It was spring which meant that it was all hands on deck. Their squad was relatively new, and half its members only had a year of experience, so they were more like tagalongs. They were usually sent to fluff up the numbers on high profile missions, and sometimes with just an adult as supervision in more local missions.
Even after the relocation, the shinobi clans still had their official territories clearly outlined. The Uchiha were the lords of the south, while the Senju ruled over the north.
The first type of missions they had clearly outlined that difference. They were mainly hired to protect the lands of the farmers or the merchandize that was being transported, or to sabotage their competitors from the north, like burning their crops, or stealing their caravans. And the Senju did the same with their northern clients as well as for their own lands. Only the shinobi Senju had moved south, the others had stayed up north to keep the farming going.
The second type of missions was commissioned by the daimyo. The Land of Fire was prosperous, and covered a large territory between other countries that were not as lucky. Each year, during spring and summer, the other daimyos would send their own shinobi to try and take over some of that territory or at least some of its production of the year.
The daimyo of the Land of Fire was clearly born under a lucky star, because his land housed some of the strongest shinobi clans to exist. Each clan had their own side of the border to protect. The Senju were in the north, fending of the people of the Land of Lightning. The Uchiha kept the nomads of the Land of Wind from coming in. The Hyuga were in the east facing the people of the Land of Water and the Akimishi-Yamanaka-Nara axis had the west and the people from the Land of Earth. All other affiliated clans either had to help one of them or had a smaller country threat to fend off. It was a delicate situation, and was where the shinobi made household names of themselves when there was no inter-clan war going on. Like right what happening then.
Her first time near the border reminded her of the time she had volunteered for Doctors without borders, to give herself a reason for being in Africa when a series of politicians deaths kept happening all over the continent.
The nomads of the Land of the Wind lived in a harsh desert and even if they could trade their gold and minerals of all kinds, for huge amounts of money, it clearly wasn't enough and they had been trying to get their hands on some of the fertile lands of the Land of Fire.
The fights were brutal and made their war with the Senju almost look like a friendly banter. Their squad had gained a huge reputation in the battles they were participating in. Especially that their mastery over Katon techniques was playing in their favor when facing the more Futon leaning nomads.
Their biggest foes, however, were the puppeteers. The nomads of the Land of Wind were masters in the creation and control of puppets that were loaded to the brim with weapons and mechanisms. They offered them a clear advantage in long distance battle, especially that the Uchiha shinobi used their own bodies to fight and were therefore more vulnerable. The best way to beat them was to cut the chakra threads they used to control the puppet and then go after the puppeteer. But that required getting dangerously close to the puppet and a high speed execution to stop the chakra threads from relinking. What was worse was that all their weapons were coated with different poisons and one scratch could mean death.
Before, the Uchiha used to lose a lot of shinobi that way. But now Haruka was here, and only a master of poisons like her could undo the work of another.
Haruka had the advantage of knowing exactly which effects were caused by which plant. When they were briefed about what to expect in the borders, she had requested information on the type of plants that grew in the Land of Wind to prepare herself. It wasn't that long of a list, because the Land of Wind was mostly desert, and Tajima had sent a special squad to get her that list as fast as possible. Their greenhouse came in handy because most of what they needed to make antidotes was ready to be shipped to the border's headquarters in no time. Touko stayed in the compound to coordinate the shipments, as well as to be there for the shinobi who were on other missions.
Besides Haruka all the other medics were hired help that only came in once the fights were over. This was no way to fight in a war, as medical support had to be there, even if it only stayed in the back. She realized just how careless she had been so far. What was the use of having good medicine if there were no doctors around to administer it? The coming winter season, she promised herself that this was going to change. But so far she was doing her best, finishing everyday utterly exhausted and out of chakra.
At first she fought in the battles too, but Tajima finally decided that she was more useful as a medic if she was well rested, and ordered she stay in the back. The Uchiha warriors trusted her and had threatened the other doctors into submission when they had started questioning her methods. But at the end, the other dotcors ended up learning some stuff from her, and she was more than willing to share her knowledge. For every poison they could come up with, she had an antidote ready in less than two days. A lot of lives were still lost, but by the end of summer, the legendary Uchiha medical genius's reputation was all over the Land of Fire.
