Half a month later.
Land of Grass - Konoha/Iwagakure Border Battlefield
The mountain hollow was quiet and still.
The kind of stillness that came from two predators holding perfectly motionless, waiting for prey to wander into range.
Yuji and Sasori crouched behind the ridge, hidden in the shadow of a rocky overhang. Below them, a narrow trail cut through the uneven terrain of the Land of Grass, winding between sparse tree cover and jutting stone formations.
And moving along that trail, a Konoha squad.
Medical ninja and logistics personnel, seven or eight of them, carrying severely wounded comrades on stretchers and improvised litters. They were heading back toward their stronghold from the front lines, moving with the careful urgency of people who knew they were exposed but had no choice.
Yuji watched them in silence. Beside him, Sasori was doing the same thing, though his attention was elsewhere. His fingers rested lightly on the chakra threads connected to his puppet formation, already deployed and waiting in concealed positions around the trail below.
Neither of them needed to speak. They'd done this enough times now that the coordination was instinctive.
Down on the trail, the squad captain moved ahead to scout.
He was careful. Eyes scanning the terrain, body angled to minimize exposure.
He noticed the blood first.
Several drops of deep crimson liquid, suspended in midair, catching the sunlight like tiny rubies frozen in place. Just hanging there.
'What...'
The captain's instincts screamed at him to move. But curiosity and confusion held him for a fraction of a second too long.
One of the drops elongated.
It shot forward like a needle fired from a railgun, crossing the distance between the air and the captain's skull in less time than it took to blink.
It punched through his forehead and exited cleanly from the back of his head.
He was dead before his body understood it should fall.
"Enemy! Enemy attack!"
The shinobi directly behind the captain reacted instantly.
He hadn't seen what killed the captain. Hadn't even processed the mechanics of it. All he knew was that the man in front of him had dropped, and that meant they were under attack.
It didn't save him.
A second drop of blood snapped through the air with the same horrifying precision, piercing his throat before the echo of his warning had finished bouncing off the rocks.
He collapsed.
And then the world around the Konoha squad came apart.
From below, from the sides, from elevated positions behind cover, nearly ten puppets launched simultaneously.
They came from every angle.
Close-combat models rushed the formation directly, bladed limbs extending and retracting with mechanical precision.
Ranged units hung back and unleashed a storm of senbon, kunai, and concealed launcher mechanisms that turned the air into a kill zone.
The firepower was absurd. And the sheer variety of attack patterns, poison needles mixed with explosive tags mixed with serrated cables, made any kind of organized defense nearly impossible.
"Puppeteer! Hidden Sand!"
Someone in the squad managed to shout it, voice tight with disbelief.
'Sand shinobi. On a battlefield between Konoha and Iwagakure.'
'Why?'
'How did they know our route?'
The questions died unanswered. There wasn't time.
A small figure burst from the shadows at the base of the mountain.
Moving with a fluid, darting agility that made him difficult to track.
Yuji hit the formation from the flank, both hands alive with razor-thin threads that caught the sunlight in brief, fragmented flashes. Against the glare, they were almost invisible.
But the Konoha shinobi were trained. Even caught off guard, even with their captain dead and puppets tearing into their ranks, the ones who could still fight snapped into defensive stances.
Yuji adjusted instantly.
He flicked his wrist and sent a spread of throwing knives arcing toward the cluster of defenders.
A standard and predictable trajectory.
The blades were knocked aside, batted out of the air with sharp metallic clangs. For a brief second, the defenders thought the barrage had failed.
Then the fallen knives jerked off the ground.
The threads connecting them to Yuji's fingers went taut, and every blade reversed direction simultaneously. They shot upward from the sand and dirt like a school of fish changing direction in unison, each one finding a gap, a joint, an exposed piece of neck or inner thigh.
Three shinobi dropped with blades buried in vital points before anyone understood what had happened.
The formation broke.
