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Chapter 126 - Arc 8 - Forest of Quest: Avoid a Bad End, FOD
🕑 Added 2025-01-17 16:00:22 +0000 UTCI'm super happy with this chapter, the beat is finally dropping. I've been dominoing this for a long time now and am happy to see them fall just right. This is probably the longest I've actually planned anything before, it's so cool! Stars in my eyes cool.
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[Being Watched Complete
Reward: To avoid spooking the enemy, Jiraiya of the Sannin will wait for your call where you met him. Simply send someone to call upon him when it is time.]
Awestruck as she was, it only took her about two minutes before she remembered she could just scan the pervy man. What she saw shocked her to her core.
That really was Jiraiya of the Sannin. Jiraiya of the Sannin made her pose for five whole minutes before he agreed to help her, which was actually a little calming because it wasn’t even in a weird way, they went through pose training. She learned how to stop mid-movement like she’s gonna kick someone in the face and just stay like that, which was apparently a favorite of Tsunade of the Sannin’s at one point. He taught her how to hold her movements and pull her strikes so that they look cool but do no damage, which was an odd thing to learn but felt good. That’s before he moved onto her sword, and stances, and even battle cries and why they can be important.
All in all, Jiraiya taught her more - mostly strange knowledge - in an hour than Kakashi does some entire months. He didn’t even get that handsy besides the stance teaching and while she has her doubts about him, she’s pretty sure that’s required sometimes. That this creepy old man that had to be baited is somehow a better teacher than her actual teacher? Truly the world is grim, dark, and full of festering evil. Sometimes that evil is the good guy. Is it okay to call him the good guy? He is on her side, that makes someone good right? She’s uncomfortable calling him the good guy, she’s not going to do it. She’s going to ask her mom about this and she gets the feeling her mom isn’t going to like it either, that’s that.
Whether Jiraiya’s here in the forest because the Hokage thought something massive was going to happen, or if he just takes every opportunity he can to isolate young girls in the forest and this was too good to pass up, she has no idea. What she does know is that the scale of what she could be dealing with is now through the roof. She’d asked him to go get her headsets and radios so they could communicate through the nonsense they’re about to deal with but he told her that if she’s truly in danger, covering her ears and making a lot of electrical noise was the dumbest idea he’d ever heard of.
She agrees now that she’s thought about it, but damn-it that would have been awesome! Luckily, Naruto had a better idea. He could just flood the area with wildlife clones of himself and use clones for important communication.
Another concern of hers is that Jiraiya has genuinely decided that luring out the threat is more important than keeping her safe. He patted her shoulder and told her that while she does absolutely need to show up to bait out the threat tomorrow, she should plan and prioritize every single chance to her advantage so that she can survive. He looked truly regretful while giving her the order, which means that he cares and still felt the need to give it. Whatever he suspects is going to happen is a significant threat to the village, it’s a threat to her home, it’s a threat to her family and friends. Which is what brings her to finally sitting down with her team and saying “we need to talk, right now, it cannot wait until morning.”
A groggy Sasuke and Naruto sit in front of the burning fire she created - it’s still good affinity training - and look her in the eyes waiting for something important. She finds her voice is hard to force out. The reality of the world has hit her almost all at once, frames have been filled with pictures, and she’s terrified. “Before we came to the forest my mind was visited by someone outside. They left something, um…” She chokes up a little bit, her cheeks flustering potently as their rapt attention is poured onto her. For once it’s Sasuke that seems to be caring, Naruto has too much faith in her to grasp the situation. “In it, there was a video of our deaths.” She bites her lip, digs her nails into her palms. “A different us, which um, I didn’t take seriously because as far as I know parallel universes aren’t a thing? It seemed more likely to be a genjutsu or something super far in the future but as time has passed and the event seems to be approaching it’s hitting me that I should have said something earlier.”
“So we should leave.” Sasuke says, a dry voice of reason once more.
“That probably would have been a good idea except… I met with Jiraiya of the Sannin.” She forces out, “and we are to play the part of bait tomorrow before he deals with the issue.”
