Why Can't a Barrier Master Be a Ninja?

[The main story is complete]

[I originally meant to write a romance, but somehow the career plot took over again. Anyway, there's daily life, infrastructure, thrilling battles, and cheats that reach the heavens. Everything you want is here!]

Takouyou Hikari is an unremarkable genius barrier specialist in the Hidden Leaf Village.

Her biggest dream was to get a steady job on the Barrier Team and coast until retirement.

Then she left the village and discovered that civilians who weren't ninja were still starving and at the mercy of the weather.

Hikari: ...Aren't ninja skills too useful to waste on something like this?

To help civilians get enough to eat, she developed compound agricultural barriers.

To predict weather hazards in advance, she developed weather-monitoring barriers.

To improve maritime efficiency, she developed ship-propulsion barriers.

To treat the sick civilians throughout the city, she and her companions developed a large-scale medical barrier.

With barrier-based infrastructure, she gained a voice on the international stage. At the time, she thought that was all it took to change the world.

Hikari had always thought that her father, mother, and teacher had all died because of the fate of the shinobi.

But her mother's keepsakes, her teacher's secrets, and even the taunts of the person who killed her teacher just before his death all pointed to an even more brutal truth. The fate and accidents she believed in seemed to be part of a carefully arranged path.

The keeper of the world's timeline came through the smoke and fire, intent on putting everything back on track.

- Sorry, it's all to keep the timeline from collapsing again.

- If your idea of stopping the timeline from collapsing leads to an ending this awful, then this world might as well end sooner!

The boy sighed, but the enormous shadow beside her joined her without hesitation.

“It's such a pain... but I can't leave you to shoulder something like this alone.”

I searched the whole site and couldn't find anything to read, so I wrote this myself through tears. The writing is at an elementary school level; I wrote it for fun.

Reader's notes:

1. Pairing with Shikamaru. ShikaTema is broken up.

2. The heroine was reborn in the womb, isn't a native of this world, and has a cheat from her birth mother.

3. A coming-of-age story.

4. OOC warning.

5. Lots of original additions.

6. It's a long story, so the romance won't progress quickly. The hero is Shikamaru, after all. (Gestures.)

7. The early story lays the groundwork for various character relationships. The middle and later parts focus mainly on her career. There are lots of original takes on the shinobi world's politics and economics, so please go easy on anything that doesn't make sense.

8. The ending breaks up Naruto and Hinata, and Sasuke and Sakura, with Team 7 each going their own way. The Hyuga storyline includes a little Kiba and Hinata. Although it doesn't feature much, there are original characters and a romance with Obito, so Obito and Rin fans, beware.

9. Comments are welcome, hehe 0v0.

Theme: Reject individual heroism.