Chunin Duties 7.13
"I am unsure as to why you asked for my assistance, Lady Uchiha," Neji said, as the morning of the Field Medic training exercise dawned. He had joined Hisana by one of the other gates to the Forty-Fourth training ground, otherwise known as the Forest of Death.
"You'll be able to monitor all the trainees in detail," Hisana said.
"Was my cousin not available? You and Lady Hinata have worked together before," Neji replied.
"I was asked to choose a genin... but that's not the only reason I asked for you."
"Oh? What could one such as you want with me? The lines of our destinies do not intersect," Neji said, his expression as carefully neutral as Hisana's.
"And yet here we are," Hisana said.
"Here we are. Yet there is still nothing we have in common between being ninja of Konoha."
"Isn't there? Lesser scions of a grand house who've beaten all expectations. I'd say we have a surprising amount in common," Hisana replied.
"You are in all respects but name the Head of the Uchiha clan. Your situation is hardly comparable to my own. Sasuke treats you as a sister."
"And has Hinata ever treated you as less than any other member of her family?"Hisana asked.
"She has not. But whether she will be the heir remains in question," Neji answered.
"It does?" Hisana asked, her shock leaking into her voice.
"She has displayed great courage ever since becoming a ninja. But she is still yet to defeat her sister and settle the issue of succession," Neji said.
Hisana picked up on what he hadn't said. That Hinata had refused to consign Hanabi to the Caged Bird Seal, refused to defeat her. That girl, Hisana thought, had a better heart than the Hyuga deserved.
"I only became an Uchiha on account of the massacre. I don't know why. My mother - she didn't tell me before... well, nobody thought I would amount to much. Or should amount to much. I was banned from attending the Academy. Sometimes I wonder if that's why..." Hisana said, trailing off.
Neji said nothing in response to that, and neither of them spoke for a long moment. Then the first rays of light started to filter through the tall trees of the training ground and Hisana smiled.
"Well, we've wasted enough time talking. I assume you've memorised your instructions?" Hisana asked Neji.
"I have," he responded, simply.
"Good. Do try and keep up," Hisana said, and then she blurred away into the forest. She wasn't going too fast - she would need to pace herself, given how long the survival exercise was. She allowed herself a little burst of speed at the start, though, and smiled as she sensed Neji follow her.
The two of them made quick time through the forest. An odd feeling ran through Hisana as she returned to the training ground for the first time since the second exam. So much had happened here - she had met Karin, fought Orochimaru's clone…
She still didn't know why he'd spared her - why he hadn't applied his cursed mark to her. His fangs had been inches away from her neck, so close she had felt the corrupted chakra burn against her skin. Yet, he hadn't marked her. She didn't believe it was on a whim like he'd said, but she had no idea at all why he'd really done it.
Twice she had been spared without explanation- once by Orochimaru, and once by Itachi. She had no good explanation for either of them, and it gnawed at her. When she'd first woken up as Hisana, she'd thought she might have been... special. A prophesied hero reincarnated to set right what had gone wrong. It hadn't been a conscious thing, not really, but it had been there.
Then she'd seen she was just the latest of any number of transmigrants. Chance had dropped her somewhere, in someone relevant - but if she figured into any great destinies, they weren't her own. That was freeing, in a way - there were no cosmic expectations for her, and the butterfly had already beaten its wings. The world had changed long before she'd arrived.
Hisana and Neji arrived at the Tower to find a number of other nina there. She saw a lot of genin corps members and older chunin - the sort of average, everyday ninja who made up the bulk of Konoha's numbers. Acting as an assistant in training exercises like this one was a popular mission for a lot of career ninja because the pay was good and the danger was minimal. Hisana suspected half the reason Nohara had asked her to help with it instead of taking part was to get her services for it on the cheap - certainly, Hisana didn't see any other infamous special jonin among the assembled ninja.
She didn't really mind. Aside from anything else, Hisana didn't need the income of one special jonin. The Uchiha Clan still had a lot of its assets, but was supporting a grand total of two members - so Hisana felt very secure in her finances, mission or no mission. Back when the clan had numbered in the hundreds, they had needed all the income they'd been able to get - active-duty ninja generally paid a portion of their earnings to the clan, and that had been a lot of the Uchiha's income in particular.
The Military Police Force had been the backbone of the clan's finances, the consistent pay allowing the Uchiha to invest in things like their large compound. Now that Hisana had seen the Clan's records, she thought the conspiracy theory regarding the Second Hokage's choice of Clan to run it just that. It was easy to see how much of the stability the Uchiha had taken for granted came from the Military Police contracts.
Hisana half listened to Nohara's explanation of the exercise. The conversation with Neji had dredged up a lot of bad memories, and she was eager to get started - to stop standing around and get to something that would distract her.
