Chapter 186: Your Ranking Among the Kage Is Dead Last
Shikaku Nara — clan head of the Nara, and one of Hiruzen's most capable lieutenants.
Internal matters went to Shikaku. External matters went to Sakura.
"This setup mirrors Frost Country pretty closely."
Shikaku had picked up on Zetsu's presence faster than anyone else in the room.
"Exactly."
"Which confirms that the sensory anomaly we ran into in Frost Country wasn't Kumo. It was Akatsuki." Sakura nodded to him.
"What if Kumo decides to come back for another round?" Chōza scratched his head.
"They won't. Not unless they're willing to give up Turtle Island." Sakura dismissed the concern immediately — though she had no intention of ever actually returning Turtle Island regardless of what the treaty said. Five years was the stated term. By the time that clock ran out, the Raikage would be five years deeper into the ground than he already was. Keep dreaming on that timeline.
Shikaku stroked his chin, working through something.
He'd never quite understood why Konoha had traded away so much else just to secure Turtle Island specifically. Sakura's tone now made it obvious there was something genuinely significant out there. Kumogakure's situation, though, was settled. Sand was the live problem.
"So what's your read on the Sand situation?" Homura asked.
Sakura had already proven herself decisively in Frost Country. Homura wasn't going to make the mistake of treating her like an ordinary Konoha shinobi anymore.
She looked around the room with a faint, strange smile and held up three fingers.
"Three days."
"That's how long it takes to finish Sand."
...
!
The room went still.
Everyone stared at her.
What did she just say? They'd been grinding through this front for months already.
"My arrival here was leaked before I even crossed the border. No point hiding it now."
"So I'm not going to hide."
"It's not just Sand who knows my squad's target is Kakuzu. He knows it too."
Homura frowned, thinking it through.
"You mean a full frontal assault? Immediately?"
She nodded.
"This war's only been a few months long, but the casualties already exceed anything from the previous shinobi wars combined. All of you understand that better than I do."
Homura stayed quiet, weighing it. He trusted her judgment. But ending a campaign like this in three days felt closer to fantasy than strategy.
In his experience, war was a slower exchange — scouting, ambush, baiting, encirclement, direct assault, defense, repeat. Lightning campaigns existed, but they were typically small elite units, executed through a single decapitation strike by one exceptional fighter, or a small handful of them working together.
A small handful of them, working together.
His eyes moved to Sakura, then to Kakashi and Mei standing behind her.
"Our objective is Kakuzu. Killing him is the only acceptable answer at this point."
"And now that they know I'm here — wouldn't I be their objective too?"
"Think it through from their side, Elder Homura. If you were running Sand command, and you'd just learned I'm on this front — what would you be thinking?"
Homura said nothing.
What would he be thinking?
A new-generation force rising this fast, this absurdly — if he were commanding the other side, he'd throw everything he had at removing that threat right now, before it grew any further. Strategic priorities be damned. Bury her under sheer numbers if that's what it took.
Never let something like this mature.
Because if you didn't—
"Sakura. You're proposing yourself as bait?"
Homura's voice trailed off mid-sentence.
The logic wasn't unsound. Chiyo would never pass up an opportunity like this. But the risk involved was enormous.
This was Hiruzen's chosen successor. Barring some catastrophic mistake along the way, she was on track to become the Fifth Hokage — possibly the Sixth, depending on how things shook out. Betting her life on this kind of gambit, and getting it wrong, could break Hiruzen entirely.
"Yes. The moment I show myself, I become their primary target."
"We want Kakuzu dead. Sand wants me dead."
"So let's find out whose fist is harder."
Sakura said it with complete ease, like placing herself directly in the path of danger was the most ordinary thing in the world.
"Sakura."
It wasn't Homura who spoke next, or Shikaku.
It was Inoichi.
Ino's father.
The pale-yellow-haired man — the same color as his daughter's — studied his daughter's close friend with real seriousness.
"Can you tell me what's actually backing this confidence?"
Sakura looked at him and extended an open palm.
Nothing visible in it.
Then, a heartbeat later: blue chakra flame ignited across her palm, dense, solid — chakra given physical form.
And inside the blue, something gold bloomed.
A single thread of golden flame, fragile-looking, as if it might gutter out any second.
Everyone in the tent went still.
Chōza, in particular, stared.
