5 Chapter 5: In a Dream

25 of April- six years After the Kyubi attack

I was looking at the faint green glow which was coating my hands. My attention however, wasn't on what I could see, but on what I could feel.

I could get a taste, an instinct, an image, from feeling the chakra of others, but I couldn't read myself. However I could see the difference from the chakra I used to climb, and it felt quieter than the nature aligned one. It wasn't exactly like the chakra sensing Karin was capable of in the manga, I could do it only when people were standing right next to me, and if the shinobi erased his presence (simply slowing down the chakra flow) he would disappear from my sixth sense.

The bare bones of medical jutsu were the different ways through which one could transfer chakra. Chakra was life force, after all, nothing more and nothing less. Shaped in yin and yang, respectively a more spiritual and a more physical aspect of it. They were opposites, but only in the sense that at the end of one began the other.

Changing one 'normal' chakra into the medical kind, meant bringing forward the yin aspect, and healing someone meant using your yin to properly assist the patient's yang.

The yang chakra took form into the production of blood cells, into the contracting of the muscles, into the infinitesimal spark of electricity that coursed among neural cells. The yin chakra took form into the manifestation of your soul, your thoughts, your beliefs, your feelings.

In that way, healing became pouring your yin, your will, in a way that was understandable by the yin of the patient (and that I suspected was the idea behind the compatibility of chakras), so that was in a language that the yang of the wounded could follow.

After turning your medical chakra into something compatible with the unique patient you wanted to heal, it came the difficult part. You needed to direct the blend of your chakras to heal. 'To heal' meant that if you needed to close a wound, you needed to enhance the clotting property of the blood, and then repairing the tissues. If the oxygenation of the blood was too low, you needed to act on the lungs, and direct the organs to produce more blood, making it circulate faster so that the cells wouldn't die of hypoxia, but you had to take care to not make the heart run too fast, the pressure had to be just right so that the patient wouldn't burst blood vessels.

Those were the bare bones.

For example, to heal a bone, one had to have a lot of previous knowledge. Bones were considered organs because they contained various types of tissue, such as blood, connective tissue, nerves, and bone tissue. Osteocytes, the living cells of bone tissue, formed the mineral matrix of bones. There were two types of bone tissue: compact and spongy. Compact bone (or cortical bone), forming the hard external layer of all bones, surrounded the medullary cavity (innermost part or bone marrow). It provided protection and strength to bones. Compact bone tissue consisted of units called osteons or Haversian systems. Osteons were cylindrical structures that contained a mineral matrix and living osteocytes connected by canaliculi which transport blood. They were aligned parallel to the long axis of the bone. Each osteon consisted of lamellae, layers of a compact matrix that surround a central canal (the Haversian or osteonic canal), which contains the bone's blood vessels and nerve fibers. Osteons in compact bone tissue were aligned in the same direction along lines of stress, helping the bone resist bending or fracturing. Therefore, compact bone tissue was prominent in areas of bone at which stresses were applied in only a few directions. And that was only the beginning of the stuff you needed to understand to know how to act upon a fracture.

Isolating toxins could be done, even if it was way easier teaching to the body how to fight those on its own, and it had the nice bonus of building up a pseudo immunity to the said toxin.

Viruses were impossible to heal through medical chakra. Why? Because the little bastards duplicated using our cells, and as such couldn't be properly identified.

I turned my attention inward, looking for the slight 'wrongness' the poison in my veins was causing. Finding it, I thought it felt like oil swimming into the water, it simply didn't belong. So I isolated the part of me that was fighting the infinitesimal quantity of venom and enhanced it but kept it at bay. I didn't want to destroy only that dose of toxin, I wanted that my body could generate enough anti-toxins that would then be ready to be produced in bulk whenever the need arose. After a while, it was difficult telling the time while in a healing trance, I let my body's answer to the venom sweep through my body, and in less than ten breaths I was completely functional. With a satisfying deep breath I trailed my faintly glowing fingers on the cut on my forearm, closing it. I was getting faster at it, I didn't have Hana's natural inclination for it, but I made mine the philosophy of 'being a genius of hard work', and it brought results, slowly but surely. I slowly opened my eyes, taking in my surroundings.

