Another Boring Uchiha Power Fantasy.

Field Hospital Two smelled like iron and medicine and sweat and the sour-sweet undercurrent of infection that no amount of cleaning could fully scrub.

Mikoto had been inside it for several hours and she hadn’t sat down once.

The hospital was four tents joined by canvas corridors, the largest medical facility at Kaminari Pass. Forty cots. When she’d arrived, thirty-two of them were occupied. By midnight of the first day, all forty were full and three patients were lying on blankets on the floor between the rows.

She had no choice but to work work work.

The first patient was a chunin with a crushed pelvis. An earth jutsu had caught him mid-retreat, a pillar of stone rising under his legs and slamming upward with enough force to shatter the bone in four places. The Sharingan showed her where the damage was, her healing chakra flowing into the pelvis and pooling at every break, lighting up the fracture map like water filling cracks in dry earth. Four major breaks. She could feel them through the chakra before her hands confirmed it. She set the fragments with the Chakra Scalpel, isolating each break, aligning the edges, then switched to the Mystical Palm and fed healing chakra into the fissures until they began to fuse.

Thirty minutes. He’d walk again in a week. Without her, he’d have been retired from service. Maybe he would’ve been thankful in a way? At least from the injuries she’s seen so far…

The second was a genin who’d taken a water jutsu to the face. The pressurized stream had torn through his cheek, shattered his jaw on the right side, and collapsed the sinus cavity behind it. He was drowning in his own blood when they brought him in. She cleared the airway first, suctioning fluid with chakra, then rebuilt the jaw in pieces. The Sharingan let her track the healing chakra as it moved through the shattered jaw, showing her where the fragments sat by how the chakra flowed around them. Each obstruction was a gap in the glow, and she fitted the pieces together by closing the gaps one by one. The sinus cavity she sealed shut. The cheek she closed last, knitting the muscle and skin over the repaired structure.

Twenty-five minutes. He’d have scars but he’d breathe through both nostrils.

The third was a special jonin who had burns across sixty percent of her torso. A fire jutsu had caught her flak jacket and the jacket had melted into her skin in patches. Removing the fused material without tearing the tissue beneath it required the Chakra Scalpel at its finest, cutting the fused material free while the Sharingan tracked the chakra scalpel’s edge through each layer, showing her exactly where synthetic ended and living tissue began by the difference in how chakra moved through them. The woman wasn’t conscious. Mikoto placed her under a peaceful genjutsu with her Sharingan while she peeled her vest out of her body one centimeter at a time.

Forty-five minutes. The burns would heal. Hopefully the memory of the pain wouldn’t haunt her.

Patient after patient. Hour after hour. The flow didn’t stop because the fighting didn’t stop. Konoha pushed. Ame pushed back. Both sides bled and the blood ran downhill to the hospitals.

The other medics in Field Hospital Two were good. A jonin-level medical-nin named Arata who had been running the hospital since the battle began. Three chunin medics who rotated in eight-hour shifts. Two genin assistants who handled triage, bandaging, and supply management.

None of them could do what Mikoto could do.

Arata noticed on the first night.

He was a stout man with tired eyes and skillful hands who had been healing shinobi for over a decade. He watched Mikoto rebuild the genin’s jaw and he didn’t say anything for a long time.

”How old are you?” he asked, when she moved to the next patient.

”Thirteen.”

He watched her work for another minute.

”You’re faster than me,” He said without any resentment. ”Are those fancy eyes really that miraculous?”

”It helps me see the damage better.”

”I can see the damage. I’ve been seeing damage for years.” He folded his arms. ”You’re seeing something I can’t.”

”Yeah, my eyes help me see a bit more than the average shinobi.” She responded without stopping her work. Her hands glowed green over a man’s shattered forearm, the bones realigning under her palms.

”Heh... Now how is that fair to me that a little girl who hasn’t been alive for as long as I been working can do my job better than me?” He laughed.

“It kind of isn’t...” Mikoto didn’t try to deflect the facts.

He assigned her the worst cases after that. The ones the other medics couldn’t handle. The ones that would have died on any other table. She took them without complaint and she saved most of them and the ones she couldn’t save she closed the eyes of and moved on because there was always another one to work on and she still had a large tank of chakra in the reserves.

The boys hauled stretchers.

It had started on the second day when the supply station chunin told them the casualty transport teams were short-handed and anyone with legs and a spine was being pulled to help. The three of them reported to the stretcher depot at the base of the pass trail and were given canvas stretchers and a route: up the trail to the collection point where the front-line medics stabilized the worst cases, then back down to the hospital. Repeat.

