Sakura's hands twitched around her bag's strap. She was ready, all packed with all the supplies she might possibly need, and she was supposed to be at the front gates in less than five.

She took a breath.

She could do this.

She wasn't even going to the frontlines!

…Not to Earth, at least.

All she was doing—all she was doing was setting up the radio system, having it parallel the existing telegram system's range.

That's it.

She was just another set of hands.

The invention had been taken over by more senior Researchers, as was the norm, and her work on it had been recognized, but that time was in the past.

Now they had to actually set it up.

Physically.

And—

And it would be fine.

Really, it would.

She'd just…

Walk out of the front gates of Konoha.

For the first time since the war began.

Her fingers twitched again, and then she swung the pack onto her back.

No point in overthinking it; any more would only make it more difficult, and she'd done enough of that already.

She was at the front gate with minutes to spare.

Nara Hiroshi, Deputy Head of Research, Communication and Detection Division, was already there.

He looked… distracted.

But then he always did.

A genin assistant was facing away from the Deputy Head as the Nara used his back as a writing surface, while the others—four chuunin not including the Deputy or Sakura—were milling about, smoking, and making sure the wagon they'd be carting around was packed.

The Deputy Head would not be joining their caravan—his was leaving in the afternoon to establish radio at the telegraph towers closest to the front and then instruct various battalions in their use—but theirs would be the one retrofitting most of the only recently established telegraph lines with radio towers within Fire proper. The telegraph lines only reached to Fire's borders, actually, it being deemed not worth it to risk extending beyond, so establishing and using the radio at the front would be (ideally) an entirely covert operation, while Sakura and the other chuunin going with her would only have to make it seem as if they were upgrading the existing and very visible telegraph system.

That wasn't to say there wasn't danger, though.

Two of the four chuunin in front of her weren't even Research at all—they were pure combat, ready, willing, and able to defend Konoha's secrets to their last breath.

And—

Well, Sakura could sense.

And she was well over a year out from her complete breakdown.

So.

Orders, and all that.

"Hey Yamanaka!" Uchiha Sadao shouted.

"Hey!" She waved, coming up to stand next to him and his brother Taro, the frontliner. Ogawa Hoja was busy re-re-rechecking the wagon (she was like that), but the other combat specialist—Abe Takayuki—stubbed out his cigarette to join the group too, lighting a new one with a small jutsu as he did so.

"Glad we won't have any Inuzuka with us." He said after the standard hellos. "They won't even let me smoke inside Konoha, says the scent sticks too long."

"Well you won't be smoking when we're on the mission." Taro said.

"I know. That's kind of why I said 'inside Konoha.'"

"Just wanted to be clear."

Well, that was fun. Their guards didn't get along.

"Hello, hello, hello—hello… hello…." The Deputy Head, who had literally barged into the middle of their group without so much as a by-your-leave, was now completely ignoring them as he searched his pockets for something. "There was something I was supposed to give you, right?"

"No, sir. It's all been taken care of."

"Oh. Good, because I forgot." Then, "Take care." And he disappeared once more.

"Is he… alright, you know, in the head?" Takayuki asked.

"He is a superior." Taro said. "You should be more polite."

Takayuki rolled his eyes.

"The wagon's ready!" Hoja called.

Uchiha Sadao, who had slunk back somewhat as his brother took the floor, grinned. "You don't say? Are you sure you don't want to check again?"

"Thank you for your diligent work, Ogawa."

"Hoja's fine, and thank you Uchiha."

"You may refer to me as Taro. That goes for all of you."

"Sakura."

"Sadao."

"Takayuki. Glad we've got that settled; let's go."

And then Sakura's feet crossed the threshold, and she was outside the walls once more.

"Standard signals?"

"What?"

"When you sense something—standard signals?"

"Oh, yes."

"Let's get moving, then."

Getting back to life in the forest… wasn't so bad, actually.

It was nothing like the front, which was nice, and everywhere they needed to do work was generally in one of the major villages or forts around Fire, so they even spent most nights sleeping in beds.

Sensing…

Well, she was doing what she needed to do.

