Naoya and Akio had called in and promised every favor under the sun to make sure she got assigned to Uncle Makoto for her first mission. He'd been keeping her brothers alive on their first missions outside the clan compound since before their father died. He was also the most senior officer they had any pull with, and probably the only one that wouldn't make them pay through the nose to take a little civilian girl into the field for the first time.

Akane only had three days before she was expected to be placed on a squad and join the war efforts. It was a very hard three days. Her family was devastated.

War was bullshit.

Akane had always been a physical person. Even as Samantha, in her first life, she'd loved to dance and play sports. Volleyball was her favorite, even if she was never tall enough compared to the other players, she had still been one of the best on the team. It was why no one complained when she claimed the title of captain.

Learning Taijutsu had come pretty easily to her. It made more sense to her than weapons training did, and while she'd become carefully deadly with ninjutsu, her first instinct in a fight was always to get in close and strike.

Naoya had sat her down and let her know under no uncertain terms that she was too small for that. Any attempt to duke it out with taijutsu, outside of a spar, with the body of a child, was a death sentence.

Her brother had gripped her shoulder tight enough to hurt, the urgency and concern almost overwhelming as he tried to impart everything and anything he thought might help keep her alive.

Akio wasn't much better. He'd packed and repacked her weapons six times before Akane managed to calm him down.

But her brothers agreed her best bet at survival was sticking close to uncle Makoto and using ninjutsu. Akane had always had impressive reserves, especially for a girl, let alone a child her age.

Her range and control of fire jutsu rivaled some of the best ninjutsu users in the clan, thanks to years of increasingly elaborate fire manipulation. She even had the Hail Mary shot of using Cremation, although she couldn't depend on it much on the field with the amount of chakra it took up, and hers was not a clan with access to soldier pills. Apparently they had an uneasy truce with the Inuzuka Clan, but they didn't have any trade, let alone trade of important medicine or clan secrets.

Her nerves buzzed with anticipation on her first official mission. It was nothing but a milk run to purchase grain for the clan, but Akane felt the specter of death hovering behind her shoulder.

Nothing happened on her first mission.

Four people died on the second.

Akane killed one of the enemy shinobi, one of her fellow new Warriors died when they were initially ambushed, and uncle Makoto took care of the other two enemy shinobi. It was obvious they were a target of opportunity. One senior shinobi with four little ducklings did smack of being easy targets for what seemed to be a squad of three senior Senju warriors.

If Akane hadn't used the phoenix flames jutsu to send a white hot fireball to the face of one and set fire to the pants of another, they might not have made it home.

Akane still threw up after, the smell of burnt skin making her nauseous the way it hadn't had the chance to when her cremation flames burnt the bodies away in their entirety.

Uncle Makoto was kind enough to reassure her she'd done the right thing-even when she knew she hadn't. Killing someone was never the right thing, but she didn't have the luxury of living in a world where it wasn't necessary. Akane had to ensure her own survival, that of her clanmates, and even that of her family.

Such were the ugly realities of war.

Akane had somehow thought she'd been prepared for it. Her clan had been at war her entire life. She'd thought she'd known was she was in for. After years of comforting her brothers when waking them from their nightmares. After watching her family be sent away in funeral pyre after funeral pyre-Akane had thought she'd been ready for what the field entailed.

She'd been arrogant.

Nothing could have prepared her for the constant sight of blood, watching the life go out of clan member after clan member, or the crisp smell of burning flesh as she constantly pushed herself further and further past her limits just to make it home.

It was beyond awful and exhausting and the only reason that Akane was surviving all the missions she had so far was a refusal to leave her family behind and a spiteful determination to outlive Tajima Uchiha.

That guy was such a dick.

Not even his own children liked him.

She'd overheard the gossip about the shouting match he had with Madara over forcing the warrior status on his civilian, barely trained, betrothed. Madara was surprisingly willing to marry her, despite their difference in status, and Akane wasn't sure how she felt about it. It was a point in his favor that he had the temerity to acknowledged it was fucked up to claim her reward was the most advantageous marriage match in his fathers hands and then set her up to die so she wouldn't actually have the chance to take advantage of it.

