Arriving at the Battlefield

The journey was quiet. There were none of those hackneyed roadside robberies; gangs of ordinary bandits would never dare rob a ninja unless they had a death wish. Even a single Genin could hold off dozens of ordinary people.

As they traveled through the strongest and wealthiest of the Five Great Nations, Yemo saw a peace and tranquility absent from the other nations. Many villages seemed untouched by the strife of the ninja world.

Apart from brief rests, Yemo and Orochimaru kept moving. Though he did not know how the border war was going, Orochimaru's anxiety made Yemo feel that things were probably not going well.

Before they knew it, night had fallen. Yemo and Orochimaru made camp beneath a rock near a water source and lit a fire with the wood they had gathered. The logs crackled as they burned, and the orange glow illuminated their faces. Boulders on either side blocked the cold night wind.

Beside the fire stood four or five branches, each skewering a plump fish. Roasting over the flames, the fish cooked and gave off a faint aroma.

Yemo sat cross-legged beside the fire. Even with his vast reserves of Chakra, he felt drained after a full day of travel.

"Whew..."

Yemo slowly let out a breath and opened his tightly shut eyes. He had finally finished refining the Chakra he had used up, and power flowed through his meridians once more.

Just then, Orochimaru suddenly asked from beside him, "Have you noticed any changes?"

"Changes?" Yemo was puzzled by Teacher Orochimaru's question. His body felt no different from usual. If he had to name a change, though, there was one. "I feel like I can refine Chakra a little faster than usual, and much more smoothly."

"Of course." Orochimaru smiled slightly. "You used Chakra to travel all day today. Although you didn't notice it yourself, your control over Chakra improved considerably without you realizing it."

Orochimaru's explanation brought Yemo to a sudden realization. Using Chakra to travel was itself a form of training. For example, whenever Yemo wanted to reduce the amount of Chakra he used on the journey, he would gradually learn to control how much he spent on each movement.

This kind of training might not bring about any earth-shattering changes, but without him realizing it, Yemo's control over his Chakra was improving bit by bit.

"Your Chakra reserves are enormous, more than a hundred times those of an ordinary person. But when it comes to using Chakra, you're only a little better than an ordinary Genin. You use far more Chakra than other ninja to perform the same Ninjutsu, but because you have so much of it, that extra consumption makes little difference to you." Orochimaru had only noticed this shortcoming of Yemo's in recent days.

As Orochimaru had said, Yemo had such vast reserves of Chakra that the small amount he wasted was a drop in the bucket. If not for a chance occurrence in the past few days, even Orochimaru would not have noticed it.

Of course, Orochimaru told Yemo this only to make him improve his Chakra control, not to make him conserve that tiny amount of Chakra.

Comparisons really were infuriating. Ordinary ninja had to carefully ration even that little bit of Chakra, because it could very well be the key to victory, yet Yemo truly thought nothing of it.

It was like taking a spoonful of water from a bucket: you could clearly see the water level drop. But if you took a spoonful from a pond, there would be no visible change.

As the fish roasted over the flames, its aroma grew stronger. The moist white flesh and crisp skin whetted Yemo and Orochimaru's appetites.

The two had eaten only a few Military Rations Pills on the road. Those merely replenished what their bodies had used up; they did not give them the feeling of being full from a meal.

Before long, Orochimaru and Yemo had eaten all five plump fish, leaving only a pile of bones burning in the flames.

The night was peaceful. A bright moon hung overhead, and countless stars twinkled across the sky like a flowing, brilliant river of stars. A faint, cold wind swept across the barren land, but the boulders blocked it, and the fire's warm light and heat helped Yemo sleep soundly.

Early the next morning, Yemo made do with a quick breakfast, then set out again with Orochimaru. Along the way, he passed through dense forests, life-swallowing swamps, and barren deserts...

Although their journey had been short, Yemo had seen much of the Land of Fire. Inspired by what Orochimaru had said the day before, he also worked on improving his Chakra control as he traveled.

