Scraping metal against stone makes a specific sound that's supposed to be calming, or at least that's what people always say about sharpening blades. Meditative, even. The truth is I was just keeping my hands busy because sitting still after being awake for thirty-six hours means your brain starts doing weird things, like counting the cracks in the ceiling or wondering if you've been spelling your own name wrong your entire life. The tanto didn't need sharpening. I'd sharpened it yesterday, or maybe the day before that, time gets fuzzy when you stop sleeping properly.
Wartime schedules were complete nonsense.
The door opened without warning, and a chunin I vaguely recognized stuck his head in. "Hey, Shinji. Commander Minoru wants to see you."
I looked up from the blade. "What, right now?"
"Yeah, he said right now."
Great, just perfect. I set the whetstone aside and wiped the blade clean with a cloth, checking the edge one last time before sliding it back into its sheath. The other chunin in the room, my roommates who I'd been sharing this space with for weeks now, all turned to look at me with identical expressions of barely suppressed amusement.
"Oh man, this is going to be good," one of them said, and he was grinning like he knew something I didn't.
Another one leaned back on his bunk. "You think they're finally going to promote him to jonin or something? I mean, it's about time honestly. He's been making the rest of us look pretty bad with all the missions he's been taking lately."
"Nah, I bet they're probably just going to yell at him again for blowing up that enemy patrol," the third guy chimed in from his corner. "Remember when he came back that one time completely covered in ash and couldn't give anyone a straight answer about what actually happened out there?"
"Oh yeah, that was pretty hilarious."
"Commander Minoru's face was even better though."
They were having way too much fun with this.
I stood up, checking my gear out of habit even though I wasn't going anywhere dangerous. Probably. "You're all enjoying this way more than you should be."
"Oh come on, you have to admit it's funny," he said through a laugh. "Some new chunin manages to piss off Suna badly enough that they supposedly put him in their bingo book? That's actually pretty hilarious."
"Is it even confirmed I'm in their bingo book?"
"Does it really matter? The rumor's entertaining enough on its own. Suna's probably holding emergency strategy meetings about you right now as we speak. 'How do we deal with this exploding clone maniac who keeps causing problems?' I bet some of them are genuinely terrified of running into your clones."
I grabbed my flak jacket from where it was hanging on the wall and shrugged it on over my shoulders. "I'm pretty sure Suna has way bigger problems they need to worry about than just me specifically."
"Sure, yeah, keep telling yourself that."
The others were still laughing as I headed for the door, their voices following me into the hallway, full of even more jokes about Suna shinobi probably checking under their beds for clones before going to sleep now.
The walk to Minoru's command room felt longer than it actually was, probably because my brain kept trying to figure out what this meeting was about. A new mission? A reprimand for something I'd done that technically worked but looked terrible on paper?
I reached the command room and knocked twice before entering.
Minoru was behind his desk, looking about how you'd expect someone running a wartime outpost to look. Another nin stood off to the side, some chunin I didn't recognize, holding what looked like a bundle of grey fabric.
"Shinji," Minoru said, gesturing for me to come closer. "Good, you're here. Go ahead and have a seat."
I sat, trying not to look as confused as I felt.
He looked at me for a long moment, and I started running through every possible thing I might have done wrong recently.
Then he said, "I'll get straight to the point. You're being promoted to jonin. The promotion is effective immediately."
I just stared at him for a second.
My brain made a sound like a record scratch.
"I'm sorry, what?"
"You heard me." He leaned back in his chair. "You're being promoted to jonin. Congratulations on the promotion, Jonin Shinji."
I looked at him. Then at the chunin holding the fabric bundle, who was now smiling slightly. Then back at Minoru.
This had to be a joke. Except Minoru wasn't the joking type, and his face was completely serious, and the other nin in the room was now placing that bundle of fabric on the desk between us, which I could now see was a jonin flak vest.
I looked down at the vest sitting there on the desk. Then back up at Minoru. Then back down at the vest again, like maybe it would turn into something else if I looked at it enough times.
It stayed a jonin vest.
"Sir," I said slowly, trying to organize my thoughts into something coherent. "I really appreciate the confidence, but are you sure about this?"
"This isn't a suggestion, Shinji." Minoru's voice carried no room for argument. "It's already done. The paperwork's been filed and approved. You're a jonin as of this morning."
"But—" I hesitated, trying to phrase it carefully. "Respectfully, sir, I haven't been a chunin for long. Isn't this... sudden?"
