5

1

When Sakura went into the Hokage’s office with Sai, Kakashi and Ino were waiting there. Ino looked exhausted somehow.

“Ino, you’re here too?”

“Yeah, I had something I wanted to try, so I went to the communications office with Master Kakashi, but…”

“Communications?” Sakura looked doubtful.

“Well, Ino said she wanted to try and see if we could contact Sasuke directly from here with her Mind Transmission Jutsu,” Kakashi replied, from behind his desk. “So we tried it, but…”

“Didn’t work,” Ino said, shrugging her shoulders. “Maybe we could have made it happen if we had a rough idea of where Sasuke is, but searching the whole world randomly definitely didn’t work. I’m kinda beat.” She stuck her tongue out. The Mind Transmission Jutsu used by the Yamanaka clan required a fair bit of concentration, which made it hard to use for extended periods of time.

“Anyway, what are you two doing here?” Kakashi asked.

“I wanted to talk to you,” Sai replied.

“Oh?”

“It’s about the fake Sasuke. It just might be that the Anbu is involved.”

“What?” Kakashi’s eyes grew narrow.

“Sakura told me,” Sai continued. “The fake Sasuke people are seeing doesn’t just look like Sasuke, he even has Sasuke’s chakra, right?”

“According to Gaara.”

“Sakura said chakra can be extracted from hair or skin. The chakra that the counterfeit Sasuke’s cloaked in might have been created like that.”

“Hair or skin,” Kakashi murmured, thoughtfully. “That might indeed be the missing piece.”

“No, it’s just a theory, okay?” Sakura panicked a little at Sai racing ahead of her. “If that’s how they did it, that still doesn’t explain how a copy of Sasuke is strolling around without Sasuke’s knowing it.”

“Well, a hypothesis is a hypothesis,” Kakashi noted. “So how does the Anbu figure into it?”

“My informant said something that’s been bugging me. He said that people from the Konoha Anbu were investigating the Final Valley, and the bridge where Sasuke and Master Danzo fought, right after the Great War.”

“The Anbu were?”

“Yes. He said that the Anbu were taking bits of dirt and stone from the place.”

“What would be the point of taking things like—oh!” Halfway through her sentence, Ino understood.

Sakura had a flash of insight at about the same time. “Right,” she half-said, half-murmured. “They wanted things from Sasuke.”

“Exactly.” Sai nodded slowly.

“It definitely would have been easy to find bits of Sasuke’s hair or skin in that place,” Kakashi said.

And his blood, Sakura added in her heart.

The Final Valley was where Sasuke and Naruto had fought so desperately to decide the last battle. They had each lost an arm in that fight. So there was no doubt that blood and tissue had been left behind there.

And the bridge where Sasuke fought Danzo—just as with the Final Valley, it would have been possible to find Sasuke’s hair or blood there. If it had been collected immediately after the Great Ninja War, there would have been a greater “freshness” to Sasuke’s tissue.

“However,” Kakashi noted. “I’m no specialist, but wouldn’t it take some serious work to separate out Sasuke’s hair or skin or whatever from the rubble they brought back, and then extract his chakra from it?”

“I think it would be an overwhelming amount of work,” Sakura said. But the Anbu had probably done that work.

She tried to remember the Final Valley then.

The fighting was over, and Naruto and Sasuke were lying on top of the massive fallen statue. Sakura treated both of their arms, while Kakashi watched over them, smiling. And then, they left the valley with a sense of hope for the new era.

The Anbu went down into that valley after Sakura and the others left. They scraped up dirt and picked up bits of rock. Looking for traces of Sasuke…

If that had actually happened, Sakura could only feel a sense of discomfort at how incomprehensible the work was.

“But what are the Anbu trying to accomplish by having a fake Sasuke seen all over the place?” Ino asked.

“I have no idea. But if this idea we’re talking about here is right and they did make a fake Sasuke, then…Master Kakashi.” Sai turned toward Kakashi. “This might explain the fact that the men who attacked me were cloaked in Tailed Beast chakra.”

“So you’re saying the Anbu are collecting tissue and the like from jinchuriki and getting the chakra of Tailed Beasts from that?”

“Don’t you think it’s a possibility? Both cases share the fact that the attackers were cloaked in another chakra.”

“That man who’s always with Kido, Magire—he’s a medical ninja. It’s not inconceivable for him to be researching this sort of technique on Kido’s orders.”

