Following Izuna's squad on missions was far more grueling and dangerous than training.
Their missions mainly involved patrolling and scouting the outskirts of the Uchiha Clan Compound. Occasionally, they ventured into the buffer zone bordering Senju territory. There were no large-scale battles here, but small skirmishes, traps, and probing attacks were everywhere.
Uchiha Sou stayed on high alert, keeping his One-Tomoe Sharingan active at all times. Its enhanced dynamic vision and perception had allowed him to spot concealed Explosive Tag traps and fleeting enemy silhouettes among the trees from a distance several times, preventing casualties.
Izuna was quite pleased with him and occasionally offered pointers on scouting and counter-surveillance.
"The Sharingan isn't all-powerful, Sou." During a break, Izuna said, "If you rely too much on your eyes, your other senses will grow dull. A true strong fighter has to trust all his senses, even... his intuition."
Uchiha Sou considered this. He had indeed felt mentally drained lately. Keeping his Sharingan active all the time was a considerable burden for him at his current level.
That day, the squad received an urgent mission: a Uchiha supply convoy had reportedly come under attack to the northwest. Its signal had gone dead, and they needed to go investigate and provide support immediately.
Izuna led the squad out at once, moving at high speed.
Uchiha Sou followed close behind, his heart pounding faster despite himself. Another ambush... just like the one the original owner of his body had encountered.
They soon reached the area where the signal had last been received. A faint smell of smoke and blood hung in the air, but all they found were the bodies of a few Uchiha shinobi and several unfamiliar shinobi, along with the wreckage of damaged carts. The main convoy was nowhere to be seen.
"Spread out and search in pairs. Stay alert! Signal immediately if you find anything!" Izuna ordered quickly, his expression grave.
Uchiha Sou paired up with a young member of the branch family named Uchiha Hi. They searched the woods to the east.
The forest was dense and dim. Uchiha Sou focused, trying to engage all his senses. His Sharingan let him make out details in the gloom, while his ears strained to catch any sound beyond the wind.
Suddenly, Uchiha Hi stopped in his tracks and let out a barely audible groan.
Uchiha Sou turned sharply. A nearly invisible, dark-colored wire had caught Uchiha Hi by the lower leg! He wasn't hurt, but the mechanism attached to the wire had already been triggered!
Whoosh! Whoosh! Whoosh!
Several poisoned bolts shot from the bushes to their side, aimed straight at them!
"Watch out!" Uchiha Sou's pupils contracted as his Sharingan instantly picked up the bolts' trajectories. He shoved the startled Uchiha Hi aside and leaned sharply backward himself!
Whoosh! Whoosh!
Two bolts grazed his cheek and arm, drawing thin lines of blood. The others struck the ground where they had been standing.
That was close!
Uchiha Hi broke out in a cold sweat. "Thanks, Sou! Damn it, this is that Senju rabble's usual trick!"
The two immediately stood back-to-back, on guard. But the bushes remained silent. It seemed the attackers had retreated after their first strike missed.
"Looks like it was just a trick to slow us down." Uchiha Hi spat.
Uchiha Sou's brow furrowed. Was that really all there was to it? Something felt off. The trap seemed less like an attempt to injure them and more like a way to... force them to change direction? Or was it covering for some other move?
His gaze drifted to the patch of seemingly calm grass ahead, where Uchiha Hi had been about to step before triggering the trap. Thanks to the Sharingan's keen perception, he thought he noticed a few blades bent at an unnatural angle.
"Hi, wait." He grabbed Uchiha Hi, who was about to continue forward.
"What is it?"
Uchiha Sou didn't answer. Instead, he cautiously picked up a stone, put all his strength into the throw, and sent it flying toward the suspicious patch of grass.
Thud!
The stone landed in the grass. Nothing happened.
Uchiha Hi watched him in confusion.
Uchiha Sou wasn't satisfied. He picked up another stone and this time threw it at another patch of ground nearby that looked perfectly ordinary.
Just as the stone was about to hit the ground—
BOOM!!
A tremendous explosion erupted! Dirt and grass flew everywhere, and a charred crater nearly two meters across appeared in its place. The shockwave was so powerful that the two men felt breathless despite standing some distance away.
If Uchiha Hi had walked straight over there just now...
Uchiha Hi went deathly pale. His lips trembled as he looked at Uchiha Sou with lingering fear and gratitude. "Sou... how... how did you know..."
