Hidden Leaf, Hidden Talents 81 (Patreon)

The fluorescent light above made a buzzing sound that probably meant the bulb was on its last legs. Not exactly ideal conditions for scientific work, but nobody had complained so far, and nobody was going to start now. When the same guy was running the experiment and being experimented on, there was a certain lack of workplace safety concerns. Who was there to report violations to? Himself?

The clone in front of him twitched, face scrunching up like he'd just bitten into something sour, and then the twitching got worse, his whole body shaking like a leaf in a storm before he finally popped out of existence with a sad little puff of smoke.

The scientist clone hummed and reached for his pen. He was wearing a white coat and glasses, neither of which he actually needed, but somewhere along the line he'd decided that if he was going to play mad scientist in a basement then he might as well commit to the bit. The glasses were purely decorative. The coat was two sizes too big. The clipboard in his hands was the only thing in this room that could be called remotely professional, and even that was being generous since half the pages were covered in doodles from when the experiments got boring.

He started writing, pen moving across paper the way it always did after the fifteenth failed experiment, which was to say slowly, reluctantly, and with the growing suspicion that the eighteenth attempt wasn't going to go any better.

Subject 17, the notes read. Administered prototype variant C-4 (Soldier Pill modified with increased metabolic accelerant, reduced buffer compounds). Time to critical failure: four minutes, twenty-three seconds. Observed symptoms: tremors, excessive sweating, disorientation, sudden dispersion.

He tapped the pen against the clipboard. Four and a half minutes. That was actually worse than the baseline formula, which at least had the decency to let a clone exist for a reasonable amount of time before trying to kill it. And the power boost? About the same. Maybe slightly higher during that first minute, but who cared about a slight improvement if the whole thing made the user explode like a paper balloon in a thunderstorm?

This was the problem with trying to outdo decades of collective research with a few weeks of solo experimentation. The standard soldier pill was the result of decades of trial and error. Generations of medical minds had poked and prodded and adjusted the formula until it did exactly what it was supposed to do. Sure, that formula was still brutal. Sure, it still burned through the body like wildfire through dry grass. But it was a controlled burn. Predictable. The newer versions, the ones that would exist in the future, had ironed out even more of those kinks.

And here he was, trying to reinvent the wheel with one hand tied behind his back.

He sighed and set down his pen. "So that's another failure."

"That's seventeen failures in a row if we're counting variant C," the other scientist clone said from across the room. "Twenty-four if we include the B series."

"We don't talk about the B series."

"Fair enough."

He leaned back in his chair. "Alright, I've been running the numbers in my head and I think I've figured out where we keep hitting the wall."

"The metabolic conversion rate?"

"The metabolic conversion rate." He nodded. "We keep trying to boost the adenosine triphosphate synthesis without accounting for the fact that the mitochondrial load has an upper ceiling. Push past that ceiling and the cells start cannibalizing themselves for fuel, which is exactly what we keep seeing in the test subjects."

The second clone pushed his glasses up his nose. "So the issue isn't potency, it's efficiency. We're dumping more chakra into the system but the body can't actually convert it fast enough to matter."

"Exactly. And remember when Tsunade was explaining chakra-enhanced cellular regeneration? The baseline soldier pill formula took Konoha's medical corps years to stabilize. We're talking years of clinical trials, controlled experiments, actual human volunteers who signed up for this, proper funding, real laboratory equipment, and an entire department whose whole job was making sure they didn't accidentally kill people."

"And we have a basement and each other."

"We have a basement and each other," he agreed. "Which, don't get me wrong, is not nothing. But we're essentially trying to speedrun a decade and a half of pharmaceutical development with a sample size of... us."

The other clone tilted his head, considering. "What if we approached it from the other direction? Instead of trying to increase the metabolic boost, we focus on reducing the chakra strain on the tenketsu. The current formula forces the entire chakra network into a high-output state all at once. Muscle response, reflex speed, sensory processing, everything spikes simultaneously, and that's why the crash is so severe. But if we could isolate which pathways are actually necessary for combat enhancement..."

"You're talking about selective activation." He sat up straighter, suddenly interested. "Only trigger the routes connected to muscle response and reflex speed, leave the rest dormant."

"Right. It would mean a smaller overall boost, but theoretically the user could maintain it longer without the systemic breakdown. Less strain on the organs, less cellular degradation, and a more controlled burn."

They both went quiet for a moment, chasing the same thread.