The forest was drowning under an incessant downpour, and the thunders were almost the only sounds that broke the monotony. Almost, because my trained and highly refined senses could pick up the creaking of the woods under the wind and the occasional branch snapping, even the rustling of the beasts moving in the undergrowth. And the heavy, happy breathing of Alfa, my favorite among the Haimaru brothers.

The dogs had grown to about a third of their adult size, but more than their bodies, their minds had been the ones to truly blossom. Alpha was a special case, because while arguably the smarter of the triplets, he was also the more festive one, and he also loved when you talked to him in a silly voice.

"Another thing I don't understand is hand seals," I confessed to my canine companion.

Everyone just went with the flow, do these signs, and there you have a jutsu. But I knew that the Nidaime Hokage had used only one hand seal instead of the 44 necessaries for the Water Dragon, the infamous Suiryūdan no Jutsu. And I had witnessed Sasuke using the Chidori without hand seals. And from personal experience I knew that I was on my way to learn a seal-less Kawarimi. I knew that hand seals shaped your chakra, which then had to be properly molded through sheer will. Chakra control was simply a blend of the awareness one could exercise on the energy spent on a task and where said energy was directed.

So the questions were two: why did specific hand seals consent one to work better with Katon, or Suiton? Why genjutsu seemed to follow its own rules? And the second, and arguably the most important question, what did the absence of hand seals say about Rasengan and Hiraishin? The latter may be sidestepped the problem using actually written seals, but the first, and its elemental variants, were shape and nature manipulation. Just like any other elemental based jutsu.

And yet there were loads of things done with chakra that didn't require hand seals. From enhancing one's body to sticking to walls, to placing seals with a simple touch. Following my gut, I could tell that I was well on my way to be able to perform a seal-less Kawarimi and Bushin. While with hand seals I had managed to tweak and blend Bunshin and Henge. Once I could perform my variation seal less, I would be able to sprout illusionary limbs in the middle of a taijutsu fight.

How did I blend the two techniques? It had been relatively easy. Each of them required three hand seals. Firstly I gathered the chakra necessary for the bushin and performed its hand seals, without letting my chakra execute the order. Keeping my focus on the complete but not executed yet jutsu, and mindful of the tension it generated in my coils, I folded it and kind of stored it away, in what I believed was a tenketsu at the base of my spine, before going on with the henge, putting it away with the same method. In the end I only had to carefully let go of the two while molding them together. But the last part was simply based on focus. I discovered the whole 'storing away techniques' while thinking about the infamous collaborative techniques of the Sandaime Hokage. The whole gig required outstanding chakra control if I say so myself. And it also exhausted me. I could create around thirty bushins before feeling the strain, or henge fifty times in a row, but producing a henged bunshin, while roughly halving the chakra I had at my disposal, exhausted me mentally. It took me two months to make it work, and it also took three whole minutes to perform.

Why did I insist so long in practicing something I only had a hunch on? One, because of gut feeling, simple as that, and I had wondered if the Yondaime had started the Rasengan for the same reason. Two of the possibilities, once I mastered the trick, were virtually endless. Bunshin and Henge together basically created the human shape of my choosing. It was an illusion and not a genjutsu. The difference was glaring, at least to me, a genjutsu worked with you entering your chakra into the coils of your opponent, and could be dispelled. The result of my bastardized blended technique was something that dispelled on contact since it was still a construct made of chakra. It held potential. And that was without going in a possible Katon Futon combination. That was years down the line.

I shook myself out of my reverie, actually seeing what I was looking at. The tall trees with big trunks, along with the heavy rain and the light of the dusk made seeing through the forest difficult, as well as numbing down the smells. Obviously it wasn't a problem for the top-notch senses of the nin dog, who let out a low rumble to warn me something was approaching.

I smiled at him and scratched behind his ears. "You'll spoil me if you keep this up, you know?" I whispered, knowing that he could hear me perfectly well. A slow wiggle of the tail was the only sign that he had understood. But his head was pointing straight in one direction, he was still trying to identify the new presence.

I rose from my seated position while Alpha vanished like a grey shadow in the undergrowth. With few practiced motions, I took down the oilskin that was protecting us from the rain and rolled it up, I secured it on my waist like it was a strange belt and, with nary a flexing of my chakra, jumped on a branch a couple of meters from the ground, before running up the trunk and erasing my presence. I moved from tree to tree like I was the ball in a pinball game, my control over my movement was refined so that my feet hitting the bark almost didn't make a sound.

