"There she is, I'd recognise that chest— I mean, that face, anywhere!"
Sakura whirled around as half a dozen puppets burst out of the smoke. The uncanny reproductions of ants, centipedes, mantids and beetles swarmed from the treeline, producing a chorus of clicks and clacks as they advanced towards her with eerily irregular, inhumanly jerky movements.
"Scorch Style: Extremely Steaming Murder!"
Although the good old reliable Great Fireball Jutsu had never failed her before, Sakura had long since graduated from regular fire style techniques. Weaving three white-hot magatama into being, she sent them streaking into the puppets, causing their wooden frames to burst into flames almost immediately...
"Kiieeek!"
The puppets seemed to shriek in pain as the flames devoured them, but to Sakura's surprise, they continued scuttling towards her unimpeded… only their outer shells were made of wood! Beneath them lay a layer of reinforced ceramic that protected their inner mechanisms, rendering them impervious to heat!
"Puppet squad, move in! We need to buy the Gokage some time!"
Acrid purple smoke erupted from the puppets' bladelike forelimbs as the flames consumed the canisters concealed within. Evidently, they contained some kind of poison, and the volatile substance did not seem to tolerate heat very well. At the very least, Sakura did not need to fear being poisoned, but the puppets were still advancing towards her, and unlike them, her skin was hardly flame-retardant!
"Ceramic, eh?" Sakura commented as she deftly avoided a series of sharpened leg blades, swaying back and forth between them. "Heat, compression and slash-resistant, but…"
Sakura's chakra spiked.
"…very prone to shattering!" she shouted. "SHANNARO!!"
As far as materials went, ceramic was quite brittle, making it vulnerable to impacts, tension, shearing and torsion… or in other words, punching, pulling, tearing and twisting! To Sakura, it felt rather good to finally have an opportunity to let loose and use her superhuman strength to her heart's content.
BANG!
Sakura punched an ant puppet, shattering it in a single blow and sending its fragments shooting into its neighbour like a shotgun blast. The ceramic scraps lodged themselves in the beetle puppet's ports, impeding its movements as it tried to leap onto Sakura and slice her apart. Her Eternal Mangekyō Sharingan spun wildly as she tracked its movements, her hands going out like lightning and snapping off one of its blade limbs.
KABOOM!
Sensing that the puppet was not long for this world, its controller activated the explosive tags concealed within its thorax. Even if she was fast, the Hokage surely would not be able to dodge a point-blank detonation, while the shattered puppet's armour would double as a fragmentation grenade for good measure!
"Rotation!"
Still gripping the long, segmented leg blade, Sakura channelled chakra along its edge and spun like a top, the impervious bubble of chakra she generated repelling the blast and the flying puppet fragments even as her broken-off puppet leg's razor-sharp edge slashed through the nearest puppets' chakra strings.
"What kind of monster is she!?" one of the Sand-nin puppeteers shouted in despair. "She took out our most expensive puppets in less than five seconds!"
Following the cut chakra strings with her Sharingan, Sakura traced them back through the treeline to their origins, but as she flickered towards them, something intercepted her mid-jump, kicking her into a large boulder with an ear-shattering bang.
"You…" Sakura groaned as she pulled herself out of the rubble. "You're that bloke I faced in the Chūnin Exams… no wonder I didn't hear you coming."
That greyish hair, those scars down the side of his face and across his throat... that was Shira of the Hidden Sand Village, whose taijutsu had given even Sakura a fright. Back then, she had rendered him unconscious before he could fully unleash his technique (to her knowledge), which was comparable to the release of the Eight Inner Gates... scary stuff.
"This isn't the Chūnin Exams any more… this time, I can't lose," the young man said quietly. "I fight for Lady Pakura, for the Hidden Sand's future."
"Well said," Sakura said, bringing her hands together, "but I have no intention of fighting fairly!"
With a clap of her hands, her pectoral muscles tensed, sending her gelatinous breasts jiggling hypnotically. This was the sole reason she rarely used the Kurama clan's Psychosomatic Illusions Kekkei Genkai in conjunction with other genjutsu: it required exposing the enemy to a striking image, just like Yakumo and her paintings!
"Manyū Assassination Genjutsu: Breast Illusion!"
Unfortunately for Sakura, she was half a heartbeat too slow.
"Seven Heavens Breathing Method: First Activation!"
Someone whose chakra was running wild was impossible to place under a genjutsu, no matter how potent. Taijutsu shinobi like Lee-chan were usually rather easy to sink into illusions due to their straightforward natures, but once they opened their inner gates, it was too late.
"Shisui-style: Body Flicker Jutsu!"
Sakura hastily flickered out of the way as Shira flashed towards her, and with a single punch, he reduced what little remained of the boulder he had kicked her into to smithereens. Clad in his yellow aura, he was almost as freakishly fast and yellow as Naruto's dad had once been.
As Sakura screeched to a stop a few metres away, she winced and laid a hand on her side. That first attack, earlier… he had been aiming for one of her tenketsu.
"Seven Heavens Breathing Method: Second Activation!"
"Already!?" Sakura blurted out as Shira's muscles visibly expanded. "You Demon Slayer knockoff, you!"
Without wasting any more time, Sakura summoned a first stage Susano'o and swiped at him with a skeletal chakra hand as he attacked once more. However, instead of following through, he simply retreated, taking a deep breath as he wound down his breathing technique.
It seemed as though the Seven Heavens Breathing Method was far more flexible than the Eight Inner Gates. Usually, once the floodgates were opened, there was no taking back the unleashed chakra, even if the fight was over and the opponent defeated... but it seemed as though Shira could put his technique on pause whenever he wished.
Even so… it was still a sacrificial technique.
Shira's breathing technique imposed a special gradient on the oxygen flowing through his lungs, maximising its purity and absorption into the blood. However, even though oxygen was essential to life, it was still technically a poison, an incredibly potent oxidising agent in chemistry. The human body wasn't made to handle toxic levels of oxygen purity, and neither could the vastly accelerated blood flow induced by the technique be good for his veins and arteries, or his various other organs…
"Waiting me out, eh?" Sakura said glumly as she watched Shira fold his arms and raise his chin at her defiantly, as if daring her to come out of the G*ndam and fight him fair and square. "Damn it, I can't catch him wearing the Susano'o in open terrain. He's way too fast, so I need to bait him in..."
The Raikage was probably taking this opportunity to free Killer B from his prison, too… she needed to wrap this up quickly before they returned, because the last thing a long-range shinobi like herself wanted was to have three close-quarters combat specialists pressuring her at the same time.