It was a good thing Naoya had been out on a mission when first received notice. She and Akio had to hold Naoya down before he attempted to assassinate their clan head. Her brother may have lived long enough to claim the status of a senior warrior, but that was not a fight he would win. She refused to let him die for her so pointlessly. So she told him she loved him and that she needed him whole and alive more than she needed Tajima to get his comeuppance.

Naoya only mostly believed her.

Her siblings were so scarred. Akemi's loss had hit Aiko so hard she could barely acknowledge it, existing around the wound it had left in its wake-clinging harder to Akane and her mother than she ever had before.

Her mother refused to see her.

It had hurt, but Akane couldn't blame her, not after everything she'd been through. Besides, it would be quite hypocritical to take exception to the way her mother dealt with the children she had on the field only after she'd become one of them. Her brothers had been strong enough to bear their mothers distance. Akane could be too.

The rest of her family tried to pull together. They tried to have family dinners when Al three warriors were home. Akane was slowly adjusting to the empty space where her mother had once sat at the head of the table.

Aiko was doing her best to hold down the fort. Her older sister was running herself ragged to keep the home, take care of their mother, and do everything she feasibly could for the rest of the family. About the only bright spot was that she'd grown closer to her brothers. Akio had been adorably baffled the first time Aiko had asked him what he wanted for dinner. Naoyas narrowed eyes reminded her painfully of a cat who'd had its fur rubbed the wrong way when Akio started asking after his missions.

Her brothers had also grown notably more clingy-something she'd barely believed possible. But now she trained her blue flames every day she didn't have a mission, firebending was no longer a dream of badassery.

It was her one shot at survival.

Survival was the name of the game these days. Akane tried to convince herself it wasn't all bad.

Naoya had finally copied a lightning jutsu they managed to modify into wire assisted death for him and Akio. Wire, thankfully, being the cheapest thing the Uchiha produced. There were several wire smiths in the clan. It was one of the few retirement options for crippled shinobi that would still earn you rations. Of course you had to be able to afford the apprenticeship fees, so it was, like most things, a privilege for those with a lineage.

It was what poor Akira was being tasked with considering how badly his recovery was going. Akane tried to drag herself over to visit him after training regularly for cuddles and naps.

He never complained about how dirty or smelly she was, just happy to have someone who showered him with affection, considering he was still a child and all. No one else treated him like one anymore. Not even his own brothers, who would grimly take him to the training grounds and make sure he could defend himself with throwing weapons if nothing else.

She understood the desperation they felt for his survival-she'd felt the same about her own siblings for as long as she could remember. But if they let that keep them from joy and love then the stupid war won.

It was what her first mother used to tell her while she was dying under the combined assault of cancer and chemotherapy. If Samantha didn't smile and mean it at least once a day-then the cancer won.

Life after her mothers death had been a bleak thing. But Samantha woke up and tried to be happy everyday regardless-otherwise the cancer won. Once it had taken her mother, Samantha had refused to let it take the rest of her life too.

It wasn't much different in her current life. She wished the war would stop stealing all the light and life in those around her.

It was so stupid.

Akane almost couldn't believe all of the incredibly stupid ways that the children around her died. Especially those on their first couple of missions who were sometimes killed because they couldn't remember what their leaders hand signs meant in the heat of their first battle, or misunderstood their orders, got caught and summarily dispatched from existence.

She had watched it happen three times, before she could no longer let it go on.

It hadn't even been that hard to think of something to do about it.

Missions for shinobi of the clan came in two real categories. Paid missions and Clan missions. Paid missions were what ninja were actually hired out for by various clients, and Clan missions were everything else the clan needed. Supply runs, construction, patrols, attacks on the Senju.

An Uchiha warrior had to take fifty Clan missions before they could qualify for a paid mission. Half of the mission's payment was then split amongst the many shinobi who undertook the mission, the other half went into the clan coffers.

