The difficulty was imnse.
Not long after the fighting started, Yuji felt it, a genuine creeping exhaustion, his breathing heavier than it should have been. The volu of information his brain was processing had no ceiling.
Every second brought new variables: the injured, the shifting battle lines, attacks coming from directions that changed before he could fully track them. His entire body stayed at maximum alertness without relief, and that cost accumulated faster than he had anticipated.
He moved through it anyway.
"Leave that one," he said, and his voice ca out flat.
The dical Squad mber who had been moving toward the collapsed Sunagakure shinobi stopped and looked at him.
"Yes."
"These three," Yuji said, indicating. "Start with them."
He applied the Mystical Palm Technique with one hand and kept his eyes on the field with the other.
Across the battlefield, two of his squad mbers were moving injured shinobi toward the rear, slowly, because there was no other option. The environnt, the chaos, the constant need to avoid becoming casualties themselves, all of it compressed their efficiency into sothing far below what any of them were capable of in controlled conditions.
Ten people saved since the engagent started. Five of them by him alone. Of the remaining five his squad had reached, two were beyond the point where treatnt justified the resources, not misdiagnosed, simply unable to return to combat quickly enough to matter in the current engagent.
Yuji had made the call without sentint. On a battlefield, the calculus of treatnt was not about compassion in isolation. It was about which recoveries would restore fighting strength fast enough to reduce total casualties.
Saving soone who couldn’t fight again today ant less capacity to save soone who could.
He did not let himself feel otherwise about it. There was no ti for indecision here, and indecision had a body count.
When the shinobi he was treating opened his eyes, Yuji was already talking to the nearest squad mber. "Get the intelligence personnel to take the others back to the outpost. This position is mine now."
The dical Ninja disappeared. Yuji pulled tools from his pouch and moved to the next injured shinobi without breaking pace, his eyes still reading the field ahead.
Every second, Sunagakure shinobi were going down.
He had known intellectually what a front-line battlefield would look like. The reality was worse.
The feeling that settled into him as he worked, hands moving, eyes tracking, mind running the analysis continuously, was not panic. It was sothing quieter and harder to shake.
Powerlessness was the word for it, though his hands never stopped and he never slowed.
No dical Ninja stood still and watched comrades die. But the dying outpaced the saving, and there was no way around that, and enduring it once was manageable.
Enduring it as a sustained condition, operation after operation, that was a different weight entirely. He could see what it did to dical Ninja over ti.
He pushed it aside and kept working.
Sothing else had caught his attention as well. Reading the wider field through his analysis, he could see it in the patterns of the engagent, in a battle at this scale, individual strength was not translating cleanly into impact.
He and Sasori had handled low-level enemies without difficulty in every prior operation.
But now... it wasn’t so easy.
The difference between operating as an independent squad and fighting inside a mass engagent was the difference between open ground and a swamp.
Individual ability didn’t disappear, it just stopped translating cleanly into outcos. Targets changed before engagents resolved.
Attacks ca from angles that hadn’t existed a mont before. The arithtic of a small squad fight, where superior skill reliably produced superior results, broke down when the variables multiplied beyond a certain point.
Nurical pressure alone could grind down a shinobi who would have been untouchable in any other context.
This was why abilities like the Third Kazekage’s or Hanzo’s were so significant. A technique that could affect a large area simultaneously, that could degrade or destroy an enemy’s operational deploynt rather than removing individual targets, operated at a different level of impact entirely.
Single kills, however efficient, were absorbed by a force of sufficient size without changing anything. The battlefield continued around each death as though it hadn’t happened.
Only when one shinobi could threaten entire sections of a formation did individual power begin to influence the outco at scale.
Yuji understood this about his own current ability. His Blood Manipulation was precise and difficult to read, and its lethality was genuine, but its reach was narrow. He could kill efficiently. He could not affect the shape of a battle. Whatever he accomplished in one area, Iwagakure might be consolidating in another, and his effort wouldn’t reach far enough to matter there.
He was not at that level yet.
This was a battle of a few hundred people. He found himself trying to imagine thousands, or tens of thousands, and gave up.
The pressure he was feeling now would multiply beyond anything he could aningfully conceive. So things couldn’t be understood without standing inside them.
Arai had told him to respect the battlefield. Saori had said the sa thing. He understood now what they had been pointing at.
He stood, located the next casualty, and moved.
Around him, the shinobi he had treated were waking and returning to the line without looking back. No acknowledgnt, they simply got up and rejoined the fight. Yuji was already moving before the last one had cleared his field of vision.
The engagent stayed fierce and showed no sign of breaking. Sunagakure and Iwagakure knew each other’s thods too well for the battle to develop unexpected angles, both sides could anticipate the other’s deploynts and specialties, which stripped the field of the kind of sudden variable that tended to end things quickly. The fighting ground on, neither side finding a decisive opening.
Then the smaller details began to matter.
On the Iwagakure side, their commanding Jonin had been reading the field continuously.
He had used the Camouflage Concealnt Technique to approach two Sunagakure puppet users and taken them down cleanly, and now he was still.
His Sensor Ninja were reporting to him in steady intervals, and he was processing everything they brought him, holding the entire field in his mind the way a commander had to.
A single oversight at this scale could shift the outco.
One report kept returning to his attention.
A short figure moving through the Sunagakure formation, quick, unhurried in its quickness, threading through the chaos with an ease. He had watched this shinobi take down an Iwagakure operative, collect a fallen Sunagakure comrade, and withdraw to a safe distance in a single continuous motion.
Clean and precise, every ti.
The Sensor Ninja’s analysis made the picture clear. Sunagakure’s injured were returning to combat.
Not in large numbers, but this was a battle of a few hundred people, and on a field this size, even a handful of recovered fighters shifted the weight of the engagent in ways that accumulated.
Iwagakure’s casualty rate should have been forcing a Sunagakure withdrawal by now. Instead, Sunagakure’s effective numbers were holding in a way that made no sense given the damage they had absorbed.
The dical Squad’s output was the reason. And the output wasn’t coming from the squad as a whole, it was coming from one person.
The commanding Jonin’s eyes settled on the small figure moving through the crowd below.
When had Sunagakure’s dical capability reached this level?
The Iwagakure Ninja’s eyes revealed killing intent.
This little one, must be eliminated!
It wasn’t that the dical Squad’s overall level had improved; it was this young Sunagakure Ninja who was demonstrating ’dazzling’ individual ability on the battlefield.
The problem is him!
...
Bonus @200PS
Support on P@reon and read upto 20 Chapters ahead @Keepsmiling 818 p@reon
User Comments
0 comments from readers