Without waiting for her to get any closer, Suigetsu raised his arms and took aim at Sakura with his finger guns.
"Water Style: Double Water Gun Jutsu!"
Pressurised blasts of water squirted out of the tips of his fingers with prodigious force, narrowly missing Sakura as the bullet-like droplets of water whizzed past her head. Sakura counted six shots from each arm— twelve in total.
The twin tomoe in each of her crimson eyes rotated rapidly, analysing Suigetsu's every movent as she darted from side to side to avoid a second burst of water bullets. Even with Uchiha blood running through her veins, the Sharingan was quite chakra-intensive, and her stamina reserves were already thinning. She needed to wrap this up before she ran dry.
Not that deactivating her Dōjutsu to save chakra was an option— after two and a half years relying on the Sharingan and growing used to its superior dynamic vision, she could no longer fight at full strength without it. Seeing with her normal vision just felt incredibly sluggish to her, now.
"Water Style: Double Water Gun Jutsu!"
Understanding dawned on Sakura as she jumped and flipped out of the way— since her opponent was essentially firing liquefied bits of himself at her, it stood to reason he'd need to reload between volleys. Her working theory was that he had to draw in atmospheric water vapour to fill the gaps in his body— otherwise, he'd shrink down into chibi mode… which ant that she just had to wait for the reload timing to close the gap! And since there wasn't much water in the dry desert air, this opening was quite large.
And the mont Suigetsu had exhausted his supply…
"Lightning Style: Chidori!"
Without even bothering to perform the hand signs, Sakura drew upon her Lightning chakra reserves in her breast seal and sent it surging through her chakra pathway network. Blue lightning sparked to life on her right hand, with the residual current going to her leg muscles, and…
'Fast!' was the only word Suigetsu could think of in that mont.
Before Suigetsu could even blink, his ears were already filled with the cries of a thousand birds chirping loudly, and he had a hand through his chest and sticking out of his back.
"I don' feel so good," he groaned, coughing out black smoke as he lted into a shapeless puddle. "Tag… out."
It was said that Lightning Style was the Hydrification Jutsu's nesis, but if anyone else had taken such a blow, they would have died the instant Sakura had plucked their heart from their ribcage. As it was, Suigetsu was rely stunned.
"Team Kurosuki, you have two remaining tag-out opportunities!" shouted Baki. "Genin Ranmaru, you're up!"
"What's the aning of this, I've clearly already defeated my opponent!" shouted Sakura angrily, pointing at Suigetsu's smoking puddle. "Just look at him!"
"Tag out," said Ranmaru calmly. "I can't win on my own."
He was still a small, nine-year-old child, and he knew perfectly well he was no match for Sakura in any of the three shinobi disciplines— least of all Taijutsu. His eyes' Genjutsu was strong enough to influence even the Hyūga clan's Byakugan, thanks to the similarity between the two Dōjutsu, but the Sharingan was the natural enemy of all low-level illusions…
Yes, the Hyūga could see inside their own skulls to check for disruptions in their brain's chakra flow— but they still had to manually disturb their chakra to break free of an illusion. Which ant that if their opponent's Genjutsu was strong enough to paralyse their muscles or suppress their ability to summon chakra, they wouldn't be able to dispel it on their own.
However, the Sharigan was a completely different story— it could automatically see through vision-based Genjutsu and find its flaws, using the discrepancies between illusion and reality to forcibly unravel it before it took root! Which ant there was no need for the Uchiha to manually perform Genjutsu Release… in most cases.
"Team Kurosuki, you have one remaining tag-out opportunity!" said Baki. "Miss Ringo Kosa, you're up."
"Finally," grunted the shark-toothed girl, as she unsheathed her jagged Kiba twinblades. "It's about ti soone put that skank in her place."
Sakura had so bad mories about that pair of swords, but she couldn't deny she had learned a lot from her confrontation with their previous owner, Kurosuki Raiga. One fine day, filled with inspiration, she had gone to her master for help developing a new technique…
---Flashback---
"That's quite a fracture you've got there, Sakura," said Tsunade, bathing Sakura's shoulder in the soft green light emitted from her palms. "You won't be able to perform any surgeries for another day or two with your arm in such a state."
"I'm sorry, Tsunade-sensei," said Sakura, shivering slightly as she felt her bones and muscles twitch and jump beneath her skin under her teacher's ministrations. "Ouch."
After growing up and filling out so more, a fifteen-year-old Sakura had decided it was ti to try once again the technique she had used to destroy Kurosuki Raiga's lightning bolt. And confident in her strength, she had once again managed to dislocate her arm and found herself in the hospital.
"Still trying to find a way to combine Chakra Enhanced Strength with elental chakra, eh?" comnted Tsunade, cutting off the flow of yang chakra. "I'm still amazed you can get the technique to initiate in the first place, but at this rate, I'll really need to label that technique of yours as Kinjutsu, if it keeps getting you hurt."
Sakura hung her head low in sha.
"I'm not saying you should give up, though," said Tsunade lightly, turning her back to Sakura as she gazed out of the window at a group of children playing in the park in front of the hospital. "Why not rethink your approach? Does your technique necessarily have to be a Wind Style Jutsu? You're proficient in four of the five basic natures, aren't you?"
The problem with Wind Style: Chakra Enhanced Strength was its incredible recoil— but what if there was a certain chakra nature that didn't explode in her face when she used it? Or at the very least, didn't cause her to punch herself in the face from the recoil?
"There's this nifty little technique I developed to read the electrical activity of comatose patients' brains," Tsunade continued. "Pushed to its extre, it can scramble an opponent's nervous system, temporarily rewiring how they move their limbs. For example, if they try to move a leg, they just might find themselves picking their nose."
"How does it work?" Sakura asked curiously. "Magnetic fields?"
Tsunade simply laughed.
"Ever been inside an MRI machine, Sakura?" she asked, the corners of her lips curling upwards. "Unless you happen to be made of tal, there's no magnetic field in this world powerful enough to hurt you. Besides, making magnetic fields with lightning chakra is quite complicated, as I'm sure you already know."
Magnet Style Kekkei Genkai users could only manipulate tal by cheating, using Wind Style in concert with Earth Style. But it wasn't true electromagnetism, unlike Sakura's Lorentz Gun Jutsu.
"…but electric fields are a different matter," concluded Tsunade. "Our biochemistry relies on ions, so as far as conductors go, the human body isn't too bad. Expose a person to a powerful enough electric field, and they start breaking down from the inside. And if you go too far, currents begin to flow... frying them from the inside out."
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