The Akimichi clan had spent centuries studying multiplication techniques and the theory behind yang-release as a foundation for their entire combat philosophy. Centuries — and not once in that span had anyone successfully manifested yang chakra in physical, tangible form.
Doing that took not just deep theoretical understanding of yang-release, but raw aptitude no one in the Akimichi line had ever carried.
Watching that gold flame radiate something close to genuine life-force, Chōza swallowed.
This wasn't simply a technical achievement. It meant something structurally larger: the girl standing in front of them had set foot on a path nobody currently alive had walked.
Hashirama himself might once have had the aptitude for this exact road — but he'd taken the Wood Release branch instead.
And now, someone else had chosen the other path entirely.
"Sakura..." Chōza's breathing had gone short.
"My confidence comes from this. From my yang-release."
Sakura's voice carried the same flicker as the flame in her hand, but the certainty underneath it was steady as bedrock.
Yang-release governed the physical body. Combined with her existing strength, medical technique, and the foundation she'd already built — the new technique amplified all of it at once. Strength, speed, recovery, reaction time, dynamic vision — every category, simultaneously, with no gap left exposed. Even her chakra reserve had grown noticeably.
And this was only the beginning.
The technique's core principle was cultivation — sustained nourishment across all 130 trillion cells in her body. The longer she ran it, the stronger her physical foundation became. There was no ceiling built into the process.
Put simply: the longer she lived, the stronger she got, automatically, as a structural property of the technique itself. Yang-release was, by design, slowly converting her into something approaching a perfected biological system.
That was the entire premise. That was the road she'd chosen to walk.
Before any of this, she'd already carried raw strength, the Yin Seal's Strength of a Hundred, two S-tier summons, and combat capability already at peak-Kage level.
Add the yang-release body technique on top, and the entire profile shifted into something new.
If a tier had to be assigned — call it Super-Kage.
A rookie one, sure. But Super-Kage all the same.
And this was just the opening move.
Homura accepted the plan.
Sakura as bait, leading directly into a full frontal assault.
A day passed. Homura launched the offensive without further hesitation.
A light breeze moved across the field. River Country was green and lush — among the smaller nations, this one had the healthiest ecosystem by far. Sharing borders with both Fire Country and Wind Country had condemned it to becoming a battleground regardless.
That, at least, ended today.
Homura stood on the elevated command platform, watching the Sand forces arrayed opposite him.
Konoha's previous losses to the nanotech parasite incident had been substantial. Sand had taken damage too, but with Kakuzu's deliberate management, theirs hadn't been crippling. Numbers currently favored Sand by roughly fifteen hundred.
Sakura stood in standard Konoha gear, her long pink hair tied back with a black band.
No headband.
At her current reputation and capability level, a forehead protector wasn't necessary to confirm her identity. She just had to stand there. Everyone already knew.
She was Konoha's. Haruno Sakura. The same way everyone already knew Tsunade by sight alone.
Wind moved through her hair as her green eyes swept calmly across thousands of Sand shinobi.
Outnumbered. Visibly. And not a trace of hesitation in her bearing.
I came. I saw. I conquer.
The moment she'd set foot on this field, the balance of the engagement had already shifted. With Pain not personally in play, there wasn't a name currently active in this war that genuinely contested her.
"Mitokado Homura!"
A voice carried across the field from Sand's command platform, old but powerful.
"Looks like you've finally found your spine. Done hiding behind that shell of yours?"
Chiyo's voice, amplified through chakra, reached every corner of the battlefield.
Homura didn't react. He looked instead at the girl beside him.
Sakura smiled faintly and answered without missing a beat.
"You're Chiyo? The one my senior, Tsunade, beat down in the Second Shinobi War?"
Young, slightly bright with adolescent edge, and just as loud across the field.
"Hmph. You're Haruno Sakura, then. The spark for this whole war?"
"Young, vicious, and apparently raised that way — typical Konoha brat."
Chiyo's voice carried clear across the line.
"Don't dress up your own incompetence with excuses." Sakura didn't pause. "Sand broke the alliance first, partnered with our missing-nin Orochimaru, and attacked our Hokage. And now you want to flip the story?"
"You're rats hiding in a mountain hole. No different from Kumo."
Sand's failures weren't exactly subtle. She didn't need to dig for material.
