Chapter 47: The Town Attacked By Pigs!

Kushina was not at the gate before her.

Mikoto stood at the main gate in the grey of early morning with Kaede and Rei already assembled and packed, and watched her best friend come tearing up the road with one sandal half on, a bedroll trailing loose behind her, and a piece of toast in her mouth.

"I'm here!" Kushina announced around the toast. "I'm here, I'm early, don't even say it."

"You're late." Kaede said.

"I'm not late! I'm just not early! There's a difference, you know?!"

"You came by my house last night to tell me you'd beat the captain here." Rei said.

"I say a lot of things." Kushina swallowed the toast and yanked her sandal on. "Are we going or are we standing around counting who got here first like a bunch of-"

"In a second." Mikoto said.

Something in her voice made Kushina close her mouth. Mikoto looked at the three of them, one at a time.

"Before we go through that gate, I want one thing understood. I know I'm not much older than any of you. One of you has known me a lot longer." She didn't look at Kushina when she said it, and didn't need to. "But once we're out there, I'm your captain first and your friend second. When I tell you to do something, you do it right then. Not after you've argued about it. Not after you've thought of a better idea. Right then. If you want to complain, you can complain all you like when we're home and nobody's in danger. Understood?"

Kaede straightened, just slightly. "Understood."

Rei had stopped bouncing. He nodded hard enough that his hood slipped. "Yes, Captain."

"Captain first, friend second, do it right then, complain at home." Kushina rattled it off and gave a firm nod. "Got it. So are we sharing a tent? Because I brought the good snacks, and I'm not sharing them with Rei."

"Hey!"

"You'd eat them all in an hour."

"I would not!"

Mikoto looked at Kushina a beat longer than she'd looked at the other two. Kushina didn't notice. She was already digging through her pack to prove the snacks existed.

"We're going." Mikoto said. "We've got ground to cover."

The eastern farm roads were a few days’ walk for civilians and a half-day at shinobi pace. The road ran through rice country, then up into low hills, the paddies giving way to dry-field farms and stands of bamboo and the occasional cart track branching off toward some hamlet tucked in the folds of the land.

Kushina talked the entire way.

"Okay, okay, hypothetical," she said, running backwards so she could face the other three. "You can only eat one food for the rest of your life. One. What is it? Go."

"Seafood." Rei said instantly.

"WRONG! I mean, your answer should've been ramen, but you said it too fast, you didn't even think about it."

"You asked the question and then got mad I answered it."

"You have to suffer over it a little! It's the rest of your life! AND SEAFOOD IS MORE THAN JUST ONE FOOD! THAT DOESN'T COUNT!" Kushina rounded on Kaede. "Kaede. One food. Forever."

Kaede walked in silence for a moment. "I don't see how this is relevant to the mission."

"It's not relevant to the mission, it's a game, oh my…" Kushina threw up her hands. "Do Aburame just not have fun? Is fun against your clan rules? Is there a bug that eats fun?"

"There's a bug that eats most things." Kaede said. "Captain, what's the actual food situation? Are we resupplying in the town or eating field rations the whole time?"

"Town, if they can spare it," Mikoto said. "From the sound of the report, those people have already lost a lot of their crops. We're not taking food out of their mouths. Field rations until we know what they can spare."

"See, that's a good question." Kushina said, pointing at Kaede. "That was a good question. I take back the bug thing."

"Mikoto-san, what's your one food?" Rei said, bouncing a little as he walked.

Mikoto thought about it. "Onigiri. My mom makes them with-" She stopped and smiled. "Okay, now I'm hungry. This game is a trap."

"It's fun, right?" Kushina grinned. "Rei, new one. You get one jutsu for the rest of your life, but you can never use any others ever again, what do you…"

It went on like that for hours. One food became one jutsu became who'd win in a fight between a thousand academy students and one angry bear ("the students," said Kaede, with total certainty, which derailed everything for twenty minutes). Rei did an impression of his usual sensei that made even Kaede turn away to hide her face. Kushina told a long and almost certainly exaggerated story about the time she pummeled an entire class a year above her. Mikoto mostly listened, and laughed whenever something funny was said.

Then they came over a rise and saw Ishikari, and the leisure part of the day was over.

You could tell something was wrong before you were close enough to see why.

It was the fields. Good farm country, dry-field crops in neat rows up the hillsides, except half of them were torn to ruin. Whole sections trampled flat, churned into mud, root vegetables rooted up and scattered and left to rot. Fences smashed flat. A storage shed with one wall caved in. The damage wasn't a season's bad luck. It was the work of big animals that came in the night and did as they pleased.

