It had been raining since the third day of the war and it hadn't stopped. The coastline south of the Land of Fire was a stretch of grey beach and grey water and grey sky that bled into each other until the horizon disappeared. The mud was ankle-deep in the camp and knee-deep further ahead, and everything smelled like salt and rain and the particular stench of corpses that hadn't been recovered yet because the tide kept pulling them out and pushing them back in.
Kakashi stood in the command tent with his book closed. The map on the table was weighted down with kunai at the corners and marked with colored pins that represented positions from six hours ago. Mist's forces moved with the water, literally, their shinobi using the rain and the coastline to shift positions faster than most scouts could track.
Temari stood across from him. Her fan was propped on her back. Her arms were folded as she was thinking.
Shikamaru leaned against the tent's support beam with his hands in his pockets, watching them both.
"Their eastern side pulled back overnight," Kakashi said, tapping a cluster of pins near the shoreline. "Our scouts confirmed movement toward the inlet. Mei is consolidating."
"She's not retreating," Temari said. "She's tightening. The inlet gives her water on three sides. If she puts her people in there, every approach is a kill zone. She wants us to chase her into it."
Kakashi nodded. "Agreed. We don't chase."
"Then we need to cut her supply line from the sea. They're getting reinforcements from home." Temari looked at Shikamaru. "Your shadow techniques. Can you work at range over water?"
"I would not be the best person for something like that." Shikamaru scratched the back of his neck. "We can't really stop them from receiving supplies unless we make our way over to the Land of Water. Unfortunately, our only option is causing them enough losses till they can't continue with this offensive anymore."
"Is that really our only option?" Temari turned to him.
"I don't see an alternative. Unless we could have a group with enough manpower to cause enough disruption back over in the Land of Water to cause them to fall back, I'm not seeing anything else." Shikamaru admitted.
Temari studied the map for a moment. "Should we request backup?"
"No. At least, not yet. We can't pull from the other fronts this early into the war. For now, it's a war of attrition." Shikamaru sighed.
What he would give to have a piece on the board like Lee right now. Just Lee alone would be enough to send Kiri back home considering they have no tailed beasts and as of now, only one mystical sword on the field. They were actually quite lucky and had the least dangerous front compared to the Cloud and Stone front. But still, who wouldn't want an easier time during a battle? When he thought back to the Suna war with Lee, that was practically easy compared to this.
Kakashi looked between them. Two people half his age solving a problem he would have spent another hour circling. He'd been a genius at twelve. These two reminded him that genius wasn't rare. The world never lacked talented individuals.
"Attrition it is, then." Kakashi said. "We rotate squads on the front every eight hours. Nobody stays on the line long enough to get sloppy. Asuma's unit takes the western area tonight. Kurenai stays in reserve with her team. If Mei tries anything clever during the rotation, Kurenai is our answer."
"And Yugao?" Temari asked.
"Yugao stays on the front line." Kakashi said. "She's been effective."
That was true and insufficient. Yugao had been fighting since the beach landing. She was also carrying a creature inside her that hated her and refused to play along with its previous host's killer.
"Anything else?" Kakashi asked.
Temari shook her head. Shikamaru pushed off the tent pole.
"Actually," Shikamaru said. He stopped at the tent flap. "We have another problem. It's not our enemies."
…
There was a brawl that had happened where Leaf and Sand forces shared a water station.
A Sand chunin named Rakusha had been filling canteens when a Leaf chunin behind him muttered something about Sand shinobi and the word "traitors." Rakusha put his canteen down, turned around, and broke the man's nose with a punch.
It spread from there.
By the time a jonin pulled them apart, four Leaf ninjas and three Sand shinobi were bleeding on the ground, two tents were collapsed, and a table had been knocked over. Nobody had drawn a weapon. It had stayed fists. That was the only reason nobody was dead.
Kakashi, Temari, and Shikamaru arrived to find the seven shinobi kneeling in the mud with their squad leaders standing behind them and the rest of the camp watching from a distance that was too close to be casual. Leaf shinobi on one side. Sand shinobi on the other. The gap between them was ten meters of mud and silence that felt wider than the ocean behind them.
Shikamaru looked at the seven kneeling figures. He looked at the crowd. He put his hands in his pockets and walked into the ten meters of mud between the two sides.
He stood there for a moment, rain running down his face, looking like a guy who'd rather be anywhere else.
