The Hokage's office smelled of drying pigment and old vellum.
Outside, night had claimed the village, leaving only the amber glow of the desk lamp to battle the creeping shadows.
Tsunade leaned back, the leather of her chair emitting a sharp urrr-gh as she shifted her weight.
Casualty reports from the trade routes occupied the mahogany surface.
A refugee caravan had been intercepted near the border; the medical assessment sheets indicated a thirty percent non-survivable burn rate from chakra artillery.
Sensor squads reported a three-second latency in detection—humidity-induced interference in resonance that had allowed the attackers to vanish.
Her field medics were flagging, their coils showing the distinctive spiral scarring of overuse.
Tsunade's eyelids felt heavy, a metabolic tax paid for a day spent managing the village's thinning reserves.
Her own chakra density hovered at sixty percent; her pathways had yet to fully recover from the last surge cycle—crack-crack-crack—cartilage popped softly as she rolled her neck.
And she stretched her arms forward—crack-crunch—flexing her fingers to test the delay in her fingertip sensation.
Across the room, Shizune stood by the window, silhouetted against the distant lights.
She cradled TonTon, who remained a dead weight of sleep in her arms.
"Iruka and Ibiki had dinner with Asuma and Kurenai," Shizune murmured.
Tsunade stopped her pen mid-sentence.
Tck-tck-tck.
She tapped the end of the brush against her cheek. "Interesting. Maybe Ibiki's finally remembering how to breathe air that doesn't smell like a dungeon."
Knock-knock. Knock-knock-knock. Knock.
A groan escaped Tsunade's throat.
Her neck gave a gritty crk-pop as she straightened. "Ugh. I forgot I called for them. Let them in."
Shizune pulled the heavy door open.
Two figures stepped from the hallway's darkness with a predatory silence.
Towa wore a white mask with a sharp, bird-like beak.
Tsunade noticed the red ink on his upper arm—the tattoo pulsed with a low frequency that caused micro-ruptures in his capillaries, smelling of heated copper.
Beside him, Komachi's cat-mask stared back.
The yellow needles in her hair gave off a high-frequency hum that vibrated against Tsunade's optic nerve, making her vision flicker.
"So," Tsunade began, her jaw tightening. "What can you tell me?"
Towa stepped forward, silver hair spilling over his shoulder.
He began to chant, the archaic 5-7-7 cadence of Sedōka poetry physically grating against Tsunade's nerves.
"Fire's floor is trod," Towa began, his voice a rhythmic rasp.
"By her who should be banished.
Laws are merely fleeting breath."
Tsunade's molars ground together as she parsed the tercet, the syllable cadence scraping against her patience.
Komachi finished without hesitation.
"Gazeru provided the core.
A sheath and a habaki.
Lacking now our violet blade."
A pulse jump hit Tsunade's neck at the phrase violet blade.
"Kagura?" Tsunade asked, pressure rising in her sinuses.
Shizune's fingers dug into TonTon's hide; the pig gave a wet wrg-sniff. Komachi nodded.
Tsunade didn't think of a biography; she remembered a mission debrief where a peer had bled out, and Kagura's pulse had never risen.
She recalled the woman training until her ligaments tore, refusing analgesics and ignoring sleep cycles with an indifference to pain.
She remembered the phantom jingle of those bells on the multicoloured rope and the scent of metal oil from her knives.
The memory shifted to Sylvie.
Tsunade recalled Training Ground 3—the smell of iron from Sylvie's ocular rupture and the heat radiating from the girl's cracked vessels.
Sylvie feared her own capacity for violence.
Kagura did not.
"Gazeru," Towa repeated. "Yūgao Uzuki knows the rhythm. Reactivate her. The missing patrols are being carbonized past Mystic Palm recovery. We cannot harvest signatures from ash without her."
Tsunade rubbed her temples, a rhythmic heat throbbed behind her eyes.
She looked at the casualty sheets.
Thirty percent dead.
Bando's cannons were catastrophic, limited only by a forty-second cooldown cycle that suggested a massive biological fuel-cost for the operators—Tsunade leaned forward in thought.
Did they require active transfusions? She imagined the outcomes: shinobis shaking with ashen skin and blown pupils.
If she refused Yūgao, she would have to personally buffer the next wave of burn victims, likely scarring her own coils further.
Towa leaned in. "The casualty rate will rise. They are carbonized, Lady Hokage."
Tsunade visually tracked the sheets and imagined hands losing fine motor control—medics pausing as their chakra flickered mid-Mystic Palm to vomit.
Sweat break broke at the base of her spine.
Her heart skipped a single, jagged beat—her hands tightened on the mahogany—knuckles blanching to the color of bone.
"No," Tsunade said.
"Lady Hokage?" Komachi's voice sharpened. "Bando's cannons leave nothing but ash. We have a blind spot three miles wide."
"I said no," Tsunade growled. She thought of Yūgao's knuckles turning white as she carved that monkshood root—her nervous system could not survive another redeployment—her cortisol baseline had never reset. "Yūgao Uzuki is finished. I won't grind her marrow into paste because you let them burn."
"The casualty rate will rise," Towa noted, his arm-tattoo glowing a bruised purple.
"I'll absorb it," Tsunade countered, a sharp spike of nausea hitting her stomach as she committed her own reserves to the gap. "Use the units in the field. Leave the florist alone."
Towa and Komachi bowed—a stiff motion—and vanished into a shish-whirr of leaves.
The office went silent, the space feeling larger and heavier.
The desk lamp became an abrasive drone.
Bzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzt.
Tsunade's mind warped the office into a triage staging area—her desk became an operating table, the light above white and blinding.
The mountain of paperwork became a burnt child, giving off the phantom smell of cauterized flesh.
Shizune adjusted her distance, moving closer but suppressing the instinct to recommend rest.
She noted the tremor in Tsunade's hands.
"You're taking a risk," Shizune whispered.
"I'm being a leader," Tsunade corrected. She reached for the sake bottle, the glass clinking against her ring.
She poured a cup, the fumes stinging her nose. As the alcohol hit her stomach, the vasodilation began.
She felt her chakra precision begin to leak—a slight inefficiency that would make tomorrow's surgeries more taxing.
She looked at the map, her thumb tracing the route Sylvie and Naruto were taking—Waves and then Forests.
Any day now, they'll land in Tea.
"We raise them," she murmured to the empty room.