And it was very quiet. A farming town at midmorning should have people in the fields. Ishikari had almost no one. The few villagers they passed on the road in moved fast and carefully, eyes going to the treeline, and gave the four shinobi a wide and wary berth until they saw the Leaf headbands. Then relief slowly formed on their faces.

The town itself was a few dozen buildings clustered where two cart roads met, a well, a shrine gone a little shaggy from neglect, a single inn with a faded noren over the door. A handful of children were playing in the dirt of the central square under the eye of an old woman, and even they played quietly, close to the buildings, nobody straying toward the edges where the fields and the trees began.

One of the kids saw them first. A boy, maybe seven, with a stick he'd been using as a sword. He stopped mid-swing and stared at the sword that was real, on the back of a real shinobi, and his mouth fell open.

"Are you here about the pigs?!" He blurted.

"We are," Mikoto said, crouching to his level. "What's your name?"

"Tarō." He pointed the stick at Shark Skin, wide-eyed. "Is that for the big one? You gotta have a big sword for the big one. My dad said the big one's as tall as the ox!"

"Tarō!" The old woman bustled over, flapping her hands, half scolding and half terrified. "Don't you bother, oh. Oh, you're, you're from Konoha. You actually came..." Her voice cracked. "We'd half stopped believing anybody would."

"We came," Mikoto said gently, standing. "We're here to deal with it. Could you point us to whoever speaks for the town?"

"Headman Sōbei. The big house by the shrine." The old woman's hands were shaking, and she gripped them together to stop them. She looked at the four of them, at how young they all were, the genin especially, and something flickered across her face that Mikoto had seen before. The fear that the help that finally came wouldn't be enough. "He'll, he'll want to see you. Thank you. Thank you for coming."

"Go on and play, Tarō." Mikoto smiled, and the boy scampered back, already telling the other children that the Leaf was here and one of them had a sword bigger than the big pig.

Kushina watched the kids go. She wasn't as chatty anymore.

Mikoto gathered the three of them by the well before they did anything else.

"Here's how we do this," she said. "We don't know enough yet. We know there's a pack, we know one of them's big, and we know they've hurt people. That's not enough to plan around. Before we go near those things, we learn everything this town can tell us. How many. How big. Where they've been seen, when they come, what direction they den up in. Everything."

"So we go look for tracks?" Rei said, perking up.

"That's part of it. But the people here have been living next to this for months. They know things no track will tell you." Mikoto looked at the three of them. "So we split up. Each of you, explore the town. Talk to people. Be polite, be patient, and listen more than you talk." A glance at Kushina. "All of you. You're here to come back to this well in a few hours knowing something we didn't know this morning."

"What're you gonna do?" Kushina asked.

"Go straight to the people who've seen the most. The headman. The doctor. The ones who already tried to fight these things." Mikoto's face was even. "Meet back here mid-afternoon. We pool what we've got, and tonight we train, and tomorrow we go hunting. Questions?"

"Yeah," Rei said. "Can I sniff around the fields?"

"Stay out of the trees alone. Edges only. If you smell a fresh trail, you come get me, you do not follow it. Understand?"

"Edges only." Rei agreed, already bouncing on his toes.

"Go."

They scattered.

The fields stank of boar.

Rei caught it the second he got downwind of the torn-up crops, and his nose wrinkled under his hood. Pig, but bigger, ranker, a musk like a regular boar turned up loud. He dropped into a crouch at the edge of a flattened bean field and put his fingers in a churned print in the mud, and his eyes went wide.

It was the size of a dinner plate.

"Yep, that's a big pig alright…" Rei realized.

"That's Kinta's field."

He spun. A man was standing at the broken fence line, watching him, and where the man's left arm should have been there was a folded, pinned sleeve. He was maybe forty, tired-looking.

"You Kinta?" Rei asked.

"I'm Kinta." The man looked at the empty sleeve, then back at Rei. "You're looking at the field where this happened, if you're wondering. Right there. Where you're crouched." He said it flat. "That's about where the big one took my arm off at the shoulder. Doc finished what it started. Couldn't save it."

Rei stood up slowly. He didn't really know what to say to that, and for once in his life he didn't try to fill the silence with something snarky.

"You want to know about them, don't 'cha?"

"Y-Yeah… Yes, sir."

