Chapter 715 - 715: Inside the Sun Inside the Moon

Toneri's puppet was leagues above regular Ōtsutsuki puppets, which were themselves each on the level of a special jōnin… but in the end, it was only a puppet. Perhaps it might have served as a warm-up for Naruto if he'd started the battle in his base state, but to fly, he needed to enter Six Paths Sage Mode, so he simply annihilated the fake Toneri with a Truth-Seeking Orb before it could even twitch, whilst Hinata fanned the ordinary puppets with a diffused blast of her own cyan chakra.

The puppets' shattered fragments rained down into the sea below.

"So, this is it," Naruto said, gazing up and the incandescent ball of light floating above their heads. "D'ya think we'll have to wait until nighttime to land on the sun, ya know?"

"There is so much wrong with what you just said that I don't even know where to begin," Karin sighed, facepalming. "Sometimes I really wonder what onee-sama sees in you."

Sometimes, Naruto wondered the same. It hadn't always been this way, after all.

He had first noticed Sakura on his first day at the academy; even back then, her cuteness had caught his eye, but alas, she had never given him the time of day. At the time, Sakura and Ino had been obsessed with that annoying bastard Sasuke, and it had only got worse after his entire family died, leaving him all dark and broody.

Girls found that attractive, apparently.

At first, the only reason he started pestering Sakura to get her attention was because he wanted to beat Sasuke at something. Before long, he found himself more and more entranced by the pink-haired girl for her own merits, and at some point, his rivalry with Sasuke and his interest in Sakura grew into two distinct things. When Team 7 was formed, all three of them ended up growing closer to one another, forging unbreakable bonds as they fought side by side over the years.

Sakura was strong, beautiful, kind and smart; she could have had any man she wanted, even Sasuke, but in the end, she had chosen him, Uzumaki Naruto. Although his romance with Sakura might have begun because of Sasuke, their rivalry no longer had anything to do with her. Her acceptance of him was validation that he had done something right, that he ought to continue moving closer towards his ideal self, to be truly worthy of standing by her side!

And then Sakura had forcefully regrown his hair, as if to deny his efforts. Of course, Naruto knew she had only done so because she preferred his old look, but he was still his own person, wasn't he? He wasn't just the Sixth Hokage's boyfriend, he was the future Seventh Hokage!

Click!

In the middle of Naruto's inner monologue, right about the part with the swing, the artificial sun's golden radiance suddenly dimmed into a silvery glow, effectively turning into an exact replica of the moon. It seemed there also existed a day-and-night cycle in the world inside the moon.

"See, just like I said," Naruto said haughtily. "Now that the sun's turned into the moon for the night, it should be safe to land, ya know!"

"But… what… how…" Karin spluttered. "That's not how— that still doesn't make any sense!?"

First, the sun and the moon were two completely different heavenly bodies; second, the sun wasn't a lamp that could be turned off; and third, they were supposed to be inside the moon! Everything here was fake, sun and moon alike!

"The artificial sun isn't that hot, it's still a fake," Tenten commented. "Even if night hadn't fallen, we could have still gone inside… now come on, let's hurry before the enemy attacks again!"

…

Just like the moon itself, the inner sun–cum–moon was entirely hollow.

Several rocky islands of varying sizes and shapes floated about in this space. There was a large, crescent moon-shaped island with a smaller spherical island hovering in the hollow between the tips of the crescent, several smaller barren islands containing ruined buildings, and one great island upon which stood a gothic-style castle.

"A castle…?" Hinata murmured. "What… is this place?"

"Let's split up," Tenten proposed. "Hinata and I will take care of the moon's power source, while Naruto and Karin take down the enemy in his castle."

Unknown to her, Toneri was not at home. He had gone down to Earth to steal a pair of Byakugan; with his extraordinary sensory jutsu, he had easily located the hidden entrance leading to Konoha and puzzled out the correct way to enter the pocket dimension.

"Something's happening," Hinata said anxiously, glancing around worriedly. "But the source, I can't locate it…"

"I can feel it too," Naruto said, frowning. "It's like Hinata-chan's chakra, only ten thousand times stronger, ya know…"

Hinata scanned their surroundings, but she could not find anything that looked remotely like a chakra battery. She couldn't see or sense anything outside the fake sun's envelope, and there was nothing but empty space and dead rocks for thousands of kilometres around them… and then she noticed it, a bubble of total void in her X-ray vision, much like the one that existed under Konoha.

The boundaries of a barrier!

"More incoming," Karin said warningly as an army of puppets rose from the faraway castle's ramparts, firing a veritable hailstorm of chakra bullets at them. "Naruto, let's go!"

…

A ripple shook through Sakura's breasts as the ground beneath her feet trembled.

First the premature destruction of the Moon Tunnel, and now these intermittent earthquakes… make no mistake, something out of the ordinary was happening on the moon. She would have given credit to these odd occurrences to Naruto and company, but strangely enough, she couldn't locate any of her friends' chakra signatures, which seemed rather odd, as her Byakugan's sight extended more than far enough to see the moon in its entirety.

"Earth Style: Hiding Like a Mole Jutsu!"

Sakura sank into the ground, phasing through a few kilometres of solid stone before emerging on the moon's cratered surface. She reflexively closed her eyes and held her breath as she slowly rose from the moon's surface, just in case Katsuyu had been wrong about her physique, but she was completely fine, as expected.

By all rights, the interstellar void ought to have made the blood in her veins and the fluids in her eyes boil away. The rapidly evaporating fluids would have burst out of her orifices, and the individual molecules would have eventually radiated away all their heat in a frozen spray, leaving her a desiccated corpse floating in space.

However, none of that happened.

Sakura was completely fine, even without cloaking herself in a chakra cloak. Her skin and her outer membranes now seemed durable and resilient enough to allow her to survive without any additional protection in outer space. The cosmic radiation bombarding her body felt like a shower of tiny kisses on her skin, warm and pleasant.

"I can see the Land of Fire from here… and that must be Redaku, all the way to the west in the mountains…"

Overwhelmed, Sakura gazed up at the pale blue dot in the distance, the star that shared its name with her first home. A thin blue beam was rising up from the Land of Lightning, the shot fired by Kumo's chakra cannon…

"Planet Earth."

That was where she belonged.

This beautiful planet and the people who lived on it were the stakes in the upcoming battle against the Ōtsutsuki clan. If she couldn't even defeat a half-breed mutt like Toneri, then there was no hope for this world.

Sakura raised her hands, aiming at the electric-blue beam streaking across the black void of space through the window she had made with her thumbs and forefingers. There was still time to intercept the cannon shot; the distance between the Earth and the moon was immense, so even though she had departed after it had been fired, she had arrived first.