The question caught everyone off guard.
Saori let go of him and straightened, her expression shifting into something more serious. "Yuji. I understand you're strong, and I know about the Kekkei Genkai, but a front-line battlefield is not the same as the missions you've been running.
You're a Medical Ninja. I'm not saying this just to keep you safe. For this entire army, your presence in the Medical Corps is worth more than anything you could do out there."
She meant it. Yuji could see that clearly enough. She had read him as young and eager, chasing the idea of real combat without fully grasping what it cost, and she was trying to correct that before it became a problem.
"I spoke with Senior Kenji on the way here," Yuji said. "The front-line Medical Squads aren't rear support, they operate on the battlefield directly, working under fire, pulling people out without engaging.
So I'd still be fighting, just in a different capacity." He smiled. "And Iwagakure doesn't look like it's settling down anytime soon. There'll be time between operations to treat people in the Corps as well. It's less efficient, but it's not nothing."
Saori opened her mouth.
"Let him," Shimizu said.
She closed it.
Any of the other officers she might have argued past. Shimizu was the overall commander, and his word was not a suggestion. He had his own reasoning, a shinobi with genuine combat ability carried genuine responsibility, regardless of age.
The battlefield made no distinction. And the Kazekage had sent Yuji and Sasori here deliberately, not to station one of them safely behind the line. That intent was clear enough.
"If you change your mind," Saori said to Yuji, her voice quieter now, "come find me. I'll take it back to the commander."
"Thank you," he said, and meant it.
The assignments were settled shortly after.
Yuji joined the Puppeteer unit, attached to its accompanying Medical Squad, the same division as Sasori, numbering several dozen in total. He was appointed Medical Squad leader immediately upon assignment.
No one raised an objection. The other four members had all heard of him, and on a battlefield, reputation and demonstrated ability mattered more than age. The squad's job was to cover the injuries of the entire division between five people, which said everything about how scarce Medical Ninja were and how heavily the weight of that scarcity fell on whoever carried the role.
Sasori became the division's vice-captain.
Yuji spent the rest of that day learning the camp.
He worked through the current injury roster for the division, sat with the other Medical Squad members and pulled what he could from their battlefield experience, and tried to build a working picture of what front-line rescue actually looked like compared to the border work he had done near Amegakure.
The differences were significant enough that he listened more than he spoke.
The following morning, military orders came down.
Their division was to move northwest in coordination with another unit, an outpost squad had reported unusual Iwagakure activity along the border, and the response was immediate and large. Hundreds of shinobi assembled and moved out, the five members of the Medical Squad among them.
Yuji had never operated at this scale before.
They covered the ground fast, reached the outpost position, linked up with the shinobi already stationed there, and spread into ambush formation across Iwagakure's projected approach route.
Sensor Ninja and a reconnaissance squad pushed forward to confirm the situation. When the reports came back and the signs of Iwagakure movement were verified, the vanguard locked into a front line and the Puppeteer division pushed directly toward the enemy position.
Hundreds of shinobi crossed the open desert in formation, sand rising around them in long drifts, eyes fixed on the dunes ahead.
Iwagakure saw them coming.
Black shapes poured down from the dunes to meet them, and in the space between the two forces, the killing intent of both armies rose into the air like heat.
Before the two forces met, Sunagakure's long-range specialists were already moving through hand seals. Wind Release erupted across the formation simultaneously, not individual jutsu but a coordinated wall of force that tore across the desert toward the approaching Iwagakure lines.
Iwagakure answered with Earth Release, their own teams activating in kind, and the chakra detonations where the two techniques met sent shockwaves rolling through the sand.
From any distance, it looked like two masses of black dots colliding. Up close, it was organized chaos with a structure underneath it.
The front line made contact and close-quarters fighting broke out alongside jutsu exchanges. The Puppeteer division moved in behind them, read the field, and began threading their constructs through the gaps, targeting Iwagakure positions under cover of the forward combatants drawing fire.
Sensor Ninja moved constantly through the ranks, tracking the enemy formation's shifts and feeding information back through the Sunagakure lines.
Every type of shinobi had a function and a position, and they filled it without being told. The coordination was not perfect, but it was real, a force that had been operating together long enough to think in the same direction.
Yuji stood at the rear and watched all of it at once.
He didn't panic. His eyes moved fast across the field, reading it the way he had learned to read a fight, where the injuries were clustering, which areas were too active for Medical Ninja to enter, where the next casualty was most likely to fall.
His brain processed the images as they came and he began issuing instructions to the other four before he had consciously finished forming the decisions.
Then he moved himself.
He had done medical work at the Amegakure border, but that had been different in every meaningful way. Small squad, fringe positions, areas where the fighting had already ended before they arrived.
What he had done there was closer to retrieval than rescue, working through aftermath rather than the thing itself. This was the thing itself. The battlefield demanded treatment while it was still happening, under active fire, with jutsu and chakra fluctuations crossing the air in every direction and the ground changing beneath every step.
Medical Ninja here were not support personnel. They were field doctors operating inside the conflict.
Yuji set aside everything that wasn't a fallen Sunagakure shinobi and let his focus narrow to that single thing. The chaos around him became background. The analysis began the same way it did in combat, read, assess, move.
He was, underneath the steadiness, slightly excited.
The battlefield offered both. Positive experience from healing, negative experience from killing, and he had every intention of accumulating both while he was here.
He was aware that this was not the most noble motivation available to him. He was fine with that.
A Sunagakure shinobi went down nearby, and an Iwagakure operative moved toward him immediately.
Yuji was already in motion. He crossed the distance in a white streak, the kunai leaving his hand on the way, it took the Iwagakure shinobi cleanly, and he caught the fallen Sunagakure ninja without breaking stride, pulling him back toward the safe zone in the same movement.
The Sunagakure combatants around him shifted instinctively, angling to cut off Iwagakure attacks from reaching him. Nobody needed to say anything. Medical Ninja on a live battlefield were worth protecting, and everyone present understood that in their bones.
This kind of engagement had its own logic entirely. It was not individual strength meeting individual strength, it was two systems operating against each other, and what mattered was how well each piece of each system did its specific job.
No single person on this field, at this scale, was capable of bending the outcome alone.
...
Bonus @200PS
Support me on P@reon and read upto 20 chapters ahead @Keepsmiling 818 p@reon