The assembly area outside the Konoha forward camp was packed with ninjas. Kenji stood among them with Haruto, Kaede, and Aoi, all of them loaded down with gear and ready to move. Their squad had received orders less than an hour ago. Support unit deployment to the front lines. Immediate departure.
"Move out!"
With the squad leader's command, hundreds of ninjas launched forward simultaneously. Kenji fell into the flow, his students close behind him. His heart rate picked up slightly as they accelerated toward the borders of Ame territory.
This was it. His first real taste of frontline combat since the transmigration.
Sure, he had the original body's memories of previous battles. Those experiences were technically his now, integrated into his consciousness along with everything else. But experiencing violence through inherited memories wasn't the same as living through it yourself.
Knowledge versus reality.
Theory versus practice.
He glanced back at his students.
Haruto's eyes were bright, scanning everything around them. Kaede kept checking his weapons compulsively, fingers tapping against kunai pouches. Even Aoi, normally more reserved, looked excited.
Kenji understood the feeling. The original body's memories included that exact emotional state from his first deployment. The thrill of heading into real combat, the sense that something important and meaningful was about to happen.
Then the battle had ended, and all that remained was numbness toward the corpses scattered across the ground, and hatred for the enemy that sank deep into your bones.
That was the cycle. Violence bred trauma. Trauma bred hatred. Hatred bred more violence. The wars in this world just kept the same pattern going, generation after generation. It was an inescapable feedback loop that ground people down until they were either dead or broken.
Or numb enough to keep functioning despite it all.
The support unit maintained a brutal pace. Ninjas could move way faster than civilians, channeling chakra through their bodies to enhance physical capabilities.
By late afternoon, the battlefield came into view.
The smell hit first. Blood, obviously. But also burned flesh, scorched earth from fire jutsu, the stench of explosive tags, and underneath it all, the sweet rot of bodies starting to decay in the heat.
Kenji's stomach turned slightly. The memories had prepared him for the visual horror but not the smell. That was something you had to experience directly.
The ground ahead was torn apart. Craters from explosive tags dotted the landscape. Trees had been sheared in half by wind jutsu or burned to charcoal by fire techniques. Broken weapons littered everywhere, kunai and shuriken embedded in soil and tree trunks. Forehead protectors, most of them cracked or blood-stained, marked where ninjas had fallen.
The battle had concluded recently. Both sides had withdrawn to regroup and treat their wounded. Medical-nin moved through the aftermath in organized teams, identifying survivors and evacuating them to field hospitals.
"Support unit, listen up!" The commanding officer shouted. "Immediate priority is wounded extraction. Find any Konoha ninjas still breathing and get them to the rear medical stations. Move!"
Kenji gestured to his students. "With me. Stay close and alert."
They moved into the battlefield proper. The destruction became more apparent up close. Body parts were scattered around. Some corpses were relatively intact, just dead from blood loss or organ damage. Others were barely recognizable as human, torn apart by explosive tags or shredded by jutsu.
He had seen death before through his memories. But his students hadn't. Not like this.
Haruto went pale within the first thirty seconds. His eyes were locked on a Konoha ninja whose entire lower body was missing, intestines spilled across the dirt. The corpse's face was frozen in an expression of agony.
Kaede turned away immediately, one hand pressed against his mouth. His shoulders heaved like he was about to throw up.
Aoi was staring at a kunoichi's body. The woman had been gutted, her torso split open from sternum to pelvis. Her hands were still clutching at the wound, as if she'd tried desperately to hold herself together in her final moments.
"Keep moving," Kenji said firmly. He stopped and turned to face them directly. "Listen to me. If you find an enemy ninja who's still alive, you kill them immediately. Don't hesitate, or try to help them. Wounded enemies will use suicide techniques or try to take you with them when they die. Understand?"
"Yes, sensei," they responded in unison, but their voices were shaky. The excitement had drained from their faces completely. Reality had slapped them hard.
"This is what it means to be a ninja. You've barely experienced real combat beyond that ambush with the Iwa ninjas at the supply point. But this is what war actually looks like. Your reactions are normal. You'll adapt."
They would have to. There wasn't any other option.
For the next hour, they worked through the battlefield. Finding wounded Konoha ninjas, stabilizing them enough for transport, loading them onto stretchers, and carrying them back to the medical zone. The students followed orders mechanically, their initial horror gradually numbing into acceptance.
He watched them throughout the process. Trauma could break people or forge them into something stronger. These three would either adapt to this reality or wash out completely. There wasn't much middle ground.
They were searching through debris in a section that had been hit by earth jutsu when he spotted movement behind a large boulder. He raised his hand, signaling the students to stop, and approached carefully.
A Suna ninja lay propped against the rock, bleeding heavily from multiple wounds. His left arm was missing below the elbow, the stump wrapped in a makeshift tourniquet. His forehead protector was cracked down the middle but still tied around his head. When he saw Kenji approaching, his eyes filled with hatred.
The man's hand twitched toward a kunai at his belt.
Kenji was faster. He drew a kunai from his pouch and held it out toward Haruto. "Kill him."