“W-wait a minute. Don’t leave us out of this,” Ino interjected.

Sakura was also confused. She couldn’t exactly see where they were going with this conversation. “Um, what are you talking about, ‘Tailed Beast chakra’?”

“Oh, I’m sorry. Hmm. How can I explain it?” Kakashi scratched his head before clapping his hands together. “Oh! Well, anyway, the three of you are on the same team now.”

“What?”

“Huh?”

While Sakura and Ino were baffled, Sai merely noted calmly, “It’s certainly very likely we’re chasing the same enemy. In which case, it might be better to share information and work as a team.”

“Enemy?” Sakura parroted.

“Tsumiki Kido from the Anbu,” Sai said. “And Magire. I’m targeting them now.”

In investigating the attacks on the daimyo and his advisor, Sai and Kakashi had landed on these two as likely suspects. There was a very real possibility that the attacks had been scripted and performed by the Anbu with the aim of obtaining a budget increase. While he was looking into this, Sai had been targeted for assassination. And the assassins had been cloaked in Tailed Beast chakra.

“Tailed Beast chakra,” Sakura murmured.

“So then,” Ino said. “Kido and his gang maybe collected Naruto’s tissue in the Final Valley too? And they extracted the chakra of Nine Tails from that…”

“But the chakra cloaking the men who attacked me only had one tail.”

“Maybe the number of tails doesn’t matter,” Sakura said. “I mean, when Naruto was getting his tails at first, he had a different number of them at the different stages of seal removal.”

“Oh, this is good. The way you’re talking like this. This team’s pretty impromptu, but it looks like it’s going to work out well,” Kakashi said, a casual remark that seemed out of place.

“Please don’t tease us, Master,” Ino said.

“Yes, don’t,” Sai chimed in. “However impromptu this team might be, Sakura and I were originally on the same team, and I’m completely comfortable having Ino join in. Right, Ino?”

At her name, Ino’s face turned red. “R-right! Easy win here!”

Knowing how Ino felt about Sai, Sakura giggled lightly.

“No, no, I’m sorry for teasing you. To be honest, I’d like to join you myself, get out there and run around, but ever since this thing got plopped on my head, it’s not so easy for me to just take off like that,” Kakashi said, patting the Hokage hat. Then his face stiffened. “Of course we should be going after Kido and Magire as suspects, but I’ve generally allowed the Anbu to operate under their own judgment, so part of the responsibility for all this definitely lies with me. And for that, I have to apologize to you.”

Sakura and the others stared at Kakashi as he continued. “I intend to immediately review the Anbu organization. All the energy I want to use out there with you, I’ll use to rack my brain on that. So you three take care of Kido and Magire.”

“We will,” the younger ninja replied in unison.

∞

“So no Ino-Shika-Cho combo, but Ino-Saku-Sai instead, huh?” Ino said.

“Sounds pretty awful,” Sakura retorted.

“Who cares if it sounds bad?” Ino threw back. “As long as our teamwork is good.”

After leaving the Hokage’s office, the three had decided to move to the roof of Konoha Hospital for the time being to discuss what to do going forward.

Sai nodded. “I’m going to keep watching over Kido.”

“And us, what should we do? Maybe it’d be good if we checked into Sasuke’s fake?” Ino said, looking at Sakura.

“Probably. But I also feel like we should get some more evidence on whether the Anbu were really collecting pieces of Sasuke. Right now, all we have to go on is what the informant told Sai.”

“Oh yeah,” Ino said. “But how are we supposed to do that?”

“I was thinking that if the Anbu were collecting Sasuke’s hair and blood, there might be other places besides the Final Valley and that bridge.”

“You mean that they would have been examining other places too?” Sai asked.

“Right. I don’t think the Final Valley or the bridge had such a huge amount of hair or blood for them to extract chakra from. So maybe they collected it from a bunch of places.”

“So, like, where?” Ino asked.

“If we expand our scope to outside the village, I don’t know either,” Sakura admitted. “But if we limit it to inside the village, then the first thing that pops into my mind is Sasuke’s house. And then Nakano Shrine. Places like that.”

“Hmm, those two places do have potential,” Sai remarked.

“And if they wanted even fresher hair from Sasuke, there’s probably a strong possibility that the Anbu went to the shrine over his house,” Sakura said.