On the opposite side, Sasori's puppets carved through the defensive line from the rear.
Mechanical arms punched through guard stances. Poison-tipped appendages found gaps in armor. A puppet shaped like a hunched, armored beetle split open its torso to release a cloud of senbon that shredded everything in a five-meter radius.
Between the two of them, the Konoha squad didn't stand a chance.
Yuji moved through the collapsing formation like a dancer in a slaughterhouse.
His body twisted and turned with an almost graceful economy of movement.
A shinobi lunged at him with a kunai. Yuji sidestepped, flicked two fingers, and a loop of thread cinched around the man's wrist and throat simultaneously. A sharp pull. The thread cut through both.
Another came from behind with a fire release technique. Yuji felt the heat before he saw it and dropped flat, letting the fireball scream over his head and explode against the rock face behind him. He rolled, came up, and sent three knives into the caster's chest before the man could form another hand sign.
One by one, the figures fell. Some to puppets.
Some to threads and throwing knives that seemed to have minds of their own, changing direction midair, reversing course, finding targets that should have been impossible to hit.
When it was over, the trail was silent again.
"I still got more than you."
Sasori landed beside him with a light hop, recalling his puppets with a casual flick of his fingers. There was a smugness to his expression that he didn't bother hiding.
He looked at Yuji, who was standing in the middle of the carnage covered in blood.
The contrast between their styles was stark. Sasori's puppets killed at a distance, leaving their operator untouched. Elegant. Detached. Like conducting an orchestra.
Yuji's method was the opposite. Close range, physical. The thread techniques didn't just kill, they dismembered. Anyone caught in the silk lines had been cut apart, flesh separated into clean sections where the threads had passed through.
"Yeah, yeah," Yuji said, wiping a streak of someone else's blood off his cheek with the back of his hand. "You're really keeping score, huh? Not tired of it yet?"
Yuji looked at Sasori, who was practically radiating competitive satisfaction, and shrugged.
"You know I can kill clean when I want to."
And it was true. His ninjutsu and thread techniques were more than capable of precise, bloodless kills. He was arguably better at underhanded, surgical elimination than Sasori was. The kind of kills where the target didn't even realize they were dead until their legs stopped working.
But that wasn't the point of today's engagement.
In a coordinated assault with Sasori's puppet formation, someone had to hold the front line. Pin the enemy down. Keep them from scattering into the terrain where the puppets would lose their advantage. That role was messy by nature.
"Someone's coming."
Both of them heard it at the same time. The faint vibration of approaching footsteps transmitted through the rocky ground.
Reinforcements. Or a patrol that had heard the noise.
Their expressions hardened in unison, and without a word exchanged, they broke from the kill zone and vanished into the terrain, moving fast and low.
The bodies would be found. That was inevitable. But by the time anyone arrived, the two of them would be long gone.
This mission was still focused on Konoha. The theater was still the Land of Grass. But the parameters had shifted.
They were operating deeper now. Closer to Konoha's active zones. More dangerous territory, with higher traffic and faster response times from Leaf patrols.
The reason they could operate here at all came down to one thing: intelligence.
And that intelligence hadn't come from Sunagakure's own network.
It came from Iwagakure.
The logic was simple. The Hidden Stone was locked in full-scale combat with Konoha across the Land of Grass. Nobody knew Konoha's troop deployments, supply routes, and patrol schedules in this region better than the village actively fighting them every day.
Sharing that information with Sunagakure cost Iwagakure nothing. On the contrary, every time a Sand team hit a Konoha logistics line or ambushed a medical convoy, it pulled attention and resources away from Iwa's own front. Free disruption, zero risk.
The enemy of your enemy wasn't exactly your friend in the shinobi world. But they could be a very useful tool.
Sunagakure and Iwagakure had their own tensions. Their own history of friction and mistrust. But compared to the mutual hatred both villages shared with Konoha, those tensions were manageable.
