Chapter 24 – Sudden Crisis and Tsunade's Lesson
Ever since the day Obito and his friends had spotted Taichi at the hospital, news of Matsushita Taichi's internship at Konoha Hospital had spread like wildfire through the class.
Curiosity flared—just how skilled was he, to be allowed to work directly in a real hospital?
Rumors snowballed. Before long, someone claimed Taichi was already a "special jōnin-level medical ninja."
The fact that anyone actually believed it said a lot about his classmates' complete lack of basic judgment.
Before long, students began showing up at the hospital under all sorts of flimsy excuses. Some came to "visit a hospitalized relative." Others claimed they were "looking for someone." A few even went so far as to deliberately cut their own arms just so Taichi could treat them.
The nonsense escalated to the point that Chief Fujita herself got involved. After personally catching a handful of the boldest offenders, the commotion finally died down.
Life returned to something like normal for Taichi—until the day disaster struck.
That morning, a flood of casualties poured into Konoha Hospital.
The sharp scent of antiseptic was overwhelmed by the heavy tang of blood. Stretchers filled every inch of the corridor.
Plaster dust and the metallic tang of blood hung in the air; the wheels of the gurneys made a sticky, squelching sound as they rolled across the tiles.
The hem of Taichi's white coat was already soaked dark red. In his palms, green chakra flickered unsteadily over the chest of a collapsed construction worker.
"Fracture of the third rib on the left, puncture of the right lung lobe," Nurse Haruno said quickly as she ripped open the patient's cement-stained shirt. "Blood pressure 70 over 40!"
Taichi's fingertips moved over the bleeding chest cavity, chakra filaments probing deep into the wound. He could feel the jagged end of a rib pressing into the delicate alveoli, the torn tissue quivering with each shallow breath.
Only three months ago, he would have needed to consult an anatomy chart just to confirm the organ's location—now, instinct guided him as he wrapped the sharp fragment in a sheath of chakra.
From the far end of the hallway came the crash of another stretcher against a doorframe.
The new patient's left leg was twisted at an impossible angle.
Taichi finished sealing the lung wound, turned—then nearly stumbled into the treatment table. Hours of continuous chakra output pounded at his temples like a drum.
"Out of the way!"
Chief Fujita burst through the emergency doors, cradling an unconscious little girl.
From the back of her skull, pale brain tissue was forcing its way through a gaping wound, mingled with blood and shards of concrete. The crimson seeped down, soaking through the medic's own forehead protector.
Taichi snatched up gauze and pressed it to the hole in her skull. Warm, viscous fluid oozed between his fingers.
When he tried to summon chakra, the familiar cool flow refused to come—his body, drained beyond its limits, couldn't even muster a basic hemostasis technique.
"IV line—now!" Fujita's voice felt distant, as though it came from down a long tunnel. "Prep the craniotomy set!"
Under the glare of the surgical lamp, the world took on a stark, merciless white.
Mechanically, Taichi kept pressure on the wound. He watched his intern badge drift in a pool of blood, the name Matsushita Taichi blurred into illegible streaks of crimson.
The moans from the hallway grew faint—until a sharp, commanding voice tore through the cloying scent of blood.
"Move!"
Tsunade slammed through the emergency door, her dark green haori snapping behind her.
Her pupils constricted sharply at the sight: a boy kneeling in a pool of blood, biting down on a bandage to staunch the bleeding in his own right hand, his medic's forehead protector so stained it was impossible to tell its original color.
A memory stabbed through her temple like a kunai—twenty years ago, on a rain-soaked battlefield, Nawaki had knelt just like that, binding a stomach wound with bloodied cloth.
The shattered forehead protector.
The white-knuckled hands.
And the fading voice in the downpour: "Sister… save them…"
"Let a professional handle this."
She grabbed the back of Taichi's collar, intending to haul him up, but gentled her grip when she felt the tremor in his shoulders.
Her gaze flicked to the treatment table—and her throat tightened with a burning, familiar dread.
The girl's injuries were catastrophic. And deep inside Tsunade's chest, that old, unwelcome sensation began to rise—heat, nausea, the suffocating rush that signaled the onset of her hemophobia.
