Chapter 336: Side Story — Sakura Haruno, Part Five
Sakura simply watched the girl, taking in everything she went through.
She continued studying medical ninjutsu and superhuman strength under Tsunade, just as she had in the original story.
But the girl who was now going through it all was no longer that lovesick, hopeless little girl she'd once been.
Having crossed through the threshold of death itself and back, she now understood, with absolute clarity, exactly what she needed.
And she'd already begun training in the technique that would come to define her entire life.
Yin Seal — Strength of a Hundred Technique.
Watching this unfold, Sakura let out a small sigh.
Tsunade, however excellent she was, was clearly not as skilled a mentor as Jiraiya, when it came to actually teaching a student.
Jiraiya, without even having formally taken the girl as his own student, had picked up on her talent for Water Release and chakra control almost immediately.
Well — no matter.
Turning the girl into a Six Paths–tier support fighter within three years was, in itself, no small achievement.
Around this time, Naruto prepared to set off with Jiraiya on a training journey across the shinobi world.
When the girl learned of this, she made a point of going to Konoha's front gate to see him off personally.
Watching the young woman return afterward, Sakura raised an eyebrow.
"Nothing you wanted to say to him?"
By now, the girl had grown thoroughly used to having this presence around her, and answered evenly:
"It's not like we're never seeing each other again. What would there even be to say?"
She really had changed.
More dependable now. Stronger.
At the very least, this wasn't a thing the old her would ever have said.
"But Naruto's eyes were practically glued to you the whole time he was saying goodbye."
Sakura went on.
The girl said nothing.
Of course she understood how Naruto felt about her.
But...
She had no interest in dealing with any of that right now.
All she wanted was to grow stronger. Stronger. Stronger.
The girl walked alone through Konoha's streets, heading toward the hospital.
Sakura watched her go.
There was something almost like anticipation in it.
Or, more precisely, it wasn't quite anticipation, exactly — more like reaching the last page of a book, seeing those final two characters.
To be continued.
Holding onto that feeling, Sakura simply wanted to know what would happen next.
To this world, Naruto was the special one — the protagonist.
But to Sakura, the girl was the special one. In Sakura's eyes, she was the true protagonist.
And since this entire world sat easily within Sakura's grasp, that made the girl's story the one that mattered.
...
...
...
Time slipped by like flowing water. Three years passed in what felt like no time at all.
The girl had grown into a sixteen-year-old young woman.
Unlike her original story counterpart's crisp, practical outfit, she had, over three years of living side by side with Sakura, unconsciously picked up something of Sakura's own style.
Black shinobi pants. A black mesh undershirt. A white athletic top patterned with flames that seemed to leap and dance.
Her shoulder-length pink hair was tied back in a neat, practical braid.
Sakura, watching the girl dressed this way, sometimes found herself drifting back to memories buried under untold ages of time.
Even though Sakura was only a fragment, she still carried everything her true self knew, clear and complete.
Her true self was now nearly a hundred thousand years old, the undisputed, unrivaled last survivor of the entire universe.
But the memories that mattered most, that ran deepest, would always be those brief thirty years, back at the very beginning.
Watching the girl now, already skilled enough to treat patients competently in the hospital, Sakura's gaze drifted, distant.
These were days she could never go back to.
"All right, you're free to go. Just keep water off the wound for the next month."
The girl reassured her patient, her voice warm.
"Thank you, Dr. Sakura."
The patient thanked her earnestly, and she offered a polite, professional smile in return.
"You've been acting weird lately."
"And you keep staring at me."
The girl shed her white coat and headed toward the hospital break room.
"Didn't I already tell you? I'm not going anywhere until you die."
Sakura waved a hand, unbothered.
The girl said nothing, walking into the break room and, without a shred of self-consciousness in front of Sakura, stripped off her clothes right there, revealing a figure that still carried the shape of youth, before changing into her regular clothes.
She'd long since grown used to Sakura's presence.
She'd been seen countless times by now anyway, and in some sense they were the same person — no point worrying about it.
Well — mostly it was that the girl had simply given up trying to make Sakura leave.
Even so — what girl wouldn't mind being watched, day in and day out, for three straight years?
Heaven only knew how she'd managed to get through the past three years!
And on top of that, Sakura made sure no one else could see her — only the girl herself could see or hear her at all.
Which meant that talking to Sakura out loud, in front of other people, always earned her strange, sideways looks.
Tsunade had honestly started to worry she might be developing some kind of split personality!
Especially given that this presence was invisible and inaudible to everyone else — it left the girl feeling like she was being haunted by a ghost, more or less.
Even if it happened to be an unusually easy-on-the-eyes ghost!
"Naruto's supposed to be back today, isn't he?"
