Chapter 101: The Tsuchikage Leads the Charge / Sasuke's Gift
Immediately.
Hiruzen mobilized eight hundred shinobi for a surprise strike on Grass Country.
Objective: secure it at maximum speed.
Kakashi, Sakura, and Sasuke were on the list.
Naruto was not. His circumstances being what they were, Hiruzen had quietly maneuvered him onto a mission to Bear Country under Asuma's Ino-Shika-Chō team. The pretext was plausible enough. Naruto hadn't questioned it.
By any conventional measure, eight hundred shinobi taking a small country with its own armed forces at speed was a difficult proposition.
But the unit's commanding officer wasn't conventional.
Ōnoki — Third Tsuchikage, Tsuchikage of the Two Scales — was leading the column.
He needed to get back to Earth Country anyway. Taking a small nation on the way home was, in his estimation, a reasonable use of the trip.
Night like a curtain. Black clouds over the moon.
Speed is the soul of war. Eight hundred shinobi departed that same night and not a single villager heard them leave.
Ōnoki sat in the chair Akatsuchi carried on his back, listening to the wind howl past his ears, saying nothing.
No one else spoke either. The column moved through the dark in silence.
Sakura kept her expression neutral, jumping from branch to branch. For her the decision had been made long ago. Having made it, she had no reservations about what it would cost.
The wind moved through her pink hair.
She thought about what had driven her since the beginning — the desire that lived at the bottom of every choice she'd made since waking up in a six-year-old's body.
Climb to the top.
This was the first real step.
Grass Country's fall would be the first stone on the path to the summit.
Those green eyes, steady as gemstones, held something that didn't waver.
A figure dropped to land beside her.
"Sakura."
Sasuke's face carried a thread of tension he wasn't quite hiding.
"What is it?"
She looked at him and kept her voice low.
"Is war... really here?"
He asked it with some hesitation. The word war had always felt distant in his life — Konoha's peace had insulated him from it. Being told, matter-of-factly, that it had arrived, left him momentarily without footing.
"Yes."
"But don't worry — we have the Tsuchikage leading us."
"We'll win this one."
She said it quietly, but the words carried far enough to reach Ōnoki's ears.
The old man — nearly seventy, the same age as Hiruzen — opened one eye and glanced back at the pink-haired girl.
He had to admit: Hiruzen had a large heart. Trusting both his own disciple and the last Uchiha to Ōnoki for a military campaign.
Wasn't he even a little worried that Ōnoki might quietly solve the disciple problem and abduct the Uchiha boy back to Iwa as a breeding program for a new Uchiha bloodline?
Ōnoki looked at the two Konoha youngsters for another moment, then closed his eyes and settled back into his chair.
He was old. He couldn't afford to burn the night. There was a battle coming. He needed rest.
Sasuke looked at the girl beside him and felt the awkwardness settle in his chest.
He hadn't expected his own nerve to fail while hers held steady.
But—
They said the shinobi who survived battlefields were the ones who became truly strong. He knew that. The Fourth Hokage, who had died for the village — the Yellow Flash had been someone who could tip the outcome of an entire war by himself. That kind of power didn't come without being forged in real fighting.
Itachi.
Wait for me.
I will become strong enough to kill you.
For Father. For Mother. For every Uchiha who deserved better.
Sasuke's fists tightened as he ran.
"Sakura..."
He glanced sideways at her again, still moving.
"What?"
She met his eyes.
Sasuke reached into his pouch with a certain studied casualness and produced two silver objects. He held them out to her.
"These are... for you."
"A promotion gift. For making jōnin."
The green flak jacket she'd been wearing throughout the invasion had made her rank obvious. Jōnin — at minimum. He wasn't certain whether Special Jōnin or full jōnin, but jōnin was beyond doubt.
Sakura looked at the two silver pieces in his hand and blinked.
She'd assumed Sasuke had approximately zero social awareness for this kind of thing. Apparently not.
"Thank you, Sasuke."
She took them.
Brass knuckles. A matched pair, solid and balanced, with one small detail: the striking surfaces were four small cat faces, each grinning.
...Cat faces. On brass knuckles. The weapon and the motif had no natural relationship that Sakura could identify.
Sasuke registered her expression and the red that appeared on his cheeks was subtle but present.
"I commissioned them from the Cat Shinobi clan."
"They... tend to leave their signature on everything they forge."
Sakura looked at the grinning cats and decided not to comment.
"The base material is Zabuza's Executioner's Blade. What remained of it after the reforging."
"Combined with the Cat clan's craftsmanship and the Uchiha clan's standing stock of chakra metal from our arrangement with them."
"They can receive and channel chakra — amplify the force of a strike. And they don't break."
Sakura's attention sharpened immediately.
Self-repairing via contact with blood. Chakra metal integrated into the structure. Cat clan metalwork.
The value of this thing is comparable to the gloves she'd spent four years saving for.
She slipped them on. They fit exactly. The grip was natural, the weight distribution clean.
The four grinning cat faces remained deeply incongruous.
She did not care even slightly.
Sasuke watched the pleased expression move across her face and looked away without appearing to look away.
She's unusual.
Everything about how she looks says one thing. Everything about how she acts says something else.
Half the time he caught himself forgetting, on some level, that she was a girl.
But this pink-haired person — operating entirely like someone who'd never been told to act otherwise — was somehow not a thing he found irritating.
Or, more accurately — there was something else in there. Something tangled up with the irritation that was distinctly not irritation.
That was, more or less, what it felt like to be thirteen.
Sakura felt a prickling on the back of her neck. She glanced at Sasuke.
Sasuke's gaze, which had been on her, slid smoothly away to the middle distance.
Sakura stared at the treeline ahead.
Oh for the love of—
(End of Chapter)