A few miles away from the initial ambush site, the desert wind whipped across the sky as Jasper was flying at top speed after the kidnappers carrying Gaara.
He was genuinely shocked at how fast they were moving on foot compared to him in the air. To make matters worse, his aerodynamic drag was terrible.
"Put me down," Sasori demanded, hanging from Jasper's grip.
"Why?"
"You'll never catch up to them with me in your hands."
He was right. Jasper was actively carrying both Sasori's true body and his puppet shell at the same time.
But Jasper's real problem were the two orange and blue blurs tracking him from the desert floor below: William and Naruto. Naruto was closer, but both Leaf shinobi were closing the gap with terrifying speed.
"Drop me toward them," Sasori demanded, noting the approaching threats.
"Are you sure?" Jasper yelled over the wind.
"Yes, I regained my movements already."
Jasper didn't need time to think about how incredibly screwed William would be if he had to fight a fully unhinged Sasori alone. Even if Naruto was there to help his cousin, just one Akatsuki member was so buffed by Arthur's cause and effects that Jasper himself wouldn't like the idea of fighting them.
"Have fun then," Jasper said, letting go of his partner entirely.
Sasori plummeted from the sky like a meteor.
On the ground, Naruto came to a halt upon seeing the massive shadow falling toward them.
Crash!
A shockwave kicked up a localized sandstorm. When the dust cleared, the hunched form of Sasori was now blocking them.
"Outta my way!" Naruto screamed in a blind rage.
"You must be Naruto Uzumaki," Sasori calmly announced, straightening his mechanical limbs. "My partner said some interesting things about you."
It's then that William finally slid to a halt beside Naruto. "Cuz, ya shouldn't have run after them like that."
"No way!" Naruto cried back. "Who knows what they'll do to Gaara if we don't stop them!"
William looked at his cousin. He had almost forgotten just how deeply Naruto cared for others like him. Naruto was a Jinchūriki who intimately understood the isolation of the monster inside. He would never give up on another Jinchūriki, especially Gaara.
Remembering this fundamental truth, William finally nodded. "Alright! I'll take on the enemy in front; you go after Gaara!"
"Are ya sure?" Naruto asked, hesitating for a fraction of a second.
"Of course! Besides! I know all of Sasori's moves!"
It was true. William had studied the lore more than the others from earth. He knew about the poisoned needles, the Iron Sand, the Third Kazekage puppet, and the secret scroll containing a hundred basic combat puppets.
Just the meta-knowledge alone was enough to counter everything the Akatsuki member could throw at him.
"None of you two will pass," Sasori said as he reached under his cloak and pulled out a scroll.
William braced for the familiar sight of the Third Kazekage. He wasn't worried, because he knew all of Sasori's puppet tricks and poison tactics inside and out. But when the puff of white smoke cleared, his confidence vanished.
He was shocked to see that Sasori had summoned neither the third Kazekage, his parents, nor his generic puppet army. Instead, floating slightly above the sand, suspended by blue chakra strings, were seven strange-looking puppets.
They all wore identical, high-collared dark blue outfits.
William couldn't identify them at first, watching them sway through the air to form a wide blockade. But as they turned, he saw the crest embroidered on their backs: the red and white fan. It was the symbol of the Uchiha clan!
A cold dread settled in William's stomach because he finally recognized them.
Yashiro Uchiha. Inabi Uchiha. Tekka Uchiha. The three military police officers who had interrogated Itachi before the massacre.
But the last four were the ones who troubled William the absolute most: Naori Uchiha, Rai Uchiha, Baru Uchiha, and Naka Uchiha.
They were Uchiha from the clan's bloodiest past. And every single one of them possessed the Mangekyō Sharingan. In the lore, they could use Izanagi to rewrite their own deaths, while Naori herself was the creator of Izanami.
"For someone who claims to know all of my moves," Sasori taunted with dead, painted eyes locking onto the boy. "You sure seem surprised right now."
William cursed under his breath. "I'm surprised because you never summoned these guys before."
"A shame you weren't in the last war, then." Sasori then flexed his arms, sening Yashiro and Inabi flying forward. "I would have turned you into a puppet as well."
The two puppets crash-landed just as William and Naruto scattered in opposite directions.
"Multi-shadow clone jutsu!" they both declared in unison.
Ten clones of William and ten clones of Naruto popped into existence across the dunes.