"Sharp-tongued little brat." Chiyo wasn't troubled by the accusation. "No wonder you're that old fool Hiruzen's student. Surrender now and I might just let you keep your life."
"Heh." Sakura's voice cut clean and easy through the wind. "Sand stabs an ally in the back, then tries to repaint history. Doesn't apologize for it, just leans on age to bully through. Exactly the image I had of your village already."
"Bunch of frauds, the lot of you. Even Kumo at least pretends to honor a peace treaty for cover. You people don't even bother with the performance — you've genuinely got no shame left."
"Birds of a feather with Kumo, the both of you."
Sakura's tone never raised, never cracked, no cursing required, and the steady contempt in it began visibly draining Sand's morale wherever it carried.
Chiyo's face darkened, eyes fixed on the pink blur on the opposite platform.
"And is that your excuse for choking off our grain exports? Letting our people starve?"
A lifetime of political maneuvering meant Chiyo knew exactly how to pivot a losing argument — straight to Fire Country's food embargo.
"Oh?" Sakura laughed. "Last I checked, it's our grain. Since when do you get a say in what we do with it?"
She let that hang a beat before continuing.
"'Fire Country has always exported grain to the great nations'—"
"Has 'always' ever made something right?"
Her voice climbed, cutting Chiyo's next sentence off cold.
"Through the First, Second, and Third Shinobi World Wars, Fire Country never once cut off grain exports. Not once."
"And what did that buy us?"
"War."
"Bloodshed."
"Cruelty."
"Konoha shinobi had to fight Sand and Kumo shinobi who were eating bread grown on Fire Country soil."
"You didn't show a shred of gratitude. You picked up knives and pointed them at us instead!"
"That grain would have been better fed to dogs! At least a dog barks back when it's grateful!"
"And you — ungrateful, treacherous, the lot of you—"
"What exactly are you good for?!"
By the end of it, Konoha's lines were fully animated, every shinobi staring across the field at Sand with real heat in their eyes.
"Traitors!"
"Traitors!"
"Traitors!"
The chant rolled across the field, carried on real fury.
"You wretched girl!" Chiyo's jaw clenched, glaring across the distance.
She wanted to argue back. Wanted to defend Sand's position. Opened her mouth — and found nothing to say.
Because every word the girl had thrown at her was, technically, true.
"What are you waiting for." Beside her, Rasa's face stayed flat, unreadable, watching the exchange unfold. "Morale's about to break entirely if you don't move."
The moment word reached him that Sakura had arrived at the front, he'd traveled through the night with Gaara to get here personally.
This was the entire reason he'd left Konoha alive after the failed assassination attempt. He'd promised himself, then, that he'd end this on a battlefield — crush that Konoha cherry blossom under his heel personally, given the chance.
"Understood."
Chiyo pressed her lips together, glanced at Rasa once, and gave the order to advance.
Sand's shinobi — already wound tight after the public dressing-down — surged forward with real ferocity. Konoha's lines, primed by Sakura's framing of Sand as ungrateful traitors who'd bitten the hand that fed them, met them with equal fury.
The two forces collided in a brutal, immediate clash.
"Elder Homura. Hold the command. I'm going in."
Sakura didn't hesitate. She launched herself directly into the chaos.
Kakashi and Mei, already braced and ready, followed a half-step behind.
There was no elaborate plan tonight. The logic was simple. She wanted Kakuzu dead. Sand wanted her dead. So they'd settle it directly — whoever's fist was harder.
BZZZT.
A sharp, ugly sound cracked across the battlefield.
Somewhere in Sand's formation, a shinobi looked down at his own chest, eyes filling with an incomprehension that hadn't yet become fear.
What is...
A fist-sized hole had opened through his chest, clean enough that the ground behind him was visible through it.
He tried to call for help. His body wasn't responding. Even opening his mouth had become impossibly difficult.
A wet, soft sound.
He hit the ground.
The men around him froze, staring at the empty space where their comrade had been standing a moment ago.
Nothing there.
Why is he... why did he just...
No one answered the question. There was only a kunai, standing quietly upright in a rock behind where he'd fallen.
"Got blood on it."
A voice — unfamiliar and yet somehow already known — reached the men nearby.
A pink shape had appeared without anyone registering motion. She bent down, unhurried, and pulled the kunai from the stone.
As though she'd come all this way for nothing more than that.
