On the other side, Shimizu, the Overall Commander of Sunagakure, had not slept all night.
Through the night he had turned the same question over without resolution, whether to push the full main force into the Land of Birds, force Iwagakure into a reactive engagement, and give Yuji a window to slip out under the pressure of a larger battle.
A full day and night had passed. If Yuji was unharmed and free, he should have been back by now. The fact that he wasn't had pulled Shimizu's thoughts steadily toward the worst available conclusion.
The uncertainty was the worst part. Captured or dead, he didn't know which, and the difference mattered for what came next.
The Village's strategic direction for this front was straightforward: hold the line, prevent Iwagakure from taking Land of Wind territory, wait them out. Given Sunagakure's current condition, even a sustained engagement involving a few thousand people would be difficult to absorb.
The Village had not sent him here to escalate. If he requested authorization for a full offensive, the answer from above would almost certainly be no.
And if he committed to a large battle without that authorization, regardless of how it went, he would be the one who answered for every casualty it produced. That was how command worked after wars that had already cost too much.
He understood all of this clearly and still spent the night unable to stop weighing it.
Over six months he had watched Yuji reshape the medical capability of the entire forward force. Setting aside whatever the boy might become, his immediate value to a front-line unit was something every person in this camp could quantify. Losing him would be a real loss, not a theoretical one.
"There's nothing to be done," Shimizu said to no one, pressing his hand over his eyes. His voice came out exhausted.
Then a subordinate came through the tent entrance moving fast, his expression carrying something Shimizu hadn't seen in a while.
"Lord Shimizu. Yuji has returned."
Shimizu was on his feet before the sentence finished.
Yuji came in surrounded by several people, visibly worn, his uniform carrying the evidence of a day and night of continuous movement and fighting.
When his account reached the part about fending off pursuit waves and killing dozens of Iwagakure ninja while evading through enemy territory, the assembled officers went quiet in a particular way, not disbelief, but the recalibration of people who had held an incomplete picture and were now adjusting it.
They knew Yuji was capable. They had seen enough of his battlefield work to know that. But capable in the specific role they had observed, a Medical Ninja operating under the constraints of front-line rescue, rarely free to act without a casualty on his back or his attention split across multiple injured. What he was describing now was something with a different shape entirely.
Nobody suspected the report was fabricated. A falsified mission record was a permanent stain on a shinobi's standing, and Iwagakure's own reaction to whatever had happened out there would be verifiable through intelligence channels soon enough. The few of them simply absorbed it and moved on.
Then Yuji placed something on the table in front of them.
A flute, completely black.
"A special ninja tool. I took it from a rogue ninja leader while dealing with Iwagakure, and encountered a small group of them while I was still being pursued. The situation was urgent and I didn't have time to investigate their origins properly, so I killed several of them and left quickly."
Rogue ninja, unaffiliated wanderers, most of them carrying patchwork techniques borrowed from various villages, frequently hired out to whoever was paying during wartime. The explanation was ordinary enough to pass without scrutiny.
"The ability is unusual. I think it could be useful against Iwagakure."
He described the effect of the military music, choosing his words with slight embellishment, framing what he had personally observed the rogue ninja leader display, and what he himself had tested afterward in the field against the pursuing squads.
"Mass hallucination?" Shimizu said.
Yuji activated it.
Ito drew a sharp breath.
Ito had never encountered this tool before and had no knowledge of its origins. If what Yuji described was accurate, that he had discovered mid-battle its ability to affect hostile targets at scale, the implications were difficult to overstate.
"Outside," Shimizu said. "All of us."
He wanted a proper demonstration. The camp's full complement of stationed shinobi would serve as the test population, the area and numbers matched battlefield conditions closely enough to give a real reading of the tool's range and effect.
Several minutes later, looking out at the number of Sunagakure ninja who had dropped unconscious across the camp's grounds, the assembled officers were first silent, then visibly energized.
"The range has limits, it doesn't extend indefinitely," one captain said, his expression already working through the tactical applications. "But it's sufficient. And yes, a target with strong enough chakra control can resist the effect, but on a large-scale battlefield, that profile describes a small minority."
"More importantly, it doesn't demand much from the user's own chakra reserves," another added. "It's not a technique that burns through the person activating it."
"Let me try," Shimizu said, extending his hand.
Yuji placed the flute in it.
Shimizu raised it and pushed chakra through.
Silence. No sound.
He tried again. Nothing.
He passed it to Ito without comment. Ito attempted it with the same result. The flute went around the group, Sasori included, and produced nothing for any of them. When it came back to Yuji's hand, the effect returned immediately.
"Only Yuji can activate it," Ito said, genuinely puzzled.
"Not unheard of." Shimizu stroked his chin. "Some special ninja tools are bound to a specific user. They select who can wield them." He turned the flute over in his mind. "Rogue ninja originsm difficult to trace. Their lineages go back to the earlier periods of the ninja world, and the connections from that era are largely lost. There's no practical way to investigate further."
He looked at Yuji, his expression carrying something measured. "You found this, and that counts for something. But once it's reported to the Village..."
Yuji was already smiling. "I understand."
The tool would be documented, reported, and claimed as village property. If anyone else in the village could use it, the higher-ups would decide its assignment and its holder. Ownership would belong to Sunagakurem that was simply how it worked.
Yuji kept the rest of the thought to himself.
An exclusive ninja tool meant exactly one thing: apart from him, no one else in the world could activate it.
Whatever the village's position on ownership, whatever the higher-ups decided about assignment, at the end of that process, the flute would come back to his hands. There was no other outcome available to them.
...
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