It was a lot like Naruto’s interference aura, but Pein could apparently see what he was doing since he immediately countered my efforts to work around the interference. It was like being targeted by a puppet technique, except that he was just trying to stop me from moving. Hell, I couldn’t even detonate my chakra with that level of interference, let alone do anything coherent.
The one who had tried to steal Hinata’s soul bent over me thoughtfully. “That was an interesting technique,” he commented. “But how long can you protect your comrade’s soul when you yourself are under attack? Are you prepared to know the pain you sought to spare her?”
“I’m prepared to face eternal torment for her sake, Pein,” I said levelly. “Nothing you can do would compare to that.”
“Brave words,” he countered. “But will you stand by them? Know pain!”
He put his hand on my head and invoked the nastiest torture technique I’ve ever had the misfortune to be targeted by. But I just smiled.
“No thanks,” I said. “You can scramble my body’s chakra, but you can’t take away my control of my own mind. Wait, your hand is cold, and you don’t have a pulse. You’re a corpse. This is a puppet technique!”
He frowned. “Now you truly know too much. There will be no escape for you until we learn your purpose here.”
“Yeah, you’re right,” I agreed. “There’s no way I’m going to escape with you on guard, and I’m sure your interrogation techniques are just as incredible as everything else you’ve got. I give up, I need to go back and start over.”
For all the trouble it had caused us, the loop was really quite useful in that kind of situation. I blinked, and found myself sitting up in bed on the first day of the chuunin exam.
The Amegakure ninja on border patrol duty all had their brains booby-trapped with a maze of shields and detection wards that informed Pein when I tried to mind-walk them. Elapsed time to beat-down: an hour and thirty-five minutes.
All goods coming into the country were handed off to local merchants, who were almost as heavily booby-trapped as the ninja. Knocking one out and replacing him didn’t work much better, but at least it took them a few hours to track me down.
Simply avoiding the patrols and ghosting around the towns under an invisibility genjutsu seemed promising at first. But around sunset a flock of little squares of paper floated by on the breeze, and I quickly discovered their maker was actually good enough to see through my illusions. Total time to beat-down: nineteen hours.
I was starting to get frustrated. Compared to these guys, Konoha’s ANBU were a bunch of little kids playing ninja. I was still sure we’d find a weakness eventually, but at this rate we’d end up getting nowhere before our next meeting with Naruto.
“Sakura, I think the rain is a sensory technique.”
I paused under a tree to stare at Hinata. We’d spent a week slowly working our way across the country disguised as stray animals, only to find that the city of Amegakure was completely surrounded by water. Neither of us could henge into a flying form, but I’d been confident we could just turn into cute, cuddly kittens and find some sucker to adopt us. But we were both exhausted from maintaining such radical henges for so long, so we’d taken the risk of hunkering down in a patch of woods to rest in our real bodies for a bit before we made our play. Then the rain had started, and Hinata had dropped her little bombshell.
“You’re joking,” I said. “This is a real rainstorm. It’s got to be, what, thirty or forty miles across?”
“Every rain drop has a tiny trace of Pein’s chakra in it,” my partner explained. “I can see them giving off little flashes of it when they touch us. He knows we’re here.”
I groaned. “How many S-rank surveillance techniques do these people have? Alright, fine, I give up. Apparently we’ve been rushing this too much, and I don’t feel like dying again today. Let’s just drop out of the loop and rethink.”
“Oh, good,” Hinata replied. “Being stabbed and crushed repeatedly is never fun, and I definitely don’t want him ripping my soul out of my body again. I propose you change your mindscape to have a hot spring overlooking the lake, and we both take a nice long soak.”
“Sounds good to me,” I agreed.
She stepped into my arms, and turned her face up to meet my kiss. Her soul leapt from her body as our lips touched, and I felt the warmth of her presence settle into my mindscape. I smiled, and closed my eyes.
“I want to go back and fix everything,” I whispered, and left the cold rains of Amegakure behind.
“We’ve been coming at this all wrong,” I said.
It was the night before we were due to go into the Forest of Death. I stood atop the city wall staring out into the darkness, trusting in my cloaking genjutsu to ensure that I didn’t draw attention from patrolling chuunin. Hinata perched atop the battlement watching me, and I noted with satisfaction that her invisibility illusion was almost as tight as mine.
“We don’t need to penetrate their security right now,” I went on. “We don’t have a deadline. They haven’t even recruited a lot of their members yet. Which may be an opportunity, now that I think of it.”
Hinata cocked her head curiously. “So, you want to get them to recruit us? I like it, but how do we make that happen?”
“I’m not sure yet. I’ve been thinking about it, and I realized I don’t know enough about the world of missing nin to figure out how he recruited the ones he did. The ANBU reports we went through a few years ago just didn’t give a complete enough picture of how the underworld works. So I figure there’s only one thing to do.”
She clasped her hands beneath her chin and looked up at me eagerly. “You mean…?”
“That’s right, we’re going on a road trip,” I confirmed with a grin. “After the exam we’re going to go missing nin together. We’ll come up with a story that makes us look like young prodigies that might be easy to manipulate, and wander the world for awhile kicking over anthills and learning how missing nin live. If we’re lucky Pein will decide to recruit us, and if not we can at least meet some of the guys he does recruit and figure out how they think.”
“Oh, goodie!” Hinata exclaimed. “I’ve always wanted to travel. See exotic places, experience strange food and clothes and customs, meet interesting people and kill them.”
“Psycho,” I chuckled. “Why would we kill innocent strangers?”
“Oh, not the innocents,” she said primly. “But seriously, two beautiful girls traveling together? Lots of people will volunteer to die. We’ll be making the world a better place and building a reputation at the same time.”
“Uh huh. You’re just looking for an excuse. Why do you enjoy killing so much, anyway?”
Her smile died, and she gave me a sad look. “I have to. Naruto told me that above all else I should learn to be happy again, and then you… the demon you… made me love her so much I could deny her nothing, and set me lose on everyone I ever hated. So I had to learn to be happy with killing evil people in creative ways. Although… I suspect now that some of them didn’t deserve it.”
“Oh.” I sighed. “I wish I’d been able to get free sooner. I suppose there are worse problems for a ninja, but… did merging with your younger self help?”
“Yes,” she nodded. “That’s how I know I punished people I shouldn’t have. I wish you’d let me do it again, actually. I don’t want to go back to being the girl I was, but there are feelings I used to have that I need to get back somehow.”
“Hmm. Promise me you’ll take the time to explain to her what’s really going on, and what it means for her if she merges with you? If she’s willing that’s one thing, but no one should be tricked into something like that.”