Just to let you all know, this story was also inspired by the novel “The Road” by Cormac McCarthy. It’s a novel about a father and son, both unnamed, traveling through the remains of America which has been hit by some horrible catastrophe. It is cold constantly and the ground is covered in black snow and ash. The father and son are trying to stay alive with their meager supplies and keep from being mobbed by the few other survivors, some of whom will go as far as cannibalism because there is so little food left in the world. It is the only book that ever came close to making me (the epitome of calmness and emotional control) cry, particularly because of the ending.

To honor that book and remind you all that this story is supposed to have a seriously “bum-you-guys-out” atmosphere, in the beginning of every chapter from now on, I will put a few paragraphs describing the huge amount of cons and lack of pros to this universe. In these first few paragraphs, you'll find the reason behind the chapter title.

Oh, and it’s also going to be told in third person from now on, because only the first and last chapters are going to have Sakura telling the story herself with words like “I” and “me.” You will notice a great difference between Sakura’s gloomy chapter one intro and her ending note in the future.

I’ve decided for this fanfic to be my “break” fanfiction. Whenever I don’t feel like writing, I always feel I can write for this story, at least a paragraph or so, because…I don’t know. I just can. So maybe it will end up having some fast updates. Let’s see.

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At The Information Vault

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The people of the world, the average people, were sorrowfully indifferent to the reality of their lives. The fact that they had to board up their windows from demons and thieves every night, the fact that one fourth of all children were kidnapped or killed or lost, had become normal centuries ago. The single, meager meal of the day was a treasure, often the only thing they learned to look forward to.

Worse still was the fact that there were gods living in golden castles in the sky far above them. Everyone knew they existed and watched the people of earth and did nothing to save them. Yet the gods would look to the shinobi of the black-hearted lords and grant them youth and power and speed that lasted until their dying breath. The gods would give power to these devils and leave the innocent to starve and die and the innocent knew it. The word “innocent,” in fact, was hardly a word any longer. Now it referred only to a sobbing and helpless virgin, begging to be spared by the lusty group of men before her.

With such qualities in the world, it was not uncommon to see women, or even men, who cried when they saw their newborn child. The tears would not be of happiness, of gratitude to the gods and to nature for this new life, but of mourning and pity, self-pity and pity for the infant.

There were people who thought that childbirth was a sin to the child, for forcing the poor pathetic thing to have to face a life this living hell, and also a sin to the parents, for having another mouth to feed and a body to protect. The parents of Sakura were probably the same. The greatest probability was that her parents had had too many children already, or didn’t want to deal with a firstborn at all, and had left her to fend for herself as an infant.

How she lived to be a young child wandering the roads alone, how she lived to be eight years old, how she lived past one year, how she lived to be captured by workers of the Undergrounds to be a show attraction, was not known by anyone. And it didn’t matter. No one cared.

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March 31st, 2:20 AM

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Comforting the fallen pitiful was something the young maiden Sakura had gotten used to over the years. When she came back from her beast-fights in the ring, she was returned to her huge cell and the girls she last remembered being there were gone, murdered, replaced by new ones who would share the same fate. At least two dozen were put into the cell per day, and two dozen almost always were gone within the next twenty-four hours.

And no matter how old these girls were, Sakura found the one who looked most pathetic, and did her best. It was her first attempt to change the world. She had done it hundreds of times, thousands, perhaps. It may have made a difference a few dozen times.

Such was an occasion now. The girl that Sakura was comforting was ten years old at the most. She had an oversized, itchy brown robe for clothing, probably a garment of her father’s. Leaves and mud were caked in the girl’s long, dark hair and on her robe but her face was clean. This may have been due to the tears she constantly swept away from her eyes and all over her cheeks. Sakura crouched in the corner of the huge cell next to her, murmured soft and meaningless words into her ear, and rubbed her scarred arm, but the sobbing hardly ceased.

A light appeared from beyond the bars of the cell door. A man, a guard, was coming in to take some of the girls to the rings to die. To die by the claws of some nameless, hungry animal or merciless muscled man. His keys jangled as he unlocked the door and opened it. The sobs ceased only slightly. There were no whimpers. The man, shorter in stature even than petite Sakura, pointed at the girl that Sakura was comforting.