“A Sannin is here?” A part of her is surprised to see Naruto even knows what that is, but then he did learn a lot specifically about the Hokages in school and Jiraiya is the 4ths teacher, so - “so we need to stay.” He is duty bound to a fault, his nod makes her smile a little through the stress. “He’ll save us.”
“I’m not sure,” Sakura shrugs, “but I do know that the moment one of the most important ninjas in the country got involved and told me to do something, it became an unofficially official village order.”
Sasuke nods himself, albeit slowly. He seems to be thinking about something deep but doesn’t share what it is. “Kabuto seems to know what it is, I reported him too, Jiraiya said not to worry about him and that it’s taken care of.”
“So the message did get through.” Naruto sighs in relief.
“We need to strategize and consider this like it’s an official mission now, either that or run away. We probably wouldn’t become missing ninja but I could see our promotion chances going down for a long time…” Sakura says.
“And our promotion chances go down permanently if we die.” Sasuke points out, “the village is important but my final goal is Itachi and us, we stand to lose both if we don’t leave.” He makes a very real point, and that’s it for her. If she hadn’t received a very real order from a superior earlier, they’d already be taking off. But… “My family lives here, I can’t just abandon Konoha like that. If you want to go on your own, I won’t blame you, but…”
“I’m with Sakura.” Naruto gives her a naive smile, one that doesn’t sit well with her at all.
“You are my family.” Sasuke grunts, “if you won’t go, neither will I, but we need to flee the moment he shows up, none of that die a hero stuff. I’ll learn your necromancy and revive you just to kill you again if you die tomorrow.”
“Agreed,” Sakura feels a pressure evaporate off her chest like it’s magic, “speaking of die a hero stuff though, we do need a back-up in the event that it’s impossible to escape before he arrives. It’s foolish to assume the best, it’s downright negligence to pretend nothing can go wrong.”
“Bombs.” Sasuke shrugs, “bombs and fire. Lots of it. There’s even a chance we survive bombs and fire.”
“Naruto, I did have the thought, do you carry explosive tags? And do they work if they’re your clones’ tags?”
“As long as the clone hasn’t dispelled, yeah. That does mean there needs to be an order to how they’re placed but…”
“We’ll go with that. I want you and Sasuke to stay as far away from the fight as possible at first, most of my traits are defensive and there’s a chance I can’t even really die,” Sakura says, “I know how it sounds but I’ll call for help if I need it. And Naruto’ll have lots of clones there for me to flee with so I won’t be alone…”
“And I do what, sit in a hole and wait?” Sasuke asks, while she tugs her collar.
“I got a quest to protect you from something called a bite, and it mentioned a bad end. I think that’s tomorrow, things will go really bad if I let whatever that is happen. I think it’s safer for you to stay away from direct combat.”
They got to bed late that night, not even due to nervousness. It took three hours to convince Sasuke to at least stay in the hole until Jiraiya would likely get there so he can help her escape. She’s not convinced he actually agreed, so much as he stopped arguing.
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“Sakura!” Ino’s normally comforting voice is shrill with fear as she lands on a tree branch next to her and about six squirrel Naruto’s. She’s careful to miss them with her feet, she clearly knows what they are. Ino spent a notable amount of time with Naruto and Sasuke in this forest while she was off getting Necromancy and it’s nice to see she’s taken to every lesson she learned. “We only have ten minutes left and I’m still off by a whole level, we failed… I can’t save you.”
“I expected you to.” Sakura admits, looking directly into her friend’s tear filled gaze with a complete lack of surprise or disappointment. She reaches out to pat her shoulder - then decides to screw that and pulls her into a hug when Ino tries to flinch back.
She squeezes her, holds her close, she closes her eyes and lets Ino sniffle for what feels like forever. Ten minutes on the clock and she’ll spend every one on Ino if she has to. “Ino, your quest was never to level up that much, it was chosen to be that high because it was deemed impossible you’d reach it and panic.” Sakura shakes her head against her. “You were lied to, even I’d have a hard time leveling up that much that quickly and I have the system’s actual help instead of the half-assed nonsense it gave you..”