"The problem," he said slowly, "is that we'd need a way to map how different tenketsu clusters correlate with specific physical functions. Which pathways light up when you're boosting muscle response versus reflex speed versus raw chakra output. Nobody's really documented that in detail because, well, why would they? The current pill just blasts everything at once and calls it a day."

"Brute force." The other clone shrugged. "It works, but it's sloppy as hell."

"Exactly. And it's not like we can see chakra networks directly, so we'd basically be fumbling around in the dark." He tapped his pen against the clipboard. "Medical ninjutsu gives you some feedback when you run diagnostics, you can feel which areas are pulling more energy than others, but it's nowhere near precise enough to isolate individual clusters."

"So we'd have to build the map from scratch. Run different stimulation patterns, document what happens, then cross-reference everything with the crash symptoms to pin down which combinations are doing the most damage." The clone paused. "That's months of work. Maybe longer."

"Which brings us back to the original problem. Time and resources we don't have."

The clone snorted. "Hey, at least we've definitively proven that forty different formulations don't work. Science is about eliminating possibilities, right?"

"Tell that to the twenty-four of us who popped."

"They knew the risks when they signed up."

"Nobody signed up. We literally made them and shoved pills down their throats."

"Details." The clone waved his hand dismissively, then paused as if remembering something. He reached into his coat pocket and pulled out a small empty bottle. "Oh, that reminds me. We have another problem."

"What now?"

"The hospital cut us off."

He blinked. "What?"

"Went down there this morning to grab more supplies for testing. Lady at the desk told me no."

"She said no. Just like that?"

"Well, she was polite about it. Something about requisition limits, wartime rationing, and how medicinal compounds aren't meant to be used as quote unquote experimental candy." The clone shrugged. "She also mentioned that I've requested more raw ingredients in the past month than the entire pharmacy division uses in a quarter, which she felt was excessive."

"It wouldn't have been excessive if you hadn't been splitting resources with three other projects at the same time."

"How is that a waste? We're making progress on multiple fronts."

"Progress doesn't mean anything if we don't have results to show for it. One solid breakthrough on the pill formula and the hospital might have actually considered our spending justified." He shook his head. "But now it's too late. They've already made up their minds about us."

The clone let out a long sigh. Hard to argue with that when they were sitting in a lab with empty supply bottles and nothing but failed experiments to show for weeks of work.

Still, there had to be something they could do.

"Did you at least try pulling the Tsunade card?"

"Oh, I pulled it. She said that actually made it worse because now she knew exactly where I picked up my bad habits."

He groaned. "This is because of that clone who tried to flirt with her, isn't it."

"He was just being friendly."

"He asked if she came with the supplies."

"That's..." the clone winced. "Okay, yeah, that's bad. But in his defense, he'd been stuck in the lab for three days straight. Spending that long without real human interaction does things to a person."

"She's like sixty years old."

"Love knows no age?"

"She's also married. There's a picture of her husband on her desk.”

"Well, nobody ever said we had good observational skills under pressure."

"The original can spot a liar from across a crowded izakaya, but somehow a wedding photo the size of a small painting sitting right there on her desk went completely unnoticed?” He shook his head. "I don't even understand how that happens."

"Maybe he was distracted by her personality."

He stared at him flatly.

"I'm trying to defend our collective honor here, work with me."

"Our collective honor died the moment that clone opened his mouth."

That pretty much killed the conversation. They just sat there, marinating in the absurdity of their situation. Weeks of legitimate research, actual scientific progress, and now they couldn't get supplies because one of them had decided to try out a pickup line on a sixty-year-old married woman.

"Okay," he finally said, pushing himself up from his chair. "This is ridiculous. I'm going down there."

"To the hospital?"

"To the hospital. There has to be someone we can actually talk to. Someone who'll explain what's going on instead of just saying no and shutting the window in our face."

The clone raised an eyebrow. "You really think that's gonna help? After everything?"

"It can't make things worse."

"Pretty sure that's what the flirting clone thought too."

"I'm not going to flirt with anyone." He straightened his coat and adjusted his fake glasses. "I'm going to be professional. Polite. Completely reasonable. I'll walk them through our research, lay out the potential benefits to the village, and request a formal meeting with whoever handles supply allocation."

"That sounds dangerously optimistic."

"One of us has to be."

The clone watched him head for the door, still looking unconvinced. "If you're not back in two hours, I'm assuming they threw you out and I should start looking for alternative suppliers."

"Your faith in me is overwhelming."

"I'm just being realistic."

......

-Uchiha Mikoto-

The forest blurred past in streaks of green and brown.