Her teammates too, had made names of themselves. Natsuki had also been dragged to the border to fill in for her, once she started working as a medic full time. Haruka had never resented Tajima more. Sure her brothers and cousin were also around the same age, with Izuna being a year younger than Natsuki actually, but they were on another level than the rest of the shinobi. They were as skilled as some of the adults even if none of them was old enough to be considered a teenager. Natsuki, with all her hard work, was still too inexperienced. It was like bringing a lamb to the wolf to feed on.
Thankfully, she made it out alive with only a huge scar on her right cheek. Haruka had done her best to heal it, and it was only apparent when you looked for it, but Natsuki was self-conscious about it. Izuna, bless his devious mind, actually helped with this, by teaching Madara some cute comforting speech and making him repeat it to her. The older boy had finally caught on to what was happening, and was as red as Natsuki for the rest of the night.
Still moments like this were rare, and she felt like they had all lost something by the end of that summer. Izuna and Hikaku had both awakened their Sharingans after witnessing the horrifying deaths of some of their closest friends. She had done her best to comfort them, but both had still tried to act strong and not show the depth of their sorrow. Tajima's response was as cold as ever. He actually congratulated them with a happy smile, not even mentioning the fallen kids.
Their Senju counterparts were also doing great. The news about Hashirama's Mokuton had spread like wild fire. He apparently had been especially vicious in their fight against the Lightning shinobi, and his body count was higher than Madara's. If she hadn't guessed earlier, now she knew that he was clearly holding back against them. She knew that he wasn't skilled enough yet to kill them, but the fact that their injuries were minimal said something.
When their contract with the daimyo expired for the season they were finally able to go back home. It had been more than a month since she was back in the compound.
After a week of rest, she went back to work. She had been Touko's apprentice for two years, and after that summer there was no longer use in pretending that she wasn't as skilled as her mentor. They decided that she had officially graduated. Now that the Uchiha had two certified doctors, even if one was only completing eight years old in a few months during winter, they could start teaching others. Touko let the members of the clan now, and the very next day five young girls and two boys were enrolled by their parents.
Haruka was a "medic-nin". That's the official term the kids used to describe her when they said that they wanted to be just like Haruka-senpai. Both shinobi and doctors. Sadly none of them had her skill in chakra control. But unlike the Senju, the medicine they practiced didn't rely on chakra a lot, and so the kids were able to learn without missing too much. Especially that Touko, who did most of the teaching because Haruka hated that part of the job, was also not an innate healer, but had achieved it through a lot of hard work.
The rest of Haruka's squad had been enrolled as teachers for the kids to help with their special schedule that had to enclose shinobi skills training too. Against all odds, Madara turned out to be the best teacher. He adapted well to each kid's specificities and instinctively knew how to balance giving the carrot and the stick. The kids were doing so great under his tutelage, that some of the regular kids in training started to come for extra lessons with him. His tough reputation was starting to get reversed in the minds of the clan members.
Haruka, as mentioned before, didn't like teaching. But she liked the praises. And so when the kids had begged the great Haruka-senpai to help them with their anatomy lessons, she decided to strike two birds with one stone. She had just received the body of some bandit, and was planning on performing an autopsy and so she invited them to watch. They should get used to the sights early on or it was useless to waste time in teaching them. Thankfully nobody fainted, but a few vomited at first.
The autopsy was going great, and she was drilling them on the stuff they were supposed to know already, while answering their curious questions. One of the boys, Hiroto, who was their best student, suddenly asked. "What's that?" He was pointing to the heart of the corpse. She knew that he wasn't asking about the organ though, but about the black dots that weren't supposed to be on it.
She knew by now that the heart was the biggest chakra producer, but the chakra pathways there were especially resistant, not letting the energy come in contact a lot with the tissue. She took the heart out and examined it closely. The side that wasn't facing them until know was full of black dots.