"It is," he acknowledged. "But it's also warranted."
He pulled a folder from the stack on his desk and opened it, though I got the sense he didn't actually need to read from it. "You've demonstrated the ability to engage and defeat multiple jonin-level opponents in combat. Not once, but several times now. You successfully defended this outpost twice against enemy assaults while neutralizing a significant number of enemy combatants both times."
He looked up from the folder. "Do you dispute any of that?"
"No, sir, but—"
"You've completed numerous frontline missions in a relatively short timeframe," he continued, overriding my objection. "High-risk missions, most of them. And your success rate is frankly making some of our actual jonin look sloppy by comparison when we look at the numbers side by side."
Minoru closed the folder and set it aside. "The others and I have been discussing this for a while now. Your performance hasn't gone unnoticed. If anything, the delay in promoting you has been more about making sure we had the proper documentation than any question about whether you deserved it."
"I just—" I stopped, tried again. "It feels sudden, sir."
"It's not as sudden as you think." He leaned back in his chair, studying me. "Let me be direct with you. Keeping you chunin at this point would honestly be a blow to unit morale."
That made me blink. "Sir?"
"The other chunin can feel the gap between your abilities and theirs," he explained. "When you're out on missions together, when you're defending the outpost, when you're in combat, they can tell. And it's not good for overall unit cohesion when someone's clearly operating well above their official rank."
"I hadn't thought about it like that."
"That's because you're focused on the missions, which is what you should be doing. But I have to think about unit dynamics and morale, and having you stay at chunin doesn't make sense anymore." He gestured vaguely toward the window. "Half the chunin in this outpost already defer to you in the field. They're treating you like a jonin whether you have the rank or not."
I sat with that for a moment. He wasn't wrong. I'd noticed people looking to me for decisions during combat situations, even when there were technically more experienced chunin present.
"And during wartime conditions, the promotion process can be significantly simplified," Minoru continued. "I have the authority to grant field promotions like this without needing to go through all the usual channels and wait times. We need capable jonin right now, and you've more than proven yourself capable of handling the responsibilities."
I just sat there, trying to process the fact that the paperwork had finally caught up to reality. I'd known this was coming eventually, I wasn't stupid, I could tell my performance was above the chunin level, but I'd thought it would take at least another few months of jumping through official hoops and completing more missions, maybe some drawn-out formal evaluation process that would let me coast as a chunin for a while longer without any extra responsibilities.
"You're quiet," Minoru observed.
"Just processing, sir."
"Do you have any concerns about the promotion?"
"No, sir. Just... surprised, I guess."
"Well, get used to it. As of now, you're a jonin. Your current assignments are going to stay the same for the immediate future, but you should expect different mission parameters going forward once things get sorted." He nodded toward the vest. "Go ahead and try it on. Make sure it actually fits you properly."
The other nin pushed the vest closer to me across the desk.
I stood up and picked up the vest, feeling the weight in my hands. It was heavier than the chunin vest I'd been wearing, with more reinforced plating worked into the design. I shrugged out of my current vest and pulled the jonin one on over my shoulders, adjusting the straps until everything sat right.
It fit well enough. Maybe a little stiff since it was new, but that would work itself out over time.
Minoru gave a small nod of approval. "Good, it fits properly. You're dismissed then."
"Thank you, sir," I said, because there wasn't much else to say when your commander just made something official that had been true for a while anyway. I left the command room, the new vest settling on my shoulders with a weight I'd adjust to soon enough. The roommates were going to have a field day with this. They'd been joking about it for days, and now they'd get to say they called it.
I was halfway to the door when something occurred to me. The bingo book thing. The rumor that had been floating around the barracks for days now, getting more elaborate with each retelling. Might as well get confirmation while I was here.
I stopped and turned back. "Sir, before I go. That rumor about Suna putting me in their bingo book. Is there actually anything to that, or is it just the usual barracks gossip?"
Minoru looked up from the papers he'd already gone back to reviewing. "No, it's real. We got confirmation through our intelligence network a few days back. You're listed as a priority target for any Suna forces operating in this region."
Huh. So the rumors were actually accurate for once.
"They consider you high-value enough that they want you neutralized before you can do more damage to their operations." He set down the paper he was holding. "Which means you need to be more careful when you run into their nin. They'll have studied your jutsu and tactics by now, so expect them to come prepared. They may have already worked out countermeasures."
