“Yes, sir.”
I woke immediately as my loop reset, and covered my body with the swirling curves my anti-summoning array before I even opened my eyes. Then I swung out of bed and dressed hurriedly, for once doing it the hard way. I was going to need every drop of chakra I had today, and even something as minor as body flickering my clothes on was a waste I might not be able to afford. I was concerned enough that I’d even stayed in my hated child form, since I wasn’t supposed to actually fight anyone.
Sasuke appeared in the room as I stowed the last of my spare shuriken, and held out his hand. I took it, and he pulled us both across the space between worlds to Naruto’s loop.
We’d considered using a different world, but anything involving summoning and Naruto was bound to be so difficult it was best to take every shortcut. The barren, flat-topped hill Sasuke took me to was in northern Sand Country, close enough to Konoha to make summoning easy and lightning-fast.
There was another Sakura waiting for me there, a confused younger me from one of the other loops who was just waking up and wondering where she was. I knelt beside her and dumped a copy of all my memories into her head.
She gasped, and then held her head and groaned.
“Ow,” she complained. “Taking that many memories at once hurts. Um, ok, ambush plan, right?”
“Right,” I agreed. “Here, take these memory bubbles and get going.”
She took the whole collection I’d built up with Sasuke’s victims, and turned to stumble off down the hill.
Sasuke reappeared with an unconscious Hana in his arms, and handed her to me before vanishing again. I restored the memories I’d taken from her in the last loop, after he had finished her training. Then I woke her. She sat up quickly, looked around, and nodded to me before taking up her position without a word.
Within minutes Ayame, TenTen, Temari and even Anko were assembled, processed and taking up their positions. Sasuke appeared with Gaara, and I applied his memories just as I felt the first tug of Naruto’s summons brush against my seals.
“He’s starting,” I said.
Sasuke frowned. “That long a delay? He must have an ally, then.”
That was obvious enough, so I just nodded. Sasuke had determined some time ago that his loop and Hinata’s reset to exactly the same moment, and mine did as well. It stood to reason that Naruto’s was the same, and it was mostly habit that had led us all to wake up at different times for so long. But controlling when you wake up is an easy trick for any ninja that wants to bother, and we’d both ended the last loop prepared to wake instantly. Naruto would have done the same, so he’d been up to something while we were working.
“Try to find out who it is, but be careful they don’t catch you,” he ordered, and body flickered halfway across the hilltop. He paused to rip open a time portal, but didn’t go through. Instead he left it there and headed down the side of the hill at high speed, cloaking his presence as he went.
Naruto’s summoning pressed against my seals, groping blindly for something it couldn’t quite latch onto. For me, this would be the tricky part. I gave Sasuke a slow count of twenty to grab the younger me and get far enough away to avoid notice, while the team around me reached their positions and set up their various parts of the ambush.
Then I transformed again, switching out the anti-summoning array for my reverse-summoning trap. The seal array flowed down my legs and across the bare stone around me as I felt the touch of Naruto’s summoning, expanding quickly to cover most of the hilltop. There was a tug, and my vision went dark as I was pulled into summon space. But by then the seal array was anchored to thousands of tons of solid rock, and while Naruto might have the power to summon the entire hill that wasn’t what his technique was configured to do. I dangled in summon space for several seconds, surrounded by a cloud of blue swirls that slowly stretched as I was pulled towards Konoha. But the array held, and that was all the time it took for it to fully deploy and power up.
Then the seals flexed like a giant spring, and I snapped back to the hilltop. The shock transmitted back through the summoning technique, a sudden tug that was amplified as my array grabbed hold of that connection and pulled.
The connection went taut, and then slack.
“Incoming!” I shouted.
An adult Naruto appeared right in front of me, almost close enough to touch. Not knowing what he’d do to me if he had the chance I dropped my connection to the seal and backed away quickly, wishing I could body flicker out of his aura. His eyes focused on me, and went wide with surprise.
“Sakura-chan!” He shouted excitedly. Then Gaara’s sand hit him.
I’d fought Gaara enough to know that even his full power was barely going to slow Naruto down, but that was all we needed. Naruto vanished under the wave of sand for a split-second, and I saw Gaara smile faintly. But then the sand blew apart in an explosion of wind, and there were six of Naruto where the original had stood. Two charged Gaara, two spun to meet Anko and Hana’s attacks, and the other two went after me.
I was already sprinting for the time portal, knowing I wasn’t going to outrun Naruto in this form. Fortunately I didn’t need to. TenTen and Temari rose to block the clones that pursued me with a barrage of wind and weapons, and they wasted valuable seconds pausing to subdue the two genin without hurting them. I noted out of the corner of my eye that the same tactic was working on the other clones as well. All of the ninja in this ambush were people Naruto cared for and would be reluctant to hurt, especially since they were mostly girls. This had been important, since there wasn’t time in the first minutes of a loop to capture and brainwash anyone especially powerful. Even Gaara had been pushing it, and he was the weakest of the jinchuuriki.
But the problem with fighting Naruto is always that he isn’t a man, he’s an army. More clones appeared all over the hilltop in little puffs of smoke, including a trio right around me. I dove left, surrounding myself with a swirl of cutting water that dispersed the clone in my way before he realized what was happening. A touch of super-strength let me leap away from the other two, passing over a rock that Anko had stuffed a roll of explosive tags under for just this contingency.
I expected the clones to run over the tags so I could blow them up, but the way they circled it made it obvious they knew the trap was there. Surprising, since Anko is actually really good at setting traps and it was a type that would normally be undetectable until the tags were primed. I threw a storm of shuriken clones at them as a distraction as I bounded away. What was I missing?
When I’d been with Naruto we’d had our own version of Hinata, and she could have seen the trap easily. But I hadn’t seen her appear with him, and I was sure I could see through any invisibility technique she could use. Besides, the summoning reversal should have only caught Naruto. To come with him she’d have to be part of him…
“Oh, crap,” I realized. “She’s in his mindscape, looking out with her Byakugan. Well, this could get fun.”
I reached the time portal seconds ahead of the lead clone, and Ayame darted between us to stand in front of the portal with her arms spread wide as I dove through. Since she had explosive tags wrapped around her chest and a manual detonator in her hand this would probably keep him from following me for a few seconds. He was really going to be pissed now, but that was just what we wanted.
The time portal led six months into the future, but Sasuke hadn’t gone through it. Instead the plan was for him to hold it for a few minutes until Naruto chased me through, and let it close. Then he’d spent the next six months methodically assembling the real ambush force, which would be prepared for us both to reappear at the other end of the portal. It was a brilliant ploy, and I was sure Naruto would have no idea what he was walking into.