So the intel flowed. And Yuji's team used it.
This wasn't a mission they'd volunteered for either. It had come directly from the village command structure. Official orders. Long-term deployment.
Their objectives were twofold. First: harass Konoha's secondary front lines across the Land of Grass. Hit supply convoys, medical teams, messenger squads. Anything soft and exposed. Second: gather battlefield intelligence from the region and report back to Suna's command.
Hit and run. Observe and report.
Simple on paper. Dangerous in practice.
Especially because of who was stationed on the other side.
The primary Konoha commander overseeing the Land of Grass theater was Orochimaru. One of the Sannin. A shinobi whose name alone was enough to make most teams reconsider their mission parameters.
Yuji's squad operated with a firm, non-negotiable rule: stay far away from the main battlefield. The smaller, peripheral engagements, the secondary fronts and tertiary supply lines scattered across the Land of Grass, those were their hunting ground.
Getting anywhere near Orochimaru's area of operations wasn't bold. It was suicide.
And both Yuji and Sasori, for all their talent, were self-aware enough to know where the line was.
"Well done."
The voice came from above and to the left. Their captain, Arai, dropped in beside them mid-sprint, matching their pace without breaking stride. He'd been shadowing them the entire time, watching from concealment while they executed the ambush.
"The target was a logistics team with multiple wounded, so the difficulty was low," Arai continued, his tone measured but genuinely approving. "But your combat fundamentals are solid, and your instincts under pressure are sharp. What impressed me most is how synchronized your coordination has become. You're reading each other's movements without needing to communicate."
Sasori said nothing. His expression remained flat, indifferent to the praise.
Yuji knew why. Arai was a Kage Guard, a direct subordinate of the Third Kazekage. In Sasori's mind, that made him an extension of the village's authority structure, not someone to be trusted or warmed up to.
Sasori's loyalty was to himself and his craft. Everyone else was kept at arm's length until they proved otherwise.
Arai didn't seem bothered by the cold reception. He turned his attention to Yuji.
"The Kazekage has a specific instruction for you."
Yuji met his eyes.
"He wants you to test the upper limits of your Kekkei Genkai's flexibility across different combat scenarios. Different opponents, different terrain, different conditions. Push the boundaries of what your blood manipulation can do in live engagements."
Arai paused, then clarified: "This isn't about incorporating new ninjutsu into the mix. It's purely about how far you can take the blood itself. Range, precision, volume, speed. The Kazekage wants to know your ceiling."
Yuji nodded. "Understood. I get it."
The instruction made sense. The blood manipulation was his most unique asset, the one ability that no opponent would have a frame of reference for. The more versatile he could make it, the more unpredictable he became.
And unpredictability was survival in the shinobi world.
Arai smiled slightly and picked up the pace.
"Let's move. We're shifting to another secondary front. The Konoha forces in this area will figure out what happened soon enough, and lingering here after an ambush is asking for trouble."
He glanced back at both of them.
"Our mission is straightforward. Harass Konoha's smaller front lines across the region. Cause disruption. Gather intel. Don't engage anything we can't handle, and don't get greedy."
Hit and run. The safest approach for a three-man squad operating deep in contested territory.
It wouldn't cause any decisive damage to Konoha's war effort. Nobody was under that illusion. But that wasn't the real purpose.
The real purpose was the grind.
Every engagement, every different battlefield environment, and terrain, it was all fuel. Experience.
For Yuji and Sasori, at this stage of their development, it was exactly what they needed.
The Land of Grass wasn't large, but it was dense with conflict. Dozens of smaller battlefields dotted the region where Konoha and Iwagakure clashed in an ongoing series of engagements. Neither side had achieved a decisive breakthrough, so the fighting had spread out into a patchwork of contested zones, supply corridors, and forward positions.
As long as Yuji's squad stayed away from the main theater, there was more than enough ground to cover.
...
BOnus @300 PS
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