Chapter 170: The World's Favorite
Sakura's fist was coming. Sasuke stood with his hands in his pockets and didn't move.
Before his Mangekyo awakened, he hadn't been her match — fine. That was before.
But right now—
Right now I'm not who I was.
I have the same power as Itachi. The clan's ultimate force. With these eyes, no one can beat me.
He watched her close the distance, Kotoamatsukami already active on her.
Misfortune wrapped around her — she'd trip on a stone, catch a face full of windblown dust, feel a sudden flutter in her chest that broke her rhythm, she'd—
"What exactly are you performing for me?"
The fist arrived.
The impact sent him off his feet. He hit the ground hard.
That force. That exact feeling. That pink hair.
He'd had a personal introduction to her strength at six years old, and apparently awakening the Mangekyo had not changed the experience at all.
Sasuke was back on his feet before he'd finished processing the landing, eyes going immediately to the pink-haired girl cracking her knuckles on the other side of the clearing.
She looked like she intended to continue.
How.
Kotoamatsukami was active. He'd felt it take hold. So why—
"New power going to your head," Sakura said, rolling her shoulders. "I think I need to walk you through some things."
She was looking at his eyes. She'd clocked the Mangekyo already.
She had a guess about when he'd awakened it. And this was exactly the pattern — get a new ability, immediately pick a fight with someone you can't beat. He'd done this before and he'd do it again unless someone demonstrated, clearly and physically, that the rules still applied to him.
Lesson plan: Reality Check.
Sasuke touched his cheek. Already swelling. He didn't care — Sakura would fix it after. What mattered was that Kotoamatsukami hadn't worked.
Except—
He looked again, Mangekyo focused.
It had worked. He could see the yin energy distributed across her — but something was holding it at the surface, wrapped around her like a second skin, blocking it from sinking in.
Pink. Formless. Faintly luminous through the Mangekyo's lens.
He recognized it.
Inner Sakura. The suppressed one. Her ambient force was sitting on the outside of Sakura's chakra like armor, and it was enough to hold his Kotoamatsukami off completely.
Sasuke reached back and pulled a kunai from his pouch. Sword was at the training grounds. He had basic equipment and that was it.
Sakura saw the kunai and crooked a finger at him.
"Come on. Show me what gave you the nerve to just stand there."
Standard provocation. Sasuke had been receiving these since the Academy.
He dropped into a crouch, blue-white lightning crackling to life across his body, and launched.
The Mangekyo wasn't just new techniques — it was perception. Every slight shift in her posture, every weight transfer, registered in perfect clarity.
Amatsukami.
He activated the second technique without thinking — if misfortune couldn't touch her, then he'd pull fortune toward himself. Both tests at once.
I'm the luckiest person alive right now.
He drove in, kunai moving, pressing the advantage—
Sakura threw a punch. He dropped under it, felt the wind of it pass over him, came up already redirecting — kunai arcing toward her back—
She kicked back. Same timing. His calculation said the heel would connect with the kunai's handle and send it spinning away — the force differential was too wide for him to hold on.
And then a gust of wind pushed a falling leaf directly across her sightline.
One moment of visual interference. Sasuke immediately shifted his angle, committed to the throw instead, and the kunai was already in the air.
Sakura tilted her head. The kunai passed her ear.
She reached for his collar.
The ground under Sasuke's foot gave way — not much, ten centimeters of loose soil subsiding under the pressure of their movement. Both positions shifted. Her grab closed on empty air.
Sakura pulled up and threw the Heaven-Covering Formation active around the whole area. Scan, confirm, nothing unusual in the environment — she reset her footing and came in again.
Take the initiative back.
Sasuke adjusted to meet her, confidence building.
It's working. I can feel it.
He surged forward.
Sakura's expression went cold.
Fine. I was going to pull it. But if you want to play—
Heaven Stomp.
One foot hit the ground. She launched.
"Die!"
The chakra on her foot ignited — blue and pink both, visible even in the dark.
Sasuke looked up at it and felt his scalp prickle. His body was already moving to get clear — and a stone he hadn't seen jutting from the ground caught his foot and dumped him sideways.
No—
He went down. The kick's trajectory passed over him.
But Sakura was already committed — airborne, angle locked, unable to adjust—
Sasuke had just avoided her by falling.
She saw it.
Something in this fight is wrong.
She released the restraint on her chakra. The foot came down with everything behind it.
The ground under the impact turned to rubble. Debris flew in every direction — chunks of earth and stone moving fast enough to cut.
Sasuke rolled, came up. Not one fragment touched him. The pieces that landed nearby were the soft ones, loose dirt.
