"YOU DID WHAT!!!"
Shouted a very annoyed and baffled Tsume Inuzuka. And the reaction was completely justified; anyone would have reacted this way if they had heard that a three-man cell had destroyed an entire camp of enemy shinobi alone, and they did it just because they couldn't be bothered to come back and report since it was troublesome.
Izumi was, of course, there, alongside both Naruto and Sasuke when Sukuna came alongside Kiyomi and Neji. Both were wearing similarly annoyed and satisfied grins on their faces, no doubt due to finally getting the fight they had been looking for. It felt like they had just come out of a stress-relief treatment or something, and, of course, they were annoyed because neither could agree on who had defeated how many enemies.
Technically, Neji, but according to Kiyomi's argument, Neji never killed a single enemy; he was just knocking them out with Gentle Fist. Since Gentle Fist wasn't good at mass destruction, his kills didn't count.
Of course, this was completely a hoax. She just wished to bury the fact that she had lost on the numbers, entirely because the smug white-eyed bastard was ridiculously fast. Kiyomi was certain she could run circles around the annoying guy, but a race to see who could defeat more enemies wasn't something she was doing against Neji Hyuga ever again.
Back to the point at hand, though, everyone was stunned when Sukuna not only reported back to the main camp late, but also tossed a few scrolls toward Tsume while casually announcing that Kumo had a camp set up on the northeastern side of the border, and his team had taken care of it.
"There was a Kumo camp northeast of here…"
"I HEARD THAT LOUD AND CLEAR, YOU BRAT! I'M ASKING ABOUT THE LATER PART…" A big tick mark formed on her forehead. Suddenly, a reminder of her own son flashed into her mind. Are all boys of that age this hard to deal with?
"Oh, that… well, we took care of it." He shrugged.
Tsume's lips twitched. 'Does this brat even understand what three genin… well, two genin and one special jōnin, taking care of an entire enemy camp even means?' Tsume, for a second, even thought that the boy had mistaken a small lookout for an enemy camp.
"Explain… leave nothing out," Tsume asked, more like demanded.
So Sukuna explained. From finding a Kumo scout team, to beating them and capturing a single chūnin to extract intel, and then wiping out the camp itself.
The more he told her, the more unbelievable it all sounded to Tsume. No doubt, tales like these were not that uncommon. Ninja history and war had gone hand in hand, and there were also brave madmen in each era. Ninja did all sorts of crazy things during times of crisis.
But that was the difference here. Shinobi did this, not kids. Every single one she knew of capable of single-handedly taking down an entire enemy camp was famous enough to be recorded in ninja history.
Like the Sannin, like the Yellow Flash, or the God of Shinobi, Hashirama himself. And now she was supposed to believe that three brats had done that by themselves.
As Sukuna explained further, both Sasuke and Naruto, hearing this first-day battlefield record, were gaping.
Sasuke's fists clenched tight, irritation roaring inside him. 'I should have gone with Sukuna instead.'
Stuck with Izumi, he had to follow her orders. It's not like they hadn't found enemy tracks and traces of their activity, but instead of going there and fighting, Izumi had them bring the information back and report.
That was the difference between working under someone who understood what you wanted. If he went with Sukuna, he would have been the one fighting those Kumo shinobi and gaining the battle experience.
His eyes looked at both Kiyomi and Neji, and suddenly both irritation and jealousy climbed up. His eyes looked at the small grins both had, even his own sister standing entirely differently now, more confident and composed…
Was that what real battle experience provids? Sasuke really found himself asking.
Naruto he behind either. He was just much more vocal about it.
"That's not fair. How come you three get to fight and we were on scout duty?" he complained.
"Izumi Sensei, why didn't we fight too?" He pouted, looking at Izumi, who just sighed at the boy looking at her like a kicked puppy.
"Because that was our mission: scouting. If anything, you should be asking them why they even bothered entering into a conflict like that."
"Exactly! What were you thinking? Taking genin into an open confrontation with an enemy camp… ARE YOU MAD!" Tsume almost shouted.
Sukuna just shrugged at that. "Not mad, just practical. We took out the scout team before finding the camp. If we were to come back and report, by then those Kumo guys would have long since found out their team had gone missing. Either they would have called for reinforcements, traced our tracks, and known that we knew their location, or they would have moved away. And those were the favorable outcomes. Think of what would have happened if they had turned the camp location into a trap. To me, the most optimal path was to take action while they were still unorganized and weren't expecting an attack…" He took his time explaining, completely ignoring the murderous glare he was getting from both Tsume and the two other girls who had just come into the camp after an entire day of hard medical labor.
Tsume wished to shout, to say something about it. However, there really wasn't anything she could. They weren't even injured. Which was a lie; both Kiyomi and Neji were injured to some degree, but having Sukuna there had its own advantages. He was arguably the best straight-up healer currently in Konoha.
Sure, someone like Tsunade would know about the human body, diseases, and poison much more, but when it came to outright healing, Sukuna had long since trumped her in that department.