"Right. I'll keep that in mind. Thanks for letting me know, sir."
I left for real this time, stepping out of the command room into the morning air. The sun was already up, and the warmth had completely replaced whatever chill there'd been earlier. Not that I'd really noticed the cold before, but now that it was gone I could tell it had been there. I took a breath and tried to figure out what to do with myself now that I was apparently a jonin with nothing to do.
Minato had mentioned yesterday that he and the others would be gone today. Some assignment. He hadn't said what, and I hadn't asked because honestly it hadn't seemed like my business. Tsunade was out too, probably doing whatever it is jonin do when they're not teaching their students. Which meant no training session today.
Medical ninjutsu training was always an option. I'd gotten the basics of internal Mystical Palm down, the jutsu that let you heal from the inside without needing to actually touch the injury with your hands. Useful jutsu, absolute chakra hog in practice. My execution was still rough enough that healing anything took way too long and burned through chakra like I was trying to power the entire outpost instead of just fixing a wound. More training would fix that. More practice would smooth out the chakra flow, make the whole process more efficient.
But spending my entire day drilling medical jutsu sounded about as appealing as volunteering for extra patrol shifts. Taking it easy sounded infinitely better. I had the entire day with no obligations, and I was absolutely not going to ruin that by volunteering for more work.
I turned around and went back into the command headquarters, making my way through the hallways toward the Sensor Room. Maybe Aya was on shift. Hanging out with her sounded better than wandering around the outpost alone trying to figure out what to do with myself.
I opened the door to the Sensor Room and found two unfamiliar faces inside. Both of them turned to look at me, and their expressions were completely blank. That particular flavor of blank that happens when someone has absolutely no idea who you are or what you want from them.
No sign of Aya anywhere.
"Sorry, wrong room," I said, and closed the door again.
So she wasn't on shift. Which meant she could be in her barracks, or at the mess hall, or literally anywhere else in the outpost doing anything else. Going to the female barracks to look for her felt like crossing a line I wasn't interested in crossing. There were limits to how much social awkwardness I was willing to endure for the sake of having someone to talk to.
I was still trying to figure out my next move when I heard something that shouldn't have been possible.
It was a familiar voice, carrying an accent only one person I knew had.
Calling my name.
I turned, half-convinced I was imagining things, because there was absolutely no reason for that voice to be here at a frontline outpost in the middle of a war zone. Except there she was, red hair streaming behind her as she ran toward me from across the compound, and then she was throwing herself at me with enough force that I had to brace or risk getting knocked over.
I caught her on instinct, arms coming up to support her weight, body reacting before my brain could finish processing what was happening.
"Kushina?" The name came out more like a question than a greeting. "What are you doing here?"
"Shinji!" She was grinning up at me, still hanging off my body. "I missed you so much!"
"I can see that," I said, trying to find my balance with a hundred-and-however-many pounds of enthusiastic girl attached to my front. "But seriously, what are you doing here?"
"I convinced the old man to let me come!" She looked pleased with herself. "He was being all stubborn about it at first, but I kept asking and asking, and eventually he said yes!"
"You... convinced the Hokage." I wasn't sure I'd heard that right.
"Yep! I'm here to help with some work at the outpost. And now..." Her grin got even wider. "We get to spend time together! Isn't that great?"
"That's..." I blinked, still trying to process this. "Yeah. That's great."
The words came out before I'd fully processed what I was saying, brain already three steps ahead trying to figure out what this actually meant. If they were letting Kushina leave Konoha, if they were allowing her anywhere near the frontlines of an active war, that meant the transfer had already happened. Had to be. Lady Mito was old, everyone knew that, and they would have wanted to keep Kushina close to her in the village to ensure a smooth transfer of the Nine-Tails. The fact that Kushina was here instead of there meant the sealing was done, Kurama was already inside her, and they'd deemed it safe enough to send her out.
Which was still insane when I thought about it. Their jinchuriki, fresh off receiving the most powerful tailed beast, sent to a frontline outpost. Even with the cover story about me being the supposed jinchuriki floating around, I couldn't imagine the higher-ups agreeing to something this risky. Did my existence really influence things this much?
I pulled back slightly to look at her. "Wait, did they just... let you travel here on your own?"
"Oh, no, I came with Mikoto-chan and Tsume-chan! We—"
"Kushina!"
