The remaining three arrived together not long after.
Pakura, Sakamoto, and Fukushima Taki. Pakura carried her Kekkei Genkai. Sakamoto's father commanded the Hidden Sand Village Guard Corps, Yuji had met him during the assassination attempt by Danzo's people. Fukushima Taki's father ran the Intelligence Agency.
All three came from significant backgrounds, and together with Yashamaru, the four of them bowed to Yuji in unison.
Three of them looked at him with straightforward respect, age entirely irrelevant to them given what they knew of his record. Pakura's expression was harder to read.
War really was the best soil for producing this kind of regard, Yuji thought.
He caught Pakura's eye, smiled, and said, "Let's go. We're leaving early."
He led them out.
Before clearing the village gates he gave them a short window to prepare and ran a quick check on their supplies. With Yashamaru present he didn't need to worry much about that side of things, the man was experienced, Medical Ninja or not, and Yuji quietly asked him to keep an eye on the younger three during the journey.
On the road, the three Genin carried the particular tension of people heading somewhere unfamiliar and potentially dangerous for the first time.
It reminded Yuji of himself at the Amegakure border, that same low-grade apprehension sitting in the chest. Pakura had decided to present a face of firm resolve, which Yuji found quietly amusing.
Whether the resolve was entirely genuine or partly performance didn't matter much. The determination behind it was real, and that was worth something.
Yuji pulled a book from his pack and read while walking, slowing his natural pace enough that the three students could keep up without struggling.
"Sensei Yuji never stops studying," Sakamoto said, watching him with undisguised admiration.
"It'll take us at least two days to reach the operational area," Yuji said, not looking up from the page. "We're still in safe territory. Relax a little."
After a moment he set the book down and looked at them.
"This is probably the first real mission for all of you. When you encounter an enemy, your first thought should not be how to fight them. Your first thought should be survival.
From a position of relative safety, observe, the opponent, the terrain, everything around you. Build the habit of reading external factors before anything else. Then, as the engagement develops, build a model of how they fight and what methods they use.
Only after that do you think about how to defeat them. Once those habits become instinct, everything simplifies."
Fukushima Taki and Sakamoto nodded.
Pakura said nothing.
Yuji saw through it and let it go. She was competitive enough that words from him probably landed as a challenge rather than guidance. That was fine. Experience would teach her what he couldn't, and once was usually enough.
He spent the rest of that day's travel learning what each of them could actually do and putting together a simplified deployment that used their respective strengths sensibly.
As they drew closer to the coast, his tone shifted without him entirely intending it, still warm in expression, but carrying more weight.
"The Hidden Mist's assassination methods are well established. Once we're in the operational area, stay alert.
Don't let the presence of our border defense personnel make you complacent, the coastal terrain is complex, and small Hidden Mist infiltration squads can still find ways through if they're not deploying at scale.
Their objective is rarely direct combat. They're after civilian settlements, supply caches, merchant convoys. Disruption and extraction, not pitched battles."
He looked at each of them in turn. "Which means our mission isn't primarily to fight them. It's to protect the people and push them out. If they retreat or flee, we do not need to pursue. Understand?"
He also wrote things down as they walked, periodically handing pages to Yashamaru, treatment plans for the kinds of injuries the squad might realistically encounter, along with supporting medical knowledge.
Chiyo sending Yashamaru along had been partly about proximity to Yuji's methods, and Yuji had no objection to that. He had already decided to raise the village's medical level wherever he could, and Yashamaru's talent was genuine.
If there was time later, he would teach him some Medical Ninjutsu directly. Whether Yashamaru could absorb them would depend on his own ability.
Two days later, tired and road-worn, the five of them arrived at a coastal fishing village.
The Land of Wind was not all gravel plains and desert. It had a coastline, and along that coastline the villages lived by the sea. Fishing was the primary livelihood here, the main source of income.
Sunagakure's approach along the coast was decentralized by necessity. Border personnel monitored the Hidden Mist's movements while individual squads were distributed across civilian settlements throughout the operational zone, each village and town hosting a small Sunagakure presence that served as both protection and a temporary foothold.
The enemy here wasn't another village's standing army, it was closer in practice to dealing with organized raiders, and the relationship between the local population and the stationed Sunagakure shinobi reflected that. They were effectively on the same side of the same problem.
"Captain Yuji."
The receiving shinobi nodded and laid out the situation, passing over a map showing the Hidden Mist's observed range of activity along the coastline. Their specific positions remained unclear.
Yuji took the map and handed it to his students.
"The red areas are the worst of it?"
"Yes. Some villages have already been destroyed beyond habitability. We've evacuated the surviving residents safely."
Small operations, repeated persistently over years, individually the yield from any single village was modest, but accumulated across the Hidden Mist's sustained campaign along this coast, the total had become substantial. They had been patient about it.
Yuji had gathered additional background from Arai before departure. He had not paid close attention to the Hidden Sand and Hidden Mist friction previously, set against Konoha and Iwagakure, the threat had seemed relatively contained.
But something in the village's casualty statistics had stood out when he looked more carefully. The numbers didn't reflect deaths so much as disappearances. Sunagakure shinobi going missing rather than turning up dead.
The Hidden Mist was not taking prisoners for exchange or political leverage. That left one explanation.
Experimentation. Intelligence extraction. Living shinobi were useful for researching their techniques, a shinobi was in some sense a walking repository of a village's ninjutsu resources, and the right methodology could convert that into something the Hidden Mist could use.
Even corpses held value for this kind of targeted research. The other great villages fought and killed for position and territory. What the Hidden Mist was doing here was something more calculating and, in its own way, more thorough. It fit their village's established character well enough.
"Sorry for the trouble," the patrol shinobi said to Yuji.
"Not at all." Yuji smiled.
He turned back to the four of them, Yashamaru, Pakura, Sakamoto, Fukushima Taki, and looked them over once.
"Let's move. We're starting."