A happy bark took away the excitement of the hunt. I followed the sound and dropped on the back of my target, who was too busy fending off the attempts of the dog to lick him.

I landed causing an 'oof' and we tumbled on the ground, I was snickering. I loved ambushes.

"You're an asshole Dai." Shin hissed. We righted ourselves up, and I scratched again behind Alpha's ears, murmuring stuff in a happy voice: "Who's a good boy? You are! We tricked him!"

His tail was wiggling like mad, and I recovered a semblance of seriousness while Shin was busy spitting out dirt. "Are the others at the cave?" he asked me.

"Yeah, It's a pity that this rain makes most of the animals stay burrowed away, otherwise we could have hunted something while waiting," I answered, rolling my shoulders to avoid getting stiff.

"Bad idea, what if you end up following their same trail and collide on your prey?" He objected.

I gifted him with a sardonic smile. "Shin, they're bandits, not the Sannin." I rolled my eyes and took off to the cave team 10 had set up camp.

We soon arrived at the cave and we both frowned noticing the dog tracks just before the disguised entrance. Without exchanging a word we covered them up, it was true that nobody was going around looking for tracks in that weather, but it wasn't an excuse to become sloppy.

We didn't bother announcing we were back if even the Hana or the other two in dogs didn't sense us (strange as it did sound) Guy sensei surely would have.

We were greeted (or should I say ambushed?) in his usually loud manner, but he was also holding up two warm cups of tea, so we accepted the warm beverage in exchange for not shutting down his sunny personality. I doubt sensei caught on on the bargain he struck, but I wasn't going to burst his youthful, almost quiet happiness.

During another mission, a couple of months before we had managed to convince him that his loud proclamations were too full of bright energy of youth to be contained in a cave and that it would have crumbled over our heads if he was going to keep shouting. We still didn't know how it worked, but since then we almost always choose to make camp into caves. That was a completely unrelated topic.

"Shall we recap the plan one last time? We hit before dawn after all." Shin suggested. With a nod, and an encouraging smile Guy sensei run over the sleeping form of Hana and brought her to our little firepit without even giving her the time to get her bearings. And suddenly waking up a ninja is a stupid thing to do, greenhorn or not.

With a snarl worthy of her canine companions her arm shot forward while her eyes were still opening, nail outstretched to swipe away the eyes of her enemy.

"Such a youthful reaction!" he was, like always, overjoyed "You still need to learn how to recognize friend from foe in your sleep!"

Hana frowned and nodded, rubbing away the sleep from her eyes.

"Before you go over the plan, a warning." our sensei said. And just like that, it was like a switch went off in his head, gone was the easygoing, approachable dude. Crouched around the smokeless fire was the notorious Gren Beast of Konohagakure no Sato. A predator carefully examining his next hunt.

"Before dawn, you'll make your first kill. You'll want to puke, you'll freeze, you'll hesitate." He looked at each of us in the eyes with a meaningful expression on his face before going on. "Here's my order as squad leader: don't. Do that after everything is said and done." And once he had said his piece, he left us to our plan. After all, he was there only as a safety net.

Our C rank sounded simple enough, find the camp of the bandits and rely the information to the village elders. It did sound like a secondary mission of a game in which no care had been spared for details, I still found mindboggling how many civilians were ready to become criminals.

Hell if I were a civilian, I would be terrified at the idea of being murdered out of the blue by a random ninja. There were also less nukenin than one would expect, maybe the sheer self-discipline needed to become a ninja was at work there. It was an interesting thought.

The problem of our mission was Shin. Or better phrased, the problem of our mission was Shin's obsession with his civilian family merchant interests. If I were to be exact, being the third son of a merchant family didn't do him any favors. Unable to inherit, he had chosen to serve his family becoming a shinobi. So when we discovered that the elder who required the mission was an accomplice of the bandits, informing them of when and where to strike, Shin had 'youthfully insisted' to directly remove the threat.

Hana had supported his decision, stating that 'what was the point of being shinobi if they couldn't protect innocents?'

I wasn't big on killing people. I knew that it was something that I couldn't avoid in this world. So at least in my mind I had made my peace with it. Since the Kyubi attack, it had been harder and harder considering other people like an anonymous mass of NPCs. The bandits no doubt killed a lot of traveling merchants, after all, they had been ambushing caravans for months, but they still had hopes, dreams, probably families. Or at least parents that had loved them. I disliked the idea of killing fellow human beings.