Sasori watched as five Narutos immediately broke off to bypass the blockade. With a flick of his wrist, he commanded Tekka and Naori to exhale a combined Fireball technique directly at them.
Two clones were incinerated, forcing the others to fall back. "Darn it!"
On the opposite side of the sand, all ten of William's clones charged at Yashiro and Inabi.
"Take this!" they yelled. "Rasengan!"
The techniques ground into the wooden bodies of the two Uchiha puppets, splintering their chests, shattering their limbs, and completely destroying their internal mechanisms as they crumbled to the ground in a heap of severed chakra strings.
William had crushed them.
But then, his confidence waned as the space around the destroyed puppets began to ripple, like a mirage over hot sand.
Then, without him seeing it coming, Yashiro and Inabi swung their blades, slashing the clones into pieces. They popped out of the battlefield, while the real William took a shallow slice across his ribs and collapsed into the sand.
The two puppets were quickly called back to Sasori's defensive perimeter just as seven Narutos arrived to protect their cousin.
"What's going on?!" Naruto asked, kneeling down and helping William sit up. "I saw you destroy those puppets with your Rasengan!"
"I did," William hissed, gripping his bleeding side. He was poisoned. "But that's exactly what I was afraid of."
"What do ya mean?"
"Look at their eyes," William pointed.
Naruto hadn't noticed it in the chaos, but looking closely now, he saw it. The puppets who didn't attack—Rai, Baru, and Naka—had their Sharingans fully activated in their wooden sockets. And more importantly, one of Rai's eyes was slowly shutting.
Something like this shouldn't even be possible.
Forget that Hashirama's cells were needed to activate Izanagi; it's the fact that Sasori even knew of the technique. There was only one person who would have told him of it.
'Dang it, Jasper!' William knew.
He quickly explained the terrifying mechanics of Izanagi and Izanami to his cousin. It was an ultimate genjutsu cast upon reality itself, allowing the user to turn injuries and even death into an illusion, at the permanent cost of their vision.
Sasori listened from across the dunes. He was growing cautious.
First, this group of Leaf shinobi knew they were coming to capture Gaara. And now, William had just revealed he understood the classified Uchiha technique that Sasori had only recently perfected.
He watched as William reached into his pouch and swallowed a red pill. "Good thing Sakura made these for us," he muttered, feeling the medicine instantly cure the poison.
Now Sasori knew that something was wrong. The intelligence leak was far too precise.
During the bloody, chaotic war in the Bird Country, Sasori had managed to take down a few of the Uchiha that Arthur had revived. Some of their bodies were harvested before retreating.
Afterward, he and Jasper had been sent on several covert missions to locate hidden burial sites to expand his collection. That was exactly how he had stumbled across the preserved corpses of Naori, Rai, Baru, and Naka.
It would be understandable that the Leaf possessed intel regarding his use of the third Kazekage. But there was absolutely no way the information regarding his newly crafted Uchiha puppets could have been released to the public.
"We're done messin' around!" Naruto declared as he reached out and grabbed William's hand.
Straightaway, his body erupted into a golden light, entering the Nine-Tails Chakra Mode. William himself was now covered in the bubbling, red chakra cloak of a version one Jinchūriki state.
"How annoying," Sasori said, pulling out his ultimate scroll. "Secret red move: performance of a hundred puppets!"
William stood up, waiting for the attack. This was it. He knew exactly what was coming: the canonical army of red-robed puppets that Sakura and Chiyo had destroyed in the original lore.
But before the smoke from the summoning seal could even clear, the distinct sound of mechanical whirring and grinding gears echoed across the desert. William's eyes widened in shock once again because those weren't the army of faceless puppets he remembered.
No, these puppets were entirely different. Every single one of them bore the musical note crest of the Sound Village on their headbands.
"My partner and I had done a lot to make these," Sasori calmly said. In his back, metallic wings formed, allowing him to climb into the air. "But to think I'd have to use them so early on a bunch of kids."
When the smoke fully evaporated, the horrifying scale of Sasori's new arsenal was revealed.
He floated majestically in the air, while below him stood three giant-sized puppets, whose faces were wrapped in sealing tags. Surrounding those three giants were one hundred other Sound Village puppets, hovering and flying around in a synchronized swarm.
The lore was dead.
William's heart sank at this new monster.