Sango responded to her moves with his own, his motion perception permitted him to calmly analyse her every move and think of a proper counter. Sango’s kick connected with her arms inciting a groan to escape from her mouth, since he saw her preparing to block the kick, Sango used the force of the impact to throw himself back to his original position and out of her reach.

Back from where he started, Sango didn’t pause as he sent chakra through his feet into the ground and reduced the area the knife used to anchor itself in the earth. With a powerful tug on the string using chakra to amplify his strength, Sango pulled the knife towards him, but together with it also came a big mass of earth, successfully catching the woman by surprise and hitting her back, sprawling her on the bare earth.

The whole event took much to describe but, it happened in only a few seconds.

Sango’s breathing was slightly more laboured, he acknowledged his training was still insufficient, he used imperfect techniques to make big moves, even with his large pool of chakra it still tired him as his body had to get used to large quantity of chakra circulation in his body.

“Kukuku.” Yet the woman sprawled on the bare ground was far from defeated, while still facing the ground she was laughing.

“Outstanding, you are continuously surpassing my expectations.” She said, by this point Sango had a vague idea about the identity of this ‘woman’. Her talking style and behaviour was rather similar to a certain someone.

‘A rather troublesome one showed up…’ He mused, but he also thought that it wasn’t all that bad, hopefully.

Before he could think about it, more people, identical in clothes, appearance and behaviour to the woman, showed up.

‘Two, no, three more’ He saw three more clones coming from all his sides, successfully catching him in the middle.

“Will you surpass my expectations even this time?” The woman he fought with first, now stood up on her feet, only slightly battered as she spoke.

“Very troublesome, aren’t you?” Sango replied, still smiling as before.

The woman didn’t answer as they began to approach Sango from all directions. Sango didn’t move, he just stood there smiling at them as if he was just a spectator. The clones had a kunai in their hands and shoot towards Sango at full speed, all in perfect coordination.

Sango just stood there, unmoving as the kunai pierced his body from all sides, cutting deep inside his flesh.

“Hmm?” The woman didn’t expect Sango to not react, she expected him to escape or counterattack using strange means, yet here he was, bleeding with a smile on his face.

Sango looked in her eyes as he used his hand to slowly move the front of his yukata, exposing the black shirt underneath, but the woman eyes widened in horror of what she saw.

All over his shirt, placed so that it couldn’t be seen from the outside, were an excessive amount of paper bombs, glued.

Sango smiled at her expression and detonated all the bombs before the woman and the clones could have any time to react.

*BOOOOOMMM*

The explosion shock Konohagakure as, indeed, the number of paper bombs was very excessive.

Inside Sango’s home, Sango was leisurely drinking tea while reading a book about Medical Ninjutsu when the explosion was heard, at the same time he received all the information his clone had when it was destroyed.

When his stalker lost sight of him as Sango turned in the alley briefly, Sango switched place with a clone already waiting for him there, the exchange didn’t take even two seconds, more than enough to pass unnoticed.

“Hmm..” He pondered, he was almost sure that to have been Orochimaru, not certain but it was almost a certainty. He knew something like this would happen, but he hopped to be much later. His clone chose to self-destruct because any more fighting would only show more of his cards and there was also a chance for shinobi of Konoha to find them, he didn’t want to find himself in the centre of that kind of attention, not yet.

The enemies he fought, were of course clones too, rather weak ones, the real Orochimaru would have finished him in but a short time, he had a long way to go before confronting a person such as him, not that it had to come to that. He also doubted his intentions were to kidnap him, Orochimaru was just testing him, like a cat that found something interesting. Sango felt the same.

Smiling at the future that indicated to be interesting, Sango resumed his reading.

Somewhere far away, in an underground facility resembling a laboratory, a man with snake-like appearance was writing something on a scroll when he suddenly stopped.

“Hahahaha, how interesting, you had me there.” The man’s laughter filled the room as his fang-like teeth were revealed.