Hidden Leaf, Hidden Talents 83 (Patreon)

The field hospital smelled like blood.

Which, I mean, obviously. That's what field hospitals are for. People come in bleeding, people leave either not bleeding or not leaving at all. But after spending the last however many days killing people without sleep, the smell had started to stick to the inside of my nose like it had paid rent and was planning to stay a while.

I walked through the main clearing, watching my clones run between tents with bandages and medical supplies. One of them was holding someone's intestines in place while an iryonin worked on stopping the bleeding. Another was stitching up a wound on some chunin's face while the guy tried very hard not to scream. A third was doing triage near the entrance, pointing people toward different tents based on how likely they were to die in the next ten minutes.

War is glamorous work.

I found an empty corner near one of the supply tents and just stood there for a moment, hands in my pockets, watching people run around like the world was ending, which, to be fair, it kind of was. By all reasonable metrics, I should have been exhausted. My body was running on fumes. My chakra reserves were fine because they were always fine, but the actual meat and bones holding everything together were starting to complain about the whole "killing people for days without stopping" thing. Muscles were sending strongly worded letters. Joints were threatening to unionize.

And yet.

I didn't feel like sleeping. Every time I closed my eyes, I saw hands and throats and all the places I'd learned to put sharp things. The adrenaline had faded but something else had taken its place, this low-level hum in my nervous system that wouldn't settle down no matter how many times I told it the fighting was over.

So instead of sleeping like a normal person, I decided to find my sensei. Company seemed better than lying in a cot staring at the tent ceiling and counting the bodies in my head.

I flagged down a chunin who was rushing past with a crate of medical supplies.

"Hey. You know where Tsunade-sensei is?"

"The river." He jerked his head vaguely eastward without slowing down. "She's been there for the past hour. Said something about needing to wash off the surgery smell."

"Thanks."

I didn't even make it past the outer perimeter before I heard voices drifting from behind one of the supply tents. Two people having one of those conversations where everyone involved was too exhausted and too busy but kept talking anyway out of obligation.

Normally I would have kept walking. Eavesdropping is rude, and more importantly, eavesdropping tends to get you involved in things you'd rather avoid. But then the man said something about "the chief pharmacist" and my feet decided to stop moving without consulting the rest of me first.

Chief pharmacist. Right. That was a thing.

My clones had mentioned her a while back. Apparently she was the one who'd axed my research funding, and they'd asked me to talk to her about it. Persuade her to reconsider. Charm her with my winning personality or whatever it was they thought I had. I'd filed it away under "things to deal with eventually" and then promptly forgot about it, because my brain had been a little preoccupied with the whole "killing people for days" situation. Funny how murder makes you lose track of your to-do list.

The story my clones had given me was that one of them had gotten a little too friendly with someone on the pharmacist's staff. A married someone. Which, if true, meant my funding got cut because a copy of me couldn't keep his mouth shut around a woman with a ring on her finger, which was annoyingly plausible. My clones were me, after all, and I wasn't exactly known for my restraint in the charm department.

Except that wasn't what I was hearing now.

"Four days. Four days since my last requisition actually came back approved, and even then they only gave me half of what I asked for." The woman sounded like she'd been saying this to anyone who'd listen. "I've got medics out there rationing painkillers like we're already under siege, and meanwhile Command keeps sending me forms asking why our treatment times are slipping. Like they can't put two and two together."

"Have you tried going through the secondary channels? The ones Minoru-sama set up for—"

"I've tried everything, believe me. Secondary channels, emergency protocols, I even wrote directly to logistics command last week, figured I'd go straight to the source. You know what I got back? A form letter. A form letter thanking me for my patience during this 'period of operational adjustment.'" She said the last three words like they tasted bitter. "That's what they're calling it now, apparently."

"What about the soldier pills? I heard the new batches have been..."

What I was hearing was two exhausted nin talking about supply lines that had been stretched past the breaking point and somehow hadn't snapped yet. About requisition forms that went into the system and never came back out. About soldier pills that used to actually work being replaced with batches so weak you might as well just take a nap instead. The woman, the chief pharmacist herself presumably, sounded like someone who'd been fighting a war on two fronts, one against the enemy, and one against the beautifully optimized logistics system that was slowly starving her people of everything they needed to do their jobs.

