Chapter 719 Sealed Inside the Moon

Sakura's figure flickered between tangible and illusory as she absorbed the torrent of blue energy.

The chakra cannon's shot was definitely something her ninjutsu absorption power could handle, since there were no traces of Six Paths or senjutsu chakra in the attack, but there was a strange sort of chakra mixed in with the Eight-Tails' Bijū chakra and the Kumo-nin's combined lightning nature chakra.

That impurity, so to speak, was causing her to phase out of sync with the universe.

'Six Paths Style: Calamity Swallowing Pill Refining Jutsu!'

The chakra cannon's payload was infused with enough chakra to teleport away the entire moon, which was more than Sakura could hope to handle on her own. Her fingers felt as though they were constantly on the verge of snapping off, even as she produced one, two, and three pills…

Meanwhile, down below on the moon's surface, Toneri had finally acclimatised to his new eyes' full power. His cyan chakra cloak no longer flickered unstably whenever he moved, and his eyes no longer stung when he used his newfound powers…

Sakura popped the first of the three pills into her mouth.

All at once, time seemed to slow to a crawl as lightning surged through her veins, supercharging her nervous system and activating her muscles. The stars in the sky seemed to spin around her in fast forward as the scenery around her changed in quick succession…

A startled pair of astronauts in space suits near a Lunar Lander.

A splendid, futuristic city, Planet Earth floating lazily in the blue sky.

The moon shattered under her feet, and the Earth cracked in half above her head.

A strange-looking fellow with a very large head, dressed in a toga…

No sooner had the smell of cheese filled Sakura's nostrils than Toneri's figure flickered in front of her, ready to strike, but a blur of golden light whizzed past her and tackled him, raising a billowing plume of moon dust as the golden and cyan figures carved a long gash across the moon's surface.

Sakura blinked, and the vision disappeared.

The man in the golden chakra cloak was gone, but Toneri was still there, nonchalantly flying towards her as though he hadn't just had his face dragged across the ground for hundreds of kilometres.

'Lightning Style Chakra Mode!'

Sakura contorted her body as nine green beams sliced through the void towards her, her immense, teardrop-shaped breasts rippling and undulating in slow motion as she dodged faster than the speed of thought. Her meaty buns narrowly avoided the sharp beams as they flopped around between the beams… and then time resumed its course.

Boom, BOOM!

Toneri raised a shield made of a Truth-Seeking Orb as Sakura appeared to flicker to his right, his arm instantly growing numb as the impact of her punch propagated through his bones… and in the next instant, the real Sakura appeared on his other side, faster than his Tenseigan could track her.

'Explosion Style: Chakra Enhanced Strength — Cherry Blossom Torpedo!'

Sakura hit him with the CBT, the punch's shockwave blasting away his chakra cloak and sending him tumbling across the moon's surface, but somehow, she had already flickered behind him before he could even bring himself to a stop.

Hands clasped together over her head, Sakura struck Toneri in his midsection, cracking open a wide canyon in the moon's surface as she smashed him into the ground. They both fell into the yawning chasm, exchanging punches and kicks as they fell through the moon's crust and into the inner world within…

"Just stay down, already!" Sakura shouted, now that she had air with which to speak. "I'm only the third strongest of all of us—"

Sakura's voice cut off as she abruptly found herself trapped in darkness.

'…???'

A tremendous weight pressed in on her on all sides.

Her body was frozen.

She couldn't move.

She couldn't even make her little toe twitch.

Her jaw was locked half-open, and there was something hard shoved in her mouth, extending halfway down her windpipe.

Sakura's breath caught in her throat as panic set in.

'Where am I?'

'It hurts!'

'Somebody!'

'…help!'

She couldn't even open her eyes, for fear that the pressure would burst her eyeballs.

'Byakugan!'

At last, something worked.

Sakura looked through her closed eyelids with her X-ray sight, extending her telescopic vision as far as it would go. Even though she could not move her head, she could still look in all directions at once. She was still inside the moon… just not the hollow moon she had come to know.

The chakra pill's effects had run out, leaving her stranded in another world, encased in solid stone and sealed 1400 kilometres below the moon's surface. It seemed interdimensional travel was far more taxing than she could have imagined; the pill could have lasted her years if she'd only used its chakra for Lightning Style Chakra Mode, but it seemed the constant space-time flickering she'd unconsciously been doing had completely exhausted its chakra…

Sakura still had two pills left, but they were inside her thigh pouch, where she had slipped them earlier… and even if she managed to get one into her mouth, it was doubtful that it would be able to take her to her one and only home, to her one and only Naruto, amongst the infinite worlds and infinite Narutos of the multiverse…

'ARGHHH!'

The Sakura-shaped hole she had made when she had been shunted into the dead moon's heart was converging. The walls were weakening and closing in, and before long, she would be crushed beneath the weight of 1400 kilometres of solid stone.

Sakura's eyes were already closed.

Even if the Sage of Six Paths hadn't created the moon in this world, the moon in her previous world had still been born of the Earth, when an enormous celestial body crashed into the newborn planet and ripped a massive chunk out of it... and the odds were that many moons in the multiverse had also been born this way.

Sealed in stone, Sakura had never been so still in her entire life. Sensing nature energy had never been so easy, even in this environment devoid of it, and at last, she found what she had been searching for: there was an inert Ryūmyaku vein nearby… a Gelel Mine. She could try to absorb its essence from a distance!

Nature energy from another world eagerly rushed into her body, and…

'Sage Art: Body Revival Jutsu!'

Sakura gritted her teeth as she crunched down on the stone trapped between her jaws. She activated her muscle cells and pushed with all her strength, her joints popping and her muscles screaming in agony...

"Sha…"

Her reinforced bones cracked under the weight of a quintillion tons of rock…

"Sage Art: Senjutsu Chakra Enhanced Strength!"

Twenty thousand Kakashi's worth of chakra exploded all at once.

"…NNAROOOOO!" Sakura screamed. "I'M THE STRONGEST WOMAN IN THE WORLD!"

The stone cracked and shifted slightly, freeing her hands and allowing her to weave signs…

"Transformation Jutsu!"

Sakura shrank to the size of a mouse and popped a second chakra pill into her mouth, before vanishing in a flicker of lightning... and a split second later, the Sakura-shaped cavern closed in on all sides with a great BOOM.