Standing on the top of a mountain, Hinata gazed into the distance with her Byakugan as her hair fluttered in the wind. A few kilometers ahead, she watched the Iwa army about to finally reach the borders of the Land of Fire after they made her wait for over two weeks.
With a small sigh, Hinata created a clone and sent it to relay this information to her troops camped a few kilometers deeper in the Land of Fire and to order them to prepare for combat.
Haaah~. She was given a thousand ninjas to stop the Iwa's advance. Seriously... if she were not so strong, she would suspect this was a suicide mission.
Well, it still was. Just not for her. Her poor troops were not going to have a great time fighting outnumbered around seven to one. Not that she would let it be so easy for Iwa. But still, it was a dick move from the higher-ups.
Then again, she was sure they would call it 'Having trust in her capabilities,' or some other nice-sounding crap.
A small wry smile formed on Hinata's face as she observed the Iwa scouts fanning around their main army and advancing three kilometers ahead of it to stop any snoopy enemy scout.
Three kilometers. They quite obviously accounted for Byakugan-wielders. Standard Byakugan could barely cover that when strained and pushed to its limit. They clearly wanted to keep their army's position a secret for as long as possible.
Unfortunately for them, Hinata's eyes were better than those of her average clansmen. Even before she added the Hashirama cells, she could cover more than that with her vision. After that, her range of vision nearly doubled.
It was why she could so easily observe the enemy without worries right now. She was still several kilometers away from the advanced scouting parties.
Hashirama's cells boosting her Byakugan was quite unexpected, but very appreciated. It was all so very interesting, how her body reacted to them. She only wanted to get Mokuton, but she got so much more out of them that it was unreal. The first Hokage was an absolute monster of a ninja.
So far, everything seemed beneficial after she dealt with the issue of the cells trying to spread through her body like some kind of new cancer and kill her. But that was no longer an issue after she harmonized them with her own biology. They now adapted into a natural part of her body.
The only troubling thing was how she sometimes got the impression that her eyes had become slightly more violet than before, darkening from their usual lavender color. But then a day would pass, and she would wake up with her normal eye color, only for the whole thing to happen again a few days later.
The change was barely noticeable. Not even Ino spotted it, or if she did, she was not sharing. Hinata snorted, involuntarily rolling her eyes at that thought. Who was she kidding? This was Ino she was talking about. The blonde bimbo would have thrown it into her face at the first opportunity if she had noticed.
Hinata did all sorts of tests back in Konoha, but she didn't discover anything wrong with her eyes. Even her eyesight was not affected, and her Byakugan seemed to be fine, too. In the end, she could only accept it as an unexpected side effect with some trepidation, hoping it wouldn't have any bad consequences.
Regenerating eyes was honestly hard and felt awful. It was nothing like regenerating limbs. That was a breeze in comparison. She'd rather not have to resort to that again.
Hinata let out a small sigh. At least, she no longer needed to wait, bored out of her mind, for the Iwa to show up. Once she had arrived at her current base, she quickly found out that there was nothing to do.
The conflict hadn't started yet, so there was nobody injured who needed medical attention. She could not train because they planned to pretty much ambush the Iwa forces, and any technique of hers that needed polishing at this point was too flashy.
She could not even teleport back to the Little Garden because the guys in the intelligence department sucked at their job, so she had no idea where the Iwa forces even were until they had arrived. She had to stay in the base, just in case. It would have been very unfortunate if she had gone away and they had shown up.
Experimenting was also out of the question. This place wasn't exactly private. She trusted her Hyuga men and women, but that did not mean she would pull out some questionable experiment right in front of their noses.
There was a time and place for those. And that time and place were usually at midnight in her heavily reinforced and sealed basement in the Little Garden, with no person around for several dozen kilometers.
In the end, Hinata had spent the previous two weeks doing the only productive thing she could come up with. She was learning how to knit.
She was already a master at killing with needles. So, she decided she might as well learn how to do something less violent with them.
It was honestly quite dull.
Now that the Iwa army was in front of her, she had mixed feelings. On one hand, she felt a sense of heaviness, knowing that the battle was going to start soon, and some of her men would not be returning home from it.
On the other hand... She couldn't help but mentally exclaim, 'Fucking finally!'
They were supposed to arrive much sooner, but according to the intel Hinata had, Onoki tried to be smart. He took half of his army and wanted to take a shortcut by crossing the Land of Rain.
