The next morning, Tsunade came to check on him again, and she told him plainly that they were relocating to another hideout.

As they traveled, Tsunade kept pace near him while the medical corps shinobi were carried ahead. Ryusei stayed silent, but inside his mind spun sharper than ever.

That whole idea of one healer per shinobi team… a pipe dream.

Tsunade ideallistically recommended it once, and Dan Kato had preached it too at the time, to look noble, to seem visionary, in front of her.

Maybe Hiruzen even dangled the promise before them, for his own reputation boost even.

But reality was never that way.

He thought of the Konoha Twelve from his memories of the original story.

How many of their teams had healers? None.

And during the WW3 flashbacks, where were all those “team medics”?

Nowhere. The truth was plain. It was never policy. Just a misunderstanding.

And it made sense. How hard was it to make a medical shinobi?

Years of training, perfect chakra control, a rare talent pool.

Could Konoha really funnel its resources there when it needed killers, when it needed fodder to hurl at the front?

No. Villages were not charities. They wanted weapons, not doctors.

Healers were necessary, yes. But not for every squad.

That had been Tsunade’s naïve idealism back then, noble but doomed.

For Hiruzen, it was propaganda points.

Let her believe she was shaping policy, let him bask in the glow of a new reformer, while things continued as before.

The only reason a mobile, specialized medical corps existed now, arranged properly by Hiruze, was because casualties in the last war had been catastrophic.

Five years later, another war, even worse.

If he hadn’t done something, resentment might have turned to mutiny.

That was the only reason he allowed this unit under Tsunade’s command.

And even then, it was smaller than a single frontline Division, a hundred, maybe two hundred shinobi at best.

Ryusei’s thoughts drifted further.

The rumors he’d read on fan-wikis in his past life weren’t wrong.

Tsunade really had revolutionized the medical field with her Yang affinity and rare chakra control.

She really had countered Chiyo’s poisons when they plagued Konoha at the start of the war.

And yes, she really had stood with Jiraiya and Orochimaru against Hanzo.

Hanzo. People back then had argued endlessly whether he was overrated.

The man had fought Hiruzen to a standstill once, Ryusei now knew after he transmigrated here, so he put that debate to rest.

Of course, he could defeat the Sannin in their youth.

The only reason he spared them was calculation; killing Konoha’s brightest would have provoked Hiruzen into retribution.

Hanzo knew his place as the head of a small village.

The truth was, the Sannin had simply been late bloomers.

At that time, they weren’t legends. Hanzo merely exposed the gap.

Ryusei smirked inwardly. This was the difference between fiction and reality. Here, all the pieces fit.

Tsunade wasn’t one to let silence linger too long.

By late that night, she had already forced herself back together.

The tears, the raw grief, the shattering realizations, all of it she buried again under the same armor she’d worn for years.

When she returned to Ryusei, it was Tsunade the Sannin who stood before him, not Tsunade the broken Senju heir.

As they moved through the trees, she finally side-eyed him with a half-smirk, voice carrying that familiar bite.

“So,” she said, narrowing her eyes just a touch, “what’s your plan now, brat? Going to cling to me like a shadow? Follow me through the warzone like some stray? Or are you planning to vanish again and make me chase you halfway across the frontlines?”

Her lips quirked faintly, but her gaze was sharp, testing.

The teasing tone couldn’t hide the genuine curiosity underneath.

He hadn’t actually said what he intended.

Until now, everything had been about the past, nothing about tomorrow.

Ryusei kept his slit-eyed look steady, the perfect mask. Inside, though, he laughed. “Stay with her? Follow her? If only she knew…”

Outwardly, he gave only a small shrug, as if the question barely mattered. “I thought I made it clear yesterday. Survival. Nothing more.”

Tsunade scoffed, rolling her eyes.

Still, something about his calm detachment grated more than she expected.

Her smirk sharpened. She pressed him, voice carrying more heat now, as if daring him to slip.