The ninja assembled at the tower were broken down into two groups. Casualties were those ninja who would be simulating wounded Konoha shinobi, and enemies were those who would be simulating enemy ninja. Hisana was to play the part of the Enemy Commander, a jounin from the Village Hidden in the Mountains. That was a fictional Hidden Village every ninja from Konoha was familiar with, along with the Villages Hidden in the Forest, Coast, and Dunes. All of them were recurring elements of training exercises and exam questions.
All of the casualties had cloth marked with seals wrapped around the location of their "wounds" - they'd respond when a certain amount of medical chakra had been pumped into them in a roughly correct pattern. It was a crude simulation of medical jutsu, but it'd do for an exercise like this.
"Alright, all Mountain ninja over here. Now, I'm sure you're all familiar with the need to do this safely, but the Hokage has been very clear that we are going to reduce training losses. Go and get your weapons checked by Neji, and then take your Mountain headband. I will personally escort anyone who causes one of the trainees a serious wound to the Hokage, and she will not be pleased. Is that understood?" Hisana said, channelling a trickle of chakra to her vocal cords so her voice would carry.
There was a general cry of agreement, and then the "Mountain ninja" went to get their training weapons checked. They were the blunt weapons used for sparring - they could still cause serious injuries like broken bones if you weren't careful, but they were unlikely to cause any deaths. Each trainee and mountain ninja had to report to the station at the Tower if they were "killed", and stay there for the day. Each day, the exercise would reset and a new scenario would begin.
Soon everyone was dressed up in mountain headbands, and the first group of casualties went out. Hisana stayed back at first, directing her troops to spread out. Neji's eyes were extremely useful, letting him keep Hisana updated on the progress of the exercise without her having to run back and forth between the several fronts.
The first day was relatively simple, and the trainee field medics did well. They encountered a few mountain ninja, but they kept their focus on reaching and evacuating the wounded. Hisana didn't take the field herself, because her role was mostly as the ticking clock - she would head the reinforcements that would punish any team that stayed too long.
On the second day, a runner from one of the mountain ninja squads reached Hisana before a field medic team had moved on for the first time. It was about one in the afternoon, and the sun was high in the sky; beating down through the thick canopy.
"Keep an eye on the rest for me," Hisana said to Neji, and then she blurred through the trees. She moved through them at speed, horizontal jumps taking her from tree to tree so fast that gravity barely had any time to work.
She arrived to see the ground smoking - she could smell the fire-natured charka in the air. All of the mountain ninja squad that had attacked the field medics as they stabilised their patients were lying on the ground, having been hit by training weapons - which might not have been deadly, but did hurt.
One of the field medic trainees sensed Hisana as she blurred out of trees, but it wasn't enough to save her. Before she could shout a warning, Hisana was in amongst their group and her first strike - her sword coated in a blunt, shape manipulation chakra flow - slammed into the stomach of the trainee who'd sensed her.
Another threw a brace of kunai at her, flashbang tags trailing from them to simulate explosives. Hisana's eyes were burning the crimson of the Sharingan, and she danced between the kunai to reach their origin before they landed. Her sword brushed against the middle-aged woman's throat, and then she threw her own kunai from her wrist seals.
They slammed into the pair thrown at her in a cloud of sparks, and then the two trailing flashbang tags landed at the medic's backline - where a few of them were still hurriedly trying to stabilise their last patients. That was several more of the medics and all the patients dead.
The last medics ran at Hisana, but it was already over. Her hands blurred through handseals, and then she spat white-hot fire in a line above their heads; blossoming into titanic blasts where the stream of fire hit trees. Had she aimed the fire jutsu at them, they would have all been wiped out.
"And that's your team and all of your patients dead. You do not have the luxury of infinite time - this is not a hospital or a classroom," Hisana said, as everyone picked themselves up to head to the tower.
She had to provide a few more object lessons as the exercise went on, but never to the same team twice. One trainee managed to escape with a single patient, running as soon as she saw Hisana emerge from the treeline. She could have found her with her chakra sense, perhaps, bet sensor-nin were rare enough that Hisana had decided not to.
Keeping track of all mountain ninja was difficult, and she was very thankful for the career genin who'd set up the radios for her. Without him and Neji, she would have been reduced to waiting for runners and her own chakra sense.
Still, when the five days were over, nobody had done badly enough that Nohara had failed them, and the lesson had sunk in - sticking around too long without support would get them and their patients killed.
Hisana was happy to be done with it, though - she'd had her head filled with nothing but field medicine for two weeks. She was eager for the Hokage's investigation into the mission assignment system to end, so Team Seven could go back to doing out-of-village missions.
After the mission to the Land of Tea, though, she was still a little suspicious of anime filler.
Team Seven's next mission will be...
[x] A mission to the Land of Rivers, to confront a former member of the infamous Seven Swordsmen of the Mist.
[x] A mission to the Land of Rice Fields, to investigate rumours about Orochimaru in the company of Jiraiya.
[x] A mission to the Land of Bears, to assist a small ninja village with a number of attempted thefts.