"You're all being incredibly troublesome…" Shikamaru scratched his neck with an irritated look on his face.
A few chuckled. His voice was not entertained and carried further than it should have.
"I know what this is about. Don't insult me by pretending it's about canteens." He looked at the Sand side. "During the invasion, people you loved died. That's true. I won't stand here and tell you it isn't."
He turned to the Leaf side. "Same thing, other direction. Sand helped attack our home. Some of you lost people that day. Friends, family, loved ones. That's real too."
He took his hands out of his pockets.
"So yeah. You're angry. You have every right to be angry. I'd be angry." He paused. "But right now, behind us, there is an army of Mist shinobi who want to kill every single one of us. Leaf and Sand. They don't care which headband you're wearing when they do it. They don't care who invaded who. They care about killing every single one of us."
His voice didn't rise.
"Konoha is fighting on three fronts. Your people," he looked at the Sand shinobi, "left your homes to come here because our alliance means something. The Kazekage could have paid that debt with supplies and kept his people home. He didn't. So, you're here."
He let that spread.
"So if anyone else feels like settling old scores, come find me and we can go a round. But if I hear about one more fistfight, one more muttered insult, one more hand on a weapon pointed at an ally instead of the enemy," Shikamaru's eyes swept across both sides, "you're done. Headband off. Sent home. I don't care which village you're from."
Silence. The rain filled it.
"What he said." Kakashi said it from the side of Shikamaru, hands in his pockets, posture slouched.
Temari stepped forward on the other side. Her arms were still folded. Her voice was not conversational.
"If any Sand shinobi on this front raises a hand against a Leaf ally, I will personally drag them back to Suna by their ankles and explain to Lord Kazekage why we sent an idiot to do a shinobi's job." She looked at Rakusha. "Am I clear?"
"Yes, Temari-sama." Rakusha said it to the mud.
"Move out." Kakashi said. "All of you. Back to your posts. We have work to do."
They moved. The crowd thinned. The gap between the two sides closed by a few feet as bodies shuffled back toward the line, Leaf and Sand walking the same muddy paths to the same muddy positions, and if nobody was smiling about it, at least nobody was bleeding about it anymore.
Shikamaru put his hands back in his pockets and walked back toward the command tent with a heavy exhale. He passed Temari on the way.
"I didn't think you had it in you." Temari smirked.
"What a pain in the ass…" Shikamaru didn't see anything worth smiling about.
"To think you had a spine somewhere in that body of yours." Temari chuckled.
She walked past him toward her forces. Shikamaru watched her go for half a second longer than necessary, then kept walking.
…
The skirmish came with Mist shinobi pushing out of the inlet with two squads. They hit the stretch of line Leaf and Sand shared where the earlier brawl had thinned the defenders' attention, and they hit it hard.
The first warning was the rain changing direction. Droplets curving sideways, pulled by chakra, forming a wave of water that slammed into them. Three Leaf shinobi went tumbling. A Sand kunoichi grabbed a tent pole and held on as the water ripped past her, her feet leaving the ground for a full second before the pressure passed.
Then the Mist shinobi came through the wall.
They moved using the mud and the rain as cover, their camouflage jutsu turning them half-invisible against the grey landscape. The first one materialized in front of a Leaf chunin and put a kunai through his throat before the man's hands finished a seal.
Asuma was thirty meters east when it started. His trench knives were in his hands before the first body hit the ground, wind chakra extending the blades. He caught a Mist jonin mid-charge and opened his throat with the wind blade, then turned to cover the chunin behind him who was still trying to stand up in the mud.
"Formation!" Asuma shouted. "Tighten up! Don't let them isolate you!"
A Sand squad heard the fighting and came from nearby. They arrived at an angle that put them behind the Mist attackers, and for one ugly moment nobody knew whose jutsu was whose. A Sand wind technique clipped a Leaf genin's shoulder. A Leaf fire jutsu forced a Sand chunin to dive sideways.
Then something shifted.
The Sand squad leader, a woman with a cloth mask and a naginata, locked eyes with Asuma through the chaos. He pointed left. She nodded. He took right. She took left. Two squads, two villages, no words, just a point and a nod and the Mist attackers were caught between them.
It was over in ninety seconds. The Mist shinobi who could retreat did. The ones who couldn't didn't.