Now that didn't work out very well for him or his boys.
Some orange-haired ninja in a dark coat with red clouds, suspected to be an unknown member of Akatsuki, showed up in front of Onoki's army, flying in the air, and pretty much told them to fuck off because they shall not pass.
Hinata chuckled, fully capable of imagining the sour and angry look Onoki must have had back then. The Land of Rain had always been a convenient place to fight for the hidden villages. So much so that they considered it their back garden. A place where they could do whatever they wanted.
Even Sarutobi seemed to unknowingly have such notions ingrained in him. If not for Tsunade shooting him a warning look and shutting him up, Konoha ninjas might have tried to invade the Land of Rain first to cut off Onoki.
Many complained about that decision, but now it seemed that Tsunade's human decency saved the village from quite considerable losses.
Onoki fought the unknown Akatsuki guy in an aerial battle. And he lost. Badly. From what a few spies managed to send back to Konoha, he suffered several shattered bones during that fight and will now be warming the bed in the hospital for several months.
The only threat he now possessed was to the poor nurses tasked with changing his diapers.
Worse yet for Iwa, the Akatsuki guy had a wide area of effect technique that flattened the surrounding land for several kilometers alongside many Iwa ninjas when they tried to press forward into the Land of Rain despite his warning. The army led by Onoki ended up scattered, and the survivors needed a week to regroup and return to Iwa to lick their wounds.
The second army, the one that Hinata had spotted, was initially intended to reinforce the Kumo-Konoha front. But that defeat forced Iwa to improvise, and so, their second army changed their direction and marched through the countries in the north, taking a scenic route around the Land of Rain's northern borders, and now intended to pressure Konoha here.
Then again, the trouble Kumo was currently having was definitely a part of that decision. Ren's little gamble seemed to work. The kidnapped bloodline ninjas they had kidnapped back from Kumo and returned to Kirigakure tipped the scales. Kirigakure entered a tentative alliance with Konoha, and so, Kumo now had to fight on two fronts against both Konoha forces and Kiri forces coming by sea.
That was not something they expected, and neither were they prepared for it. Kakashi, Gai, Asuma, and even Tsunade were on the Kumo front, giving Kumo quite the hard time.
Even Jiraiya was nearby, just in case a jinchuuriki showed up... but that was supposed to be a secret. Ino simply had a big mouth at home.
Feeling her clone disperse and getting memories from it, Hinata mentally hummed. The message and orders were delivered. Her ninja started preparing for an attack.
She glanced at the advancing Iwa ninjas and sighed yet again, her heart already heavy with guilt about what was going to happen next. Raising her eyes to the sky, she gazed at the roiling dark stormy clouds that spread all the way to the horizon.
When she was just starting her training with Ren, around the time Ino had joined, Ren taught them about ninjutsu. About how techniques that required charging time were more or less useless on the battlefield.
'You would simply die while charging the attack,' he said.
But unlike the teachers at the academy who had covered the same thing, he also explained that there were situations where such attacks could be extremely deadly.
After all, techniques that required time to prepare usually packed a much bigger punch than those that were instantaneous. It was why the one thing a ninja should never give their opponent was time to prepare.
A sad smile bloomed on Hinata's face as rain slowly started to fall from the dark clouds. Her eyes lowered back to the Iwa army. These fools. Why couldn't they just be on time? They had given her two weeks to prepare.
A faint trace of lightning chakra enveloped Hinata's fists. She raised her hands toward the sky, and a lightning bolt erupted from them, striking upward until it connected with the dark clouds.
The Iwa army panicked. But it was already too late.
Thunderous sounds boomed across the gloomy, weeping sky as countless arcs of lightning instantly emerged from deep inside the stormy clouds at once, as far as an eye could see, all streaming and concentrating above the Iwa army.
Several Iwa ninjas started to use defensive earth techniques, but how could they make it on time when Hinata only needed two seconds to gather all the lightning chakra she was storing in the clouds for the last two weeks?
Her resolve hardened her heart, and Hinata's expression became blank. She disliked killing. The whole point of becoming a medical ninja was to save more lives than she had to kill in her ninja career. Yet, here she was about to cause another massacre for her village's safety. Life was full of irony, it seemed.
"Lightning Storm." She mournfully whispered, and with a flicker of her chakra, the sky lit up and screeched with lightning.