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[Obtained: Immense Chakra Reserves!]
Name: Mikoto Uchiha
Age: 13
Rank: Genin
Affinity: Lightning Affinity, Fire Affinity, Yin Affinity, Water Affinity
Unique: Immense Chakra Reserves, Sharingan (Dormant), Advanced Growth Rate
Skills: Fire Style Mastery, Water Style Mastery, Clone Jutsu, Substitution Jutsu, Transformation Jutsu, Shurikenjutsu, Basic Taijutsu, Basic Genjutsu, Body Flicker, Perfect Chakra Control, Uchiha Style: Kenjutsu, Stealth, Survival Knowledge, Cooking
Equipment: Kunai, Shuriken, Smoke Bomb, Explosive Tags, Poison Gas Bomb, Flash Bomb, Gas/Sleep Bomb, Food Pills, Wire Strings, Shark Skin, Giant Folding Fan
Genmai wasn’t as heavy as he looked.
He was an Akimichi. He looked exactly as heavy as he was. Mikoto had picked him up like a princess, his body taking up most of her vision. She lifted him over her head so that she could see while she was running.
It was not comfortable for either of them.
She ran anyway.
The trees blurred. Rain Country forest at speed was a smear of grey bark and green treetops and black mud, branches whipping past close enough, roots rising out of the earth like knuckles she had to read two steps ahead to clear. Genmai grunted every time she changed direction or dropped from a branch.
She ran faster.
Four hours in, Genmai spoke for the first time since they'd started.
"You’re stronger than the average genin, kid."
It was not a question.
"Uchiha."
"I weigh a lot, and it doesn’t seem like anything to you."
"You’re not as heavy as you look, Genmai-san." Mikoto politely said.
He laughed despite the pain. The forest rushed past. She cleared a fallen log without breaking stride.
"You don’t have to lie to me girlie. I’m not some chick who is sensitive about their weight." he said.
"Sorry," she smiled.
He would’ve loved to talk more, but he wasn’t a fan of the pain, so he hushed up. The rain picked up. She kept running.
They reached the camp before nightfall.
The Konoha forward camp sat in a shallow basin between two forested ridges.
A sentry met them at the perimeter. He took one look at Genmai's side and whistled for a medic.
The medic came at a jog, a thin man the standard white medical nin outfit appeared stained in brown and red. He took Genmai from Mikoto's shoulder without asking, slid himself under the bigger man's arm, and started walking him toward a long low tent on the east side of the basin.
Genmai looked back at her once.
"Thanks, Mikoto-chan."
"I’m happy I could help."
He gave her a single nod and then he was gone behind the tent flap.
Mikoto stood at the edge of the camp for a moment. The scroll was still pressed against her ribs.
She found the command tent by the banner over its entrance: the Konoha leaf stitched in faded red on rain-darkened green. A jonin inside took the scroll from her, checked the seal, checked it again, and set it on a table next to four other scrolls of varying sizes.
"Who sent this," he said.
"Kazuhiko-san. Hunter squad operating in the southern Rain hill country."
"Kazuhiko's still alive?"
"As of yesterday, yes."
The jonin grunted. He pulled out a logbook and wrote something in it.
"Your name."
"Uchiha Mikoto. Genin."
He wrote her name in the log and closed it.
"Barracks are the long tent on the south side. Food's in the mess. You're off rotation until I say otherwise. Get some sleep."
"Yes, sir."
She bowed and left.
The mess tent smelled like rice and salt. A woman with a ladle and a flat expression served her a bowl of rice, a strip of dried fish, and a cup of something brown that might have been tea. Mikoto took it to a corner of the tent where nobody else was sitting and ate.
The rice was overcooked. The fish was too salty. The tea tasted like bark water.
She ate every grain. She drank the cup dry. She sat with the empty bowl in her hands for a while and listened to the camp. Voices. The scrape of sandals on packed earth. Someone laughing somewhere like they wouldn’t get the chance to laugh tomorrow. Rain starting up again on the canvas over her head.
