The air on the bridge turned heavy, the sound of the rushing water below suddenly amplified in the silence. Sasuke's eyes narrowed, his Sharingan tracking the subtle shift in Sakura's stance. He had expected her to crumble, to weep, or to be paralyzed by the shock of his cruelty. He hadn't expected her to find her voice.
"With all the strength you thought you had," Sakura repeated, her voice dropping to a low, dangerous vibration, "you never actually tried to understand, Sasuke."
She didn't wait for his retort. She didn't wait for him to call her a nuisance again.
Sakura lunged. It wasn't the desperate, flailing attack of a heartbroken girl; it was the calculated strike of a medic who knew exactly where the human body was most fragile.
Sasuke moved to parry, his movements fluid and arrogant, but he miscalculated the sheer pressure of her resolve. When her fist connected with his forearm, the ground beneath them didn't just crack—it shattered. The shockwave traveled up his arm, rattling his teeth.
"You think your hatred makes you deep?" she spat, her green eyes burning with a cold, newfound clarity. "It makes you simple. It makes you predictable."
She swung again, a horizontal kick aimed at his ribs that forced him to leap backward. She was breathing heavily, not from exhaustion, but from the sheer weight of the emotional armor she was welding into place. With every strike, she felt a piece of her old self—the girl who saved his seat at the academy, the girl who practiced her confession in the mirror—shrivel and die.
Sasuke landed gracefully, but his breath was hitched. He looked at her, truly looking at her for the first time in years, and saw the wall she was building. It wasn't a wall of fear; it was a wall of indifference.
"You're pathetic," Sasuke hissed, though his hand drifted toward the hilt of his Kusanagi. "Analysis won't save you from the reality of power."
"Power?" Sakura let out another short, jagged laugh. She stood amidst the rubble of the bridge, her medical chakra flickering around her hands like a ghostly flame. "You've traded everything for power, and yet you're still a slave to a dead man's ghost. You aren't the only one who can be cold, Sasuke. I'm done trying to reach you. From now on, I'm only going to outrun you."
The pain in her heart was still there, a dull, throbbing ache behind the wall, but she pushed it down, burying it under layers of iron-hard discipline. She realized then that to survive him, she had to stop treating him like a person and start treating him like a target.
She centered her chakra, her gaze locking onto his with a clinical detachment that mirrored his own. The girl who loved Sasuke Uchiha was dead; in her place stood a shinobi of the Leaf, and she was no longer pulling her punches.
"Come on then," she whispered, the wind whipping her short hair across her face. "Show me that power you traded your soul for. Let's see if it's enough to keep me down this time."
To be continued