Chapter 33: The Necklace.
The offensive resumed on the seventh day.
Fresh squads had arrived overnight, rotating in from the rear camps. This group had swelled in number. Supply lines were reinforced. Medical kits restocked. The jonin leading the push had new intelligence on what lay at the valley's southern end: an Ame command outpost that directed their eastern front. Messenger hawks and runners flowed through it daily. Take it, and Ame's eastern commanders would be cut off from their forces, blind and unable to issue orders for some time.
Mikoto formed her water clones at dawn. Four this time instead of three. The healing demand would be higher today.
"Listen up, today is the real push. Everything before this was like the warm-up. The enemy knows we're coming and they've had a week to prepare. It's going to be harder, faster, and messier than anything you've seen so far."
Nawaki rolled his shoulders with a grin on his face. He was ready this time. He believed it completely.
"Stay together. Same rules as before. Follow my orders. Cover for each other. Don't be heroes." Mikoto said.
"Yes, sensei!" All three said.
They moved forward.
The valley's southern stretch was a killing field.
Ame had fortified every meter of it. The rain was heavy, visibility low, and the enemy was using it. Water jutsu flooded the corridor between positions, turning the valley floor into ankle-deep mud that sucked at sandals and slowed movement. Senbon traps peppered the undergrowth. Explosive tags were wired to triplines that were invisible in the rain.
Mikoto's Sharingan caught any nearby triplines. She called them out as they advanced, guiding her squad and those nearby through the maze of traps. Twice she stopped the people around her to redirect around a cluster of explosive tags buried in the mud.
The fighting actually started at the first defensive line and didn't stop.
Konoha hit the Ame positions in waves. Fire jutsu and earth jutsu tore the landscape apart. Water jutsu answered from the Ame side, turning the valley into a churning mess of clashing elements. Mikoto's water clones moved through the chaos healing the wounded while the real Mikoto carved a path through the Ame defenders with Shark Skin and the Chakra Enhanced Strength, every swing shattering fortifications and the men behind them.
Her genin followed. Nawaki's water walls bought the forward teams breathing room. Emi's fan sent sharpened winds that sliced through enemies and fed the fire jutsu of the Konoha shinobi beside her. Nonō moved between the wounded with kunai in one hand and bandages in the other, not healing with chakra because Mikoto had told her to be mindful of her chakra. So she applied first aid with the speed and care of someone who had been taught by the Red-Eyed Angel.
They worked as a team. The way Mikoto had taught them. The way six days of exhausting training had drilled into their muscles and minds.
The second line fell. Then the third. Konoha pushed through the valley's narrows and the terrain opened slightly, the ridges pulling apart, and for a moment it felt like the hardest part was behind them.
Then the fourth position was a fortified compound. Stone walls reinforced with earth jutsu. A garrison of Ame shinobi. The fighting escalated from ugly to catastrophic. Two Konoha jonin went down in the first exchange. A squad on the left side got pinned by devastating water jutsu and Mikoto had to go in to save numerous lives.
Nawaki was in the middle of it. He was fighting beside Emi and Nonō, his water jutsu creating barriers that the team used as cover, his kunai finding targets that Emi's fan distracted. He was doing exactly what Mikoto had taught him. Staying with his team. Conserving chakra. Using his strengths.
Then the jonin came.
An Ame jonin broke through the Konoha line and drove straight at the nearest squads in the second row. He was fast and he cut through a chunin who tried to intercept and kept coming.
Nawaki saw him. Emi saw him. Nonō saw him.
The jonin's water whip lashed toward Emi. She raised the fan and the gust deflected the whip's arc, but the force sent her sliding backward through the mud. The jonin pressed forward, closing the distance, his left hand already forming the signs for something bigger.
Nawaki stepped between them.
He didn't take a second to think. His body moved between the enemy and his teammates. His hands came up in the breathing pattern he'd been practicing for six days. Deep inhale. The oxygen flooded his lungs. His blood moved faster. The world shifted.
His eyes went white. A yellow aura flickered around him. The First Activation of the Seven Heavens Breathing Method.
Five times his normal strength and speed.
He met the jonin's charge head-on. His fist connected with the man's forearm and sent it flying to the sky. The jonin's eyes widened. A twelve-year-old brat had just nearly broken his arm with raw physical force.
Nawaki pressed the advantage. A second punch caught the jonin in the ribs. A third drove him back two meters. The yellow aura blazed. Nawaki was faster than he'd ever been, stronger than he'd ever been, and the feeling was intoxicating. Power surging through every muscle. The world moving in slow motion around him.
Emi stared. She'd never seen the technique in actual use before. The white eyes, the aura, the sudden explosion of speed and strength from the boy she'd been calling an idiot since she met him.
The jonin recovered. He was experienced enough to adapt. He retreated, launching a barrage of water bullets to cover his withdrawal.
