"Yo!" shouted Naruto, as he leapt onto a branch above their heads. "You're in a sorry state, Sasuke. Didja get your butt kicked without me?"
As usual, Naruto was late. Sakura didn't know where he had flown off to, but surely he could have made an effort to come back sooner?
"Stop antagonizing him, Naruto!" Sasuke shouted in anguish; the Genjutsu's bloody scene of carnage was still fresh in his memory. "This guy's on a whole other level— we don't stand a chance against him!" Then, turning to Orochimaru, who was still disguised as a Hidden Grass Genin, Sasuke added reluctantly, "what kind of scroll do you need? There's no need to fight to the death over scrolls…"
"Don't you dare give him our scroll, Sasuke!" Naruto yelled. "We can take him, ya know!"
For some reason, watching Sasuke debase himself in front of some random Genin from some minor village, Naruto couldn't help but feel incredibly frustrated. Even before Naruto had begun thinking of Sasuke as his fated rival, he had always felt that there was a sort of kinship between the two of them which couldn't be explained with just words. It was more than just empathy towards a fellow orphan, it was a sort of brotherhood that he just couldn't explain…
Sasuke gave Sakura a brief sidelong glance, before reaching into one of his pouches and retrieving the fake scroll. Sakura noticed that he had deactivated his Sharingan…
"This is what you want, don't you?" Sasuke called out to the disguised Orochimaru. "Our heaven scroll. Here, catch!"
Sasuke cocked his arm back and threw the fake scroll at Orochimaru, but Naruto jumped down from his branch and intercepted the scroll mid-flight, before landing next to Sasuke, who looked at him in dismay for ruining his perfect plan.
Meanwhile, Sakura was beginning to have second thoughts about her own plan, and she was feeling more and more disgusted at herself. For her plan to work, Sasuke would need to be implanted with the Cursed Seal of Heaven as a distraction…
She was fairly sure that Orochimaru's Juinjutsu could only be used with his true body, since part of the Cursed Seal was composed of his own cells (among other things). Implanting the Cursed Seal of Heaven on Sasuke might be possible with a Snake Clone, but Sakura was hoping that Orochimaru would take matters into his own hands, for such an important task as the preparation of his future vessel.
Her entire plan hinged on the supposition that Orochimaru would likely be too distracted by the process of marking Sasuke to notice a sneak attack from a seemingly weak kunoichi like herself. It would be the perfect opportunity for Sakura to attack his true body directly and sever his female host body's breasts, allowing her to permanently absorb Orochimaru's powerful chakra into herself.
In short, for the hunter to become the hunted, Sasuke's well-being would have to be sacrificed. However, after spending so much time together, Sakura had developed a genuine bond of comradery with the other two, despite their differences, and the thought of betraying their trust was making her feel inadequate and uncomfortable.
Knowing the plot in advance, Sakura knew that only she had the ability to change the future, so why couldn't she just do that instead? Wanting to become stronger at the expense of her friends, was that really the kind of shinobi she wanted to become?
But without getting stronger, how could she possibly protect the ones she cared about? Her new friends, her new parents, the village? But if she sacrificed her friends, what use would there be in gaining strength? Talk about a Catch-22…
"I told you not to give him our scroll," Naruto growled, as he glowered at Sasuke. "Or d'you think I'm so weak it makes no difference if I'm there or not!?"
"Yeah, you're weak!" Sasuke shouted in desperation. "Not only are you dragging us down, at this rate, you're also going to get us all killed!"
At that moment, Naruto looked incredibly disappointed in Sasuke, and Sakura's heart lurched.
'Naruto hasn't even used his Talk-no-Jutsu on you yet!' Inner Sakura said spitefully. 'Why are you letting him influence you like this? Let's be rational about this! If you don't let Orochimaru do as he wants, he'll just keep chasing Sasuke the entire length of the exam, and then he'll kill you and Naruto for daring to get in his way, just to blow off steam! I know you think the Will of Fire is just a scam, so just do what you need to do!'
"Who are you, my conscience?" Sakura muttered to herself. "Just shut up, will you? I'm thinking."
Naruto shook his head in disappointment at Sasuke's cowardice, before jumping at Orochimaru, who was still standing on his snake's head. The snake moved impossibly fast for a being of its size; it whipped its tail at him, sending him crashing into a tree, where he hung limply in the Naruto-shaped indent he had created in the wood, leaving him coughing up blood.