"You put genin's lives in danger, genin who were entrusted to you," Tsume finally stated, having no other argument to use since Sukuna was well within his rights to take action if it came to that. He was a special jōnin, after all.
"War is dangerous. While they are here, on the front lines. They are in danger 'period'. Your accusation only works if I put them in needless danger, which I can assure you wasn't the case. I had my eyes on them all the time. If they were in danger, I could have stepped in at any time."
His argument was sound. Tsume wished to argue that what if he couldn't step in in time, but again, the fact that the boy in front of her had mastered the Fourth Hokage's Flying Thunder God just popped into her brain, and that argument died down before it could even begin.
"And if they were injured, I could take care of that as well. I'm somewhat of a healer myself, you know." Sukuna cheekily winked at the two girls on the side, Sakura and Karin, glaring intensely at him, making them blush just a bit and irritating Tsume.
Of course, she knew that. Her daughter Hana, a medical kunoichi, practically sang this boy's praises about how ridiculous his healing skills were. If she heard it right, she even mentioned Aizawa wished to make this brat the next medical head as well.
And that meant she couldn't play that card either. Ultimately, she found herself boxed in and gave up. She couldn't lecture the brat. Unlike her son Kiba, this one wasn't folding under her fierce nature.
Sigh. 'I wonder how Miss Haruno handles this one.'
"What was the size of the camp?" she finally asked, just hoping that this camp was smaller and that they had gotten lucky.
"Hmm… around two hundred to three hundred. Though mostly genin and chūnin. There weren't that many jōnin in there." Sukuna tried to recall and said.
Tsume's mouth stiffened. Indeed, that was a smaller camp, but that was still a much higher number than she thought it would be.
She quickly went through the scroll Sukuna had given her. Most of the scrolls contained only heads. Heads of the enemies, even with their Kumo headbands intact on their foreheads.
"I took only the important ones. The ones who had any Bingo Book presence. Others I just burned there."
Tsume didn't respond. Because her body stiffened even further when she realized she was currently holding the heads of two very high-level jōnin from Kumo. Not from Kumo's higher-up circle, but these two were rising talents in Kumogakure.
"Did you kill them?" she asked.
"Nope… that would be their kill." Sukuna looked at the heads and shook his head, pointing at the still-silently-bickering Neji and Kiyomi.
Tsume felt like she had aged a decade at that. 'Are all genin nowadays monsters like these? First this pink-haired brat, then the Uchiha boy, and now these two. How come my own son is so mediocre?'Tsume grumbled under her breath, mentally noting to give Kiba a proper training sentence after this bloody war was over.
"Sigh… I'll report this to the village. However, you're not allowed to pull stunts like this anymore. Next time you find an enemy camp, you come back and report. Is that clear?" Tsume narrowed her eyes at him.
"Crystal."
"Good. You all are dismissed."
Sukuna, alongside Kiyomi and Neji, walked out with grinning faces, as if they were taking that order to heart.
Sukuna didn't fight much. There weren't many who could give him a good fight. However, even he had to say that just duking it out felt good. While both Kiyomi and Neji were at the center of the attention, he was taking care of any runaways and later even fought many of the shinobi using nothing but Taijutsu.
It felt good.
Simply just punching people. Simple and satisfying. And thus, he had no intention of following orders all of a sudden just because Kiba's mother asked nicely, which, by the way, she didn't. She ordered him, which he was more likely to disobey on the pure principle of not following orders alone.
So they left with grinning faces, leaving behind an utterly exhausted woman who felt like she was aging faster all of a sudden.
"Such a bitch…" Kiyomi snarled the moment they stepped out of the tent. "How dare she talk like that to my darling?"
Good thing the Inuzuka clan was famous for their keen noses, not sharp hearing.
Even Neji, uncharacteristically, nodded in agreement. "Clearly a woman who needs to be shown her place."
Sukuna just ignored them. Unlike them, he could see that Tsume Inuzuka wasn't being bossy or bitchy; she was just worried. His own mother was like this all the time. He was too used to it now.
Of course, he still didn't plan to follow orders.
"Sukuna." Came a voice, stopping all three midway.
"Sasuke. What do you want?"
"Next time, take me with you."
"Huh?"
"Yeah, me too. I want to fight enemies as well. Take me." Naruto's voice chirped from behind Sasuke.
"You too…"
xXx
A/N : Most of the time after writing a chapter I give it to the AI to fix problems for me. From garmmar to pacing. One of my problem is that when I sit down to write, I completely ignore pacing and keep on writing until I feel I like have written enough nonsense between actual chapter.
This chapter is one of those, I wrote and gave to Ai for grammar correction but haven't done anything else. Meaning you guys get to read all that nonsese I write.
Kami- why would you do that, you guys might ask ?
Simple, I want to know whether you guys like this kind of natural none which goes completely away from Ai more than my last chapter which Ai overtook before I knew it.
Honestly, last chapter was changed beyond my expectation by Ai and I didn't even realised before the original thing which I wrote was no longer there, and I am now a bit hesitant to use Ai to fix my chapters.
So here you guys have, a completely hand written chapter (Excluding the grammar mistakes of course) from packing to size.
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