Kinta crouched at the fence, his one hand resting on the rail, and looked out over his ruined field with eyes that knew every meter of it.

"Sit down, ninja boy," he said. "I'll tell you what twelve years of hunting these hills taught me, and then I'll tell you what the big one taught me in about four seconds, which was more. You listen to both."

Rei sat down.

He listened.

Kaede found the doctor's house by the line of people waiting outside it.

She didn't go in. She stood across the lane, and she watched, and she let a thin trickle of kikaichū drift out along the eaves where no one would notice them, and when they returned to report what they learned, she listened.

What she learned was that the line was long, and most of it was not sick. They were checking on someone. Asking after someone. The same few names came up over and over.

An old man sat on the bench outside, not in the line, just sitting. Kaede crossed to him and sat at the other end of the bench and said nothing for a while.

After a few minutes he spoke without looking at her. "You're one of the Leaf kids."

"Yes."

"Took your time."

"Yes."

He grunted, mollified by the honesty. And then he started to talk, and Kaede listened to a man who had watched this valley for seventy years tell her exactly how many boars there were, and when they'd come, and how the herd had grown fat and bold on a valley that had no one left to stop them.

Kushina was good at a lot of things. The subtler arts of being a shinobi were not one of them.

She'd marched up to the first house with people outside it, opened her mouth to announce that Konoha had arrived and everything was going to be fine, and gotten exactly as far as "Hey! We're-" before she'd seen the woman sitting on the step.

The woman was youngish and bone-tired, with a baby asleep against her shoulder and a toddler clinging to her leg. Her eyes found Kushina and didn't quite settle on her. There was a white mourning cloth tied around the doorpost behind her.

"...Hi?" Kushina said, much smaller.

"You're here for the pigs." The woman's voice was empty and polite. "Sōbei's up by the shrine."

"Yeah. I, yeah." Kushina stood there. The toddler peeked at her from behind the woman's leg. "Is that, are these yours? They're cute."

"This one's Tarō's sister. You'll have met Tarō. He's… he's a loud boy. Takes after his father that way."

The mourning cloth. The way she said father, past tense.

Kushina was eleven and reckless and had put her foot in her mouth more times than she could count, and some instinct she didn't know she had told her to sit down on the step. So she sat. Not too close. And she didn't say anything about being a hero, or about the Red-Eyed Angel being her best friend, or about how she was going to punch some boars into next week. She just sat, and after a moment she held out a finger to the toddler, who grabbed it.

"My name's Kushina." she said.

"Oharu." the woman said.

They sat on the step together, the loud girl and the quiet widow, and the baby slept, and across the square the children played their too-careful games, and Kushina found that for once she had nothing to brag about and nothing to prove, and though it was awkward, she stayed for a little while, so a tired woman wasn’t alone on her step.

Headman Sōbei was an old man.

He received Mikoto in the big house by the shrine, poured tea with hands that shook a little, and told her how it was. The boars had moved into the valley last autumn, a breeding pack, drawn by the easy crops and the lack of any predator big enough to challenge them. A bad winter elsewhere had pushed them down out of the deep hills. They'd settled. They'd bred. And a herd of aggressive boars the size of small bears, in farm country, with no one but farmers to face them, had turned Ishikari from a working town into a place that hid indoors and watched the treeline.

"We tried… We sent to the Daimyō's office three times. Three times. Heard nothing for months. And the damage kept on, and the winter stores got thin, and people started talking about leaving." He set down his cup. "So I gave my blessing to the hunt. Our own men. Hunters and farmers, fifteen of them, the strongest we had. I told them it was better than starving."

"What happened?"

"It was awful… They drove the herd fine. The small ones, the regular ones, they killed four, drove the rest off. They thought they'd won. And then the big one came through the brush where nobody was looking and it went down the line like, like a cart through a paddy. Tatsuo died where he stood. Kinta lost his arm. Heita lost an eye. Three more hurt bad enough they may never work a field the same. All in the time it takes to draw a breath." He looked at his own hands. "I sent them. I told them it was better than starving. Now Tatsuo's widow has three children and no husband, and his brother Heita has one eye and won't speak to anyone, and it's on me."

"It’s not your fault..." Mikoto said quietly.

Sōbei didn't look like he believed her.

She went to the doctor next.

Dr. Yura was a blunt, broad woman of fifty with forearms like a farmer's and the flat, unsentimental attitude of someone who'd spent thirty years being the only thing standing between this valley and its own mortality. She had no shinobi training. She had a room of hurt people and not enough of anything, and when Mikoto offered her hands and her chakra the doctor looked at her hard for a long moment.

