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[Obtained: Fūinjutsu Affinity!]
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, Medical Ninjutsu (Mystical Palm), Fūinjutsu Affinity
Equipment: Kunai, Shuriken, Smoke Bomb, Explosive Tags, Poison Gas Bomb, Flash Bomb, Gas/Sleep Bomb, Food Pills, Wire Strings, Shark Skin, Giant Folding Fan
Three people and a dog were waiting at the north gate.
The first was the squad leader. Sarutobi Daichi, chunin, mid-twenties, with a short beard. He wore Konoha's flak jacket over a dark long-sleeve shirt, and the way he stood said he'd been standing in places like this for a long time. Arms folded, weight on his back foot, eyes already on Mikoto before she was close enough to speak.
The second was the Inuzuka. A girl, maybe seventeen or eighteen, with the red fang markings on both cheeks and a wild tangle of brown hair pulled back with a leather cord. She was crouched beside her ninken, a grey-furred dog the size of a large wolf with one torn ear and calm yellow eyes. The girl's name, Mikoto would learn, was Tsuga. The dog's name was Hai.
The third was the Aburame. Tall, quiet, with dark round glasses and a high-collared coat that covered him from chin to shin. His name was Tetsu. He did not introduce himself. Tsuga introduced him.
"That's Tetsu. He doesn't talk much. Like most Aburame."
Mikoto bowed. "Uchiha Mikoto. I'm your medic."
Daichi looked at her. He looked at the bandaged sword on her back. He looked at her face.
"How old are you?"
"Thirteen."
His jaw tightened. He looked at the folded assignment paper in her hand, then back at her.
"You trained with Ren?"
"I studied under Ren-sensei for eight days."
"Eight days." He repeated it, not sure that he was hearing it right. "Can you keep someone alive if they take a bad hit?"
"Yes."
"Can you do it while people are trying to kill you?"
"I don’t know." Mikoto answered honestly. She’s never been attacked while healing before.
"All right." He unfolded his arms. "We move north along the river fork until we hit the ridgeline, then sweep east along the treeline for two kilometers. We're scouting ahead of the main force. If we find enemy movement, we mark it and pull back. We do not engage unless we have to." He looked at each of them. "Questions."
"None," Tsuga said. Hai's ears flicked forward.
Tetsu said nothing, which Mikoto took as his version of the same answer.
"No, sir," Mikoto said.
"Good. Tsuga on point. Tetsu, spread your insects wide. Mikoto, you stay in the middle. If someone goes down, you get to them. If nobody goes down, stay out of the way."
"Yes, sir."
They marched forward.
Rain Country earned its name.
The drizzle started within twenty minutes of leaving camp and didn't stop. It thickened, thinned, thickened again. The trees dripped. The ground squelched under every step. Mikoto's hair was plastered to her face within the first hour, and she pushed it back behind her ears and kept moving.
Tsuga moved at the front with Hai, the dog's nose low to the ground. Every few minutes the girl would tilt her head, nostrils flaring.
Tetsu walked behind Tsuga with his hands in his pockets. His insects were not visible. His kikaichū were out there somewhere in the wet forest, spreading in a wide net.
Daichi brought up the rear. His eyes never stopped moving.
Nobody talked. The rain filled the silence for them.
Two hours in, Tsuga held up a fist. Everyone stopped.
"Smoke," she said. "Old. Half a day, maybe more. Coming from the northeast."
"How many," Daichi said.
Tsuga breathed in through her nose. Hai did the same beside her, then sneezed once and shook his head.
"Can't tell. The rain's washing it out. More than two. Less than twenty."
Daichi looked at Tetsu.
"My kikaichū have found no chakra signatures within their range," Tetsu said. His voice was flat and quiet, like he was reading from a report. "That does not mean the area is clear. It means no one is within three hundred meters."
"Understood." Daichi looked north, toward the ridgeline that was barely visible through the rain and the trees. "We push forward. Slow. Eyes open."
They pushed forward slowly.
The forest changed as they climbed. The treetops thinned. The trees grew shorter and more gnarled, their roots gripping the wet rock like fingers. The river fork was below them now, a grey ribbon winding through the valley floor. The ridgeline rose ahead, a spine of dark stone running east to west with scattered brush and stunted pines along its crest.
Tsuga stopped again.
"Fresh," she said. Her voice was different now. Lower. Tighter. Hai's hackles were up, the grey fur along his spine standing in a ridge. "Multiple. Close."