The problem with Clan missions, was that the elders in charge of assigning new shinobi to squads didn't really seem to care if the children in question were actually prepared to take whatever missions the squads were assigned, as training, like education-was up to immediate families.

They simply noted whether or not the corpse had been recovered, after, and if the child in question had the sharingan-the only qualification for the creation of a corpse retrieval mission. They couldn't let their enemies get their hands on the glorious sharingan of course.

Akane had decided she was pretending her station as Madara Uchiha's new fiancée gave her the authority to create pre-clan missions.

The idea was simple: she would get her hands on a few single shinobi chores that were usually masqueraded as clan missions for recovering injured shinobi and give them squads of 'warriors in training' to get them used to actual mission lingo and tactics in the safety of the compound. The idea was that the better ingrained the knowledge was-the less likely they were to fuck up in the field.

Considering most injured shinobi that took those particular 'clan missions' mostly did it to ensure their family ate that month, it ended up working out for everyone involved. With the offer of assistance the injured shinobi only had to wait until they were mobile, not mobile and semi functional, to take aforementioned missions, since all the work was fobbed off on the kids.

One of the first test cases was Ryota, who despite his lineage's theoretical support needed the income to feed himself and Akanes nieces. After Akemi's funeral the Susano elders had declared they would provide Ryota just enough food for his little family to survive on the condition that Ryota trained young members of his Lineage and married the woman his mother had recently picked out.

Her former brother in law earned her respect by declining and making sure that his daughters were taken care of by himself instead. It wasn't a secret that Ryotas mom had never warmed up to Akemi, or that she considered her son's twin daughters dead weight. Anyone she wed Ryota to would be her ally in getting rid of them.

Akane's family helped where they could, with babysitting and what food they could spare. She also knew her mom, and by extension, Aiko, would take the twins in a heartbeat if Ryota ever offered, but the man was determined to be the one to raise them. He said he promised Akemi to be the best father he could be, and her mother had clearly chosen wisely because Ryota was determined to live up to the promise he made to his dead wife.

The trial run was a success across the board.

Ryota was able to mind the twins and instruct the shinobi-to-be on proper field operations at the same time. He only had to correct the five and six year old children a few times. Check the chores were done up to the proper standard and he barely had to move so he didn't further aggravate his injuries.

The practice was set in stone a mere month after Akane had instituted it, and according to some pleased grumbling from squad leaders it had cut down on pointless accidental deaths by baby warriors.

Akane had been ecstatic, especially when she saw how proud her brothers and sister were. It was almost making her feel shy. But in between training until she dropped, checking in on Akira, the twins, and the hellfires of war, Akane remembered her desire to help her clan all over again.

And she was actually in a position where she could get away with her pretend authority as long as it was notably beneficial.

It took her a while to figure out where to start working on them-but Akane had long since found problems in the clan that someone should be trying to fix, but were pretty much ignored because the clan was at war.

Of course the problems solely existed because of the war.

Like the alarming amount of starving widows in the clan.

Most widows didn't have much problem remarrying if they didn't have more than one or two kids, but some were left with a single warrior to support up to seven people in the family and didn't have her mothers network to find work to offset the cost of feeding so many mouths with so little rations.

Then there were the widows who had proven unable to bear children and whose immediate family could simply not afford to support them. Or the ones who had found themselves single yet too old to be desirable on the marriage market, and sadly didn't have any sons willing or able to feed them.

The retired healer who'd taught her how to treat Akiras wounds had become one of them years ago, and she barely made ends meet by waking up at the ass crack of dawn to offer her services doing all the grunt work in the clan healing halls the salaried healers couldn't get to for food scraps, as she never had children and was considered too old to be an effective healer with her eyesight mostly gone.

It wasn't, Akane thought, that the Uchiha didn't try to help each other. Tamura was one of the oldest Uchiha around. Once upon a time, when she'd first started losing her sight, a lot of the warriors she once treated had done their best to provide her with food and even firewood, year round. Some of her apprentices even cooked for her, and were the ones who insisted on compensating the old woman for the chores in the first place.