The trail up was steep and muddy and lined with rocks that caught their sandals at the worst moments. The trail down was worse because they were carrying someone and every stumble could kill the person on the canvas between them.

Their first carry was a woman with a kunai embedded in her thigh. She was conscious and furious and she cursed the entire way down, which Shikaku later said was actually reassuring because it meant her lungs worked.

Their second carry was a man with no visible wound who couldn’t stop shaking. His eyes were open and they didn’t track anything and his mouth moved without sound. The front-line medic who’d stabilized him said he had internal injuries by an enemy jutsu and his body was in shock. He didn’t speak the entire trip down. He didn’t seem to know they were there.

Their third carry was a genin younger than them. Maybe ten. He had a gash across his stomach that someone had packed with gauze that was already soaked through. He held Inoichi’s hand the whole way down and asked him if his mom would be at the hospital and Inoichi said yes because what else could he say to someone his age on the verge of death?

They made eight carries on the second day. Twelve on the third. The faces blurred together. The weight of the stretcher didn’t.

Between carries, they waited at the collection point for the next one. They sat on rocks and drank water and tried to joke to keep their spirits up. The collection point was a flat shelf of rock just below the tree line where the front-line medics worked in the open air, triaging the wounded as they came off the line. The ones who could walk went down on their own. The ones who couldn’t went on stretchers. The ones who couldn’t be moved at all stayed where they were until they could be or until they didn’t need to be.

The dead were laid in rows along the eastern edge of the shelf. Nobody covered them. There weren’t enough sheets.

The cook fire was warm and the story was about the White Fang.

”You haven’t heard about Sakumo Hatake?” The speaker was a chunin named Doi, a thick-necked man with a crooked nose who had been at the pass for two weeks. He sat on an overturned crate with a bowl of rice balanced on his knee and an audience of eight shinobi arranged around the fire in various states of exhaustion.

”I know the name,” Inoichi said. He was sitting cross-legged with his hands around a canteen of warm water. ”Konoha’s White Fang.”

”The White Fang.” Doi shook his head with something close to reverence. ”Kid, that man is something else. You know what a legend is? A legend is when other legends talk about you with respect. Jiraiya, Tsunade, Orochimaru? Three students of the Hokage? Sakumo Hatake makes them look average.”

A jonin sitting across the fire snorted. She was pretty with a small scar and hadn’t said much all evening. ”That’s an exaggeration.”

”Is it?” Doi leaned forward. ”I talked to a guy who was in a battle with him. Several squads of Suna nin set up an ambush in a canyon. Forty-six of them. Hatake went in alone because his team was pinned and someone had to break the line. He came out the other side in under a minute. Forty-six Suna nin, dead.”

”That’s the story that gets passed around,” the jonin said. ”The real number was probably twelve.”

”Twelve is still twelve.” Doi took a bite of rice. ”And that sword of his. You ever seen it?”

”No.”

”Me neither. But the guy I talked to said when Hatake swings it, it leaves a streak of white in the air. Like a scar in the sky. He said the streak hangs there for a full second after the cut. Enemies see the white streak and they know. Some of them run before the second swing.”

”That’s awesome…” Chōza said quietly.

Doi looked at him. ”Awesome?”

”A sword that leaves light when you swing it. That’s just... cool.”

A few of the shinobi around the fire chuckled. Doi grinned.

”It is cool. I’ll give you that, big guy.” He pointed his chopsticks at the three boys. ”Who are you three anyway? I’ve seen you hauling stretchers.”

”Team Mikoto,” Inoichi said. ”Nara Shikaku, Yamanaka Inoichi, Akimichi Chōza. Our sensei is at the field hospital.”

”The Uchiha girl?” The jonin across the fire sat up straighter. ”Red eyes? Big sword?”

”That’s her.”

”She fixed my leg two days ago. Crushed kneecap, three fractures. She had me walking in twenty minutes.” The jonin looked at the three of them differently. ”That’s your sensei?”

”Yeah!” Chōza nodded. The pride in his voice was unmistakable.

”Lucky kids,” Doi said. ”She’s something special. I heard from the hospital staff that she hasn’t taken a break since she got here.”

”That sounds like her for sure. Always trying to help people…” Shikaku said. He was staring into the fire.

A genin sitting at the edge of the group, quiet until now, spoke up. ”Is it true she’s only thirteen?”

”Yeah,” Inoichi said.