Hours of running through identical-looking forest had a way of making the mind wander, and Mikoto found herself thinking less about the mission ahead and more about completely useless things, like the fact that she hadn't had a decent meal in days and Shinji still hadn't come from his mission, which meant her chances of eating something that actually tasted good remained frustratingly close to zero.

She shook off the thought and refocused on the run, her gaze settling on Aya up ahead. Their squad leader set a pace that looked effortless, and from the slightly labored breathing Mikoto could hear around her, she wasn't the only one struggling to keep up. The half-cloak draped over Aya's left side kept fluttering with each leap, and during one particular jump the wind caught it just right, pulling it back far enough for Mikoto to see what was underneath.

Nothing.

An empty sleeve, pinned up neatly so it wouldn't flap around. No arm. Just... absence where an arm should have been.

Mikoto almost stumbled. She caught herself quickly, recovering her stride before anyone noticed, but her mind was already racing. Aya was missing an arm. Their squad leader, the sensor Commander Minoru had supposedly praised, was operating with only one limb. How had Mikoto not noticed before? The cloak, obviously. It had hidden the injury completely during the briefing. But now that she knew, she couldn't stop thinking about it.

Was she okay? Physically she seemed fine, obviously, but losing an arm had to do something to a person. Shinobi needed their hands for seals, their arms for weapons, their whole body for taijutsu. To have that taken away, even partially...

But then again, she was a jonin.

Mikoto let that sink in for a moment. She'd grown up sparring with jonin cousins who treated her best attacks like mild inconveniences, and none of them had been missing any limbs. If Aya had made it to that rank even after losing an arm, then the gap between them was probably even wider than Mikoto wanted to think about. One hand or two, the woman could almost certainly take her apart without much trouble.

Then again, none of that really mattered for this mission. Their assignment was support work. Casualty evacuation, helping the medical staff, ferrying wounded from the front lines to safety. Low combat probability, relatively speaking. They weren't being sent to fight. They were being sent to carry stretchers and assist the people who actually knew what they were doing.

Unless they got unlucky.

War had a way of making people unlucky. Mikoto had seen enough in the past few weeks to know that plans fell apart, safe assignments turned dangerous, and people died in places they weren't supposed to die. But she pushed that thought down and focused on the running. No point in borrowing trouble. They'd deal with whatever came when it came.

For now, she just had to keep up.

......

The field hospital announced itself long before they actually saw it.

The smell came first. Blood and antiseptic and something else underneath, something Mikoto didn't want to think about too hard. Then came the sounds, groans and shouted orders and equipment clattering, all of it growing louder as they got closer. By the time they emerged from the forest and got their first look at the place, Mikoto had already braced herself for something grim.

It was worse than she'd imagined.

Tents stretched across a clearing that had probably been chosen for its defensibility, surrounded by natural rock formations and dense foliage that would make it hard to spot. But all that tactical consideration couldn't hide what was happening inside those tents, or outside them, because there simply wasn't enough room to keep everyone under cover.

Wounded shinobi were everywhere.

Some lay on cots, others on blankets spread directly on the ground. A few were sitting up, bandages wrapped around heads or torsos or limbs, faces tight with pain they were trying not to show or too tired to hide. Medics moved between them in a constant flow, checking vitals, changing dressings, murmuring reassurances that had probably been repeated so many times.

Mikoto had barely caught her breath from the run when a woman emerged from one of the larger tents, walking toward them like she had somewhere else to be five minutes ago. She was older, maybe late forties, with graying hair pulled back in a bun and a face that looked like it hadn't smiled in weeks. Her white coat was stained with blood, some dried brown, some still fresh enough to glisten.

"Command finally sent us support, huh." The woman's eyes swept over the group, assessing them the way a carpenter might assess a pile of lumber, figuring out what could be made useful and what was just going to get in the way. "Hinako Sarutobi. Chief Pharmacist of Konoha Hospital, though right now I'm running this whole mess."

Aya stepped forward and gave a brief bow. "Aya, squad leader. Just tell us where you need us."

"Everywhere, honestly." Hinako gestured broadly at the chaos around them, and Mikoto could hear the exhaustion underneath the briskness. "We're short on staff, drowning in patients, and the front keeps sending us more every few hours. So here's what's going to happen. I need to split your squad. Some of you stay here, help my medics with triage and basic care. The rest go forward and bring back wounded. We've got stretchers, we've got routes mapped out, we just don't have enough bodies to run them."

She pointed to a shinobi standing nearby, a tired-looking chunin with dirt on his face and blood on his sleeves. He was holding some folded stretchers under one arm.

