Another Boring Uchiha Power Fantasy.

The outpost was falling. Nonō could feel it. The shouts getting closer, the explosions getting louder, the gaps between them getting shorter. Twenty minutes ago the outer wall had been intact. Ten minutes ago the eastern wall had come down. Now the Sand shinobi were inside the compound and the fighting was room to room and wall to wall and the sounds were the sounds of people dying in spaces too small to dodge.

She was crouched behind a collapsed section of barricade with the Hyūga twins, and the two of them were the reason she was still alive.

Hiashi Hyūga fought like the heir he was. He stepped into the gap where the barricade had fallen and his Byakugan was already reading the three Suna chunin rushing through. Veins standing against the pale skin around his eyes, the dōjutsu seeing everything: chakra pathways, tenketsu points, the flow of chakra through their bodies mapped in perfect three-dimensional clarity.

The first chunin threw a kunai. Hiashi deflected it with a tap of his finger that didn’t waste a single degree of motion as he slid forward. His fingers found the man’s extended arm and struck twice, and the arm went dead from shoulder to fingertip. A third strike hit the chunin’s chest, directly over the heart, and the chakra burst disrupted the organ’s rhythm. The man dropped.

The second chunin closed in with a sword. Hiashi pivoted, the blade passing within an inch of his ribs, and his palm found the swordsman’s armpit, a cluster of tenketsu that ran the entire arm. Two strikes. The sword clattered. A spinning palm strike to the chest and the swordsman flew backward through the gap.

Three seconds. Two down.

Hizashi came through the gap from the opposite side and met the third.

The twins fought differently in the details but identically in the fundamentals. The same Gentle Fist. The same Byakugan reading every action before striking. But where Hiashi was aggressive, Hizashi was fluid: he let the third chunin swing, reading the trajectory through the Byakugan before the arm finished extending, then stepped inside the arc and struck the man’s elbow, wrist, and shoulder in a three-hit sequence so fast it sounded like a single impact.

The chunin’s arm locked. Hizashi spun behind him and drove a palm into the base of his spine.

The man collapsed without a sound.

”Hmph. Only a fool would try to test the strongest taijutsu in the world.” Hiashi said.

”Finished…” Hizashi looked around.

Both were sixteen years old. Hiashi was half a step more aggressive. Hizashi was half a step more patient. Together they were a force that nothing besides a jonin was getting through. And even then, it wasn’t guaranteed they could put them down.

The third member of their squad had not been idle.

While the twins held the gap, Nonō had been moving through the wounded behind the barricade. Three shinobi down, all with injuries from the initial breach. She’d stabilized the worst one, a woman with shrapnel in her gut, in forty seconds with the Mystical Palm. The other two she’d triaged, bandaged, and told to stay down.

”I need to move forward.” She said, adjusting her glasses.

”Are you sure you’re up for something like that? You look tired.” Hiashi slightly mocked.

”Forward is where the wounded are.” Her spine was straight, her breathing even. ”There are people in the east wing who were cut off when the wall came down. I can hear them.”

”I see them.” Hizashi said. His Byakugan was active, scanning through the remaining walls. ”Four. Two are down. One is fighting. One is...” He paused. ”Hiding.”

”Then I need to get to them.”

”We’ll help you out, I guess.” Hiashi shrugged. More enemies to kill would only help him become a jonin faster.

They followed behind Nonō.

The east wing of the outpost was a slaughter. Sand shinobi had poured through the breach and the Leaf defenders who’d been stationed there had been overwhelmed. Bodies on the ground. Kunai in walls. The smell of blood and death.

A Suna chunin came around a corner. Nonō attacked first. She didn’t look dangerous. She was twelve, small-framed, with round glasses and a medical smock over her flak jacket. She carried no visible weapon. Her hands were glowing blue. She looked like exactly what she was: a medic who’d taken a wrong turn.

The chunin raised his kunai.

Nonō’s right hand brushed his forearm as she stepped past him. The Chakra Scalpel was a thin blue edge of chakra at her fingertips, and it made no sound at all. It cut through the tendons of his forearm without breaking the skin. His fingers went slack. The kunai fell. He stared at his hand, confused, because nothing had visibly happened to it.