She wasn't being petty. She wasn't holding a grudge over some clone's wandering eye. She'd cut my funding because she literally didn't have enough funding to go around, and when you're choosing between "experimental research that might pay off someday" and "keeping the people in front of you alive right now," that's not really a choice at all.

Well. That was annoying.

Not because I was angry at her. I couldn't be, not after hearing that. If anything I felt a little bad for assuming the worst, even though technically it was my clones who'd done the assuming and I'd just accepted their version of events without questioning it. Which was its own kind of laziness, I guess. Easier to believe someone was being petty than to consider that maybe the whole system was falling apart and she was just trying to keep her corner of it standing.

And that was the real problem, wasn't it? Supply shortages in wartime. The eternal headache that no amount of clever planning ever seemed to fix. Every country that had ever fought a war longer than a month had run into this exact issue, and most of them had solved it the same way: they hadn't. They'd just kept grinding until one side ran out of bodies before it ran out of supplies, or vice versa.

Depressing thoughts for a depressing morning. I left the two nin to their complaining and headed toward the river.

About a ten minute walk from the field hospital. Not ideal, but it was the only water source that wasn't either a mud puddle or a half-day hike away, so nobody was complaining.

I made my way through the trees, the sounds of the camp fading behind me as the rush of running water grew louder. The path opened up onto a riverbank, wide and rocky, with the water flowing smooth and deep through the center. Steam rose from the surface in lazy curls. Natural hot spring feeding into the main river. Nice.

My feet stopped before my brain caught up to why.

Tsunade was in the water.

Just... standing there. Waist-deep in the river with her back to the shore. Her blonde hair hung loose and wet against her skin, darker than usual from the water, clinging to her shoulders and the curve of her neck. Droplets ran down the line of her spine, slow and lazy, disappearing somewhere below the surface. The water was just high enough to hide everything important, but low enough that my brain was very aware of how easily that could change with one wrong ripple. Then she half-turned toward the shore, maybe reaching for something, and I got a view I definitely wasn't prepared for. The soft swell where her chest met the waterline, skin still flushed from the warmth, the way the light played across wet skin and turned the whole scene into something my eyes really didn't want to leave.

She reached up to push her hair back, and that was worse. The stretch pulled her shoulders back, lifted everything, and suddenly there was a lot more to look at than there had been a second ago. The motion was completely innocent. Just a woman fixing her hair. But my eyes followed it anyway, tracing the movement of muscle under skin, the way water slid down her arms and rejoined the river.

People called her a legendary kunoichi, one of the Sannin, all those impressive titles. Right now my brain wasn't processing any of that. Right now my brain was just stuck on the fact that she was naked and wet and about twenty meters away from me. And I, being a perfectly healthy young man with functional eyes and absolutely no sense of self-preservation, did what any idiot would do in this situation.

I looked.

For exactly three seconds.

Then my survival instincts caught up with my libido and screamed at me that I was about to die.

I used shunshin to get out of there so fast I probably left an afterimage behind. The ground where I'd been standing exploded a half second later, stone and dirt fountaining into the air as something hit it hard enough to crater the earth. I ended up twenty meters out, spine flat against a tree trunk, trying to get my heart rate under control. The adrenaline spike I could explain. The other thing making my pulse race, less so.

I didn't get much time to work on either problem.

Tsunade appeared in front of me.

Wrapped in a towel. Just a towel. Hair still dripping, skin still flushed, looking at me like I was something unpleasant she'd found on the bottom of her sandal. The towel was white and slightly translucent from the water, clinging to curves that did absolutely nothing to help my situation. She had her arms crossed under her chest, which only served to emphasize certain things that I was now desperately trying not to look at.

"You know," she said, her voice deceptively calm, "I haven't seen you in a while. We've both been running around doing our jobs, barely any time to catch up, and the first thing you do when we finally reunite is peep on me while I'm bathing."

"Okay, first of all, I wasn't peeping."

"Oh, really? Then what exactly would you call this?"

"Arriving at an extremely unfortunate time while looking for someone I hadn't seen in a while." I kept my face very, very neutral. "I was told my sensei was at the river. Nobody thought to mention she'd be naked in it."

