This chapter was nice, a cool down from the last two high intensity chapters. A lot of swearing in the first half. Most edits from Patreon to public have removed swearing, there's a lot more in my first drafts but uh, I think it fits here so I left it in.
Chapter 86 released on Patreon, we're wrapping up Arc 5 in a few chapters here and then we'll be onto Arc 6 which is a timeskip. A pretty big one, considering the story has only been a few months in setting time.
A lot of people don't realize that the Chunin exams weren't right after Wave, but they weren't, there's a lot of implied time that passed. I could have ignored that, but honestly, Sakura could use a timeskip.
Enjoy the chapter all, I hope you're having a great day.
Sendicard/WitchAtTheEnd | Linktree
"We have sight," Naruto announces, "a shadow clone deer just died."
Ino nods. Sasuke ducks for cover.
Hiding in the trees, using henge to appear as twigs and branches and such is the easy part, the hard part is Ino's. Her mission is much more important, and much more difficult than anything they have to do. She has to play with Kakashi.
"Where are they?" The Cyclops asks her.
"Uh, where are who?" Ino asks, placing a hand on her hip, "whom maybe? I've never been very good with linguistics, I bet Sakura'd know, you should ask her. Oh wait, you sent my love out on a mission without any of her friends, I remember now… fuck off? Dick."
"That's how this is?" He asks, hands landing in his pockets, while his eye glares her down.
The plan is simple. Naruto leaves a close grasshopper in Ino's jacket, so he can talk to her. Sasuke and he hide while she abuses a legal loophole. "Duh?" She gives him a smirk. "The moment I get a good date with her, off she goes, you didn't even follow her." She clicks her teeth and shakes her head. "I'd think it was discrimination but let's be real here, you're so much pettier than bigotry. You're mad she got a date when the only date you've had in recent years was with your left hand and a book some old guy made. I bet he smells, can you make out his gross pungence with every page?"
"I'm not sure my personal life is your business, but I have no problem picking up women, Ino." Kakashi's eye rolls, but that's the point. She's succeeding.
The glimmer in Ino's eyes gives the game away, but it hardly matters. "Sure, sure, because men getting laid defend themselves to little girls, I believe you." She lifts the hand not at her hip, and looks at her pink painted nails. It's the little things that make a play feel real, "regardless, you're abusing my patients too much, they need another hour."
"Bold," their sensei praises her, "though you know you can't stop me. I could always beat the info out of you…"
"You can't touch me, I'm not your student, and I have legal authorization to be here. Sooooo…" She shakes her head, "threats won't work here, you'll have to actually hurt me, Kakashi. I'm sure you'd get away with it, but would you break the rule in the first place, or have your years enforcing them made you respect them too much to fuck around for a game?"
"I know where they are, I just want you to tell me. It'll be a good lesson for them to never rely on people who aren't a part of their mission." Mostly, this entire gambit relies on Kakashi being too willing to argue with someone over pedantic bullshit, to buy them another few minutes to rest.
"You say that but I'm pretty sure I'm holding you up right now," she says, "unless you don't think you've been stopped?"
"I've stopped you, maybe-"
The weirdest part is that it works.
No one, not even Ino, expected it to work. She already administered painkillers several minutes ago to numb the beat down that doesn't seem to be coming.
It seems Naruto and Sasuke get a few more minutes of rest.
Sitting around the flickering campfire, she hasn't let go of Tenten once. Holding her close, she's clearly making the older girl uncomfortable, but she's sitting here stunned and a little shocked, her fingers are vibrating on Tenten's recently torn skin. She hasn't said a word, and neither has Tenten, the reality of it all crashing down in an instant has her shaken. Being invincible herself is one thing, but what's it matter when she leaves the ranged unit alone? She didn't even need to do that.
She could have left a water clone with Tenten, what was the point in learning a jutsu if she doesn't use it?
She trusted Tenten's power, and the artificial levels the system has attributed to people, and she forgot that being stronger than her doesn't mean she doesn't have strengths they don't.
| Contribution Level is a calculation made using base stats, skills and abilities are not counted. |
She knew that, she knew that!
She knew Neji's clan training made him physically stronger, and Tenten would naturally be faster and stronger than her from her extra year of weapon training.
She knew Tenten would be less durable by the very nature of being a cannon, being tanky isn't how a gunslinger works, and even if it was, would it matter? Her abilities create artificial rules, but reality still exists adjacent to her. Tenten doesn't need to lose all her HP, and she won't get her hand back tomorrow if she fails to put it back on. Lethal injuries are lethal to everyone but her, and she needs to remember that.