Another familiar voice, this one sharper and significantly less pleased. Mikoto appeared from the same direction Kushina had come from, moving fast and looking annoyed, and every bit of that annoyance was directed at Kushina.
She reached us and immediately grabbed Kushina by the shoulders. "What are you doing? I told you not to run off like that!"
"But I saw Shinji!" Kushina said, as if that explained everything. Which, to be fair, it kind of did.
"Yes, I can see that." Mikoto's eye twitched slightly. "I can also see that you're currently attached to him like a barnacle. In the middle of a military compound. Where people are staring."
I glanced around. She wasn't wrong. Several passing shinobi had slowed down to watch, and a few were definitely whispering to each other.
"They're not staring," Kushina protested.
"They are absolutely staring."
"Well, maybe they're staring because you're making a scene, not because of me."
"I'm making a scene?" Mikoto's voice went up slightly. "You ran off the second we got here, and now you're—just let go of him already. Come on. Give him some space."
She started trying to pry Kushina off me, pulling at her arms. Kushina's grip tightened immediately.
"No! I just got here! I haven't seen him in a while!"
"You can talk to him without doing this!"
"But this is better!"
"It's really not!"
Mikoto pulled harder. Kushina held on tighter, her arms locked around me with surprising strength. I stood there like a particularly unfortunate piece of rope in a tug-of-war, trying to figure out if there was a way to extract myself from this situation without making everything worse.
There wasn't.
"Kushina, seriously, let go. You're making him uncomfortable."
"I'm not!" She twisted to look up at me, her chin digging into my chest. "You don't mind, right, Shinji? It's fine, isn't it?"
I knew a trap when I saw one, and this was definitely a trap. If I said I minded, Kushina would be upset. If I said I didn't mind, Mikoto would be annoyed. There was literally no winning answer here. This was a kobayashi maru scenario playing out in real-time, and I had exactly zero interest in finding out which answer would land me in deeper trouble.
Silence. Silence was the only winning move here. Just stay quiet and let them sort it out themselves.
"See?" Kushina said triumphantly when I didn't answer. "He doesn't mind!"
"He didn't say that," Mikoto shot back, still pulling. "He didn't say anything, which means he's too polite to tell you that you're being ridiculous right now."
"No!"
After what felt like an unnecessarily long struggle, complete with Kushina digging in her heels and Mikoto pulling harder and both of them arguing the entire time, Mikoto finally managed to pull Kushina off me. Though Kushina looked about as pleased with this development as someone who'd just been told their favorite ramen stand had closed permanently and wouldn't be reopening.
She crossed her arms, pouting. "You're no fun, Mikoto."
"I'm plenty fun. I just don't want you embarrassing Shinji in front of everyone here."
"I wasn't embarrassing him!"
"Morning, Shinji."
Tsume walked up behind them, grinning like she'd just witnessed the most entertaining thing she'd seen all week.
"Morning," I said, because I had to say something and that seemed safe enough. Because what else could I say while one girl was still glaring at another for pulling her off me, a third was watching the whole thing like it was free entertainment, and half the outpost had probably seen the entire thing?
Tsume's grin widened. "So. That was fun to watch."
"I'm so glad we could entertain you," I said flatly.
"Oh, you absolutely did. That was better than the time Kuromaru got his head stuck in a fence." She looked between Kushina and Mikoto. "You two done fighting, or should I get some popcorn?"
"We're not fighting," Mikoto said stiffly.
"Could've fooled me."
"We're just... discussing things."
This was going to be a long day.
....
The best way to stop two people from fighting, I'd discovered through trial and error, was to distract them with food. Not just any food though. It had to be good food, food so good your brain just short-circuits halfway through the bite. You start chewing like world peace depends on it.
So I took them hunting.
"Wait, we're going where?" Kushina asked, blinking at me.
"Hunting," I said again. "Out in the forest. We're going to catch something and cook it."
"No, I heard you fine. I'm just trying to figure out why we're doing this."
"Well, I'm hungry for one thing, and the mess hall food here isn't exactly great. And maybe if you two are busy doing something else, you'll stop going at each other."
Mikoto and Kushina exchanged glances, then looked back at me.
"We weren't arguing," Mikoto said.
"You were absolutely arguing."
"We were having a discussion."
I raised my eyebrows at her. "A discussion that somehow involved you two getting physical with each other?"
"I mean, yeah, that's just how discussions work out sometimes when people feel really strongly about things," Kushina said, and she actually sounded completely serious about it too.
