Chapter 147: Mei Terumī Gets Lost
Late night.
Sakura was having a problem.
The combined technique she'd named the Spiral Mountain Formation — Kushina's Mystic Palm Eye paired with Ino's Yamanaka arts — was too strategically vital to leave unguarded. For the past several weeks, both girls had been essentially attached to Sakura at all times.
Same meals. Same tent. Same sleeping arrangements.
Soft warmth on both sides. Not that it was doing anything for Sakura emotionally — mostly she felt a mild, persistent exhaustion.
It had been lively at first. After a while, it just became noise.
Ino and Kushina were natural enemies. They found something to argue about roughly every four hours. If they had a difference of opinion, they escalated immediately.
And both of them had decided that Sakura's arm was the optimal pillow, which meant she spent every night as a human mattress, and at least once per night one of them would roll over and mutter "you're lying on my hair" into the darkness.
You're lying on my ENTIRE ARM, Sakura did not say, because she was trying to get some sleep.
Pre-dawn light.
Sakura drifted awake. Arms: completely numb. She blinked.
My arms. I can't feel my arms.
She began the process of extracting them, carefully, and looked at the red pressure marks running up both forearms. She rubbed them back to life.
Then she stopped.
Killing intent.
"Sakura~"
The voice drifted in from somewhere very close behind her.
She turned slowly.
Kushina's red hair was in full early-morning chaos, one side pressed flat against her head. There was a red mark on her forehead.
Sakura had knocked the water bottle off the nightstand while rubbing her arm. It had landed directly on Kushina's skull.
"Ah. Ha. Kushina. Good morning."
"SAKURA—"
Here we go again.
Ino, yanked from sleep by the noise, rubbed her eyes and looked at both of them with the dead-eyed expression of someone who had endured this too many times.
"You two are so loud."
"What did you say, Ino-PIG?"
"What did YOU say, OCTOPUS?!"
Sakura walked out of the tent and sat on the small stool by the entrance, leaving them to it.
Half a month since she'd returned to the Frost Country front.
After the first few Kumogakure guerrilla squads were wiped out — over a hundred ninja eliminated in rapid succession once the Spiral Mountain Formation went active — the harassment had tapered off sharply. They'd clearly realized the tactic wasn't working anymore and stopped throwing people into it.
Sakura stared at the last embers of the morning fire.
White Zetsu. That was how Kumogakure had been reading Konoha's positions so accurately. No Zetsu had been caught, which meant Akatsuki's support was real but limited — they were willing to provide intelligence, not direct combat assistance.
White Zetsu was too valuable to sacrifice for a side engagement. And Kumogakure's own strength was high enough that the Akatsuki didn't need to commit fighting assets.
What they wanted was a messy, prolonged war. Not a quick resolution in either direction.
She stood up.
If you know what the enemy wants — do the opposite. Deny it to them.
Akatsuki hadn't committed fighters to help Kumogakure directly. So the answer was to end this fast, before they changed that calculation.
Kumogakure was dug in and waiting. That meant forcing them out.
A turtle in its shell was only comfortable until someone brought the pressure to the shell itself.
Push to the Lightning Country border. Make staying comfortable an impossibility.
"There's a problem with that."
Kakashi raised the objection once Sakura had laid out the plan.
Jiraiya had no objections. Kakashi did.
"If we push and they choose not to engage — they could bypass us entirely. Strike our rear. Or worse, cross into the Land of Fire directly. What's our answer if they do that?"
Kushina's sensory range was extraordinary, but she was one person, fixed with the main force. The Kumogakure ninja had demonstrated multiple times that their own sensor capability was well above normal — they had more than one asset of comparable quality.
And the value comparison was straightforward: pushing into the Land of Lightning meant fighting over mountains and cliffs. Pushing into the Land of Fire meant fighting over one of the most resource-rich territories in the ninja world.
If the calculation was purely about what to raid, Konoha's backyard won easily.
And right now, Fire Country's interior defense was thin. The River Country engagement had cost four thousand ninja. Kagami Uchiha had taken a fresh batch to reinforce. The village currently had three to four thousand defenders at most — not enough to stop the Raikage's personal strike force.
Kumogakure, by contrast, had held a significant reserve. The Third Raikage's legendary last stand against ten thousand Iwa ninja had preserved much of the village's combat capacity. This war had only ever called on a portion of it.
Push too hard and too fast, and they could find themselves caught between two fronts.
Sakura didn't dispute any of that. She also didn't say it out loud, but she was fairly confident the Raikage wouldn't try the exchange.
The old man and Tsunade were both in the village. Either one of them could hold a border. And the Raikage couldn't afford to play that game, because—
Turtle Island.
The real Falls of Truth. The reason Kumogakure produced perfect jinchūriki at a rate no other village could match — the secret marriage of the waterfall's resonance with Uzumaki sealing arts.
If that location became known, Kumogakure would become the next Uzushiogakure.
The Raikage understood that lesson intimately. He'd been part of the force that burned Uzushio to the ground.
Letting Konoha's forces enter Lightning Country territory was a risk he simply could not accept. Not with the Eight-Tails at home.
The strongest tailed beast in recorded history wasn't the Eight-Tails — but that was exactly the kind of misconception a smart enemy would love to let stand.
With the Eight-Tails there, with Turtle Island there, with everything that implied —
He wasn't going to gamble.
Sakura looked at Jiraiya.
Jiraiya scratched his chin.
He had a reasonable sense of where Sakura's reasoning had taken her.
"The problem is the Lord of the Land of Fire. This isn't something the old man can explain easily."
He looked at her with genuine regret.
And voted the proposal down.
Sakura kept her expression neutral and said nothing further.
She'd missed something. The political layer — the lords of the great nations, the web of nominal authority that ninjas operated within and underneath.
She'd only been thinking about how to win the fight.
Fire Country was supposed to be Konoha's own backyard. The idea of having to let the enemy dictate the geometry of the engagement because a man with a fan and a face full of powder needed a politically defensible explanation—
This was the first time Sakura had genuinely disliked the structure she operated within.
She had power. She could move things. And yet she was still leashed by people who couldn't fight their way out of a paper bag, because that was how the system worked.
She'd spent enough time being a subordinate that she'd learned to work inside constraints.
She just wasn't sure she liked it.
Before the thought could go further, someone touched the tent's barrier from outside. Everyone went quiet.
At Jiraiya's signal, the visitor entered and addressed him with a respectful nod.
"Jiraiya-sama. A missing-nin from Kirigakure has arrived at the camp perimeter."
"She's asking to speak with you."
(Chapter End)
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