The tent flap rustled and a young chunin named Kenji with earnest eyes and a fresh scar bisecting his eyebrow, entered with a crisp bow.
"Miwa-san," he reported, his voice tight with a mixture of respect and apprehension.
"We have received word from the commander! Our unit's redeployment is… postponed. Indefinitely. No new timeline given. We are to await further orders."
The words landed like a physical blow. Miwa's knuckles whitened where they gripped the edge of the desk. The scroll beneath her fingers blurred for a moment.
'Postponed. Indefinitely.'
The frustration, a simmering volcano beneath her calm exterior, threatened to erupt. She took a slow, deliberate breath, the scent of ink and dust filling her nostrils.
"How long," she murmured, the words low and dangerously controlled, more to herself than to Kenji,
"do they expect seasoned shinobi to gather dust while the war grinds on? How long before they remember we exist?"
Kenji shifted his weight, sensing the storm beneath her stillness. He wisely remained silent.
Miwa closed her eyes for a heartbeat, mastering the surge of anger. It wasn't Kenji's fault. He was just the messenger. She opened her eyes, the fury banked, replaced by a cold, professional mask.
"Understood, Kenji. You are Dismissed. Rotate watch rotations as scheduled."
Kenji bowed again, deeper this time, relief flickering across his face.
"Hai!" He exited swiftly, the tent flap whumping closed behind him, leaving Miwa alone with the suffocating silence and the scroll that held nothing but stagnation.
The frustration demanded an outlet. Sitting still was anathema. Miwa pushed back from the desk with a sharp scrape of wood on packed earth. She needed to move, to feel the burn of exertion, to silence the clamour of uselessness in her mind. She needed to train.
She strode out of the tent, ignoring the curious glances from shinobi tending to gear or sharpening blades. The late afternoon sun cast long, sharp shadows across the camp.
Near the perimeter, away from the main bustle, lay a relatively clear patch of ground bordered by thick-trunked pines – a space commandeered but underutilized.
'Perfect.'
With swift, efficient movements born of decades of discipline, Miwa began transforming the space into a semi-training ground. She dragged weathered practice posts – logs roughly hewn and scarred by countless strikes – into a loose triangle.
She unearthed worn straw dummies from a supply tent, their burlap sacks frayed and leaking stuffing, propping them against the posts. She cleared rocks and debris from a central area, leaving hard-packed earth scuffed by previous users.
Taking her position in the centre, Miwa drew a standard-issue kunai. The cool weight felt familiar, grounding. She closed her eyes, centring herself, pushing the image of the postponed deployment scroll away. When she opened them, her Sharingan flared to life – twin crimson pinwheels spinning slowly, sharpening the world to impossible clarity. Every grain of dirt, every splinter on the posts, every swaying needle on the pines snapped into hyper-focus.
"Fwip-THWACK!"
She exploded into motion. A kunai blurred from her hand, embedding itself dead-centre in the forehead of the nearest dummy with a solid thunk. She was already moving, a whirlwind of controlled fury.
Her steps were precise flowing seamlessly between the posts. Fists snapped out impacting a post with bone-jarring force, leaving splinters in her wake. A spinning back kick slammed into a dummy, sending it rocking violently on its base.
She moved through Uchiha taijutsu katas, the forms sharp, aggressive, designed for lethal efficiency. High blocks deflected imagined strikes, and low sweeps sought to destabilize invisible opponents.
Her movements were a Jonin's dance – fast, powerful, economical. Yet, to her own critical eye, honed by the Sharingan, something was… off.
A fractional hesitation in a spin. A slight stiffness in the follow-through of a high kick. A breath held a moment too long during a complex combination.
The frustration fueled her, but her body protested. A deep, persistent ache radiated from her core, not just the expected burn of exertion, but a gnawing, internal throb that had settled since the brutal clash at No Man's Land.
The medical-nin had mumbled about "chakra overconsumption," "severe musculoskeletal stress," and "residual chakra scarring." They'd poked and prodded, and exchanged worried glances.
"It's hard to say, Captain," the head medic had admitted, wiping his brow. "Some of this damage… the sheer kinetic overload… it bears hallmarks of Biju-level force. It could be from Killer Bee's impacts. But the deep tissue tears, the way your chakra pathways are inflamed… it also resemble cumulative damage from years of high-intensity combat. Like old injuries aggravated past their limit."
Uncertainty. Her body was a battleground of conflicting traumas, and the healers couldn't definitively name the enemy.
Gritting her teeth, Miwa pushed harder.
She launched into a sequence of rapid kunai throws each blade finding a different vital point on the dummies and posts. She flowed into acrobatic evasions, cartwheeling away from imagined earth spikes, rolling beneath invisible wire traps.
Sweat-plastered strands of dark hair to her temples, her breath coming in sharp, controlled gasps now. The Sharingan burned, tracking dust motes stirred by her passage, analyzing the minute tremors in her own muscles.
"CRACK-SPLINTER!"
A roundhouse kick aimed at a practice post connected, but the recoil sent a jolt of white-hot pain lancing up her leg from her hip. She stumbled, a fraction, her flawless rhythm broken. A snarl escaped her lips, more at her own weakness than the pain.
"Useless!" she hissed to the empty training ground, the word swallowed by the rustling pines. She wasn't training; she was flailing. Punishing her body for its betrayal, for the command's indifference, for the war that left her here, waiting.
Driven by a surge of bitter anger, she gathered chakra. Not for a jutsu, but for raw, physical enhancement. Blue-white energy crackled around her fists and feet, humming with dangerous intensity. She slammed a chakra-enhanced palm strike into the central practice post.
"KA-WHAM!"
The sound was thunderous. The thick log, hardened by years of abuse, splintered down the middle with a tortured groan, the top half shearing off and crashing to the ground in a cloud of dust and wood fragments. The shockwave rippled out, flattening the grass in a small radius and making the remaining dummies shudder violently.
Miwa stood amidst the settling debris, chest heaving, the chakra glow fading from her limbs. The display of power was undeniable, Jonin-level devastation. But the cost was immediate and brutal. The deep ache in her core flared into a searing agony, stealing her breath.
A wave of dizziness washed over her, and she swayed, bracing a hand against the splintered stump of the post, her knuckles white. Sweat dripped from her chin onto the ruined wood.
"Flap-Flap-Flap… THUD!"
The sound was incongruous. Not the wind in the pines, not the distant camp noises. The distinct, heavy flap of large wings, followed immediately by a soft, solid thud landing just behind her on the soft earth.
Every nerve in Miwa's body, already frayed and screaming, snapped taut. Adrenaline surged, momentarily eclipsing the pain.
'An intruder?'
Instinct took over. Despite the agony, she spun in a low crouch, a kunai flashing into her hand from a thigh holster in a blur of motion, her Sharingan instinctively trying to reactivate, only managing a weak crimson flicker before sputtering out. Her injured leg protested violently, threatening to buckle.
Her combat-ready stance froze mid-motion. Standing calmly amidst the wreckage of her training ground, not five meters away, was Renjiro. Dust motes, still settling from her destructive palm strike, drifted around him like lazy snowflakes. He looked… composed. Unhurried. As if shattering the quietude of a military encampment's perimeter was a casual stroll.
In his hand, held casually at his side, was a long, slender case. It looked old, crafted from smooth, dark leather worn soft at the edges, fastened with simple brass clasps. There were no markings, but it exuded a sense of contained purpose.
He extended the leather case towards her. His voice, when he spoke, was calm, quiet, yet it cut through the pounding in her ears and the raggedness of her breath with startling clarity:
"Happy Birthday, Aunt Miwa."