“Mmm, but I wonder.” Ino crossed her arms and stared off into space. “Would they really go all the way over there to look for hair? I think it’s pretty likely that they managed to bring back blood from the Final Valley, but finding Sasuke’s hair at Nakano Shrine would be pretty tough.”

“They go and look for it, and if it’s not there, it’s not there. But I think they went to look at least once. Right after the Great War.” Sakura proposed that they ask around to find out if anyone had seen the Anbu in the vicinity of Nakano Shrine at that time. “If someone did, that’s circumstantial evidence at least.”

“Okay! So let’s do that.” With Ino’s agreement, the plan for all three was decided.

“We should meet regularly and share whatever we’ve learned,” Sai said. “If we collect every scrap of evidence, no matter how small, it’ll lead us to Kido eventually.”

Sakura and Ino nodded their agreement, and the hastily put-together team got to work.

Working was good. She felt much better working than sitting in her room moping. And she was working for Sasuke’s sake.

This thought was what kept Sakura going.

2

Kido was getting impatient.

He had succeeded in sending a Sasuke doppelgänger out into the world to be seen as much as possible. But the star of the show, Sasuke himself, had not appeared in the village.

Why is he not coming back?

There was no way the real Sasuke was unaware of the current situation. He had to have heard about it somewhere.

Kido did not like Sasuke’s lack of response. It stank of the notion that Sasuke was taking no notice of what Kido was trying to do.

But in his impatience, Kido struck upon a single excellent idea. If he played this card, not only was there a fairly high probability that Sasuke would return, but the situation would become even more favorable in terms of Kido’s plan.

“So play the next card,” Kido said, in his office. Magire and several other high-level ninja were also there. All wore Anbu masks.

“This woman,” he said, waving his hand lightly. A moment later, a single kunai plunged into the wall, coming to rest on a single photograph. “Take her. A classmate of Sasuke’s, Haruno Sakura. Once news she is missing reaches Sasuke’s ears, he will come back to the village.”

“And then we’ll take the next step and kill her?” another ninja said. “The impact on him would be greater that way.”

“No, we won’t kill her,” Kido said. A thin smile spreading across his face, he continued. “Not right away.”

3

At first, it was rough going for Sakura and Ino on their rounds of the village.

To begin with, Nakano Shrine was on the outskirts, in a place where there weren’t too many houses. On top of that, the period immediately after the Great War itself was a stumbling block. It had already been more than two years since the end of the war. People’s memories were fading.

It took three days of asking around near the shrine before they heard anything useful from anyone.

“The Anbu? Oh, I saw them!” the anyone in question—Rock Lee—told them. “There were about three of them, I guess!”

“When was that?” Sakura asked.

“It was a little over two years ago,” Lee replied. “I sometimes come to this area on my runs. That’s actually why I’m here today. After all, normally, there aren’t very many people around here, you see? Which is why I remember seeing the Anbu that day. Although, well, you’ll see the Anbu popping up anywhere, depending what sort of mission they’re on. I didn’t think it was particularly suspicious.”

Sakura and Ino glanced at each other and nodded.

“What are you investigating? If you’d like, I could be your superpower?!” Lee said, but Sakura and Ino gently dodged this.

“Mm-hmm, if something comes up, we’ll call you.” Like Naruto, Lee had a tendency to just charge in. Sakura thought he wasn’t particularly suited to the evidence-gathering sort of work she and Ino were doing.

In the evening, they met with Sai and reported the results of the day’s investigations. On her way home, Sakura’s feet were light. They had gotten results that day, however modest.

If they circled in on Kido bit by bit, they could help Sasuke. That thought renewed Sakura’s determination.

“I told you to let go!”

The sudden angry roar stopped her in her tracks. It had come from a side street near her house.

She peered into the alley. It was already night, but the street lamps penetrated the dark, however faintly, so the road ahead of her wasn’t pitch black.

Several men were pressing another man down onto the ground. The men doing the pressing all wore Anbu masks.

“Look! Let me go!”

“Quiet! You’re suspected of terrorism!”

“I’m telling you, it wasn’t me!”

Of the quarrelling voices, the one coming from the man on the ground was familiar to Sakura.

“Sasuke?!” she cried out.

“Sakura!” The man on the ground lifted his face.

It was indeed Sasuke.

“Tell them. I came back to the village and suddenly they attacked me. They’re saying I killed some terrorists or something.”

