Chapter 189: A Spirit That Swallows Ten Thousand Miles
"Huh? Whirlpool Country?"
River Country front.
Sakura's eyebrows went crooked looking at the road-worn trio standing in front of her, Genma at the front.
"Yeah, that's... that's the situation."
Genma, Raidō, and Iwashi hadn't even had time for water before Homura had pulled them straight to Sakura.
Genma was painfully aware he couldn't afford to annoy this particular person. Whatever rank he held now meant nothing once she sat in the Hokage's chair — there were a hundred small ways someone in that position could make his life difficult.
Sakura looked at him, then past him at Raidō, and visibly bit back whatever she'd been about to say.
Fine. Whirlpool Country it is.
I am genuinely the hardest-working person in this entire war. Running across the map nonstop.
"When do we leave?"
"As soon as possible."
She was about to agree outright, then her eyes flickered with a thought.
"Can the Flying Thunder God relay take one more person?"
"No problem."
She wanted Mei along — her intelligence on Kiri would matter a lot on this front.
"I'm coming too."
Kakashi, silent until now, spoke up.
Genma glanced at him, then back at Sakura, a question in his eyes.
"...Can we fit three?"
Sakura scratched her head.
"...Sure."
Genma accepted this with visible resignation.
Might as well bring the whole tent at this point.
Sakura looked at Kakashi for a moment, said nothing further, and went to find Mei.
This man was currently operating in pure self-destruction mode. Left alone with his own thoughts for too long, his Sharingan was going to burn itself out eventually. But keeping him fully occupied was, on balance, probably the safer option — better than leaving him isolated with whatever was running through his head.
If he ever reached a genuinely dark place alone, that would be a much harder problem to walk back.
By the time she returned with Mei, Genma's relay team was already assembled and ready.
"Alright. Let's go."
The three of them joined hands, forming a perimeter around Sakura's group, and triggered the Flying Thunder God technique without hesitation.
All three of them — Sakura, Kakashi, Mei — vanished instantly.
Whirlpool Country.
A flash, and the world reassembled. One moment River Country, the next, an entire Land of Fire away — Whirlpool Country.
Sakura scanned the surroundings.
A command tent, evidently. Empty.
Genma frowned at the Flying Thunder God seal etched into the desk.
No one here.
Not just the tent — outside it too, barely any Konoha presence visible.
Sakura stepped out first, Kakashi and Mei right behind her.
"Who's there?!"
A nearby sentry challenged them sharply the instant she emerged.
"It's me."
She looked at him.
"Lady — Lady Sakura!"
Recognition hit immediately, relief flooding his expression at the sight of her and Kakashi.
"Where's Lady Tsunade?"
This front was technically under Tsunade's command — she should have been here, running operations from the tent.
"Lady Sakura, Lady Tsunade is already engaged with Kirigakure's forces."
The sentry explained quickly.
Tsunade's forces had collided with Kiri on the very first day after arrival. The assault had come in hard and fast, and Konoha's side was struggling badly.
Two thousand troops to begin with — and that number included supply, patrol, sensory support, scouting, medical. Frontline combat capability sat closer to fifteen hundred.
Fifteen hundred, against the full weight of Kirigakure. Even with the village's only real heavyweight being the Fourth Mizukage alone.
The full weight, because Kiri hadn't split its forces at all. No second front against Iwagakure across the sea. Word had apparently reached them from Sand that Iwa was already half-defecting in spirit, content to coast and watch — so Kiri had abandoned any plan to engage them and thrown everything into Fire Country instead.
And Tsunade, the obstacle blocking that, needed to be removed as fast as possible.
"Let's move."
Sakura got the battlefield's location and headed out immediately, Mei and Kakashi following.
Equipment. Jutsu residue. Blood. Severed limbs.
The field was covered in all of it, thousands of Kiri shinobi grinding Konoha's far smaller force backward step by step.