Sakura floated alongside her, leaning in close to her ear, teasing.
"Mm."
The girl walked down the hospital corridor and answered, calm.
A passing young nurse gave her a lingering, second glance.
There goes Sakura again, talking to herself...
And Lady Tsunade doesn't even do anything about it...
The girl had no idea exactly when Naruto would actually arrive in Konoha, so she hadn't planned on going to greet him at the gate.
Right now, she was headed to the Hokage Building to check in with Tsunade about the next phase of her training.
In medical ninjutsu, she'd risen to become the hospital's top authority besides Tsunade herself, at a pace no one else could hope to match.
Even Shizune, by now, couldn't match her skill in medical ninjutsu.
Which said something about just how monstrous the girl's grasp of theory and control over chakra truly was.
After all, medical ninjutsu operated almost entirely directly on the human body.
Even the smallest error could cost a patient their life — the demands it placed on chakra control were, by any measure, extraordinarily strict.
Except...
She'd barely made it out of the hospital doors and around the corner when a familiar voice rang out through the streets.
"THAT'S RIGHT!"
"The great and mighty Naruto Uzumaki is BACK!"
The boy's voice, brimming with energy, echoed above Konoha's rooftops, and the girl stopped in her tracks.
Already? This early?
"Naruto?"
"Is that Naruto?"
Looking off in the distance, at Naruto perched on a telephone pole, still wearing that same tacky orange tracksuit as always, the girl's face broke into an unconscious smile, and she waved.
"SAKURA!"
Spotting the familiar-yet-strange pink figure nearby, something like awe flickered across Naruto's eyes, and he leapt down from the pole in an instant, closing the distance in a few quick strides.
"Sakura!"
"It's been so long!"
Naruto looked at the young woman before him — so completely changed — a little awkward, a little bashful, a little overwhelmed all at once.
"Yeah. You too, Naruto."
"You've grown a lot taller since I last saw you."
The girl looked at him, something wistful crossing her face.
After all, three years ago, Naruto had actually been shorter than her.
"166 centimeters at sixteen."
"That's still definitely on the short side."
Sakura commented from the sidelines.
"Heh heh. It's all thanks to Pervy Sage!"
"I've been through a lot these past three years, you know!"
Naruto grinned, scratching his head.
"So — over these three years — do you think I've changed at all, Naruto?"
The girl looked at him, her gaze drifting slightly to the side.
"Nope!"
"You're exactly the same as always, Sakura!"
Naruto gave her an enthusiastic thumbs-up at once, which drew a resigned sigh from Jiraiya standing nearby.
This kid really doesn't understand women's hearts at all...
The girl's expression fell at that. Around the same time, Konohamaru wandered onto the scene too.
Watching the interaction between the group of them unfold, Sakura found herself a little bored.
Amid the joking and horseplay, Naruto showed off his latest technique.
The Reverse Harem Technique, upgraded.
This left the girl thoroughly unimpressed, though Sakura studied Naruto's improved Reverse Harem Technique with genuine, careful interest.
She had to admit — whatever else this kid had picked up over three years with Jiraiya, he'd clearly put a lot of work into that particular technique.
Which made Sakura suspect Jiraiya's motives here weren't entirely pure.
Amid all these thoughts, Sakura's gaze drifted, almost casually, toward a corner just at the edge of her sight.
Hinata, huh.
"N— Naruto... um..."
The dark-haired, white-eyed girl, face burning bright red, hid at the corner, too shy to come out.
Seeing Naruto again after three years apart left Hinata's heart pounding wildly.
Hinata's appearance drew Sakura, oddly, into an old man's nostalgic reverie of her own.
In Sakura's own world.
After the battle against Kaguya ended, Hinata had spent her life alone.
Once Naruto married Karin, Hinata had eventually received a marriage proposal from Ōtsutsuki Toneri, out on the moon.
Given the Amanogawa Empire's overwhelming power, Toneri had ended up marrying into the Hyūga clan directly, taking their name.
There'd been no one else on the moon for him, after all.
The two of them had gone on to spend a lifetime together, more or less making the best of it.
Hinata and Toneri's descendants had turned out remarkably capable, coming within a single step of Six Paths level.
Sakura had no particular feelings about any of it.
The Hyūga clan had raised Hinata; if she herself hadn't lived up to her own potential, whose fault was that, really?
As for the claim that she simply hadn't had enough to eat to properly develop her talent — that was nonsense, plain and simple.
All that could really be said for Hinata was that she had a fine pair of eyes.
Her physical aptitude had never been anything remarkable.
And the Byakugan relied heavily on physical aptitude.
At the end of the day, the Byakugan was mostly a supplementary tool for the body — it couldn't inflict damage on an opponent directly through its own power the way the Mangekyō Sharingan could.