She held the glare for another second, eyes narrowed like she was deciding whether to drown me, then let out a breath and let some of the tension drop from her shoulders. "You look like hell.”

"Thanks. I feel like it too."

"When did you get back?"

"About an hour ago. Maybe less." I shrugged. "Wasn't really keeping track."

She studied me for a moment, and I knew what she was doing. Looking for the things I wasn't saying. The wounds I might be hiding under my clothes, the exhaustion I was pretending wasn't there. One second she was ready to put me through a tree, and the next she was checking if I was about to fall over.

"You should be resting right now," she said. "Not wandering around camp looking for people at rivers."

"Tried that. Couldn't sleep." I wasn't sure why I was being this honest, but it was too late to take it back now. "Figured talking to someone would help more than staring at a tent ceiling."

"So you came looking for me, huh."

"You're the only person here I actually want to talk to." Which was a lie, obviously. Mikoto was here too, somewhere in this camp, and I'd be happy to talk to her any day of the week. But between my cute teammate who I hadn't just seen naked, and my sensei who I very much had just seen naked... well. The choice wasn't exactly difficult. My motivations weren't pure. They were, in fact, about as impure as motivations could get while still being technically within the bounds of acceptable social behavior.

She studied me in silence, eyes lingering just long enough to make the pause uncomfortable, before turning away. “Give me a minute to get dressed. Then we can talk.”

She walked back toward where she'd left her clothes, and I made a very deliberate choice to look anywhere except at the way the towel moved as she went.

I counted the leaves on the tree next to me. Very interesting leaves. Such detail. Much nature.

When she came back, she was dressed and her hair was tied up, still damp at the ends.

"You've been out there for a while now." She said. "The front, I mean. How long has it been? A week? Two?"

"Something like that."

"So." She tilted her head. "What'd you think?"

"Honestly? It was a lot of stabbing people and trying not to get stabbed back." I scratched the back of my neck. "Pretty much what it said on the label."

“Eloquent as always.”

She let out a breath and looked away, toward the river.

"I'm glad you're back."

I blinked. That was... unexpected.

"You worried about me, sensei?"

"Don't get cocky." She shot me a look. "I just don't want to have to train another idiot from scratch. Do you know how long it took to get you to a point where you weren't completely useless?"

"Ouch. My feelings."

"Your feelings will survive."

"Will they though? That was pretty devastating. I might need medical attention."

"Then go find a medic who hasn't just caught you peeping on them."

"Fair point." I shifted against the tree, finding a more comfortable position. "Speaking of medical attention, though. When are we picking up the lessons again? I've been out there for a while now and I'm starting to get rusty."

Tsunade was quiet for a moment. She looked out toward the river, watching the water flow past.

"Honestly, there's not much left for me to teach you."

I blinked. "What?"

"The jutsu, the theory, the chakra control, you've got most of it down already." She sighed. "You picked it up faster than anyone I've ever trained, which is annoying as hell, by the way. Took me months to learn what you figured out in a few weeks."

"So, what, I'm done? Officially graduated from the Tsunade school of putting people back together?"

"Not even close." She turned back to me, and her eyes were serious now. "You know the techniques. That's not the same thing as being a medic. What you need now isn't more lessons from me, it's patients. Hundreds of them. Thousands, maybe. You need to see what happens when things go wrong in ways the textbooks don't cover, when the body does something nobody warned you about. You need to make mistakes that cost people their lives and then figure out how to live with that afterward." She paused, and her voice dropped a little. "That's not something I can teach you in a training session. That's something you have to go through yourself."

"Or," I said, "I could just watch you make those mistakes and learn from them instead. Seems more efficient. Less dead people on my conscience."

She snorted. "You think I'm still making mistakes?"

"Everyone makes mistakes. You're just better at hiding yours." I shrugged. "Besides, why does learning have to come with a body count? If I can shadow you, see how you think through the ugly cases in real time, that's still experience. I'm just borrowing yours."

She was quiet for a moment. Then she laughed, short and surprised. "Borrowing my experience. That's new."

"I'm full of new ones."

"You're full of something, alright." But the corner of her mouth was twitching upward. "Fine. Maybe you've got half a point. Watching someone else eat shit is still educational." Her eyes narrowed suddenly. "Hold on. You're not planning to sabotage me, are you? Trip me up so you can learn from my ‘mistakes’?"