"Next time, I'll leave you with a water clone." She promises, Tenten's body is still jittering from the extra healing it received.
"And what good would that have done?" Neji asks her, stoking the fire with a fresh piece of wood in their almost sepia landscape. This dungeon is mystical alright. It probably shouldn't even be evening yet, but the entire sky is dark and the crescent moon stands out. It's orange, which is not a color a moon should be, but then this isn't a real moon anyway so what's it matter? "You got stabbed too. I was only spared the sneak attack because the Byakugan saw them."
"Then why didn't you alert us?" Sakura scoffs.
"It's one of the weaknesses of the Byakugan," it's Tenten who speaks up in his defense, while Neji looks away with a scowl that seems turned inwards, "just because he can see something doesn't mean he can see that we can't see it. To him they were walking right up to us. He only realized we couldn't see them when we got stabbed."
"That must be… harrowing," Sakura gulps at the thought, internalizing that kind of horror in an instant. It's something she can get behind, that's up there with knowing she'll recover and they won't. Logically she should take every hit for her team, but then when her team scolds her for doing that, what is she supposed to do? At least Neji's issue is more straightforward.
"It rarely comes up," Neji says, "actual invisibility like that is magic, and magic rarely exists in any form in the outside world, if at all. Normally it's just not realizing they're in a Genjutsu that I saw through automatically, which is easy to tell when they start reacting to things that don't exist."
"Genjutsu is the addition, not the absence, normally," Sakura nods to herself, "I should learn Genjutsu. I bet it'd be easy for me…"
"You, using subtle arts?" Neji laughs at her, a sound that takes some of her tension by force. It's nice to hear it, Tenten's little giggle helps too. She came so close to never giggling again. She strokes her side, feeling something well up in her chest. That coulda been Sasuke or Naruto, or Ino somehow. What if she'd been so busy feeling good about herself, that someone actually did die?
Would she ever have forgiven herself?
"I know you have an A rank secret, but can you tell me what that was?" Neji asks, "none of that made sense."
"My reality is conceptual." Sakura decides to admit to him, after a look between him and Tenten. They've been through enough at the moment, they deserve to know a little something. Especially when she's pulled them into her reality, and dragged them through this nonsense and almost got Tenten killed. "They weren't at Genin capabilities, so they couldn't hurt me. Their attacks were too sloppy, so I couldn't miss deflecting them. The aftereffects of it all weren't strong enough, so they couldn't touch my HP bar."
"Your HP?" Tenten asks, "that's why you're healing. You're not really hurt, your numbers are, and numbers can be restored."
"It's theoretically possible I won't die if they hit zero," Sakura admits, "back in Wave, my first real mission, I lost consciousness when I only had a few seconds left to live. I still woke up later perfectly fine, and while I had received medical attention between falling asleep and waking up, there's no proof it mattered. Analytically, I think it shouldn't have survived, unless I stopped bleeding once I lost consciousness."
"So you might be invincible, but have no proof, and no good way to test it," Neji surmises, just before tossing what's left of the stick into the fire and watching the flame rise for them, a humble summoning under their command providing warmth and gracious light to their gray reality, "that sucks."
"If I am, I should be jumping in front of attacks meant for others," Sakura says, "but if I'm not, well I won't find out until I'm dead."
"I'd forget about it," Neji says, "death comes for us all someday, but if you seek it actively you won't be there to save the next Tenten… I owe you, I would like to be able to repay you in some way other than delivering your corpse to your team."
"..." Sakura doesn't have a response to that.
"Your magic is the only reason Tenten's still alive," Neji says, "I looked, I never found a single canister of that stuff, even in areas you later checked and found some. You summoned them into existence merely by looking, and they saved Tenten."
"That magic is the only reason we're here at all," Sakura argues, "without this dungeon, invisible enemies wouldn't have existed to hurt her."
"There's no proof we wouldn't have met Fierro outside of this place," Neji shakes his head, "magic exists, deal with it. I thought we already had this discussion?"
"It's different now that someone's gotten hurt." Sakura mumbles.
"No, the difference is that the person who got hurt wasn't you," Neji asserts, glaring right into her eyes, "I know your type well, and your system isn't helping you. Everyone signed up to be a ninja knowing that this day might come, that their demise was magic or jutsu or just bad luck doesn't change what we all agreed to."
"But not today, Tenten's safe." She squeezes the girl to her.
"Not today for us, but all fourteen of the dead Genin died today." Neji says, "you're not feeling bad about them, are you?" His question hangs in the air for her. The answer is no, but why not? Why does Tenten matter so much more than them?