The thoughts popped up in her head. The deaths. The kills. The fighting. The fact that she would have to do it all over again soon enough… Mikoto couldn’t stand being alone with her thoughts right now despite finally getting a break.
She found the barracks. She found a cot. She set Shark Skin within reach of her right hand, pulled the thin blanket up to her chin, and closed her eyes.
Sleep came faster than she expected but it was not pleasant.
She dreamed of all the men and women she killed. She dreamed of her dying instead. She dreamed of herself in the future surrounded by mountains of bodies for the so-called dream of peace. Asking herself is it worth it? Is it worth making it so that no one has to fight and kill each other anymore if she had to take the lives of hundreds of thousands or millions?
Mikoto didn’t know.
She woke up before dawn with her face wet and her hands fisted in the blanket.
She stayed on her blanket for a long while. The barracks were dark. Someone nearby was snoring. Someone else was talking in their sleep about their mom’s cooking.
She got up. She washed her face with water from a bucket near the tent entrance. She slung across her back and went outside Shark Skin.
The camp was grey in the pre-dawn light. Figures moved between tents, slow shapes in the mist. A pair of sentries changing shift at the east ridge. A runner heading for the command tent with something clutched against his chest.
She needed something to do.
She walked toward the long low tent on the east side of the basin where the medic had taken Genmai.
The medical tent was larger than it looked from outside.
Canvas walls, canvas roof, canvas floor laid over packed earth. Two rows of cots ran the length of it, maybe twenty on each side, and more than half of them were occupied. Some of the occupants were sleeping. Some were not. A man near the entrance had his left arm in a sling and his right hand pressed over his eyes. A woman three cots down had bandages wrapped around her entire torso and was staring at the canvas ceiling blankly.
The woman running the tent was at the far end, standing over a cot where a man lay very still with his shirt cut open and his chest rising and falling in the wrong rhythm. She had both hands pressed flat against his abdomen and her palms were glowing the soft blue-green that Mikoto had only heard about. Chakra, shaped for healing. The Mystical Palm Jutsu.
Mikoto watched.
The woman was middle-aged. Her hair was pulled back in a knot, grey strands loose at the temples. Her hands were steady. Her face was blank.
The glow faded. The woman straightened. She looked at the man's chest, listened to his breathing for three seconds, and turned away.
She saw Mikoto standing at the entrance.
"Lost?" she said.
"No, ma'am."
"Visiting someone?"
"No."
The woman's eyes moved to the bandaged sword on Mikoto's back, then to her face, then to the hitai-ate on her forehead.
"Then what."
"I wanted to know if there was anything I could help with."
The woman looked at her for a long moment. It was a look that weighed things.
"Do you know first aid?"
"Basic first-aid taught in the academy."
"Medical ninjutsu?"
"No."
"Can you identify a fracture by touch?"
"No."
"Can you tell the difference between arterial and venous bleeding without looking at the color?"
"No."
"Organ placement? Do you know where the liver sits relative to the stomach? Where the femoral artery runs? What happens when a rib punctures a lung versus when it merely cracks?"
"No."
The woman exhaled.
"How old are you?"
"Thirteen."
Another sigh.
"Sit over there." She pointed to a low wooden stool near the supply shelf at the back of the tent. "Watch what I do. Don't touch anything. Don't talk to the patients. Don't get in my way. If I tell you to hand me something, hand me that thing and nothing else. If I tell you to leave, leave. Understood?"
"Understood."
"My name is Ren."
"Mikoto."
"You’re the girl who brought in the Akimichi."
Mikoto nodded.
"He couldn’t shut up about you. Quite annoying it was."
She sat.
Ren did not teach, she simply worked, and Mikoto watched, and the watching could be a form of teaching.
The first morning was triage. Two shinobi came in from the field before noon, one with a compound fracture of the forearm where the bone had gone through the skin, the other with a deep laceration across his back that had been packed with mud and leaves by whoever had tried to help him in the field. Ren cleaned the laceration with boiled water and a cloth that smelled sharp enough to make Mikoto's eyes sting. She set the fracture by hand, no jutsu, just pressure and alignment and a splint carved from a supply crate. The shinobi with the fracture screamed. Ren worked steadily despite it.
