Chapter 31 - The Plan
Sakura will be the first to admit that this is not how she intended for her plan to work out. Truly! She’s usually better at this. She had been the tactician for Team 7 and the second-best tactician in the village. Second only to Shikamaru in fact.
Her plan was simple after Hinata’s party.
Step 1: Go home with her nii-chan.
Step 2: Eat dinner with her family.
Step 3: Take a bath with said nii-chan.
Step 4: Let Mama, Papa, and Nii-chanJan Ken Pon for the right to read her her bedtime story (the whole family liked to fight over who got to read to her for some reason. They were weirdly competitive over the right).
Step 5: Make sure everyone is fully asleep.
Step 6: Create a kage bunshin to stay in bed in her place and muffle her chakra to that of a squirrel.
Step 7: Sneak out of the compound with the help of the trees.
Step 8: Eat a light snack because sneaking out as a four-year-old toddler is tiresome work.
Step 9: Enter the forest between the Hyūga compound and the western village wall.
Step 10: Thank the trees for letting her hide in their branches and wait for the signal.
Step 11: Skewer- ahem- capture (alive!) the Kumo shinobi when he comes running with Hinata.
Step 12: Shriek so loudly that she and Hinata go deaf and flare her chakra BRIGHT.
Step 13: Pretend she sleepwalked to the clearing and stumbled upon the kidnapping, explaining this to the Hyūga guards, teary-eyed, while begging for her parents.
Step 14: Her parents come to get her, she cries in “relief” in their arms, and they go home. Because she is a sweet, innocent child who can do no wrong.
Everything worked out.
Everything up until step 11.
Because Sakura forgot her chakra control, and super strength is instinctive at this point.
Because, for all that she is physically four and mentally running on six-year-old brain power, her soul is a war-hardened veteran shinobi.
So, when she pretends to be shocked at where she finds herself and jumps at the sight of the clearly malicious enemy shinobi holding her friend captive, Sakura’s “little baby punch of heroism” is not a light love tap that would make most shinobi laugh at her attempt.
No.
Her “little” punch (laced with chakra because it’s instinct) shatters the Kumo shinobi’s tibia, and he drops Hinata to fall to the floor, clutching his leg and crying in pain. Her second one- because her fists are in motion, because she is deep in her act- sends the shinobi flying through four trees and into the Hyūga compound walls he just absconded over.
Hinata, having wiggled free from her bonds and loosened the cloth around her mouth, runs up to hug Sakura, crying and stuttering.
Sakura only has one thing to say.
Shit.