Severance was instant. Her grip failed. The tanto dropped.
Her eyes went wide—not with pain yet, the cut was too clean for immediate agony, but with the sudden wrongness of an arm that no longer obeyed commands. Fingers that refused to close. A weapon that had been part of her for years, suddenly beyond her reach.
Tatsuya's sword opened her throat before understanding could become fear.
Blood sprayed. She made a sound, not a scream, just a wet gurgle as her windpipe flooded. He was already moving, pulling his blade free, turning toward the next chakra signature that was screaming threat at the edge of his awareness.
Three more Iwa-nin were circling to flank the main engagement. Their attention was on Jiraiya's position, where something was happening that sounded like the world ending—massive jutsu detonations, the earth itself groaning in protest.
They hadn't seen him yet.
Phoenix Sage Fire.
The hand seals came faster than they ever had in practice. Chakra surging from his core to his chest, transforming, superheating. He exhaled, and a dozen small fireballs scattered from his mouth like angry hornets, each one tracking a different vector of approach.
The technique wasn't powerful enough to kill outright, not against prepared chunin. But it didn't need to be. Two of the Iwa-nin broke left, dodging into each other's paths. The third took a fireball to the shoulder and stumbled, his attention momentarily fractured between the burn and the threat axis.
Tatsuya was already moving. Shunshin closed the distance, not the flashy teleportation that higher-ranked shinobi used, just enhanced speed that ate chakra and covered ground. He came out of the technique behind the stumbling nin, sword driving toward the gap between vertebrae.
The man twisted. Instinct or training, Tatsuya couldn't tell. The killing strike became a deep cut across the back instead, opening muscle but missing the spine.
Not enough. Finish it—
The man's partners were recovering. Tatsuya felt their chakra signatures flare as they oriented on his position.
Fire Release: Flame Bullet.
A continuous stream of fire forced them back, buying seconds. His wounded opponent tried to turn, to face him, and Tatsuya's blade found the femoral artery through the gap in his armor's coverage. The leg buckled. Blood fountained.
He didn't stay to watch the man die. The other two were coming, and his chakra reserves were already feeling the strain.
Somewhere to his left, Jiraiya's presence was a sun in his sensing—massive, overwhelming, radiating power that made the chunin around him seem like candles. Whatever the Sannin was doing, it was reshaping the battlefield. Trees were falling. The earth was breaking apart.
Ahead, Minato was... impossible.
Tatsuya caught glimpses between his own desperate exchanges. The blonde jonin moved through enemies like water through fingers—not the Yellow Flash yet, no signature technique, no teleportation, but something that might become that legend. Speed that defied comprehension. Precision that bordered on precognition.
A kunai flew from Minato's hand. An Iwa-nin fifty feet away dropped, the blade embedded in his eye socket. Minato was already gone, already engaging two more enemies simultaneously, his movements so smooth they seemed choreographed.
That's the difference, Tatsuya thought, parrying a strike from one of the flanking nin while his chakra scalpel opened the other's tricep. That's what genius looks like.
He wasn't genius. He was a surgeon in a stolen body, fighting on training and desperation and the muscle memory of a dead genin. Every kill cost him. Every technique drew from reserves that weren't infinite.
But he was still standing. Still fighting. Still—
"Medical!"
Takeshi's voice, strained with pain, cutting through the chaos.
Tatsuya's sensing found him instantly—a familiar signature, dimmer than it should be, flickering at the edge of the engagement. He disengaged from his current opponent with a burst of Flame Bullet that forced the man to shield rather than pursue, then ran.
Takeshi was on the ground behind a fallen log, both hands pressed against his thigh. A kunai jutted from the wound, buried almost to the ring. The blood pulsing around the blade was too bright, too fast.
Femoral artery. Partial laceration, maybe complete. He's got minutes.
"Hold still." Tatsuya dropped to his knees, his hands already glowing green with medical chakra.
"There was—kunai came from—didn't see—"
"I know. Don't move."
The wound was bad. The kunai had struck at an angle, slicing through the sartorius muscle and nicking the femoral artery beneath. Every heartbeat pushed more blood past the damaged vessel wall. If he pulled the blade out, Takeshi would bleed out in under a minute.
So he didn't pull it out.
Instead, Tatsuya pushed medical chakra around the wound, stabilizing the tissue, encouraging the arterial wall to begin sealing even with the foreign object still in place. It was crude—a field hospital would do it properly, remove the blade under controlled conditions—but crude kept people alive.
"Stay down," he ordered, feeling the bleeding slow, then stop. "You move, you die. Understand?"
"I—yeah. Yeah."
Tatsuya turned back toward the battle.
An Iwa chunin was right there.
The man had come silently, probably tracking the medical chakra signature, sword raised for a killing blow at Tatsuya's exposed back. His sensing had been too focused on Takeshi's wound to catch the approach until it was almost too late.