In the end, Hinata had simply ended up like so many mediocre children of great clans throughout history — married off to Toneri to secure his combat strength for the family, nothing more.
Nothing especially regrettable about any of it.
The Hyūga had raised her, cultivated her, and given her the chance to become clan head eventually — even if that chance had only come through her marriage to Toneri.
Given everything, that was already a stroke of considerable luck.
She hadn't ended up like her younger sister, Hanabi, forced to bear the Caged Bird Seal.
Worth noting: two hundred-some years into the Amanogawa Empire's history, decay and corruption within the imperial system led one power-hungry member of the Hyūga main house to trade the Caged Bird Seal for political leverage — and from that point on, the Hyūga branch family was finally freed of that particular burden for good.
Sakura felt no particular regret over the Amanogawa Empire's eventual collapse.
Even though it was an empire she herself had built.
Even though her own younger sister's descendants had eventually all been wiped out in the chaos.
None of them had been entirely innocent, in the end — if you enjoy three hundred years of power and excess, you have to be prepared to pay the price for it eventually.
A vast empire, left without any external enemy, would inevitably descend into endless internal strife.
That was simply a universal flaw of human nature.
Even with Hashirama himself, in his Six Paths body, holding the world together for two hundred years, within a hundred years of his death, the empire had collapsed under the weight of problems that had been quietly festering the entire time, throwing every corner of it into war.
The wars raged for a full decade, and once the empire finally fell apart, endless further conflict followed in its wake.
And because technology had by then advanced so rapidly that even ordinary people had the means to kill trained shinobi, the wars grew larger, deadlier, and far more devastating — the final decisive battle alone saw nearly five million soldiers on the field, by the most conservative count.
The former Land of Fire — by then, the Grand Fire Protectorate — was left almost entirely devastated by every conceivable kind of weapon. It took nearly five hundred years before the region finally recovered.
After all, two hundred years of peace and prosperity, with no shortage of resources to sustain it, had let the shinobi world's population explode to unprecedented heights.
By the year Hashirama died, the shinobi world's total population had reached its all-time historical peak — fully five billion people.
No empire that came after would ever match Amanogawa's population again.
Sakura felt something like wistfulness at the thought, mixed with a touch of genuine regret.
Not regret over the empire's fall, or the countless deaths the wars had caused.
Only regret that she'd never gotten the chance to see her own sister one last time.
The very first thing she'd done, upon first waking from her long sleep, was comb through every scrap of the shinobi world's recorded history.
There was a written account, somewhere, that Mirai — even on her deathbed, in her final years — had still been speaking of her, thinking of her, all that time.
Sakura's thoughts pulled themselves back to the present. She gave her head a small shake.
I really am starting to sound like a nostalgic old woman.
Nothing better to do than reminisce about the past all day.
By the time Sakura's attention returned fully, the girl and Naruto had already made their way to the training grounds.
They were about to run the bell-retrieval exercise with Kakashi again.
Even with only the two of them this time, Kakashi had still brought two bells along.
The first time they'd done this exercise, it had been meant to test Team Seven's teamwork. This time, it was purely to gauge the girl's and Naruto's individual strength.
"Heh. Still only two bells, huh."
"And no Sasuke this time."
The girl's expression didn't shift at Kakashi's words. She simply nodded, calm.
Naruto, though, felt a faint pang of sadness.
Kakashi couldn't help but glance, briefly, at the pink-haired young woman beside him.
He'd seen, clearly, once, exactly how much the old Sakura had cared for Sasuke — how she'd poured nearly all her time and energy into him. It was part of why he'd never paid her much attention before.
Never would have guessed things would end up like this...
"Kakashi-sensei. If you're not going to make the first move, I won't hold back either."
The girl raised one hand calmly, a pair of specially-crafted gloves already fitted onto it, though no one had noticed when.
Her palm, blade-like, hummed with a keening whine of chakra along its edge.
Kakashi's expression sharpened visibly at the sight.
A chakra scalpel?
Take a hit from that, and it's game over.
But instead of closing the distance to engage him directly, as Kakashi had expected, the girl raised her chakra blade high overhead and, before his utterly disbelieving eyes, brought it down.
Violent, savage chakra surged in that instant.
In almost the same breath, the entire ground split open beneath the force of that single strike.
And it didn't stop there — the trees lining the field beside Kakashi were caught in the blast too, torn apart without exception.
A single strike, cleaving the earth itself.
Kakashi and Naruto both stared, mouths hanging open.
"Now that's interesting. A fusion of the chakra scalpel and superhuman strength, is it?"
Standing off to the side, arms crossed, Jiraiya watched the pink-haired girl in the distance with open, appreciative interest.
(End of Chapter)