CH_35

The next day, Tōji got up at dawn, washed up, and had breakfast.

After that, he properly organized his ninja tool pouch—that was the important thing.

Though as a genin here, he could barely get any tool resupply. But at least he needed to know how much "ammo" he had left.

His most prized Exploding Tags were down to only two. 『Why doesn't this kind of major expenditure—done for the sake of the country and the village—get reimbursed?』

Maybe it was because he and the others were just lowly genin of little use. No one had assigned them any tasks, but no one had told them to go back to the village either…

It wasn't until nearly ten in the morning that Hizashi finally showed up.

He sent most of the genin to work as laborers, and a smaller group to run errands in different parts of the camp. Only Tōji—because he knew a little first-aid medical treatment—was assigned to the medical corps as an assistant.

On his way to the medical unit, he saw squads of shinobi moving about in a hurry, and occasional chūnin on patrol passing by. Looks like after the ambush, even daytime security had been tightened.

Gradually, he could hear pained groans and smell disinfectant—Tōji knew he was close.

But what he saw first were quite a few lightly wounded shinobi waiting outside several large tents, most in silence, a few chatting quietly among themselves.

The chūnin who'd escorted Tōji there simply told him to pick up medical supplies and then directly attend to whatever the light casualties needed.

『Mm… simple, brutal, and efficient.』

When Tōji went to collect the supplies, a middle-aged female medical-nin—whom others called Haruka—gave him a slightly more specific assignment.

Medical-nin were a truly scarce resource in this era. Each large tent had only one fully qualified medical-nin. The rest were nurses with some medical knowledge, or genin-level novice medics.

No wonder even Tōji—who'd only learned a bit of battlefield first-aid and knew only the 【Healing Technique】—was pulled out to help.

If the lightly wounded waiting outside those medical tents had to rely solely on their own bandaging, recovery wouldn't come quickly.

Tōji focused on treating those with only superficial flesh wounds first—the ones he was more confident about. He'd clean and disinfect, then use the 【Healing Technique】 to speed up the healing to a certain point and stop.

That was what Lady Haruka had instructed—heal them to "good enough," and conserve chakra appropriately.

Because there were quite a lot of these lightly wounded cases. And those injured shinobi might be sent out on missions at any moment—they might not even have time to wait for treatment before they had to leave.

In the days that followed, Tōji was basically assigned to handle these flesh-wound cases exclusively. And there were always plenty of them.

He didn't slack off—in fact, he often pushed his chakra to near-empty, which left him looking drained for a while.

But this kind of work was also excellent training. By the third day, Tōji started noticing that his chakra reserves recovered faster than usual, and the 【Healing Technique】 was becoming more and more natural to use.

As for Natchi, his assignment was running errands around the camp—delivering non-classified orders or ferrying documents. A safe and easy arrangement, really.

The daily influx of wounded roughly reflected how intense the fighting was on the battlefield. But Konoha hadn't sent any fresh reinforcements to Kannabi in a long time.

Tōji mainly picked up rough bits of the situation from the wounded soldiers' chatter—but he didn't learn much.

The calendar had already dragged to the end of the year, and the war remained deadlocked. After all, Iwa had no intention of forcing a decisive battle.

But in terms of resource consumption, Konoha was burning through supplies at twice the rate of Iwa. Even though Konoha's supply lines were short—fighting within its own borders—it had several times more troops deployed than Iwa did.