"Sensei. I'm hurt."

"You're suspiciously eager to learn from my failures, is what you are."

"That's a deeply cynical interpretation of my genuine desire to grow as a medic."

"Uh huh." She didn't look convinced. "You just want me to screw up so you feel better about being green."

"I would never take joy in your misfortune. That would be disrespectful to my beloved teacher."

"Your beloved teacher thinks you're full of it."

I grinned. She rolled her eyes. The usual.

We ended up chatting about nothing for a while after that. This and that. Who was annoying her at the hospital, what I thought of the local fish population, whether the war would drag on another month or another year.

Then her voice went serious.

"There's a mission."

I cracked one eye open. "Already? I just got back."

"I know." She actually looked apologetic, which was concerning. Tsunade didn't do apologetic unless the news was genuinely bad. "Command wanted me to brief you. Apparently you've made quite an impression on them."

"Good impression or 'we need a warm body to throw at a problem' impression?"

"Depends on how optimistic you're feeling." She pushed off the tree and turned to face me properly, arms crossed. "Chiyo's been making a mess of things. The Puppet Brigade's been hitting our supply lines hard, ambushes, poison traps. Three convoys gone in the last week. A lot of people didn't come home."

"Can't someone else draw the short straw on this one?"

"Already tried. Two elimination squads. Neither one reported back. Fighting her turns into attrition every time, and she wins those."

I let that sink in. Chiyo had been a problem since Ame. We'd clashed there, sort of, and I'd gotten a taste of what she could do. Not someone you fought head-on unless you wanted to die in interesting and unpleasant ways.

"So what's Command actually asking for here?"

"They want her gone. Dead if you can manage it, neutralized if you can't. Either way, she stops bleeding us dry." Tsunade's voice was flat, matter-of-fact. Mission briefing voice. "Command's putting together an assassination squad. You've been assigned to it. And before you ask—no, I wasn't on the original roster. They wanted me chained to the field hospital since I'm the only one who can handle her poison cases."

"But?"

"But—" Her eyes glinted. "Then I pointed out that there's currently a dozen copies of you running around camp who can do everything I can do. Command got real quiet after that."

“So you're coming with me?"

"I'm coming with you. You and I are the only people on this continent who can cure what she dishes out, and thanks to your little multiplication trick, the hospital doesn't collapse if I walk away for a few days." She shook her head, but there was a smile pulling at the corner of her mouth. "You know, when they stuck me with you, I figured it was going to be a waste of time. Another kid with decent chakra control who'd take years to turn into anything worth a damn."

"And now?"

"Now I think teaching you iryoninjutsu might be one of the best things that's happened to Konoha since this war started." She met my eyes. "So don't let it go to your head."

"Too late."

"Of course it is."

"For what it's worth, I think you're a pretty good sensei too."

She raised an eyebrow. "Pretty good?"

"Well, I don't want you to let it go to your head."

"Unbelievable. I've created a little monster who throws my own words back at me. This is my legacy."

"If it helps, I can start quoting Orochimaru instead. Really make you appreciate what you've got."

The sound she made was probably supposed to be exasperated, but it came out closer to a laugh. I wisely chose not to point this out.

Good moment. Almost made me forget we were about to go kill someone.

Chiyo, huh.

I let my head fall back against the bark and stared up through the leaves. Last time we'd crossed paths, we'd both walked away bleeding, her a little more than me, maybe, but not by enough to matter. Not by enough to call it a win.

But that was then.

Things were different now. I'd picked up a few new tricks since our last dance, the biggest one being a certain Raikage's favorite party piece. Lightning release pushed through the nervous system, sharpening reflexes, accelerating everything until the rest of the world looked like it was moving through mud. I'd been working it into my swordsmanship for weeks now, and it was starting to feel less like a borrowed jutsu and more like something that belonged to me.

"When do we leave?"

"Now." She pushed off from the tree. "Chiyo's been carving through our supply lines all week. Medical convoys, mostly. She hits fast with her puppets, bleeds us dry, and ghosts before reinforcements can get anywhere near her. Classic guerrilla nonsense."

"What about Orochimaru? I figured he'd be handling something like this."

