"Then you leave me no choice," Sasori rumbled. "I'll finish this quickly and ask your companions instead. And if they won't answer my question, then I'll just kill them and move on to the next Leaf shinobi I find."
Taking advantage of the fact that her opponent's attention was firmly fixed on her, Sakura brought her palms together and tensed her pectoral muscles, sending her breasts bobbing up and down in a mesmerising rhythm.
"Assassination Genjutsu: Breast Illusion!"
If Sasori was affected by her Genjutsu, he gave no sign of it. Taking the psychic attack in stride, he manipulated the Hiruko doll into opening its mouth, firing a volley of senbon needles at her.
Sakura's eyes widened— she immediately abandoned her Genjutsu attempt and pirouetted out of the way, but Sasori's tracking was relentlessly accurate. He continued to spew needles at her, driving her to backflip into a handstand, before springing up to a safe height onto a thick tree branch.
Sasori followed Sakura's movements attentively as she scrambled up to higher ground, fearlessly meeting her sinister, crimson eyes as she turned around to face him. And that's when Sakura found out that her hypnotic gaze could not affect him any more than her breasts!
There were two reasons for this:
Firstly, Sasori did not really perceive the world through his eyes, seeing as he had discarded the originals after remodelling his body so that it would fit inside a Pringles can. There existed no chakra pathways in his body that Sakura's yin chakra could follow to reach his brain!
Secondly, and perhaps most importantly… Sasori no longer had a brain! His soul and consciousness were bound to the lump of flesh in the canister that served as his heart (more accurately, they remained bound to his chakra, rather than to his physical form). Essentially, his body modifications had rendered his physiology so alien to Sakura that she could not even begin to fathom how to alter his consciousness!
The Hiruko doll scuttled to the base of Sakura's tree and raised its right arm, which folded open to reveal a hidden array of swords and sawblades. The puppet sliced through the tree trunk like a hot knife through butter with its arm blades, sending it crashing down, before calmly raising its left arm. Sakura immediately recognised the device that had been outfitted onto that arm— it was a needle grenade mounted onto a rocket fist!
Anticipating that Sasori might use the weapon if she feigned vulnerability, Sakura leapt off her perch as the tree fell, knowing that her opponent would assume that she couldn't change direction in midair.
And just as she had predicted…
Chakra pulsed through Sasori's strings, activating mechanisms that forced pressure to build up in the Hiruko's left arm— and once enough pressure had accumulated, his forearm came right off and rocketed straight towards her. Using a little chakra to force him to deploy his single-use poisoned needle grenade had been well worth the effort!
"Rotation!"
Sakura emitted chakra from her Tenketsu in sequence, like booster rockets. As she fell towards the grenade and the Hiruko puppet, she spun herself into a human-sized top. The grenade detonated harmlessly against her protective envelope, its needles whizzing in every direction as they bounced off the spinning chakra bubble.
"Shannarooo!" Sakura shouted.
Spinning like a drill, Sakura pierced through the cloud of needles and continued accelerating towards Sasori below, who hadn't expected her to survive, let alone use her defensive move as an attack!
A fraction of a second before the Sakura hamster ball drill slammed into the Hiruko puppet like a meteor, a dark shadow flew out of its tail hole, narrowly escaping the oncoming attack.
BOOM!
Sakura collided with the puppet, shattering its hardened outer shell as easily as if it were glass, and warping beyond recognition the delicate mechanisms concealed within. She then swiftly emerged from the wreckage, looking every which way in search of Sasori's true body.
He was no doubt hiding somewhere, summoning his next puppet…
Technically, Sakura was supposed to have the terrain advantage, but now that advantage had turned into a disadvantage. The Sand Village's puppet users were accustomed to fighting in the open terrain of the desert, hiding behind dunes while their puppets drew the enemy's attention. But although forests posed a challenge for puppet users, as they had to be careful not to get their strings tangled in the trees while manoeuvring their puppets, the element of surprise far outweighed that drawback!
Sakura knelt and slammed her palms against the ground, but before she could send out a pulse of her chakra, she felt a great disturbance in the heaven and earth electric field behind her. Something had completely blotted it out, which could only mean…
"Metal!" Sakura cried out.
She whirled around and peered into the darkness of the forest. A low buzzing sound like that of a million hornets began filling her ears… Something was coming!
"You're quite something, girl, but you're probably too young to recognise my masterpiece," a youthful voice echoed through the forest. "So, allow me to introduce you to your manner of death… Behold! You are about to lay eyes on the Third Kazekage!"
A veritable tsunami of grey burst forth through the treeline and into the clearing. The huge wave, taller than the trees around it, was composed of iron sands vibrating at high frequencies, which rapidly devoured and reduced everything they touched to sawdust!
Standing astride the wave was an eerily lifelike puppet with black hair. This had once been the man whose disappearance sparked the Third Shinobi World War…
"Here I come!" shouted Sasori, who was following closely behind his puppet.
He channelled more chakra into his Third Kazekage puppet, taking control of its Magnet Style. Controlling this much iron sand and making it oscillate like so was rather taxing, so he focused his chakra on a smaller portion, shaping it into a cube and sending it flying at Sakura at high speeds ahead of the wave!
The pink-haired girl drew back her fist and punched the cube, sending it flying right back at its sender as if it were all a tennis rally. Undeterred, Sasori reshaped the iron sand into a pyramid before sending it back towards his opponent, extra-pointy bit first. Now, if the pink-haired girl tried to strike the iron sand, her fist would be split apart!
But to his surprise, Sasori found that his opponent was now furiously weaving hand signs instead of attempting to dodge or take cover…