A Ninja's Guide to Surviving a Shinobi War
By: JAJapster

Copyright Stuff: I don't own anything in the contents of this story. Please don't republish this story without asking permission. That is all.

Summary:
Slightly AU –It has been three years since the flames of war engulfed Konoha and the rest of the world, claiming the lives of hundreds of thousands. When Naruto unexpectedly returns, though, he brings with him the key to Konoha's victory: a suicide mission deep behind enemy lines. A squad of Shinobi will leave on a quest to end the war, but none of them will return home the same, if at all.

Chapter Two: The Cost of War

Hyuga Neji was fast, too fast for her to naturally time his attacks and counter punch him when he missed. He would weave in, unleash a brutal combination of deadly jabs and chops using the Hyuga clan's trademark style of fighting, and then dance out of range long before she even had a chance to load up her hand canon of a right hand. She had always known Neji was an expert in hand to hand combat, but she hadn't been prepared to deal with his speed when she had agreed to spar with him earlier that day. Already her torso, bared by her form fitting training outfit, was covered in nasty bruises and her lip was trickling blood from where Neji had connected before she had a chance to raise her guard.

Haruno Sakura exhaled deeply and watched as Neji hopped nimbly on the points of his toes. Without warning, he lunged in and stabbed his fingers into Sakura's ribs. She grunted in pain as his attack dug into her flesh and ruptured one of her chakra points, but she gritted her teeth and took a wild swing at Neji's face. She was too slow, of course, and her fist tore through the air fast enough to send a gust of air through Neji's long black hair.

"You're telegraphing your attacks. I can see you cocking your fist back from a mile away." Neji pointed out. "Are you sure you're body is ready for this?"

"Just shut up and fight," Sakura snarled.

Three years had past since Sasuke had tried to kill her. He had almost succeeded. The medics still didn't know how Sakura survived the attack. The gun shot wound was fatal, they told her. Anyone, even a Shinobi, should have died almost instantly. Sakura, however, not only survived being shot in the back, but she had somehow managed to cling on to life long enough for the healers to stabilize her condition.

The road to recovery had not been easy, though. For almost a year she was practically paralyzed from the waist down and it had taken months of intense physical therapy and a number of additional surgeries before she could even walk again. Training, let alone returning to active duty as a Shinobi, had been completely out of the question.

Neji nodded and obliged. Sakura studied his feet closely, hoping to see some kind of hint as to what he was planning, but they betrayed nothing. The Hyuga can Shinobi smashed a closed palm into her stomach, knocking the wind out of her and sending her crashing to her knees.

"Dammit," Sakura snarled in between ragged gulps of air. She slammed her fist into the ground, sending tremors through the earth and splitting it into two.

The doctors all thought that Sakura would never be able to be a Shinobi again, that her injuries would prevent her from being able to deal with the strenuous duties of a Konoha ninja. But Sakura had been determined to prove them all wrong, and after another year and a half of therapy and non-stop training, she had achieved the impossible and gotten re-certified as a Konoha Chunin.

While her wounds had completely healed, her skills had greatly deteriorated and it was frustrating to suddenly find herself being beaten in training by Shinobi who had spent the last several years fighting in the war. It was also unnerving. If Neji, as extraordinarily talented as he was, could defeat her in battle, surely an enemy ninja could do the same. The only difference, of course, was that while Neji would pull his punches to prevent seriously hurting her, a true opponent would not be so merciful.

"We should take a break," said Neji. He was looking at her with an expression that was half concern and half pity. It pissed Sakura off. She was not weak and she definitely did not want anyone's charity.

"No," Sakura said, picking herself back up to her feet. "One more."

Neji shrugged. "Fine. One more."

Sakura kissed the fingerless glove that encased her right hand and once again watched Neji as he danced around her. He was faster than her and technically a better striker. But despite her lithe appearance and thin arms, she was substantially stronger than he was. All she needed was one lucky punch and it would be all over.

"Focus when you throw," instructed Neji. "Concentrate."

But Sakura wasn't worried about her technique. She knew what she had to do. Instead, she pretended that Neji was Sasuke, that traitorous fuck who had promised her that he loved her right before shooting her in the back and leaving her for dead. She pretended Neji's serene features was that prick Sasuke's smug face, and she channeled her desire to bash it into a bloody pulp into her fist.

Again Neji moved in for the kill, but this time, Sakura had no intention of trying to strike with him. She ate the punch, a fierce chop to her kidneys that felt like he plunged a knife into her side, but rather than letting her hands go like she normally would, she grabbed Neji's arm and pulled him into her. Neji, suddenly realizing the danger of his predicament, tried to pull away, but Sakura was much too strong. Her chakra was flowing through her arms, giving her the supernatural strength that allowed her to effortlessly break rocks in half.

She switched her grip, grabbing the back of Neji's head with both her hands, and slammed a knee into Neji's stomach. He tried to defend, so Sakura twisted him to the side and this time her knee connected with Neji's jaw. She finally released her clinch, allowing Neji to reel backwards, but she wasn't in the mood to allow him to recover. She chased after him, peppering him one punch after another. A few of them connected solidly, rocking Neji's head backwards and bloodying his nose, but Sakura noticed with alarm that he was also beginning to block quite a few of them.

He was starting to regain his senses, something that Sakura couldn't allow. She had caught him off guard and if she didn't capitalize on the opportunity, she might never get it again. With a wordless yell, Sakura brought back her fist, ready to plant it flush on Neji's chin and knock him out cold.