Too close for seals. No time to—
Fire Release: Great Fireball.
The jutsu formed faster than thought. Desperation compressed the chakra, accelerated the transformation, bypassed the careful hand seals he'd practiced a thousand times. Flames erupted from his mouth in a roaring column that caught the enemy full in the chest.
The man didn't scream. There wasn't time. One moment he was a threat; the next he was a burning shape collapsing backward, stone armor cracking from thermal shock, the stench of cooked meat filling the air.
Tatsuya's stomach lurched. He ignored it.
Another signature, approaching fast, but this one was familiar. Ren materialized from the chaos, fists wrapped in earth-technique reinforcement, intercepting two more enemies who'd been circling toward Takeshi's position. The heavy genin fought like a wall, absorbing blows that would have shattered Tatsuya's guard, returning them with compound interest.
"I've got these!" Ren shouted. "Go!"
The battle shifted. Contracted. Jiraiya's assault had broken the enemy's coordination, and Minato was systematically dismantling what remained. Tatsuya felt the signatures winking out one by one, some fleeing, most dying, the predatory precision of the Konoha response overwhelming the attackers who'd thought themselves hunters.
It ended almost as quickly as it had begun.
Fifteen enemy shinobi. Maybe two minutes of actual combat.
All of them dead.
Tatsuya stood in the aftermath, breathing hard, covered in blood that was mostly not his own. His chakra reserves were dangerously low—the healing on Takeshi had cost more than he'd anticipated, and the Great Fireball at close range had scraped the bottom of the tank.
But they were alive. His team was alive.
"The scalpel worked."
Minato's voice was quiet, thoughtful. He'd appeared beside Tatsuya without warning, one moment empty air, the next the blonde jonin studying him with those too-perceptive eyes.
Tatsuya wiped blood from his sword. "You sound surprised."
"Not surprised. Impressed." Minato's gaze moved to the kunoichi's body, to the arm that had failed her at the critical moment. "Hearing about a technique is different from seeing it used. You didn't hesitate."
"Hesitation gets people killed."
"It does." Minato was quiet for a moment. "Most medic-nin I've worked with, they struggle with the transition. Healing and harming use the same knowledge, but the mindset is different. They freeze, or they overcorrect, or they can't find the edge between saving and ending." His eyes found Tatsuya's. "You didn't have that problem."
It wasn't a question. It wasn't quite an accusation either. Just... observation. The kind of careful assessment that Tatsuya was learning to associate with people who saw more than they should.
"I'm not most medic-nin."
"No," Minato agreed. "You're not."
Jiraiya's heavy footsteps announced his approach before his voice did. "Scalpel boy. Casualties?"
"Takeshi took a kunai to the thigh. Femoral involvement, but I stabilized it. He needs proper extraction, not field work."
"And Ren?"
"Bruised. Nothing serious."
Jiraiya grunted, surveying the scattered bodies. His expression was unreadable. "First real engagement. Three kills, maybe four. Field medicine under fire." He looked at Tatsuya directly. "Most genin would be vomiting by now."
"I'll add it to my schedule."
"You know why combat medics are rare? It's not the training. It's the head." He tapped his temple. "Healers think in terms of preservation. Fighters think in terms of destruction. Trying to hold both at once, most people can't do it. They're good at one or the other, not both."
"Tsunade-hime manages," Minato added quietly.
Jiraiya's expression flickered, something complicated, old history. "Tsunade's been pushing for years to get combat medics standardized. Wants one on every squad. The old men keep telling her no, too expensive, takes a fighter off the front line, all the usual excuses." His voice carried an edge of old frustration. "So she does it herself. Proves it can be done every time she takes the field. And they still won't listen."
His gaze settled on Tatsuya with uncomfortable weight. "Point is, what she does isn't normal. Most medics stay behind the lines for a reason."
The implication was clear: And yet here you are, doing it anyway.
"Cold logic wrapped around something that isn't cold," Jiraiya continued, echoing his earlier assessment. "That's what I said about you, wasn't it?" He shook his head slowly. "Keep the scalpel in reserve when you can. Surprise advantage only works once per enemy. But when you need it—" his eyes flicked to the kunoichi's corpse, "—don't hesitate."
"I didn't."
"No. You didn't."
Jiraiya exchanged a glance with Minato, something passing between them that Tatsuya couldn't read. Then the Sannin turned away, already moving toward the next problem.
"Defensive positions. The probe failed, which means the real assault comes next. I want everyone ready in ten minutes."
Minato was silent for a moment. The sounds of the aftermath, wounded being treated, reports being compiled, the distant crackle of dying fires, filled the space between them.
"You're interesting, Tatsuya-san," he said finally. "I think this mission is going to be educational."
He walked away before Tatsuya could respond.
Educational. Right.
In the distance, Jiraiya was watching them both. His expression was unreadable.
The mission was just beginning.