"You any good?" Yura asked.

"Yes." Mikoto said. No false modesty. There wasn't time for it.

"Then come in. I've got a man with crushed ribs I've been afraid to move for a week, and a girl with a leg that set wrong, and an infection in a gore wound I'm losing. Start there." Yura held the door. "And don't tell me what you can't do until you've shown me what you can."

So Mikoto worked.

She healed the crushed ribs whole, the green light pouring deep, the man weeping with relief when he drew his first painless breath in a week. She rebroke and reset the girl's badly-set leg under a gentle genjutsu and knit it true. She drew the infection out of the gore wound and rebuilt the tissue under it healthy and pink. She went down Yura's line of the hurt and the failing and she fixed them, one after another, the small wounds and the large, and the doctor followed her from bed to bed with an expression that started as professional skepticism and ended somewhere near zealous awe.

And then she came to Heita.

Tatsuo's brother. The one who'd lived. He sat in the corner of the back room with a bandage over the left side of his face and his good eye fixed on nothing, and he didn't react when Mikoto knelt in front of him.

"Heita," she said. "I'm a healing ninja. May I look?"

He didn't answer. But he didn't stop her, and she unwound the bandage carefully, and looked at what the boar had left.

The socket was a mess of healing scar, the lids torn and badly mended by Yura's overworked hands. That part she could fix. The lids, the scar, the damage to the bone around it, all of that the body knew how to heal, and she could urge it to heal right.

But the eye was gone.

Mystical Palm couldn't help with that. Ordinary medical ninjutsu only hurried along what a body already knew how to do. A body knew how to close a wound and knit a bone and grow back skin, slowly, and her chakra made the slow fast. But a body did not know how to grow back an eye. There was no healing there for her to hurry.

There was another way, though.

Mikoto let her Sharingan turn, three tomoe, and looked at his right eye. Past the iris, past the white, down to the cells that built it, layer on layer, the clear jelly and the thin living sheet at the back that caught the light and the thick cord of nerve that ran from it into the dark of the skull. Everything his missing eye had been, his remaining one still was. She had the whole pattern sitting right in front of her.

The Regenerative Healing Jutsu could take a sample of a person's own cells and change them into whatever the wound needed. It was meant for the worst injuries there were, holes through the body, organs torn apart, and it was brutal to perform. A full formula drawn on the floor around the patient. Hours of work without a single break, shaping each cell correctly and then setting it exactly where it belonged. Hospitals put whole teams of medics on it in shifts, and even then it failed more often than not.

An eye was small. But it was also the most delicate thing she could think of to build. And the nerve behind it had to meet the brain and agree to talk to it again, and she had no way of knowing for certain that it would.

She healed everything she could first. She made the socket whole and painless, mended the lids so they closed right, smoothed the scar until it was a pale line instead of a mess.

Then she told him the truth, because he deserved it from someone who wasn't guessing.

"Heita. Listen to me. Ordinary healing can't give you the eye back. But there's a technique that might. It takes hours. I'd have to draw a sealing formula around you and build the eye from your own cells, piece by piece, and the whole time I can't stop or leave. If something goes wrong halfway, I could lose all of it." She held his gaze. "And even if I build it right, I can't promise you'll see out of it. The eye might come back and stay dark. I won't lie to you about that."

His good eye moved. For the first time, it actually looked at her.

"I'm not doing it today." Mikoto went on. "Not while that boar is still out there. Those things come down at night, and if they hit the town while I'm halfway through, I'd have to choose between finishing your eye and protecting this town. I'm not going to put either of us in that spot. When it's dead, I'll come back here, and if you want me to try, I'll try."

For a long moment Heita didn't move.

Then his good eye filled, and overflowed, and he put his face in his hands, and he sobbed. She could maybe give him back an eye. Nobody could give him back Tatsuo. The eye was just the thing he could finally cry about.

Mikoto stayed with him while he did. She didn't tell him it would be alright, because some things weren't, and he'd know she was lying. She just stayed, a hand on his shoulder.

Sometimes the medicine was simply being there for someone.

When she finally stepped out of the doctor's house into the afternoon light, Dr. Yura was waiting.

"You think you can do the eye." Yura said.

"It’s a possibility."

