Chapter 70: Resolve
Jiraiya led them out to a wooded stretch of riverbank on Konoha's outskirts.
When Sakura mentioned, in passing, that Naruto could already walk on water and had the Rasengan down, Jiraiya went quiet for a moment. He looked at the blond kid with an expression that was doing several things at once, none of them visible on the surface.
Then he made up his mind.
He summoned Gamatatsu again — the armored toad — and reached back to produce the Mount Myōboku summoning scroll. Naruto signed it. Jiraiya watched him do it with that same complicated expression, and smiled.
"Does this mean I can summon that toad?!" Naruto was staring at Gamatatsu with barely-contained excitement. "That cool toad?!"
"Theoretically, yes."
Naruto immediately started forming seals. Jiraiya caught his hands.
He turned toward Sakura, who was sitting cross-legged on the ground watching this with mild curiosity.
"So." A knowing smile. "You want the Heavenly Canopy Method from me."
"Help me with something first."
Sakura raised an eyebrow.
Jiraiya pointed at Naruto.
"Drain him dry."
?!
Naruto's face went crimson in approximately one second flat.
H-hey — I mean, I do like Sakura, but there's someone right here watching, and also she might not even— I mean—
He shot a sideways glance at Sakura, face burning, then snapped his eyes forward, then couldn't help another sideways look—
Sakura looked at Jiraiya.
Her eyes had narrowed slightly.
Naruto uses almost all his chakra suppressing the Nine-Tails. What he can actually access is a fraction of his total reserves — but even that fraction can produce thousands of shadow clones. Drain that fraction completely, push him past the wall, and the Nine-Tails' chakra starts bleeding through to fill the gap. Combine that with a fresh summoning contract and he'd have the raw power to actually call something from Myōboku.
That's what this is.
"Fine," Sakura said, and stood up.
!!!
She— she said yes—
Naruto's eyes went wide. He watched Sakura reach into her pouch.
And pull out a pair of black gloves.
He'd seen those gloves once before. In the Forest of Death. Right before Sakura had launched a punch that sent Orochimaru flying.
The flush drained from his face.
...This squeeze is not the squeeze I was thinking of.
"Naruto." Sakura turned to face him, pulling the second glove snug. "Come at me. Full strength."
Jiraiya stepped neatly to the side, found a comfortable tree to lean against, and watched.
"...You want me to attack you?"
Naruto stood there, caught between his body's instinct not to hit someone he cared about and the growing certainty that he'd badly misread this situation.
"What if I hurt—"
"You won't."
Flat. Certain. Not unkind.
Sakura looked at him, and something in her expression shifted — became more deliberate, like she'd decided this conversation needed to happen and now was as good a time as any.
"Naruto."
She touched her own chest. Right over the sternum.
"That spot. Orochimaru's sword went through it. In the Forest of Death."
Naruto's face did something complicated.
"Getting hurt just means I wasn't strong enough yet. If I'd been stronger, it wouldn't have happened." She held his gaze. "If you were stronger, Orochimaru couldn't have gotten close enough to do it in the first place."
I can't— Naruto's mind put together an image he hadn't seen and didn't want — Sakura, a sword, a forest — and something in his chest went hot and wrong.
If I'd actually been there—
If I'd seen that—
I think I would have—
"So I don't want to be weak," Sakura said. "That's not a complicated position. Weak hurts. Strong doesn't. The only direction is forward."
Her chakra moved. Her hair shifted with it, drifting slightly, and the green of her eyes in the afternoon light was very steady.
Six years, she thought. Six years in this world, and every single day I've been building toward something. Complaining the whole time — yes. But my hands never stopped moving.
From a man to a woman, from that world to this one, in a world where personal power is everything — the goal never changed. Get stronger. Get stronger. Keep going until I'm standing at the top of something.
She'd taken Orochimaru's sword and kept fighting.
The Hundred Healings could close a wound in her body. It couldn't do anything for resolve. That part she'd had to carry herself.
"Naruto." She raised her chin slightly. "You keep saying you want to be Hokage."
"Yeah—"
"I want that too."
He blinked.
"Not the title. The thing the title means." She looked at him steadily. "You've got it backwards, by the way. It's not 'become Hokage and then everyone acknowledges you.' It's 'earn everyone's acknowledgment, and that's how you become Hokage.'"
The words landed. She could see them landing.
"So." One corner of her mouth moved. "Someone who won't even come at me — can they earn my acknowledgment?"
Jiraiya, from his tree, was paying very close attention. He'd expected her to run a simple chakra-drain exercise. This had turned into something else. She meant all of it — every word — and the conviction in her voice was the kind you couldn't manufacture.
The old man made an interesting choice, he thought. For his last student.
Sakura raised one finger.
"Don't hold back. Come at me like you're trying to end it." She met his eyes. "If you hold back—"
She pointed her finger at the ground.
"You'll regret it."
She won't actually let anything happen to him. She's standing right here.
But Naruto didn't need to know that right now.
She drove her finger into the earth.
The ground cracked in a ring around her hand.
(End of Chapter 70)