There just wasn't enough food to go around.

As the old woman aged, most of her old patients died off, and her grown apprentices with families of their own couldn't justify feeding their old master when a few bites of food could be the difference between a living child or a dead one. So the old healer fell through the cracks, receiving less and less assistance until she was just barely hanging on.

Tamura Uchiha did not deserve such a fate, she was barely in her sixties. But these days, considering the clan life expectancy, that was considered old. It even felt a little worse because the woman had once been a healer, like her mother before her, and so on for generations. She hadn't even needed sight to properly teach Akane how to bandage and treat burns, she'd dealt with so many over the years. Yet she was set to die off quietly, like so many other unfortunate women.

Akane got a stipend as Madaras fiancé, but it was pretty much meant to keep her in ninja wire and Kunai. So even if she donated its entirety, she wouldn't be making a dent in the actual problem. Especially if anything happened to Akane and the money they were relying on was suddenly gone.

Fortunately Akane had become practiced at creative solutions.

Once upon a time, Samantha had attended a candle making class on a date that went nowhere, but she'd met some urban beekeepers and found herself introduced to an entire subculture of people that kept gardens and even managed to raise chickens in small city apartments or unreasonably small backyards. Samantha had become grateful for her new friends for the free produce once her own attempts at growing plants in her small studio apartment failed, but her willingness to come over and be of assistance meant she was familiar with a lot of the processes of vertical farming and keeping chickens alive and generally healthy enough to make eggs in small cramped spaces.

It wasn't that the Uchiha didn't try to use what space they had available to grow their own food. The issue was mostly shinobi appetites and prioritizing feeding their soldiers instead of their civilians. There was also the sad matter of overcrowding, and simply not being able to spare the manpower for proper fields instead of yards.

While the new compound had its old perimeter widened so that the two thousand and change Uchiha that compromised the clan could theoretically build their homes and have enough space for every home to have a decent yard, the war meant houses were built far too slowly. Priority, as always, had been given to lineage families, which created small Japanese style manors with private training spaces and sprawling gardens. Then senior warriors and eventually baby shinobi could try to petition the elders for a home of their own, but their odds weren't great if they didn't at least have the sharingan.

But by the time most of the senior warriors were housed, their clan head had declared the building was using up too much manpower and the house building slowed to a crawl. Most families were still living in the barracks, which had been carefully sectioned off with screens to give the illusion of privacy. It had been more than a year and yet maybe one house was completed per month. The widows and orphans didn't have a chance in hell of leaving the Barracks anytime soon.

The only reason Akanes family had managed housing in the first wave was a combination of Naoya's Senior warrior status and the clout her family received by defending Tajima's sons. Without her eldest brother, her own family would have had no chance of leaving the Barraks as quickly as they had.

So those who would seriously benefit from the ability to grow some of their own food didn't even have a plot of land to grow anything in. Hence Akane and her alternate universe knowledge had to come to the rescue. She'd asked some of her squad mates to help her clear out a field a five minute walk from the barracks and set up what was functionally a community garden with walls for vertical farming, sectioned out by vegetable type and began her spring food production.

The biggest garden hack she could thank her previous life for though, was learning how to grow vegetables from the parts you cut off to otherwise throw away when cooking. Akane had no idea how to get her hands on seeds, or even how many her little stipend could have brought. It was a blessing not to have to worry about it. She'd known several people who had done their best to instruct her, and she was now profoundly thankful for their efforts.

They had failed, because Akane had the literal opposite of a green thumb, but making puppy dog eyes at Aiko until she tried Akanes latest 'harebrained scheme' soon bore results. The design was pretty simple, she'd prop up a wall, angle boards on it to make triangular pits and use wire and kunai to keep them in place. Then she'd fill the pits with dirt and she had vertical garden space, but she'd have to show proof of concept before she could get proper production going.