Nawaki avoided all three by leaping side to side. The jonin was retreating, running, and the golden light in Nawaki's blood was telling him to chase.
"YOU IDIOT! HOLD POSITION!" Emi shouted at him. She could already see his forward positioning, ready to chase.
He heard her.
He didn't listen.
The power was singing in him. Six days of training. Weeks of wanting to prove himself. The First Activation burning through his body like liquid fire and he felt, for the first time in his life, like the shinobi his grandfather had been.
He ran after the jonin into the trees.
"NAWAKI!" Emi screamed. Not because she cared. Because the idiot was leaving their formation and she could see the tripwires in the undergrowth that his white eyes apparently couldn't.
He was too far gone. The aura blazed. His feet carried him twenty meters past the last Konoha position, into the forest beyond the fortified compound, into the space between the lines that neither side had cleared.
The jonin he was chasing wasn't retreating. He was leading.
Nawaki realized it one step too late. The tripwire caught his ankle. Not one wire. A network. Twelve connections running to twenty-four explosive tags buried in the undergrowth in a pattern designed to catch anyone moving at speed through this exact corridor.
The jonin Body Flickered away with a smile. He'd never been retreating. He'd been baiting.
Twenty-four explosive tags detonated simultaneously.
The blast ripped through the forest in a sphere of fire and pressure that stripped the bark from every tree in a fifteen-meter radius. The sound hit the compound a half-second later, a thunderclap that made the fighting pause for one frozen instant as every shinobi on both sides turned toward the explosion.
The forest where Nawaki had been was gone. Trees were falling. Fire was spreading. Smoke and debris filled the air.
Mikoto was already running.
She killed the two chunin in front of her with a single horizontal sweep of Shark Skin and Body Flickered toward the blast site before their bodies hit the ground. The distance was forty meters. She covered it in under a second.
She found him at the edge of the crater.
The blast had thrown him ten meters. His body had hit a tree trunk and crumpled at its base. The tree was on fire. Nawaki was on fire. Parts of him.
She couldn't recognize him.
That was the first thing that hit her. The body on the ground didn't look like Nawaki. It didn't look like anyone. The explosive tags had done what explosive tags at close range did to a human body. They tore it apart. His clothes were gone. His skin was gone across most of his torso and his left arm and the left side of his face. The muscle beneath was shredded, exposed, some of it burned, some of it simply missing. His left arm was broken in three places, the bones visible through the ruins of his flesh. His right leg was twisted at an angle that said the knee was no longer connected to anything. Blood covered everything. It pooled beneath him and mixed with the mud and the rain.
The First Hokage's necklace was intact. The green crystal sat against the raw, bleeding ruin of his chest, untouched, glowing faintly with the chakra imbued by its maker decades ago.
He was alive.
Barely. His Senju-Uzumaki bloodline was the only reason. The vitality, the resilience, the life force that ran through the founding family's veins and refused to let go even when there was nothing left to hold on to. Any other genin would have been dead before the debris settled. Nawaki's heart was still beating. His lungs, what was left of them, were still trying to breathe.
Mikoto's hands glowed green before her knees hit the ground.
The Sharingan spun. Two tomoe in each eye, tracking the damage through the healing chakra she poured into his body. The green energy flowed into him and she watched where it went: pooling at rupture sites, diverting around shattered bone, stopping cold at places where the tissue was so destroyed that the chakra had nothing to bind to. Burns across seventy percent of his body. Three compound fractures. A punctured lung. Internal bleeding from seven different sources. Organ damage to the liver and left kidney. Spinal compression from the impact with the tree.
It wasn't enough. She could see where the damage was by how her healing chakra flowed around it, the pools and dead zones mapping the damage. But the deeper she pushed, the more the detail blurred at the edges. She could feel that something was wrong at a level she couldn't quite reach, couldn't quite see. The healing chakra was hitting tissue too damaged for the flow-mapping to distinguish between dying and dead. She needed to see the individual fibers. The cellular response. The exact boundary between what could be saved and what was already gone.
She needed to see everything.
A deep pressure built behind her eyes. Something that had been building since the moment she'd seen the blast and known, known with every part of her, that one of her students was in the center of it. Terror. Fear. The desperate refusal to let a person she'd trained and scolded and fed and taught die in the mud while she knelt beside him with hands that weren't good enough.
The pressure pushed outward through her optic nerves and the world contracted to a point and then expanded.
The third tomoe appeared.
One in each eye, clicking into place alongside the first two, the red deepening, the perception sharpening beyond anything she'd experienced before. The world didn't just get clearer. It got deeper. The blurring at the edges vanished. The cellular detail that the two tomoe couldn't reach snapped into perfect focus. She could see every cell. Every bond. Every pathway. Every torn fiber, every fractured bone surface, every ruptured vessel. The damage was catastrophic and now she could see all of it, every layer, from the charred surface down to the bruised organs, from the shattered bones down to the individual fractures within them.
