"I honestly have no idea!" said Sakura helplessly, as she scrubbed the bathhouse's tiled floor with a broom. "She just crashed out, and then she conked out— just like that!"
The female Genin— that is, Ino, Hinata and Karin (plus Sakura, to watch over their progress)— had been assigned the women's section of the bathhouse to clean. Incidentally, whenever Sakura would come here for a bath, she would always find it strange to see the mural of the Land of Fire's mountains on the wall, instead of the mural of Mt. Fuji that she had grown used to seeing in Tokyo's bathhouses…
"It's weird, you know?" said Ino. "Tenten always seemed so level-headed—" she reluctantly lifted open a drain's grate and reached tentatively into the dark hole with her hand. "—ewww!" she shrieked, having touched something slimy. "Okay, I literally cannot do this any more— there's gunge under my fingernails, this is disgusting!"
Ino yanked out a repulsive bundle of women's hair from the drain, which had congealed into an amorphous blob of filth and cleaning product residue. This was the price women had to pay for long and beautiful silky hair— clogged drains!
"Eugh. So, is Tenten going to be all right?" Ino continued, tossing the unspeakable mass into a bin with thinly veiled disgust. "And what happened to those strangers?"
Even though Ino desperately wanted some help with the drains, it wasn't to the extent of pulling a comatose girl out of bed!
"Lady Tsunade's personally watching over her," Sakura assured her. "As for those guys, they'll be spending the foreseeable future in a cell until the Torture and Interrogation Force figure out what makes them tick. The higher-ups are taking this pretty seriously, apparently— those two somehow managed to bypass the Sensing Barrier and the entrance gates, so there's going to be a whole investigation and everything…"
Sakura just couldn't stop thinking about Tenten's final words before fainting— she simply couldn't make sense of them. Even though she had read very little of Boruto in her past life, having rapidly lost interest, she still couldn't fathom how the titular protagonist of Naruto's sequel could have possibly earned such hatred from such an extremely minor supporting character.
'Judging from Boruto's and Sasuke's expressions when it happened, they obviously have no clue why Tenten attacked them on sight, either— which means that Tenten probably comes from a time even further into the future than they do,' said Inner Sakura thoughtfully. 'Maybe it has something to do with the reason she became a Returner?'
There just wasn't enough available information to solve this puzzle. Tenten couldn't answer any questions, as she had fallen into a coma, but even if she had been awake, Sakura still wouldn't have asked her why she hated Boruto and Sasuke so much— she didn't want to get her memories erased again!
"Come to think of it," Sakura murmured to herself. "Tenten did say something about Sasuke, after my first match in the Chūnin exams finals…"
How could she ever forget? The warning was etched into her brain:
As long as you don't interfere with my plans, I don't mind letting you play house with Sasuke for a bit longer.
Sakura had initially assumed that Tenten had planned to stop Sasuke from defecting to Orochimaru, but in light of recent events, her initial hypothesis seemed unlikely.
After all, Naruto wouldn't be able to save the world from Kaguya without the Indra reincarnate— it wouldn't make sense to kill Sasuke too early or to stunt his growth, because it would only bring about a bad ending. As a result, regardless of what Tenten might have in store for Sasuke, it had to happen AFTER he helped Naruto save the shinobi world!
Suddenly, the sounds of shouting and of things crashing into each other filled the air— it sounded like some kind of accident had occurred on the other side of the partition separating the men's section of the bathhouse from the women's.
"What's all this commotion!?" came the bathhouse's proprietor's voice from the other side, followed shortly by, "Ah, you again, you peeping tom!?"
"Ehehe…" came Naruto's contrite voice.
A few hours later, the girls finished cleaning their part of the bathhouse, in large part thanks to Sakura's Shadow Clones and their diligent work ethic— and since they were already there, they collectively decided to take a bath. And so, after stripping out of their clothes in the changing room and rinsing themselves off with a quick shower, Sakura, Karin, Ino and Hinata headed for the large heated bathtub at the end of the room.
"Ahh~ This is heaven~," Sakura sighed, as she lowered herself into the bath until her neck was completely submerged in nearly scalding water. "My shoulders get so stiff, sometimes…"
On the other side of the partition, the boys pricked up their ears.
Could this be the legendary girls' talk?
"Is it just me, or have you grown some more?" said Ino, looking enviously at Sakura's breasts bobbing in the water. "I can't believe they're so big that they actually float…"
When visiting a bathhouse, it was common courtesy not to stare at the other patrons' privates, but Sakura's frontage was just so conspicuous that it was simply impossible to ignore.
"You're getting pretty big yourself, Ino," Sakura offered. "You've been using my cream, right?"
Ino's burgeoning breasts weren't quite so small any more— Sakura had noticed that they now visibly bounced when she walked.
They were about as big as Hinata's, in fact…
Noticing that Sakura was now looking in her direction, Hinata wrapped her arms around her chest and sank her body deeper into the water, her cheeks turning pink.
"S-Sakura-chan," said Hinata bashfully. "Please d-don't stare at me like that…"
"You haven't been using the free sample Sakura gave you?" Ino questioned her. "You look about the same as always…"
Hinata's cheeks turned bright crimson.
"Blub, blub… It was e-embarrassing," she mumbled softly, lowering herself even further into the water, so that she now blew bubbles out of her mouth when she spoke. "My bre— m-my chest, it keeps getting in the way, so I stopped… Blub, blub, blub…"
Karin scowled, palming her own meagre bust. Due to her recent expedition to the Hidden Cloud, she hadn't been able to follow her onee-sama's daily beauty regimen, and as such, she was still as flat as a washboard…
"I'm sure Naruto would go crazy for you, if you were just a bit bigger," said Ino, winking at Hinata. "Boys are simple creatures, you know… doesn't take much to make them happy."
That being said, even though most women like to dress up and look pretty, that doesn't mean they do it purely to attract the opposite sex. Truthfully, they mostly do it for fun and for their own sense of self-worth. Otherwise, girls like Ino wouldn't keep starving themselves and denying themselves their favourite snacks— after all, men like women with a bit of meat on their bones! (But not too much, and it has to be in the right places!)
"Oi!" Karin suddenly shouted. "I can sense you moulding chakra, Neji! You'd better not be thinking of doing anything ungentlemanlike, you pervert!"
The sounds of a brief scuffle on the boy's side carried over the partition, accompanied by shouts of "no fair," "get him," and, "lucky bastard!"
"Still, you could make a fortune with your recipe, Sakura," said Ino calmly. "You know, Shikamaru's family owns pharmacies all over the Land of Fire, they could sell your cream for you. I could talk to him about it, if you'd like…"
"It's true that I need money," Sakura admitted.
According to the Hidden Cloud's secret scroll, Sakura would need pure chakra metal to begin 'cultivating' the Lightning Chakra Mode, since the Nintaijutsu required her to electroplate chakra metal to her skin as a foundational step.
However, chakra metal was exorbitantly expensive— to begin practising Lightning Chakra Mode, Sakura would either have to melt down the Manyuu Blade, or shell out several S-rank mission rewards' worth of ryō…