"He will guide your forward team. Knows all the pickup points, knows which paths are still clear." Hinako was already half-turning away, her attention snagged by something happening in one of the tents behind her. "Get moving. Every minute we waste is someone bleeding out."

And then she was gone, disappearing back into the mess of tents and patients without another word.

Aya didn't waste time. The moment Hinako was gone, she turned to face the squad.

"Four of you are staying here. Help the medical staff with whatever they need, bandaging, moving patients, fetching supplies, anything they ask. You, you, you, and you." She pointed at four of the genin, Mikoto not among them. "The rest of you are with me. We're heading forward."

The guide set down the stretchers he'd been holding. Aya immediately pointed at three more squad members.

"We're gonna rotate as we go, half of us carry wounded, half protect the carriers, then we switch off so nobody burns out too fast." She turned to the guide. "Whenever you're ready."

He nodded, looking too tired to offer any commentary, and started walking toward the tree line on the far side of the clearing. Away from the hospital. Toward the front.

Mikoto fell into formation with the others, leaving the field hospital behind. The sounds of the wounded faded as they moved deeper into the forest, replaced by the familiar rustle of leaves and the distant rumble of something that might have been thunder but probably wasn't.

She didn't look back.

……

-Shinji's Clone-

The door to the makeshift lab swung open, and the clone who'd stayed behind looked up from his clipboard with an expression that was already halfway to smug before he even opened his mouth.

"That was fast. How'd it go?"

The returning clone didn't answer immediately. He walked over to the nearest chair, sat down heavily, and stared at the ceiling for a long moment.

"...that bad?"

"You have no idea." He dragged both hands down his face. "I spent an hour getting bounced around. First floor sends me to third floor, third floor sends me back down to first but a different section, that section's on lunch, and then finally someone points me to the Pharmacy Division."

"And?"

"And it turns out the person who cut our funding is the Chief Pharmacist. Woman named Hinako Sarutobi."

The scientist clone nodded slowly. "Okay, so you talked to her and...?"

"I didn't talk to her."

"Why not?"

"Because she's not there." He let out a long breath. "She got deployed to the front. Left a few days ago."

The clone blinked. "She left."

"She left."

"After cutting off our supplies."

"Immediately after cutting off our supplies."

"So she just... denied our requests and then conveniently shipped out to somewhere we can't reach her."

"That's exactly what happened, yes."

The clone just stared at him for a few seconds, then slowly set down his clipboard. "Unbelievable. She really just dropped the hammer and then walked out the door, huh."

"I asked if anyone else could authorize the reinstatement. The Deputy Chief said no. Only the Chief Pharmacist has that authority for non-standard research requisitions."

"What about going higher? Hospital Director or something?"

"Apparently he doesn't get involved in pharmacy matters unless it's an emergency. And our research project running out of ingredients doesn't count as an emergency."

"It feels like an emergency to me."

"It feels like an emergency to me too. But we're not the ones making the rules."

The clone picked up his pen and started tapping it against the desk. "So what are we looking at here? Wait two months for her to come back? Find alternative suppliers?”

"The Deputy said I could submit a formal appeal in writing. It'll be reviewed when the Chief returns."

"In two months."

"At minimum. Could be longer depending on how the war goes."

"Wonderful." The clone tossed the pen onto the desk. "So we're dead in the water."

"Pretty much." He paused. "Though... if she's at the western front, there's a decent chance one of ours might run into her out there."

"You want to dump this on them?"

"I want to delegate this task to our colleagues in the field who are better positioned to handle it."

"That's the same thing."

"It sounds better when I say it my way."

The clone snorted. "Alright, fair. They're closer to her than we are, and they don't have to deal with all this bureaucratic horseshit. If anyone's gonna corner her for a conversation, it's them."

"Exactly. We just pass along what we learned and let them handle it from there." He spread his hands. "After that? Not our problem anymore."

"I like the way you think."

…….

-Mikoto-

The forest rushed past in a blur of green and brown.

She kept pace at the rear of the formation, eyes scanning the trees around them while the rest of the squad moved ahead. Four of her squadmates were handling the stretchers, two per wounded, their breathing heavier than the others but their pace steady. The two shinobi they'd picked up earlier lay still on the canvas, one with a badly broken leg, the other with shrapnel wounds across his chest and shoulder. Neither injury was pretty, but neither was immediately life-threatening either. Stable enough to wait.

Aya suddenly changed direction, veering left without warning.