Her left hand touched his thigh as she passed. The scalpel severed the quadriceps. His leg buckled. He was on the ground, one arm useless, one leg collapsed, and there wasn’t a single mark on his body to explain why.

”W-What…” He stammered.

Hizashi finished him.

They pushed deeper. Another Suna shinobi, this one a kunoichi with a puppet on strings, the doll bristling with hidden blades. The puppet lunged at Hiashi, who avoided it and severed the chakra strings with the Gentle Fist. The puppet collapsed. The kunoichi created new strings and reattached, and the puppet rose again.

Nonō circled behind the puppeteer while the twins occupied the puppet. Small and quiet, she was the last person in the room anyone was watching. Her hands slid down the backs of the kunoichi’s arms, shoulder to wrist, and the Chakra Scalpel went with them, through the muscle and the tendons underneath, without a drop of blood. The kunoichi’s arms dropped. Her fingers went slack, her chakra strings dissolved, and the puppet hit the floor in a clatter of wooden limbs and hidden blades. She stood there, conscious, staring down at her own arms hanging at her sides, unable to lift either of them.

”I’m sorry, but I can’t allow you to continue killing my comrades.” Nonō whispered.

Nonō drew a scalpel from her medical pouch and stabbed it into the side of the kunoichi’s neck, straight through the carotid artery.

They moved on. They found the four cut-off shinobi in the east wing’s storage room. Two were wounded, one critically, a genin with a piece of wall debris embedded in his chest. The fighting one, a chunin with blood on her face, nearly attacked them before recognizing the Konoha headbands. The hiding one was a supply clerk with no combat training who had crawled under a shelf and was shaking so badly the shelf was rattling.

Nonō knelt beside the critically wounded genin. The debris had punctured the chest cavity. Air was leaking in through the hole, collapsing the lung. She could hear it, a wet sucking sound with every breath that was getting weaker.

”Hold still,” She said. ”I’m going to help you, okay?”

She used the Chakra Scalpel first, cutting the debris fragment loose along the path of least damage and drawing it out. The genin screamed. Nonō would’ve loved to place him under a genjutsu like her sensei, but she had to reserve her chakra. She didn’t have her chakra reserves. And like she was taught, that meant she had to heal in a different way compared to her sensei.

Nonō sealed the chest wound with the Mystical Palm, feeding healing chakra into the puncture, rebuilding the pleural wall from the inside. Nonō kept working while inwardly apologizing. He tried to scream the whole time, but it only came out as a wheeze.

Ninety seconds later, the lung reinflated. The wound closed. The genin’s breathing stabilized from a ragged wheeze to something approaching normal.

”You’ll be fine, okay?” She reassured him. ”Don’t move for ten minutes.”

She healed the second wounded shinobi, a dislocated shoulder with torn ligaments, in thirty seconds. She coaxed the supply clerk out from under the shelf and checked him for injuries. Unharmed. Just terrified.

”Stay here.” She told them all. ”Hiashi-san, Hizashi-san and I will clear a path to safety.”

The genin stared at her. ”You’re an angel…” He’d never seen a more beautiful girl in his life…

”That’s my sensei...” Nonō blushed.

”The Red-Eyed Angel is your sensei?! No wonder…” The chunin exclaimed.

…

The outpost barely held. The Suna assault pulled back when their momentum stalled, the breach sealed by a combination of earth jutsu from the remaining Konoha defenders and the fact that every Suna shinobi who’d entered the east wing had died.

The quiet afterward was the worst part. The moaning of the wounded. The shuffle of stretcher teams. The crackle of fires nobody had the energy to put out. Nonō worked through it. She was the highest-ranking medical-nin at the outpost, which meant she was in charge of triage, treatment priority, and the decision nobody wanted to make: who got healed first and who waited and who was past helping.

She healed fourteen people that afternoon.

