"Helloooo," Naruto called out. "Anybody out there theeeeere?"
An unnatural stillness hung in the air.
No matter how much Sakura strained her ears, she couldn't make out anything except the sounds of Naruto splashing around. There was no wind, so the tree leaves didn't rustle. No birdsong or the buzzing of insects, either— just silence.
It was strangely off-putting.
"Oi, not so loud, Naruto," said Sakura in a low voice. "We're out in the open, here— who knows who might be listening?"
Naruto ventured farther into the field, parting the golden stalks of rice as he waded through the ankle-deep water, while Sakura lingered at the edge, unwilling to get her toes wet or expend any chakra to stand on the water's surface.
Sakura swivelled on the spot and peered into the half-darkness of the forest that bordered the field. She had definitely heard someone stepping on a branch.
"Sasuke?" Sakura whispered into her headset. "Was that you?"
Sakura obtained no response other than that of static.
The wireless radio technology that the Hidden Leaf Village had developed for communications between squad members had quite a short range— no more than a few hundred metres. Furthermore, due to the mountainous terrain, the radio's effective range was even shorter than that— Konoha wasn't rich enough to install radio signal repeaters on each and every hill within its borders…
"SAKURAAA!" Naruto's distant voice suddenly rang out.
At that moment, two hulking figures came rushing out of the forest, swinging large weapons. Sakura gracefully pirouetted out of the way of their attacks and jumped onto a tree branch to analyse the threat from a safe distance. Her enemies were two in number— they were wearing some sort of dark, European-style full plate armour, and they were wielding two-handed spiked war maces.
Acting as though they hadn't just tried to murder her, the two knights lifted their maces from the crater where Sakura had barely avoided their strike and hefted them onto their shoulders. They looked up at Sakura, their red eyes glowing ominously under their helmets' visors… and then, they jumped.
"Whoa!" Sakura blurted out, as the two medieval knights came hurtling towards her.
Their metal weapons had to weigh a ton, and yet they had just jumped 10 metres into the air, as if they were as light as feathers…
Sakura sprang from her foothold and grabbed onto a second branch, which she used to swing towards her assailants. She then drove her foot into the first knight's chest plate, denting the metal with her prodigious leg strength, before lightly stepping off him and flipping forwards, latching onto the second knight's back.
As they fell together, Sakura pummelled the second knight with her fists, aiming for the gaps in his armour. Strangely enough, Sakura didn't feel like she was hitting flesh, but rather rubber. If her vicious strikes bothered him, he did not let it show— he bore them all without even a single grunt of pain.
Right before they crashed into the unforgiving ground together, Sakura leapt off the knight's back and executed a front flip. As she completed her revolution, she extended her right leg, hammering her heel into the knight's head the moment his body smashed into the earth.
The knight's helmet crumpled like aluminium foil, leaving his head a flattened mess in the deep crater left under Sakura's foot. She then knelt at the knight's side and observed her handiwork— there was no blood or anything gruesome on the corpse— just a deep imprint of the underside of her sandal, in the okonomiyaki crepe that had become the knight's head.
'This thing isn't human,' observed Inner Sakura. 'A homunculus? No… this thing's hollow— like some sort of inflated sex doll....'
That would certainly explain the knights' inhuman lightness and their rubberlike texture.
"Are you the puppet master?" said Sakura abruptly, as she got to her feet. "Are you the one controlling these Hollow Men?"
She had just sensed a strange form of energy a few dozen metres behind her. She couldn't quite tell what it was— just that it was vaguely familiar and not chakra.
"I can feel Gelel energy on you," a boy's voice rang out behind her. "You will tell me where and how you obtained a Stone."
Sakura whirled around.
Her interlocutor was a young man with long blonde hair. Just like the Hollow Men, he was wearing European-style plate armour, but he wielded a short broadsword rather than a spiked mace.
"Gelel energy?" Sakura asked cautiously. "I don't know what you're talking about."
"If you won't talk willingly," said the young man dully, drawing his sword, "then I'll be forced to loosen your tongue."
Sakura truthfully had no idea what the young man in front of her was babbling about, but one thing was clear: he was an enemy. Sakura drew her Manyuu blade from her hip and held it in front of her in the Breast-Guarding Stance. The two swordsmen inched closer and closer to each other, keeping an eye on each other's maai— the distance separating their respective striking ranges— and the moment they entered each other's domains…
"Rising Thunder!" the young man shouted.
"Manyuu Style: Breast Hunt!"
The young man's sword elongated, its blade turning into turquoise mist. The gaseous blade passed through Sakura's own sword and snaked towards her, forcing her to abort her attack and roll away.
However, as surprised as Sakura was to find herself faced with an unblockable attack, nothing could have surprised her more than to hear English spoken by her opponent. Her mind was instantly filled with questions, such as:
What could this possibly mean?
Was this person a Transmigrator just like her?
Was he an overseas fan of Naruto who'd kicked the bucket and ended up here as well?
"Hello, naisu too mee-to yoo," said Sakura in broken English, trying her hardest to remember her junior high lessons, which now seemed like a distant memory. "Mai name izu— Sakura. What izu— your name?"
"…???" seemed to say the young man, judging by his mystified expression.
Sakura's head tilted to the side quizzically. Could her opponent not understand what she was saying? Was her pronunciation truly that incomprehensible?
The shinobi continent was like a god's miniature garden— a melting pot of various ethnicities from her previous world, the Earth. When Sakura had first arrived in this world, the first thing she had noticed upon looking into a mirror (apart from the fact that she was now a girl) was that she looked European. Naruto was white as well— though Sasuke was distinctly Japanese.
Furthermore, as Sakura had discovered when she had visited the Hidden Cloud, the darker-skinned people from Kumo weren't like southeastern Asians, but looked much more like people of African descent— though that much ought to have already been obvious to Sakura, given Bee's propensity for rap, the village's general enthusiasm for electricity-based powers, and the Raikage's reputation as the fastest shinobi in the world.
(Thank goodness Kishimoto didn't write them any more stereotypes, or I would have been in trouble!)
And for some reason, the only spoken language on the continent was Japanese, all names were Japanese as well, and the only culture to be found in all the land was Japanese…ish.
How very mysterious indeed!