Haruto stared at the weapon.
"There are no prisoners on this battlefield," Kenji said flatly. "Leaving him alive is a risk. He could recover enough to attack us, or he might use a suicide technique when we turn our backs. Either way, he dies. You're going to do it."
Haruto took the kunai with trembling hands. The Suna ninja glared up at him with those hate-filled eyes.
"Do it," Kenji said quietly.
Haruto stood there for maybe three seconds. Then he screamed, more from fear than aggression, and hurled the kunai with everything he had.
The blade struck the Suna ninja in the chest, going through his vest and burying itself to the hilt. Blood erupted from the wound, spreading across his torso and soaking into the ground beneath him. The man's eyes went wide, then gradually unfocused as life left his body.
Haruto stared at the expanding pool of blood. Then tears started streaming down his face without warning.
"Why? Why does it have to be like this, sensei?"
Kenji looked at the corpse, then back at his student. "There's no good answer to that question. War brings death. That's all there is to it."
He meant it. The logic of this world's conflicts had never made sense to him, even with his knowledge of how things would play out. The Second and Third Great Ninja Wars accomplished basically nothing except producing mountains of corpses and deepening hatreds between villages. There were no territorial gains, resources captured, or strategic advantages that justified the cost.
Just violence for violence's sake, driven by people too consumed by hatred to see the futility of it all.
For him, survival was the only goal that mattered right now. Philosophical questions about the nature of war could wait until he wasn't in danger of dying in one.
"Listen carefully," he said to all three students. They gathered closer, listening intently. "War in the shinobi world isn't like conventional warfare. There are no fixed frontlines or defensive positions. Battles are just chaotic melees where both sides clash until one can't sustain combat anymore and withdraws. The ninjas who can't keep up with their retreating forces get surrounded and killed. Like this Suna ninja. He fell behind during the withdrawal, and now he's dead."
He gestured back toward the Konoha camp. "When we're in combat, you stay with the main force. Always. If the retreat order comes, you move immediately and you don't fall behind. Anyone left on the battlefield alone dies. That's not a maybe. That's a certainty."
"We understand, sensei!" All three of them nodded vigorously.
Even Haruto had stopped crying. The emotional weight of his first kill was still there, Kenji could see it in his eyes. But the kid understood now that the pain of killing an enemy was nothing compared to the terror of being killed by one.
They continued working through the battlefield. The sounds of distant combat echoed from other sections. Explosions, screams, the crack of lightning jutsu. Fighting was still happening somewhere nearby, just not in this area.
---
Weeks had passed.
Today was still "evacuation work," just like any other day. Kenji had his students grab one more injured Konoha ninja and start heading back toward friendly lines. The man was unconscious but stable, breathing steadily despite a nasty gash across his abdomen that Aoi had bandaged.
Kaede was carrying the wounded ninja on his back, moving carefully to avoid jostling the injury. Kenji was in the lead, scanning for threats. Haruto and Aoi flanked them on either side.
They were maybe fifty meters from the Konoha medical zone when his chakra sensing picked up a signature ahead.
"Contact!" he shouted. "Enemy ahead!"
The warning came just in time. A kunai with a lit explosive tag wrapped around its handle came screaming out of the smoke, aimed directly at the center of their group.
"Explosive tag! Scatter!"
All three students reacted instantly. Haruto dove left, Aoi went right, and Kaede threw himself backward while keeping his grip on the wounded man.
The explosive tag detonated in midair where they'd been standing half a second earlier.
BOOM.
The blast wave hit, hot air and debris washing over them. Kenji felt the heat singe his hair and tear at his clothing. Shrapnel whistled past, small pieces of metal and rock that could have shredded them if they'd been any closer.
When the smoke cleared, all four of them were intact. Roughed up, clothes torn, covered in dust, but alive.
Then Kenji sensed movement to their right.
A Suna ninja burst from behind a pile of rubble, moving fast. He was heading straight for Kaede, who was still trying to get back on his feet while supporting the unconscious Konoha ninja on his back.
The attacker had a katana drawn. He closed the distance in a heartbeat and swung the sword downward, aiming to cleave Kaede and his cargo in half with a single stroke.
Kenji's hands were already forming seals. "Mind Body Switch Technique!"
His consciousness shot out of his body and slammed into the Suna ninja's mind. The foreign mental space was hostile and disorienting, full of rage and killing intent, but he had practiced this jutsu a lot of times. He seized control immediately.
The sword stopped half an inch from Kaede's back.
Kenji held the Suna ninja's body completely still. His own body back at the original position went limp.
Kaede scrambled away from the blade, his eyes wide. "Sensei!"
The kid understood. Kenji had warned them repeatedly during training. When he used Mind Body Switch, his real body was completely defenseless. And if the possessed target got injured while he was controlling it, the damage would transfer back to him.
Kaede's hand moved toward his kunai pouch, the instinct to counterattack kicking in. Then he stopped himself, remembering the warning about backlash damage.
Instead of attacking, he turned to thank his instructor.
That's when his expression changed.
"Sensei! Behind you!"