"Busy. Him and Hatake both. Suna and River have been hammering the main front, and Command can't justify pulling anyone off the line to chase one woman who won't sit still long enough to die properly." She started walking, and the wet fabric of her shirt left very little to the imagination. Not that I was imagining anything. "Which is where we come in."

I matched her pace. "So we're the B-team."

"We're the 'everyone else already failed' team." She shot me a sideways look. "Try not to let it bruise your ego."

"I'll manage somehow."

The walk back to the field hospital didn't take long. The sounds of the camp grew louder as we approached, medics rushing past with bloody hands, stretchers going in and out, the whole ugly routine. I split off to grab what I needed while Tsunade went to handle the official stuff.

Restocking didn't take long. When I got to the supply tent, the chunin running it already had a package waiting for me. Kunai, shuriken, wire strings, a handful of explosive tags, ration bars. I gave him a nod of thanks and sealed most of it into the storage seals on my gloves.

My stomach chose that moment to remind me that I hadn't eaten anything since... actually, I couldn't remember when I'd last eaten. That probably wasn't good.

I pulled one of the ration bars out and took a bite.

And immediately wished I hadn't.

The taste wasn't bad, exactly. Ration bars were never good to begin with, and this one was... fine. Just fine. A little different from the usual flavor, maybe. Most people wouldn't even notice. They'd just shrug and assume it was a new batch, a different supplier, whatever.

But I wasn't most people.

Somewhere back in Konoha, my clones had been running experiments. Clone-on-clone stuff. One group force-feeding another group various substances just to see what happened and catalog the results. All in the name of science and self-improvement. Mostly self-improvement. The science part was debatable. Either way, the memories from those sessions had filtered back to me over time, and my tongue had become unfortunately educated in flavors it never asked to learn.

This ration bar hit some of those notes. Not exactly the same, but close enough that my brain made the connection and my appetite packed its bags and left.

I turned away from the supply tent, casually raising a hand to my mouth like I was stifling a yawn, and spat the food into my palm. Couldn't exactly make a face and spit it on the ground in front of everyone. People talk, and 'guy who spits out ration bars' wasn't the reputation I was going for. A quick brush of my hand against my glove and the chewed-up mess disappeared into a storage seal. The rest of the bar followed a second later, like I was just scratching an itch.

I'd eat something else later. Preferably something that didn't remind me of my clones' weird science projects.

When I glanced back, the chunin running the supply tent was watching me. Our eyes met for a second, and something flickered across his face before it went blank again. He looked away first, suddenly very interested in reorganizing the crates behind him.

Weird. But whatever. Food situation sorted, or at least postponed, I headed to the assembly point.

The squad was already assembled when I found them. Nine people total, including me and Tsunade. I counted heads and ranks out of habit. Two chunin. Five jonin. And when I looked closer at those five, I had to blink. Three Hyuga with their pale eyes, two Uchiha with dark hair and darker expressions. Command wasn't messing around. They'd pulled out the dojutsu users and elites for this mission. They really wanted Chiyo gone.

Tsunade glanced my way when I joined the group, gave me a small nod, and started the briefing. Formation, entry routes, how the Hyuga would handle detection while the Uchiha caught anything the Byakugan might miss. The usual stuff you went over before heading into a fight when your target was a veteran who'd already killed two squads sent after her. Nobody said the word "assassination" out loud, but nobody needed to. We all knew what "dealing with" someone meant in this context.

When she finished, Tsunade's eyes moved across the group one more time. "Questions?"

Nothing.

"Good. This isn't a fight we can afford to drag out. We go in fast, we hit hard, and we don't give her space to think. Clear?"

We were about to move out when a nin appeared at her side. He leaned in close and said something I couldn't hear. Whatever it was, it made her expression shift from focused to annoyed in about half a second.

She turned to face the squad. "Change of plans. Something else just came up. I have to go."

I stared at her. "You're joking."

"I'm not." She was already turning away, already moving. "Handle Chiyo without me. I'll catch up when I can."

And then she was gone, flickering away before anyone could argue.

One of the Uchiha moved forward almost immediately, his face completely unruffled by the sudden change in leadership.

"Change of plans doesn't change the mission," he said. "I'll assume command unless anyone has objections."

