"Not much experience."
Yuji checked the system panel after the engagement and closed it without dwelling on the numbers. He had understood this pattern since the later stages of the Iwagakure front, as his strength grew, ordinary enemies yielded less.
The accumulation still mattered over time, and he held to that, but small skirmishes weren't the efficient earning environment that a large-scale battlefield had been.
There was also the practical consideration that if he eliminated every Hidden Mist ninja himself, Pakura and the others would have nothing to do. The mission's actual purpose was their development, not his kill count.
It suited him well enough. He had the Hand Seal materials and research notes he had brought from the village, and the mission provided exactly the kind of loose time he needed to work through them properly.
Trying to train four students, complete active missions, and study simultaneously would have been genuinely difficult to manage. With him as a background presence and the four of them handling the operational work, the schedule balanced itself.
The pattern established itself quickly.
Each day Yuji positioned himself somewhere nearby with a book or notes in hand while Yashamaru and the other three worked through the map's intelligence, tracking Hidden Mist activity zones and engaging what they found.
When fighting broke out, he didn't intervene immediately. When injuries came, and they came regularly, he let the students move through the experience themselves, including the pain and the fear, only stepping in when the damage approached something genuinely dangerous.
He could afford to operate this way. Even if all four of them took serious injuries simultaneously, his current medical capability could bring them back from almost anything short of immediate death.
And for the threshold beyond that, the cases that would have required Tsunade's forbidden techniques under normal circumstances, he had something else now.
He had spent the better part of a year's worth of positive experience points on it. The earning had been substantial, treating the wounded of an entire main force over more than a year produced a different scale of accumulation than squad-level work, but the cost had matched it.
What he had purchased was the Reverse Cursed Technique, drawn from the advanced methods of Jujutsu Sorcerers, adapted through the system into something functional within the ninja world's framework.
The effect was cell regeneration and damage repair at a fundamental level. Operated fully, it could restore even destroyed neural tissue.
The limits of what it could accomplish in practice depended on his current strength, but the baseline was already far beyond conventional Medical Ninjutsu. It required no hand seals and could be activated at any moment, a seal-less technique that operated on pure chakra output.
He had also unlocked the secondary function: application to others, not only himself.
Saving Sakamoto on the first day had been the Reverse Cursed Technique. Neither Yashamaru nor any of the students had the knowledge base to identify it as anything unusual.
From their perspective, it had simply looked like exceptional Medical Ninjutsu working faster than it should have. He wasn't concerned about the ability being identified.
He had originally intended to purchase Tsunade's two S-rank forbidden techniques, Creation Rebirth and the Hundred Seals.
The Reverse Cursed Technique rendered both largely redundant, covered more ground, could be used on others, and cost less than the two combined. The decision had been straightforward.
What remained of his positive experience points after the purchase he was holding carefully. The Reverse Cursed Technique had a ceiling that could be raised, maxing it out was possible in principle, but the cost was nowhere near reachable yet.
For now, the ability meant he could let his students genuinely fight, genuinely get hurt, and genuinely learn, with the quiet knowledge that he could catch anything that crossed the real threshold.
The fear they experienced in those moments was the point. The best way to handle fear was sustained exposure until it became familiar, until the body stopped treating danger as exceptional and started treating it as the normal conditions of the work. Everything else followed from that.
It was not a gentle method. But Pakura, Sakamoto, and Fukushima Taki were adapting. Yuji's medical capability gave them something to lean on, not comfort exactly, but the knowledge that injury was survivable, which freed them to commit to engagements they would otherwise have pulled back from.
One night, in a depression in the rocky terrain, Yashamaru was leading Pakura and the other two at a dead run.
Yashamaru's face was running with sweat, his expression carrying the controlled exhaustion of someone who had been pushing past their limit for long enough that the limit had become difficult to locate.
Beside him, Pakura, Sakamoto, and Fukushima Taki were all wounded and still moving.