Such an impact would have been sufficient to turn anyone into a fine red paste; however, Naruto was simply built different. The Eight Trigrams Seal hadn't degraded to the point of allowing him to manifest a chakra cloak around his body yet, but due to his emotions running wild, his chakra pathway network had already been flooded with pure Tailed Beast chakra, granting him inhuman durability and an enhanced healing factor.
Even in his normal state, Naruto already had hundreds of times more regular chakra than your average Kakashi, thanks to the Nine-Tails' chakra constantly leaking through its seal and assimilating into Naruto's already impressive chakra pool, but this was to go even further beyond!
(Ignoring the Nine-Tails' passive chakra regeneration buff, Naruto's natural chakra pool would have grown to 4 Kakashi after Jiraiya's special training, right around the time Shippuden started)
"This repulsive chakra," said Orochimaru, sounding vaguely interested. "Has he mastered it to this extent already…?"
Orochimaru's gigantic pet snake lifted its head, allowing its master to get a better view of Naruto, who was still embedded in the tree he had been flung into. At that moment, neurons sparked in Sakura's brain, as she remembered a long-forgotten memory from early on in the anime; the time to strike was near!
But first, she needed help…
"I'm scared too," Sakura told Sasuke, and he believed her; the fear on her face couldn't be faked. "But I can't just abandon Naruto. I'm going back in, with or without you."
Sasuke closed his eyes briefly; his hesitation, his fear, and his doubt were as clear as day on his face. But when he opened his eyes again, they had turned scarlet, and the twin Tomoe in his eyeballs were spinning around his pupils once more, as proof of his determination. How could he face Itachi if a mere Genin was giving him such trouble?
Sakura took this as a sign that Sasuke had once again revived his fighting spirit, so she began summoning all of the chakra at her disposal…
"Shadow Clone Jutsu!"
Pure white smoke burst out from under Sakura's feet like a geyser, and when the smoke had cleared, three identical copies of Sakura stood where there had only been one before. Sasuke nodded at the three Sakura, and he began making a large Fūma shuriken spin in his hands …
Orochimaru inwardly sniggered. Did those children think he had been born yesterday? The girl had obviously turned herself into the Fūma shuriken that was currently in Sasuke's hands with the Transformation Jutsu (From where else could he have pulled out such a huge shuriken? There was no spent sealing scroll in sight…).
In his expert opinion, the pink-haired girl had taken advantage of the smokescreen created by the Shadow Clones' manifestation to cover her use of the Transformation Jutsu's seals; and at the same time, the presence of her Shadow Clones was covering for the disappearance of her original body…
Not bad at all…
"Dance of the Crescent Moon!"
Orochimaru slightly lowered his mental evaluation of Sakura, as he watched the three pink-haired girls approaching rapidly, clumsily trying to reproduce the steps to the hypnotic sword dance. The pink-haired girl was obviously trying to use a Ninjutsu-Kenjutsu combo that she hadn't mastered yet, what a disappointment…
Users of the Dance of the Crescent Moon were supposed to create two Shadow Clones for a threefold simultaneous strike at the enemy from their blind spots. However, all three copies of the pink-haired girl were doing it terribly wrong, and one of the Shadow Clones was especially bad; she wasn't synchronized with the other two at all.
Orochimaru frowned; this was strange…
Shadow Clones were all copies of the same person, and they were supposed to have equal amounts of chakra divided between them, so why was this one lagging behind the others? Unless…
…the unsynchronized Shadow Clone was actually Sasuke in disguise? Was he the real threat, the true assassin hidden among the other two powerless Shadow Clones…?
Orochimaru immediately revised his first guess; if he was correct, then the Sasuke standing in the back and the Fūma shuriken he was holding were also the pink-haired girl and one of her Shadow Clones; it didn't matter which was which, because she must have divided her Genin-level chakra pool to precipitously low levels by making three Shadow Clones at once, weakening her to near civilian levels…
Strength, speed, reaction speed… they all scaled with how much chakra one had left. When a shinobi began to run out of chakra, all of their physical attributes would drop to an ordinary human's level, because they would no longer be able to sustain their enhancements; the alternative was death via chakra exhaustion.
Which was why Naruto's Shadow Clones seemed so slow to react and weak in the beginning of the anime compared to his true self (as long as he dispelled his Shadow Clones to return his chakra back to himself, otherwise he would be as weak as they are); they had so little chakra allocated to them that they were barely more physically powerful than children!