She could see what needed to be saved and what was already lost.
Her hands moved.
The Mystical Palm poured healing chakra into the worst sites first. The internal bleeding. Seven sources, each one a ruptured vessel that was draining what was left of his blood supply. She sealed them one by one, the three-tomoe Sharingan guiding her chakra to each rupture with an accuracy that the two tomoe couldn't have matched. She could see the vessel walls now, the torn edges, the way the blood flowed through the gaps. She didn't have to guess where to send the healing. She could watch the cells respond in real time, see the tissue knitting together fiber by fiber, adjust her output to match exactly what each wound needed. The bleeding slowed. Stopped.
The punctured lung. Air was leaking into his chest cavity, collapsing the left lung, putting pressure on the heart. The Chakra Scalpel opened an internal path and she guided the healing chakra through it, sealing the perforation, reinflating the lung with a careful burst of pressure. Through the three tomoe she could see the individual alveoli reinflating, the membrane resealing, the tissue responding to her chakra at a level she'd never been able to perceive before.
The organs. Liver laceration, left kidney contusion. She stabilized both, watching through the Sharingan as her healing chakra reached the damaged cells and coaxed them back from the edge. Not fully healing them but stopping the damage from spreading, buying time for the more critical repairs.
The bones. Three compound fractures in the left arm. She set them with the Chakra Scalpel, aligning the fragments the way she'd done a thousand times before, but now she could see the bone at a level she'd never imagined. The fracture lines. The marrow. The way the periosteum tore and the way it could be guided back together. She fused them with the Mystical Palm and watched the calcium bridge form between the fragments in real time. The knee she couldn't fix completely, the ligaments were shredded, but she reconnected enough to prevent the joint from separating further.
The burns. Seventy percent of his body. She couldn't heal all of it. Not here, not now, not with a battle raging around them. She prioritized. The burns over his chest and throat, where the tissue loss threatened his airway and his heart's protective layer. The burns on his face, where the damage was encroaching on his eyes and his brain. She closed what she could and left the rest for later because later was better than never and never was what would happen if she spent too long on surface damage while his insides were still failing.
His heart stuttered. She felt it through her hands. A skip, a falter, the muscle losing rhythm. Through the three tomoe she could see the cardiac cells misfiring, the electrical signal stuttering through damaged tissue.
She sent a burst of lightning chakra into his chest. Nawaki's heart caught. She watched the cells respond, watched the rhythm restore itself beat by beat, watched the electrical signal find its path again. It steadied. It kept going.
She kept going.
The battle was still happening. She could hear it, the clash of jutsu and steel and voices and explosions, but it was background noise now. Her world was Nawaki's body. Her hands and his flesh and the green light between them.
Emi appeared at the edge of the crater. Her fan was out, her face pale, her eyes taking in the wreckage that used to be a forest and the wreckage that used to be her rival.
"Is the idiot dead…?" She asked cautiously.
"No." Mikoto said without looking up.
"Is he going to die?"
"Not while I can still do anything about it."
A water clone materialized from the rain and took up a defensive position. Nonō arrived seconds later, sliding down the crater's edge, her face white.
"Sensei…" she whispered. She was looking at the thing on the ground that had been Nawaki. Her hands went to her mouth.
"Nonō. Look at me, not at him."
Nonō's eyes found Mikoto's new eyes. There were three instead of two now...
"I need you and Emi to protect us while I work. Nothing gets through. Nothing interrupts this."
Nonō swallowed. She drew her kunai. She turned outward, facing the forest, her back to the surgery happening behind her.
Emi had already turned. The fan was open completely. Her eyes swept the treeline.
"If anyone comes near us," Emi said, "I'll handle it."
"The idiot doesn't get to die because he was being an idiot." She added, quieter. "I still haven’t stolen his dream of becoming Hokage, yet."
The water clone stood between them and the battle, the water version Shark Skin drawn and ready.
Mikoto's hands glowed green. The three-tomoe Sharingan tracked every cell, every response, every flicker of life in the broken body beneath her palms.
His Senju-Uzumaki blood was fighting. The vitality was there, deep in the cellular structure, a stubbornness that refused to quit even when every system was failing. Normal healing would have lost this battle. The damage was too extensive, too deep, too catastrophic for any medic working without the ability to see what Mikoto could now see. But she could see it all. Every cell that was dying and every cell that was fighting and every cell that could be saved if she reached it in time.
She reached.
And reached.
And reached.
The green light didn't stop. The rain fell on her back and on Nawaki's ruined body and on the necklace that sat against his chest, the First Hokage's crystal glowing faintly in the grey light, still intact, still holding on.
Like its owner.