8

1

Several fierce collisions thundered through the air before the forest finally fell silent again.

Sakura started walking in the direction Kido had flown off.

Her opponent was flat on the ground in a slightly open area of the forest, broken and beaten.

Slowly, without letting her guard down, Sakura approached him. He seemed to be unconscious; the Tailed Beast chakra was gone, and he was back to his uniformed appearance.

At that moment, she heard Ino’s voice from above her head.

“Sakuraaaa!”

Lifting her face, she saw three birds and then Sai and Ino dropping down from their backs, followed by Kakashi, Naruto, and Hinata.

“Master Kakashi… Guys…”

“Sorry we’re late,” Kakashi said.

“You manage okay, Sakura?” Naruto asked.

“Yeah. Somehow.”

“Nice work taking him down alone,” Kakashi said, looking at Kido.

“Although I’m just barely standing,” Sakura said, with a wry smile. In fact, her chakra was almost entirely depleted. “What about Magire?”

“Me and Ino, we managed,” Sai replied.

“He can’t move because of my paralysis drug,” Ino added. “But just in case, Sai’s clone is standing guard.”

At that moment, the supposedly unconscious Kido let out a faint groan. “Kakashi…?”

“Don’t do anything stupid. If I see you moving even an inch, I’ll cut you down,” Kido informed the other man, coolly.

They could hear Kido clicking his tongue softly.

“So this guy was trying to make some kind of weird drug, yeah, Sakura?” Naruto asked.

“He was. Using your hair and Sasuke’s.”

“Creepy!” Naruto stuck his tongue out.

“A Tailed Beast drug and a sharingan drug, hmm? It’s definitely creepy, but if something like that got out into the world, it’d be more than a little hassle. And if the bad guys could just power up so easily, controlling them’d be serious work too,” Kakashi said, and shrugged.

“But we stopped the sharingan drug at least,” Ino said.

“And the Tailed Beast drug too,” Sai said. “If we search their hideouts, we should be able to seize all of that too.”

“I suppose so. All that’s left now is to hand them over to the interrogation—” Kakashi abruptly cut himself off and narrowed his eyes sharply.

“Master?” said a puzzled Sakura on behalf of them all.

“I’m getting a Mind Transmission voice from the Barrier Team,” Kakashi said, before putting a hand to his forehead and conversing with the Mind Transmission sender.

“Got it.” Once he was done the conversation, Kakashi turned to Sakura and the others. “Several people wearing Anbu masks apparently slipped out of the village.”

“The Anbu?”

Kakashi nodded and turned his eyes on Kido. “Your subordinates?”

Kido smiled thinly. “In all my safe houses, I’ve placed receivers linked with my chakra and life signs. It’s set up so that an emergency alarm sounds if my chakra decreases significantly. The standing instruction for my subordinates is to leave the village immediately when it goes off. With the drugs.”

Kakashi clicked his tongue. “Well prepared.”

“You sure it’s okay for your subordinates to run?” Sakura asked. “You’re going to be put in prison, you know.”

“I take responsibility for being defeated in battle. I will submit to imprisonment. But in exchange, my subordinates will spread the Tailed Beast drug outside the village. The ninja world will be destroyed, and public order will fall at once. And that will be my gratification.” Kido chuckled.

“Where are your subordinates headed?” Kakashi asked.

“Do you really think I’d answer that?”

“I don’t. So sleep for me for a bit,” Kakashi replied, and chopped at the back of Kido’s neck with the edge of a straightened hand. Kido fell unconscious. “We’ll go after them right away. Barrier Team said they broke the barrier on the north side of the village and went out there. Sai, your birds.”

Nodding, Sai called in the birds on standby in the sky.

“Just in case, Naruto and I will leave clones here.”

“Understood.”

Kakashi and Naruto wove signs and used their clone jutsu.

“Take care of this,” Kakashi instructed the new clones before jumping onto a bird with Sakura and the others.

They were split up in pairs: Sai and Ino, Kakashi and Sakura, and Naruto and Hinata. The birds rose up into the air and started toward the north.

“Honestly. Right up to the very last of it, he’s giving me headaches,” Kakashi said, with a sigh.

“You think we can catch them?” Ino said, uneasily, on top of the bird next to him.

“If they increase their chakra with the Tailed Beast drug, they’ll be able to travel pretty fast,” Sai noted. “It’s iffy.”