"Heaven Stomp!"
Tsunade, in full battle gear, roared and dropped a flying kick toward the boyish-looking figure of the Fourth Mizukage, Yagura Karatachi.
Yagura raised the hooked black rod in his hand and pulled. A water mirror rose from the ground, summoned by the hook on the rod's edge.
Tsunade's reflection stared back from inside the mirror's surface.
"Water Release — Water Mirror Technique."
His voice was flat, naming the technique without inflection.
The reflected Tsunade tore free of the mirror, mirroring her movement exactly, throwing the same flying kick.
The two Tsunades' kicks met head-on.
The mirror-Tsunade dissolved into liquid. The real one went flying backward.
"You absolute coward."
Tsunade glared across at Yagura, teeth grinding.
Same trick again. He kept refusing a real exchange, using this disposable mirror technique to stall her endlessly.
Five thousand Kiri shinobi against fifteen hundred Konoha — and after the previous day's preliminary engagement, that number had already dropped to twelve or thirteen hundred. That first clash had only been testing the waters. This was the real push, and Konoha's lines weren't going to hold much longer.
Tsunade watched her own forces buckling and clenched her jaw.
Pull back?
This was her grandmother's homeland. Uzumaki Mito's birthplace. If there was any way to avoid ceding Whirlpool Country, Tsunade genuinely didn't want to take it.
But right now—
She didn't see a way through.
Yagura watched her, expression empty, hands already running through a fresh set of seals.
"Water Release — Great Waterfall Technique."
Whirlpool Country was an island nation — water was never scarce here. And Yagura wasn't just the Fourth Mizukage; he carried the Three-Tails inside him too. Deep reserves, home-field advantage, both stacked in his favor.
The technique rose like a tidal wave, surging toward Tsunade with the force of an open ocean bearing down.
Tsunade watched it come, momentarily frozen, and let out a long breath.
Guess this is it.
She was already opening her mouth to call the retreat when a low voice cut across the field.
"Water Release — Great Waterfall Technique!"
A second wave rose from nowhere, surging up to meet Yagura's head-on.
Who—?
Tsunade turned.
The only person who'd ever matched her grandfather's command of water release had died with him. No one in Konoha had come close since.
A figure was closing fast — brown hair, long, a water-blue robe streaming behind her. Cold, fixed expression. Open killing intent radiating off her without any attempt to hide it.
That's—
That's the one from Frost Country.
"Yagura Karatachi!"
Mei's voice carried fury, hatred, grief — all of it compressed into the name.
"Ah. You." Yagura looked at her, unmoved. "The traitor."
In the same instant, both Great Waterfall Techniques collided head-on.
The water exploded skyward, a churning ocean given violent voice.
Tsunade, balanced on the water's surface, watched Yagura warily. Mei arrived at her side a moment later.
"Sakura and Kakashi are already on the field."
That landed like solid ground under Tsunade's feet.
If Sakura was here, and this woman — equally skilled in water release, by the look of what she'd just thrown — was fighting beside her, this engagement was no longer a lost cause.
Mei straightened, scanning the field with a calm, deliberate focus.
"Roughly five thousand here. This is Kiri's entire deployable force."
She'd led the resistance movement against Kiri's leadership before all this — she knew the village's exact troop numbers better than almost anyone alive.
Tsunade's surprise wasn't at the size of the number. It was the opposite.
One of the Five Great Villages, and that was all they had? Five thousand?
Mei caught the reaction and gave a tired, bitter half-smile, eyes turning cold as they settled back on Yagura across the water.
"His Bloody Mist policy. Generations of shinobi killing each other off internally."
"This is what's left."
Before Tsunade could respond, Yagura answered first.
"A traitor doesn't get an opinion on village affairs." His tone was flat. "How laughable."
His hands snapped through seals.
"Water Release — Water Dragon Bullet!"
Mei matched him in the same heartbeat.