The squad followed without question, adjusting their course to match hers. Nobody asked why. Nobody needed to. When your squad leader was a sensor and she changed direction mid-run, it meant she'd picked up on something the rest of them couldn't feel.

A minute later, they found him.

A man slumped against a tree trunk, his flak jacket soaked dark with blood. He wasn't moving much, just shallow breaths that made his chest rise and fall in an uneven rhythm. His eyes were open but unfocused, staring at something none of them could see.

The guide was at his side before anyone else had fully stopped moving. His hands glowed green as he ran them over the man's body, the soft light of diagnostic jutsu illuminating the mess of wounds underneath all that blood.

"How bad?" Aya asked.

"Artery's clipped on the left side. He's got head trauma too, hit something on the way down, maybe." He pulled his hands back, the glow fading. "He needs immediate evac. If we don't get him back soon, he's not going to make it."

Mikoto's gaze drifted to the two shinobi on stretchers behind them.

So that was how it worked.

They weren't just running back and forth between the front and the field hospital, ferrying one or two wounded at a time. That would burn through their squad's stamina in hours and waste most of their time on empty return trips. Instead, they collected the wounded as they moved, filling their stretchers with anyone stable enough to wait.

But some wounds couldn't wait.

Her eyes moved to the man bleeding against the tree. Some injuries were bad enough that every minute mattered, and the system had to bend around them instead of the other way around.

Sure enough, Aya was already making the call.

“You two, take him.” She glanced at two genin who weren't currently carrying stretchers. Her gaze then shifted to a nearby chunin. “Hayashi, you're their escort. Get him back to the field hospital as fast as you can without killing him on the way.”

The chunin she'd pointed at gave a short nod while the other two were already unfolding their stretcher.

Aya turned back to the rest of them. "We keep moving. More wounded up ahead."

The guide wiped his bloody hands on his pants and started walking. The squad fell in behind him, leaving the three-man team to handle their patient and make the run back to the hospital.

Mikoto spared one last glance at the wounded man as they carried him off in the opposite direction. His face was pale, almost gray, and she found herself wondering if he'd still be alive by the time they got him to the medics.

Then she turned and followed the others deeper into the forest.

There wasn't time to wonder about things she couldn't control.

......

That first day ended without incident.

No ambushes, no enemy contact, no surprises. Just the monotony of moving through the forest, picking up wounded, carrying them back. Rinse and repeat until the sun went down and Aya finally called it.

The second day was the same. And the third.

By the fourth morning, Mikoto had stopped keeping track of individual runs. They all blurred together into a single continuous loop of trees and stretchers and blood-soaked bandages. Wake up, eat something tasteless from the ration supply, head out. Find wounded, carry wounded, hand them off to the medics. Go back out. Find more. Carry more. Hand them off. Repeat until there were no more wounded left to collect in their assigned sector.

When they weren't running stretchers, they were helping at the field hospital. Changing bandages, fetching water, holding down patients while the iryonin worked. Mikoto learned very quickly that medical work wasn't glamorous. It was messy and loud and sometimes the person you were helping screamed in your face because the pain was too much and there wasn't enough anesthetic to go around.

She also learned, very quickly, that comforting the wounded wasn't something she was good at. The physical tasks were fine, she could haul supplies and hold patients down without any problems, but the moment someone looked up at her with pain-glazed eyes and asked a question she couldn't honestly answer, her mind went blank. The medics knew how to handle those moments, had their reassurances polished from years of practice. Mikoto just squeezed their hands and hoped that was enough, even when she knew it probably wasn't.

Sleep came in stolen hours between shifts. Four hours here, three hours there, never enough to feel rested but always enough to keep functioning. The cot they'd assigned her smelled like sweat and antiseptic, both so ingrained in the canvas she doubted it would ever wash out. She stopped noticing after the second night.

She couldn't remember the last time she'd actually tasted her food. Meals had become just another task, whatever appeared in front of her went down, not because she wanted it but because eating was part of the routine and her body wouldn't keep going without it

Somewhere around the fifth day, Mikoto realized she'd stopped thinking about anything beyond the immediate task in front of her. Not home, not her family, not even Kushina or Shinji. Just the next run, the next wounded, the next hour of work before she could collapse onto her cot again.

It was easier that way.

......

The sixth day started with the same routine as the five before it, Mikoto's squad moving through the forest in their usual formation. Aya at the front, sensing for wounded and threats alike, with the rest of them spread out behind her. Two stretchers occupied, four bearers working in shifts, everyone else watching the perimeter.