It wasn't her favorite thing, really, but she'd never really thought sensing had been the problem on the front, and it wasn't a problem now.

(The problem was Arden. The problem would always be Arden. And yet the constant voice in the back of her mind, telling her that Arden knew important things—that she'd known those things once too—never seemed to go silent.)

So the first month, and the second, passed rather easily, moving around every few days to the next location and working together on proposals in the meantime.

Taro and Takayuki seemed fundamentally unable to get along, Hoja had a panic attack over forgetting something every time they moved sites, and Sadao wouldn't speak against his brother, ever, which only made Takayuki more annoyed, but—

It was easy.

Straightforward.

Get the job done on one site and move to the next.

Exchange pleasantries—she was the most trained in diplomacy by far—and coordinate with the locals and samurai as needed.

Keep an eye out for danger.

And so it went.

And went.

And went.

And then, with only two locations left to go, it didn't anymore.

"Shit, shit, shit, shit, shit, shit, shit, shit…."

"Shut up, Takayuki."

"Well excuse me for—"

"I agree, shut up." That, admittedly, was Sakura. Still, she felt rather justified, what with the alert they'd just gotten from a very out-of-breath raven summon that the enemy had breached the front and were some headed right for them, and they were expected to hold the line until backup could arrive.

The enemy would be at their location in two hours.

Their backup, given that Konohagakure was half of Fire away and their reinforcers would be expected to spend time and effort tracking down every single group that had gotten past the front, might not arrive until the next day.

"We need to get to the tallest house." Sakura said.

"I agree. There was one… five minutes back. Let's get there in two."

Once at the house (and it was very easy, once the farmers learned what was coming, to convince them to flee to the village an hour or so away and 'loan' the house itself to the shinobi), Sadao got to work banging holes through the second floor so that they could fire jutsu from above, Hoja wasted no time tearing down the stairs entirely (no use making it easy for them), Taro set to trap setting across the street and surrounding the house, and Takayuki used his earth affinity to reinforce the walls and roof.

Sakura sat in a very familiar position atop it all. At least this time the roof kept her out of sight—several holes had been made instead to allow her to play lookout. It was possible that the enemy shinobi would try to sneak through the woods, of course, but Fire's woods were notoriously enveloping, and from the raven's message, they didn't even have a strict destination—they were just trying to cause damage. Drawing them in with fire and projectiles would probably be the easy part, then; surviving the return fire would provide enough of a challenge to last a lifetime.

15 minutes since the raven…

30…

45…

The first Iwa shinobi arrived a full hour ahead of schedule, but they were prepared.

The battle was bloody, messy, and short.

The road they were on was neither a direct route to the Capital nor Konoha, so it was possible, even likely, that most of the breaching force had figured that out and taken a different path.

Everyone stayed in position.

105 minutes since the raven…

120…

135…

After two hours and forty minutes, the second wave—twice the size of the first, and clearly built for battle instead of speed, arrived.

Again, they defended.

Sadao's arm suffered third-degree burns, Hoja was blinded in one eye, and Takayuki and Taro were both swaying from chakra exhaustion.

The infiltrators were dead.

Sakura kept sensing.

180…

195…

210…

During her time on the 'frontline', Sakura saw almost no combat. The time she'd been forced to—to stop the infiltrator, that had been bad, but… that was it, really. The rest of the time…

She'd been sent home due to the constant stress of staying on alert, not due to the constant stress of battle.

She couldn't even see much of the battle as it happened directly below her, but she could sense it, hear it, smell it—

225…

240…

Sadao was the best of them all at anything medical, having considered becoming a medic-nin before going Research. It was his dominant arm that had suffered the damage, and so his aid was limited. Hoja, who had been in a series of administrative roles until transferring to Research, took over instead, the lack of depth perception being only a minor hindrance compared to her lack of knowledge.

Sakura wasn't considered as an option.

Her 'gift' was too important.

255…

270…

Still, even as the hours began to drag on, it was clear that they were in rough shape. The stress was beginning to get to Sakura, too; the constant feeling of being on alert uncomfortably familiar. (She'd felt that way even before the war, to be fair; Arden's memories were of her world's future, and not exactly positive, and the drive to notice when the two began to sync up—well, if anything, it was surprising it had taken as long as it did before she cracked.)