"Possibility..." The doctor nodded slowly, like the word pleased her. "Last healer who came through these parts years back promised a cripple he'd walk, took the family's money, and left. You told a grieving man exactly what it'd cost and exactly what it might not give back, to his face, when a promise would've been easier." She looked Mikoto up and down. "I thought you were just a kid with ninja miracles, but it looks like whoever taught you, taught you right. Now go kill the thing that did this, and don't you dare let any more people end up on my table."

…

They met back at the well in the mid-afternoon, and they pooled it.

Between Kaede's old-timer and Rei's one-armed hunter and Sōbei and Yura, the picture came clear. The pack was fourteen strong: thirteen large boars, bad enough on their own, the size of small bears, fast and mean and territorial. And the alpha. The big one. Every account agreed and none of them were exaggerating; the thing was the size of a cart, old and scarred and intelligent, and it was the one that had broken the hunt and killed Tatsuo and taken Kinta's arm and Heita's eye. The regular boars were dangerous. The alpha was the mission.

They denned in a hollow up in the treeline to the northeast, came down to feed in the dark and the early morning, and ranged across the valley's fields on no schedule anyone could pin down. Kinta had told Rei the ground around the den; the old man had told Kaede the numbers and the timing; Oharu had told Kushina nothing useful about boars at all and everything that mattered about why it had to be done right.

"Fourteen in total, thirteen and the big one. That's a lot of angry animals for three genin." Mikoto said, turning it over.

"We have to take 'em." Rei said, but quieter than he would have that morning.

“We have to, Mikoto.” Kushina agreed with a determined look.

"And you will. If we do it smart. Which is what tonight’s for." Mikoto agreed.

The inn gave them two rooms and would not hear of payment, and Mikoto took them out to the field behind it while there was still light.

She'd led enough teams now to know that the best thing for a team to learn wasn’t wasn’t strength or jutsu, but teamwork.

"Kinta told Rei something important," she said. "A boar that size doesn't turn well once it's moving. It picks a target and it goes straight at it. So you never stand in front of one. You step aside, let it go past, and hit it from the side while it's still trying to turn around." She walked to the far end of the field, thirty paces off, and turned to face them. "I'm the boar. Don't let me reach you."

The three of them spread out across the grass. Kaede on the left. Rei on the right. Kushina in the middle.

Mikoto dropped her head down and charged like an actual boar. Kaede stepped left. Rei hopped right. Kushina stayed exactly where she was, too busy laughing at the sight of her best friend charging like a pig.

"Kushina, move!" Rei yelled.

She didn't. She threw the punch at the last instant, a big looping right aimed at Mikoto's face. Mikoto ducked her head under it, tapped Kushina's stomach with one finger, and Kushina's feet left the ground. She went rolling like a ball with her eyes completely wide, not expecting so much force to come from a single finger. Kushina landed flat on her back in the grass, her brain not fully caught up to what exactly happened as she looked up at the sky.

Mikoto appeared in her vision and looked down at her.

"Dead." She said. "And that was me going easy." She pointed at Kaede and Rei, who had stepped aside like she'd told them. "They did it right. You did it your way."

"That's not fair, a real pig wouldn’t have dodged like that!" Kushina wheezed at the sky.

"Never underestimate an enemy, Kushina." Mikoto helped her up.

Kushina got back into position clutching her stomach as Mikoto charged them over and over again. Each time Mikoto healed the scrapes, and each time they came back a little smarter. Kaede figured out first that she didn't have to hit anything; she only had to throw a cloud of kikaichū in front of Mikoto's face and Mikoto had to veer around it, straight into the side of whoever was waiting there. Rei figured out that it wasn’t much trouble at all to avoid a wild boar. Even one faster than average still had simple signs that showed what it intended to do.

Kushina picked grass out of her hair and glared at her teammates. On the next charge, she stepped aside with them, and as Mikoto thundered past, Kushina's fist caught her in the ribs from the side. It was the first hit any of them had landed all evening. Kushina grinned like it had been her idea the whole time.

Mikoto called it when the first stars came out, early enough that they'd get a full night's sleep. She'd healed every bruise and every scrape along the way. What she couldn't heal was how worn out they were. Hours of pouring chakra into the same tricks over and over had drained them nearly dry, and the three of them could barely drag themselves back into the inn.

Kushina grumbled the whole way to the room about how a captain wasn't supposed to flatten her best friend so many times. Rei was asleep before he hit the bedroll. Kaede, orderly even in exhaustion, checked her insects and laid out her gear for morning and then lay down without a word.