They'd already made three runs today. This was supposed to be the last one before rotating back to hospital duty.

Mikoto had learned things over the past week that nobody talked about in the hospital. Like how the medics quietly marked certain patients with a black tag when no one was looking, the ones too far gone to waste resources on. Or how the priority list wasn't really about who was hurt worst, it was about who could be saved with the least effort and sent back to fight. War medicine wasn't about saving everyone. It was about numbers.

She'd brought it up to Aya on the third night, after watching a medic walk past a man who was still breathing to treat someone with a less severe wound.

"That's how it works," Aya had said, not unkindly. "We don't have enough supplies or enough hands to save everyone. So we save the ones we can, and we make sure their sacrifice means something by not wasting resources on lost causes."

"But he was still alive."

"He was dying. There's a difference." Aya had paused, her expression softening just slightly. "I know it's hard to accept. I didn't like it either when I first saw it. But someone has to make those calls, or we lose more people trying to save the ones we can't."

Mikoto had tried again with Hinako the next day, catching the Chief Pharmacist during a rare moment when she wasn't elbow-deep in someone's chest cavity.

"I know it's hard to watch," Hinako had said, her voice flat with exhaustion. "But every minute we spend on someone who's not going to make it is a minute we're not spending on someone who will. Bandages, medicine, chakra—none of it's infinite. We use what we have where it'll do the most good."

"I understand the logic," Mikoto had said. "I just... is there really no way to get more supplies? More medics? If command knew how bad it was out here..."

"Command knows exactly how bad it is. They're the ones who decided what we get and what we don't." Hinako's expression didn't change, but something in her tone had softened, just a little. "We do what we can with what we have. We give the dying something for the pain, we sit with them, we make sure their family gets notified. That's not nothing, girl. Sometimes that's all we can offer, and it matters more than you'd think."

Mikoto hadn't argued after that. Not because she agreed, but because she understood that arguing wouldn't change anything. The system existed because it had to. Because the alternative was chaos, was everyone dying instead of just some, was medics burning themselves out trying to save people who couldn't be saved while the ones who could slipped away.

She hated it. She hated every part of it.

But she'd stopped saying so out loud.

Up ahead, Aya held up a hand, and the squad stopped. Mikoto blinked, pulling herself out of her own head and back into the present.

"Two wounded ahead," she said quietly. "Thirty meters, near the ravine."

They moved forward, and Mikoto saw them before anyone else spoke. Two shinobi propped against a fallen tree, both wearing Konoha flak jackets torn and stained dark. One had his leg wrapped in bloody bandages, the other was clutching his side and breathing in short, shallow gasps that didn't sound good.

Their medic was already kneeling beside them, hands glowing green. His expression tightened as he worked.

"The leg wound is stable," he said after a moment. "Broken bone, blood loss, but he can wait. This one..." He looked at the man clutching his side. "Internal bleeding. He needs surgery now."

Aya nodded and turned to the squad. One stretcher. Two wounded.

Mikoto already knew what the answer was going to be, but she asked anyway. "What do we do?"

"One of you take the leg wound on your back—he's lighter, his injury can handle it." Aya's gaze moved to the man with internal bleeding. "He goes on the stretcher." She glanced at the medic. "Keep him stable as long as you can."

They moved quickly. The stretcher team loaded the worse-off man onto the canvas while one of the genin crouched down, letting the wounded shinobi climb onto his back. It wasn't comfortable for either of them, but comfort wasn't the priority.

They were about to start moving again when Aya went still, and that was enough to put everyone on edge. A sensor freezing like that was never good news.

"We've got company," she said. "Seventeen of them coming in fast from the southwest.”

Seventeen.

Mikoto felt her stomach drop. Their squad was down to eleven after sending groups back with critical wounded over the past few days. Eleven against sixteen, and they had two injured to protect.

But she wasn't shocked. None of them were. They'd been warned this might happen, had drilled for it, had spent every quiet moment on the runs mentally preparing for the moment when "low combat probability" stopped being accurate.

"Formation C," Aya said calmly. "Stretcher bearers in the center, everyone else forms a defensive ring. We move fast but we keep formation. If we scatter trying to outrun them, they'll pick us off one by one. Stay together and protect the wounded. Understood?"

Nods. A few murmured confirmations. No one argued, no one panicked.

They started moving.

......

The first clash came two minutes later.

Five of them, River-nin judging by the headbands. Advance scouts, Mikoto figured, trying to get ahead of the main group and box them in. They hit the clearing fast and aggressive, clearly expecting a quick rout, just medics and stretcher-bearers, easy pickings.

