"Hellooo?" Sakura called out, as she wandered down a dark corridor. "Anyone home?"
A group of shinobi darted out from behind the corner ahead and levelled their rifles at Sakura, releasing a storm of kunai. Gathering wind chakra in her palm, Sakura flicked her hand and sent a wave of compressed air to meet the oncoming barrage.
The air shimmered as the shockwave swept down the corridor, knocking down the kunai mid-flight and driving her attackers into the wall behind them with a satisfying series of crunches, where they crumpled to the floor into unconscious heaps.
"Any big bads around, I mean?" Sakura added, stepping over their limp bodies as she reached the end of the corridor and chose a direction at random to press on. "No? Don't tell me you haven't even some sort of Elite Four lurking about?" she went on. "If it turns out it was only this level of goon who got the better of me and dragged me down here, I'm going to be very mad~"
Usually, the pattern with villainous organisations went something like this: first came the goons, the faceless small fry who existed chiefly to demonstrate the protagonist's strength; then were the so-called Four Heavenly Kings or Elite Four, each formidable enough to slow the protagonist and their friends for at least an episode or two; and finally there was the big bad at the pinnacle, the one the hero would spend an entire arc working towards.
Basically, in Dragon Ball terms: Saibamen & Raditz→ Ginyu Force & Vegeta→ Frieza.
At any rate, it really was quite puzzling.
Sakura had no recollection of ever being knocked out.
One moment she had been poring over Doctor Shinnō's secret scroll, and the next she was waking in a cell, serving as a pillow for a pile of groaning villagers. She doubted the scroll had been booby trapped with a Genjutsu, since her Sharingan would have seen through the illusion, which meant something else had done her in.
Something actually dangerous.
Sakura cast a casual glance outside as she passed a porthole set into the stone passageway, only to step back almost immediately for a double-take, goggling through the glass at the clouds drifting across the vast blue sea of sky.
"What the…"
All this time, Sakura had pictured herself somewhere within the underground hideout she had detected with the Area Scanning Jutsu; what with all of the moss, roots and vines clinging to the stone brick walls, and the dungeon's rather serious water infiltration problem… yet somehow, she had ended up thousands of metres above the earth, suspended in the sky!
Without even realising it, Sakura had already secured the first of the two qualifications needed to become eligible for Mile High Club membership. In this world, she had the chance to initiate the first ever instance of sex on a flying contraption!
"What in the Laputa is going on, here!?" Sakura screeched as she pressed her eye to the round window. "Is this thing actually flying!?"
Now that she thought about it, the cowards who had attacked the Hidden Leaf Village had done so via aerial bombardment, so it followed that they must have mastered other forms of heavier-than-air flight. If that were the case, they were leagues beyond the hot-air balloon, lighter-than-air flight technology that currently represented the pinnacle of aerial travel on the shinobi continent.
Ding!
Sakura tore her gaze from the porthole and cast a wary eye down the dark corridor, searching for the source of the sound. With a soft chime and a blinking green light, a lift further down opened its door. It was almost as if it wanted her to step inside…
"A trap, eh…?" Sakura murmured, nodding to herself with a hint of understanding, arms crossed beneath her chest. "…as if I'm going in there, idiot!"
She crossed her fingers.
"Shadow Clone Jutsu!"
…
Sakura was beginning to develop a case of acrophobia, along with a milder bout of hypothermia. She shivered, clutching her sides as she placed one foot carefully before the other, negotiating an eighty-degree slope as she scaled the flying stone fortress from the outside.
By her reckoning, she had just climbed over a nostril, of all things.
"S-s-so t-t-this is t-t-the r-r-real L-Land of S-k-k-ky, eh?" Sakura mumbled, teeth chattering. "B-b-brrrr…"
The Land of Sky's true form was that of a Cambodian-inspired flying temple, complete with soaring towers and enormous stone faces. It hovered thousands of metres above the ground, where the air was bitterly cold and brisk, not to mention thin with oxygen.
A surge of memories suddenly entered Sakura's mind, nearly causing her to lose her footing. Her Shadow Clone had been defeated in combat in a record-breaking 0.1 seconds, tackled into oblivion, by none other than…
"Shinnō-sensei!?"
Sakura closed her eyes and reviewed her Shadow Clone's memories.
Apparently, Shinnō's kindly doctor persona had been nothing but an act, deliberately designed to amplify his victims' anguish when they realised that their greatest benefactor had, in truth, been the source of all their suffering… all to draw forth as much dark chakra from them as possible!
"The villagers… Amaru…" Sakura said, realisation dawning. "He's just using them as batteries for this Ancor Vantian flying fortress!? And he explained his entire plan to us, just to make us even madder? Well, it's working, shannarooo!"
Doctor Shinnō was, in fact, a survivor of the Second Shinobi World War, during which the Hidden Leaf Village had laid waste to the Land of the Sky. He hungered for revenge, and he would stop at nothing to obliterate those responsible for the destruction of his home…
Sakura patted her skimpy clothes, hunting for anything metallic to launch at the flying fortress with the Lorentz Gun Jutsu. Unfortunately, her sword, weapon pouches and scrolls had been confiscated, leaving her with nothing but a solitary scrap of pocket lint. If she'd known it would come to this, she would have made the effort to bend down and pick up some of the kunai the Land of Sky shinobi had fired at her with their strange rifles…
"Speak of the devil…" Sakura muttered.
A formation of flying shinobi on gliders was fast approaching, no doubt returning from patrol. Dressed in white linen embroidered with red flame patterns, Sakura stood out like a sore thumb, clinging to the bridge of the great stone face's nose as though her life depended on it… because it most certainly did.
"SHA!" Sakura shouted, lifting her foot as the returning fliers aimed their rifles at her.
BOOM!
The great stone face crumbled inwards as Sakura brought her foot down with Chakra Enhanced Strength, and much like the Great Sphinx of Giza, the statue lost its nose, its fragments tumbling into the forest thousands of metres below. Sakura slipped through the hole, secretly relieved she would not have to wriggle her way up the stone face's nostril to get back inside after all.
…
Sakura landed lightly on the stone floor of a spacious, green-hued chamber.
Now that her brain was beginning to thaw, she realised that if she sent this flying fortress crashing to the ground thousands of metres below, there was no way she was getting out of becoming a Sakura pancake. No, better to take down all the bad guys first and then figure out a way to land this ruddy thing safely!