Alpha and Beta went ahead in a large circle. They were on herding duties, while their brother would stay with Hana, they went to silently take down a sentinel before hiding themselves, ready to jump in the middle of the fray if things got out of hand. Shin had booby-trapped the surroundings and was ready to lead them into a deadly chase once we'd been figured out.

Nearing the enemy's camp, we split once more, Guy sensei disappearing among the higher branches, and Hana with Gamma going for the two bandits on guard. Not that they could do their job properly, no civilian could see jack squat through the downpour, trees shielding from the worst of it or not.

Shin and I slowed down waiting for her signal. After the following flash of lightning, a light was lit and switched off twice from the guards' position, signaling the success of her part of the job.

I took a deep breath. This is it. I thought, exchanging a nod with Shin, we moved silently into the enemy camp.

The tents were placed in a circular pattern: we split off, he went to the left, starting placing tripwire and explosive notes on the entrances, silently dropping in a pellet that unleashed a lethal gas, while I silently slipped into the first tent on my right.

Looking over the sleeping forms inside, I gathered my wits.

Three hand signs and a careful application of my chakra assured me the men in the tent would keep sleeping through sudden sounds. With a movement dictated more by training than my will, I took a kunai from my pouch and let it spin around my finger. I knelt over the first man and with a strangely steady hand I brought the point of the sharp kunai to a millimeter from the neck of the man.

I was frozen. And always helpful, my brain provided me with images of the neck's structure I painstakingly memorized from medical texts.

Important structures contained in or passing through the neck include the seven cervical vertebrae and enclosed spinal cord, the jugular veins and carotid arteries, part of the esophagus, the larynx and vocal cords, the sternocleidomastoid and hyoid muscles in the front and the trapezius and other nuchal muscles behind. I recited into my head.

I wasn't twelve, so I could only imagine the difficulties Hana had to push through. But then, I wasn't a bred and raised killer either, so my worry about her psychological well being maybe was misplaced. And I was stalling. I recognized it and frowned heavily. I could almost hear the man's heartbeat, or maybe it was mine. I wasn't against lawfully delivered death, rapists had no place in the world I wanted to live in after all. And I had little doubt that the men at my mercy did cause their share of grief. But still, our mission had been gathering information about the reason why caravans had been disappearing. Suddenly becoming judge and executioner because Shin smelled an opportunity for his family to gain a new grateful trading partner.

Those considerations didn't solve my conundrum. I steeled myself and plunged the kunai upwards, digging up until I hit the brain, killing the man immediately, with only a sharp sting of absolute pain that managed to wake him in the split second necessary for him to die.

The sudden, unbidden disgust that rose into me was somewhat expected, so I pushed it aside, knowing that it was directed towards the situation I was into, and not to myself.

Still, my hope to let them be dreaming while dying was busted if they could break through my genjutsu because of the pain.

I refused to see them as something less than me, something beneath human because I didn't like where that road would be leading me. It wasn't even about some kind of misguided sadness, I could easily be convinced that those that stole not because of hunger had no right to be treated like civilized humans. It was more along the lines of... They aren't worthy of anything beyond being removed from the picture. Nothing more and nothing less.

Founded my resolve, I moved over the other form, leaving my first kunai embedded where it was, I didn't want to deal with the wet and probably disgusting sound of it leaving the flesh.

The other man was sleeping on his side, so I simply punched him at the base of his skull with an outstretched knuckle, breaking the first of his vertebrae and killing him on the spot.

The following moments, or minutes, were a haze. A routine quickly established and carried out. Enter silently, make them dream, kill, exit, repeat. Again. Again.

I exited the last tent with hands that were dripping blood. I started to hate the men I had been murdering. Why didn't they fight back? Didn't they want to defend their lives? The sharpness of my thought shook me awake, reminding me of my surroundings.

The rest of my team was already waiting for me in the middle of the camp, the heavy rain couldn't hide the paleness of Shin, nor the splattered blood on Hana's face. The Haimaru brothers cuddled together at her feet. But the dawn was rising, and in the first rays of light I could distinguish the uncharacteristically grim expression of my sensei's face.

He nodded slowly, congratulating me for a job well done.

It was then that I bent over and puked out my soul, or at least tried to.