He looked around the group. One of the Hyuga shook his head. "No objection." The other two Hyuga followed with the same response, one after the other, voices as blank as their expressions. Then the other Uchiha. Then the two chunin. If I didn't know better, I'd think they'd practiced this on the walk over.

Which left me.

Seven pairs of eyes turned my way. Waiting.

I opened my mouth. Closed it. Considered my options, which amounted to exactly one.

"...Sure. Yeah. Fine by me."

What else was I supposed to say? Everyone had already agreed. Making a fuss now would just make me look difficult for no reason.

The squad moved on like the whole thing had never happened. Gear checks, weapon adjustments, the usual pre-mission routine. Not a single complaint. Not even a raised eyebrow.

I couldn't tell if that was professionalism or something else. Either way, I had a puppet master to kill. With or without my sensei, apparently.

I suppressed the pout that really, really wanted to form on my face.

There goes my quality time with sensei. The timing was just nasty.

…

We moved out five minutes later.

Ame territory was exactly as miserable as I remembered it. Grey skies, grey earth, rain that couldn't decide if it wanted to be a drizzle or a downpour so it just alternated between both every few minutes.

The squad traveled in loose formation, spreading out just enough that a single area jutsu couldn't take us all out at once. The pace was brutal, but necessary. Chiyo wasn't going to stay in one place forever.

We moved through Ame's grey wilderness like shadows with a deadline. At full sprint, the world became a wet blur of greens and greys, branches passing beneath our feet faster than most civilians could track with their eyes. The rain hit sideways at this speed, stinging any exposed skin.

Two hours. Ground that would've cost a genin team half a day, eaten up beneath us before the rain even had time to soak through.

The route we took wasn't straightforward. Couldn't be, not when hunting someone like Chiyo. The Uchiha led us through a series of unpredictable patterns, zigzagging through the forest, sudden turns left when the terrain suggested right, doubling back on ourselves only to veer off at sharp angles moments later. Counter-tracking measures, designed to throw off anyone trying to follow our movements or predict our destination.

And yet.

Despite all of that, the Hyuga kept adjusting. Every time we changed direction, they'd scan the area, exchange a few hand signals, and we'd shift course again like they were following a trail only they could see, piecing together fragments of information while moving at speeds that should have made any kind of tracking impossible.

Chiyo's squad wasn't sitting still. They were on the move too, probably relocating after their last hit. Which meant we had a moving target chasing another moving target, both at full speed through unfamiliar terrain in the middle of a downpour. Academy instructors like to describe scenarios like this in hypotheticals, then quietly admit it never actually happens in the field.

But somehow, it did.

The Hyuga spread out, Byakugan flaring to life. Veins popped around their eyes like always, making them look half-possessed. Never got used to that visual. Useful as hell, sure, but deeply unsettling to watch.

“Contact. Northwest, two kilometers. Fourteen signatures, moving at high speed in a loose sprint formation.” He paused, focus narrowing. “One at the center stands out. Chakra matches the provided profile. That’s our target.”

"You're sure?"

"It's her."

Fourteen puppet users plus Chiyo herself. She'd rebuilt fast. Last time my clones had gone through her brigade, we'd taken out at least half of them. That was, what, a few weeks ago? And she'd already replaced her losses and then some.

Either Suna had a very deep bench of puppeteers, or Chiyo was good at recruiting. Probably both.

The Uchiha taichou made a series of hand signals. The squad split, circling around to approach from multiple angles. I ended up paired with one of the Hyuga, a woman who hadn't said a single word since the mission started. She moved through the underbrush like a ghost, barely disturbing the wet leaves beneath her feet.

We hit them from three directions at once.

And by "hit," I mean we opened with enough firepower to level a small village.

My hands moved through seals I'd never personally performed before. Horse. Tiger. Ram. Snake. The knowledge came from my clones, borrowed memories of jutsu they'd picked up and practiced while I was busy doing other things. This particular jutsu was something special. Something I'd been saving for the right moment.

Katon: Gōka Mekkyaku.

The chakra built in my chest. And kept building. And kept building. I was dumping nearly everything I had into this one jutsu, which was either overkill or exactly the right amount of kill depending on how the next few seconds played out. Then I exhaled.