“But… I’ve tried so hard.” Ino’s features droop, her arms slack, falling out of even trying to join her in the hug. “I haven’t gotten a good night’s sleep in over a month.”
“That’s all you needed to do. If you didn’t try as hard as you have to get as strong as you are, I’d spend the entire time worrying about you during whatever’s about to happen.” Sakura explains to her, patting her friend’s back as warmly as she can manage while only being extremely awkward. Finally after a long yet somehow shallow breath from Ino, she pulls back to look into the shimmery blue ocean that is Ino’s tear filled eyes. “The only person you were ever going to save me from is myself, and you have. Forget about the quest, instead I need you to do me a favor.” Sakura does her best to give her a bright smile, even if she knows the way her lips twitch is awkward and fruitless. “Yesterday I was at a location for an entire hour. Shino is about one click to the north, he’ll be able to lead you there. Go and tell the man waiting there that it’s time. If you can do that, you’ll likely really save me.”
“I love you.” Ino gasps, nods, rubs her eyes clear and then disappears without another word. There’s no solemn look of determination, no powerful talk or motivational speech about how she’ll do her best. Ino is gone before Sakura can even reply.
“You’re one of the most important people in my life,” Sakura mumbles after the missing form of her friend, “be safe.”
“The system lied to her?” A Naruto squirrel asks, revealing they can talk which wasn’t something she was aware of until just this moment. Despite being startled, Sakura shakes her head at it like she’s not surprised at all. Her suddenly erratic heartbeat would betray her but she’s pretty sure Naruto can’t hear heartbeats from a distance yet.
“Probably not.” Sakura hisses through clenched teeth. Lying to Ino hurts, but she needs her for this and she needs her as far away from what’s about to happen as physically possible.
She’ll make it up to her later, maybe with an ice cream sundae? She’d love to treat Ino to ice cream after all this. She’s a bad liar, but there’s one person in this world she can likely lie to, and it’s Ino. Ino wouldn’t suspect she was going to lie to her about something this important in the first place and as she’s recently learned, charm is a meaningless stat unless you’re applying it manually. “Is Sasuke in position?”
“He is.” The fluffy creature nods at her, it looks so unnatural it brings a giggle to her lips.
“Five summons are left with Karin, the remainder are here.” She says, flipping on the Umbrella Intern trait. She can feel a flare of power scorch the air as almost one hundred monsters suddenly awaken to their real powers around her and screech into the air. “Underground, in the trees, waiting at a perimeter to march in. If this isn’t enough to survive, nothing we could possibly have done would change the outcome of what’s about to happen.”
“I have ten thousand clones stationed around.” The squirrel says, “there are over a hundred thousand explosive tags littering the forest. If we die… I’m not sure what’ll happen if we set off over a hundred thousand explosive tags in the same spot.”
“Uh, let’s hope we don’t find out.” She titters awkwardly, looking out into the clearing in front of them. Whoever’s coming for them will not survive if she has any say in it. Technically they could be after her specifically but for once she doubts this is about her at all. The Quest asking her not to let Sasuke get bitten and the memory of her death seemed to be all about the Uchiha, so, she’ll roll with that and do this to protect Sasuke. The order to engage and all the stress here only further leads her to believe this has nothing to do with the KSH.
Hopefully Jiraiya also called for external help, if not, well he’s probably enough… Right?
He has to be.
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The playing field she set up, all that effort, every puzzle piece positioned just right; it all scatters in the wind exactly two seconds after she fully readies herself. They say no plan survives contact with the enemy, but she’s had several plans so far that have gone almost exactly as she imagined it. Fierro actually went better than planned, and while Tenten got snuck up on the plan for being a distraction while Neji went onto the roof worked amazingly. While it was a spur of the moment plan, switching with Naruto clones to avoid Gato worked incredibly well, even if she spent weeks apologizing.
