“Sure. Come on, I know a nice little hot spring resort outside of town where no one will find us before the loop ends.”
She nodded, and stumbled to her feet with none of her usual grace. I helped her dress, and got her out of there before the servants came snooping around. An hour later we were fifteen miles out of town, in one of the little cluster of hot spring resorts Jiraiya usually took us to when Naruto and me trained with him. The place was mostly deserted, it being a weekday morning, so Hinata and I had a spring all to ourselves.
She sighed as she slipped into the hot water. “Thank you, Sakura. I can’t remember the last time I visited a hot spring.”
“Then it’s been way too long. You know, maybe we should take a vacation sometime soon. I visited just about every tourist attraction in Fire Country back when I was training with Tsunade. I guess we can’t bring Naruto, but we could skip out after the forest next time around and spend a month sightseeing.”
She smiled. “You’re too good to me. But no, I’m too carefully watched for that. If I try to leave father will have a hunter team after me in a day.”
“It always comes back to him,” I grumbled. “I swear, at this rate we’re going to have to kill him and put you in charge of the clan.”
“Perhaps,” Hinata replied noncommittally. “Which reminds me, the last time you brought me out we had that wonderful conversation with the Kyuubi. Are you alright?”
“Yeah. Just incredibly embarrassed that I let that monster get to me so easily.”
“Is that why you spent so long training without me?” She asked. “You were a lot stronger in that fight with the other me than you were the last time we sparred.”
“Um.” I sunk into the water and looked away. Yes, I was embarrassed. Ashamed, really. I was sure that what the Kyuubi had done to me was some kind of technique, but I also couldn’t deny that part of me was eager to surrender to it. What did that say about me?
Hinata laid a hand on my shoulder. “Sakura, you’re only human. Even you shouldn’t be ashamed to fall prey to a demon god’s techniques. We’ll just have to be careful not to let it out again, alright?”
I nodded. “Yeah, you’re right. I’m just tired of being surrounded by obstacles I can’t overcome. The loops, the invasion, Sasuke, the damned Kyuubi, and now the other you. It seems like every time I think I’m making progress on one problem another one appears.” I sighed. “I’ve spent so many years training, but I don’t know if it’s even gotten me anywhere.”
“Maybe you should find out,” Hinata suggested quietly.
I considered that. “Maybe you’re right. It’s been a long time since I actually tried to change anything.”
Hinata was a little loopy for the rest of the day, and I could tell it was a struggle for her to remember who she was sometimes. But she recovered quickly, and with a few days of R&R she was back to her usual self. Better, in some ways. The foreign memories seemed to fade with time, but she’d definitely picked up a lot of her counterpart’s jyuuken skill. She was actually good enough to beat me in a pure taijutsu match, although I still came out ahead if we allowed other techniques. With that level of ability I had to wonder if I should start including her in more of my plans.
But I couldn’t save her memories from a loop if I was dead, so I’d have to tackle the most dangerous parts alone.
“You’re right Sasuke, that isn’t Naruto. He never would have remembered such a long password.” I wondered idly if I sounded as bored with this scene as I felt. If I did, Sasuke didn’t seem to notice.
He-who-would-someday-go-psycho smirked. “Exactly. Show us your real face, imposter!”
Orochimaru grinned and dropped his Naruto disguise, revealing the face of that Grass nin he was impersonating. Then he hit us with his full killing intent, and Sasuke froze.
Finally, the moment I’d been waiting for.
The first time through I’d been a little shaken by the projection, but then I’d calculated how powerful our enemy would have to be to put so much force behind it and become quite legitimately terrified beyond words. This time around I just chuckled.
“I don’t think Grass Country has any genin with Kage-level power,” I commented. “Let’s see now, you aren’t the Hokage, probably not a foreign Kage, definitely not Jiraiya or Tsunade. Let me guess — Orochimaru?”
He raised an eyebrow. “Clever child. But you’re no genin either, are you? What’s your real name, girl?”
“Oh, Sakura’s my real name. It’s just everything else you think you know about me that’s wrong.” But he’d just replaced himself with an earth clone, so I did the same and body flickered into the trees.
The next few minutes were…interesting. His clones fought with summoned snakes and flashy elemental techniques, while mine stuck with skill and the occasional replacement to conserve chakra. Meanwhile I cloaked myself in genjutsu and tried to find the real enemy while he did the same. It took me a few minutes to realize he was going to win that fight too and replace myself with a shadow clone, while the real me went deep underground.
But after a few minutes of tag and a brief interruption by Naruto we’d both lost several clones, and the Sannin got bored. I spotted his real position when he set off some kind of wide-area jutsu that cancelled my earth techniques, forcing me to replace myself with my clone just to escape being entombed.
“You’re not bad, girl,” Orochimaru purred, “but you’ll never beat me like that. Show me what else you can do.”
Then he summoned a snake that must have been three hundred feet long, with a mouth big enough to swallow ten of me in one bite. I gave him my best badass bitch grin. “You really want to see what I can do? Check this out.”
I body flickered onto the snake’s nose and slammed a super-powered fist into it, which threw me high into the air while dispelling the summon. He leaped after me, but by then I was already replacing myself with a passing bird, a tree limb, and finally a rock on the ground below.
I formed three seals and slapped one hand to the ground, and a thin layer of earth swept up to cover me as it fused into stone. The joints were still flexible earth, but overall the protection was as good as Gaara’s sand armor while still being light enough not to slow me down. Which was important, since Orochimaru caught up with me a second later and I was suddenly very busy dodging.
I ducked his first blow and swept his legs, but he just tumbled back while throwing a spread of shuriken at me. Since I was armored I ignored them in favor of turning his landing spot to sticky quicksand, but he rolled to his feet as easily as if it were water. I threw myself at him at my full speed, but he blurred aside and planted a fist in my belly that shattered my armor and blew me back through the tree trunk behind me.
“Ouch.”
I staggered back to my feet and looked around, but there was no sign of my opponent. Even his presence had vanished.
Then I felt a pinprick in the back of my neck, and everything from there down went numb. “Boring,” he whispered in my ear. “Just another jounin taijutsu specialist disguised as a child. Your skill is nothing compared to your teammate’s eyes, little girl.”
I turned my awareness inward, and discovered there was a blade severing my spine between the second and third vertebrae. A poisoned blade, at that. Even then I might have survived, but Orochimaru wasn’t the sort to take chances.
The blade lengthened until the tip emerged from the front of my throat, and the snake Sannin beheaded me with a casual flick of the wrist. Apparently those stories about severed heads living for several seconds are true, because I had plenty of time to watch my headless body topple to the ground before the world went dark.