Finally, as afternoon approached, Yemo and Orochimaru reached the border of the Land of Fire. Only here did Yemo truly sense the presence of war.

For instance, Yemo passed several small villages on the way, but they were deserted, without even a single head of livestock. They had become completely dead villages.

To escape the war, the villagers had all moved far from the battlefield. They would return only when the fighting ended and peace came.

Of course, the actual battlefield was not within the Land of Fire, but in a buffer zone between the borders of the Land of Fire and the Land of Clouds. This place was merely on the edge of the battlefield.

Although Konoha ninja guarded the border, some Kumo Ninja inevitably slipped through. To cause unnecessary casualties, Konoha had joined forces with the Land of Fire's leadership at the outbreak of war to evacuate every village along the border, large and small.

Having somewhere to flee was a privilege enjoyed only by the people of great nations. Some small nations became battlefields for the great nations in their entirety, leaving their people nowhere to run.

That was the difference between great and small nations. Fighting between great nations rarely brought the flames of war onto their own soil. For the sake of their own interests, the great nations had a tacit understanding to place their battlefields on the territory of smaller nations.

That was especially true of the Land of Fire, the strongest of the Five Great Nations. To date, no ninja village had managed to fight its way into the Land of Fire during a Shinobi World War; at most, fighting had broken out along its borders.

Small nations were different, especially those caught between great nations. They had to be constantly prepared for war, on guard against the great nations on either side.

Once those great nations went to war, it meant utter disaster for the smaller ones. The Land of Whirlpools was one example: if Konoha had not intervened for his big sister Kushina's sake, it would have been destroyed long ago.

He had heard, however, that the Land of Whirlpools had recently become embroiled in war again and was on the brink of annihilation. That had nothing to do with Yemo, though. He felt no sense of family belonging toward the Uzumaki Clan. After arriving in the world of Naruto, Yemo no longer had parents, and he had suffered plenty of bullying in the Uzumaki Family. He had thought he was all alone, but later the family elders told him he had a sister named Kushina Uzumaki. So Yemo had resolutely demanded that the Uzumaki Clan elders send him to Konoha.

In the original story, the Land of Whirlpools had already fallen by the time Kushina went to Konoha, yet it was still clinging to life now. Yemo thought his own arrival must have caused a few small changes.

The matters concerning the Uzumaki Clan could wait until later. Returning to the war, when Yemo reached the border, he finally learned what war was like. In a word, it was brutal...

Vast stretches of forest had been destroyed along the way, and wherever he looked, Yemo could see thick smoke billowing up from many places. Among the ruined trees, he saw the corpses of fallen ninja. Some had been torn apart, some burned to charcoal, and others had died with their eyes still open, full of unwillingness. There were both Kumo Ninja and Konoha ninja among them. Because of the war, the medical teams had not yet been able to collect their bodies.

Yemo had never seen anything like it. At most, he had learned some Ninjutsu. The moment he saw such a brutal scene of battle, he vomited violently.

"Do you understand now? This is the brutality of war."

Before them was a battlefield where Kumo Ninja and Konoha ninja had fought: a devastated forest, wreckage strewn across the ground, and one or two corpses visible among the ruins, their faces so mangled that it was impossible to tell whether they belonged to Konoha or Kumo.

The sight made Yemo sick to his stomach, but to Orochimaru it was ordinary. Having lived through the Second Shinobi World War, he had seen scenes like this countless times, and who knew how many that were even worse.

Fortunately, he had not eaten much earlier, and his stomach was empty. Eventually, he could not bring anything else up even when he wanted to vomit. Yemo wiped his mouth with his hand and looked at the scene before him. "Sure enough, on the battlefield, life is the cheapest thing of all," he could not help remarking.

After that, as he followed Teacher Orochimaru, Yemo saw many more scenes like it and gradually came to accept them.