Sakura stood in the crater and looked at him.
"A technique that works through real-world conditions," she said. "Redirects whatever would hurt you, uses whatever's available. And it runs continuously."
Sasuke's expression didn't change, but she could see him recalibrating.
She's already mapped it.
"...Who knows," he said. "If Sakura wants to know, she can ask nicely."
Ask nicely.
Sakura's eye twitched.
You want me to bow and ask you? With what face?
Three shuriken appeared in her hand.
It didn't matter what the mechanism was. The gap between their baselines was too large to overcome with any passive technique. Strength, speed, reaction time, chakra volume — he was behind her on all of them. A high-tier ability without the raw foundation to back it up was just noise.
His technique read like Obito's type — environment manipulation, indirect interference. A mechanic-type ability.
Mechanic types were her favorite problem to solve.
You want to play games? Fine. I'll break it by force.
"Shuriken Shadow Clone Technique—"
She released all three. They split into a black downpour filling every angle of approach, no gaps.
Sasuke's hand was already moving — kunai intercepting, deflecting, sending shuriken spinning into the earth around him—
Every one that reached him missed something vital. Every one that landed near him was the soft edge, the flat face.
Sakura was already moving through the rain she'd created.
"Stop performing."
Her hand shot for his throat. He backpedaled. She followed. He couldn't shake her.
He started forming seals.
"Fire Release — Great Fireball—"
The first ember touched his lips and Sakura's hand landed on his face, pink chakra flaring up like a wall of flame, and the fireball had nowhere to go.
Extinguished in his own mouth.
What—
He pushed lightning through his skin — full dispersal, paralyze at contact—
The pink chakra took it without flinching.
This is impossible.
She was right on him. At this range every ninjutsu was dead before it formed. She was a taijutsu fighter and he was a ninjutsu fighter and she'd closed the distance completely — the only tool he had left was the kunai.
He thrust it at her.
Sakura's expression didn't change. One hand retracted from his collar, one finger extended, and she flicked the blade.
The kunai left his hand.
His arm went numb to the elbow.
He stood very still for a moment.
He had known, intellectually, that she was strong. He'd seen the staff punched through her chest. He'd seen her kill the Raikage. None of it had felt quite as immediate as one finger removing a weapon from his grip.
If she can do that to a kunai, she can do it to a sword.
"Hmph."
Sakura pressed the advantage.
She wanted to see what his technique looked like against a completely closed-out position. No range to work with, no geometry to exploit — just her hand around his collar and nowhere to go.
"Sakura!"
Sasuke shouted it as he kept backpedaling.
"What are you yelling for?!"
You're not Naruto. Naruto at least shouts something interesting mid-fight.
The sky had darkened without her noticing. Low clouds moving in, and now the first drops of rain beginning to fall.
Now?
She'd checked the sky twenty minutes ago. Clear in every direction.
Sasuke, your eyes are genuinely unhinged.
She stayed on him, watching the environment now with as much attention as the fight itself.
Rain was falling ahead of her. The way she was moving — if she held this line, a single heavy drop would catch her directly in the eye.
She felt it before she calculated it.
The whole world is helping him.
The leaf. The subsiding ground. The rain.
Small things. Common things, the kind that happened every day without notice. But they kept happening, and every single one of them had successfully interfered with her.
Sasuke right now was the world's favorite.
She understood his ability.
Not Izanagi's reality rewrite. Not a dodge or a parry. Just—
Luck.
The simplest, most absurd thing possible. The kind of everyday fortune that people talked about and couldn't explain.
If he led an army, a meteor might land on the opposing force.
Sakura closed her eyes. She drove through the falling rain. Her hand snapped toward him—
Something caught in her peripheral vision. In the sky.
She opened her eyes.
Seriously.
A streak of fire. Falling. Aimed, as far as she could tell, directly at her.
Not large — about the size of a house, roughly — but at that velocity, that was an S-rank impact in mass and speed.
"That's a ridiculous ability."
Sasuke was still backpedaling, and now he was smiling.
"The current me is already beyond what Sakura can—"
His sentence stopped.
Because Sakura's hand had found his collar again, and she was looking up at the incoming meteorite, and she was drawing back her other fist.
She's not—
Sasuke stared.
The thing falling toward them was small by cosmic standards and enormous by every other standard, and the force it was carrying at terminal velocity was enough to level the neighborhood, and Sakura was looking at it like it was mildly annoying.
"Let the moon come."
She said it like it answered something, like it was a conclusion she'd arrived at a long time ago, and Sasuke had no idea what it meant.
She gripped his collar, pointed her fist at the falling rock, and charged straight at it.
☆☆☆
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