Story: SBO Naruto

 

It sounds like the setup for a joke. Sakura, Lee and Neji stepped out into the public square, and all three of them stopped cold in their tracks. Sakura, for her part, slowly turned towards Neji to see the expression upon his face. She'd never seen that emotion from him before, and was having trouble placing it, exactly.

It was a mixture of profound existential horror and a clinical, detached curiosity. Neji stood rigid, his long, dark hair once again a sleek obsidian rather than a neon, candy-coated pink. His clothes had returned to normal as well, and he looked like the proud prodigy of the Hyuga clan again, but his eyes—those pale, pupilless orbs—were wide, staring at the bustling crowds of Konoha as if he had just witnessed the collapse of the moon.

For a long minute, none of them spoke. The sounds of the village swirled around them: the distant shout of a merchant, the rhythmic clack of sandals on stone, the laughter of children. To any onlooker, they were simply three elite genin taking a stroll. Inside, they were a wreckage of shattered dignity.

"I can still feel it," Lee whispered. "Lurking in the back of my mind. The instant that I am alone -"

"Lee, if you say another word, I will personally shut your larynx off," Neji warned. Veins started to pulse around his head. There you go. There's the anger. There's the outrage she was expecting. "Say nothing. I understand now. I see how this works."

Of course he did. Neji's a pretty smart guy. Of course he would work it out right away. From the way that Sakura had been behaving up until now, what tripped the transformation to and from their current forms - he'd obviously spot it.

But that led to the inevitable followup question from her: "What now?"

"Now?" Neji grunted. "Your assessment was correct. You need to be in a contradictory condition - both observed, and kept in quarantine. I shall find Lady Tsunade and inform her of this..."

Sakura felt a sudden, violent jolt in her mind. <b>Oh my god, Neji’s ass was actually kind of cute!</B>

She gasped, slamming her hands over her mouth. Her face flushed a shade of red that rivaled her outfit. She glared at the air, fighting the phantom cheerleader still doing high-kicks in the theater of her subconscious. Go away, go away, go away!

Lee looked between them, his brow furrowed. "So, it is like a stealth jutsu? We become -"

"Ah! Ah! Ah!" Sakura gasped, grabbing his mouth before he could utter another word. "No, no, don't say the word you were about to say!"

That did get a bit of attention on them from passersby, though some of them, at least, seemed to believe it was typical gennin hijjinks, which... urgh, that said something didn't it?

"He's most likely wrong at the first point anyway," Neji said. ""Not a jutsu. A conceptual parasite. It feeds on the awareness of its own existence.

Sakura rubbed her temples. The headache was returning, a dull throb that pulsed in time with the inner voice currently singing a song about "big, bouncy buns." She understood full well what Neji meant, of course.

"We're ticking time bombs," she said. "We cannot be left alone together, or -"

"Precisely," Neji interrupted. "It is a self-propagating cognitive loop. It strips the mind of complex thought to prioritize primal impulses, distracting the host sufficiently that the victim is too distracted to seek a cure or resist the spread. It is an efficient, if utterly repulsive, piece of biological or spiritual warfare."

Huh. That was actually a pretty clever way to go about this. Instead of directly talking about it, use words that would leave a layman confused and baffled. They wouldn't be able to understand what that meant at all, which meant they would not be able to spread the effect this way.

Though there was a risk. If someone had heard and understood, they wouldn't transform if they were surrounded by people who didn't. Urgh, whatever, too late now - Best thing they can do is get some privacy.

"We can't all go to Tsunade," Sakura said. "If we do, bigger chance one of us slips up."

<b>Meaning you~</b> her inner bimbo teased. Urgh, shut up already!

"And besides which!" Sakura continued. "If one of us marches right up to her and explains what's going on, the next thing you know -"

The next thing you know... The image crossed her mind unbidden. The strongest woman in the village spending her afternoon shopping for micro-skirts and wondering where her makeup is. A shudder went through her - this whole thing was so demeaning! The only thing that sorta made her feel better was that it affected the men as well, but that was a stone cold comfort.

"Finding someone to take care of the two of you might prove... challenging," Neji said. "All the same, our best approach at this time is to bring in a truly brilliant mind. Tsunade should be able to analyse it. If we ensure that her assistant, or someone else, remains oblivious..."

"So, we deliberately infect her?" Sakura hissed. "Come on, Neji, I thought you were better than that! You just wanna see what she looks like with - "

With bigger boobs and even less inhibitions than she already has.

"It may be our only means of discovering a way to reverse this," Neji said. "Consider the situation. Do any of us alone have the means to study this? The knowledge, the experience? No. I do not believe that we do."

That was... certainly true. Simply containing it was one matter. Paradoxically, they might need to do something akin to setting fires to stop a fire. 

The three of them began to walk, keeping a careful distance between one another. The physical space felt necessary, a buffer against the possibility of the "loop" triggering. Sakura kept her eyes forward, but her mind was a battlefield. Every time she saw a woman with blonde hair or a particularly short skirt, a spark of recognition flared in her chest. 

*Teehee! Look at that cute boy! I bet he'd love to see my big, juicy—*

"Shut up!" Sakura barked.

A passerby, an older man carrying a basket of fish, paused and looked at her with a confused expression. Sakura froze, her face heating up. She forced a tight, artificial smile.

"Just... practicing my kiai!" she yelled, giving a stiff bow.

The man shrugged and continued on his way. 

"You are struggling," Neji observed, his voice devoid of pity but full of observation. "Are you feeling alright?"

"Been better!" Sakura hissed. "It's like there's a second person living in my head, and she's a complete idiot. She doesn't stop talking about... things. And she's constantly trying to convince me that I'm 'destined' for this."

"I feel it as well," Neji admitted, his gaze drifting to the horizon. "A certain... lightness. A desire to stop analyzing the world and simply exist as a vessel for pleasure. It is a terrifying sensation. To have one's intellect—the very thing that defines us—replaced by a void of glitter and lust."

"The other me is rather exuberant and full of life," Lee admitted. "All the same -"

"All the same," Neji slowed his pace, his expression darkening. "Based on the data, the virus is dormant when the 'idea' is not being reinforced. But it is not gone. It is a latent trait now. We are like people who have learned a forbidden jutsu; we cannot 'un-learn' the knowledge. The bimbo is now a part of our psyche. It is a shadow-self, waiting for the right conditions to emerge."

The weight of the realization settled over them. They weren't just victims of a prank or a temporary spell. They had been fundamentally altered. The pride of the Hyuga, the intensity of the Strong Fist, and the brilliance of the medical prodigy were now tethered to a version of themselves that existed only to be desired.

"We need a system," Sakura said, her voice regaining some of its authority. "A protocol. No one goes into a private room alone with another infected person. No one mentions the 'B-word' unless they are in a crowded area where the effect is suppressed. And for the love of everything, we do not, under any circumstances, go clothes shopping together."

"Agreed," Neji said.

"I shall adhere to this code with the strength of a thousand suns!" Lee declared.

Yeah, okay. Now all they had to do was get to the hokage and hope this attempt for a cure wasn't worse than the disease.