“What?
Letting a child lead the operation—what were they thinking?”
Outside the operating room, Koharu Utatane was furious.
“Don’t jump to conclusions.
There wasn’t a better option available at the time, was there?” Hiruzen said, drawing on his pipe, pausing for several seconds before continuing.
“He could have been treated directly, yes, but he was injured retrieving intelligence.
If it’s at all possible, I’d like to make sure his everyday life isn’t affected going forward.”
“But—”
“He’s a prodigy.”
Hiruzen said it flatly, then set a scroll down without another word.
Koharu Utatane took it, glanced it over, and her face shifted into open astonishment.
She’d been a medical-nin herself once, though these days she was too tied up with “real business” to spend time around the hospital or the medical division.
That didn’t mean she’d lost her eye for this kind of thing.
This technique was clearly an advanced iteration of the chakra scalpel.
Capable of handling far more delicate surgical work.
The trouble was—
An A+ learning difficulty was steep enough to scare off most of the medical division as it stood.
Koharu believed she could manage it herself, but she also knew perfectly well how long it had been since she’d last stood at an operating table.
And besides.
She wasn’t young anymore.
Surgery this precise—even assuming she had the raw skill for it, her stamina and chakra reserves would give out halfway through, easily.
If Tsunade were here—
Koharu caught the thought and shook it off before it went any further.
Even without a technique like this, Tsunade could have handled the treatment regardless, and comparing this boy to her wasn’t fair to begin with.
Never mind.
Better to soften her tone when she saw him.
Whatever the circumstances, the boy had only stepped in because there’d been no other choice.
Just as she reached that thought, the rear door of the operating room opened.
Kitayama Sho emerged carrying Chiba on her back.
She caught sight of Hiruzen and Koharu and froze for a beat before hastily bowing.
“Lord Hokage, Lady—”
“How is he?”
Hiruzen cut her bow short.
Formalities mattered less to him right now than a prodigy like Chiba.
“His chakra’s completely spent.
He’s exhausted himself.
He took a soldier pill, but that can’t make up for sheer fatigue,” Kitayama Sho said quietly, then added, a little shamefaced, “The rest of us were only assisting this time.
It was entirely his work reconnecting all those bone fragments.
If the rest of us could manage that technique, the operation wouldn’t have been anywhere near this difficult.”
“So the chakra needle is worth spreading through the division, then?”
“Absolutely.
It’s worth putting into wider use—and not just for operations like today’s.
It could serve other purposes too.
Paired with the debris-extraction technique, for instance.”
Kitayama Sho had only thought of that pairing because of Chiba.
The needle could work alongside suction to draw out debris and foreign matter; by the same logic, it could just as easily pierce an opening in internal organs to make room for the extraction technique to follow.
Koharu had been turning something over in her mind this whole time, and hadn’t interrupted.
Hiruzen asked a few more questions, then, seeing Chiba had exhausted himself into sleep, waved a hand, sending Kitayama Sho off to let him rest.
“Koharu.
What do you make of him?”
“Hizuren, his talent is extraordinary.
I can see something of Tsunade in him, and something of Orochimaru too, if I’m honest.
But that’s exactly what worries me.”
Koharu frowned.
“Perhaps.
But I’m old, and I don’t have many chances left to me.
I’d like to try this once more.”
“Come in—what are you doing here!”
“Chiba, we heard you collapsed.
Are you all right?”
Tenten arrived out of breath from running.
Behind her, Lee poked his head in, spotted the two of them, and ducked right back out.
Chiba let out a short laugh.
“I’m fine, really.
My chakra just ran dry—a bit of rest and I’ll be good as new.
So, how have classes been lately?”
“Pretty good, actually.
Once word got around that early graduation was on the table, everyone’s been working a lot harder.
I heard even those repeat truants in the lower years have mostly stopped skipping class.”
Tenten paused mid-thought, then held up a finger.
“Oh, except this one kid, Naruto Uzumaki—he still skips as much as ever.
If anything, more than before.”
Right on cue, Lee’s head poked back in.
“Tenten got second in the class!
Only just behind Neji, hehe—all right, I’m off to train!”
“Hey!
Who asked you to say that?”
Tenten flared up, but Lee was already gone.
Chiba pushed himself up off the bed in the recovery room, pulled out his notebook, flipped to a page, and held it out to her.
Tenten looked down at it, puzzled.
“Chakra threads.
A byproduct of some research I’ve been doing.
We can’t use puppet techniques, but for controlling things like kunai and shuriken, they work surprisingly well.”
“This is too valuable, I can’t accept it!”
Tenten understood exactly what she was looking at.
The difficulty had to sit at B-rank at least—plenty of chūnin never got the chance to learn something like this.
“A technique exists to make people stronger.
Otherwise there’s no point developing it at all.
Your skill with thrown weapons is genuinely good, but weapons alone will hit a wall against certain opponents.”
Chiba said it seriously.
“As if!
Don’t underestimate me—my weapon work isn’t limited to what they teach at the Academy.”
Tenten pouted.
She’d always felt her throwing scores had been held back by the Academy’s ceiling on the coursework.
Given something harder, there was no way she’d have spent two years tied for first instead of standing alone at the top.
“What if you ran into a strong Wind Release user?”
“Ordinary Wind Release, I could probably still—all right, fine.
I get that you mean well, but I can’t just take this for nothing.”
Tenten held her ground.
Chiba thought for a moment, then his eyes brightened.
“Doesn’t your family sell blades?
I’ve been wanting to work on swordsmanship lately.
How about you help me pick out a good one instead?”
“Fine, deal.
And—thanks.
If you ever need help with bladework, come find me.”
Tenten began studying the notes in earnest.
She had a stubborn streak, a real one—far more so than someone like Sakura, who talked about standing on her own two feet but folded and went crying to Naruto the moment things got hard.
Not that Chiba particularly cared what Sakura Haruno did with her life.
After reading it through, Tenten fell into thought, then said, “According to your notes, you want to compress chakra into a weapon—and release several of them at once?”
“Weapon isn’t quite the right word.
More like a needle I can control completely.
I want it to take whatever shape I need, forming instantly at the moment of the strike, without hand seals.”
“That’s the end goal I’m working toward.”
Chiba explained.
Tenten nodded, understanding at last why Chiba had gone to the medical division in the first place.
When it came to chakra control, the medical division stood above everyone else.
Beyond that, she had a vague sense that Chiba’s idea ran deeper than he was letting on—that this so-called “needle” of his probably had uses far more unsettling than what he’d described.
In the end, though, she didn’t press him further.
She simply copied down the notes with care, meaning to work through them at her own pace once she got home.
Not everyone learned things at the ridiculous rate Chiba did.
In truth, Chiba’s reasoning wasn’t as complicated as it looked.
He’d settled on a needle for two reasons: precision and efficiency, with minimal waste, and compatibility with a range of other techniques—the Body Flicker among them.
On top of that, part of why he’d come to study at the hospital in the first place was to map out the body’s pressure points.
Without the Byakugan, there was no way to see the chakra pathways directly.
So Chiba planned to build up his knowledge of them gradually, through study and repeated exposure, mapping out the common points one by one.
Once he had that, the chakra needle would be good for a great deal more than just medicine.
Chiba turned his attention inward, toward the bodhi seed.
Not much had changed.
If anything had shifted, it was three faint grooves now etched across its surface, patterned like fault lines.
One deep and long, the second short, the third long but shallow.
If it hadn’t been a conscious entity so thoroughly bound up with his own existence, he never would have noticed the change at all.
Three grooves, for the two techniques I’ve shared and the soldier pills?