Chapter 179: "Not a Good Day to Go Outside"
Purple poison mist poured from the puppet's open mouth, riding the cover of darkness, billowing toward Sakura in a wide rolling wall.
Sakura watched it come with mild interest.
She hadn't run into a serious poison specialist since her medical ninjutsu had matured fully. Most people who played with toxins simply didn't register as a threat anymore. She wouldn't even need the Yin Seal for this — her own medical technique could metabolize most things in real time.
The ninja world had exactly two people worth taking seriously on poison. One was Chiyo of the Sand, currently somewhere on the River Country front. The other was standing in front of her right now.
Just to be efficient about it, she pulled a small dark pellet from her pouch.
Haruno Special Soldier Pill, Version 2.0. Same base as the original — chakra restoration — with new functionality layered on top. Swallowed whole: anti-toxin. Crushed into powder and applied topically: hemostatic. Still tasted exactly as horrible as the original. A genuine upgrade in every other respect.
She ate it without hesitation, chewed, swallowed, and walked straight into the cloud.
"That mist is a proprietary formula," Sasori said, watching her approach with open disdain. "Not something a random pill solves."
He didn't wait to find out. He drove the puppet's magnetic release forward, shaping iron sand into triangular and rectangular masses and hurling them at her position inside the cloud, giving her no room to recover.
Sakura, inside the toxin, took a moment to actually smell it.
Strawberry.
Same rule as mushrooms — the prettier the color, the worse the poison.
He'd clearly engineered the scent to encourage deeper inhalation. Made it pleasant on purpose.
She broke it down by smell alone: abrus seed, castor bean, aconite, and — bulking out the mixture — a large quantity of dried, powdered strawberry.
Three minutes to onset, roughly, for that combination.
My pill works in two and a half.
Already irrelevant. Functionally just a smoke screen at this point.
Itachi watched from a distance, wanting to close in and unable to risk the cloud. Sasori hadn't planned around him in the first place — Sakura's combat profile had been public knowledge since Frost Country. Strength, summoning, an unkillable Yin Seal. No documented medical specialization beyond basic field healing.
Poisoning and wounding were not the same category of problem, and Sasori had bet on the wrong one.
The iron cube hit the cloud at full speed. Sakura treated the toxin like empty air, dropped low, and launched.
CRACK.
A heavy, dull impact split the night. The cube came apart, fragments scattering into the mist, and Sakura was already through it, closing on Sasori at full velocity.
Sasori's eyes narrowed.
The mist did nothing?
That was Scorpion 5.0. His best formula. Years of refinement.
"Magnetic Style — Iron Sand Drizzle!"
He fell back on the same approach — buy distance, keep the puppet's reach between himself and the threat. This was the entire logic of puppet combat: attrition through proxy, let inanimate things absorb the cost of engagement while the user stayed safe.
The spikes came at her again.
Sakura's patience, never deep, ran out.
A flick of the wrist released a hidden sealing scroll under her sleeve, and a pair of brass knuckles slid into place. Chakra ignited across both fists — tiger-head constructs forming, roaring, the sound carrying across the clearing.
The iron spikes hit the construct and turned to dust.
Sasori's mouth curved into something unsettling.
Equipment. Magnetic Release exists specifically to counter equipment.
He redirected immediately, trying to seize her brass knuckles through magnetic control, turn her own weapon against her.
Nothing happened.
Her speed didn't change. The knuckles kept burning, kept advancing, completely unaffected.
Sasori's composure broke.
This range. No escape window.
"DIE!"
She was already inside his guard.
He stepped back on reflex. It changed nothing.
A puppet body had limits, and those limits were the ceiling on everything he could do, regardless of preparation.
ROOOAR.
The tiger's jaws closed on his skull.
His head came apart.
The headless body did not fall. It kept moving — controlling the puppet, retreating with full coordination, as if losing the head had cost it nothing.
Still fighting? With no head?
Even braced for something unusual, Sakura felt the specific wrongness of it. She knocked aside a blade aimed at her ribs, spun, and put the headless body through the air with a roundhouse kick.
The body reconnected with Itachi a short distance away. From a storage scroll under one wide sleeve, it produced a spare head, fitted it to the neck, rolled the shoulders once, and continued as if nothing had happened.
