The Ultimate Sacrifice

Sakura vaulted off a boulder and leapt, arms outstretched towards the low-lying tree branch she was planning to launch herself into the air from, but before she could swing herself to greater heights, searing pain flared across her back.

"Rotation!"

Despite not having her feet on the ground, Sakura managed to spin a protective cocoon around herself by expelling chakra in sequence from all 361 of her Tenketsu— just in time to block Kakuzu's Fire Style: Intelligent Hard Work Jutsu, which detonated a fraction of a second after making contact with her body.

Raging flames roared around Sakura's spinning protective bubble, but little by little, the firestorm gradually died down, briefly allowing Sakura to see beyond the orange veil of flames— and then her smoking (hot) body crashed into the ground like a meteor.

 'Ugh,' Inner Sakura moaned, as Sakura dizzily struggled to her feet. 'I think I'm going to be sick…'

She was feeling slightly queasy after spinning for so long, but vomiting her dinner was the least of her worries— for the first time in what seemed like an eternity, she was actually running out of chakra.

As a reminder, Urashiki had stolen almost all her chakra a little under two days ago. If it had been Kakashi, he would have been incapacitated for at least a week, but thanks to Tsunade's Senju-Uzumaki blood running through her veins, Sakura had managed to recover a good part of her energy during that time— but not all of it.

While the Eight Trigrams Palms Revolving Heaven truly was the perfect impenetrable shield, it was also horribly inefficient, since it protected the whole body; using it for so many times and for so long had nearly exhausted all of Sakura's resources.

She knew that using the technique was only a stopgap measure— sooner or later, she'd run out of stamina, and Kakuzu would kill her— and yet, she'd had no choice but to rely on it time and time again to resist Kakuzu's many elemental area-of-effect Ninjutsu.

"Need to think of something," Sakura muttered to herself. "Need to trick him somehow."

A bolt of lightning fell from the heavens, and Sakura hastily scrabbled out of the way— before performing a somersault to avoid Kakuzu's spear-like arm bursting out of the ground; right where she'd been standing a fraction of a second ago.

"You're starting to annoy me, girl," said Kakuzu calmly, as he jumped out of the hole in the dirt and casually dusted himself off. "There's a bonus for capturing you alive, but time is money, and you are beginning to take too much of my time…"

The implication was clear: if Sakura gave herself up, Kakuzu would hand her over to the black market alive— and as long as one was alive, there was hope. No matter how Sakura looked at it, she had better odds escaping from the black market than from Kakuzu.

Still, she also had her own pride as a kunoichi— how could she just surrender to the enemy?

Sakura racked her brain for ideas— given enough time, she was certain that she'd be able to find some way to trick him, but Kakuzu was relentless.

If only she had some time to think…

If only she could get away from him, if only for a minute…

If only she had access to the chakra sealed within the unfinished Yin Seal…!

Sakura abruptly stopped moving— she had just had an idea!

"Done running away?" asked Kakuzu suspiciously. "Good… it'll all be over soon…"

Kakuzu cautiously approached Sakura, checking his surroundings for traps— it always paid to be careful. As the saying goes: a lion uses its full strength even when hunting a rabbit…

"Shannaro!" Sakura suddenly shouted, taking a haymaker swing at Kakuzu's face.

Despite Sakura's incredibly telegraphed punch, Kakuzu immediately jumped to a safe distance— he remembered all too well the ease with which his prey had thrown him around like a rag doll, before nearly chopping off his head.

As long as he kept bombarding her with Ninjutsu from a distance, she wouldn't be able to harm him— Kakuzu prepared himself to lay down some suppressive fire to stop her advance, but he quickly realized that his opponent had no intention of closing the gap!

"Shadow Clone Jutsu!"

A cloud of white smoke exploded at Sakura's feet, and Kakuzu stared in disbelief as seven identical pink-haired girls jumped out of the Jutsu's smoke and ran off in different directions. Judging from their weak chakra fluctuations and their slow speed, Haruno Sakura had split her chakra into seven equal portions, no doubt hoping that he'd follow one of the six fakes…

"How foolish," said Kakuzu impassively, as he tore off his Akatsuki robes, revealing his bare torso lined with sutures. "You would have been better off fighting."

There were four porcelain masks stitched into his back, and each one of them contained a stolen shinobi's heart— these hearts were the secret behind Kakuzu's ability to use all five chakra natures, as if he had been born with them. If Sakura wanted to permanently kill Kakuzu, or at the very least defeat him, she would have to destroy all of his hearts.

Naturally, Sakura knew all too well about Earth Grudge Fear, Kakuzu's secret and signature Jutsu— Naruto V.S. Kakuzu was one of the most memorable fights in the anime!

The four masks popped off Kakuzu's back, each accompanied by a large mass of black tendrils, which grotesquely wriggled and writhed into vaguely humanoid forms— and once they were done extricating themselves from each other, Kakuzu and the four elemental masks quickly ran off in pursuit of the seven Sakuras.

…

Upon hearing them leave, Sakura let out a quiet sigh of relief.

Kakuzu had fallen for her sleight-of-hand trick: the seven Sakuras were actually all Shadow Clones. Using the Shadow Clone Jutsu's smoke as cover, her real self had hidden herself in the very hole Kakuzu had dug to ambush her from below!

Still, while the danger might have momentarily passed, she wasn't out of the woods yet. To avoid giving away the nature of her trick, she had made her Shadow Clones spread out in all directions, to make it really seem like her real self had been among them— but as a result, this tactic had cut off all of her possible escape routes.

Even though Sakura had seven Shadow Clones playing tag with five Kakuzus, it doubtlessly wouldn't take much time for him to catch them all and realize he'd been deceived— at which point he would set up a perimeter around the area and search for her, making it impossible for her to sneak away unnoticed— and then she'd inevitably get discovered once the encirclement tightened around her hiding place.

"Looks like I've got no other choice," Sakura muttered to herself.

Sakura held her hands in front of her, before plunging each of her claw-like fingers into her sternum, leaving ten angry welts on her skin. As soon as she lifted her fingers, Sakura's breasts shuddered, and her exposed cleavage began to flush pink— vast quantities of dense chakra were welling up from within her bosom, as her breasts' fat cells, connective tissues and glands converted themselves into breast chakra…

"Secret Technique: Breast Diet!"