Blood shit and mud covered him. eyes wide running from trench to trench fighting any opposition with the few skills he could call his own. Jabbing savagely at an eye with a kunai but no longer throwing them for conservations sake.
Junpei idly mused that if he ever got back from the front lines he would buy his taijutsu sensie anything he wanted as those lessons saved him once again from the sharp end of another faceless Genins kunai.
The fighting in this trench was particularly bloody and he suddenly spotted a kumo chunin who seemed to be shaken by the horrors taking place in front of her. In less than a second he was there, reaching up and slicing her throat open before delving back in to the fight, trying to judge if an opponent was too strong for him before engaging and helping where he could in the higher level chunin fights by pulling attention away with his one genjutsu fast enough to use in battle. Or by darting in and slicing a tendon when they were distracted.
This time however it was a chunin who got the drop on him and he just barely avoided a killing stroke. Instead, he received a deep slash across his shoulder and back. He collapsed in the mud and tried to play dead but the chunin wasn't fooled and stabbed at his form, thankfully before he could be skewered, a stray fire jutsu from a jonin level fight incinerated the entirety of the chunins upper half.
A month or two ago he might have marveled at the close brush with death but now he knew he couldn't afford even a second in this mele, so he got back to his feet as fast as he could and began the search for another opponent.
All he could hear was his own gasps of breath and the pounding of his pulse. Through his haze of fear and adrenaline he saw two genin attempting to take down a chunin.
He recognized the maneuver they were attempting, it was one that was drilled into every academy student, it was usually performed with three students but it was doable with two, if less effective, and in these circumstances with multiple hostiles and both of them already engaged with the chunin, it would be hard to attempt any kind of surprise attack.
Judging his distance he readied himself to insert into the maneuver. As the first genin attempted to attack from the front the second jumped above and tried to stomp on the chunins face. The chunin had been prepared though, and ruthlessly cut down the first genin before turning his attention to the one above. However the chunin had not predicted a third opponent and had no time to react as junpei went low and hacked at the back of the mans knee.
The genin above took the moment of distraction to land on the mans shoulders and snap his neck before jumping back off as the man fell to the ground, dead. The other boy didn't so much as look at him before speeding off, but junpei understood the quick hand signal for "acknowledgement" that the genin sent him as a thank you.
He then became aware that the jounin fight he had been saved by earlier was coming his way again and so he retreated into the upper most branches of a nearby tree as the eye catching fight passed his position. He took the opportunity to catch his breath and survey the battlefield.
He'd always had a bit of a knack for strategy, not that he'd ever had a command, and so it wasn't hard to find an area that needed reinforcement. A Konoha squad of three very green genin and their sensei were quickly being pushed back by a Pair of chunin and a deranged looking jounin.
Junpei cursed under his breath as he concluded that the overall battle would be very hard to win if the opposition was able to eliminate any of Konoha's jounin. So he formulated a plan he was unsure he could make work, flooding as much chakra as he was able into his legs, he leaped up from the tree, above the battle, aiming to drop on top of one of the kumo chunin.
It did have the desired result, as he landed his knee in the chunins back, breaking it with a sickening crack, but the kumo jounin did not take well to the intrusion into his squads formation and in the next moment junpei found himself crashing into a tree trunk at immense speeds.
Junpei curled up at the foot of the tree and heaved on the ground trying to take a breath but finding himself unable. Suddenly he was aware of all the pain he had been blocking out, his back and shoulder felt as if they had been cut to the bone and he was sure he had broken a number of ribs.
He didn't know how long he lay there, writhing and gasping, but eventually he was picked up and taken to the med bay, so he supposed that the fighting had ended and he had survived once again. Barely