Kuroda let that point stand. “Walk me through the part where she died in your care,” he said tightly.

The ship rolled and banged. Genma pressed his feet hard against the bottoms of his boots, anchoring himself with chakra. The seasickness he’d predicted for Kuroda was starting to hit him, instead. Or maybe it was just exhaustion.

“When we emerged from the sewer, Namiashi and Hatake were both gone. When Fukuda realized her sister and niece were both missing, she immediately ran after them. We tracked Namiashi first, and found him under enemy assault with Kimiko-san. We engaged. Fukuda—” Genma swallowed, and diverted a little more of his precious chakra to his inner ear to try to quell the motion sickness. “Fukuda took another blow to the belly. I didn’t see it, I was fighting the shinobi who had Namiashi-taichou and Kimiko-san hostage. When the fighting was over, I was treating Namiashi for strangulation when Tousaki called me over. Fukuda had collapsed. That was when I discovered the splenic injury. She’d been bleeding internally, but either hadn’t noticed it herself, or had elected to keep it secret. By that point, she was in shock. I’d estimate she’d lost at least thirty percent of her blood volume, and was continuing to bleed heavily. Without a full surgical team and immediate blood transfusion, her injury was not survivable.”

“By that point,” Kuroda said. “If you’d realized sooner?”

Genma took a breath, picturing Fukuda’s blue nail beds, her bloodless lips, her racing, desperate heartbeat, and met Kuroda’s accusing gaze. “If I’d realized sooner, I still might not have been able to save her. Internal organ injuries are generally outside of the scope of a field medic’s capabilities. If her injury had been very minor, I may have been able to stop the bleeding. But given how close to death she was after the second battle, my guess is her injury was severe from the outset.”

“Did you even try to save her?” Kuroda demanded. He glared at Genma with bitter contempt, as if he already knew how inadequate Genma’s answer would be.

“I— when I assessed her, she was in severe shock, so I tried to support her blood pressure, but that just increased the rate at which she was bleeding out internally.”

“And then?”

“I tried to seal the bleeding vessels, but there were too many of them. Her spleen was shredded.” Genma hesitated before he admitted. “I tried to use a jutsu for knitting soft tissue, but it’s designed for skin and muscle injuries, not for something as complex as organ repair.”

“So you used a treatment unsuited to the task.” Kuroda’s dark eyes narrowed further. His lip curled in disgust. “Then what?”