Shuriken and kunai crossed in glittering arcs above the churned earth, and the crack of exploding tags rolled across the field like distant thunder. Somewhere behind the front lines, the men of the Analysis Team went about their work with the flat, hurried calm of people who had long since stopped flinching at the sound of battle.
"Captain, this is a genin with sensory talent — Tobitake Tonbo. He chose to join the Analysis Team after graduation."
Dokuraku Meguri gestured to the boy behind him.
Inoichi Yamanaka studied the newcomer, one eyebrow lifting at how young he looked.
Bandages wrapped Tonbo's eyes, ears, the back of his neck, and the crown of his head beneath his Konoha forehead protector. Watching the world without using his eyes — that alone suggested his sensory talent was worth something.
"S-Senior Inoichi? Hello, I'm Tobitake Tonbo." He straightened at once under that gaze, his voice bright with a nervous kind of excitement.
"No time for pleasantries." Inoichi did not slow down. "Meguri, you'll take him. Get him through the Psycho Mind Transmission as fast as you can. Can you manage it?"
"On it, Captain." Something sharpened in Meguri's eyes.
Tonbo's face fell. He had hoped for a jōnin's instruction, not a fellow genin's.
He is young too, Tonbo thought, turning his attention to the young man now leading him away. This 'Demon Instructor' of the Analysis Team, whatever reputation the name carried, still looked barely older than himself.
He had not expected, after one more sleepless night troubled by fractured memories, to simply die and wake up here — pulled straight into graduation in the middle of the Third Shinobi War, still only a boy in body, with a body of memories that were not entirely his own settling in beside the ones he'd brought with him.
Terrified of dying twice, he had gone looking for the safest hole to hide in, and found it in the life the real Tobitake Tonbo had been meant to live: a place in the Analysis Team. Their only task was to pull information from captured minds, sort it, and pass it up the chain. In peacetime they would be little more than gatekeepers, shuffled wherever Konoha needed a spare pair of hands, far from anything that might get a man killed.
It suited him perfectly. No glory in it, and no reason for anyone to remember his name — which was exactly how he intended to survive this war.
He followed Meguri to the edge of the camp, where wartime had left nothing that could be called comfortable.
"Here." Meguri tossed him a scroll. "The training manual for the Psycho Mind Transmission. With your sensory talent it shouldn't give you trouble. Ask me anything you don't understand once I'm back from my mission."
Then he was gone, and Tonbo did not blame him for it — the battlefield was hungry for every hand, and even his own classmates, Might Guy, Ebisu, and Shiranui Genma, had already been swallowed into the fighting. A logistics post like his came with no one to spare for one-on-one instruction.
He unrolled the scroll and pulled the bandages back from his eyes to read it.
This novel's true home is a different platform. Support the author by finding it there.
He had expected a short technique. He had been careless to think so. The characters ran dense and long across the paper, and as he worked through them he understood why: beyond the execution method, it detailed how to extract the most from a captured mind once inside it, and how to guard one's own thoughts from being tainted by what one found there. The hand seals were the smallest part of a discipline that could fill a shelf of scrolls on their own.
Sensory talent and steady spiritual energy were enough for the execution itself — that, at least, proved simple. The words seemed to open themselves to him as he read, far more easily than he had feared.
Rat. Horse. Tiger.
The seals came together without effort, and the Psycho Mind Transmission took shape.
He looked around the camp for a mind to test it on and found none, so the jutsu dispersed unused.
What now?
He could not risk a technique loud enough to draw an enemy's eye — the Analysis Team stayed hidden for good reason. Sensing, then. As a sensory-type ninja, rarer by far than one merely gifted with Wind-natured chakra, that much he could practice freely.
He wound the bandages back over his eyes, and the world around him dissolved into lines.
The Tiger seal came again, and chakra stirred through him. His perception widened, and within a kilometer he felt the small, scattered signatures of frogs, birds, and distant ninja flare into awareness. It fell short of the clarity a Byakugan would offer, but for a commoner-born talent it was rare enough to matter — no wonder sensors like him were so few.
He tested the rest as well: Transformation, Clone Technique, the basics every genin carried. And in doing so, he found something strange.
Whatever he had brought with him through death seemed to have sharpened everything he touched. Any skill came to him quickly now, and more than once he found himself improving on it without meaning to. The Transformation Jutsu, which should only reshape him into something he had studied at length, answered instead to a single glance — one look at a nearby animal and its shape and posture surfaced whole in his mind, ready to wear. His Clone Technique seals, once a full second's work, now came a third faster.
In battle, that difference alone could decide who walked away.
"What are you doing? I told you to learn the Psycho Mind Transmission."
Meguri had returned to find him practicing Tree Walking instead, and something close to anger flickered across what little of his face wasn't hidden by bandages. Wartime showed little patience for ninja who ignored orders — it killed them, usually quickly.
"I've learned it already. I just didn't have anyone to try it on." Tonbo dropped from the branch to land in front of him.
Meguri went still, disbelief plain even through the bandages. The records said Tonbo's sensory gift was exceptional, but his ninjutsu and academy theory scores had never risen past upper-middle.
"Follow me." He asked nothing further — the bandages across his own face made it impossible to read what he was thinking, and perhaps that suited him.
Curious, Tonbo followed him down into an underground chamber lined with a corridor of sealed doors. Meguri stopped before one of them.
"The ninja inside has already had his information read. His mind's still scattered from it. Try it on him — and don't overdo it."
Tonbo stepped into the dim room, lit by a single candle. A Sunagakure ninja sat slumped and vacant-eyed within — proof enough that forced thought-reading left its mark. Meguri stayed by the door, watching closely enough to stop anything reckless.
Tonbo formed the seals without hesitation and pressed both hands to the nerve points above the man's temples.
He really did learn it, Meguri thought, watching him work. It had taken Meguri himself three days to master this technique, and here the boy had already found the fastest access points to the nerves without being told — a shortcut that would save considerable effort in every reading to come.
Tonbo's consciousness slipped into the other man's mind like passing through a tunnel, memory fragments streaming past on either side: the academy, graduation, missions as a lowly genin, half a year surviving the Third War's battlefields, and finally capture at Konoha's hands. Much of it came broken and disjointed, worn thin by whoever had read this mind before him, but enough remained — combat instincts, scouting habits, the small tricks of a soldier who had lived long enough to learn them.
He absorbed it all, faintly astonished at how naturally another man's experience folded into his own understanding, as though he only had to glimpse a skill to grasp its shape.
In the Analysis Team, at least, my combat experience won't fall behind anyone else's, he thought.