Asuma stood in the aftermath, breathing hard, rain washing the blood off his trench knives. The Sand squad leader walked over. She pulled her mask down. She was young, maybe twenty, and her eyes were the flat, tired eyes of someone who had seen worse than this.
"Your wind technique." She said. "You use it to extend your blade range?"
"Yeah." Asuma nodded.
"Those weapons of yours must be made of chakra metal..."
"It's the good stuff." He chuckled.
She pulled her mask back up and walked back to her squad. Asuma watched her go, then turned to check on his people.
Seven hundred kilometers northeast, Sakura Haruno was up to her elbows in a man's chest cavity.
The Cloud front's field hospital was a series of large tents set up behind a ridge, far enough from the fighting that stray jutsu couldn't reach it, close enough that the stretcher teams could get wounded back in under ten minutes. The tents were organized by severity: green for walking wounded, yellow for serious, red for critical. Sakura had been in the red tent since sunrise.
The man on the table was a Leaf jonin whose name she didn't know. Lightning burns covered the left side of his body in branching, tree-like patterns that ran from his shoulder down to his hip. The burns weren't the problem. The problem was that the lightning had stopped his heart for six seconds before his squad got him to the stretcher, and in those six seconds, his brain had started dying.
Sakura's hands glowed green inside his chest. She could feel the heart, restarted now but arrhythmic, skipping beats, struggling. She pushed chakra into the cardiac muscle, coaxing it back into rhythm, not forcing it, guiding it, because a heart that was forced into rhythm would stop again the moment you let go.
"Come on," she whispered. "Come on, come on, come on."
The heart steadied. One beat. Two. Three. A rhythm. Weak, but present.
"He's stable..." Sakura exhaled as she pulled her hands out and wiped them on her apron. The apron had been white that morning. It was not white anymore. "Get him to recovery. Watch for seizures. If his heart goes irregular again, come get me immediately."
Two medics lifted the stretcher and carried him out. Another stretcher came in before they'd cleared the tent flap.
"Sword wounds, both legs." The stretcher bearer reported. "He's lost a lot of blood."
Sakura looked at the man on the stretcher. Young. His legs were cut in parallel lines, deep, evenly spaced.
She went to work with a tired exhale.
Hours passed. The stretchers kept coming. Lightning burns, always lightning burns, because Cloud's forces loved their lightning techniques and every third shinobi in their army seemed to know at least one. Sword wounds from their kenjutsu specialists. Rarely did they have other kinds of injuries.
And the stories.
"I heard the Raikage hasn't shown himself yet," a jonin told her as she sealed the wound on his side. "His army is hitting us with their regular forces. Testing us. When the Raikage comes out, that's when it gets bad."
Sakura worked. She healed. She saved people.
During a brief lull, the stretcher bearers caught their breath and no new wounded came through the flap for the first time in hours, Sakura stepped outside.
The air was cooler out here. The sounds of the distant battle were a low rumble, like thunder that never stopped. Occasionally something louder broke through, an explosion, a technique with enough force to shake the ground even at this distance. Each time it happened, the medics in the recovery tent flinched.
Sakura didn't look toward the battle.
She looked the other way. West. Toward the Land of Grass, where the Stone front was, where hundreds of kilometers of forest and mountain and battlefield separated her from the person she was thinking about.
Lee was over there. Fighting Stone shinobi.
She was worried about him. It wasn't logical. She knew it wasn't logical. Lee was the strongest person she knew. Even Kakashi-sensei admitted he'd never killed a tailed beast. Nor did his sensei. Lee had.
She worried anyway, because that was what you did when someone mattered to you, and Lee mattered to her very much.
"OI! FOREHEAD!"
Ino's voice hit her from behind like a slap. Sakura turned to find her standing in the tent flap, gloves bloody up to the wrists, hair plastered to her face with sweat, and an expression that suggested Sakura had about two seconds to explain herself.
"You gonna stare at the horizon all day or are you gonna help me keep this guy from bleeding out?! Your boyfriend is FINE! Get back in here, NOW!"
Sakura's mouth opened. The reflex fired. The denial, the correction, the automatic "he's not my boyfriend" that had been her default response since she was twelve years old and Lee had first told her she was beautiful.
She closed her mouth.
She nodded.
Lee was doing what he did best. She should do the same.
Sakura walked back into the tent, pulled on fresh gloves, and went back to saving lives.