Tsume just burst out laughing at that. "You know what? I like this plan. Let's go kill something."
...
Finding a deer in the forest near the outpost wasn't hard if you knew where to look and had the patience to track properly. Tsume's dog helped, which made the whole thing faster than it would've been otherwise. We brought it down together, and then I showed them how to prepare food in the wild.
"Wait, what are you doing right now?" Kushina asked after watching me for a while.
"It's called stone grilling. The proper term is ishiyaki."
"Stone grilling," she repeated slowly. "So you're planning to cook the meat on rocks."
"On heated rocks, yeah."
"That's a thing people do?"
"It's a thing I do. And it works really well if you do it right."
Ishiyaki wasn't something any of them had seen before. I knew because they got quiet when I started setting up, watching me arrange flat stones around the fire, letting them heat until they were hot enough to sizzle when I tested them with a drop of water. Then came the actual cooking part, placing the wrapped meat directly on the heated stones and watching it sear. Time-consuming, sure, but that was half the reason I'd suggested it. Can't argue when you're too busy helping with the cooking and getting progressively hungrier.
By the time the meat was ready, the smell had already solved half my problems. Nothing ends an argument faster than the realization that there's food within reach and you're wasting time fighting instead of eating. We sat around, hunger winning out over whatever grievances they'd been nursing earlier, and the conversation shifted to topics that didn't involve anyone trying to strangle each other.
Mikoto bit into her piece and her eyes went wide. "Oh." She chewed slowly, with juice running down her lips. "This is actually incredible. The outside's all crispy but the inside is so tender it's basically falling apart on its own." She took another bite right away without even bothering to wipe her lips first. "How is it this good?"
"I mean, I did tell you it would work."
Kushina made a sound that might have been agreement, but she was too busy eating to form actual words. She'd gone completely quiet the moment she'd taken her first bite, and now she was eating like someone might take it away from her if she didn't finish fast enough.
"So it's just you three?" I asked between bites. "Or did you come with a bigger group?"
"We were traveling with a supply convoy," Mikoto explained. "We rode along with them all the way from Konoha. They needed some extra security for the trip, so we got assigned as their escorts."
"How long did that take?"
"Way too long." She took another bite. "It would've been a lot faster on our own, but the convoy couldn't exactly move at shinobi speed. We had to match pace with all the supply wagons."
"That sounds pretty boring."
"It was incredibly boring," Tsume confirmed. "Just endless walking at civilian speed while we watched a bunch of carts full of supplies roll along. Kuromaru almost lost his mind from the complete lack of anything exciting happening."
The dog made a sound that might have been agreement.
Kushina was making agreeing noises too and nodding along with what they were saying, but she was still way too busy eating to really contribute much verbally to the conversation.
"Any trouble on the way?" I asked.
Mikoto shook her head. "Nothing serious. We ran into a couple of bandits on the second day, but they took one look at us and decided they had better things to do elsewhere."
"Sounds like they were pretty smart bandits then."
"Yeah, smart enough to live, unlucky enough to meet us." Tsume swallowed her food and grinned at me, and there was something in that grin that made me immediately suspicious. "You know, we've gotten way stronger since you left the village. Mikoto and I have been training together pretty much constantly. We could probably beat you in a spar now."
I raised my eyebrows. "Probably?"
"Okay, definitely then," she corrected herself, and her grin got even wider. "We could definitely beat you now."
"That's a pretty bold claim."
"It's not a claim, it's a fact. We've been working really hard on our training. Right, Mikoto?"
Mikoto nodded, though she looked slightly less confident than Tsume sounded. "We have been training a lot. And I think we've both improved quite a bit."
"I'm sure you have," I said. "I mean, improvement is always good."
"You don't believe us," Tsume accused.
"I didn't say that."
"You didn't have to. I can tell." She leaned forward, eyes bright with challenge. "We should spar later. We could prove it to you."
"Maybe," I said vaguely, biting into the food again.
Tsume was just about to say something back when her eyes suddenly dropped to my chest, and the grin on her face slowly started to fade. She stared at my flak vest for what felt like a long moment, and I watched her expression shift from confident to confused. Her head tilted slightly to the side, and I could practically see her brain working through what she was looking at.
"Wait a second," she said slowly. "That vest..."
They already knew I'd been promoted to chunin before my deployment, I'd told them that much before I left. But the vest I was wearing now looked different from what they were used to seeing. The design wasn't quite the same as the standard chunin vests around the village.