Activating her Sharingan, she pumped some of her own chakra into the heart and realized where the problem lay. The bandit earlier in his life probably had an injury close to the heart, which sectioned one of the small chakra tubes wrapped around it. Even if he survived, the injury was never properly healed and the tube was left with a small opening that leaked the chakra into his heart. From earlier testing, she knew that all tissues could handle a certain amount of chakra passing through them to get to its proper pathways, or to the organ it was supposed to be used in. But she had theorized that large amounts of chakra going through organs that normally didn't require such quantities, like the eye for the Sharingan, caused the black dots. The same black dots described in the thieve's scroll. The same ones she hadn't been able to replicate to study, so far.
She put the heart down carefully and hugged Hiroto as hard as she could. This boy didn't know just how much he had helped her. She probably wouldn't have noticed as she was planning on studying this guy's liver more than anything. Thanking the brats for their help, she kicked them out of the lab and sent them to look for Madara-sensei for an early afternoon lesson.
Haruka took multiple samples of the heart tissues and examined them. Clearly they weren't burns, but small platelets of an unidentified molecule.
The thing that sucked when you were doing research in a bad lab was that, even if you know the techniques you should use, you have no means of finding out anything with a proper scientific method. The good news however was that you don't need to use a scientific method to prove the validity of your work. It kind of worked out nice to be the drug producer, the commission who approved the drug and the doctor who prescribes it.
After two days of trying every method she could think of to identify the molecule, she decided that she actually didn't need to. She just needed to figure out a way to make it go away. And so, she set up camp in Touko's lab. She spent days combining plants and mushrooms in various quantities, and mixes and trying them out on the very limited number of samples she had. She ate there and slept there. The kids were starting to think she was going crazy, and a worried Touko had tried to get her to go up to her apartment to take a bath and rest, but she refused to leave. Her goal was to come up with a decoction that only affected the molecule and not the tissue around it. She chose to make a decoction and not a proper drug to keep it from harming the body with too much side effects.
After, days of hard labor and more than seven dead bunnies (who were properly mourned as martyrs of the Uchiha clan by everyone), she finally came up with something. The tissue was cleared, and the bunny that had drunk it wasn't dead after more than a week, it even seemed to be pretty happy. She finally decided that it could be tried on humans. But she had only awakened the Sharingan for less than two years, so there was no way to notice any real difference, or she would have tried it herself.
After discussing it with Touko, they once again let the clan know that they were looking for volunteers. A few shinobi came forward, but they finally settled on Elder Genryu as their first guinea pig. He had made a great argument for his case. His vision was almost gone so there probably was no other person in the clan whose optical nerve was more clogged than his, and he was old and retired so even if her decoction made things worse it wouldn't change anything. And finally he added that this was probably the only chance she would get to poison him.
Haruka had then moved into his house for a week of testing and monitoring. The old bag of bones turned out to be a decent guy. His wife was dead and he lived alone. He had a daughter who came to check on him every day and take care of him, but he refused to move in with her because he liked his independence. He enjoyed Haruka's cooking, and taught her how to play shogi. And they enjoyed each other's company, even when their arguments were loud enough to alert the neighbors.
The tests were successful. She gave him a heavily concentrated dose in the first evening before going to sleep. A few hours later, he woke her up complaining about a burning feeling in his eyes. It had lasted for hours, but when the morning came he was positive that his eyesight was better. She kept giving the decoction every day, and after the fourth he was seeing as good as when he was in his twenties. After that she felt more confident in giving the decoction to other people who suffered from the same problem, experimenting with dosage and frequency of use. In the middle of winter, they had the final results: A low concentration decoction will be prescribed to be taken once a month as a preventive medicine, that would prevent the little plaques from forming.
Over the next few years, Haruka's medicine became a must for every person who awakened the Sharingan. It became so mainstream that its cost was covered by the clan's communal fund, and people could just come and take their monthly dose for free.