Yuji and Sasori joined the village's dispatched unit and headed for the border.
This was different from anything they had done before. Not a mission with a defined endpoint, a long-term garrison, with no return date until Iwagakure settled down and the skirmishes between the two sides stopped entirely.
The Kazekage had chosen this posting deliberately. With the wider war concluded, even an active border conflict with Iwagakure carried significantly less risk than anything touching Konoha. The pressure had reduced. The hidden dangers were smaller.
It was the right environment for what he wanted them to develop.
The border tension itself had been started by Iwagakure.
With the war over and Konoha and Kumogakure both beyond their reach for the moment, Iwagakure had turned its attention to the one neighbor it judged most vulnerable. Sunagakure and Iwagakure had always understood each other well, geography made that inevitable, given how often they had fought across the Land of Wind's borders.
What Iwagakure saw now was a village that had come out of the war diminished, holding territory too large for its current strength to convincingly defend.
The Land of Wind was vast, slightly larger than the Land of Earth, though most of it was barren desert. That apparent uselessness was precisely what made it attractive for strategic purposes.
A foothold there, even a small one, would position Iwagakure advantageously for the next major conflict before it arrived. The Tsuchikage's assessment was straightforward: Sunagakure no longer commanded the kind of strength it had under the Second Kazekage, and maintaining control over such an enormous territory with what remained of its military was more performance than reality.
Iwagakure wanted a piece of the Land of Wind ceded peacefully, framed this as a reasonable concession given the circumstances, and had made the demand through official channels, representatives conveying Onoki's position directly to Sunagakure's border troops.
Sunagakure could not agree. The village's performance in the war had already strained its relationship with the Daimyo. Losing territory on top of that would be impossible to explain to anyone, the Daimyo, the civilian population, or the shinobi who had fought to hold those borders.
Under Rasa's command, Sunagakure had refused to yield a single point, and the stalemate had persisted since. Iwagakure's movements had become less aggressive over time, but they had not stopped.
They were content to drag it out, applying steady pressure against an opponent they believed was weakening, waiting for the calculation to shift in their favor.
Yuji had learned all of this not through guesswork but from the captain leading their unit, who laid it out plainly on the road to the border. It was not sensitive intelligence, anyone serving on this front already knew the shape of things.
Onoki's face came to mind as he listened. The old man was older even than Hiruzen Sarutobi, and he had been shaping Iwagakure's decisions for longer than most shinobi had been alive.
Yuji's clearest memory of him from the original story wasn't tactical, it was an image of Onoki as a young man, standing in front of Uchiha Madara and being sent flying. A boy in front of a force of nature. Whatever that encounter had put into Onoki, he had carried it for decades since.
"Iwagakure's worst casualties in this war didn't come from us or Konoha," the captain said as the group moved through the desert at pace. "Their heaviest losses were on the Kumogakure front. That's where they bled."
Yuji already knew this. It explained Kumogakure's position as well, the retreat from Konoha had been driven partly by what Iwagakure had cost them on the other side.
"Yuji." The captain, Kenji, glanced at him. "Your previous missions. You weren't operating on a front line, were you?"
"No," Yuji said.
Counting his current record, almost every mission of real weight had been carried out within the three-person squad, him, Arai, and Sasori. The handful of solo missions he had taken on since returning to the village were low-difficulty work, nothing that stretched him.
"Any questions when we get to the front, come find me," Kenji said.
"I will."
Their unit was small, fewer than twenty, and would be folded into a larger force once they reached the border. It reminded him of arriving at the Amegakure front for the first time, the way the veterans there had looked at the three of them, barely concealing their irritation at having children assigned to their lines.
He still remembered the Chunin named Endo, who had told them with a straight face to go experience the tempering of blood and fire. The tone had not been encouraging.
The attitude here was different. He and Sasori were not rookies who needed hand-holding, they were combatants who could carry their own weight, and any unit commander with sense would know that immediately. Joining a front-line unit as a known quantity rather than an unknown was a different position entirely.
Two years. He turned that over quietly as the desert moved past them.
"Captains are probably already arguing over Yuji," one of the unit members said, grinning. "His medical reputation reached the front lines before he did."
"Put me in his squad," another said. "Honestly, just having a Medical Ninja at that level nearby, I'd sleep better."
"Keep dreaming."
Laughter moved through the group. The mood was easy, unhurried.
Sasori walked among them and said nothing. His expression discouraged conversation without quite closing the door on it, and people had already learned to leave the space around him alone.
From what Yuji gathered listening to the others talk, the front-line structure was layered, units divided by function, each with sub-teams, Squad Leaders and captains sitting beneath an overall Commander.
He would almost certainly be assigned to the Medical unit. Sasori, without question, would go to the Puppeteer corps.
The current Commander was a Jonin named Shimizu, a Puppeteer himself, one of Rasa's subordinates. Rasa had held overall command from the war's opening through to its close, leading the Puppeteer unit directly while managing the broader strategic picture.
Even in the war's later stages, when the village's finances had begun to strain, he had kept Iwagakure from making any meaningful gain. Whatever his personality, the man could lead troops. Yuji heard it in the way Kenji and the others spoke about him, not performed loyalty, but the quieter kind that came from watching someone deliver results under pressure.
For village shinobi, trust worked that way. You built it on a battlefield, in front of people, where the outcome was real. A small independent squad like theirs, however much they had actually accomplished, existed largely outside that system.
The people who knew what they had done were the three of them and whoever had read Arai's reports.
That was about to change.
Joining the front lines meant entering the structure where reputation was built in plain sight, where performance translated directly into standing.
The official path to advancement inside the village ran through exactly this kind of posting.
Yuji looked out across the desert ahead of them.
'Good', he thought.