"One of ours, then. What happened?" The ANBU captain eased back from whatever he'd been about to do, seeing that Tonbo already knew them.
"ANBU-sama, please — my dad's still fighting them. The Seven Swordsmen of the Mist!" Guy said it like a lifeline thrown the moment he spotted the mask.
That landed harder than anything else said so far. The Seven Swordsmen, here?
"Enough. Show us the way." Tonbo swept his senses over the three of them once more, satisfied none of it was a disguise, then crossed the distance, formed a quick set of seals, and pressed a hand to each of their shoulders in turn.
Guy and the other two felt only a light touch, and then the exhaustion that had been dragging at them simply wasn't there anymore, like it had never happened. They nodded to the ANBU without needing to be told twice and turned to lead the way.
"Boar. Get word to the Hokage — request backup." The captain's voice had gone flat and serious. Anything involving the Seven Swordsmen, the Hidden Mist's own elite, wasn't something to take lightly.
Tonbo gave himself a private thumbs-up for the timing. Nothing steadied a nervous unit like watching its captain take a threat seriously enough to call for help before it was strictly needed.
"Yes, sir." Boar summoned a hawk, tied the message to its leg, and sent it winging back toward the village.
By the time they reached the site, the fight had already burned itself out. A hundred meters of ground lay torn open around them, scorched and cratered.
"Dad—" Guy was the first to spot him and went down at his side before anyone could stop him.
Tonbo followed more slowly. What remained of Might Duy's jumpsuit had burned away to almost nothing, his whole body charred, his eyes open and rolled back. Whatever he'd spent to hold this ground, he'd spent all of it.
"Let him rest." Tonbo set a hand on Guy's shoulder. He'd have liked, in another circumstance, to read what those last minutes had cost the man — the shape of a technique like that would have been worth knowing — but he had no intention of taking it from him now, uninvited, and the Village wouldn't have sanctioned it besides.
"Nuibari — that's Kushimaru Kuriarare's blade. Kabutowari belongs to Jinin Akebino. Shibuki's Jinpachi Munashi's. And the twin blades, Hiramekarei — Mangetsu Hōzuki." The ANBU captain read off the dead as his eyes moved between the four corpses and the weapons scattered near them, disbelief plain in his voice.
"Who was this man." It wasn't really a question.
"Stay sharp — three more of them are unaccounted for. They may still be alive out there." Only once he'd said it did the captain seem to remember himself, settling back into the discipline of a man who'd run more operations than he could count.
The others fanned out at once, searching. Tonbo reeled his own feelings back in and pushed his range as far as it would stretch.
A minute later, nothing. "Captain. No enemies in range."
"Nothing on our end either."
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"No trace of the other three nearby. They've likely already fled." The rest of the search and sensor teams compared notes and came to the same conclusion.
"Clear the site. Nothing about this leaves this unit." The captain's order came without hesitation.
"Yes, sir."
"As it happens, we're the Analysis Team, and we came prepared. Leave the bodies to us." Meguri stepped forward, and the captain nodded him through.
Tonbo drew out a sealed scroll, unrolled it, and studied the runes worked across its surface, the character for corpse marked at its center. Boar, Tiger, Tiger — the seals took, and the jutsu spread out over Might Duy's body, wrapping it whole before drawing back into the scroll. He tied it off and passed it to the captain. The others finished their own share of the work around him, while the ANBU gathered up the four blades, cleaned and bound them for the trip back.
Guy and the other two could only watch, hands empty, no part left for them to play in any of it.
Guy's eyes had gone bright again, but for a different reason now. He walked straight up to the captain. "ANBU-sama — could I join the ANBU?"
"Make chūnin first, then put in the request with the Hokage yourself. That part's not up to me." The captain said it kindly enough, and privately thought the boy had earned the ambition — a father who'd cut down four jōnin-caliber swordsmen alone left little doubt what the son might grow into, given time.
Tonbo had nothing to say to that. Neither did Ebisu or Genma.
"Guy. Now's not the time to be bending anyone's ear," Tonbo said instead. "Getting these bodies and blades home safe comes first. Whatever else you want to talk through, it can wait until we're behind the walls again."
"Right."
"Move out. Eyes open the whole way."
Guy fell in beside his teammates without another word, grief plain on him but the discipline holding regardless.
"That genjutsu I used on you earlier — rest for a full day once you're home. No training, understood?" Tonbo remembered to say it partway down the road.
"What kind of jutsu was that, exactly? Is there a cost to it?" Ebisu asked, tensing. A minute ago his legs had felt inexhaustible; now he wasn't sure what that had actually meant for his body.
Genma turned the question over on his own. "Wasn't nature transformation. Wasn't medical ninjutsu either, and nothing's actually wrong with either of us yet. Genjutsu, then?"
"There it is — figured you'd get there, Genma. Sharp as ever." Tonbo grinned. "Genjutsu: False Vigor. It tells the body it's already at its peak, whether that's true or not, and the body believes it enough to squeeze extra output out of every cell it has. Borrowed strength, not free strength — you pay it back afterward, in rest."
Both of them, top of their class once, understood the shape of it immediately. Guy alone looked lost, though his teammates worked twice as hard explaining it to him anyway, thinking of his father and wanting him to actually take the rest rather than burn straight through it on principle.
"Guy, for a man built entirely out of noise and sunshine, you're surprisingly thorough about the details," Tonbo said, watching him out of the corner of his eye.
By then Guy had made his peace with his father's death, at least enough to answer his teammates properly instead of brushing them off, as though he meant to spare them the worry rather than the other way around. Tonbo had always suspected, from everything he remembered of how this boy turned out, that there was more care folded into him than the volume ever let on — a man built for passion who somehow never lost the fine print along with it.
Worth remembering, that False Vigor worked as well as it had. A genjutsu built in a hurry, closer to self-hypnosis than anything technical, and apparently it held just as well on people who trusted him as it did on the enemies he'd built it for in the first place. Just not on both at once — an enemy would need convincing first, and that was a different problem for a different day.
Another ANBU squad appeared ahead of them not long after — the requested backup, arriving too late to matter, but arriving all the same. They reached Konoha soon after that, filed their reports, and went their separate ways to rest.
Not that rest meant much for the Analysis Team specifically. Tonbo had hoped there might be something left to learn from the dead jōnin themselves, some scrap of memory worth the reading, but that door had already closed along with the scroll.
So he went to Ichiraku Ramen instead, ordered the large bowl, and spent a while trading the day's smaller feelings with Ayame instead of the larger ones.