A flaw in the system

III

There was something wrong about this morning, was Sakuras first thought as she found herself on the bridge with her two quite teammates. Naruto had exhausted his chakra the night before and Kakashi had decided that he should sleep in. Sakura had secretly thought that the decision was stupid since Zabuza could be coming any day now but she held her tongue. Teacher knows best. And anyways her and The others hadn't had a proper conversation since the day when Sumire had shown up at the door.

Every single one of her hairs were on end and her survival instincts just screamed at her to get the hell off of the bridge but she ignored it. Damnit she was a ninja and ninja didn't run away. She steadied her hands around a plank of wood on the floor and began to concentrate on her heart rate.

A couple years ago Sakura had been diagnosed with Anxiety Paranoia personality disorder by her doctor, and her parents had almost pulled her out of the Academy. Whenever she had a bad feeling about something, or something went very badly wrong she was prone to panic attacks, but recently she'd learned how to control her heartbeat and calm herself down. It didn't work all of the time but it was pretty solid when she really needed to mellow out. Sakura had asked her parents to keep it to themselves. Only them and the doctor knew, not even Minato Hokage was aware.

She had sat to the side when she became acutely aware of a presence behind Tazuna and body slammed the bridge builder down, out of the way of Zabuzas massive blade. And it seemed as Zabuza arrived, Kakashi sensei had geared himself up for a fight and was now standing opposite the Kiri-nin his Konaha Hitai pulled up. And as the two Jonin rank Ninja began to face off, Sasuke ran to where a masked boy was stood. The same masked boy that pretended to be a tracker-nin.

Sakura growled lowly, and just before she could get involved in the fight, she heard Sasuke yell to her. "Stay out of this! I'll handle the fighting, you just guard Tazuna!" She sighed but stayed back anyway. They didn't need her here. The could have completed this mission without her. She shook the thoughts away and created three shadow clones and one earth clone. She doubted she would need it but her earth clone was more hard wearing than a shadow clone and she made it just in case.

Sakura and her shadow clones surrounded the bridge builder, keeping him safe from all sides. All of her clones got to work when Zabuza sent his own clone out to assassinate the pink haired brat and that annoying bridge builder. What he wasn't expecting was for the girl to be smart enough to evade his tactics and take down his clone.

After the Zabuza clone was taken care of Sakura turned her attention to the dome of ice mirrors and her trapped teammate. Scratch that, trapped teammates. She heard Narutos yelling from inside and couldn't help but think how much of a bonehead the boy was. If he hadn't rushed inside he and Sasuke could both try and break the ice from inside and from out. The pink haired girl was immediately turned around by the yell of her clone, and suddenly another Zabuza clone was behind her and his gigantic sword was going straight for Tazunas neck.

"Oh no you don't." She muttered, and just managed to push away Tazuna, in turn having the sword imbedded into her calf. She didn't yell and she didn't scream, and although she really really wanted to, she didn't cry. Instead she created one more clone and ripped off a peice of cloth from the bottom of her dress, wrapping it unceremoniously around her calf in a half ditch attempt to help stop the bleeding. It didn't, and the cloth was soaked through in a matter of minutes. And as she watched her leg bleed out she thought of her earth clone hiding in the river below.

The earth clone technique had been taught to her by her late grandfather when she was seven. Since her clan was a civilian one originating from Suna, she often went there as a child and on one such occasion her grandfather had decided she would benefit from the C-rank technique that is earth clone. It took her a week to learn it and drained almost an eigth of her reserves but she had learnt it. Now, as a genin, it didn't take up nearly as much Chakra, but it was still a rather difficult technique.