“Come with me. Now.” the command was flat, uncaring, lazy. The pink-haired girl was used to picking some girls up, helping them stand and watching them walk away. She was also used to seeing the named girl run to the back of the cell and hide behind some others, crying and begging. She would be dragged away kicking and sobbing. But this girl, eyes still tearing, stood up and let the man take her hand and lead her away.

Sakura sighed. The guard closed the barred door after the girl left, and the door beyond, leaving the rest of the trapped females within darkness once more, the single torch in their cell lighting almost nothing around it.

The heroine of our story was not yet eighteen, or not seventeen, she wasn’t quite sure, and she was clothed in a turquoise cloth dress that nearly reached her knees, strapping over her shoulders in a manner that was gruff and not elegant. The dress was bloodstained all about the torso, for this was the garb the men gave to Sakura most often, the garb she most often fought in. Beasts almost always lunged for the throat or chest, resulting in irremovable blotches of dark blood.

It was in this dress, some years ago, still a young girl, that she had picked up a grown lion and thrown it across the fighting stadium. For that occasion, once every while, perhaps once every two months, Sakura would be lucky enough to hear a person in her stands call her “Lioness,” and that was one of the few occasions in her life where she knew of delight and pride.

Her hair had been cut short with knives by the guards, so that it would not be in her face while fighting, and it retained an an unnatural brightness in color that matched the, also unnatural, shining of her eyes. The maiden’s eyes were the color of emeralds, strangely beautiful in a place where beauty had no place. The skinniness of her limbs, and the contrastingly powerful muscle that gave them their shape, had been fed by countless battles to the death and unsavory rations that an Underground victim was forced to endure.

Most, if not none, of the other girls in the cell shared her shape of body. Most of them were lanky and gaunt and shivering with weakness. The few that did have her body shape had been in the cell for half a week at most and had been forced into that frame by starvation with their own families.

When the guards first brought a new girl into the cell, that girl had about six seconds to use the better light to see the others in the cell. If she was lucky enough to see this pink-haired fighter, they would have been extremely lucky. They would have had something, a strange, bright-eyed girl, to think about besides their own horror until they were escorted into a stadium to have their murder witnessed by hundreds.

Sakura looked about the area. After several years of spending almost all her life in a dark cell with other darkly-clad females, her eyes had gotten used to darkness and she could see fairly well in it. The Undergrounds’ stadiums were lit with a thousand torches on the ceiling and on the walls and it was nearly as bright as daylight, but much hotter as well. With these two environments, she had both common vision and a decent sort of nightvision. She planned to use this to her advantage whenever she left the Undergrounds. Surely it would help with the fact that she had no sense of time whatsoever.

The small maiden moved herself until she sat against the wall, the rather comfortably cold stone wall, and closed her eyes to sleep. She had no idea how close her goal lay, and she was not prepared, but found that, after hundreds of battles with nightmarish monsters, she could make herself prepared in the space of a second. So it would be.

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April 6th, 2:20 AM

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“Pink hair.” That was what most of the guards called her. She wished she knew the guards’ names, so that perhaps she could use it against them one day and kill them, but found the guards never had names besides “you” or “hey, man with the weird scar” so it was futile.

Sakura was laying on her back towards the front of the cell. She turned her head, emerald eyes lazy but bright, and stared at the guard. “Time for a fight.” he said, gesturing to her with one finger. Sakura stood up, pointlessly brushed the side of her turquoise dress and let the guard take her hand in his callous one. He locked the door to the females’ cell and pulled her along.

The walk always took about fifteen minutes, Sakura had absently realized long ago. It was just another fact of life, like the fact that she had two arms and legs and eyes. But to amuse herself, to keep from being bored at staring at the stone walls pass by yet again, she counted the minutes. After seventeen minutes and forty-one seconds, the guard and Sakura turned the corner to the last hallway. Beyond Sakura could see a bright orange light lighting up the far corridor. The thousand torches of one of the Undergrounds stadiums. The anxious, exciting cheering and whooping. The grassy, wild smell of some animal waiting to fight, Sakura’s only connection to the scents of the outside world lost to her years ago.

