Reborn!

46: New and Old

Naruto halted in his attempt to squeeze into the Sasori-shaped cavity in the human puppet.

"Ah. Yamato-taichō, meet Hiruko-kun. This was among the spoils of Sakura's battle with Sasori, so I decided it would be useful for today," Naruto explained simply.

Sasori did not consider how his child-sized puppet armour would be difficult for a young man of average build to fit into.

Naruto whipped out a fūinjutsu brush and added some seals to expand the space for a more comfortable space to sit in while controlling the puppet.

"It's made from human flesh and bone," Naruto cheerfully supplied.

Sakura, arriving at the meeting point a step behind Yamato, felt her jaw go slack as she identified the contraption as a bonafide human puppet.

"How do you have that?" she demanded.

The unsaid question was, "How did you convince Sasori to lend you his favourite puppet?"

"I guess he has a new favourite now?"

Naruto shrugged carelessly as the telepathic, equally unreliable response reached the pink-haired kunoichi.

Kaien appeared out of nowhere next to Naruto, having shunshinned over from his perch on the roof of some building nearby.

Kaien was more impressed by how Naruto managed to go unnoticed while standing in the open, in the middle of the road leading to Konoha's entrance even with such a conspicuous puppet.

Naruto slid into the puppet and experimentally tugged on a lever after properly attaching his chakra strings...

And the bladed tail lashed out at Yamato's face.

The former member of the ANBU forces barely managed to get a kunai out in time to block it, narrowly avoiding a scratch from the venom-coated blade.

"That was an accident!" Naruto chirped, not at all convincing.

No one questioned why he brought the puppet along at all, since the plan was documented in the mission detail they were provided -- albeit the original idea was for Yamato to control a fake made using Mokuton.

Naruto drew a stack of talismans from a storage seal somewhere, stuck one on each of his three teammates' foreheads and burned the rest -- which Yamato found quite wasteful, but one could never talk sense into an Uzumaki.

"Safety precaution," he rasped through the voice-emitting mechanism of the puppet.

Simple seal matrices -- by Naruto's standards -- that concealed the chakra and breath of the user. Whether one was able to hide one's own presence was up to the individual's skill. There were superior seals that could be applied more reliably, but Naruto found it funny to see his teammates walking around with the slips of paper comically stuck to their faces. Opportunities to trick Sakura like this were few and far between. Besides, it was not as if they needed to fight. The talismans fit their needs and there was even the added benefit of causing his teammates to look like Jiangshi, a certain type of oriental zombie.

They swiftly traversed familiar terrain, arriving at a landmark that was quite the sight for sore eyes -- the Tenchi Bridge.

Yamato directed the two chūnin to remain hidden, and Naruto alone shuffled forward in Hiruko's shell.

"It has been a long time, Sasori-sama," Kabuto greeted, shifting to reveal his face.

Naruto looked on unflinchingly.

Kabuto was not much compared to Yashamaru, but he was a decent actor.

Kabuto continued to speak, unaware that he had been seen through, "It has been five years."