Sakura reached for the door handle and turned it experimentally.
It was unlocked.
With a light push, the door swung open silently, and Sakura slipped into the room, closing the door behind her. The lights were already on, sparing her the trouble of hunting for a switch.
This room was decorated very differently from the rest of the hideout; in fact, it looked far more like something Sakura might expect from a nursery. Colourful wallpaper covered the walls, depicting rolling hills of green grass beneath blue skies lit by smiling yellow suns, which shone their cartoonish rays down on faceless children holding hands. Looking away from the walls, Sakura saw that the room was filled with cribs placed at regular intervals in a grid pattern, from which the loud cries she had heard in the corridor were now clearly emanating.
Hesitantly, Sakura wandered into the midst of the cribs, peering into each one as she passed. As expected, they were occupied by infants… In this day and age, there were not as many orphans as in years past, but no matter the time, there would always be unwanted children. It seemed like Danzō was still up to his old tricks of robbing the cradle for new operatives…
"?"
Sakura looked up, the sound of a door creaking open having caught her attention. A child, no older than ten, poked his head out from a doorway leading to an adjoining room along the side of the nursery.
"Can I help you, onee-sama?" the cute child said, tilting his head to the side. "Oh, I know!" he then exclaimed as he stepped out from behind the doorway, clapping his hands excitedly. "Are you the new wet nurse?"
Hands behind his back, he tottered over to Sakura, looking at her with his big eyes.
"N-no," Sakura replied. Finding her throat to be rather dry, she swallowed hard. "I'm not."
"Oh…" said the child, looking rather crestfallen. "The young ones don't seem to like formula very much. They'll be disappointed..."
Out of the corner of her eye, Sakura spied more children peeking at her from the side room the boy had stepped out of. It seemed as though Danzō had arranged it so that the older children might care for the toddlers, leaving his more useful agents to do work that was actually useful for him…
A shiver ran down her spine. There was something uncanny about the way they stared at her.
"By the way," Sakura said slowly. "I was wondering… if I wanted to find one particular baby, how would I go about identifying her? I don't see any nameplates on the cribs… ah, but she probably wouldn't have been given the same name here that her mother gave her…"
Sakura was looking for Lady Manyū Kyōko's baby, whom she had named Hatomune, much to her husband's dismay. Giving a name to a child they might never see again would only make their grief all the deeper, in his opinion.
"What a strange question, onee-sama," said the boy, smiling broadly. "We were all abandoned by our parents at birth. We are unworthy, but even so, we were given a chance to live by the grace of Lord Danzō. Things such as names are… unnecessary!"
Without warning, the child surged forwards, revealing the kunai he had concealed behind his back, but Sakura caught him by the wrist and twisted his arm behind him, forcing the weapon from his grip. The kunai clattered to the floor, setting off a storm of wails from the cribs around them.
"You don't owe Danzō anything!" Sakura cried. "If anything, he's the one who stole your chances at a normal life!"
Ten-year-olds came streaming out of the neighbouring room, brandishing various cold weapons, and they circled around Sakura, cutting off any chance of escape… or so they thought. Sakura kicked the child she was holding away, sending him sprawling, and she leapt into the air, flipping before landing feet first on the ceiling.
"Water Style: Starch Syrup Capturing Field!"
Sakura's cheeks bulged, and she spat out a glob of syrup that splattered across the floor. A few of the quicker, luckier children managed to leap away in time, but the rest found themselves bogged down in the mire, unable to free themselves. The soles of their feet stuck to the ground, and as they made exaggerated movements in an attempt to extricate themselves, they lost their balance and fell, causing themselves to smear the syrup further across their clothes and limbs, entangling even more of their companions as they went down.
"Don't underestimate teenagers, you brats," Sakura called out to them from the ceiling. "Just throw yourselves obediently into the syrup if you aren't covered in it already, and you'll spare yourselves a beating."
As expected of brainwashed soldiers, they did not even deign to respond to Sakura's ridiculous demands. They only gripped their weapons tighter and leapt to join her on the ceiling, while those who remained below, still standing on their own two feet, did their best to hurl their weapons at her.
Annoyingly, Sakura's enormous breasts hung pendulously from her chest, obscuring much of her field of vision. Standing upside-down on the ceiling clearly did her no favours, so she flipped once more and landed with a splash in the pool of syrup below, covering even more of the children in goo.
"Give it up!" Sakura shouted, twirling and pirouetting between the cribs, dodging flying shuriken and kunai while sliding her feet across the floor and kicking up waves of syrup in the same motion. "You're not even old enough to have graduated from the academy, and I'm a Jōnin! You'd be lucky to touch even one of my hairs!"
This was taking too long.
Sakura had lost her pursuers earlier, but since she had been forced to mould chakra to fight, she was certain the Root's operatives had already pinpointed her location and were on their way… and she did not want the children caught in the crossfire.
"Why won't you fight us seriously?" one of the few remaining girls said, panting heavily. "If you were fighting to kill, we wouldn't have lasted this long… at this rate, they're going to catch you."
"Is that concern I hear? Well, I don't need it. The person you should be worrying about is yourself," Sakura said. She agilely avoided a thrown sickle, seizing the kusarigama's chain as it whistled past her ears and pulling it, causing the child at the other end to lose their balance and fall into the syrup. "And besides, what kind of heroine would I be if I hit children?"
Another girl chimed in.
"We're not children. We're shinobi. Tools to be used at Lord Danzō's discretion," she said dully. She turned to the other girl, the one who had expressed concern for Sakura. "Aya, don't forget what happened to the others. If you can't follow simple orders, you'll be considered a broken tool, and then you'll be discarded too…"
For a child, the look in her eyes was depressingly similar to Kakashi's. Sakura fixed the girl who had killed her own heart with a glare. Her eyes rolled back in her head, and she collapsed into a heap in the syrup at her feet. Until someone freed her, she would be enjoying a pleasant illusion, one in which she was allowed to feast on all the sweets she could eat.
…and now, the girl named Aya was the only one left, and her feet were already glued to the ground. There was no need to fight any more; Sakura had already won.
"The baby you're looking for is over there," Aya said meekly, pointing to one of the cribs. "The Manyū child is in that one, three rows down and on the far right."
Chakra gathering at the soles of her feet, Sakura stepped across the sticky expanse covering the floor and picked up the crying baby from the crib Aya had indicated. Unfortunately, she did not have nearly enough arms to carry all of the babies back to the surface, but this was a start. She would come back for the rest later.
"Hang on," Sakura said, frowning. "How did you know I was looking for that baby in particular…"
Sakura's voice trailed off as the all-too-familiar buzzing of insect wings reached her ears. Her body reflexively stiffened in fear, the swaddled baby in her arms letting out a pained cry from being hugged too tightly.
And suddenly, a sharp pain stabbed her side.
Stiffly, Sakura looked down.
A kunai was stuck in her side, a damp patch of scarlet blooming across her clothes where the handle protruded. Looking up, she saw that Aya was now staring her down with cold eyes, the frightened façade she had shown earlier nowhere to be seen on her face.