They didn't know her face. But the voice — that was the one who'd just spent five minutes verbally dismantling Chiyo across the entire battlefield.
Her name was—
Haruno Sakura.
She straightened, blade clean now, and her green eyes swept across the men around her.
Splat.
The nearest Sand shinobi's eyes went wide with something past fear, settling into pure incomprehension.
When—
When did she move?
No one answered that question either. By the time it formed, none of them could hear anything anymore.
It took her one motion. The kunai opened every throat in range before any of them registered the threat at all.
No defense was possible. No response. No reaction time existed in the gap between her decision and its execution.
Raising a weapon against her wasn't combat. It was a luxury none of them had been granted the time to attempt.
"Working better than expected."
She dispatched another nameless Sand shinobi without looking at him directly, surveying the scattered bodies around her with mild, detached interest.
This was yang-release and yin-release working in tandem. Yang pushed her cellular structure into something operating on an entirely different scale — the kind of presence a tiger projects without effort in front of a rabbit. Layered over that, yin-release chakra technique formed a localized field of pure suppression.
And it shouldn't be forgotten — genjutsu had always been one of her natural strengths.
Not using genjutsu and not being capable of it were two entirely different statements. She'd simply found the hand-seal requirements tedious before now.
But combining the yang-release body technique with yin-release skill produced an overwhelming pressure field that required no seals at all.
A higher order of life suppressing a lower one, structurally, without conscious effort. The same way a tiger's mere scent is enough to send something smaller into instinctive panic.
This particular application had occurred to her on the fly, mid-engagement — and it was working considerably better than she'd hoped.
It wasn't absolute, though. Sufficient willpower, sufficient conviction, or simply enough raw strength could break through it.
Like the figure in front of her right now.
A brown-haired girl, hands shaking around a kunai she was still holding, visibly close to breaking — and not running. Not letting go of whatever was keeping her upright.
Sakura's eyes flickered with something like mild surprise.
Matsuri?
Gaara's student. Unexpected to find her here.
She reached out a hand toward the girl—
A hand closed around her wrist before it landed.
"That's enough."
A tall, one-armed man, expression set hard, looked at her directly.
The Fourth Kazekage. Rasa.
Right on cue.
Matsuri, seeing her village's Kazekage arrive in person, felt whatever courage had been holding her together drain out all at once. She sank to the ground, legs unable to hold her any longer.
Terrifying.
That's actually terrifying.
She's my age.
And she didn't even move — just standing there, and I couldn't make myself move at all.
"Matsuri. Leave."
Matsuri, evidently someone with real standing in Sand even Rasa recognized by sight, struggled upright, trembling.
"Y — yes... Lord Kazekage..."
She left, under Sakura's calm, unbothered gaze.
"You know something?"
Sakura looked at Rasa.
"What."
His tone carried wariness he wasn't fully bothering to hide.
A few months apart, and this girl's capability had shifted entirely. He didn't remember her, months ago, being able to bring a chunin to a standstill on killing intent alone.
He'd misread it then too, technically — what he'd interpreted as killing intent had actually been the same field of higher-order suppression she'd just walked through Sand's ranks with.
It didn't matter to the outcome either way.
"Out of all the Kage, you'd rank near the top."
Sakura's words landed like an endorsement.
"Heh." Rasa's mouth twisted. "Does that matter, this late?"
"You're going to die in this war."
"This time next year, today's the date on your headstone."
He'd misread that too — assumed the compliment was sincere, missed the setup entirely.
"No." Sakura looked at him, correcting the record. "What I said was: out of all the Kage, your ranking would be near the bottom."
"You're insulting me."
Rasa's voice came out sharp.
"I'm stating a fact."
Her eyes hadn't left her own wrist, still held in his grip — he hadn't let go yet.
"And right now, you're doing something genuinely dangerous."
Her gaze lifted. Whatever surfaced in her green eyes in that instant sent every hair on Rasa's body standing on end.
A rabbit, suddenly aware it was standing in front of a full-grown Siberian tiger.
The warning hit somewhere primal, instant, lethal — and his hand released her wrist before conscious thought caught up, his body already moving backward, putting distance between them on pure reflex.
Sakura watched him retreat — visibly braced, cold sweat already showing — with mild interest.
"See."
"Told you."
"Out of all the Kage — dead last."
☆☆☆
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