What came out of my mouth wasn't a fireball.

It was annihilation.

A wall of fire—no, a tsunami—erupted from my lungs and plowed across the forest in a roaring tide of orange and white. The world ahead simply ceased to exist. Trees didn't burn. They detonated, wet bark flash-boiling into splinters before the flames even touched them, old trunks that had stood for decades reduced to pillars of screaming fire in the space of a second. The rain tried to fall. Tried and failed. Each droplet evaporated three meters above the inferno, turning the air into a shimmering wall of steam and heat distortion that made the world ripple like a mirage.

As expected of Madara's favorite jutsu. The man had good taste in mass destruction.

From my flanks, the squad poured in everything they had. A Futon jutsu shrieked from my left, wind chakra slamming into the fire like gasoline into a bonfire. The flames didn't just grow. They transformed. What had been devastating became biblical, a firestorm that roared with a sound like a thousand furnaces opening at once. The Uchiha added their own Katon from the right, fireballs the size of trucks merging into the sea of destruction, pushing it further, faster, hungrier. The combined assault painted the forest in apocalypse. Flames climbed so high they kissed the storm clouds, turning grey to gold, and for one impossible moment the rain itself seemed to catch fire.

For a moment, I thought it might actually work. That we'd caught them completely off guard and this would be the shortest assassination mission in Konoha history.

But something in my gut told me otherwise.

And it was right.

Chiyo had felt us coming. Felt the chakra building in those final seconds before we unleashed hell. Because what emerged from the flames wasn't death.

It was resistance.

Half her brigade had thrown up water at the last second. Suiton: Suijinheki, walls of liquid steel ripping up from the waterlogged earth and slamming into the inferno head-on. The collision was violent. Steam erupted in a wall so thick it blotted out the sun, the scream of fire meeting water so loud it wasn't sound anymore, just pressure, a physical force that slammed against my eardrums and made my skin ache. The other half went for earth. Doton barriers punched up from the ground in ragged walls of rock and mud, soldiers huddling behind them like children hiding from a storm.

Some held.

Some didn't.

One puppeteer—I saw him, just for an instant, crouched behind a barrier when the fire hit. The wall flash-fried into glass and shattered. And he just... wasn't there anymore. No scream. No body. Just a black smear on the ground where a man had been, and the smell of cooked meat rising through the rain and the ash and the steam.

The smell of what we'd done.

When the flames finally died, nothing looked the same.

What had been forest was now a graveyard of char and glass. Trees reduced to black skeletons, frozen mid-collapse. The ground itself had vitrified in patches, sand turned to dark crystal that reflected the grey sky in warped, funhouse mirrors. Steam rose from every surface like the earth was exhaling its last breath.

But they weren't all dead.

Figures stirred in the haze.

The first one I saw clearly was a woman—young, maybe twenty—dragging herself out from behind a half-melted Doton wall. The left side of her face was... gone wasn't the right word. Remade. The skin had sloughed off from temple to jaw, revealing glistening red muscle underneath, the white gleam of bone peeking through where her cheek had been. One eye was swollen shut, the lid fused to itself by heat. She was trying to scream, but all that came out was this thin, reedy whistle, her throat must have been scorched too, vocal cords cooked inside her neck.

She kept crawling anyway.

Another survivor stumbled upright to her left. A man, older, his flak jacket still smoking. He'd gotten his barrier up in time to save his life, but not his hands. They hung at his sides like blackened claws, fingers curled into permanent fists where the tendons had contracted from the heat. Third-degree burns climbed past his wrists and disappeared under his sleeves. He was staring at them with this look of distant confusion, like he couldn't quite connect those ruined things to his own body.

Behind them, more shapes emerged from the steam. A puppeteer cradling an arm that bent the wrong way at the elbow, bone visible through a split in charred skin. Another with burns covering sixty percent of his body, moving on pure adrenaline, dead on his feet and too stubborn to fall.

Eight of them. Eight survivors out of fourteen.

And at the center of them all, Chiyo.

The old woman wasn't untouched, a gash ran down her left arm, dripping blood into the ash, and her robes were singed at the edges. But compared to her squad? She'd gotten off easy. Absurdly easy.

