The metallic tang of ozone and blood filled the air. Sasuke's hand, still crackling with the dying sparks of the Chidori, trembled slightly, though his expression remained a mask of cold indifference. The strike hadn't been fatal—he had pulled back at the last millisecond, or perhaps her instinctive flinch had saved her—but it had torn through her shoulder, leaving a jagged, smoking wound.
Sakura didn't clutch the injury. She didn't fall to her knees. Instead, she took a step forward, the smell of her own burnt skin grounding her in a way no lecture ever could.
"You know what? It was supposed to hurt, Sasuke," she said, her voice eerily calm. A sharp, sarcastic laugh escaped her lips—a sound so hollow it seemed to echo off the fog-covered water beneath the bridge.
She kept walking until she was inches from him, forcing him to look at her. Her eyes, usually filled with a soft, yearning warmth, were now glassy with unshed tears that she refused to let fall. The emerald green was turning into something harder—flint.
"Is this what you really want, Sasuke? Tell me!" she demanded, her voice rising not in anger, but in a desperate need for finality. "Hurt me more. Make it clear to me. If the girl who loved you for years is just an obstacle to be cleared, then finish it. Give me a reason to never look back."
Sasuke didn't flinch. He didn't look at the blood soaking her pink tabard. He looked through her, as if she were a ghost haunting a path he had already moved past.
"You're still talking about feelings," he said, his voice dropping to a low, lethal silk. "That's your weakness, Sakura. You're an annoyance from a past I've already burned. I didn't miss your heart because I hesitated; I missed because you aren't worth the precision."
He stepped closer, his Sharingan spinning with a cold, rhythmic cruelty.
"You want clarity? You are nothing to me. You are a memory of a village I despise, and every time you cry, you remind me why I left. If you stay in front of me, I won't just hurt you. I'll erase you."
The words hit harder than the lightning chakra ever could. Inside Sakura, something didn't just break—it solidified. The agonizing heat in her chest began to cool into a thick, impenetrable frost.
She didn't sob. She didn't beg. She simply stepped back, the light in her eyes dimming until they were as opaque as his. The first layer of the wall was built on the realization that he wasn't "lost"—he was gone. The second layer, cemented by his words, was the realization that the Sasuke she loved had never truly existed in the way she imagined.
"I see," she whispered. The sarcasm was gone, replaced by a terrifying neutrality. She reached up, wiped a stray drop of blood from her cheek, and turned her back on him.
She didn't run away. She walked toward Kakashi and Naruto, her posture straight, her hand finally glowing with a steady, clinical green light as she began to heal her own wound. She didn't look back at the Uchiha. For the first time in her life, the silence behind her didn't feel like a void—it felt like freedom.
To be continued patreon.com/AkiraNix