“By the time I hit ten, you’ll be out there.” It was a command. Sakura nodded listlessly, her mind secretly awhirl with fighting tactics and raw will. “One,” Sakura began walking down the corridor. When the man said, “Seven,” she was within the glow of the torches. When the man said, “Eight,” she moved out of the corridor and into a great room with a ceiling seemingly high as the sky.

There was a flat, sandy area at the bottom, the ring, circled by rows upon rows of stone and wooden benches, some carved from fine mahogany and some from jagged, untidy driftwood. Almost each and every seat was taken up by some man or woman in strange, foreign yet beautiful garment fit only for an urbane ball. Uncountable orange sticks of fire lined the walls and the ceiling. But all Sakura had eyes for was the monster sitting at the other end of the ring, waiting for her.

Demons in this world were not just a figment of nightmares and imagination. They were as real as the thieves that haunted the roads and towns at night, as real as the very air. It was said that the first few demons had been the pets of some shinobi, serving some lord centuries ago. The demons escaped to the woodlands and went on a mad mating spree, some attempting to even use female humans for reproduction.

That was why, it was said, demons appeared in every shape and size imaginable, yet always hideous: they could breed with anything, so long as it was female.

They were almost always black or grey, rarely brown or purple. This one looked nearly like a bear covered in long grey fur like a sheepdog, yet its ears were so long that they trailed in the sand at its clawed feet. The long fur and ears, and the eye that was on its front-left leg, were the only things that kept it from looking like an actual animal.

It lifted its head and made a groaning, pained sort of sound, and kept its head in the air while it ran towards Sakura with a limping yet fast gait. She was ready when it came at her, ready when it slammed its head down on her waiting arm like a hammer. The audience cheered again and again and the arena seemed to grow hotter as they saw that the girl could have a limb torn off if the beast could move but a few feet closer.

The force of its head coming down was enough to send any average human to their knees. But no human who could live in the Undergrounds was an average human. Frowning grimly, Sakura shoved her free arm, her right arm, into the beast’s mouth and grasped the rough, bumpy tongue. It cried out, its three eyes going wide and its huge feet stamping the ground anxiously. Sakura tugged and tugged with all the might of the monsters she had conquered before. The demon’s tongue came out of its mouth, severed and bleeding and writhing and the crowd stomped their feet for it.

“Ugghhgaan!” The demon staggered back and spat its blood onto the sand covering the arena. Sakura squeezed the tongue, wringing it of blood and fluid, glaring balefully at the monster while her skin shone with sweat of battle and heat.

In the next few seconds the demon went insane, and was running at the petite maiden with all the rage it was worth. Sakura prepared to duck and deliver a kick to the demon’s legs, hoping to sever them with the force of it. But the thing ducked its head and took her leg into its mouth.

Making an expression quite like a grin, the thing reared its ugly head and tossed Sakura to the other side of the arena. She crashed into the wall just below the first row of seats and the viewers leaned down to look at her, exclaiming and pointing. Sakura groaned and felt the hot blood welling at the back of her head and tried to ignore the ringing that drowned out all other noise and the heat all around her that felt worse than usual. The demon was running at her again, tongue-less mouth open and ready to rip away at her.

Fear filling her blood she he improvised, as she often did. She kicked out one leg and it caught the monster on the lower jaw. The bone cracked and the demon was hurled away, rolling until landing on its belly. Blood oozed from its mouth and two new wounds on its legs. The thing had died.

The crowd erupted. The heat grew more and more unbearable. Sakura panted and swept a hand across her sweating face and made her indifferent way back to the corridor which would lead to her refreshingly cold cell. A new guard, one she’d never seen before, stood there waiting for her just out of sight of the crowd. He grasped her hand, and Sakura flinched at the feel of it. It was unknown, soft, scented, hardly rough. And the way he smelled… This man had surely been to the outside recently.

“Come with me, pink hair.” he said. Sakura stared blankly into his eyes and nodded. “That demon’s bite was meant to rip your leg off, not to throw you. I trained that beast myself. I know. That was one of the strongest demons I’ve tamed.”

“That monster seemed the same as any other animal I’ve fought. I wouldn’t have guessed he was your strongest beast.” She expected to be slapped for this remark. Talking when her voice wasn’t wanted was worthy of a slap. It was common enough. So she was mildly surprised when the guard replied, as though he was talking to a person and not an Underground fighter, “Exactly. My strongest was no different to you than any other monster we fetch from the wild. You are being given a new task. Something else to try your skills at.”