"I should have mentioned," Itachi said, with the calm of someone delivering information slightly too late to matter, "her equipment is a Ninja Cat clan production. They reinforce their materials against magnetic interference specifically because magnetic-release is the natural counter to standard tools."
Sasori's expression, already poor, got worse.
"Why didn't you say that earlier?"
"You released a toxin cloud that size. I assumed you weren't planning to need the information."
Sakura watched the two of them regroup, calm.
An interesting pair. One had wiped out his own clan to the last child. The other had erased a small country, infants included. Common thread: neither had a documented limit on who was acceptable collateral.
Itachi got a provisional pass — Hiruzen's arrangement, and Sasuke's future eternal eyes, bought him a measure of patience she wouldn't extend to anyone else.
Sasori didn't have that.
He dies here tonight.
She bit her thumb, ran through the seals, and slammed her palm against the ground. The earth cracked open in a circle around the summoning seal as it bloomed outward.
"Summoning Jutsu — Great Demon Monkey King!"
White smoke surged upward. The towering humanoid summon resolved in front of both Akatsuki members.
Something cold settled in Sasori's stomach.
"Who are we dealing with this time, Sakura?"
Enma's arms folded, eyes locked on the two figures ahead.
"Akatsuki."
Three words. Enma's killing intent went up several notches without further explanation — both the closed Frost Country campaign and the ongoing River Country front had made Akatsuki the village's standing kill-on-sight list.
"I see," Enma said.
No further discussion needed.
"Demon Monkey King — Adamantine Staff!"
The familiar weapon dropped into Sakura's hand.
Itachi had no intention of engaging further. He turned.
"Split up," he said, to Sasori, and was already moving.
If Itachi wanted Sakura down, Susano'o was the only path with any chance of working — and even setting aside whether his current state could support it, he wasn't going to go to full lethal force against Hiruzen's student. Not for this.
So he made the rational choice.
He ran.
Sasori opened his mouth to object — two of them together, even against this, might have had something — but by the time he turned, Itachi was already a shadow dissolving into the dark.
Sakura was already moving.
Sasori snarled and committed the puppet's reserves.
"Magnetic Style — Sand Iron World!"
Black iron sand surged together, branching outward like a living lattice, spreading in every direction at once.
Sakura didn't slow down. The Adamantine Staff cut a clean arc and shattered the leading edge of the formation like it wasn't there.
Want to compare materials with a staff forged from a Great Demon Monkey King? Send Orochimaru's blade. Want to out-fight someone holding said staff in melee? Find a White Fang who's also learned Tsunade's strength, then have him bring the same sword.
One shout, one strike, and the entire spreading lattice came apart in pieces.
She closed the distance, the staff breaking iron branches with every swing, moving directly at him.
Sasori said nothing. His mouth had gone flat.
This kunoichi had taijutsu, medical technique, raw strength, and an indestructible weapon stacked on top of all of it. Every angle he had was covered. With Itachi gone, he had no backup and no realistic path to winning.
My art—
He looked at her closing the gap and made a decision he didn't like.
He tore off his Akatsuki robe, exposing the body underneath — almost entirely puppet construction, save the chest. Steel cable where his abdomen should have been, four scrolls strapped to his back, two folded blades at his hips.
He's committing.
Sakura's expression sharpened. Her pace didn't change.
Sasori raised both hands. Two barrel mechanisms emerged from his palms.
Scorched Earth Formation.
Flame poured out, white-hot, intense enough that the grass around him started withering and yellowing the instant it appeared.
Sakura ran through hand seals fast.
"Earth Release — Earth-Style Wall!"
Hiruzen's technique, and nothing like the version Kakashi did. A wall nearly three stories tall tore up out of the ground almost instantly.
Sasori registered it with something like respect.
The Third's student.
The white-hot fire hit the wall a moment later and started melting the surface where it impacted — even this scale of wall wasn't holding against Scorched Earth Formation indefinitely.
Then, from behind the wall, came the sound of something enormous taking a breath.
Sakura had used the cover to run her only other ninjutsu.
"Water Release — Water Dragon Bite-Crash!"
A dragon of water, several stories tall, erupted skyward, the roar of it shaking loose leaves off nearby trees.