They were wrong about that.

Aya met the first one before Mikoto had even finished drawing her kunai. One arm or not, the woman moved like water flowing downhill, natural and inevitable. Her blade caught the River-nin's throat before he could complete his swing, and then she was already turning to the next target.

Mikoto engaged the third, a kunoichi with short hair and snarl twisting her face. Their kunai met with a ring that jarred up her arm, and then everything blurred, too fast to think, just training taking over. Feints, counters, the flicker of hand seals at the edge of her vision. The woman was faster than her, more experienced, and Mikoto had to burn a substitution and a bunshin just to avoid a wind jutsu that would've taken her face off.

Shaking it off, Mikoto came out of it more aggressive than before. She caught the kunoichi across the forearm and took a blade in her own thigh for the trouble, but she kept moving, and then they were inside each other's reach again, cutting and blocking and cutting. Before long her ears were ringing. She couldn't tell if it was from a hit she didn't remember taking or just from the blood pounding in her skull. Everything narrowed down to the next half-second, the next opening, the next breath—and then she found one. The kunoichi's guard dropped for just a moment and Mikoto made her pay for it, driving in hard. But the woman was good and twisted away from what should've been a killing blow, and then Aya was there beside her, and between the two of them they finally put her down.

Mikoto didn't look at the body. Couldn't afford to. They were already moving again, the stretcher bearers never stopping, the rest of the squad forming up around them while the last two River-nin hung back at the treeline, unwilling to close the distance after watching three of their comrades go down in quick succession.

But they weren't giving up either.

A water jutsu shot toward the stretcher bearers, a pressurized lance that would have punched straight through flesh and bone. The medic intercepted it with a mud wall that exploded on impact, showering everyone nearby with wet debris. Before the spray had even settled, the second River-nin was already launching his own attack, a wind jutsu that ripped through the underbrush and sent leaves and branches flying.

Mikoto's hands moved through seals on instinct. Her fireball met the wind jutsu halfway, and the collision turned the air into a brief inferno that singed eyebrows and stole the oxygen from her lungs for a terrifying second. The heat washed over them, uncomfortably close.

They kept moving. The River-nin kept following, kept throwing jutsu, kept probing for an opening. Earth met water. Fire met wind. The forest behind them was becoming a mess of scorched trees and shattered rock, and it was only getting worse.

Mikoto was painfully aware of how thin their options were. Some of their chunin had split off earlier to escort the critical case back. That left just the medic and one other who could use elemental jutsu, along with her and Aya. Everyone else was genin, capable fighters but limited to weapons and basic jutsu. Four people to counter two harassers lobbing jutsu from the treeline, and that wasn't even counting the rest of the enemy squad gaining ground behind them.

She was still running through possible countermeasures when one of the genin got caught in the crossfire. A fire jutsu met a water jutsu too close to the formation, and the steam explosion sent debris flying. Something, rock or wood or frozen water, punched into his shoulder hard enough to spin him halfway around. He didn't scream, just grunted and kept running, blood streaming down his arm and dripping onto the forest floor.

Mikoto gritted her teeth.

Her Sharingan was already tracking the harassers, reading their movements before they could follow through. One was winded from his last jutsu. The other's chakra was spiking, hands starting to move, the familiar buildup that came right before an attack.

Not this time.

Her hands blurred through the seals, and she spat a single fireball into the air. At a glance it looked like one attack, a predictable response they could easily dodge. Then it burst apart into a dozen smaller flames that scattered wildly through the treeline, curving and weaving toward both River-nin at once.

The Hōsenka caught them off guard. They broke from cover, one rolling left, the other leaping right, both abandoning their attack to avoid being burned alive.

They never saw Aya coming.

The jonin appeared behind the leftmost River-nin like she'd materialized from thin air, her single arm already extended. Mikoto didn't see what jutsu she used, only the result. A blade of compressed wind that carved through the man's torso from hip to shoulder, splitting him open in a spray of red that painted the tree behind him. His body hit the ground in two pieces, organs spilling out onto the dirt in a wet, steaming pile.

The second River-nin didn't bother trying to fight. He saw what happened to his partner and bolted, feet already carrying him toward the deeper forest.

Mikoto was faster.

She was sprinting before she'd consciously decided to move, three shuriken already between her fingers. She threw them in a wide arc, each one trailing wire. The shuriken curved around trees, looped back on themselves, and the fleeing River-nin ran straight into the web she'd woven mid-stride. Wire bit into his throat, his arms, his legs, yanking tight from three different angles at once. He jerked to a stop like a puppet whose strings had all been pulled the wrong way, suspended between the trees and choking on his own scream.