“Hinata, if you see anything, say something, okay?” Naruto called out.

“Okay!” came Hinata’s reply. Before long, she cried out. “Ah! Toward our ten o’clock! I can see a fire!”

“A fire?” Kakashi asked.

“Yes. And some people on the ground…”

The row of birds changed course and flew ahead even faster.

Finally, the scene became visible to Sakura and the others as well. Several people were collapsed in the grassy plain below them. Around the bodies, they could faintly make out smoke rising up.

“What is that?!” Ino cried out.

“We’re going down!” Kakashi said, and the birds lowered their altitude.

Sakura and the others leapt off the birds’ backs onto the ground and raced over to the scene.

The people collapsed there were Anbu ninja. None of them were dead, but all of them had totally disrupted chakra and their awareness was clouded. Meaning genjutsu had been used on them.

Genjutsu…?! Sakura gasped and sent her eyes racing around the area.

She felt like she saw a human shadow momentarily cut across the forest at the far reaches of her vision. A glimpse of a back in a turban and a coat.

Sakura almost cried out. But in the time it took for her to blink, the figure was gone. She squinted and strained her eyes, but she couldn’t sense any aura or chakra.

Just my imagination?

No. It can’t be…

She heard Ino speaking. “So what is this? What happened?”

“Mm. Somehow…apparently, someone caught up with them before we did and finished them off for us,” Kakashi said, crossing his arms.

“Finished them off for us?” Ino asked.

“You guys know, don’t you?” Kakashi asked Team Seven, grinning playfully.

“Yes.” Sakura smiled, and Naruto rubbed the bottom of his nose with a chuckle. Sai also grinned brightly when he got it.

Traces of Fire Style jutsu. The Anbu members attacked with genjutsu. And—maybe it had just been her imagination, but—that figure she saw for an instant from behind.

“What?! You don’t mean Sasuke?!” Ino shouted.

“Well, that’s probably it.”

“The real one? Seriously?”

“Pretty sure that was the real one,” Kakashi said, laughing.

“What? Then why isn’t he here?”

“He probably went back,” Sai said. “To his traveling.”

“No no no, that’s just cold. I mean, the village is totally not far from here, right? He could at least stop by. Right, Sakura?”

“Right,” Sakura replied, but strangely, she didn’t feel sad about it.

After not reacting at all to this whole thing, practically telling them to handle it themselves, Sasuke came back in the end. She was happy to know this.

On his way back to the village, Sasuke came across the Anbu members cloaked in the Tailed Beast chakra. They fought, and he won with his Fire Style and genjutsu.

If he used his sharingan, he could read his opponent’s memory.

So he probably read the memory of one of the Anbu there. So when he learned about the decisive battle fought by Sakura and the others against Kido, he took in the fact that Kido’s chakra suddenly dropped, and figured out that these Anbu were fleeing the village.

If the big boss Kido had been defeated, then there was nothing left for him to do. He would go back to his journey. And then Sasuke left this place…

This was how Sakura imagined the events that had so recently taken place there.

“I dunno.” Naruto shrugged. “Doing what needs to be done, and then up and disappearing, that sounds pretty much like Sasuke.”

“It really does.” Sakura giggled. But she was glad to just be able to feel these lingering echoes of this “Sasuke-ness.”

“But, you know, since you guys took down Kido and Magire, I figured it was about time for me to step up. And then Sasuke comes along and steals my thunder here.” Kakashi shook his head regretfully.

“If you’re having digestion trouble, Master, did you want to run back home?” Sai said. “We’ll be taking the birds, though.”

“Oh, I’m not going to get all worked up just for the sake of it,” Kakashi replied, immediately. “That’s more Guy’s style.”

They all burst out laughing at the Hokage’s light tone.

2

Tsumiki Kido and Magire were transferred to the custody of the interrogation force. The investigation proceeded with Morino Ibiki in the lead, but at first, Kido and Magire held their tongues. So Ibiki changed methods, switching from oral interrogation to reading his prisoners’ minds.

The intelligence division’s specialized machine was readied, and someone from the Yamanaka clan was called in to be the examiner.

No matter how tightly they might have kept their mouths shut, it was pointless when their minds could be read with the machine and the jutsu.

As a result, Kakashi and his team learned a number of things concerning the Kido faction. Most notably, the locations of safe houses and hideouts within the village. And the other members of the faction.