Sasori felt something cold settle further. He had no time to redirect before the dragon was already coming down on him.
Sakura jumped, landed on the dragon's head, chakra blazing on the staff — blue and pink, a tiger's roar audible underneath the water's own.
Dragon and tiger together. The noise alone was enough to feel in the chest.
Sasori brought both barrels around to meet it.
The dragon's tail swept sideways and absorbed the fire stream directly. Steam exploded outward in a wall, blanketing the clearing.
Sakura's sensory formation cut through the steam without effort. The staff came down.
Sasori, in the half-second before impact, hit the release on his chest cavity in pure reflex.
Secret Technique — Hundred Puppets Performance.
It bought him nothing. The staff connected, and the body holding it came apart in pieces.
But the technique kept running — the shattered puppet's components scattering outward into the dark in every direction.
A core hidden inside one of three hundred decoys.
Sakura read it instantly. She drove the staff into the ground, both hands free, and eight shuriken appeared between her fingers.
She spun once and released all eight in a full circle.
Not held back this time — nothing like the sparring restraint she'd used on Sasuke. Maximum coverage.
"Shuriken Enlargement Technique."
"Shuriken Shadow Clone Technique."
Each blade swelled into a full Windmill Shuriken, then split into eight more, the night filling with a black rain radiating outward from her position.
Trees came down in clean cuts. Boulders fractured. Wherever a puppet fragment had been hiding, it stopped existing in any recognizable form.
When the rain settled, Sakura looked at the wreckage and frowned.
Under the sensing formation, nothing was moving except her and the staff.
Three hundred decoys, and he got the real one clear.
Still too slow.
Need more raw output. Faster throws mean nothing escapes the radius.
The noise had been substantial enough to draw attention. Before long, an ANBU squad arrived at speed.
"Lady Sakura — are you alright? What happened here?"
The squad leader took in the cratered earth, the melted slag where the wall had stood, the stripped tree line, the scattered puppet parts, and visibly worked to keep his expression professional.
"Nothing major. Couple of rats wandered into the village. Dealt with it."
She picked up the abandoned puppet — the one Sasori hadn't managed to recover in his rush to escape — and dropped it in front of the squad.
"This one runs on magnetic release. Take it to the old man."
"Clean up out here too."
She turned to Enma.
"Go report to the old man. I have somewhere to be."
She walked off toward the detention block without waiting for a response from anyone, ANBU or summon.
Enma watched the pink shape disappear and pulled a face.
Used to call me 'Lord Enma.' Now it's just Enma.
At this rate it'll be 'old monkey' next.
The squad leader surveyed the cratered field, the cooling slag, the bare ground where a forest used to be, and thought, not for the first time, that this was the woman who had killed the Fourth Raikage in a straight fight.
It tracked.
Three minutes earlier.
Itachi exhaled, working some of the tightness out of his chest, and listened to the dragon's roar and the tiger's snarl fading behind him as he walked toward the Sarutobi residence.
Running into Sakura hadn't been ideal. But it had solved one problem for him — Sasori was no longer his concern. He had a clean opening now to find Hiruzen alone.
Sakura was not going to lose to Sasori. He had no doubt about that.
As for Sasori himself — that outcome was out of Itachi's hands now. Whatever happened, the noise had been loud enough that if Zetsu came to check, Pain wouldn't have grounds to fault Itachi specifically. Bad timing, bad luck — running into the one off-duty kunoichi in the village still awake and roaming after midnight.
He kept walking.
A figure stepped into his path.
Itachi's composure, already strained from the night's events, wavered.
Her again.
He'd shaken her off once. Had the fight with Sasori carried far enough for her to track him back here?
"Well, well." The woman leaning against the tree trunk had her arms crossed, studying him with open amusement. "I thought some rat had wandered in from somewhere. Didn't expect it to be the man who gutted the entire Uchiha clan."
"You slipped away from me earlier. That won't happen twice tonight."
Mei Terumi tilted her head, taking him in with the unhurried attention of someone who already knew how this was going to go.
Itachi exhaled internally.
I should have checked the almanac before leaving the safehouse today.
Apparently today was not a good day to go outside.
She didn't wait for him to recover his footing.
"Boil Release — Skilled Mist Technique!"
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