Starting over

#91 One Last Obstacle

Naruto POV

We were travelling in silence, when we saw the first signs of the forest making way for the desert that we called home. I smiled slightly, at the sight of the first corns of sand that the wind brought into the woods. Everyone gathered the last of their strength and we sped up, hoping to reach Suna before the sun had set. 

We reached the outskirts of the desert and we immediately knew, that we would not be able to achieve this goal. In front of us stood nine people. I knew who they were from the bingo books. There was Pain with his six paths, Konan the paper shinobi, Itachi the disloyal Uchiha, who wasn’t as disloyal as he was made out to be, which I knew from my previous life, and then there was Sasori. “I got the men in the middle, Team Shiro you take Konan, I guess that Saskue and the other Konoha shinobi will want to fight with the other Uchiha. Team Daiku protect the council. Temari take Sasori.”, I said calmly, drawing a smile from our opposition, as they split up, waiting for their respective opponents to come to them, obviously thinking that they were far superior. 

Temari POV

I nodded at Naruto’s orders and jumped towards Sasori, who was waiting with the puppet of the third Kazekage by his side. “Ready for round two?”, I asked, taking my fan off my back. The puppeteer said nothing as he commanded his puppet to attack. Iron sand came flying at me from every direction. Using a small wind Jutsu I dissipated the sand for a short time, allowing me to get some offense of my own in, which was unsurprisingly blocked by walls of black sand, before said sand came back attacking me. I knew this was gonna be a hard fight, since we just had gone almost twelve hours without rest and I was pretty low on chakra. But I had to push through for the mission and for my live, since I don't think, that we were allowed to leave, regardless if we left the council or not. I again broke the attacking sand waves and reached into my pocket taking out a soldier pill. Looking at the Akatsuki shinobi in front of me, I knew that I would have to go all out if I wanted to have a chance at killing him. Taking out a few explosive kunai I threw them with one hand at him. Sasori evaded them to no one’s surprise, but he had not seen the chakra threads that I had attached to the kunai, before I had thrown them. He tried jumping over them,causing almost all of the kunai to miss him and hit the puppet of the third, that had been behind him, but two of them found their mark and as he reached the height of his jump he blew up, with puppet parts flying everywhere. I was relieved at how easy the former suna shinobi went down, when I heard something moving inside the smoke burnt robe that had covered Sasori earlier. I readied myself for everything when the robe was thrown off. But I was still shocked when I saw the red haired body of the teenage Sasori climb out of the destroyed puppet. He had apparently turned himself into a puppet. I took out my fan again as Sasori charged forward, drawing a scroll from his back. I pushed him back with a powerful gust of wind as he  unrolled the scroll and pushed chakra into it. A giant smoke cloud blew up behind him and I knew, that he most likely had pulled the same move he had pulled against us three years prior. I swung my fan and blew the smoke away, revealing a hundred puppets, floating over Sasori. I immediately spun around, creating a large tunnel of wind, that eventually grew to a miniature tornado, which then moved towards the massive force of puppets at an incredible speed. Sasori only had time to save half of his puppets, with the other half being ripped to shreds in the tornado. Then he attacked and I was stuck, avoiding blades and bending my body in ways, that even I didn't know I could to stay alive. Occasionally I would get a hit on one of the puppets, often destroying it in on swing, but it was a slow grind and the puppets didn't seem to stop coming. 

After a while I finally had the count of puppets down to a small enough force that I could effectively counter attack. When their wave of attacks stopped, I swung my fan around and created a large circle of wind, trapping the puppets inside it. It must have seemed foolish, since they were now trapped in the circle, but I was as well. I smiled as I spun around in the other direction, creating a second ring, that spun in the other direction. The puppets were trapped in between and were ripped to shreds. I panted slightly as the jutsu died down, since it took a considerable amount of chakra. Sasori got over his shocked face rather quickly and looked at me, while taking out another scroll from his back. “It took me a long time to get my puppets back together. You will pay for that.”, he said as he unrolled the second scroll and another smoke cloud exploded behind him. The smoke disappeared quickly, revealing Sasori standing next to three puppets. Two of them I recognized from a story that Rasa had told us about the rather famous Sasori of the red sand, they were his parents. The other one I didn't recognize but from the looks of it had a strong affinity for lightning since it seemed to be filled with electricity, occasionally giving off sparks. I readied my fan again and knew; that fight had just begun.