Aya was on him before he could even try to free himself.

The tanto went through the back of his neck and out his throat in one thrust. Blood sprayed across the forest floor, pooling beneath him as his body twitched and jerked. She twisted the blade once, severing whatever was left, and pulled it free with a wet sucking sound. The twitching stopped.

Aya didn't even look at the bodies. She was already moving back toward the formation, her face as calm as if she'd just swatted a pair of flies.

"Keep moving," she said. "The main force is still coming."

She was right. The rest of the enemy squad caught up thirty seconds later, twelve River-nin coming at them from three directions and fanning out through the trees to cut off every escape route. There were too many to fight and too spread out to break through cleanly.

Mikoto's hand drifted to the butterfly hairclip hanging around her neck, fingers closing around it without thinking.

‘Shinji...’

"Don't let them pin us down!" Aya shouted.

The fighting became a blur after that. Bodies moving too fast to track, jutsu lighting up the forest in flashes of color and heat, the wet sounds of steel meeting flesh. Mikoto lost count of how many times she swung her kunai, how many fireballs she threw, how many times she barely twisted away from something that would have killed her. Her Sharingan burned in her skull, feeding her information faster than her body could react to it all.

Someone screamed behind her. She didn't turn to look. Couldn't afford to. A River-nin came at her from the left and she cut him down, then another from the right, then two more at once and she was backpedaling, parrying, her arms starting to shake from the impacts. Blood in her eyes, hers or someone else's, she couldn't tell anymore. The stretcher bearers were still moving, she thought, hoped, but the formation had fallen apart and now it was just chaos, just survival, just—

Something hit her from behind.

The world spun. Trees. Sky. Dirt. Pain exploding across her back, her ribs, stealing the air from her lungs. She was on the ground somehow, couldn't remember falling, and there was a shadow standing over her with a blade raised. The steel descended toward her face, and she couldn't look away, couldn't close her eyes, could only watch it come.

She blinked.

When her eyes opened again, the blade was gone. The River-nin was gone. The ground was gone. Instead there was warmth around her, arms cradling her against something solid, and when she looked up she saw leaves overhead and a familiar face looking down at her with that stupid smile she'd thought about way too many times over the past week.

"Hey there," Shinji said, soft and almost casual, like he hadn't just pulled her out of the jaws of death. "Miss me?"

Mikoto's brain was still trying to catch up. She was in his arms—actually in his arms, one under her knees and the other supporting her back like something out of a bad romance novel. On a tree branch high above the forest floor. Below them, the sounds of fighting continued, muffled by distance and leaves.

"You—" Her voice came out hoarse, and she had to swallow before she could get the rest out. "You absolute idiot. Where have you been?"

"Oh, you know. Here and there." His smile faded slightly as his eyes moved over her, checking for injuries. "You're hurt."

"I'm fine."

"Mikoto, you're bleeding."

"It's not all mine." She tried to push herself up, winced, and immediately regretted it. "Okay, some of it's mine."

His grip on her tightened just a little. "Don't move. You took a bad hit to your back, I need you to stay still."

"How did you even find us?"

"Luck, mostly. I crossed paths with reinforcements heading this way and asked what was happening. They said a support squad was pinned down by River-nin." His voice was calm, but his grip on her said otherwise. "Then someone said Uchiha, and I stopped listening to the rest."

She wanted to make a joke about him playing hero, but the words wouldn't come. She could still feel that blade coming down toward her face.

"The others," she managed. "My squad, the wounded we were carrying, they're still—"

"Being taken care of, don't worry." He nodded toward the chaos below, and when she followed his gaze she saw Konoha reinforcements pouring into the fight, grey flak jackets overwhelming what was left of the River-nin squad. "See? Nothing left for you to worry about. Just rest and leave the rest to me."

Her fingers curled into the fabric of his jacket, and she finally let herself breathe.

"I missed you," she said quietly.

Shinji's expression softened for about half a second before that familiar grin crept back onto his face.

"Well, yeah. I'd miss me too. Have you seen this face?"

She stared at him. She was exhausted, bleeding, had almost died about thirty seconds ago, and this idiot was making jokes about how handsome he was.

She turned her face away, pouting. "Forget I said anything."

"Too late." He pulled her closer. "It's already seared into my memory."

She groaned, but she didn't pull away.

She didn't want to.