Tetsu's head turned slightly to the left. "Confirmed. My kikaichū just brought back information of enemy. Six. Bearing north-northeast, approximately one hundred and fifty meters, moving parallel to the ridge."
"Six," Daichi said. He was already shifting his weight, his hand moving to the kunai pouch at his hip. "Formation. Tsuga, pull back to-"
The umbrellas came first.
Three of them, spinning upward through the rain from behind the ridge, dark shapes against the grey sky that opened like flowers blooming wrong. They hung at the apex of their arc for a single heartbeat, and then the senbon came down.
Thousands of them.
The air turned to metal. Needles fell in sheets, guided by chakra, converging on the four of them from three directions at once. The sound was like sharp rain, a hissing curtain of steel that punched through leaves and bark and dirt.
Tsuga was already moving, pulling Hai against her body and rolling behind a boulder. Tetsu's kikaichū erupted from his coat in a dark cloud, forming a living wall in front of him that caught needles like a net. Mikoto threw herself sideways behind a tree trunk, senbon hammering into the bark inches from her face. She used the transformation jutsu on Shark Skin.
Daichi was not fast enough.
He got his arms up. He turned his body. He took the brunt of the first wave across his forearms and flak jacket, needles punching through the fabric and into the muscle beneath. But the second umbrella's payload came from his left, and he was already committed to shielding from the right.
The senbon hit his unprotected side. Dozens of them, punching through his shirt and into the flesh between his ribs. He staggered with blood spurting from his mouth.
Then the water jutsu came.
One of the Ame shinobi had been weaving seals behind the senbon screen. A torrent of pressurized water erupted from the ridgeline, thick as a man's torso, and it hit Daichi in the chest before he could form a single hand sign. The force of it lifted him off his feet and slammed him backward into a tree. The bark cracked but his bones cracked louder.
But the water didn't stop. It pinned him against the trunk, grinding him into the wood, and the pressure was wrong. Too focused. Too narrow. The stream bored into his torso like a drill, and where it hit, the flak jacket shredded, and the skin beneath the jacket shredded, and the muscle beneath the skin split open in a ragged trench from his left hip to the bottom of his ribcage.
The jutsu cut off. Daichi slid down the tree trunk and hit the ground in a heap. His midsection was an open wound. The rain turned pink around him.
Six figures appeared on the ridgeline.
Ame shinobi. Rebreathers covering the lower half of their faces. Dark clothing, slashed forehead protectors gleaming wet in the rain. Two of them held umbrellas. One was still in the final hand sign of the water jutsu. The other three had kunai drawn.
One of them looked down at Daichi's body and laughed. Short, sharp, ugly.
"Leaf dogs," he said. "Four of them. That one's done for sure."
Tsuga was on her feet behind the boulder, teeth bared, Hai snarling beside her. Tetsu's insect wall had reformed around his body, kikaichū buzzing in an angry swarm . Both of them were looking at Daichi. Both of them were looking at the six Ame nin on the ridge.
Mikoto was already running.
She reached Daichi in three seconds. She dropped to her knees beside him and her hands were glowing green before they touched his body. The wound was catastrophic. She could feel it under her palms, the ruptured muscle, the cracked ribs, the abdominal wall torn open wide enough that she could see the pink-grey coil of intestine beneath. Blood was pouring out of him in rhythmic pulses that matched his heartbeat, and his heartbeat was too fast and getting faster.
"Stay still," she said.
"Can't-" He coughed. Red came out.
"Stay still and stay quiet, please." Mikoto firmly requested.
She poured healing chakra into the wound. Stopping the bleeding first, sealing the severed vessels one by one while the rain washed blood over her fingers. His intestines were exposed but uncut. The muscle wall was the problem. She fed chakra into the torn edges and forced them to hold, knitting the fibers just enough that they wouldn't separate further.
Daichi screamed all the while. Then he stopped screaming, because he passed out.
It was a lot easier to work without him squirming and screaming. Mikoto felt bad for thinking it, but didn’t dwell on it for long.
Above her, on the ridge, the Ame nin were coming down.
"Kill the other two," the one who had laughed said. "The medic can wait. She's not going anywhere. And by the time she’s finished, her chakra will be finished trying to heal those wounds."
Tsuga launched herself at the nearest one with Hai at her side, a blur of claws and fangs and snarling fury. Tetsu's kikaichū surged forward in a black wave toward the two on the left flank. The fight broke open across the hillside.