“Hmph. Survival. You make it sound simple. But from what I saw, you don’t crawl through life. You plan. You move. You bite back. And after I drag you out of death’s mouth, all you give me is a one-word plan?”

Ryusei didn’t answer right away, but the faint curl at his lip looked almost mocking, as though he was laughing at her without words.

He tilted his head slightly, meeting her gaze coolly. “You’d prefer a speech? I thought you liked blunt answers.”

Her tongue clicked. “Don’t look at me like that. I’m not blind, brat. You’ve got something else in mind. Nobody crosses Root operatives and then shrugs it off with ‘survive.'”

Ryusei’s tone stayed flat, calculated. “What else should I say, then? That I plan to cling to you and let you carry me along?”

That earned him a dry laugh. Genuine, even if short. “At least that would sound honest,” she said. For a heartbeat, her eyes softened before she caught herself and masked it again. “But you’re too proud for that, aren’t you?”

“Maybe,” Ryusei said. Then he let the faintest shift touch his face, just enough to look conflicted. “Or maybe I don’t think you’d really want someone like me following you around.”

Tsunade blinked, caught by the weight of his tone.

For a moment, she almost spoke, but instead she clicked her tongue and pushed ahead a branch harder than before, as if hiding her hesitation.

Inside, Ryusei smirked. ‘Good. Let her stew. Every step forward, she ties herself closer, without me even pulling.’

But Tsunade wasn’t done.

She slowed again, leaning slightly closer, close enough that her scent reached him, her eyes narrowing.

“Don’t think I’m letting you run off somewhere, brat. Whether you like it or not, you’re tied to me now. Unless you’ve got some secret arrangement hidden up those sleeves, you’ll be following my lead.”

Ryusei’s mask didn’t twitch, but inwardly, he grinned wide.

‘Perfect. Let her think she’s binding me by force. That only makes it easier to reel her in.’

Out loud, he gave a dry, almost mocking chuckle. “If that’s what you want to believe, Senju-sama.”

Her brow twitched at the tone.

But instead of snapping, she gave only a soft “tch” and straightened.

“That’s right. Don’t forget it.”

Ryusei’s expression then ‘softened’, just slightly, as if he had come to a decision, after watching her posture, her words, her ‘protective’ tone.

He let out a quiet breath and turned his face toward hers. That flawless blonde face was close beside him as they leapt from branch to branch.

“…Fine,” he said evenly. “It’s no problem telling you. Even if you’re too conflicted now to help me directly, to choose between me and the village, or me and your teacher… at least I can trust you to keep this to yourself. Better that than a misunderstanding later.”

Tsunade’s face didn’t shift, keeping the same cool exterior, but her ears sharpened at once.

She hid it with a scoff, but inside she smirked. ‘So that’s what this brat was testing with his earlier words… He really thinks he can measure me like that.’

Her gaze lingered on him, thinking that she saw right through his ‘mask’. To her, he was already too familiar. Proud, aloof, distrustful, saying one thing while thinking another. Always pretending distance. Always acting like nothing touched him. Just like Takeshi had been.

When Ryusei spoke of her “still siding with the higher-ups” and not being able to help him, she even caught a faint edge of salt in his tone. It almost made her chuckle. ‘Such a predictable look,’ she thought, ‘but that look is… a little cute.’

Her memory betrayed her for a second, overlapping Ryusei’s face with Takeshi’s, handsome, but a bit different in their youth, that same aloof pride, that same way of looking at her like she had disappointed him somehow, but acting casually about it.

She remembered that time when Takeshi, around that same age, gave her that exact expression after she vanished on missions with her teammates and didn’t see him in the Senju compound for weeks.

Her chest tightened, then she forced the memory away, burying it as she always did.

Ryusei, meanwhile, began to speak, his voice steady, each word deliberate.

His narration unfolded slowly, laying out his intentions step by step, as though this was the first time he had decided to let anyone peek behind the curtain.

Tsunade kept her expression neutral, but she listened to every word.

Source: Webnovel.com, updated by NovelKeep