Please let him go. Sakura swallowed the words before they had a chance to leave her mouth.

“Wait. Are you really Sasuke?” she asked, in all seriousness. She’d been thinking and working all this time on the idea of the fake Sasuke. She was bound to become paranoid.

“And now you’re asking me stuff like that.” He let out a short sigh. “Did you forget your old classmate’s face? Look at me,” he said, briefly, and let the silence speak.

Reflexively, she returned his gaze, and in that moment, her vision blurred and smeared.

Genjutsu!

She couldn’t stay on her feet. But the genjutsu wasn’t that strong. She quickly quelled the disturbance in her chakra and regained her steady posture.

And then she felt a presence behind her.

Before she could turn around, she felt a stinging sensation on the back of her neck.

She felt some kind of drug being injected into her veins. The strength left her knees, and she collapsed facedown on the ground.

4

First came the pain in her neck. It was like her consciousness gradually returned through the doorway of that pain. Soon, she felt something cool and hard against her shoulders and back. She realized she was lying on the floor in an unnatural posture. She tried to move her arms and legs, but couldn’t.

She slowly opened her eyes. Her hands were bound behind her, her ankles tied together with some metal restraint.

She felt vaguely nauseous, but this passed after a while.

She was in a bare concrete room. Big, empty. Directly in front of her was a rusted iron door. There was no window, so she couldn’t determine if she was underground or not.

She had no idea how much time had passed since she had been kidnapped.

She tried forcing her arms apart; maybe she could break the restraints. But she couldn’t muster up much strength. They had injected something into her neck when they took her. This lack of strength was probably the effect of that.

The iron door had a tiny window in it, and she could see someone wearing an Anbu mask peeking in through it.

“She’s awake. Tell Master Kido.”

After these words, she heard the footsteps of someone else running off.

Master Kido, the mask said. So this was one of Kido’s hideouts.

The memory of the kidnapping came back to her.

It had been cheap theater. The Anbu holding down the newly returned Sasuke. There was no way something like that would happen right next door to Sakura.

And she had been suspicious at first. But she let her guard down for an instant. And for shinobi, an instant was deadly.

I am such a disaster…

Sakura closed her eyes. She was ashamed of herself for getting caught in such an obvious trap.

She could hear the footsteps of several people, and then the door opened to allow a man with a hooked nose in. Beside him was a fair-skinned man with a monocle.

Hook Nose was wearing a coat over his uniform, while Monocle was in a white robe. Two masked Anbu members stood behind them, probably the pair who had been watching over Sakura outside the door.

“So you’re…Kido, then” Sakura said to Hook Nose, haltingly.

“I am. Haruno Sakura. You don’t happen to know where Uchiha Sasuke is?”

“Where…Sasuke is? I’d like to ask…you the same thing.” Her posture made it hard to speak. She was on her side like a caterpillar with her interlocutor looking down at her. The humiliation made Sakura’s eyes hard. “So you’re the one…who cobbled together the fake...Sasuke and sent him out, huh?”

“I am. I thought doing so might make him return to the village. But he has not. Which is why we kidnapped you.”

“To make...Sasuke come back..to the village…?”

You kidnapped me?

“You’re his classmate. Same team. Friends who fought together in the Great War, yes? Once he hears that you’ve gone missing, he will come back.”

“Hmm...I don’t know. Sasuke’s incredibly cool. Just me going missing. He won’t—”

Come back to the village, she tried to say, but a small pain shot through her heart.

Would you really not come back, Sasuke?

Because it was just me who went missing…

She wanted him to come back. But she quickly chased that thought away.

That can’t happen. If he comes back, he’ll be doing exactly what they want. He should definitely not come back.

But if he doesn’t come back, then that means that he’s not particularly worried about me…

Sakura was torn between her yearning for Sasuke and her fear for his safety.

“If he doesn’t come back,” Kido continued, “it’s quite simple. We’ll just kill you. When he hears your body’s been found, even that man will come home. At least for the funeral.”

“In that case, go ahead and kill me now!” She figured she’d give herself over to her anger and try ripping off her shackles. But she still couldn’t muster enough strength.

“I think it would be best if you refrained from doing anything reckless,” Monocle said—most likely the medical ninja Magire. “The injection in your neck was a drug that makes it difficult to knead chakra while simultaneously numbing your muscles. Simply being quiet and resting will allow you to avoid expending excess energy. That is all.”