The prototype she'd filled with dirt and she'd set into the side of her house for a wall garden using Akira's first few flawed attempts at ninja wire and kunai showed their little green shoots and Akane cajoled her older sister to treat a class on how to do it and crowd funded scrapped materials. She made sure the people that attended filled out a sign up sheet and those that made it to every class were the first to be offered a sharecrop contract.

Akane, not being a capitalist, mostly made sure accounts were clear to avoid any fights between the women that grew the produce in the future. If everything was written down in black and white, and everyone had a personal copy of the contract then anyone trying to pull a fast one would be very obvious. Who knew her managing experience of her organizing bar trivia nights would also come in handy, Akane still had the compulsive need to cut cheating off at the roots. It wasn't just widows who showed up, after all, and it was better to avoid trouble where she could.

Some of the girls in the clan about her age were willing to help just to suck up to her, since she was supposedly the future clan head's fiancé and all. She assumed they thought proximity to her was encouraged in the hopes of finding a better marriage than their Family trees might net them, much like the girls who still trained desperately in the hopes that they, too, could defend some important lineage child and have a fantastic marriage bestowed upon them by the clan head. Akanes life was being treated like a Cinderella story, which was quite annoying when she thought about it, so Akane tried not to.

The only one of her new fan club Akane actually really liked was a girl named Cho with intelligent eyes and the most initiative she'd ever seen someone who was her actual age show. Cho had actually spent a week redesigning Akanes original wood and wire side shelves assisted by Kunai into something that only required wood and significantly less wire. Which was great, because there had been some displeased mumbling about using up good steel. Even flawed and old Kunai could be melted down and recycled.

They were at war, weapons were important. The Clan had long made it clear what it's priorities were.

Cho even managed to find two other girls with decent heads on their shoulders who she commanded with Akanes borrowed make-believe authority and kept Akanes agenda going efficiently even in her absence. In Samantha's former world Cho could have been president, or at least CEO of something important. She was like a force of nature.

Cho was her new best friend.

It was a new kind of friendship for Akane that included catching her up on all the details of her ongoing projects in the clan whenever she made it back from a mission, and working as a sounding board while she trained, brainstorming the next steps she felt each one should be taking and making sure it was carried out in her stead.

Between Cho and Aiko, who had seemingly learned more from their mother on how to keep an ear out for clan gossip than Akane had, the community garden managed to take root in the clan.

Akane tried her best to be nice to her sister and new friend. She tried to verbalize her gratitude effusively since it wasn't like she could pay them or properly reward them for their efforts. But she tried to be clear about how important they were, and what a big difference their work was making in the clan.

Less people would starve. Anyone who'd been hungry knew how much that mattered. What a positive change they were making. In their war with the Senju, most of the Uchiha clan had been hungry.

So her sister and her friend had thrown their lot in with Akane, and she was so grateful. She wouldn't have been able to do anything without them.

The only snag she'd really hit was the changing of the seasons. If she could make green houses then she'd be set on at least keeping anyone who needed food assistance alive. But she had no idea had to actually make glass, or even access to anyone that could. She'd been complaining to Naoya about it when her brother gave her a thoughtful look and told her not to worry about it.

He said he'd take care of it.

Akane had not expected him to show up with a blue haired fiancé and her little brother. Having a glass blower from Wave who knew what they were doing was a god-send.

Even though it turned out Naoya and Emiko would never actually get married…

X

Early update! Although I'm changing my update schedule to Mondays instead of Sundays, so the next update will be on the 29th of this month.

Akane, nervous about going to war-putting on a brave face: I got this

Akane, after impressing her squad leader and saving some clan members: I don't got this

I promised yall some clan progress and I delivered. Akane stays trying, and we love her for that.

Next chapter is Ayumi, the mother, who I fully acknowledge as a controversial character-but much like her kids, she's been through a lot. I tried to make sure she made sense, if nothing else.

Also I'd really appreciate some feedback, this is the first story I've ever published where I've had to come up with so many different characters. Please let me know if theres something off with characterization and the like. Thanks in advance!