Uchiha Sou was startled too, his heart racing. He hadn't been sure. It was just a strong suspicion based on the tiny irregularities he'd spotted with his Sharingan and his intuition.
"Just luck... Maybe my Sharingan picked up something out of place." He forced out an explanation, suppressing his unease.
So this was a battlefield? The threat of death was everywhere, coming not only from enemies in front of them, but also from these insidious traps.
At the same time, a thought surfaced that he couldn't suppress: had that tripwire trap really been a coincidence? Or had the person who set it calculated that, after discovering the first trap, people would instinctively move forward to stay alert or pursue the attackers, overlooking a second, deadlier trap beneath their feet?
If that was the case, then whoever had laid these traps had an incredibly precise grasp of human nature and behavior.
Their subsequent search turned up no more enemies. They found the supply convoy, which had only been forced to change its route and was otherwise unharmed. It seemed the attackers' only aim had been to harass and cause damage.
On the way back to the Uchiha Clan Compound, Uchiha Sou remained silent.
He thought back over what had happened. That "premonition," born of keen observation and logical deduction, had saved his life and his companion's.
It gave him a deeper understanding of his eyes' abilities. Perception wasn't just about seeing clearly. Perhaps it also meant... seeing farther? Seeing through things?
That night, he went alone to a secluded corner of the training ground.
He concentrated and replayed every detail of the day's encounter with the traps—the tripwire's location, the angle of the bolts, the hidden spot where the second Explosive Tag had been placed...
Then he picked up a few Shuriken and turned his gaze to a target in the distance.
Instead of throwing them as he usually did, he tried to immerse his mind in a peculiar state. He imagined the Shuriken's flight path, possible interference from a breeze, and the tiny differences that might result from throwing at different angles...
At the same time, he cautiously channeled a faint trace of Chakra—not to enhance his strength or speed, but to imbue the Shuriken with a strange... "intention."
The feeling was profoundly mysterious. It was as if he weren't throwing the Shuriken, but rather... "setting" an initial cause.
"Left eye... Yomotsu Okami..." he murmured unconsciously. The Tomoe in his eye seemed to glow faintly.
Whoosh!
The Shuriken flew from his hand, tracing an arc through the air.
Thwack!
It hit the target precisely... but not in the bull's-eye. It struck an inconspicuous spot near the edge.
Uchiha Sou frowned slightly and walked over to inspect it.
At the point of impact, the wood fibers had split in an extraordinarily fine spiral pattern. The Shuriken itself sat at a slightly odd angle, as if it hadn't struck the target directly, but had first glanced off something in a faint, inexplicable collision and shifted its course before hitting.
The collision had been so slight that it was almost negligible.
"Did I fail?" Uchiha Sou felt a little disappointed. He had wanted to "set" the "cause" of the Shuriken hitting the bull's-eye for certain, but all he seemed to have done was produce a trivial deviation.
He shook his head. He must have been overthinking it. How could he master a power like this so easily?
What he didn't notice was that, a short distance ahead of the Shuriken's original path, an almost invisible spiderweb thread had trembled in the cold night air.
The Shuriken should have passed right beside the thread along its original trajectory.
But because of the faint "intention" attached to it and an extremely unlikely deviation in its angle, the tip of the Shuriken had brushed the resilient thread.
The imperceptible graze had exerted almost no force, but it had set the thread vibrating.
The other end of the thread was attached to a dead leaf. The leaf stirred gently, then drifted down from a low branch.
It spun lazily as it fell.
Below it was a squad of shinobi traveling secretly through the night, their foreheads bearing the crest of the Hagoromo Clan.
The leaf fell silently onto the helmet of a young shinobi at the rear of the squad, briefly blocking his vision.
He reached up instinctively to brush it away, slowing his pace by half a step. His foot came down on an almost invisible tripwire—a warning line that the companion ahead of him had carefully avoided.
Ding-a-ling—!
A clear bell rang out abruptly in the still night, its sound carrying far into the distance.
"Damn it!" The Hagoromo squad leader's face changed dramatically.
In the distance, a Uchiha squad on a scouting mission nearby abruptly stopped.
"Movement! Northwest! Stay alert!"
The wheels of history seemed to have been nudged, ever so slightly, by a tiny pebble at that moment.
No one knew.
Uchiha Sou put away his Shuriken, yawned, and left the training ground. His eyes felt a little tired, which he thought was from overtraining.
He needed to rest. Tomorrow's mission would be even more demanding.
And far to the northwest, a small, premature clash—one that should never have happened, all because of a falling leaf—quietly began.
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