“Ngh!” Sakura gritted her teeth.

“We won’t kill you right now,” Kido said. “Ideally, we would be able to kill you in front of him.”

Sakura stared up at Kido. “In front of Sasuke?”

“Exactly. Doing so will improve the quality of his eyes.” Kido gave her the biggest smile he’d had since entering the room.

“The quality…of his eyes…?”

What is he talking about?

“The Uchihas are a deeply loving clan,” Kido remarked, malicious smile still playing on his lips. “I’m sure you also know that the nature of this love has granted the Uchihas strong eye powers, yes?”

She said nothing.

“Anyone would grieve and lament if a precious family member, a friend, a lover were to be killed before their eyes. But that’s not all that happens with the Uchiha clan. Their grief is so deep that it acts on their optic nerves and gives their eyes power.”

She managed to keep herself from gasping.

“Their sadness and anger and grief must further refine that eye power. Which is why we will kill you in front of him.”

Sakura took a deep breath. “And doing that, what are you trying to…?”

“A sharingan drug,” Kido told her. “We’re going to use his eyes as the ingredients and make a drug. A drug that will allow anyone to use the sharingan. We’ll sell it.” His throaty laugh crawled along the concrete floor. “I will collect more money than anyone has ever seen before. Money, money…!”

The menacing chuckle turned into loud laughter, and filled the room.

This man…

For the first time, Sakura felt not hatred for this man Kido, but fear.

5

There was a knock on the door.

Sai turned the shower off. In between knocks, he could hear a voice calling his name. It sounded like Ino. He put on some underwear and headed toward the door, drying his head with a towel.

When he opened the door, Ino was standing there.

“So, Sai, the thing is—whoa! Hey!” In an instant, Ino’s face was beet red. “W-why aren’t you wearing any clothes?”

“Sorry, I was in the shower.” He had thought it would be fine to open the door to Ino like this, but apparently, it was not. The mysterious part was that not only did she get angry, her face also turned red.

“Anyway, what’s going on? It’s so early,” Sai said, and Ino turned her gaze back on him. Her face was still red, but her expression held a hint of tension.

“Sakura’s gone.”

“Sakura?” The hands moving the towel on his head stopped.

“I went to the therapy center early this morning since there’s some paperwork we have to do together. But she never showed. So I went to her house, and she’s not there. I tried detecting her chakra, but I couldn’t find any trace of it.”

Sai let out a sigh. “It’s probably Kido and his gang.”

“That’s what I thought too.”

“Let’s go look for her,” he said, and went into his room. As he hurriedly yanked on his uniform, he called to Ino in the entryway. “If he wanted to get in the way of our investigation, all he’d have to do is take her down right then and there. The fact that she’s gone means they’ve taken her somewhere.”

When he was done getting ready, he went back out to Ino. “Have you told Master Kakashi?”

Ino shook her head. “Not yet.”

“Could you use Mind Transmission to tell him?” Sai asked.

Ino nodded and quickly wove the signs to use her jutsu. In a moment, Kakashi, Ino, and Sai were connected in their heads via the Mind Transmission Jutsu.

“Master, Sakura’s been kidnapped.” Ino explained the situation. “Sai and I are going to go look for her now.”

“You need backup?” Kakashi’s voice flowed through their heads. “Having said that, though, a lot of people are out on missions. The number of people I can mobilize right away is limited.”

“We’re fine just the two of us,” Sai said. “I’m sure Sakura is still alive. But if we do a large-scale search, there’ll be a commotion in the village, and they might just kill her immediately.”

“Okay, sorry, but I’m counting on you,” Kakashi said, apologetically. “I’d like to go with you, but a message came in from the Raikage over the wireless earlier. He said we should probably go ahead and have a meeting of the five Kages about putting Sasuke on the wanted list already. I’m going to discuss the situation and get them to wait a bit.”

“Master, please take care of that. We’ll handle—” Sai said, and Ino’s jutsu was released.

“But look for her where?” Ino said.

“I’ve been watching Kido for ten days or so now, I know a few of the places he goes around to. We’ll start there.”

“But they know that you’ve been investigating them, right? So they wouldn’t hold Sakura anywhere you might know about, would they?”

Sai nodded; Ino’s remark was exactly on point. “I’ve got an idea. It’s a bit of an aggressive way of doing things, though. Let’s go,” he said, and started moving.