Mikoto noticed Tsume staring and followed her gaze, her eyes landing on my chest. She blinked once, twice, and then her eyes widened slightly. "Shinji, that vest you're wearing..."
"Yeah?" I took another bite of food, watching both of them stare at me.
"Did you..." Mikoto paused, like she was trying to make sure she was seeing what she thought she was seeing. "Did you get promoted again?"
"Again?" Kushina looked up from her food, finally paying attention to the conversation. "What do you mean again?"
"I mean his vest looks different." Mikoto was still staring. "That's not a chunin vest."
Kushina squinted at me. "What else would it be?"
"That's… a jonin vest, isn't it?" Mikoto finished quietly, looking at me. "Shinji, did you get promoted to jonin?"
Kushina and Tsume both choked on their food at the same time, which would've been funny if they hadn't been making horrible strangled sounds while trying to breathe and process what they'd just heard. Kushina started coughing so hard she had to put her food down, and Tsume was pounding on her own chest trying to clear her airway.
Kuromaru looked concerned and nudged Tsume with his nose.
"I'm fine," Tsume wheezed out, still coughing. "Just—give me a second—"
Kushina stopped coughing first, but she was still making this weird gasping sound. "Did she just—did Mikoto just say what I think she said—"
"Okay, hold on," Tsume interrupted once she'd caught her breath properly. She held up one hand like she needed everyone to just stop for a moment. "Are you actually being serious right now? You made jonin? Already?"
"Yeah," I said with a small shrug. "Got the promotion this morning, actually. Right before you all showed up."
Nobody said anything for a moment after that. Just the sound of the fire crackling and the usual forest noises in the background.
Tsume and Mikoto were both staring at me like I'd just told them I could fly.
"This morning," Tsume repeated slowly.
"Yeah."
"Like, this morning this morning," she said, like repeating it would somehow make it make more sense. "As in, just a few hours ago."
"I mean, that's usually what 'this morning' means, so yeah."
"So you've been a jonin for less than a day at this point."
"I guess technically, yeah."
She shook her head slowly. "You know you're absolutely insane, right? Like, this whole thing is just completely insane."
"It's really not that big a deal," I said casually. "Wartime promotions just tend to happen faster, that's all."
"Okay sure, faster," she said, and there was this snort in her voice. "But not that fast. Most people spend literal years just trying to make chunin, and you basically skipped past the whole thing in what, a few weeks maybe?" She gestured at me with the piece of meat she was still holding. "You can't just sit there and act like this is somehow normal. This is the complete opposite of normal."
Kushina had finally lowered her food, though she was still staring at me with wide eyes. "But I don't understand how. I mean, I know you're strong and everything, but jonin? That's..."
"That's supposed to take years and years of experience plus dozens of really high-rank missions," Mikoto finished for her quietly. She wasn't eating anymore either, just looking at me with this expression I couldn't quite read. "The youngest jonin I've ever heard of made the rank at sixteen. And that was considered exceptional."
Sixteen. Right. Which meant in a few years, Kakashi would shatter that record completely by making jonin at twelve years old and nobody here would even remember I'd been considered young for the rank. Not that I could tell them that. Not that it mattered. The achievement felt less impressive when you knew someone was going to come along and make your accomplishment look average by comparison.
"Yeah, well," I said with a shrug. "War has a way of changing how things work."
Tsume went quiet for a moment after that, and I could see her working through something in her head. Her frown got deeper, and she glanced over at Mikoto. "Wait, hold on a second. What does this actually mean for our team though?"
"What do you mean?"
"I mean our team. Like, the actual team setup." She started counting things off on her fingers. "We've got Mikoto and me who are both still genin, then there's you who's apparently a jonin now, and then Tsunade-sensei who's also a jonin." She looked between all of us. "That's two jonin and two genin all on the same squad. I've honestly never heard of anyone setting up a team like that before."
"Yeah, me neither," Mikoto said, and she looked pretty troubled by the whole thing now. Which made sense when you thought about it. Team dynamics really mattered out in the field, and having two jonin plus two genin all on the same squad didn't match up with any kind of standard team setup that people used.
"It's weird," Tsume said with a sigh. "This is really weird."
"Things work differently during wartime though," I said, and it was true even if it probably wasn't very reassuring to hear. "The standard rules don't get applied as strictly when you're operating in an active war zone. Everything's a lot more flexible."