But six on two was not really a fair fight.
Tsuga and Hai hit the first Ame nin together, Fang Over Fang spinning them into a twin drill of slashing claws. The nin dodged sideways, fast, and a second one was already flanking Tsuga with a kunai aimed at her kidney. Hai intercepted, catching the man's forearm in his jaws, but a third was coming from behind.
Tetsu's kikaichū swarmed two of the Ame nin, crawling over their arms and legs, draining their chakra. One of them smacked their limbs uselessly, and the other one drove a kunai at Tetsu's face.
They were losing. Slowly, but they were losing.
Mikoto's hands were still on Daichi's wound. The bleeding was under control. The muscle wall was holding. He needed more. He needed hours of careful work that she did not have. If she tried to continue healing him, her squad would die, and she would have to face six enemy shinobi by herself.
She pulled her hands away.
The green glow died. She wiped her bloody palms on her thighs and stood up. Shark Skin was on her back. She reached over her shoulder and gripped the handle, underneath the Transformation jutsu, the sword was writhing against her spine, hungry.
The Ame nin who had laughed was ten meters away, walking toward her with his kunai out and his rebreather fogging in the cold rain. He saw the sword come out and his eyes narrowed, but he didn't slow down. She was a child. A medic kneeling in the mud next to a soon-to-be-corpse.
Mikoto had used the body flicker technique.
The distance between them vanished. One moment she was standing over Daichi. The next she was inside the man's guard, close enough to smell the metal of his rebreather, and Shark Skin came across his midsection in a rising diagonal slash that started at his left hip and ended at his right shoulder.
The cleaver shredded him. The sword's surface sliced through his flak jacket like it was paper, and the skin and muscle beneath came apart. His chakra flooded into Shark Skin and Mikoto felt it refill her like a warm wave, filling her reserves, and the man looked down at himself with an expression of total incomprehension.
His torso opened. A trench of mangled flesh that exposed the white of rib bone and the dark shapes of organs beneath. He tried to put his insides that were outside back in. It didn't work.
He dropped.
The five remaining Ame nin saw it happen. The closest one, the water jutsu user who had torn Daichi open, whipped toward Mikoto with both hands already forming seals. Water gathered in the air around him, pulling from the rain itself, condensing into a high-pressure stream aimed at her chest.
Mikoto looked at him as she weaved through a jutsu of her own.
It was a small genjutsu. A fraction of a second's work. She shifted his perception of where she stood by half a meter to the left. His eyes told his body she was there. His jutsu adjusted.
The water stream blasted past her right shoulder and destroyed the tree behind her.
Mikoto closed the distance with one step and brought Shark Skin down on his extended arms. The blade caught his forearms and tore through the sleeves, through the skin, through the muscle, and she felt the sword drink deep. The man's chakra reserves emptied in a single pull. His water jutsu collapsed, the gathered moisture falling as ordinary rain. His legs buckled.
Mikoto planted her foot on his chest and kicked him backward off the sword. He hit the ground armless and hollow, quickly dying.
Three seconds. Two dead.
The Inuzuka saw it.
Tsuga had been pinned between two Ame nin, blocking kunai strikes with clawed hands while Hai harried them from behind. She saw the water jutsu user collapse. She saw the opening. The Ame nin facing her flinched, just a fraction, his attention pulled toward the impossible thing happening to his comrades.
Tsuga didn't wait. She drove both hands forward into his chest, claws extended, and the force of the blow cratered his sternum. Hai lunged at the same moment, jaws closing around the man's throat from behind. The Inuzuka and her dog ripped him apart between them.
Three down.
Tetsu saw it too.
His kikaichū had been struggling against the two Ame nin on the left flank, one of whom kept dispersing the swarm with bursts of water. But the water user's technique was weaker now. Less pressured. The bugs were draining him. And the other one, the one with the kunai, had turned his head to look at the girl with the enormous sword who had just killed two of his squad in three seconds.
Tetsu's kikaichū poured into that gap. They swarmed the distracted man's face and neck, crawling into the gaps of his rebreather, biting into his skin. He clawed at them, screaming through the mask, and Tetsu stepped forward and drove a kunai into the base of his skull.
Four down.
The remaining two Ame nin were running.
One of them had an umbrella strapped to his back and was sprinting for the ridgeline. The other was weaving hand signs while he ran, water gathering at his feet in a defensive shell.
Mikoto exhaled. She wove fourty-four hand signs as quickly as she could.