"Water Release — Water Dragon Bullet!"
Two roaring dragons of water tore upward, colliding mid-air, locked in violent contest.
"Well. It's lively out here."
A light wind carried Sakura's pink hair sideways. She tucked it behind one ear with pale fingers, calm green eyes looking down over the chaos from a rise above the field.
Standing there on the high ground, an invisible pressure radiated off her without a single deliberate gesture. Every eye on the field found her without being told to.
"Sakura..."
"Lady Sakura..."
Konoha shinobi recognized her one by one across the field.
"Konoha — fall back."
Kakashi's voice, beside her, was quiet. But it carried across the entire battlefield without effort.
"Did you not hear me?"
"Fall back."
Her eyes settled on the Konoha shinobi still locked in close combat with Kiri's forces.
Five thousand.
"...Understood."
One Konoha shinobi started the retreat, and the rest followed his lead, abandoning their engagements and pulling back in a wave.
Kiri's shinobi watched the pink figure on the rise, swallowing hard, tension visibly climbing.
Who is that.
They didn't know her by sight — Kiri's isolationist policy had kept them cut off from the wider world's intelligence, and Sakura's name hadn't reached them despite her growing fame elsewhere. But even without the name, just standing there told them everything they needed to know.
This was someone serious.
The pressure radiating from her — yang-release fused with yin-release suppression — was unmistakable even to people with no frame of reference for what it actually was. This was the specific atmosphere of someone at the top of the hierarchy, and it didn't require comprehension to register. It simply demanded attention. Every line of sight on the field bent toward her without anyone choosing to look.
Facing down thousands of enemies, Sakura showed nothing resembling fear.
A light step. Her body dropped from the rise like a falling leaf, landing without sound.
Kiri's shinobi watched her approach with visibly mounting unease.
The closer she came, the heavier the pressure radiating off her became.
One of them — at the front of the formation — broke first, screaming, and charged her directly.
The Bloody Mist policy had produced something inhuman, but it had also produced shinobi with genuinely hardened nerve. And the numbers gave them courage too.
Five thousand against one.
No.
One against five thousand.
The lead attacker closed the gap—
A column of dust tore straight through the battlefield.
!!!
Everyone following close behind froze mid-stride.
What had happened?
What had just happened?
Where was their comrade?
Before any of them could process it, a second column tore through. Several more Kiri shinobi launched into the air, hit by whatever this was.
Anyone the projectile touched — dead or crippled. No middle outcome.
It was only then that the formation registered what the "unidentified projectile" actually was.
A Kiri shinobi, still wearing the village's water-blue uniform, eyes blown red, blood pouring from every visible orifice, chest caved in and embedded in a rock wall.
One of their own.
Punched into the air by the pink-haired Konoha shinobi, repurposed as a thrown weapon.
But the sight didn't break their will to fight. Every single one of them had clawed their way up through a system built on the Bloody Mist policy's rules. If fear of death alone were enough to stop them, they'd have died long before reaching this field.
"KILL!"
"KILL!"
"KILL!"
The roar tore across the battlefield as wave after wave threw themselves at her without hesitation.
Sakura met them without slowing.
One punch. One death.
Every body in front of her launched outward like artillery.
No technique. No finesse. Pure, raw, unfiltered force.
One fist, overriding everything else.
It didn't matter what weapon they carried — kunai, shuriken, blade, whatever skill they'd honed with any of it. One punch. One kick.
That was the whole equation.
One after another, Kiri shinobi were launched into the sky and came back down somewhere else, broken.
No one's technique mattered against her.
"Water Release — Water Dragon Bullet!"
Someone, finally, finished the forty-four-seal sequence for their strongest jutsu, hidden behind the wall of bodies.
A roaring dragon of water erupted skyward and surged directly at her.
Her eyes lifted, calm. She raised one hand, closed it into a fist.
The dragon let out something like a wail and dissolved into a hard rain of droplets.