By cracking the safe houses and hideouts, they were able to seize all of the Tailed Beast drug. The confiscated drug was brought to Shizune, who began analysis on it, together with the information read from Kido’s and Magire’s minds.

“So they really did collect Naruto’s hair and blood from the Final Valley. And then they extracted the Tailed Beast chakra and made the drug,” Kakashi said in the Hokage’s Office.

Sakura, Ino, and Sai took in this report, standing in front of his desk.

“But could they really make the drug with just that?” Sakura asked. “And in such large quantities?”

“There’s a story to that. They went and found someone with the blood of the Sage of Six Paths and forced him to help with researching and producing the Tailed Beast drug.”

“The Sage of Six Paths…?” Sakura furrowed her brow.

Kakashi nodded before turning toward Ino. “You don’t remember, Ino? The brothers Kinkaku and Ginkaku who used to be in Kumogakure?”

“Of course I remember. We fought them in the war, after all,” Ino replied.

Ninja brothers, powerful in the village of Kumogakure. In the last Great War, they had been brought back to life with Edo Tensei and fought Ino’s team. Sakura knew this as well.

“But what does that…?”

“Kinkaku and Ginkaku ate the flesh of Nine Tails and gained Tailed Beast chakra. Kido and his team took a clue from that and came up with the Tailed Beast drug, apparently.” Kakashi paused before continuing, “They collected Naruto’s personal material in the Final Valley. The amount of chakra they got from that was too little to make into a drug. So they needed to make more. And Sakura and Ino, you two probably know more about this than I do, but when you’re cultivating cells, you need a medium, right?”

“That’s right. Something to feed the cells you want to grow, some kind of base for them,” Sakura said.

“This descendant of the Sage of Six Paths—well, it was some boy in one of the small lands to the south, but anyway—Kido and Magire kidnapped him and locked him up in one of their safe houses. Then they made him donate some tissue and used that as a medium to increase the amount of Naruto’s Tailed Beast chakra.”

The boy had refused. Naturally. He was a boy from a country with nothing whatsoever to do with Konoha, living a very normal life as a noncombatant. But Kido had used threats and drugs to break his will. Unable to resist, the boy had been forced to donate tissue under the supervision of Kido’s faction.

“And now he’s…?” Sakura asked.

“Don’t worry,” Kakashi replied. “He was rescued when we searched their hideouts.”

“Thank goodness.” Sakura breathed a sigh of relief, and Ino and Sai exchanged a look.

“And,” Kakashi announced. “There’s one more report from the examiner who dove into Kido’s memories.” But instead of continuing immediately, Kakashi took a moment, almost as if choosing his words carefully. “The primary factor in this incident—I’m not sure if we can say for sure, but it’s about Kido’s upbringing. Tsubaki Kido was born into a poor family…”

The story Kakashi then told was one to make their hearts ache, when seen from the point of view of the recent series of events.

A father who, in order to send his son to the academy, quit taking his own medication, and instead took empty capsules. A painful story.

Although the Land of Fire, where the village of Konohagakure was situated, was relatively wealthy compared with the other five great nations, this sort of thing still happened.

An abnormal fixation on money. Military business through drugs. The connections with Kido’s youth were obvious. But…

“That said, this mess Kido caused now, we can’t just wave it off like it was bound to happen,” Kakashi noted.

Sakura and the others frowned slightly. It was a tough problem. Not the sort of thing where you could simply say “do this” and be done with it.

“Well, as Hokage, I’m just going to make sure I create a village where we don’t see kids going through this kind of thing,” Kakashi declared.

∞

“I’m glad we created the children’s therapy center,” Sakura said to Ino and Sai after they had left the Hokage’s Residence.

“Because of that story about Kido’s childhood?” Ino asked, and she nodded.

“Yeah. We really can’t just leave kids with that kind of emotional trauma.”

In that last fight, Kido had denied there was any meaning to the children’s therapy center. He had aggressively asserted that the center would only increase the number of weak children in the world.

Was it his own painful experiences during childhood making him spit such bitterness at her?

There was nothing like that for me. Don’t spoil them. I made it through on my own strength. Maybe that kind of hard feeling drove Kido.

But this was from the man had put into motion the recent scheming and trouble. Thinking about it like that, she felt even more keenly how critical it was to care for children’s minds. It was hard to treat mental scars.

