Fun Fact: Kyoko's ANBU moniker "Usagi" is the Japanese word for "rabbit."

Chapter 24 — A Fact of War

Kyoko was observing Tsunade stitching a chunin's kidney back together when the entire world shook and the yelling began. Tsunade looked up, swore, and refocused, this time quickly closing the wound instead of using it as a teachable moment. "Stay here," she ordered, pressing gauze over the newly sealed cut and keeping it in place with medical tape. "Don't leave the tent."

"Shisho—"

"Stay here." Tsunade ducked out of the tent.

Kyoko moved forward, reaching back to keep a hand on the hilt of her tanto. She drew the flap back just slightly and peered out. She activated her sharingan. One tomoe, one tomoe, one tomoe she reminded herself. The world sharpened. Just a little.

Tsunade was across the camp, past the tents, and bent over someone on the ground. Along the border of the camp itself, her fellow Konoha nin were pushing back against an influx of Iwa nin with mixed levels of success. One of the smaller figures fell.

Kyoko was moving by the time the man over him raised his blade, already halfway through her hand signs. She slid out of her shunshin in front of Raidou with her hands in the rat seal, looking the man right in the eye as she layered the illusion across his reality. His eyes widened, and he reeled back from a fireball that wasn't there. She took that for the opportunity she'd made it and sliced him open with her tanto.

"Move," she ordered, looking back at Raidou. "Move!"

He nodded and, clutching his bent arm to his chest with his other hand, scrambled up.

It was the roar of a katon jutsu that warned her. Kyoko whipped back around and rolled to the side to avoid the blaze. She grit her teeth as she overestimated her size and hit the ground hard, her left hand nicking against the blade of her tanto. As she came up, she focused on her one-handed signs. It was hard with the smaller chakra pathways, the shallower energy reserves, the inexperienced hands, but not impossible.

Her afterimage cast, she rushed forward. The katon-user spat a fireball at where she'd been a half-second before, and Kyoko cut through the arm she'd used to cast it. Kyoko stabbed her tanto into the woman's chest and left it there as she fell, taking advantage of her now free hands for a series of hand seals. She brought both hands to her mouth, breathed in deep, and then shot her own fireball at the Iwa nin just behind his fallen comrade.

Hands still hot from flame and chakra, Kyoko snatched her tanto up and sheathed it as she turned. "Move!" she yelled again, rushing for Raidou. The sounds of battle were dying down around them, but that was far from meaning they were safe. She stopped beside him and grabbed at his shoulders, pulling uselessly. She was too small to make any difference, and he wasn't moving enough to help himself. Kyoko grit her teeth and looked up.

An Iwa nin—large, larger than those around him—smashed his way through the ribs of the Konoha shinobi in front of him, the only person that had been between him and Kyoko and Raidou. She tightened her grip. "Come on! Stand up!"

Solid black arched up from the ground, snapping around the Iwa nin. Shadowy hands started gripping at his throat.

Kyoko jerked her gaze to the side. The Nara standing there didn't look at them, his jaw clenched and his hands clasped in a rat seal. "Got another of those fireballs in you, kid?"

Another? She's already spent a large portion of her chakra doing medical rounds around the camp with Tsunade, and—

"Kid!"

Kyoko dropped her hold on Raidou and braced her feet. Another set of hand seals, and she forced out another fireball, hissing when her forearms protested the burn. Just as she lowered her hands, something caught her around the waist and lifted her from the ground. Kyoko yelped and scrambled, reaching for her tanto.

"Stop fighting me, kid," the Nara growled.

Kyoko heaved a sigh of relief, sagging in his hold. She twisted a bit to see that he had Raidou trapped facedown under his other arm. Raidou's eyes were screwed shut, blood dripping down his face and his limbs hanging loose.

"I have to help him," Kyoko mumbled. "Nara-san, I need to—"

He just grunted to interrupt her and carried them into the closest tent. He dropped her and, as she caught herself, lowered Raidou to the ground. Then he disappeared back outside into the battle.

Kyoko scrambled to Raidou's side. Head wounds always bled a lot, but not like this. She rolled him onto his back, bracing his side against her knee when he tried to shudder away from the movement. "Hold still."

His face was bloody, but it wasn't all skin anymore, and there was no mistaking that the smell of burnt flesh wasn't just from the Iwa nin she'd hit with her own jutsu. Not his face. Not his face, not again. He wasn't scarred here yet. He didn't have to be. She could fix it. That was what she was here for, after all. She could fix it.

"Hold still," she ordered again, but this time her voice wobbled as she said it. She moved her hands—her left one still bleeding—to his face, ignoring the part of her that called for proper procedure. Wash your hands, disinfect the area, wear gloves, put on a—

She didn't have time for that. Kyoko prodded, ignoring his whines of pain, until she found the edge of the burn just above his lip. She drew up iryo chakra and began mending the area. Slowly. Steadily. Her hands started to shake, and she knew that between her smaller reserves, her earlier iryo work, and her ninjutsu, she was starting to run low on energy and what she could do. But one thing she couldn't do was stop. Raidou was burned, and if she didn't fix this then how could she fix anything else?

She didn't realize she was falling until an arm came around her. "Alright, that's enough, Tiny. You've done enough."