The difficulty was immense.
Not long after the fighting started, Yuji felt it, a genuine creeping exhaustion, his breathing heavier than it should have been. The volume of information his brain was processing had no ceiling.
Every second brought new variables: the injured, the shifting battle lines, attacks coming from directions that changed before he could fully track them. His entire body stayed at maximum alertness without relief, and that cost accumulated faster than he had anticipated.
He moved through it anyway.
"Leave that one," he said, and his voice came out flat.
The Medical Squad member who had been moving toward the collapsed Sunagakure shinobi stopped and looked at him.
"Yes."
"These three," Yuji said, indicating. "Start with them."
He applied the Mystical Palm Technique with one hand and kept his eyes on the field with the other.
Across the battlefield, two of his squad members were moving injured shinobi toward the rear, slowly, because there was no other option. The environment, the chaos, the constant need to avoid becoming casualties themselves, all of it compressed their efficiency into something far below what any of them were capable of in controlled conditions.
Ten people saved since the engagement started. Five of them by him alone. Of the remaining five his squad had reached, two were beyond the point where treatment justified the resources, not misdiagnosed, simply unable to return to combat quickly enough to matter in the current engagement.
Yuji had made the call without sentiment. On a battlefield, the calculus of treatment was not about compassion in isolation. It was about which recoveries would restore fighting strength fast enough to reduce total casualties.
Saving someone who couldn't fight again today meant less capacity to save someone who could.
He did not let himself feel otherwise about it. There was no time for indecision here, and indecision had a body count.
When the shinobi he was treating opened his eyes, Yuji was already talking to the nearest squad member. "Get the intelligence personnel to take the others back to the outpost. This position is mine now."
The Medical Ninja disappeared. Yuji pulled tools from his pouch and moved to the next injured shinobi without breaking pace, his eyes still reading the field ahead.
Every second, Sunagakure shinobi were going down.
He had known intellectually what a front-line battlefield would look like. The reality was worse.
The feeling that settled into him as he worked, hands moving, eyes tracking, mind running the analysis continuously, was not panic. It was something quieter and harder to shake.
Powerlessness was the word for it, though his hands never stopped and he never slowed.
No Medical Ninja stood still and watched comrades die. But the dying outpaced the saving, and there was no way around that, and enduring it once was manageable.
Enduring it as a sustained condition, operation after operation, that was a different weight entirely. He could see what it did to Medical Ninja over time.
He pushed it aside and kept working.
Something else had caught his attention as well. Reading the wider field through his analysis, he could see it in the patterns of the engagement, in a battle at this scale, individual strength was not translating cleanly into impact.
He and Sasori had handled low-level enemies without difficulty in every prior operation.
But now... it wasn't so easy.
The difference between operating as an independent squad and fighting inside a mass engagement was the difference between open ground and a swamp.
Individual ability didn't disappear, it just stopped translating cleanly into outcomes. Targets changed before engagements resolved.
Attacks came from angles that hadn't existed a moment before. The arithmetic of a small squad fight, where superior skill reliably produced superior results, broke down when the variables multiplied beyond a certain point.
Numerical pressure alone could grind down a shinobi who would have been untouchable in any other context.
This was why abilities like the Third Kazekage's or Hanzo's were so significant. A technique that could affect a large area simultaneously, that could degrade or destroy an enemy's operational deployment rather than removing individual targets, operated at a different level of impact entirely.
Single kills, however efficient, were absorbed by a force of sufficient size without changing anything. The battlefield continued around each death as though it hadn't happened.
Only when one shinobi could threaten entire sections of a formation did individual power begin to influence the outcome at scale.
Yuji understood this about his own current ability. His Blood Manipulation was precise and difficult to read, and its lethality was genuine, but its reach was narrow. He could kill efficiently. He could not affect the shape of a battle. Whatever he accomplished in one area, Iwagakure might be consolidating in another, and his effort wouldn't reach far enough to matter there.
He was not at that level yet.
This was a battle of a few hundred people. He found himself trying to imagine thousands, or tens of thousands, and gave up.
The pressure he was feeling now would multiply beyond anything he could meaningfully conceive. Some things couldn't be understood without standing inside them.
Arai had told him to respect the battlefield. Saori had said the same thing. He understood now what they had been pointing at.
He stood, located the next casualty, and moved.
Around him, the shinobi he had treated were waking and returning to the line without looking back. No acknowledgment, they simply got up and rejoined the fight. Yuji was already moving before the last one had cleared his field of vision.
The engagement stayed fierce and showed no sign of breaking. Sunagakure and Iwagakure knew each other's methods too well for the battle to develop unexpected angles, both sides could anticipate the other's deployments and specialties, which stripped the field of the kind of sudden variable that tended to end things quickly. The fighting ground on, neither side finding a decisive opening.
Then the smaller details began to matter.
On the Iwagakure side, their commanding Jonin had been reading the field continuously.
He had used the Camouflage Concealment Technique to approach two Sunagakure puppet users and taken them down cleanly, and now he was still.
His Sensor Ninja were reporting to him in steady intervals, and he was processing everything they brought him, holding the entire field in his mind the way a commander had to.
A single oversight at this scale could shift the outcome.
One report kept returning to his attention.
A short figure moving through the Sunagakure formation, quick, unhurried in its quickness, threading through the chaos with an ease. He had watched this shinobi take down an Iwagakure operative, collect a fallen Sunagakure comrade, and withdraw to a safe distance in a single continuous motion.
Clean and precise, every time.
The Sensor Ninja's analysis made the picture clear. Sunagakure's injured were returning to combat.
Not in large numbers, but this was a battle of a few hundred people, and on a field this size, even a handful of recovered fighters shifted the weight of the engagement in ways that accumulated.
Iwagakure's casualty rate should have been forcing a Sunagakure withdrawal by now. Instead, Sunagakure's effective numbers were holding in a way that made no sense given the damage they had absorbed.
The Medical Squad's output was the reason. And the output wasn't coming from the squad as a whole, it was coming from one person.
The commanding Jonin's eyes settled on the small figure moving through the crowd below.
When had Sunagakure's Medical capability reached this level?
The Iwagakure Ninja's eyes revealed killing intent.
This little one, must be eliminated!
It wasn't that the Medical Squad's overall level had improved; it was this young Sunagakure Ninja who was demonstrating 'dazzling' individual ability on the battlefield.
The problem is him!
...
Bonus @200PS
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