Restoration: Book 2/3

Chapter 26

-Sakura's POV-

"Before I begin, do you have anything you want to say?" I asked the teenage boy whom four of my friends were holding down.

A couple days passed, and my energy finally returned, so I was caught up on the situation and convinced to try and extract whatever that dark veiny thing was on the back of the boy's neck. Kankuro, Kiba, Sai, and Shikamaru each held one of his limbs as we made him lay face down on the dining room's hardwood floor.

He'd been interrogated for three days now, and the only thing they could get from him was some nonsense about inhabiting able-bodied humans so they could search for some plant called "Dengen" that none of us had ever heard of. We couldn't get him to tell us where he came from or if he knew how many humans in total have been affected. So, we called it quits and decided to try and save whatever the poor human boy that'd been inhabited name was' life.

"Removing me will not save you. My brothers will eventually come." By saying that, he hinted that all his kind were considered male.

"Okay, then I'm about to start."

A few others were nearby, watching from the doorway to not crowd the area. With a sharp knife, I cut a two-inch opening directly above the center of the bulge on his neck. Sasuke was standing by with a metal bucket so I could quickly toss whatever was about to be removed into it.

Luckily, a few of the guys had ransacked a couple floors of the no-longer-burning asylum, so I had some proper medical supplies like gloves, masks, and first aid kits.

I moved the skin back slightly and held my breath as a wave of nausea overcame me. Whatever that thing was, it was an inky black and shined when the light hit it as though its skin was coated in moisture. Blood was steadily leaking from the wound, but that wasn't what gave it the wet appearance.

Any normal human being would be making some kind of sound in response to the pain, but the kid remained silent the entire time.

Carefully, I grabbed a pair of tweezers and worked them into the wound to gently pull each of the little vein-like outreaches from further within the boy's body. The entire process took nearly an hour, but by the end, I could free the kid from the weird alien thing and heal his injury enough that he would no longer need stitches. I learned my lesson from overdoing it and decided only to use my healing sparingly.

In the bucket with a thick net over the top lay a small creature that looked like a tiny, tiny version of maybe an octopus mixed with a jellyfish but with even thinner tentacles. The center of it, the most significant part that caused the bulge on the neck, was barely bigger than an American quarter. Its slender body moved slowly like a worm or something, and I wondered how it even got into a human to begin with.

The boy didn't wake up immediately after it was removed, and we all agreed it was best to tie him to the chair again just in case he panicked when he woke up. We were all thinking about it even if we didn't want to, but there was a chance he wouldn't wake up at all. Sure, his vitals seemed fine when I checked them, but you can't have any expectations when working with the unknown like this.

"Sakura, I think it's dead."

I turned to see that Ino had joined Sasuke in watching over the metal bucket to ensure the strange creature didn't do anything. When I came over to look, I had to agree that it looked deceased. The shiny black film around it had dulled to a dry gray color, and its limbs appeared stiffened. It was no longer moving.

"What should we do with it?"

I met my best friend's eye before frowning and looking toward the kitchen, "Maybe we should put it in a tupperware or something, just in case."