The air in the makeshift medical tent was a thick, cloying soup of antiseptic, blood, and the sour tang of fear. Dawn's pale light did little to brighten the scene, merely illuminating the sheer scale of the night's carnage. Stretchers lined the muddy ground, each bearing a story of pain. The low moans of the wounded formed a constant, horrifying chorus beneath the sharp, clipped shouts of the medics. Aiko's world had narrowed to the space between one bandage and the next, her hands moving with a practised, weary rhythm, stained crimson to the wrists.
"Aiko!" The voice was strained, cutting through the din. It was Kaede, a fellow medic with flyaway brown hair and eyes shadowed by two days without sleep. She clutched an empty wooden crate, her knuckles white. "We're out. Gauze, antibiotics, blood-staunching herbs… the last of the coagulant paste is gone. The supply convoy was ambushed at the Red River Pass."
Aiko didn't look up from the shinobi whose leg she was binding, a deep gash still weeping sluggishly. Her voice, when it came, was low and steady, a rock in the churning river of panic.
"We'll have to make do, Kaede. With the Constant attacks on the various divisions, our supply lines are definitely disrupted." She finished the knot with a firm tug. "Start boiling water. Tear any clean cloth we have left—bedrolls, spare uniforms, anything. And find me more needles. Any needles."
Kaede nodded, some of the frantic energy leaving her posture at Aiko's calm command. Aiko was only a chunin, but in this hellish triage, rank was measured in saved lives, not official titles.
A moment later, a new commotion erupted. Two stretcher-bearers rushed in, carrying a jounin whose flak jacket was dark and sodden with blood from a vicious abdominal wound. His breathing was a wet, shallow rasp. "Internal bleeding!" one of them yelled. "The standard field kit won't cut it!"
The senior medics were swamped. Aiko moved without hesitation. "Here. Put him down here." She cleared a space on a low table, her mind already racing, cataloguing the deficiencies. No surgical retractors. No refined chakra scalpels. No sterile clamps.
Her hands glowed with a cool, green light as she placed them on the man's stomach, her chakra probing the damage.
'A severed artery, lacerated spleen.' She saw the procedure in her mind's eye, clear as day.
'Tsunade-sama would've done this with a single gesture,' she thought, a familiar, weary ache of inadequacy settling in her chest. 'A flick of her wrist, a surge of chakra, and the tissues would knit themselves back together. But I'm not her.'
She was Aiko, and she had only what was at hand. "Kaede! My kunai—the clean one from my pouch. Boil it. Now! And get me two thin, sturdy twigs, about this long." She held her fingers apart. "Peel the bark off."
As Kaede scrambled, Aiko focused, pouring her chakra into a precise, needle-fine stream. It wasn't the grand, cellular-reconstruction mastery of the Legendary Sucker. It was battlefield triage at its most brutal. She used the chakra to clamp the artery shut, a temporary, energy-draining measure. When the kunai came, still steaming, she didn't flinch. It was a tool, like any other.
With an economy of motion that belied the horror of the act, she made the necessary incision, her chakra-guided touch ensuring she caused minimal collateral damage. She used the peeled twigs as makeshift retractors, holding the wound open while her fingers, slick with blood, worked inside to tie off the bleeder with a thread unravelled from the hem of her own uniform. It was gruesome, desperate work, but under her hands, the man's ragged breathing began to even out. The immediate threat was over.
As the adrenaline faded, a memory, sharp and unbidden, pierced her exhaustion.
She was seven, hiding in a root cellar that stank of potatoes and damp earth. The world above was thunder and screaming. When the silence finally fell, she crept out into the street that was no longer there. Smoke and rubble. And there, in the middle of the street, lying where they had fallen, were her parents. Not shinobi. Just bakers. Caught in a crossfire between Konoha and Iwa patrols during the Second War.
She remembered standing there, utterly powerless, as medics in green haori rushed past, their focus on the wounded shinobi. No one stopped for the two civilians.
That powerlessness had become a fire in her gut. She hadn't joined the Academy to be a hero or to master a thousand jutsu. She had joined with a single, burning resolve: 'No one else should die helpless.'
She would be the one who stopped.
Back in the present, she finished suturing the jounin's wound with steady hands. She looked around the chaotic tent. Senior medics, some from the prestigious Shimura or Sarutobi clans, barked orders, their authority innate. Everyone spoke in hushed, awe-stricken tones about Tsunade, the ideal they could never reach. Aiko was not part of that circle. She had no famous name, no unique bloodline, no special rank.
But she saw the nods from the other lower-ranked medics, the grateful glances from the orderlies. A young man with a bandaged arm brought her a cup of water without being asked. A kunoichi she'd treated for chakra exhaustion earlier gave her a tired but genuine smile. They were a brotherhood of the overlooked, the workhorses of this war.
'We're not legendary,' Aiko thought, wiping her brow with a clean part of her forearm.
'But we keep people breathing.'
The next few hours blurred into a montage of suffering and stoic endurance. A genin, no older than fifteen, stared blankly at the space where his right arm used to be. A jounin writhed on a cot, his skin crackling with the residual energy of a lightning jutsu, the smell of burnt flesh clinging to him. A man with a punctured lung clutched her sleeve, begging her through bloody lips to send a letter to his little girl in Konoha. She promised she would, storing the crumpled, bloodstained note in her pouch.
She moved from cot to cot, her chakra reserves dipping dangerously low, her body running on fumes and willpower. There was no time for sleep, only for triage, for cleaning, for holding a hand or whispering a reassurance.
Then, the world outside erupted. Alarm bells clanged, a harsh, metallic shriek that cut through the tent's grim rhythm. Messenger birds fell from the sky like feathered stones, tiny scrolls tied to their legs. The words spread through the camp in a terrified whisper:
"Iwa and Kumo… coordinated push… Suna puppets breaking through the eastern flank…"
The tent flaps flew open. A new wave of stretcher-bearers charged in, their faces masks of grim urgency. The floor, already slick, became a river of red. The orderly chaos shattered into pure bedlam. Screams, shouted orders, and the frantic scraping of stretchers on the ground filled the air.
"Aiko! Trauma team three, now!" a senior medic yelled, pointing to a newly cleared space where the most critical cases were being dumped.
Her training took over. She waded into the fray, her eyes scanning, her hands already glowing green as she began checking vitals and chakra flow on the broken bodies. One, two, three… She reached a fourth man, his chest plate shattered, his head lolling to the side. She reached out to turn his head, to check his airway.
Her hand froze in mid-air.
The face was a mess of blood and grime, the forehead protector cracked straight through the Konoha symbol. But beneath the filth and the swelling, the features were unmistakable. The strong jaw she'd teased him about, the stubborn set of his brows, the faint scar on his chin from a childhood fall.
A cold void opened in her stomach, swallowing all the noise, all the chaos.
"No… Hiro?"
It was her old teammate from Team 25. The world snapped back into focus, but now it had a single, terrifying centre. She dropped to her knees, her medical protocols forgotten. She clutched his bloodied, limp hand in both of hers, ignoring the shouting, the running, the fresh tide of misery washing around her.
"Hold on," she whispered, her voice raw, pouring every ounce of her chakra, her resolve, her memory into the words. "I've got you, Hiro."
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