"Water Style: Water Dragon Jutsu."
The rain around her answered. Water pulled from the air, from the puddles, from the soaked earth, coiling into a shape that rose behind her like something magnificent. The dragon formed in less than a second, huge and roaring like a ferocious storm, and it launched forward along the hillside with its jaws open.
It caught the running nin with the umbrella first. The impact folded him in half and drove him into the rocks so hard that his internal organs popped inside his body. He didn't get up.
The second one, the one with the water shell, tried to deflect. His shell held for a fraction of a second before the dragon's mass overwhelmed it, shattering the technique and sending him tumbling across the wet stone. He came to a stop face-down in a puddle, coughing water and blood.
He pushed himself up on shaking arms. He looked back at Mikoto.
She was already there.
Shark Skin came down. One swing. The sword transformed into a cleaver tore across his back from shoulder blade to spine, and Samehada swallowed what was left of his chakra in a single gulp. The man collapsed flat and didn't move.
Six down.
The hillside was quiet. Rain fell on the dead and the living without preference. Mikoto stood among the bodies with Shark Skin shivering internally with joy. Very much satisfied with the meal. She exhaled calmly. Her hands were steady.
Tsuga was staring at her from across the clearing. Hai was at her side, muzzle dark with blood. The Inuzuka's eyes were wide, her lips parted, rain running down her cheeks.
Tetsu's kikaichū were returning to his body in slow streams, crawling back under his coat. His glasses were cracked. Behind them, his eyes were unreadable.
Mikoto turned away from them. She walked back to Daichi.
She knelt. She put her hands on his wound. The green glow returned.
"Tsuga," she said, without looking up. "Please help me keep watch. If there are more of them, I need to know before they get here. I’m going to have to give all my attention to make sure the captain survives."
Tsuga blinked. She looked at Hai. Hai shook himself, spraying blood and rainwater, and put his nose to the ground.
"Yeah," Tsuga said. Her voice sounded different than it had an hour ago. "Yeah. On it."
Tetsu moved to the perimeter without being asked. His kikaichū spread outward again.
Mikoto got to healing.
Daichi's wound was worse than she'd left it. The muscle wall was holding, but the internal damage was extensive. Two cracked ribs had shifted inward, threatening the lung. The abdominal lining was inflamed. His pulse was thin and weak.
She worked for forty minutes. She rebuilt the muscle fibers layer by layer, sealed every bleed she could find, coaxed the cracked ribs back into alignment and fed chakra into the fractures until they began to fuse. It was only because of that immense chakra reward she got that he hasn’t died already. She was burning through chakra at a rate that would have emptied her a month ago. Otherwise she would have to rely on her sword for chakra and it was a little stingy with sharing it. Like a kitten who growls when eating because it hasn’t realized the person who feeds it is safe to be around and trust yet.
When she finally pulled her hands away, Daichi's breathing was steady. The wound was closed, pink and raw but closed. He was alive. He would stay alive, if nothing else went wrong.
She sat back on her heels. The rain ran down her face.
Tsuga was watching her again. The Inuzuka had come closer during the healing, close enough to see the green glow and the wound closing under Mikoto's hands.
"You're a monster, brat." Tsuga said.
"That’s not very nice to say." Mikoto pouted.
"What the hell are you?"
Mikoto looked at the bodies on the hillside. Six Ame shinobi, crumpled in the mud and the rain. One of them was still twitching. She looked away from that unpleasant sight.
"A Uchiha," she said.
Tsuga let out a laugh. Hai sat down next to her and leaned his weight against her leg.
"Tetsu," Mikoto said. "Can you check if the path back to camp is clear?"
A pause. Then, quietly: "Already done. My kikaichū already reported back to me about our surroundings. The route is open."
"We need to move him," Mikoto said, looking at Tsuga.
"I'll help," Tsuga said.
Hai carried him on its back.
They walked south through the rain with the dead behind them and the living between them, and nobody said anything for a long time.
Halfway back, Tsuga spoke.
"Thank you."
Mikoto didn't answer immediately. She adjusted Daichi's weight on her shoulder.
"I was just doing what anyone else would do in my position," she said. "No need to thank me."
"That's not what I mean." Tsuga's voice was rough. "We were dead. You know that, right? Six Ame nin on home turf with the high ground and the first strike? We were dead. And you just..."
She didn't finish.
Hai whined softly. Tsuga scratched behind his ear with her free hand.
"You're something else, Uchiha brat."
They reached the camp before dark.