Three of her remaining puppeteers were still combat-ready, shaken but mobile, burns and cuts that wouldn't slow them down much. The rest of her squad wasn't so lucky. And through the steam, the ash, the carnage, Chiyo's eyes found me.

If looks could kill, I'd have died about seven times over in that single glance.

I'd been glared at before. By enemies, by rivals, by Kushina when my chopsticks wandered too close to her ramen. But Chiyo was in a league of her own. This was generational hatred. Grudges that got passed down through bloodlines, started wars, ended civilizations. She looked at me like I'd personally murdered everyone she'd ever cared about and then asked what was for dinner.

Which, to be fair, wasn't entirely inaccurate.

"Good work."

The Uchiha taichou moved up beside me, sounding exactly like every squad leader I'd ever met when a mission was going well. "For someone newly promoted to jonin, your skills certainly live up to the title. That Katon jutsu was impressive."

He was close now. Closer than he needed to be.

"Now all we need to do is finish off Chiyo and the rest of the wounded," he continued, taking another step toward me. "None of them are in any shape to put up a fight. This should be simple."

I scratched the back of my neck, keeping my body language loose. Relaxed. "It was nothing, really. Though I have to say—your acting was pretty good too, taichou."

I watched it land. Watched the mask slip.

His eyes went a little too wide, a little too fast.

Then the killing intent flooded out of him like someone had kicked open a dam, and his tanto was already clearing its sheath, the blade screaming toward my throat in a horizontal slash.

I was already moving.

The blade missed. I made sure of that. But he wasn't working solo, the rest of my "squad" joined in half a second later, weapons already in hand, bodies snapping into formations so synchronized it was almost beautiful. Teams thrown together at the last minute don't move like that. These guys had been a unit long before this mission. Long before me.

Eight against one. Nine, if you counted Chiyo, though she seemed content to watch for now.

Bad odds.

So naturally, I ran straight toward her.

"Quick note," I called back over my shoulder as I sprinted toward the cluster of wounded Suna-nin, "without your masks on, did you really think you could fool me? Your acting was terrible."

The air behind me turned into a wall of spinning steel. I twisted, dropped low, then pushed off into a diagonal leap that took me between the gaps, steel grazing past on both sides, none of it touching.

"Oh, and I lied earlier. About your acting being good." I tucked into a roll, came up running. "It was actually pretty bad. Not the worst I've seen, but definitely in the bottom ten percent."

Behind me, the pursuit intensified. The sound of eight pairs of feet hitting scorched earth, getting louder, angrier.

"That chunin at the supply tent though, the one with the ration bars?" I laughed, vaulting over a charred log. "His acting was so awful I had to hold back from laughing in his face. Seriously, the way he kept glancing at me after I took a bite, he might as well have held up a sign saying 'Please notice I poisoned your food.' Let me guess—slow-acting? Wanted me to drop dead somewhere convenient, away from witnesses? Hilarious. Genuinely hilarious. You should send him back to whatever training program you pulled him from, because he is not ready for fieldwork."

Their expressions didn't change. Trained right out of them, probably. But I wasn't done fishing yet.

"Here's what I'm curious about, though." I cut hard left as a wind jutsu screamed past my ear. "Does Danzo know his people have such terrible poker faces? Or is that something you develop after years of licking his boots?"

The reaction was subtle. A twitch here, a tensed jaw there.

Then one of them spoke. "How did you—"

He stopped himself, but the taichou was already looking at him. Not with anger, Root operatives didn't do anger, not on their faces anyway. Just that cold, flat stare that promised a very unpleasant conversation later. If there was a later.

So. Root after all.

I'd thrown the name out half as a gamble. Nice to know my gut feelings were still working.

And speaking of feelings, theirs had changed. The killing intent, I mean. Before, there'd been a leash on it. Put him down hard, keep him alive for questioning, violence with an endpoint. But the moment that Hyuga slipped up, that restraint evaporated. What I was feeling now was unfiltered killing intent. Apparently knowing Danzo's name had upgraded me from 'retrieve' to 'eliminate.'

Poor things. Working so hard to decide whether to kill me or not, completely unaware that I'd already made the same decision about them. Them and Chiyo's little puppet show. One big grave, plenty of room for everyone. The nice thing about fighting in enemy territory was that bodies didn't need explanations.