Before she could, though, Neji's palm shot forward, faster than Sakura could see, and hit her right in the chest. It felt like someone had struck her with a gigantic hammer. Pain exploded in her chest, radiating throughout her entire body, and the force of the blow picked her off her feet and sent her flying through the air. She didn't even feel the impact when her paralyzed form hit the ground and skidded to a stop several feet away. A piercing noise was resonating in her ears, sending agonizing vibrations through her skull, and her vision was a blurry mess with black dots dancing across her eyes.

She did, however, recognize Neji's face as he looked down at her.

"OK," Sakura gasped. "Now we can take a break."

The mission had gone even worse than Shikamaru had expected, a disconcerting abnormality considering he thought he always approached each assignment as pessimistically as possible. Somehow, everything that could have possibly gone wrong went even more disastrously than previously conceived. They had landed in the wrong spot and had been forced to hunt through the woods for several hours before they accidentally stumbled upon the lost platoon. By then, the sun was already rising and its rays were like a search light honing in on their position. They didn't have the luxury of waiting for the cover of darkness again, so instead Shikamaru had made the call to move out immediately and hope they got lucky while retreating and went undetected by the enemy.

They weren't.

The second the platoon had broken cover, a hailstorm of machine gun fire rained down on them. Mortars and artillery followed shortly after, bombarding the fleeing soldiers with a torrential downpour from hell. Half of the survivors were killed almost instantly. Shikamaru got a large chunk of shrapnel in his leg and was forced to limp the two miles to safety. The soldier they were ordered to recover, the councilman's nephew, had almost made it.

They had practically sprinted through the forest, dodging gunfire and explosions as they ran, while the footsteps of their pursuers thundered ominously behind them. Shikamaru had left some booby traps behind to slow down the soldiers from Earth and Lightening, but they did little to impede the progress of what sounded to be a hundred troops who badly wanted to kill them.

Just before they reached the edge of the forest where ally helicopters were waiting to cover their escape, a bullet had burst through the trees and hit the poor boy right through the heart. He had collapsed, mortally wounded but not quite dead yet, and Ino had slung him over her shoulder and carried him the rest of the way. The enemy had retreated back into the woods once they realized they were in range of Konoha forces, but that still left an agonizingly long hike back to their camp.

When they finally arrived, Shikamaru didn't even have the strength to complain about the medics' rough treatment as they patched up his wounded leg. While the nurse dug out the metal fragment embedded in his thigh, he watched as the surgeons tried in vain to rescue his assignment's life. It was a futile but necessary gesture given his important family relations, and a few minutes later Shikamaru saw them wheel the poor kid past on a blanket covered stretcher.

All in all it had been a pretty shitty day.

Shikamaru winced as he walked down the aisle of tents that housed Konoha's forces. His wounds would heal quicker than a normal person's due to his chakra, but he would still have to take care to nurse it for the next couple days so as to not reopen the wound. At the very least, it would give him an excuse to sit on the inactive roster for a little while and get some much needed rest. He and Ino had been deployed on mission after mission without break for what seemed to be an eternity, and he knew both of them desperately wanted the chance to recuperate.

It wasn't just the scratches, bruises and broken bones that were progressively beginning to take their toll on him. It was also the mental trauma from the days of gunshots ringing in his ears, explosions detonating mere feet away from his head and the pervasive, rancid stench of blood and rotting flesh that was beginning to gradually weather his psyche.

He found Ino sitting on a cot in the tent that they shared. She didn't look at him when he folded up the flap and walked in, and she continued staring wordlessly at the wall when he sat down beside her.

"You OK?" he asked, gently resting his hand on hers.

There were dried tears staining her cheek and her eyes were red and swollen. "No." she whispered, her hands trembling.

"What's wrong?" Shikamaru eyed her with concern. He noticed that she hadn't changed out of her uniform, which was now stained in blood.

"I-I could hear his thoughts the entire time..." she whispered, her voice a bare, trembling whisper. "The entire time I was carrying that kid back, even though he was unconscious, I could hear him screaming in my mind."

Ino's gift, like the rest of the Yamanaka clan, was the ability to read and control minds. Unfortunately, that also meant that she sometimes heard things that she would rather filter out, like the thoughts of a wounded young man as he slowly died a prolonged, painful death.

"What did he say?"

"H-he wanted to go home..." she replied, fresh tears welling up in her eyes. "H-he was calling out for his mother and telling her how much he loved her."

"I'm so sorry, Ino," Shikamaru said, hugging her close to him and letting her cry freely into his shoulder.

He wished he could say this was the first time this had happened, but it wasn't. In fact, it was common for Ino to break down like this after every other mission. When she had to tend to the wounded, all she could hear was how their screams for mercy. When she was in the heat of battle, killing with all the ferociousness that her training had taught her, all she could see was the wives and children of the men whose existences she was snuffing out like a candle. Their memories, happy and sad, became hers, and Shikamaru could only imagine how much guilt she felt for taking their lives.

"I-I wish I didn't have my powers," she sobbed. "I wish I wasn't a ninja."

Shikamaru looked at his hands. Underneath his fingernails were stained with dirt, but there was also traces of blood. None of it was his own. During their retreat from the forest, he had had to kill more than a few enemy soldiers in order to clear a path.

"Yeah," Shikamaru replied. "Me too."

Author's Notes:

Thank you to everyone who reviewed the first chapter of A Ninja's Guide to Surviving a Shinobi War. It's done pretty well in hits, so I'll continue on and see how things go. As always, if you want to read more or see chapters get written quicker, please be sure to drop even a quick review if you can. I have a job and all that sort of good stuff, so it's really, really hard to find the time to sit down and write. Thank you for your support and patience!