”How is she that good at thirteen?”

The three boys looked at each other. None of them had an answer that they could give. They knew some of the reasons. They’d seen how she trained, how she studied, how she always pushed herself and then past what should have been possible. But the full truth of it was something they didn’t understand either. She was just Mikoto-sensei. She was just like that.

”She trains a lot.” Chōza mentioned.

“Maybe it’s because she’s a Uchiha?” Inoichi guessed.

“She does a lot more crap than the average ninja from what I saw.” Shikaku added.

The others didn’t look satisfied with that answer but nobody pressed it.

”If Sakumo Hatake were here,” Doi said, leaning back on his crate, ”this pass would be ours by morning. One man. One sabre. Done.”

”If my sensei were on the front line instead of the hospital,” Inoichi said, ”it’d be done by lunch.”

“The medic?!” 

“The medic.” Inoichi smirked.

The others laughed loudly at that confident proclamation. Just thinking of him as a dumb kid who didn’t know what he was talking about.

Day three.

The hospital had sixty-seven patients today. The rest were on the floor, in the corridors, under tarps outside the main entrance. Arata had requisitioned a fifth tent. It hadn’t arrived yet.

Mikoto’s hands hadn’t stopped glowing in fourteen hours.

She moved between patients, finding the path of greatest need and dealing with it. A severed artery sealed before the blood loss became critical. A punctured lung reinflated with chakra fed through the pleural wall. A shattered femur set and fused in twenty minutes while the man on the cot was unconscious with a genjutsu.

She was tired. Mikoto could admit that.

The fatigue was visible in her eyes and in her wrists and in the small muscles of her back that had been clenched for hours. Her chakra reserves were deep enough that the healing jutsu and chakra scalpel technique barely dented them, but chakra wasn’t the same as stamina. Her body needed sleep, and she hadn’t given it what it wanted. No, what it needed.

But she could keep going. Her body was tired but not at its limit. Not yet. And every time she considered stopping, another stretcher came through the tent flap and the person on it was looking at the ceiling with the expression of someone who was trying to decide whether they wanted to keep living.

She kept going.

”Mikoto.” Arata appeared at her shoulder. He had dark circles under his eyes that looked permanent. ”When did you last eat?”

”This morning.”

”Which morning?”

She thought about it. She couldn’t remember.

”Eat something,” he said. ”I’ll cover your patients for thirty minutes.”

”I can keep-”

”That wasn’t a request. It was an order. Go eat. Thirty minutes. Then come back.”

She ate. She sat on a supply crate behind the hospital and ate a rice ball from her rations and drank water from a canteen and stared at the mountain above her. The fighting was visible from here. Flashes of jutsu along the pass. The distant crackle of explosive tags. Shadows moving across the rock face that might have been people and might have been tricks of the light.

She ate the rice ball in four bites and went back inside after exactly thirty minutes.

Chōza felt the man die.

It happened on the fourth carry of the third day. The man was heavy, a thick-shouldered jonin with a wound in his side that the front-line medic had packed and wrapped and said needed surgery within the hour. Chōza had the front of the stretcher. Inoichi had the back. Shikaku walked alongside, watching the trail for roots and rocks.

The man was conscious when they started down. His breathing was rough but steady. His hand gripped the stretcher rail. He said something to Chōza that Chōza couldn’t hear over the sound of his own footsteps.

”What?” Chōza said.

”Water…” the man said.

”We’ll get you water in a little bit. Just hold on for us, okay?”

”Water…”

”In a few, I promise.”

They kept walking. The trail was steep. Chōza’s arms burned from the angle. The Adamantine Staff was strapped across his back and the weight of it added to the strain but he didn’t think about that.

Five minutes in, the man’s hand slipped off the rail. Chōza heard the fingers uncurl, the soft sound of skin leaving metal.

”Hey,” Chōza said. ”Hey, stay with us, mister! Keep your hand on the rail!”

Nothing.

”Inoichi, is he-”

”His eyes are still open…” Inoichi said from the back. His chakra was fading...

They walked faster. Chōza’s feet found every root and every rock but he didn’t stumble because stumbling meant dropping the stretcher and dropping meant time lost and lost time would kill this guy faster.

”Come on,” Chōza said. ”Come on, we’re almost there. Stay with us, man! Don’t give up!”

Seven minutes from the hospital, the pulse stopped.

Chōza felt the life in him go out all at once.

He stopped walking.

”Chōza. He’s gone…” Inoichi said.

