Aburame Tetsumaru's hands were shaking. Despite taking zero damage—his beetle armor had deflected every kunai and jutsu—his muscles were locked tight from the sheer adrenaline of his first real combat.
The fight was over, but he couldn't relax. His mind was a total blank; his muscles were rigid, and his limbs twitched with involuntary tremors. Yet, as the scent of iron and ozone filled the air, he felt no nausea or terror. He didn't want to vomit. Instead, a profound sense of emptiness washed over him, as if he had entered the legendary "Sage Time"—that hollow clarity that follows a peak of exertion.
Tetsumaru waited for the stiffness to recede before standing up to inspect the bodies. The man who had died of cardiac arrest had a face turned a sickly shade of purple, his eyes bulging as if they might pop from their sockets.
Tetsumaru had no intention of "looting" the corpses. Searching a fallen ninja is a highly specialized task. This was a Suna-nin; with the rise of their Puppet Brigade, the Sand's mastery of poisons had reached terrifying heights. In the past, a Suna corpse might have only hidden a venomous scorpion; nowadays, they were rigged with intricate traps and lethal chemical agents. Tetsumaru wasn't short on cash, so he decided to leave the scavenging to the professionals.
Furthermore, the Academy had hammered one rule into their heads: during wartime, don't expect to find jutsu scrolls on a corpse. No ninja would carry a library into a war zone. Teaching tools were bulky and cumbersome—dead weight that would only slow a ninja down and get them killed.
Tetsumaru turned his attention to his teammates. The one pinned by the tree was still breathing, but the first one hit by the shuriken was already cold.
Tetsumaru didn't have the physical strength to move the massive trunk yet, so he used his blade to hack away the branches until his teammate's pale face was visible. The boy was gasping for air, his stamina clearly depleted by injury, shock, and terror.
The moment he saw Tetsumaru, he croaked, "Did we... did we win?"
"Yeah. Four Suna-nin. All dead."
"I'm sorry... I'm so useless."
"Don't say that," Tetsumaru replied. "If you two hadn't drawn their fire, my first volley of Flight-Locusts wouldn't have landed. Handling one Chunin was my limit. I only survived because of the beetles. If a second one had targeted me, I'd be dead."
It wasn't empty comfort. It was the cold truth.
"What about Gentaro? How is he?"
So his name was Gentaro, Tetsumaru thought, shaking his head in silence.
"!"
A soft, ragged sobbing filled the clearing. A minute ago, they had been joking about life at the front-line camp; a minute later, one was gone. For a ten-year-old, the first experience of losing a friend is a crushing blow.
A child who could face death for the first time without a flinch was either a psychopath like Itachi Uchiha or a transmigrator with a fifty-year-old soul. Neither could be called "normal."
Watching his teammate cry, Tetsumaru felt the grief beginning to seep into his own heart. To keep himself from breaking down, he turned away to "inspect" Gentaro's body, using the distance to steady his breathing.
It was then that reinforcements finally arrived. Tetsumaru suppressed his emotions, greeting the newcomers with a wooden, expressionless face.
They were late. Four minutes had passed since he fired his signal flare. In the high-speed world of shinobi combat, where seven ninjas had clashed and five had died in a matter of thirty seconds, four minutes was an eternity.
Tetsumaru and his surviving teammate watched the reinforcements with cold, unfriendly eyes. Their position was only a hundred and fifty meters from the main column. What was the point of a four-minute response time? Were they just here to collect the remains?
However, as the reinforcements drew closer, the two boys blinked in surprise.
The unit consisted of two Chunin and six Genin, and both Chunin bore the fresh marks of battle. They had clearly fought their own way here. Seeing that this squad had "only" suffered one dead and one wounded, the two men visibly relaxed and immediately ordered the Genin to begin first aid.
One of the Chunin called Tetsumaru over. "I am Chunin Yamashiro Chifang. Report."
"Sir. I am the Captain of the Third Temporary Scouting Squad, Genin Aburame Tetsumaru. While on patrol, we encountered a four-man enemy cell..."
Tetsumaru laid out the facts. "...After neutralizing the Suna cell, I was unable to free my teammate from the debris and remained on-site to maintain a defensive perimeter."
As the second Chunin supervised the removal of the tree trunk and treated the survivor, he drifted over to listen to the debrief. The more they heard, the more their eyebrows climbed. The two teammates had essentially been decoys; Tetsumaru had single-handedly wiped out a complete Suna combat cell.
Another genius?
The two Chunin whispered to each other for a moment but said nothing further. In Konoha, "geniuses" were a dime a dozen.
Tetsumaru realized his performance might have been a bit much. A fresh graduate capable of taking down a Chunin-led cell was definitely "standing out." But in the moment, he'd had no choice. He'd been clawing for his life. To try and hide his strength while on the brink of death would have been suicide.
Once the field was cleared, the Chunin led the survivors back to the main body.
As soon as they returned, Jiraiya ordered a forced march. The ambush site was less than forty minutes from the main camp; the enemy had deliberately targeted them in that window where mental fatigue starts to set in just before reaching safety.
An hour later, the reinforcement battalion—dragging their wounded and their baggage—finally reached the camp. Only then did Jiraiya let out a breath of relief. He began arranging quarters for the rookies and compiling intelligence.
