Chapter 71: Draining Naruto
The force traveled through one slender index finger into the earth and kept going.
The ground split open — a crack running from the point of impact straight toward Naruto's feet, spreading like a fault line. He lost his balance and sat down hard.
"Naruto."
Her voice was level. Patient. Already moving on.
"Are you coming at me or not? I said what I said."
Something in his eyes snapped into focus.
"So that's what you want." He scrambled upright, hands coming together for seals. "You want to fight me for the Hokage position."
"That's not exactly what I—"
"But it doesn't matter." His feet found solid ground. He looked at her — at this girl he'd liked for longer than he could properly articulate — and his jaw set. "Even if it's you, Sakura. I'm not giving that up."
I'll get strong enough to protect Sakura. To protect Sasuke. To protect Kakashi-sensei. To protect everyone.
His eyes dropped for just a moment to the spot on her chest she'd pointed at.
Never again.
"Multi Shadow Clone Technique!"
The chakra detonated outward. Hundreds of him — thousands — materializing in every direction, filling the clearing, circling the pink-haired girl at the center until she was nothing but a shape inside a sea of orange and blond.
Sakura looked around at the walls of Naruto closing in from every angle.
He wasn't listening.
I asked him to hit me. Now I have a lecture about being protected.
She looked at the nearest clone and crooked one finger.
Come on then.
The clone charged. Sakura pivoted sideways, caught the wrist mid-swing, pulled — one smooth rotational throw — and launched it. She fed a thread of chakra into it as it left her hand, reinforcing the clone's structural integrity just long enough for it to work.
The clone became a cannonball.
It carved a tunnel through the crowd of its copies — boom, boom, boom — sending white smoke bursting in a line until it hit a tree and vanished with a final crack.
"Interesting."
Jiraiya had propped his chin on one hand.
"Injecting chakra into the clone to reinforce it, then using it as a projectile to break the others. Doing that while running Enhanced Strength — that's not nothing."
Precise chakra control was the whole foundation of Enhanced Strength. Threading a separate chakra operation through it simultaneously, without disrupting either one — that was the kind of thing most people practiced for years before managing it.
He filed it.
The clones hit from every direction.
Sakura moved through them without hurry, without expression — pick one up, throw it through five others, reach for the next. White smoke accumulated in clouds around her. Bodies of Naruto piled up into clearing.
"Multi Shadow Clone Technique!"
The field refilled.
She looked at the fresh wall of orange and felt the faintest trace of something like weariness at the edges. Not physical. Just the arithmetic.
He has so much chakra.
"Naruto," she called out. "Use the Rasengan."
"I won't."
The clone closest to her answered without hesitation, and she could hear the stubbornness in all of them at once.
"Doesn't matter how it goes. The Rasengan doesn't get pointed at Sakura."
...Okay.
She pressed her lips together.
If he won't use it, this is going to take hours.
She pulled two kunai from her pouch. One forward grip, one reverse — forward for driving force, reverse for angles and concealment. If she was going to do this economically, she needed to stop burning chakra on the throw technique and start using tools.
"Conserving chakra now," Jiraiya observed from his rock, chin still in his hand. "Smart."
He'd thought about this a lot, actually. When Hiruzen had told him he'd taken a new disciple — at his age, with everything on the old man's plate — Jiraiya's first reaction had been somewhere between confusion and mild exasperation. Homura and Koharu had apparently felt the same. What was the point? Hiruzen was Hokage. He had enough to carry. Why add a student?
But that speech.
I don't want to be weak. So I'll be strong. That's the whole thing.
A kid who'd internalized that — genuinely internalized it, not just as something to say — was worth making time for. If she hadn't ended up as Hiruzen's student, Jiraiya thought he might have looked twice himself.
As it was, she was his junior. He watched her work through a thousand copies of the same stubborn blond kid, methodical and unhurried, while the sun tracked across the sky.
The light had gone orange by the time it ended.
Naruto hit the ground for the last time and stayed there — chakra genuinely, thoroughly exhausted, every last reserve wrung out. He lay on his back looking at the sky and breathing hard.
Sakura stood with her hands on her knees, getting her own breath back.
That took forever.
She looked at the sprawled figure on the ground. His chakra levels, from what she could sense, were at the bottom of the barrel — the fraction he could consciously access was gone. The Nine-Tails' reserves, caged behind their seal, would start bleeding through now whether either of them wanted it to or not.
Which is the point.
"Alright," she said, straightening up.
We got there.
(End of Chapter 71)