…

He arrived at the outpost two hours after the assault ended with the rest of the reinforcements, eight of them in all, walking through the western gate. Seven chunin with tired faces and mud to their knees, and one genin in a green jumpsuit, grinning like he’d been invited somewhere pleasant. He was pretty old for a genin.

“Reinforcement reporting in!” He announced to the gate sentry with a thumbs-up and a grin that showed too many teeth. “Might Duy! Here to help!”

The sentry looked at him, looked at his headband, and looked at the outpost behind him that had nearly been overrun.

“...They sent us a genin?”

”They sent you Konoha’s most youthful genin!” Duy corrected, still grinning. ”Where do you need me?”

They put him on rubble-clearing duty. He cleared debris with a speed and energy that didn’t match his rank, hauling stones and beams that should have required two people, whistling to himself, occasionally stopping to say positive things to anyone who looked at him. The other shinobi at the outpost gave him a wide berth.

…

The Suna forces came back three days later. This time they brought something unexpected… The first sign was the sand. It came over the ridge to the south in a wave that shouldn’t have existed. Rain Country was mud and clay and rock, not sand, but the wave that crested the ridge was golden-brown and dry despite the rain, the water beading off it and running away.

Hiashi’s Byakugan activated. Hizashi’s followed.

”It’s just one…” Hiashi muttered. “But his chakra is unbelievable…”

The shinobi walked over the ridge. He was an adult with dark rings under his eyes and a gourd on his back that leaked sand in a continuous stream. The sand moved for him, a living extension of his will, rivers of it pouring off the ridge and spreading across the ground in every direction. It covered the approach like a carpet. It climbed the walls of the outpost like ivy. It found the gaps in the barricade and pushed through them, grains hissing against stone, an army made of dust.

Behind him, fifty Suna shinobi followed at a distance. They didn’t need to fight. They had him.

”Everyone, hold the walls!” The outpost commander, a special jonin named Akane, was shouting from the watchtower. ”That’s Suna’s jinchūriki! Full defense! Do NOT engage at close range!”

Nonō watched the sand reach the outer wall. It pressed against the reinforced stone, testing it, and the stone cracked.

Hiashi and Hizashi stood on either side of her. Their Byakugan was reading the jinchūriki’s chakra network and what they saw made both of them tense.

”His chakra reserves are beyond anything I’ve ever seen…” Hiashi stated. Very rarely during this war had he ever felt fear…

The outer wall came down. Sand poured through in a flood, carrying debris and dust. The Konoha defenders scattered. Jutsu fired at the jinchūriki from three directions: fire, water, lightning. The sand rose in a dome around him and absorbed the fire and water. Fire did nothing. Water turned the sand sluggish and mud-like. Lightning punched through the dome and broke apart against the armor of sand beneath it.

He continued forward as the sand reformed behind him. Three Konoha-nin rushed him. The sand caught them before they got within ten meters. Tendrils wrapped around their legs, their arms, their torsos, lifting them off the ground. The jinchūriki looked at them with dead, exhausted eyes and clenched his fist.

They screamed as their bodies were crushed into a pulp.

”We can’t fight that…” Hizashi knew without a doubt.

”We need to retreat.” Hiashi surprisingly agreed.

”The wounded can’t move.” Nonō said. ”I have eleven patients in the medical tent.”

”If we stay, we all die.”

”If we leave them, they all die.”

”Medic, are you serious?”

”I can’t leave them.” Nonō shook her head.

A section of the inner wall exploded inward. Sand flooded the courtyard. The jinchūriki was coming through, slow, unstoppable, the sand spreading ahead of him like a living carpet, and everything it touched was crushed or buried or swallowed.

Might Duy appeared beside them. He wasn’t grinning anymore.

”You three, how fast can you run?” He asked.

”What?” Hiashi stared at him.

”How fast can you run? If I gave you thirty seconds to run, could you reach the treeline?”

”We’re not leaving the-” Nonō started.

”The outpost is gone, kid.” Duy’s voice was gentle as he ruffled her hair. ”Look around. That thing in there will kill everyone here and nobody in this compound can stop it.”

”Then what are you suggesting?” Hizashi asked.

”I’m suggesting I buy you time and you take the girl and you run.”