The plan had been reasonable. During the day they had located a Hidden Mist position nearby, held back rather than engaging immediately, observed carefully, gathered what intelligence the situation offered, and decided to hit at night when darkness gave them an advantage.
Four enemies, four of them, and enough accumulated experience from the past weeks to attempt something more sophisticated than a direct approach — draw one enemy away, scatter the formation, take them individually.
The lure failed. The three positioned to ambush were discovered before the plan could develop. And there had been a second Hidden Mist squad operating in the area that none of their reconnaissance had surfaced.
The retreat had been immediate and had not stopped since.
"Where's sensei," Sakamoto got out between ragged breaths, scanning the dark terrain around them without slowing. "When is he coming?"
Being Yuji's student had two distinct qualities. The security was absolute, none of them were genuinely afraid of dying anymore, not with what they had seen him do.
The torment was exactly this: in the moments when everything was collapsing around them, they never knew precisely when he would appear or where he was watching from.
"I'll cover the rear, go!"
Pakura stopped, reversed, and brought her hands through the seals.
"Scorch Release: Steaming Swelter."
Several fist-sized spheres materialized around her, not ordinary fire, but something purer and more concentrated, wind and fire natures fused into a single output.
They didn't need to connect. They detonated in the space around the pursuing Hidden Mist ninja and the effect was immediate, dry heat flooding the area, air that burned to breathe, moisture stripped from eyes on contact.
"Kekkei Genkai. Kill her."
The Hidden Mist captain read it quickly and spoke without hesitation. The girl's output wasn't at a level that stopped them, but a Kekkei Genkai user alive was a different calculation from a Kekkei Genkai user dead.
Kunai with explosive tags dropped across Pakura's position. The blast radius was wider than her dodge could cover and she went airborne, Yashamaru catching her before she hit the ground.
Six Hidden Mist ninja had closed the circle around the four of them by the time they landed.
"The Hidden Sand actually sends Kekkei Genkai users out this young." The captain looked at Pakura with the particular coldness of someone making an operational decision. "Take the girl. Kill the other three."
They were visibly spent. The injuries accumulated across the pursuit had made any meaningful counterattack unlikely.
"Sensei! Sensei!"
Sakamoto's voice had gone raw.
"Sensei?"
The Hidden Mist captain registered the word with mild curiosity. A training squad, then, that explained the composition, the youth, the Kekkei Genkai user deployed so far forward. He almost felt something like contempt for whoever had authorized the arrangement.
"Sensei..."
The last call had something close to tears in it.
"All right, I heard you. I heard you."
A figure came out of the dark and landed in the field between them and the Hidden Mist ninja. The speed of it made the captain's expression shift.
Then he looked at who had arrived.
Another young face.
The captain processed this for a moment. This was the instructor?
Yuji stepped up beside his four students, glanced at Sakamoto, and sighed. "There are only slightly more of them than usual. You've fought enough times now, you need to be braver about it."
"Sensei Yuji, I genuinely have nothing left," Sakamoto said.
"If you don't push past where you think your limit is, you'll never find out where it actually is. Don't sell yourself short."
He was giving a lesson. In front of six Hidden Mist ninja. The captain stared.
Yuji.
Something moved in the back of the captain's memory, working toward a name.
The face. The age.
"Blood Doctor Yuji, the Hidden Sand's Blood Medic..."
"Retreat!"
The word came out with an edge of something that had not been in his voice before. The other five moved instantly, explosive retreating steps carrying them back into the dark.
The captain found he wasn't moving.
His torso had stopped responding to him. His legs sent no signal. He was standing where he had been standing and he had no idea when the boy had crossed the distance between them.
Body Pathway Derangement. Chakra converted to electrical interference, the brain's commands to the body severed at the transmission point.
"Retreat?" Yuji said, from directly beside him now. "That won't work. You're an enemy. Letting you walk away would make me a poor teacher." He paused. "You also injured my students."
He seemed genuinely pleased about something.
"You recognized me, by the way, this is actually the first time that's happened out in the field. I appreciate it."