up and down. "So much for your pure Uchiha love, shashasha!"
"Don't you start adding strange things to my character, ya know!" Sakura shouted from the top of the giant earthen cylinder. "I certainly don't laugh like a One Piece character!"
Naruto, Sasuke and Kakashi watched as Sakura and a veritable waterfall of Shadow Clones came over the cylinder's rim, the clones vanishing in explosions of white smoke before they could even hit the ground. It had already been ten minutes since Sakura and her thousand Shadow Clones had begun their water-walking training, which meant it was now time for her to absorb their experience.
"Urk…" Sakura groaned, her shoulders drooping. "I'm suuuuuper unmotivated now…"
A week's worth of training compressed into ten minutes… she felt like turning into a slug.
"I'll let you fondle your own boobs if you keep going," Naruto cooed, placing his hands under Sakura's tremendously bloated mammaries and pushing them up for the offering. "Think you can do it~?"
"Uoooh!" Sakura roared, instantly perking up. "Naruto's body… it's suddenly filling up with determination, for some reason!?"
Sasuke shot Naruto a strange look.
"You know, for a guy…" he said. "You're disturbingly good at playing a girl."
Naruto blushed, shifting from side to side with his hands behind his back, leaning forwards slightly to show off a hint of Sakura's deep cleavage. "Jeez, it's a bit embarrassing to be told that, Sasuke-kun…" he said coquettishly, batting Sakura's long eyelashes. "…you really think so?"
Sasuke's ears turned as scarlet as his eyes.
"Gwahahaha!" Naruto howled in laughter, holding his sides as tears of hilarity streamed from his eyes. "Your face…! You're so easy, cherry boy!"
"You're the cherry boy, moron!" Sasuke snarled. "Besides, it's not fair making Sakura wear those strange expressions, you loser! I'll seriously kill you once you're back in your own body if you don't stop!"
Naruto wiped away a tear from the corner of his eye, shooting him a look of pity.
"Cherry boy, huh…" he said, sighing.
"Unlike you—" he glanced at Kakashi, "— and maybe Kakashi-sensei, I have already graduated from such things…"
Naruto raised an eyebrow, regarding them both with an air of superiority.
"I'm sorry, it's childish of me to rub it in your faces," he sighed, shrugging nonchalantly as he shook his head. "I've already climbed the stairway to adulthood, after all, so I shouldn't be bullying you kids like this…"
A vein popped under Kakashi's forehead protector.
"You know what?" Naruto went on, bringing his fist down into his open palm with a smack in mock realisation. "I don't need my dirty mags any more… I'll donate them to you as an apology. How does that sound?"
"If you want to kick his butt, feel free," Kakashi grumbled. "He's been like this the entire journey."
"Gladly," Sasuke said viciously. "A liar like him deserves nothing less."
Meanwhile, Sakura in Naruto's body had summoned a thousand fresh Shadow Clones with the chakra she had recovered from the first batch, and she was having them pick up the leaves from all the trees she had knocked down the previous day during her tree-climbing exercise.
Although the leaf-sticking exercise was comparatively easier than tree-climbing or water-walking, being one of the more basic Ninja Academy drills, that was only when applying a single leaf to the forehead… Three hundred and sixty-one leaves, one for each of the tenketsu, were far more difficult, since most shinobi only trained to reliably emit chakra from their hands and feet.
"And combined with water-walking," Sakura muttered to herself, "you get the perfect, all-inclusive chakra control exercise!"
Unlike wood, water was in a state of constant flux. It shifted beneath one's feet, forcing one to modulate the emission of chakra on the fly. Thus, if one could step on water, then one could step on anything!
Except air, naturally. A flying shinobi, imagine that! The idea was ludicrous!
"All right, let's split up into two groups!" Sakura called. "Half of you, stick leaves to each other, the other half, into the water!"
Sakura personally possessed around fifteen thousand Kakashi's worth of chakra, and a Naruto augmented with the full might of Kurama's chakra had more than a hundred times that, somewhere around the two-million mark. Theoretically, Naruto's body could produce hundreds of millions of Shadow Clones without dying, provided his chakra was divided equally amongst them.
Soon enough, the air was filled with splashing noises as a five-hundred-strong army of Naruto look-alikes stepped onto the water's surface and sank in, one after the other. Again and again, they doggy-paddled back to the cylinder's edge and climbed out, only to fall in with a splash moments later, until…
"I'm doing it!" one Shadow Clone exclaimed. "I'm not falling in— blub blub blub!"
It wasn't long before one Shadow Clone succeeded in remaining afloat for more than a second. One in five hundred had fluked upon a better methodology for controlling the immense chakra with which she had been created… or at least, a slightly better version of it than the others'.
Sakura frowned.
Everything was going according to plan so far, but she couldn't help feeling like there was something really obvious that she had failed to account for with the next step in her personal training regimen, though she couldn't quite put her finger on it…