That saying is evidently for when the opponent is on another level beyond your comprehension, as is made clear when she has to raise her arms up and stick herself to a tree to avoid being blown away with half her traps and dozens of squirrel Naruto’s. The force of the gale hitting her is truly tremendous and even her colossal summons are uprooted from where they’ve hidden themselves to fly away into the air. In one move everything is reorganized, before the fight even starts she’s fighting an uphill battle and struggling to stay in place. A branch flying by her manages to nick her cheek without her body even moving, meaning that the wind is sending random objects at her with more classified and system acknowledged power than every genin in Fierro’s dungeon could muster when sending their kunai at her.
She closes her eyes to ensure nothing slices them and only after thirty beats of her heart does it stop. For a civilian that’s not very long, for an active ninja it’s an eternity. She stands upright on the side of the tree as nowhere else is fully intact around her. There’s a canal dug in the ground, and some of the other trees are completely uprooted. The amount of smaller wildlife running around confused and displaced is shocking, the fact that only half of it is Naruto is moreso. She wasn’t aware there was that much smaller wildlife in this forest, it does a great job hiding itself. It would have to, with all the predators. She thought Naruto was being dumb disguising himself as something that’s not really around but as it turns out she has to start giving him more credit. Her brother is somewhat of a genius himself, able to see things she never would on her own.
The explosive tags are probably displaced, but that’s okay, she really didn’t want to die exploding anyway. What’s more problematic is all the wire traps the three of them setup are screwed, the summons are no longer placed tactically, and the pitfalls are now uncovered and serving as spike traps for if she trips. She had expected an attack from all directions, or maybe a group of elites that’d cause her to have to be quick on her feet and dart from place to place like in a movie while trying to buy time.
She didn’t expect the first move to take her breath away and reduce the landscape to a bad joke. “Sakura! What do we do now?!” Naruto’s voice calls out from her side, but it’s not his voice that causes her to look up at a tree not too far away and take him in. Standing on the side of a crooked monolith of wood and fragmented bark is an oddity. It looks like Naruto, baggy jacket and all. Their mom got him a nicer one, it’s still pretty orange but it’s got a few darker colors mixed in and the same triple-crest circle that’s emblazoned on her chest plate rests on his shoulder. His hair is further disheveled than normal and Sakura can even make out a little fear in his sharp blue eyes. In every way that her five senses can determine, including his very distinctively rugged smell, she is looking into the eyes of her brother.
That doesn’t stop her from pulling a scroll from her sleeve and unsealing its contents as she unsheaths her black blade into the world. Hungry for a massacre, it gratefully sucks up the sealed blood and inwardly she thanks Sasuke. If they hadn’t killed those three she’d be feeding Hunger with her own life force and if what her sixth sense is telling her is accurate she’ll need far more than she has to start with to survive long enough for Jiraiya to get here.
For while the soul of the Naruto in front of her feels distinctly different, curled and twisted and malicious to a fault; she can’t tell any difference in intensity from the real Naruto. That doesn’t say much on its own, she can’t tell the difference in intensity between Gaara and Naruto unless they’re standing right next to each-other and she’s sure the nine tails is stronger than the one tail.
It is still enough for her to recognize that there’s a Biju standing across from her, and it’s not her friend. It stands there with painted skin and fake eyes and dares to use a voice it hasn’t earned the right to mimic, and yet, she has no power to tell it to stop. “Sakura, what’s wrong?” He asks, tilting his head to take in her frozen expression and shaking noodly legs.
She is going to die screaming. For all the power Naruto’s soul possesses, he can’t use any of it outside of all these clones. She gets the feeling whatever’s pretending to be Naruto can use quite a bit of its Biju’s power, if not all of it. She almost immediately regrets drawing Hunger in the first place, she might have been able to stall for more time for Jiraiya to get closer if she didn’t immediately skip to revealing her awareness and threatening them with a deadly weapon. They’re clearly playing a game, they don’t need to trick her which means they want something before they slit her throat and watch her bleed out into the dirt. “Oh? What’s this?” They break character at the sight of her sword coming to life, its sigils glowing and its surface crackling with intense heat. “You weren’t fooled for even a second. I didn’t think my Henge was so poor.” Naruto’s voice is sickly sweet, and every instinct she has knows it should never sound like that. Even knowing it’s a henge doesn’t stop her instincts from revolting at seeing and hearing Naruto as a threat to her life.