She glanced at Sai. He’d also gone through a cruel childhood. A war orphan, he had joined Root and been forced into fierce training. He’d had painful partings as well.

Back when they first met, Sai was like an emotionless machine. Not only did he not smile, he was a boy who didn’t even know at what sorts of times anyone smiled. He could definitely smile now, though. And get mad. Because he had friends right there alongside him to heal those mental scars.

And Sasuke too. Sakura’s thoughts turned to the traveler.

The tragedy of his clan—his boyhood was one of being tossed around by destiny. Nearly carried away by hatred, what saved Sasuke was Naruto and all of his other friends in the village.

It would be so great if the children’s therapy center could be a friend like that, Sakura thought. A place you could visit freely and talk about anything. And if you were bad at talking, then you could just be bad at it. They would work on their side to make it so you could get the words out—they would wait until you said something. That kind of place.

“I want this to be a village where all the children are laughing,” Sakura said. “Although that might be hard to do.”

It might be hard. But this whole incident had only strengthened her conviction that they had to try.

“Yeah,” Ino said, and Sai smiled.

“Sakura!” A voice called out.

Turning around, she saw a younger medical ninja who worked at Konoha Hospital running toward them. It was the woman who had reported on the results of the therapy center at the last meeting.

“The medical ninja of Sunagakure have come with a number of questions about the children’s therapy center,” this younger ninja said.

“They have? Okay, I’m coming,” Sakura replied.

“I’ll come too?” Ino asked.

Sakura was about to agree, but quickly rethought that. “Mm, it’s okay. I’ll take care of it.”

“But—” Ino began, but Sakura leaned over to whisper in her ear.

“It’s okay. You go and get something to eat with Sai.”

“Hey…” Ino’s face grew red as if to say “Don’t get the wrong idea.”

“It’s okay!” Sakura said again. “Ino-Saku-Sai was just this once,” she whispered. “And once you’re given a mission on a formal team again, you won’t have as many chances to be alone together, you know?”

When Sakura pointed this out, Ino’s feelings seemed to resolve themselves.

“Right, okay then.” Ino nodded.

“See you later.” Sakura waved a hand and turned on her heel.

Maybe I shouldn’t have butted in.

Heading toward the hospital with the younger ninja, Sakura looked back at Sai and Ino walking side by side. Sometimes, she saw smiles on their faces that had the same air to them as the ones she had seen before on Naruto’s and Hinata’s.

Lavender and dogwood.

Ino didn’t know which to choose, but Sakura thought the answer would probably come unexpectedly fast.

You can do it, Ino! she yelled after her friend in her heart.

The Sakura of a little while ago would have been panicking. Everyone’s finding love; she was the only one who wasn’t. That sort of thing.

But she was different now.

“I’ll see you soon.”

That “soon” was bound to come. She even thought it was maybe almost time for it to be “soon.”

When Sasuke came home, she wanted to talk about this mess with Kido—she wanted to talk about so many other things with him too.

Welcome home, Sasuke.

The thing is, I…

“I’m back, Sakura.”

Author/artist Masashi Kishimoto was born in 1974 in rural Okayama Prefecture, Japan. Like many kids, he was first inspired to become a manga artist in elementary school when he read Dragon Ball by Akira Toriyama. After spending time in art college, he won the Hop Step Award for new manga artists with his story Karakuri. After considering various genres for his next project, Kishimoto decided on a story steeped in traditional Japanese culture.

His first version of Naruto, drawn in 1997, was a one-shot story about fox spirits; his final version, which debuted in Weekly Shonen Jump in 1999, quickly became the most popular ninja manga in the world. The series would also spawn multiple anime series, movies, novels, video games and more. Having concluded the series in late 2014, Masashi Kishimoto has kept himself busy this year with the sidestory Naruto: The Seventh Hokage and the Scarlet Spring and writing the story for the latest Naruto movie, Boruto: Naruto the Movie both of which will focus on the title character’s son, Boruto.

Born in Hiroshima Prefecture, Ohsaki was the winner of the ninth Jump Novel Grand Prix. He has adapted the manga Gin Tama and Nura: Rise of the Yokai Clan into novels, and writes the manga Te to Kuchi, with artist Mizuki Kawashita. He has an established reputation as a skilled author of period pieces and comedy.