The surrounding Kiri shinobi stared, stunned past speech.
One punch. One A-rank technique. Gone.
The same effortlessness as everything else she'd done so far.
The ground cracked beneath her as she launched, the shockwave alone knocking several nearby shinobi off their feet.
A pink blur shot skyward, angling directly at whoever had cast the technique.
The shinobi responsible saw her coming and felt his whole body go cold with terror. He turned to run on pure instinct.
A hand closed on the back of his collar.
With force that left no room to resist, his entire body was flung sideways like a thrown weapon.
A dozen Kiri shinobi were obliterated where his body landed.
He himself had died on impact with the first one he hit — and the momentum carried him through anyway, the body finally lodging in a rock wall alongside the first thrown corpse.
Twin trophies.
"NINJUTSU SQUAD!"
"NINJUTSU SQUAD!"
A desperate cry rolled across the field as more Kiri shinobi threw themselves at her in suicide charges, buying time.
Sakura kept clearing bodies, one punch and one kick at a time, while behind the chaos, ten members of Kiri's ninjutsu corps finished their preparation.
All ten ran through seals together.
"Water Release — Great Explosive Water Wave!"
A wall of water nearly twenty meters tall tore up out of the sea.
In an island nation, water-release scaled to a different order of magnitude.
Sakura backhanded the nearest charging shinobi out of the way and turned to face the wave bearing down on her.
Twenty meters. Enough to scour the field clean.
She brought her hands together.
You started this with jutsu.
"Yang Release — Water Dragon Bite-Crash!"
With yang-release behind it, and an island nation's water reserves to draw from, the S-rank technique scaled into something on an entirely different order than before.
"ROAAAR!"
A massive water dragon erupted skyward, the roar of it shaking the air for miles.
At the edge of the battlefield, a hooded figure in black watched the dragon's full silhouette resolve, visibly startled.
Fifty meters, easily. A body comparable to a tailed beast in scale.
"So this is Sakura's yang-release."
Tobirama had appeared without anyone noticing, watching the unstoppable pink figure below with something close to satisfaction.
She landed on the dragon's head and rode it directly into the incoming wall of water.
Everyone watching stared, unable to process what they were seeing.
This is a joke. It has to be a joke.
A monster.
She's a monster.
The dragon met the wave, and the outcome decided itself instantly. The dragon plunged through it like it wasn't there, then turned and tore through Kiri's formation directly, alive with motion, yang-release lending it something close to genuine will.
One sapphire claw closed around a Kiri shinobi and crushed him outright.
The tail swept sideways, sending a dozen more flying.
A single technique, and dozens were dead before the dragon's chakra finally exhausted itself, scattering into mist and rain.
Sakura dropped straight into the broken Kiri formation.
A tiger walking into a flock of sheep. Not one of them was a match for her.
Every part of her body was a weapon now — a turn of the fist, and a life ended.
"M-monster..."
"That's not human..."
"It's terrifying — it's so terrifying—"
There was no real defense against her presence anymore — not just the physical violence, but the suppression radiating off her, which on its own was enough to break someone's nerve before a single blow landed.
After enough comrades died in front of them — dozens, then hundreds — some of them finally broke.
Shinobi were still people. People died. Once it became clear there was no version of this fight that ended in survival, someone finally turned and ran.
And like dominoes, the second followed, then the third, then the fourth.
A total collapse.
With the Fourth Mizukage pinned down elsewhere, no one left on the field could touch Sakura. No commander, no elite, nothing capable of even slowing her down.
Sheer numbers could sometimes overwhelm anything — but only if there was someone capable of holding the formation together under pressure. There wasn't.
Kiri's entire line broke at once, panic spreading faster than the casualties themselves.
Sakura watched the rout begin and laughed coldly, charging straight into the fleeing mass.
More bodies launched skyward.
"Help — somebody help—"
"No — please, no—"
"Monster! MONSTER!"