”You just said nobody here can stop it.”

”I said nobody can stop it.” Duy looked at the wall where sand was grinding through the stone. ”I didn’t say nobody can slow it down.”

He took a breath.

”Listen to me.” He crouched so he was eye-level with her. His face was kind. ”You’re a medical-nin. The springtime of your youth hasn’t even started yet! I’ve seen the way you treated those people in the tent. Konoha still needs you. You stay alive and you heal more people. Your job isn’t to burn your budding youth here trying to protect people you can’t.”

”What are you going to do…?”

He stood. He faced the wall.

”Something I’ve been training for my whole life.”

Behind him, Nonō turned and ran for the medical tent. The twins swore and ran after her.

Gate of Opening.

The air around him changed. A pressure, sudden and immense, radiating from his body. His muscles bulged, the jumpsuit stretching tight, veins standing against the skin of his neck and arms.

Gate of Healing.

Energy flooded him. The fatigue of three days of rubble-clearing vanished. His body surged with a vitality.

Gate of Life.

His skin flushed red. The air itself pushed outward from his body. His pupils vanished. The veins across his body stood out like cords and his hair lifted as if gravity had forgotten about him.

Nonō knew that red. Mikoto-sensei had warned them about it the day she taught them the Seven Heavens Breathing Method: the Third Activation, when the skin burned red and the body started paying for every second.

That’s the Seven Heavens…?

It wasn’t. Mikoto-sensei’s method went in through the lungs. Whatever Duy was doing, he was forcing his way through something deeper, and he was going beyond the third activation.

Gate of Pain.

Blood leaked from his nose. His muscles swelled past what the jumpsuit could contain, seams splitting along the shoulders and arms. The ground beneath his feet cracked from the pressure of his chakra alone.

Gate of Limit.

The shockwave knocked Nonō and the twins backward. The earth cratered beneath Duy’s feet. His body was radiating chakra, and the rain was being pushed away by the force of his chakra, a dry circle forming around him in the middle of a downpour.

The jinchūriki’s sand reacted. It surged toward Duy, a wall of golden-brown rushing to crush the sudden threat.

Duy ran through the sand. Five gates of speed turned him into a green blur that the sand couldn’t track, couldn’t catch, couldn’t redirect fast enough to stop. He hit the jinchūriki’s sand dome at full speed and punched through it, his fist cratering the compressed barrier, and for one second the jinchūriki’s dead eyes showed something they hadn’t shown all day.

Surprise.

Duy grabbed the jinchūriki’s gourd strap. He didn’t try to kill him. He didn’t try to fight. He used the momentary shock of contact to redirect his own momentum, planting a foot on the jinchūriki’s chest and launching himself backward at a speed that tore a trench in the courtyard.

The sand reformed. The jinchūriki stumbled, recovered, and the sand surged again, denser, faster.

Duy was already gone. He hit the medical tent at full sprint. Nonō was in the doorway with her hands already glowing over the nearest cot, and the twins were right behind her, reaching for her arms. Duy scooped her under one arm, caught Hiashi by the collar with his other hand, and screamed, ”HIZASHI, GRAB ON!”

Hizashi grabbed his brother’s arm. Duy’s legs coiled and he launched all four of them over the outpost wall in a single leap that cleared the compound entirely, landing in the treeline thirty meters beyond the outpost’s wall in a crash of branches and mud and bodies.

Over his shoulder, through the rain, Nonō could see the medical tent. Then the sand came down over it, and she couldn’t see it anymore. He didn’t stop. Five gates of speed carried them through the forest at a pace that turned the trees into a green-brown blur. Nonō, pressed against his side, could feel his heartbeat through his chest. It was impossibly fast, a drumroll, a machine running past every safety limit it had.

”You’re killing yourself!” She realized. She could feel what the forbidden jutsu was doing to his body.

”Sorry young lady. We’re almost home free. Worry about that after!” Duy responded.

He ran for two minutes. Two minutes of speed that no shinobi without the gates could match, and when he finally stopped it was because his body told him it was done.