“What sort of new task?” Surely that would have her slapped. She was truly expecting it, but again the guard replied quite calmly, “Seduction.”

Sakura could have laughed. Surely there were maidens more suited to it, maidens who weren’t muscled and tiny and untidy as she was, and fifty times more refined and civil. But she accepted the notion of her stupid and useless self being used as an entertainment object as another pointless, painful thing of the world. It couldn’t be helped.

Not now, anyway.

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April 4th, 10:15 PM (back in time about a day and a half)

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Elegance.

Power.

Glory.

Luxury.

Pleasure.

God.

These things belonged to the gods of the earth, the self-proclaimed gods of the earth: the five lords of the five great lands. These fine things were locked up in the lords’ castles and only the lords, and perhaps a few of their better shinobi, had access to them. Those that did would often find themselves lifting their arms up into the air and laughing.

“These things the finest to be found on the planet and they are mine!” they would say.

But the fineries were not all locked up in the five castles. Some of them were in the Undergrounds, the thousands of underground tunnels and chambers throughout the world where people were pit against beasts. The audience for this murder was made up of the villagers of the lord’s “chosen.” The few villages of the land that made the lord’s food and clothing and jewelry were the ones who were privileged to come to the Undergrounds and watch the unfortunates, the majority of their land, die.

In the Undergrounds the residents of the “chosen” villages may just be lucky enough, or rather have enough pocket money, to pay a courtesan’s fee. A courtesan, mind you, is nothing but a fancy and well-dressed whore who charges much more than what she is worth. Most of the courtesans of the world could be found in the Undergrounds. The few that weren’t there were at the greatest position they could get themselves: the bedchambers of the lords and their shinobi.

Courtesans and even low-class but exceptionally pretty hooker were frequent visitors to the bedchambers of lords, in fact. It was common knowledge that most lords were visited by at least two courtesans a week. No lord was a virgin, and if a new lord came up one day and was a virgin, he wouldn’t be for long.

When someone referred to “The Undergrounds” they could mean all the hundreds of of underground chambers throughout the world or just the one they happened to live nearest to. When I, the narrator, say that Pein, Lord of the Land of Rain, was relaxing in the Undergrounds, I mean that he was relaxing in the Undergrounds that were nearest to his home, his castle in the Land of Rain.

There were special chambers reserved for him and his shinobi, naturally, and they’d all been dealing with rather strenuous and life-threatening training in the past few months. Pein decided to give his men—and women, for there were a few female shinobi—a break and let them amuse themselves in the Undergrounds just a few miles away from (and under, of course) his castle.

He was there now, one of his own chambers reserved for the godly only: for him and his most trusted subordinates. If the velvet cushions stuffed with crane feathers did not relax one’s muscles immediately, the warm and dim atmosphere, burning incense in the air, walls draped with silken weavings and lonely corners decorated with statues and busts carved from pure gold and silver would surely leave an average commoner breathless.

The crane-feather cushions were a favorite of any he allowed to use them. It was usually only Hidan and Kakuzu, his most trained and trusted shinobi, who dared to lay upon them at all, even with permission. They called themselves brothers but no one knew if this was true or not, not even them. Both were nearly thirty years old, but as shinobi, given youth and power and speed by the gods, they appeared at least ten years younger. (But Kakuzu, some other shinobi dared to joke, had been the butt of some god’s stupid joke, as he certainly looked older than Hidan.)

Back to the point I must go—here, Pein, Lord of Rain, lay reclining on his favorite crane-feather cushions, breathing in expensive incense and feeling tired and aroused at the mixture of erotic dancing before him and a sip of wine every ten seconds.

Courtesans were a regular part of a lords life in the same way that horses were a part of a stablehand’s life. These two had been in the beds of all five lords and were considered the best to be found anywhere. Ino Yamanaka was the first, born and bred into a brothel in the Land of the Leaf, ruled by the young lord named Naruto and sold to Pein for the price of half a dozen mansions. For that price he would keep her and bed her as many times as he liked for a month before selling her to whichever lord would pay the most.