She used the Mystical Palm twice that first day. Once on a woman whose kidney was failing from a poison that had been in her system for three days. Once on the man she had been working on when Mikoto arrived. Both times, her hands glowed the same steady green, and both times, Mikoto sat on her stool and watched healing jutsu.
It healed both external and internal injuries. It found the injuries in the body and the body used the healing chakra to accelerate its natural healing rate.
Ren did not explain any of this. Mikoto guessed that was how it worked.
On the second day, Ren handed her a few scrolls.
Anatomy. Organ systems. The circulatory path of blood through the body. The layout of the chakra pathway system and its relationship to the physical organs beneath it. Pressure points. Trauma response. What kills fast and what kills slow and the narrow space between treatment and letting go.
"Read it," Ren said. "All of it. If you have questions, write them down. I'll answer them when I have time."
Mikoto read it in a day.
She came back the next morning with a list of eleven questions written on the back of a supply requisition form she had found in the mess tent.
"These are good questions," she said.
She answered nine of them between patients. Two of them she answered by showing, guiding Mikoto's hands to the underside of her own forearm and pressing down on the radial artery until Mikoto could feel the pulse and the pathway it followed up toward the elbow.
"Here," Ren said. "And here. And here. Cut any of those three and the arm is dead in four minutes. Seal any of those three with chakra and the arm lives. The distance between killing and healing is the width of your intention. The technique is the same."
On the third day, Ren let her change bandages.
On the fourth day, Ren let her clean wounds.
On the fifth day, Ren sat her down at the back of the tent with a fish.
The fish was alive. It was a river trout, fat and silver, flopping in a shallow basin of water that Ren had filled from the camp's rain collection. It had a cut along its side, shallow and clean, that Ren had made with a kunai before handing it over.
"Heal it," Ren said.
Mikoto looked at the fish. She looked at Ren.
"I haven't been taught the Mystical Palm."
"You've watched me do it thirty times in five days." She folded her arms. "Heal the fish."
Mikoto performed two hand signs.
The healing chakra came out of her hands and it was green.
The cut closed. The scales knit. The fish thrashed once and then stopped, breathing through its gills in the shallow water, and the cut was not there anymore.
Ren was looking at the fish.
"Do it again," she said. She picked up the kunai and made a second cut, deeper this time, across the trout's belly.
Mikoto healed it. Faster this time. The chakra came easier, as if her hands already knew the shape they were supposed to make.
Ren made a third cut. Mikoto healed it. A fourth. Mikoto healed it. The fish was getting agitated, thrashing more actively. Ren set the kunai down.
"Good enough on the fish," she said. "Now do it on Bed Twelve."
Bed Twelve was the man with the failing kidney. He had been in the tent since before Mikoto arrived. His skin had gone yellow. His breathing was shallow and his eyes, when they opened, did not track properly.
Mikoto knelt beside his cot. She put her hands over his abdomen where Ren pointed. She felt the organ under the skin, the place where the tissue had begun to necrotize.
"Slowly," Ren said. "Too much chakra and you'll accelerate the damage instead of reversing it. Feel the boundary between living tissue and dead tissue. Feed the living. Don't touch the dead."
Mikoto fed the living.
It took twenty minutes. It less chakra than she expected. The core of it lay more in chakra control rather than depths.
When she pulled her hands away, the man's breathing had changed. The yellow in his skin had not gone away, but it had lightened by a shade, and when his eyes opened, they tracked.
Ren checked his pulse. She checked his temperature. She lifted his shirt and looked at his abdomen and pressed two fingers against the skin over the kidney and held them there for ten seconds.
She straightened.
"You'll come back tomorrow and do it again," she said. "Same time. Same duration. Three more sessions and he'll be stable enough to transport."
"I could continue."
"You learn fast, but you still need to pace yourself."
"Thank you."
