Still, the hospital work wasn't a total loss.
Yuji understood that better than anyone. The experience points might have been pitiful, but the practical gains were real.
For a doctor, the ward was its own kind of battlefield.
Every surgery, every emergency treatment, every precise application of medical ninjutsu under pressure... all of it sharpened him. His chakra control had become tighter, more instinctive. The constant drain and recovery cycle of performing technique after technique on patients had quietly expanded his total chakra reserves over time.
And his proficiency with the techniques themselves had deepened in ways that combat alone wouldn't have given him.
Sasori knew a fair amount about medical ninjutsu in theory, but he wasn't a practitioner. He didn't live in it the way Yuji did. So it was natural for him to look at Yuji's time in the village and see stagnation.
He was wrong. But Yuji didn't mind letting him think that.
"While Sasori's away," Yuji said quietly, "I'll keep pushing the physical reinforcement."
The idea had been forming in his mind for weeks now.
As his mastery of medical ninjutsu expanded, especially his understanding of how the techniques actually worked at a cellular level, Yuji had realized something.
Cell activation didn't have to be limited to healing wounds in other people.
It could be turned inward.
Used carefully, with precise control, it could temper his own body. Strengthen muscle fiber. Reinforce bone density. Push his physical limits beyond what normal training could achieve.
The concept wasn't entirely new. Tsunade's own techniques hinted at it heavily. Creation Rebirth, in particular, demonstrated that medical ninjutsu's regenerative properties could be redirected toward self-enhancement if the user understood the mechanics well enough.
The key was control. Understanding the human body at a level deep enough to manipulate it without causing damage. Knowing exactly how far to push before the cells broke down instead of building up.
Yuji intended to use himself as the test subject.
Even if he couldn't reach Tsunade's level of physical enhancement, even a marginal improvement would compound over time. And marginal improvements, stacked consistently, had a way of becoming something significant.
He sat up from the bed, rolling his shoulders, ready to wash up and call it a night.
"Hm?"
He stopped.
His eyes drifted toward the door.
Nothing visible. But something at the edge of his awareness, the faintest shift in the air, the instinct of someone who had spent enough time around shinobi to know when one was nearby.
Two seconds later, two soft knocks confirmed it.
"Yuji?"
He crossed the room and opened the door. A Sunagakure ninja stood outside, dressed in standard gear but carrying himself with the controlled stillness of someone trained for covert work. He smiled pleasantly.
"Who are you?"
"Anbu. Lord Kazekage wants to see you."
Yuji blinked and glanced past the man's shoulder at the sky. The village was dark. Nearly every light in Sunagakure had gone out. It had to be well past midnight.
He usually didn't get home until late, but even by his standards, this was an unusual hour for a summons.
"If it's urgent, the Kazekage can summon me anytime. Why this late?"
His mind was already running through possibilities. An emergency at the front? A classified development that couldn't wait until morning?
That was the only explanation that made sense.
"Wait for me."
Yuji nodded and ducked back inside. He dressed quickly, pulling on his gear with practiced efficiency. Last, he looped his Sunagakure forehead protector around his neck, letting it hang loosely against his collarbone.
He'd never liked wearing it on his head. It felt uncomfortable, almost constricting. So since the day he'd been promoted to genin, the neck had been its home.
The placement wasn't random either. The way he positioned it, the metal plate covered his throat just enough to offer a thin layer of protection over the vital point. A small detail. The kind most people wouldn't notice.
He followed the Anbu out into the cool desert night.
"This way."
Yuji had already started turning toward the Kazekage's office building by instinct, but the operative gestured in a different direction entirely.
"This private?" Yuji asked, keeping his tone casual. "What exactly is going on?"
No answer beyond a brief nod and a quickened pace.
Yuji's eyes narrowed slightly.
A secret meeting. A location away from the official building. Just him and the Kazekage.
His expression shifted. The easy, relaxed demeanor he carried around the village thinned away, and the sharper version of himself, the one that lived underneath, settled into place.
They moved through the village at speed, two shadows cutting through the darkened streets.
And Yuji noticed it almost immediately.
The route.
During wartime, Sunagakure maintained strict internal security. Patrol squads operated around the clock, covering fixed routes through every district. The schedules were tight, the coverage thorough, and any outsider entering the village was subjected to invasive screening.
Yuji had lived in the village long enough to memorize every patrol route, every shift change, every gap in coverage.
The Anbu leading him was deliberately avoiding all of them.
Every turn they took threaded between patrol windows. The operative knew the routes just as well as Yuji did, maybe better, and he was using that knowledge to ensure no one saw them.
"The Kazekage ordered this mission personally," the Anbu said, glancing back with that same easy smile. "It has to stay classified. No one else can know."
Yuji gave a small nod but said nothing.
His face was calm.