The pink shape moved through Kiri's panicking ranks like something out of a nightmare.
She grabbed a discarded Kiri short sword off the ground and brought it down once — the man, his back turned, came apart cleanly in two pieces.
Blood soaked into her pink hair. To the men around her, the youthful face beneath it had stopped looking like a person's at all. Something that climbed out of hell instead.
She'd never trained with a blade properly. It didn't matter. Fast, brutal, precise — she had all three regardless.
She chased the broken formation of thousands alone.
Nearly a hundred more died before she finally slowed.
Watching the survivors scatter in every direction, she let them go.
She tossed the borrowed blade aside without looking. It found a fleeing Kiri shinobi at the edge of her vision and dropped him instantly.
"Sakura..."
Kakashi had arrived at some point. He'd watched all of it.
A shinobi.
Is this what a shinobi actually looks like?
Is this what the Third Hokage was, once, in his prime?
"Let's head back, Kakashi."
Sakura pulled the band from her hair and shook her head once. Pink hair, matted with blood, fell loose around her shoulders.
The blood had dried in tangled clumps. It itched. Uncomfortable.
She was about to turn and leave when something at the edge of her vision caught her attention.
A figure breaking away from the chaos at full speed, distant.
That was—
Yagura.
The black rod and grey hair were distinctive enough that there was no mistaking him, even at range.
"One more name to add to the list, I guess."
"Sakura!"
Tsunade's voice carried from the far side of the field, having spotted her, sprinting toward her with visible relief.
"Stop that man!"
She didn't need to finish the request. Sakura was already moving.
Target: the Fourth Mizukage.
Yagura felt his pupils contract the moment he registered the new threat closing on him.
He'd planned to release the Three-Tails against Mei and Tsunade's combined pressure. But with the entire formation collapsing around him, even the Three-Tails wasn't going to save this.
And worse —
One person had just torn through Kiri's entire deployed force, alone. No tailed beast in the world handled that kind of opponent cleanly.
He committed to a full-speed retreat.
A low voice cut through the air behind him.
"Summoning Jutsu — Demon-Gate Barrier!"
Demon-Gate?
Yagura recognized it from intelligence reports — a defensive Konoha technique.
Why use that here, now, chasing him?
No time to work it out. He kept running.
A violent shrieking wind reached him from behind, forcing him to look back.
What he saw nearly stopped his heart.
The pink-haired girl had hauled the multi-story iron gate clean off the ground and was hurling it at him with both hands.
That's insane. That gate is fifty meters tall.
Lifting it is one thing. Throwing it—
He twisted sideways, barely clearing the gate's path.
A roar cut through the air behind him.
"Yang Release — Mountain Lord!"
Sakura, already in full sprint, became a streak of light closing the gap, and a tiger — vicious, massive — manifested directly in front of him.
"Water Release — Water Mirror Technique!"
In the instant of crisis, Yagura swung the hooked rod, pulling a water mirror up from nothing.
The tiger reflected in its surface tore free, charging out to meet the real one head-on—
And dissolved into nothing the instant before contact.
"Die."
Sakura understood it the moment she saw it.
Yang-release was a manifestation of physical, bodily energy. The Water Mirror Technique could reflect ordinary jutsu using chakra alone. But yang-release required actual physical substance to sustain — and a mirror reflection had none.
Yagura's stomach dropped, watching the tiger close in without slowing.
He didn't have time left to puzzle out why the mirror had failed. He needed the Three-Tails. Now. Or he wasn't walking away from this field.
"Three—"
He never finished the word.
Long pink hair streaming loose, soaked dark with blood, the girl had already closed the final distance.
Chakra roared, gathered into a single point, and a starving tiger consumed the punch whole.
In the same instant, tailed-beast chakra surged across Yagura's body, a turtle-shell carapace beginning to harden over his skin.
The fist landed.
The shell shattered.
☆☆☆
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