The Gate of Limit closed first. Then Pain. Then Life. Then Healing. Then Opening.

The gates shut like doors slamming. The power left. The strength left. Everything that had been holding him together for the past three minutes let go at once.

Might Duy fell with a scream.

He hit the ground face-first and didn’t move. His body was messed up beyond belief. The muscles in his legs had torn in strips, the fibers separated like pulled rope. His arms were the same, the biceps and forearms shredded from the inside by forces they were never meant to endure. His ribs were cracked, three on the left, two on the right, the stress fractures from the fifth gate’s shockwave propagating through bone that had been vibrating at superhuman frequencies. Blood seeped from his nose, his ears, from the corners of his eyes.

He was breathing. Barely.

Hiashi hit the ground beside him, released from the grip, and rolled to a stop. Hizashi landed in a heap and immediately stood, Byakugan scanning behind them for pursuit. Nothing. The jinchūriki hadn’t followed. They were clear.

“Is he alive?” Hiashi asked, looking down at Duy, surprised he was capable of such speed and strength…

“Yes, I think…” Nonō was already kneeling at his side. Her glasses were gone, lost somewhere in the sprint, and without them Duy was a blur of torn green cloth and red skin. Her hands didn’t shake. Her eyes were the problem.

“Hiashi-san.” She didn’t look up. “I can’t see well without my glasses. I need your eyes. Tell me everything you see inside him.”

Hiashi hesitated for half a second. Then the veins rose around his eyes, and he knelt across from her.

“His heart is beating too fast to count,” he said. “The muscle around it looks swollen.” He frowned. “And his ribs… Three cracked on the left, two on the right. Blood pooling under the skin of his back, here, and here.” He pointed. “Every big muscle in his arms and legs is torn. The fibers in his legs look like shredded rope.”

“Nerves?”

Hiashi leaned closer. “There’s a thread of chakra running along the nerves in his legs. It’s thin. Broken in places.”

Nonō pressed her lips together. “His heart first. If it doesn’t slow down in the next few minutes, it’ll give out.”

She placed both glowing hands on his chest and poured healing chakra into the heart, calming the frantic rhythm, easing the muscle back from the edge of seizure.

“Tell me when it slows.”

Hiashi watched. “Slower,” he said. Then, a few seconds later, “Slower.” Then, “There. That’s a pace a person could live with.”

She held it there until his heart found a rhythm it could survive. Then the muscles. Layer by layer. The torn fibers couldn’t be rebuilt in one session, that would take days of sustained healing, but she could stop the bleeding, seal the worst of the tears, prevent the damage from spreading. Hiashi called out every tear she couldn’t see, and she followed his voice from Duy’s chest to his arms, his legs, his ribs.

“Some of this damage will be permanent unless he gets sustained treatment over several weeks,” She muttered. “This forbidden jutsu nearly killed him...”

Hiashi was looking at Duy’s face. The man’s eyes were closed. His expression, beneath the blood and the sweat and the bruising, was peaceful.

”To think someone as foolish as this saved my life…” Hiashi shook his head.

”He saved everyone he could.” Nonō’s hands glowed.

She worked for an hour, popping a food pill to continue going when her chakra ran low. The forest was quiet around them, just the rain and the glow. When she finally sat back, Duy’s vitals were stable. His heart was beating at a survivable pace. His muscles were sealed, not healed, patched enough to keep him alive until she had the necessary tools and time to do the real work. His ribs were set. The internal bruising was contained.

He would live. He would walk again. It would take time and it would hurt and there was a possibility, that some of the damage would be permanent. But he would live.

Duy opened his eyes.

He looked up at Nonō’s face, blurred without her glasses, lit from below by the fading green glow in her palms. He looked at the twins, standing guard, their Byakugan scanning the trees. He looked at the sky, grey and raining.

He smiled.

”Not bad for a youthful genin, wouldn’t ya say?” he weakly chuckled.

Nonō laughed.

”Thank you very much, Duy-san.”

“The Power of Youth will never let you down.” Duy’s hand shook as he gave her a thumbs up.

He fell asleep. Nonō picked up his body as they prepared to move.