The other was Karin, who had no last name, because she had been a nobody when the world first noticed she existed. She had begged to be let into a brothel at the age of sixteen, with nowhere else to go but with a body she knew would make her richer than any woman dared dream.

Both were somewhere around the age of twenty-two, and the five lords were considering giving them the same life-lasting youth that shinobi received, for their services were simply so good that it would be worth it to give the effort to get such things. Right now the lord couldn’t think of that, however, he could think of little else besides his own lust. The right combination of colored tops and teasing, flowing skirts could make any courtesan or common whore look good, but it did these two whole worlds of benefit. One of them was minutes away from coming to bed with him, and the other would have the same fate with one or even two of his shinobi.

Dancing, dancing…how could any two humans have such skill at it? Their delicate grace and sensually teasing moves mesmerized Pein every time. The clacking of beads, the swish of feather-thin clothing meant only to be ripped off the wearer, the scent of white wine and vanilla perfume…was ruined by a knock on the doors.

“Lord, Lord! Genma Onimusha wishes to pay his yearly homage, Lord!”

Ino stopped her erotic dance and stomped her foot on the floor. The sound was muffled by the thick carpet and pillows littering the floor in an eye-appeasing pattern. “Ohhhh! Why are we always interrupted at the climax of our dance? O fine lord, maybe we can ignore this foolish messenger for a bit an continue our—”

“No such thing.” the orange-haired king said immediately. “Enter.” One glance sent the blonde courtesan back a step, and she fiddled foolishly with the beads in her hair. Pein’s eyes were, after all, completely unnaturally colored for a human and frightening even when he didn’t mean them to be. Pein knew this, and knew that any look he gave Ino that wasn’t amorous would send shivers up her pathetically fragile spine.

A few moments later, the messenger meekly opened up the door. He was a brunette youngster, some five or six years Ino and Karin’s junior, and scrawnier than any starving animal Pein could bother to mention at that moment. “Genma Onimusha, your Highness…” the youth said with fake dignity. “He owns the Undergrounds just at the southern tip of your kingdom, not far from here, and he wishes to pay his yearly homage with this.” The youth held out a scroll that was tied with fancy and fake green string.

Pein recognized the type immediately: only the finest artists, artists that the lords chose for themselves, would use such scrolls with such strings. This was a painting of some sort. The brunette youth squeaked as the scroll suddenly left his hand and twin scars were left on his palm in its place.

He didn’t mention the pain that was slowly growing in his hand. That could and would cost him a limb, the way it had cost his mother three limbs. “Sir Onimusha has had a certain maid locked up in his female victim cell for nearly a decade.” This was enough to get a raise of the lord’s graceful brows. Any one person surviving that long in the Undergrounds was unheard of.

“She is believed to be hardly seventeen years old, and hardly even my size. Every day, sometimes twice a day, she is taken out of the cell full of other females and fights a beast in an arena. Animals, sometimes demons. She’s killed every single one. She can lift creatures easily thrice her size and weight. No matter how close she comes to dying each time, she always manages to keep herself alive. She is faster than a falcon and stronger than a tiger, but what Sir Onimusha wanted me to assure you of was her beauty. You may see it in that scroll, lord.”

Pein had been staring at the unopened scroll while the frightened messenger spoke, and opened the scroll soon after the youth asked him to do so. His unnatural eyes widened at the illustration before him. “Is this accurate?” he asked flatly. The messenger knew what a flat voice meant: seriousness. For what reason? He didn’t know. He wasn’t supposed to know.

“Onimusha wanted to assure you that the artist who created that picture takes every living detail he can see and copies it, and if you think he is wrong he offers his hands for you to chop off, lord. She looks exactly the way she does pictured there. Better. Yes, Onimusha wanted me to tell you she’s more beautiful than that illustration shows.”

The painting of Sakura was flattering but accurate, for lack of better explanation. It showed her during the thick of battle, a front view angled just a smidge to the side, backed by a nondescript, dark crowd in one of the many underground stadiums of the Undergrounds. She was staring fiercely at some unseen enemy with eyes alight with fire as green as emerald. The gown she wore was bloodstained and torn but showed a satisfying amount of skin that was perfect despite the bleeding cuts and scars. Her hair hardly touched her shoulders and even in the two-dimensional coloring, Pein could practically feel its sleek thickness under his fingers.

He wanted it under his fingers.