"Okay, but flexible how exactly?" Mikoto asked.
"Well, sometimes you'll have two teams working together on the same assignment," I tried to explain. "Or sometimes teams get split up and people get moved around to different squads. A jonin might take genin from two different squads on a mission if that's what makes sense for the objective. Or you might end up with temporary teams that only last for one or two missions before everyone goes back to their original units."
"So basically anything goes and nothing's really set in stone," she said.
"Pretty much, yeah. It really depends on what's needed at any given time." I paused for a second. "And it also depends a lot on what Tsunade-sensei herself wants to do going forward. If she still wants to keep teaching us, then we all stay together as a team. If she decides she doesn't want to do that anymore... then the team might end up getting reorganized into something else."
That made them both go quiet. The idea of the team getting split up clearly wasn't something they'd considered before.
Mikoto's frown got deeper. "Actually, where is she right now anyway? Tsunade-sensei, I mean. Is she here at the outpost somewhere?"
"Out on assignment, probably. She's usually either at the hospital or somewhere in the field."
"The hospital?" Mikoto straightened slightly. "There's a hospital here?"
"Well, it's not as big as the one back in Konoha, but it's a proper hospital. It's a two-story building near the center of the outpost. It handles all the wounded who come back from the frontlines. Tsunade-sensei spends a lot of time there when she's not on missions."
"So if we wanted to find her..." she trailed off.
"Your best bet would be to check the hospital first and ask around there. If she's not at the hospital, then she's probably out somewhere on a mission." I took another bite of my food. "Fair warning though, she's been really busy lately with everything going on. So don't be too surprised if you end up having to wait around for a while before you can actually talk to her."
"How long is a while, usually?"
"Could be hours. Could be days. Just depends on what she's dealing with."
The conversation trailed off after that, leaving just the sound of the fire and the usual forest noises around us.
Kushina hadn't really stopped eating through any of this, completely unbothered by the team discussion since none of it affected her anyway. She wasn't part of our squad, so the whole question of team dynamics and reorganization didn't affect her at all. She was just here to enjoy the food and the company.
She finished another piece of meat, hummed happily to herself, then picked up her wooden skewer and speared a fresh piece from the stone. She held it up, examining it like she was checking the quality, then turned toward me with a bright smile.
"This is really good, Shinji!" She extended the skewer toward me, the meat still steaming slightly, holding it right up near my face. "Here, you should try this one! This piece came out perfect! Say ahh!"
I froze.
This was a trap. An obvious trap. Eating from Kushina's skewer meant Mikoto would absolutely start something, and we'd be right back to the bickering I'd just barely managed to stop.
Before I could figure out how to handle this without upsetting her, Mikoto moved. She leaned over, quick as a snake, and bit into the meat Kushina was holding, taking a large chunk right where Kushina had been about to offer it to me.
"Hey!" Kushina yanked the skewer back, glaring at Mikoto. "That was supposed to be for Shinji!"
"Oh, was it?" Mikoto smiled, still chewing. "I thought you were just sharing with the group."
"You know exactly what I was doing!"
"Do I though?"
And just like that they were bickering again, their voices starting to rise, and Tsume just burst out laughing beside me. She was clearly enjoying watching this whole show way more than she probably should have been.
I took another bite of my own food and decided that you know what, this was fine. This was totally fine. Everything was completely under control here.
The argument continued for another few minutes, gradually losing steam as they ran out of creative insults and went back to eating. The fire crackled between us, smoke rising into the daylight through the web of branches. For a moment, it almost felt peaceful. Just some friends sitting around a fire, eating venison, not thinking about anything beyond whether there was enough food left.
Should've known it wouldn't last long.
A chunin came into the clearing moving pretty fast, fast enough that I noticed him approaching before he even had a chance to call out to us. His flak jacket had dirt smeared all over it, like he'd been running through the forest for a while without really bothering to avoid obstacles or branches along the way.
"Shinji!" He stopped a few meters away from our fire, breathing pretty hard from the run. "Commander Minoru needs you at headquarters. You've got a mission."
The laughter died. All three girls turned to look at the messenger, then at me.
I set down my food and stood up, brushing off my pants. "It sounds serious. What kind of mission?"
"He'll give you the full briefing when you get there. But he specifically said to head there immediately, so I'd get moving if I were you."
Right. So much for taking it easy today.