As the shaken Genin began swapping stories, Tetsumaru quickly pieced together the full scope of the ambush.
The attackers were indeed Suna-nin—four cells in total, including a Puppet Brigade squad. The Sand had struck Tetsumaru's scouting unit on the right flank first, but it had been a feint to draw reinforcements away from the left.
Jiraiya, however, had made the right call. He had prioritized the left flank, intercepting two of the three Suna cells and turning an ambush into a head-on collision. The shock effect the Sand had hoped for was neutralized.
But the price was still steep. On the left flank, nine Genin across three scouting squads were hit. Eight were dead; one was critically wounded.
The main column had been struck by the Puppet squad that slipped through. Four puppeteers using six puppets had unleashed a saturation fire of poisoned needles. In a mere eight seconds, they had fired over thirteen hundred senbon, resulting in seventy casualties.
The needles themselves weren't lethal; the poison was. In those first few seconds, a rookie's reaction determined their fate. Those who immediately swallowed an antidote pill survived with minor symptoms; those who hesitated were severely poisoned. Those who panicked and ran, accelerating their blood flow, were dead before they could hit the ground.
Tetsumaru scanned the casualty list and saw the names of his kin. Aburame Shishin and Aburame Takaitai were gone. In the blink of an eye, two cousins his own age had been erased.
The atmosphere in the camp was oppressive. Perhaps it was the staggering losses from a simple reinforcement run, or perhaps it was just the reality of the front.
Tetsumaru sat on an abandoned stump, quietly reflecting. He had won his fight without a scratch, but he knew it wasn't because he was "stronger" than a Chunin. It was like a weightlifter trying to fight a kickboxer; he couldn't land a hit, while the enemy hit him at will.
He had been thoroughly suppressed by the Suna Chunin. In that brief CQC exchange, he was constantly off-rhythm. Every strike he threw was parried, while every strike from the enemy landed. He only survived because of his beetle armor. Without it, he would have been a human pincushion after the first three exchanges. A kunai wound is horrific; even a non-vital hit can lead to rapid exsanguination.
The winning factors were the pixel-analysis of his Eye of Truth combined with the ambush capacity of the Flight-Locusts, allowing him to eliminate the three Suna Genin first and create a numbers advantage.
The final blow was the result of a seal-less technique and a neurotoxic crystal—pure surprise tactics. No wonder the veterans always said that "intelligence" was a ninja's greatest weapon.
This fight proved that Tetsumaru's physical skill was still below Chunin level. However, between his scouting, his locust strikes, and his beetle defense, his combined combat power was enough to trade with one. From now on, he decided to focus on long-range engagements, leaning into the advantages of his snails and locusts.
As he refined his new tactical doctrine, his official assignment arrived. He was being folded into a depleted squad under the command of Chunin Ueno Hayato.
Following the directions, Tetsumaru found a medium-sized tent in the northwest corner of the camp. It was empty. In front of the tent was a fire pit ringed by stones, the embers long dead. Four large rocks served as stools. In the shadows nearby, a pile of trash—bloody rags and used bandages—glistened under the dim light.
It was a gritty, minimalist campsite. Tetsumaru confirmed he was in the right place and sat down on a rock. He pulled a box from his backpack.
He carefully laid out rows of insect eggs. After checking their status, he used his secret arts to stimulate their vitality, misted them with a disinfecting reagent, and buried them under a thin layer of soil in a patch of sunlight.
He pulled out another box containing hatched Flight-Locust larvae. After an inspection, he scattered them into the surrounding grass to forage.
Finally, he brought out over a dozen boxes filled with wood shavings and pupating locusts.
The locusts Tetsumaru bred could never survive pupation on their own. They required astronomical amounts of iron and calcium to form their metallic exoskeletons. If the larvae ingested that much metal, they would die of toxicity. The only solution was manual injection during the pupal stage.
He meticulously directed his Kikaichu to inject a nutrient broth and a ferric oxide solution into the pupae before stowing them away.
The sky grew dark, but no one returned.
Tetsumaru wasn't worried. He ate some dry rations and then used his chakra to stick himself upside down to the end of a tree branch. As he swayed gently with the wind, he focused on his chakra control while contemplating the next generation of his insects.
To be honest, he felt a lingering chill of fear.
He had developed over a hundred species of ninja insects before graduation, each with elaborate tactical roles. Today's battle had proven almost all of them were useless. If he hadn't had that sudden flash of inspiration to create one "Shield" and one "Spear" bug, he would likely be dead or crippled right now.
His mainstay insects—the Flight-Locust and the Armor Beetle—shared a key trait: he had grafted in the Kikaichu's gene for consuming chakra.
In a way, these weren't new species, but highly specialized Kikaichu. They could use chakra to massively enhance their natural traits—speed and explosive power for the locusts, structural integrity for the beetles. The trade-off was that they couldn't produce their own chakra and had to stay on their host for long periods to "charge up."
Practice is the sole criterion for testing truth, he mused. And combat is the sole criterion for testing weapon design.
The results were in. "Kikaichu-fication" was the way forward. All his other fancy designs and complex theories could be filed away in the archives.
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