Taichi wiped the blood from his face with his sleeve, gathering chakra into his palm once more.
"The chief said that once brain tissue is exposed for more than twenty minutes, the patient will—"
"Go handle the leg impalement injury." Tsunade's voice cut him off sharply. Her fingers dug deep into her palm, knuckles whitening. The sterile light overhead stretched her shadow long and thin, blurring for a moment with the memory of her younger self standing before an operating table. Back then, she could slice into her brother's chest without her hands trembling; now, she couldn't even bring herself to look directly at the child's wound.
Taichi grabbed the emergency kit and rushed into the corridor. Moonlight streamed through a shattered window, spilling across the stretchers. His chakra was so depleted he couldn't even perform the Healing Technique—he could only set splints with his bare hands. When one injured worker bit down on his wrist in agony, Taichi merely shoved a wad of gauze into the man's mouth without a word.
It wasn't that he refused to use attribute points to restore his stamina—he was simply human, and his selflessness had limits. For strangers, he had already gone further than most would dare.
Tsunade leaned against the cold wall, listening to the clash of instruments. For the first time in twenty years, she cursed her finely honed sensory skills—because she could hear everything. In the adjacent treatment room, Taichi was staunching arterial bleeding with nothing but primitive, manual pressure. His ragged breathing tangled with the memory of Nawaki's heartbeat, fading into silence beneath a rain-soaked sky, pulling her sanity taut like a snare.
The darkness before dawn is the heaviest. When Taichi collapsed for the third time, overturning the treatment cart from sheer chakra exhaustion, Tsunade finally caught his wrist. His skin beneath the lab coat burned with fever, yet his pulse was as fragile as a dying ember.
"That's enough." Her voice was hoarse, almost unrecognizable. "Go to the rest room."
"But the worker in bed three—"
"That's an order!" Her voice spiked, but as Taichi staggered away, her eyes reddened. Moonlight caught the green medical cross on his back—the emblem of healing—now stained a dark, dried brown.
By the time morning mist seeped into the hallways, the last critical patient had been wheeled into surgery. Tsunade stood in the shadow of the emergency exit, watching Taichi asleep, curled on a bench. His right hand, caked in blood, hung loosely over the edge. The faint tracery of medical chakra still shimmered in his palm.
"Stubborn… just like Nawaki." She removed her cloak and draped it over him. The Senju crest embroidered in deep green glinted faintly in the dawn light. The robe she could never place on her brother's shoulders had finally found its home.
When the first sunlight pierced the fog, Tsunade unfurled a fresh scroll. The ink on the Advanced Medical Ninjutsu Outline was still wet, dotted with droplets of morning dew.
"Starting today—two extra hours of training, every day." She stuffed the scroll into Taichi's arms, her fingertips brushing the scabbed calluses on his hand. "What I'm going to teach you isn't just how to save lives."
Taichi stared blankly at the scroll, still groggy after sleeping nearly half a day. "Tsunade-nee… this is?"
"From now until school starts, you'll come to me for two hours of training after your hospital shift. At your current level, you'd be an embarrassment to my name!" Her words dripped with the prickly pride only she could manage.
Taichi, knowing her nature, took no offense. If word got out that one of the Legendary Sannin personally mentored someone, the line of hopefuls would circle the village twice.
"Thank you, Tsunade-nee. I won't waste what you teach me."
"Alright, brat, go clean yourself up."
"Yes, ma'am."
From that day on, Taichi spent every afternoon after his hospital work studying under Tsunade. She started from the very basics, filling in the gaps left by his self-taught methods—before this, the most he'd learned came from occasional questions to Nonō.
Now, with Tsunade's systematic instruction, both his theoretical knowledge and practical skills in medical ninjutsu surged forward. Even his Yang Release nature transformation advanced rapidly. Within half a month, he mastered his first A-rank technique—the Chakra Scalpel.
At present, his abilities stood as:
Healing Jutsu Lv10 (14/2000)
Mystical Palm Technique Lv6 (24/1000)
Fine Disease Extraction Lv5 (231/800)
Chakra Scalpel Lv3 (84/400)
Yang Release Nature Transformation Lv4 (75/600)
Taichi's medical proficiency had now far surpassed his combat skills—a development he had never expected.