“Her name is Sakura. Her last name is unknown. Genma Onimusha would like to give you this maid as his yearly homage to you, as a gift. The finest gift he can give.”

His grin was answer enough, but the lord said, “I will have her immediately. As soon as she can be brought.” The messenger bowed and panted and grinned, as though this simple news was too much for him. “She is in a chamber in the Undergrounds just a few miles from here, lord. She can be here in less than an hour.”

“Fifteen minutes.”

“Of course!”

The meek boy was gone and the room was silent. The calming incense and warmth of the room only made the lack of noise seem more ominous. Still the Lord of the Land of Rain stared at the painting, at a female so ungodly fair and he dared not tear his eyes away for fear that the painting suddenly become some illustration of a common lusty courtesan.

Courtesans. Whores was what they were, what they would look like in comparison to this…this perfect specimen, this flower. No matter what his outward appearance showed, Pein was just over thirty-one years old, and in all those years he’d never laid his eyes on a female so faultlessly beautiful.

Karin, one of the two expensive courtesans, must have leaned to the side slightly from her spot on the other side of the chamber to see the scroll he held. “She’s a great beauty, my lord. How lucky you are, to have one so stunning and so young. So unique!” she said fawningly, but he knew from experience with Karin and all those females like her that she was thinking the exact opposite.

“She is.” he agreed, pretending he didn’t know her thoughts. “It is a sin I do not have her. A sin against the Lord of Rain. A sin against the gods. She belongs with me.”

That little speech must have aroused the other courtesan—Ino, the one he always thought slightly more lusty and pathetic—as he heard her make a little mewling sound in her throat. Wishing those words had been meant for her, no doubt. A most pointless and laughable wish.

“Of course,” and he rolled up the scroll, being tender and gentle as possible with the delicate parchment, “being a lord requires that one be a gentleman. And gentlemen know how to share to some extent. I may just be compelled to share her with Sasori and Kakashi, perhaps Naruto, or even Itachi, if they can behave themselves like civilized humans for once.”

When he turned around and glared at Ino and Karin they flinched expectedly. He was used to the reaction and ignored it. “Leave me. Now. Return to your private chambers and await some of my shinobi. They’ll have a night with you.”

He could feel their disappointment wavering in the air, but they bowed to him, low as possible, and left without meeting his eyes. Karin closed the door behind them, and once she did Pein went to each corner of the room and blew out the burning incense and candle flames. The room cooled. The air moving around the room through the fresh air canals now made a refreshingly cool breeze.

Here in his cooled chamber, where courtesans danced for him, he would wait for Genma Onimusha to bring him the green-eyed maid. The green-eyed maid who appeared as frail as a leaf in winter, yet could bring down monster after monster in the Undergrounds.

And Pein couldn’t help wondering, sleepily, how in the world she could have lived in Genma Onimusha’s section of the Undergrounds, the section where he rarely visited, where none of the lords visited for no particular reason. Why did the gods hide such a gorgeous flower from him, from all the lords, for so many years?

This also brought on the question of her origin: where did she come from? Was she really native to the Land of Rain, his land, or did she just wander across the border from the Land of Sound? Of course, that question couldn’t be answered. Few people anywhere across the world knew their origins, why they were farmers and not blacksmiths or carpenters and not horse breeders.

Like thousands or perhaps millions more, Sakura’s origins were unknown and would more than likely remain unknown.

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My fist comment is: Get used to the POV change. It’s going to stay in third person. The last chapter will have Sakura telling the story by using “I” and “me.” Second comment, probably more important, is that I’m not going to apologize for making sex a big part of the lords’ lives. It’s supposed to make them more despicable as antagonists, yeah?

Third comment: Courage the Cowardly Dog rocks all you guys’ socks. It rocks them completely off your feet. Fourth comment, you ask? Well, I don’t have one. I don’t think I can say much more except “well this eleven-page chapter is really short in comparison to most of my other stories…” Now then, here’s a list of which lord rules over which land. Yes, I chose Kakashi over Deidara, but I promise to incorporate Deidara somewhere. Good guy or bad guy, I don’t know yet.

Pein – Rain

Naruto – Leaf

Sasori – Sand

Itachi – Sound

Kakashi – Stone

Ta…Storm.