A few hours later, near the Land of Rivers – Land of Wind frontier…
"It seems they've been expecting us," Aburame Shibi said softly, his gaze fixed on the Kikaichū clinging to the tip of his finger, shaking its thorax at him. "The Hidden Sand has increased its patrols along the border. Breaking through will be difficult."
Insects poured from Shibi's sleeve and spread across the map Chōza was holding up. They scurried over the paper, arranging themselves along the Sand's patrol routes, their movements mirroring the real patrols in real time as Shibi received steady updates through a chain of dancing insects stretching all the way to the border of the Land of Wind.
"What about there?" asked Sakura, pointing at the map from a safe distance away from the insects. "There's a big gap in their formation we could slip through, right over there. It looks a bit suspicious to me, but with Lord Namikaze's Flying Thunder God Jutsu, couldn't we use the opening they've left to blitz straight through, even if it is a trap?"
"Lord Namikaze?" Minato echoed, with a hint of amusement in his voice. "I'm hardly such an important person…"
He then looked at Shibi, who shook his head.
"It's not a gap in the Sand's formation," he said, with a trace of sadness in his voice. "None of my insects have returned from that region, so they cannot accurately reproduce the movements of any patrols that may have taken position there."
Minato drew in a sharp breath.
"What?" Princess Sāra said, looking around in confusion. "What is it?"
Minato, Chōza and Shibi exchanged a knowing glance.
"The Hero of the Hidden Sand," they said in unison, grimacing.
"Ohh…" Sāra said slowly.
Sakura looked at each of them in quick succession. How come even the sheltered princess knew, but she didn't!? "What?" she said. "What am I missing? Who's this Hero of the Hidden Sand?"
"Pakura of the Scorch Style," said Shibi quietly. "She's a tricky one."
"I wouldn't mind letting her fry my bacon," Chōza chuckled, unconsciously rubbing his butt as he spoke. "But all joking aside, she's seriously dangerous. The last time we crossed paths, we had to leg it for our lives. My backside's never been quite the same since."
Sakura gaped at Minato. There was someone even the future Fourth Hokage couldn't handle!?
"The Scorch Style is the bane of my hit-and-run tactics," Minato said with a sheepish smile. "Anything that enters her range turns to ash in an instant, and that also goes for the jutsu formulae on my special kunai; no formulae means no teleporting… and even if I did somehow manage to get close, even without the Flying Raijin Jutsu, I'd be steamed alive long before I could land my finishing move."
In other words, to have any hope of approaching Pakura, one needs a Water Style practitioner strong enough to quench her flames. A squad of lesser ninja wouldn't stand a chance; only the most skilled could wield Water Style jutsu without drawing on a natural source of water nearby. And in the middle of the desert, water wasn't exactly abundant…
"If it hadn't been for Minato summoning a toad that time, we'd have been… toast," Chōza said, reminiscing about the past. "We had to crawl through a kilometre of toad guts to escape."
"Oesophagus. The oesophagus of the Rock-Dwelling, Fire-Breathing Giant Toad of Mt Myōboku," Minato corrected him. "Personally, I find the name rather boring, but the toad in question won't respond to my calls if I call him Hellfire Dragon-Toad of the Darkness Flame, Behemoth of the Ninth Summit."
The average human gastrointestinal tract measured about nine metres, so Sakura could only imagine how big the Rock-Dwelling Toad must have been to have intestines that stretched that long.
"What does it matter what it's called?" Chōza sighed. "Instead of summoning its guts around us, you should have summoned it around her!"
"A fireball was coming right towards us!" Minato argued. "I wasn't going to let my students die!"
Sāra and Sakura watched Minato and Chōza bicker with growing apprehension. Was this team really going to be all right? Noticing their unease, Shibi said calmly, "There's no need to worry. They actually get along rather well. They're only shaking off their nerves before the fight. Once the mission begins, you'll see the true face of Team Minato."
But that was actually the last thing Sakura wanted to see.
If Minato were unleashed here, the sand would soon run red with the blood of his enemies. If she knew anything about Naruto's father, it was that when he was cut loose, he would dart across the battlefield, sowing chaos behind enemy lines as he vanished and reappeared from kunai to kunai, taking a life each time he did.
Namikaze Minato was a man who danced on the razor's edge of his own life; whether it was because he cared too deeply for his comrades or because he carried some hidden death‑wish, she couldn't say.
However, one thing was certain: if a massacre took place here, when no one had been meant to die in the original timeline, the consequences would be catastrophic… and even worse, there was a chance Minato might die at Pakura's hands.
If that happened, Sakura might as well remain here in the past and begin anew, because the world waiting at the other end of the twenty‑year temporal tunnel would no longer be her own… it would be a world without a future, a world not worth living in.
A dead world, sucked dry by the Ōtsutsuki.
"I have an idea," Sakura said quietly. "I'll act as a decoy while you slip behind enemy lines into the Land of Lōran. Leave one of your Flying Thunder God kunai with me, and then you can come fetch me once you've reached safety."
Everyone stared at her.
"That's suicide, girl!" Chōza exclaimed. "There's a difference between dying for a cause and dying for nothing at all. Even if you showed yourself, you'd draw at most the attention of a patrol or two— nowhere near enough for us to break through."
"I don't know how you've lived your life until now, Konan‑chan," Minato said gravely, "but in the Hidden Leaf, throwing away children's lives to save our own is not how we do things."
Sakura looked at him mournfully. Was that really the case?
In a matter of months, Rin would be dead, Kakashi's life in ruins, and Obito snatched away by a madman who should have perished long ago. All because Minato could not be bothered to watch over his disciples… or rather, because he was too valuable to be tied down by a handful of brats. His high‑mobility squad could sway the course of a battle in an instant; in the eyes of the higher-ups, it was a waste to leave him minding a group of Chūnin who ought to have managed perfectly well on their own…
"Chūnin, my arse…" Sakura muttered.
Kakashi was born ready, but when Rin and Obito were thrown onto the battlefield, they most certainly hadn't been ready. The only reason those two had been promoted to Chūnin was that the Leaf was running short of soldiers and had been forced to send children out to fight. This was Sarutobi Hiruzen's Will of Fire… the thought made Sakura sick.
"Don't forget, I'm Lady Tsunade's disciple," Sakura said, looking straight into Minato's eyes. "I'm far, far stronger than I look… and I won't have others fighting my own battles for me. That's my ninja way."