His mind was not.
Something about this felt off. Not wrong, exactly. But the edges didn't quite line up the way they should have. A midnight summons was unusual but explainable. A secret location was uncommon but not unheard of for sensitive operations. Avoiding patrol routes made sense for classified movement.
But all three together, at this hour, with this level of secrecy...
Yuji filed the discomfort away and kept moving, keeping his senses sharp.
They reached the outermost edge of the village.
The buildings had thinned out and then disappeared entirely. Just open desert stretching out under a black sky, the sand pale and still beneath the thin crescent moon.
And then, in the distance, a figure.
Standing alone on the sand. Back turned. Wearing the distinctive robes of the Land of Wind's leadership, the silhouette carried the unmistakable shape of the Third Kazekage.
Just standing there. Waiting.
"Lord Kazekage."
The Anbu escort stopped and spoke first, his voice carrying across the open ground with practiced respect.
Yuji's eyes narrowed. He studied the figure ahead, trying to pick out details through the darkness. The robes were right. The posture was plausible. But something...
His heart slammed once. Hard.
The raw instinct that months of combat at the border had hammered into his nervous system, the kind of reflex that bypassed the brain entirely and spoke directly to the body.
Move.
The Anbu in front of him pivoted.
One second he was kneeling in deference toward the "Kazekage." The next he was lunging, a kunai already drawn and aimed squarely at Yuji's chest.
Yuji's body was already reacting before his conscious mind finished processing what was happening. He twisted, pulling his torso back and to the side.
Not fast enough to dodge completely.
The kunai missed his heart but buried itself into his abdomen, punching through flesh.
Pain flared. Hot and immediate.
Yuji's expression went cold.
He wrenched himself backward, pulling free of the blade, and created distance in a single explosive leap.
As he flew back, his eyes snapped to where the "Kazekage" had been standing.
The figure was gone.
All that remained was the robe, hanging in the air for a brief, almost theatrical moment.
A decoy. There had never been anyone in those robes.
Buzz.
The sound ripped through the air before he could land.
A massive four-bladed shuriken came screaming toward his head from his blind side, spinning so fast the edges blurred into a single disc of steel.
Yuji twisted midair, wrenching his body sideways with core strength. The blades passed close enough that he felt the wind shear across his cheek.
He hit the sand hard, rolling once and coming up in a crouch.
Yuji glanced at it. His expression shifted.
"A Fuma Shuriken."
The signature weapon of the Fuma Clan. Expensive, oversized, and rarely seen outside of specific combat applications. In Sunagakure, tools like that were almost exclusively reserved for puppet mechanisms, built into the internal frameworks of combat puppets where their size and lethality could be maximized.
The pieces clicked together in less than a second.
The midnight summons. The route that avoided every patrol. The fake Kazekage. The Anbu who wasn't Anbu.
Outsiders.
These two weren't Sunagakure shinobi.
And he couldn't think of a single reason anyone inside the village would want him dead. Not after everything he'd done for the hospital, for the wounded, for the war effort.
Someone from outside the walls had slipped through Suna's defenses, learned the patrol routes, forged the right story, and come for him specifically.
An assassination.
Yuji rose to his feet.
Blood was running down his abdomen, soaking into his shirt. The wound was deep enough to be dangerous.
And then it wasn't.
The flesh around the gash rippled. Muscle fibers reconnected. Skin knit itself closed like thread being pulled through fabric. In seconds, the wound was gone.
Yin Healing Wound Destruction.
He'd activated it the instant he realized he'd been hit. Even as he was leaping backward, even as his eyes were tracking the empty robes where the Kazekage should have been, his hands had already formed the signs. Chakra had flooded the wound site before the blood had time to drip.
The two attackers froze.
The one who had posed as the Anbu escort stared at the clean, unmarked skin where his kunai had landed moments ago. His eyes widened.
Yuji flexed his fingers.
Thin lines of silk thread, nearly invisible in the moonlight, unfurled from his fingertips and spread outward.
Under the pale moon, the nine-year-old stood on the open sand with his arms raised, fingertips curled, threads extending in every direction.
"It's really been a while," Yuji said softly. His voice carried across the sand. "I almost forgot what this felt like."
The months in the village had been productive. Necessary. But they had also been monotonous. The hospital, patients, and paperwork. The endless, grinding routine of saving lives one bed at a time.
He'd grown during that time. Quietly and significantly. But some part of him, the part that had come alive during the border campaign against Amegakure, the part that calculated kill trajectories and read enemy movement, that part had been starving.
"Before we get started," Yuji said, tilting his head just slightly, "mind telling me who you actually are?"
The two attackers exchanged a glance.
The intelligence they'd been given on this target was wrong.
Clearly, this kid was not as simple as just an ordinary Medical Ninja.