She kept sensing.

285…

300.

Five hours after the raven, just as dusk was beginning to settle over the land, Sakura called the alarm yet again.

This group was moving slower, more carefully, hiding their chakra so well that they were almost upon the house before Sakura noticed.

Underneath her, the combat and Research veterans jumped into action.

It was a group of three.

Three against five—better odds than they'd had all day.

But Sakura knew all too well the deceitfulness of numbers.

Hoja went down first. That wasn't a surprise, considering the three fighting—Sadao was being kept back a bit as the medic, his knowledge useful even if he could only tell someone else what to do, and Sakura was being kept back as the sensor—she was the least experienced, and the most valuable in preventing any nasty surprises.

Still, it was a surprise when Hoja dropped within a few seconds of the fighting starting (it happened so fast, everything always seemed to happen so fast, all they'd been trained to do only mattering for a handful of minutes at most at a time.) It was a bolt of rock that had dropped her, straight to the stomach.

Sakura tried not to think about her chances of survival.

Takayuki was next.

A metal bolt from an Iwa weapon Sakura hadn't seen in person before, straight through his skull.

Sakura wanted to flee.

The acreage of the farmland ended well before the horizon; it was entirely possible that she could disappear into the forest before the attackers were finished murdering her comrades.

She dropped into the battle instead.

Being above the battle, able to focus on the chakra of each actor, was very different than being in the midst of it. Sakura's ninjutsu was relatively weak, so instead, she reached into her jacket and pulled out an exploding tag, slapping it onto one of the attacker's shoulders and leaping out of the way as Sadao bodily shoved him out of the window. Her leap was badly positioned, unfortunately, and she found herself falling through a particularly weak part of the second story's floor.

This put her in the midst of the battle between Taro and the two other attackers as an explosion destroyed the majority of the front of the house, sending shards of wood and dirt flying in every direction. She barely felt the lightning attack of one of the attackers being formed in time—lighting could often track its target, so instead of leaping out of the way, Sakura decided to redirect.

She'd prepared for this, at least.

They'd spent the entire time on the mission figuring out how to keep their precious and expensive system from being destroyed—by rain, by lightning, by fire…

It was Hoja who'd come up with the prototypes months ago, and Tora had thought they might be useful as a defensive tool in battle and had worked to make the basic concept into a useable weapon.

A giant rubber handle, therefore, carefully lashed to her belt, was released with a tug, and the metal whip that was connected lashed out, taking the violent stream of lightning at the luckiest possible time and redirecting it towards the ground as Sakura leapt onto her toes. Tora, being familiar with the weapon, did the same.

Their two opponents did not.

While the charge hit all four of them, Sakura and Tora were barely affected, having only gotten the tail end of the attack, while the Iwa nin found themselves on the backfoot for the first time since the start of the battle.

Tora and Sakura pressed the advantage, the former with a barrage of Fire jutsu and the latter—her—with her whip and her incredibly defensive taijutsu that kept their enemies divided on whether to focus on her clear relative weakness or the biggest threat.

And then Sadao's body—completely mutilated from the neck down—thumped onto the floor, and the Iwa nin Sakura thought dead by explosion jumped in after him, hands still raised and coated in thick blood (some small part of Sakura's mind identified the bloodline as one that could make their arms move so fast they could literally blast through human bodies. Sakura remembered the injuries from her time in the medical tent at the front, but had always expected its user to look more blatantly abnormal. The man on top of her comrade, however, was completely normal in appearance, except for the abnormally thick layer of blood which drenched his arms from nails to shoulders.)

Some part of Sakura gave up the second she recognized Sadao.

It was his brother who was doing the hard work, after all, his brother who was keeping her alive.

And now it was three on two and Taro was staring at his baby brother's corpse.

Except, from her angle she could see Taro's eyes, see them as they alit on the younger man, as they put together the pieces of what had happened in lockstep with Sakura.

And, just as Sakura was accepting that soon her own siblings would have one less sister,

Taro's eyes changed.