Maybe she shouldn’t have made Sasuke stay back, no, Sasuke needs to run as far away as possible. Naruto too, she shouldn’t have come here either. Screw Jiraiya, screw the village, none of it matters. The moment this creature moves, it’ll all be a regret no one’s alive to feel.
“Naruto doesn’t come to me for every decision, I know if you’ve been watching us that it probably looks that way but…” Okay she’s kinda lying, without soul sense she would have been a little fooled, but she’d be slightly suspicious. Naruto’s a very independent guy when he’s not whimpering over a corpse. He only looked to her because she has so much more experience with the dead. Even if she hadn’t been suspicious, an owl over there shaking its head at her is a pretty dead giveaway that Naruto wants her to know this isn’t him.
“My mistake.” Watching Naruto’s grin split his face unnaturally before his tongue slithers out and licks his lips has a very different and extremely menacing vibe to it than it probably would have yesterday. Yesterday, she likely would have been terrified, now it’s not just terrifying it’s also giving her flashbacks to Jiraiya’s creepy old man gaze. It’s so much worse, the toad sage never held any animosity in his eyes for her, but it’s a similar feeling that causes her skin to crawl and she’s not having any of it if she can help it.
She points her flame shrouded sword at him, and watches as the entire tree in front of her puffs into a potent smoke. It shakes the ground below them a little, which in turn shakes her off balance. She’s never seen henge smoke possess force before, but she gets the feeling she should get used to seeing new things. He clearly wasn’t threatened by her pointing at him, so she has to wonder why he gave up the act with such a display of power.
She sends a few hand signs to a Naruto chipmunk quite a ways away. Sasuke needs to be informed that he should stay hidden until he has a real opportunity. He probably already knows that but every variable matters right now and she’s not leaving anything to chance. As the smoke clears, she gets a look at who’s approached her. A woman with long black hair stands on the crooked tree where Naruto was. A long yellow top droops down around the waist area of the woman to fall just above her knees. Black underclothes hug her body well and a long brimmed wooden hat sits snugly atop her head. Some kind of purple rope is tied around her midsection, and it looks suspiciously unique, ninja don’t normally like being that unique as it can be rather dangerous.
The ‘Grass Genin’ in front of her - complete with a signifying headband that’s almost guaranteed stolen - looks a lot like an adult. That’d be scary even without soul sense, there’s not a single adult ninja she’d like to fight if she can help it. Adulthood is a luxury, one that has to be earned, and as a twelve year old girl - almost thirteen - she’s not feeling too great about her less than a year of being a Ninja right about now. “You know your teammates well, Konoha’s will of fire is still burning hypocritically strong.”
“Well I mean, he lives with me, he’s kind of my brother… it’s a whole thing.” She finds herself correcting the enemy and for once it doesn’t feel stupid. Every second she can stall is another second for a freaking Sannin to come save her. She’d love to cry ‘mommy’ and curl up into a ball but instead she has to hold a flaming sword in their general direction and hope they choose not to come towards it anytime soon. Ino has to have gotten to the perv by now, right? Shino definitely knows the location, his tracker bug is actively on her right now so she’s sure it was on her yesterday.
[Quest Update: Avoid a Bad End, FOD
The time is now. A quest to help you has been sent out to the Rookie Nine, Team Gaara, Team Gai, every proctor in the area, three Jonin, and Jiraiya of the Sannin.
Survive for five minutes and enough help should arrive to ensure you survive the engagement completely.]
A timer appears at the top left of her vision, counting down one second at a time.
Five minutes… she can do that, right? With a flicker of doubt, she rips off the bandaid and scans her opponent.
[Orochimaru of the Sannin - Run Away Level Solo Elite
Boss Fight]
Orochi- ”Fuuuuuuuuuuuu-”
Comments
Christopher Cummins
Wouldn't you?
Dopplerdee
Oh good she said the fuck outloud