"It wasn't a compliment. Don’t burn yourself out, Mikoto." She picked up the basin with the fish in it and carried it toward the back of the tent. "Faster you learn, faster I can put you to work on the cases I don't have time for. There are forty-three people in this tent and I’m the only medical-nin who can use the Mystical Palm Jutsu. If you can take even five of them off my hands, that's five people who don't die because I ran out of chakra in the day. The others don’t have the necessary chakra control yet to learn the Mystical Palm Jutsu."
She set the basin down. She did not look back.
"Same time tomorrow, Mikoto."
"Yes, Ren-sensei."
Over the next three days, Mikoto healed.
She healed the kidney man three more times, each session shorter than the last as the organ responded and the healthy tissue began to outpace the dead. She healed a genin with a shattered collarbone who had been waiting six days for Ren to have the time. She healed a chunin whose hand had been crushed by an earth jutsu, working the small bones back into alignment the way the scroll described and feeding chakra into the fractures until they began to fuse. She healed lacerations, burns, and a cracked rib that had come dangerously close to the lung.
Ren watched her for the first two days. On the third day she stopped watching and started assigning.
"Beds four through nine. Assess, treat what you can, flag what you can't. Don't experiment."
Mikoto wasn’t stupid enough to experiment with human lives. She did what she was told and treated and requested for help when she didn’t know what to do. Ren checked her work at the end of each day. She found one error on the first day, a fracture Mikoto had mistaken for a deep bone bruise. She found nothing on the second. She found nothing on the third.
On the evening of the eighth day since Mikoto had arrived at camp, Ren sat down across from her at the back of the tent. The tent was quieter than it had been in days. Three patients had been cleared for transport. Two had walked out on their own feet. The kidney man was sitting up and eating rice.
Ren poured two cups of the bark tea from the mess tent and set one in front of Mikoto.
"You're wasted in the regular ninja forces," she said.
Mikoto wrapped her hands around the cup.
"That's not a compliment either. It's a problem. You learned in eight days what takes most people eight months. That means when they pull you out of my tent, and they will, and put you back on a squad, and they will, you will be the most valuable person on that squad and nobody will know it until someone starts bleeding."
She drank her tea.
"Don't let them waste you. And when they come for you, which will be soon because this camp doesn't keep shinobi idle for long, try not to get killed. Trained medics are harder to replace than swords."
"Yes, ma’am."
"That's all. Go sleep."
“Thank you for everything Ren-sensei.” Mikoto stood. She bowed. Ren had already turned back to the supply shelf.
“Don’t mention it, kid. Just save lives.” Ren waved her out of her tent.
She walked back to the barracks in the dark.
The summons came the next morning.
The same jonin from the command tent was waiting for her when she came out of the barracks. He had a small folded paper in his hand and an unhappy look on his face.
"Uchiha."
"Sir."
"You've been reassigned. New squad, forward patrol along the northern Rain border. They lost their medic last week. You're the replacement." He held out the paper. "Briefing is in one hour. Your squad lead will meet you at the north gate."
She took the paper. She opened it. A name, a location, a departure time.
"Questions," he said.
She had several but she asked none of them.
"No, sir."
"Good. One hour."
He left.
Mikoto stood in front of the barracks with the folded paper in one hand and Shark Skin against her back. The sun was rising through the clouds to the east, thin and pale, and for the first time in nine days, it was not raining.
She went to find Ren.
The medical tent was already awake. Ren was at Bed Twelve, checking the kidney man's vitals. She did not look up when Mikoto entered.
"I got a new mission," Mikoto said.
"I heard."
"I wanted to thank you again."
"Don't bother. I taught you because I needed the help. Not to help some fast-learning brat."
She finished with the kidney man. She straightened. She looked at Mikoto.
"Don't die," she ordered.
"Yes ma’am," she nodded.
Ren nodded once. She turned back to her patients.
“WE’LL MISS YOU LITTLE UCHIHA!” Some of the patients cried out.
Mikoto’s face turned red as she bowed at everyone. They laughed as she walked out into the pale morning light. She tucked the folded paper into her pocket. She adjusted the weight of Shark Skin across her back.
One hour.
She went to eat first.