Inoichi set down his end.

Chōza stood there with the stretcher handles in his fists and looked at the man’s face. The eyes were still open. They were brown. The mouth was still parted from the last time he’d asked for water.

He’d wanted water. That was the last thing he’d wanted. Not a miracle. Just some simple water…

”We have to keep moving, guys.” Shikaku exhaled with a heavy breath. He was standing a few feet away. His face was strained. ”They need the stretcher back. And we got more people to help out.”

Chōza nodded. He picked the stretcher back up. They carried the dead man the rest of the way down.

Day four.

Mikoto hit the wall at three in the morning.

One moment she was healing a genin’s shattered collarbone, the green glow steady, her hands sure. The next her red vision doubled. Her knees buckled. She caught herself on the edge of the cot and stayed there, bent over, breathing hard, the healing chakra flickering and dying in her palms.

Damn it!

Her body had reached its limit. She didn’t run out of chakra. Her body. The muscles were cramping. Her eyes ached from the Sharingan’s constant drain on her optic nerves. Her hands were shaking. Because her thirteen-year-old body had been standing and working for three days without more than a few minutes of rest.

She reached into her pouch and pulled out a food pill.

She looked at it. Small, dark, unremarkable. Powerful stimulants and nutrients compressed into a pellet the size of her thumbnail. Three days and three nights of fighting capacity. At the cost of total collapse when it wore off.

She put it in her mouth and swallowed.

The effect was almost instant. Energy flooded her body. The fatigue dissolved. Her vision cleared. Her hands steadied. Her muscles unclenched and the cramping faded and for a few beautiful seconds she felt better than she had since arriving at the pass.

She knew it wasn’t real. The pill wasn’t healing her. It was pushing her body past its limits by force, overriding the signals that said stop, replacing exhaustion with chemicals that her body would pay for later. Three days. Then the crash. Then she’d be useless until she recovered.

Three days was a lot of patients though. A lot of lives saved through her hands… Those saved lives could put an end to this battle quicker and maybe the side effects won’t even be a big deal since the battle would be over!

She straightened up. She put her hands on the genin’s collarbone. The green glow returned, steady and bright.

She kept working.

…

Mikoto didn’t seek it. She didn’t do anything differently from what she’d done at every medical tent and forward camp she’d ever worked in. She healed the people in front of her with everything she had. That was it. That was all she’d ever done.

But the scale was different here. At the other camps, she’d healed dozens. At Kaminari Pass, the number was climbing toward the hundreds. And every person she healed went back to the line or back to the rear and they talked. About her eyes, her sword, her age, her hands, and the way she could fix things that the other medics said were unfixable.

”Get me to the Uchiha!”

It started with one shinobi on a stretcher who’d heard the stories from the man in the cot next to him. By the fourth day, it was a phrase that stretcher teams heard regularly. Wounded shinobi, barely conscious, blood on their faces, asking to be taken to the girl with the red eyes.

The other medics didn’t resent it. They might have, if Mikoto had been arrogant or annoying or anything other than what she was, which was a thirteen-year-old girl who healed them too when they were too tired to stand and who thanked them every time they handed her a roll of bandages. Arata had stopped assigning her cases. She just took the worst ones. The ones nobody else could handle. The ones where the choice was ”Mikoto or death” and there was no third option.

She healed a man whose heart had stopped. She restarted it with a precise burst of lightning-natured chakra to the chest, then repaired the damage that had stopped it in the first place, a fragment of bone from a shattered rib that had punctured the pericardium. The man woke up gasping and the first thing he said was ”Am I dead?” and Mikoto said ”You’re back!” and moved to the next patient.

She healed a woman whose spine had been partially severed by a wind jutsu. The Chakra Scalpel worked along the severed pathway while the Sharingan tracked the chakra flow, showing her where each connection needed to be restored by where the energy stopped flowing. She followed the dead spots and brought them back to life one by one. Arata stood behind her for the entire forty minutes watching her hands and not breathing. The woman’s toes twitched when Mikoto finished. Then her feet. Then her legs.

”You just gave her back her life, you know?” Arata said.

”She wasn’t dead, Arata-san.” Mikoto said. ”She just couldn’t move.”

”That’s the same thing for a shinobi.”

She healed them. One after another after another. The green light didn’t stop.

On the fourth night, Inoichi lost someone.

The woman had taken a kunai to the chest. The blade had missed the heart but punctured the lung, and by the time the stretcher team got her to the collection point she was drowning in her own blood. The front-line medic stabilized her enough to transport, packed the wound, told Inoichi to keep pressure on the packing and keep her talking.

