Chapter 22: Resolve
The wind howled across the cliff. Her loose red hair ribbon, worked free by the gusts, slipped out of her pink hair and was about to go sailing off into the void —
A pale, slender hand caught it out of the air.
"Sakura... your way of thinking really is..."
Hiruzen searched for the right word, unsure how to even begin evaluating her Will of Fire.
"I know, Grandpa Hokage." Sakura cut him off gently. "Because Grandpa Hokage is already getting on in years. If I made you exhaust yourself worrying about the next generation on top of everything else — wouldn't that just prove how useless we juniors really are?"
She tilted her face up at him.
"So I want to do it myself. One step at a time."
Looking down at the perfectly earnest expression on this little pink-haired girl's face, Hiruzen fell silent. She had, quite efficiently, sealed off every reasonable counterargument he might have made.
Pink on the outside. Cut her open and she's pitch black on the inside.
"Sakura..."
His gaze had changed. The cloudiness was gone. He was looking at her now like a man who had just made a major decision.
"What is it, Grandpa Hokage?"
Sakura tilted her head.
The old man's slightly chapped lips moved. And when the words came out, the jewel-green eyes of the girl in front of him went wide.
Mission Accomplished.
Sakura weighed the purple scroll in her hand, and for the first time in two years, the boulder pressing down on her chest finally came to rest on solid ground.
The Sword of Damocles hanging over her head — gone.
A wildly unexpected, total success. Worth every brain cell she'd fried inventing the entire Sakura Haruno doctrine of Will of Fire.
Yin Seal — Strength of a Hundred Technique!
In her hands.
Two whole years. Two years of grinding from civilian academy student to skipping all the way through sixth grade, and then cinching the whole thing in a graduation exam with a single essay on the Will of Fire!
I am AMAZING.
In this moment, Sakura felt lighter than she had in years. Like every chain she'd been dragging around had just clattered off her shoulders.
Even the air tasted fresher.
She wanted, desperately, to share this with somebody. But of course, this was a joy that had to stay locked inside her own chest, to be digested in private.
She bounded across Konoha's rooftops, not even sure where she was heading.
But did it matter?
It didn't matter.
She just needed to get somewhere with no people. Somewhere she could let it out.
Two years of work. Two years where she hadn't slept a single peaceful night. Always afraid that the moment her Yin Seal showed even a flicker of progress, the Intelligence Division would come kicking down her door.
She didn't know exactly where she'd ended up. Just that there was a lake in front of her, the scenery was pretty, and that was good enough. She stopped.
She unrolled the scroll in her hands — the one stamped with the special encoding that marked it ABSOLUTELY CLASSIFIED.
Lines of text bloomed in front of her eyes.
It was like reading a letter from the most familiar stranger in the world. Even though her eyes were seeing it for the very first time, Sakura grasped the meaning of every notation almost instantly.
She read fast. She understood fast. Because, technically, this was knowledge she had only "forgotten."
In theory, the Yin Seal had no shortcuts. The only path was for the user to grind, day after day after day, slowly accumulating chakra and pouring it into the mark on their forehead.
She rolled the scroll back up and looked out over the lake. The still, glassy surface reflected her own face back at her.
Picture-perfect. Soft. Pink.
She picked up a stone from the bank and tossed it in. Ripples spread, danced, then smoothed out again.
But this time, the face reflected back from the water didn't look as happy as before...
There was a hollow feeling somewhere in Sakura's chest.
She had the Yin Seal. She had everything she'd been chasing. And yet, now that the initial euphoria had worn off, there wasn't a trace of joy left in her.
She thought back to what Hiruzen had said up there on the cliff.
The old man's lips had moved, and those eyes — the ones that should have been dimmed by age — had pinned her in place so completely that she hadn't dared meet them directly.
"Sakura. Would you be willing to become my disciple?
"My final disciple."
The wind tugged at her pink hair. For a heartbeat, she hadn't been able to believe her ears.
And then, almost stumbling over herself in her hurry, she'd answered:
"I would! Master!"
She looked down at the purple scroll in her hand again. This was what Hiruzen had given her, after she'd told him she wanted to become a shinobi like Lady Tsunade.
Her green eyes dimmed.
Was that... a betrayal? On my part?
Was Hiruzen Sarutobi a good man?
Look — the whole Hiruzen-as-Machiavellian-mastermind reading was something the fan community had cooked up. In the actual canon, the Third Hokage was a decent man through and through. A little indecisive at his worst. Nothing more.
Sakura asked herself, honestly.
To his enemies? No, he wasn't a good man.
To his political rivals? No, he wasn't a good man.
But...
She pressed her lips together.
To her? He had been a genuinely good elder. A good one.
Maybe he had his own agenda. Maybe all of this was about giving Naruto more bonds to anchor him to the village, and she was just one more anchor in that web.
But did that matter?
A man should be judged by what he does, not by what's in his heart.
And right now, for the sake of one scroll containing the Yin Seal, she had lied to a kindly old man.
A kindly old man who had quite possibly looked at her and seen the future of Konoha. Who had taken her on as the last student of his life.
In this world, master and disciple and teacher and student were two completely different things.
Kakashi and Team 7? That was teacher and students.
Jiraiya and Naruto. Tsunade and Sakura. That was master and disciple.
One was an institutional arrangement. The other was a true inheritance — the passing-down of a soul's worth of knowledge from one person to another.
The two were not even in the same league.
In a very real sense, the bond between master and disciple in this world was stronger than blood.
Sakura's head snapped up. Her green eyes glared out at the lake with a sudden, ferocious intensity.
She knew this was probably stupid. Probably arrogant. Probably completely uncalled for.
She was forging her own chains. Loading her own back with her own burdens.
The little pink-haired girl rose to her feet, picked up another stone from the bank, and hurled it at the water.
By any normal logic, an eight-year-old girl chucking a rock could only generate so much force.
But —
The wind screamed. The water wailed.
The entire surface of the lake erupted into churning waves under the impact of that single pebble. There was a sharp CRACK — and on the far shore, a thick old tree slowly toppled over and crashed to the ground.
The half-man-tall boulder behind that tree? Sheared clean in half by the same pebble.
That was Enhanced Strength.
Pure, distilled violence.
Enhanced Strength — Hiruzen's gift to her.
Old man. If you really think I can be that person... then fine. I'll become exactly the kind of person you think I can be.
"Huh?"
"Sakura!"
A delighted voice from behind snapped her out of her thoughts.
A blonde kid with a fishing rod slung over his shoulder had appeared at the edge of her vision.
"Naruto?" She blinked at him. "Are you... fishing?"
She eyed the rod in his hands. Genuinely surprised.
"Yeah! I didn't think I'd run into you out here, Sakura!"
Naruto's whole face lit up. He jogged right over to her without a hint of hesitation.
"Wanna fish with me, Sakura? I can make you a rod too!"
Looking at his hopeful expression, Sakura scratched the back of her head.
Eh, whatever. I'm not doing anything else today. I'll keep him company for a bit.
"Sure, why not." She paused. "Oh — are you chumming the spot?"
"Chumming? What's that?"