Inoichi kept pressure. He kept talking.

”What’s your name?” he asked, walking beside the stretcher while Chōza and Shikaku carried.

”Yuna.” Her voice bubbled. Red at the corner of her mouth.

”That’s a pretty name. Where are you from, Yuna-san?”

”Konoha.” She coughed. More red. ”The market district. My family runs a tea shop.”

”Yeah? What kind of tea?”

”All kinds.” Her eyes were starting to drift. ”Green. Barley. My mom makes this roasted rice tea that people come from across the village for.”

”That sounds good. I’d like to try it someday.”

”You should.” Her hand found his wrist. Her fingers were cold. ”Come by after the war. I’ll make you a cup.”

”How about two instead? I used to not be a really big fan of tea but-”

They were ten minutes from the hospital. Her breathing changed. The bubbling sound got worse. Inoichi pressed harder on the packing. Blood seeped between his fingers.

”Keep talking, Yuna-san. I wanna hear more about the tea shop.”

”It’s small. Just four tables. My dad built them himself. Cherry wood. He sanded them until they were smooth as glass.” Her voice was getting thinner. ”I used to hide under the tables when I was little. My mom would pretend she couldn’t find me.”

”Yuna-san, stay with me.”

”I’m tired.”

”I know. We’re almost there.”

”I want to go home.”

”You will. I promise. We’re almost there. Just stay with me, please.”

Her breathing stuttered. Inoichi pressed harder. He could feel her ribs under his hands, the fragile cage of bone around the lung that was filling with blood, and he pressed and pressed and pressed because that was all he could do. Pressure. Just pressure. That was the limit of what Mikoto-sensei had taught them and right now it wasn’t enough.

”Yuna-san?”

Her hand was still on his wrist. Her fingers had stopped gripping.

”Yuna-san.”

Five minutes from the hospital.

”Yuna.”

Her chest wasn’t moving.

He stopped walking. He looked at Chōza. Chōza looked back.

”She’s gone...”

They carried her the rest of the way in silence.

At the hospital entrance, Inoichi set the packing down on the supply table. He washed his hands in the basin. He washed them for a long time.

Shikaku stood near him without speaking.

”I told her she could go home,” Inoichi said. He was looking at the water in the basin. Pink from his hands. ”I told her we were almost there.”

”You kept her calm and at peace,” Shikaku said. ”A lot of people don’t even get that...”

”She had a tea shop. Cherry wood tables.” Inoichi’s jaw worked. ”Her mom makes roasted rice tea.”

Shikaku put his hand on Inoichi’s shoulder.

”I want to learn the healing jutsu,” Inoichi said. ”After this. I want Mikoto-sensei to teach me. I don’t want to stand there with my hands on someone’s chest and not be able to do anything except press.”

”Okay.”

”I could have saved her, Shikaku. If I knew how.”

”Maybe.”

”Not maybe. Her lung was the problem. Mikoto-sensei could have fixed that in two minutes.” His fists clenched. ”Two minutes.”

Shikaku didn’t argue. There was nothing to argue with. Mikoto-sensei couldn’t be everywhere.

Day five.

The battle didn’t seem any closer to stopping.

Fresh Ame reinforcements had arrived through the northern approach, visible from the pass as a column of dark-clad shinobi filing through the mountain trails like ants on a root. Konoha’s morning push had been met with a counterattack that drove them back to the previous day’s line. The afternoon push gained thirty meters and lost twenty. The evening was a series of fighting that accomplished nothing except adding more bodies to the collection point.

The stretchers kept coming.

The hospital kept filling.

Mikoto kept healing.

The food pill hummed in her blood. Her body felt borrowed, running on fuel that would demand repayment. But for now her hands were steady and her eyes were red and the green glow didn’t waver.

A chunin she’d healed on the first day came back on a stretcher on the fifth. New wounds. He looked up at her and smiled.

”Haha, there’s my guardian angel!” He greeted her happily.

”I wouldn’t go that far…”

”Are they ever going to give you a break? I don’t think I’ve ever seen you at the mess hall or outside of these medical tents.”

”I took some breaks...” Mikoto didn’t share everything with him. She still had more people to help.

She healed him again. He went back to the battlefield the next morning.

From the command post, no orders came to withdraw. From the Ame side, no signs of retreat.

The flashes lit the mountainside through the night. The stretchers came down. The dead were laid in rows.