Nine months had passed since Minato took the hat, and Konoha stood on the edge of its forty-eighth year when the quiet of another ordinary night broke apart.
The tremor came first, a surge of energy vast enough to roll through the whole village at once, and on its heels came the alarm — the one reserved only for nights when Konoha's survival itself hung in the balance. Every ninja who heard it came awake at once, heart already hammering before the mind had caught up, and within moments rooftops across the village were crowded with shapes watching the source of it: nine tails, swaying against the night sky, tall enough that whole streets of buildings came down wherever they swept.
"Son, what is that?"
Tonbo and his father stood together on their own rooftop, staring up at the towering shape. So it's finally here, Tonbo thought, something in his chest going still and cold despite himself.
"That'll be the Nine-Tails, Dad. Get to evacuation — you remember the drill." He didn't wait for an answer before he was moving, already crossing rooftops toward the beast. "Keep Ayame and Teuchi safe."
Tōsei nodded once and was gone in the other direction — a former chūnin himself, and the emergency procedures hadn't changed since his own service: every chūnin and above fell in to guide civilians toward shelter, every genin worked under them, and every ninja above that rank converged on the threat itself.
"Emergency protocol in effect. Everyone not engaging protects the noncombatants." Shikaku Nara's voice carried over the village, and orders followed close behind it.
By the time Tonbo reached the fighting, the Ino–Shika–Chō line and a wall of other shinobi already had the beast half-surrounded, coordinated through Inoichi's Mind Body Switch. Shuriken, kunai, exploding tags rained against it and did next to nothing — worse than nothing, since every strike only seemed to feed its temper.
"On my honor as Hokage, I swear to hold this village."
Minato stood facing it squarely. The Nine-Tails answered by opening its jaws around a swelling black sphere, and Minato was already moving through the seals before it finished forming. "That's not landing here." A tear opened in the world around the sphere, and the Tailed Beast Ball vanished through it, the explosion that followed rolling in from somewhere well outside the village walls a moment later.
Tonbo felt the shockwave of it even at this distance. A blow like that would have left nothing standing wherever it actually struck — which meant the Fourth had somewhere to put it, and that somewhere was very likely a fight already underway with whoever was steering this thing from behind the beast's own eyes. Obito, unless he missed his guess. Good. Time to put his own share of the Will of Fire to some use.
More than a year removed from the genin who'd first stumbled onto a battlefield, he crossed the last stretch at a dead run and dropped in beside Kakashi and Might Guy, already ringed by ninja trying to hold the beast in place.
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"What's the read on it?" he asked.
"Something's steering it through the eyes. Sharingan." Kakashi didn't look away from the thing as he said it.
"Then it's time to burn a little youth of my own!" Guy was already dropping into a stance, some wide-armed opening move Tonbo had never bothered learning the name of.
Tonbo's senses spread wider, and the Nine-Tails' own monstrous chakra could no longer drown out what mattered underneath it: three, then four familiar signatures closing in fast. The Third Hokage, both of his advisors, and one more behind them.
One shape broke off from the rest and went straight up into a full engagement with the beast.
"Chōza-sensei! Now that's youth on display!" Guy's eyes lit at the sight of it, something fierce catching behind them at watching his own teacher throw himself at something this size.
Chōza was never going to beat it outright — nobody there expected him to — but his sheer bulk alone soaked up whatever the beast tried to fling at the surrounding streets, and that bought room for everyone else. Shadow Imitation locked its footing in place a heartbeat at a time; the Mind Body Switch turned it briefly against itself; explosive tags kept coming in waves.
"Let's move." Kakashi was already crouched to spring.
"Burn bright!" Guy agreed.
A figure with a blade slung across his back dropped into their path before either of them could take a step.
"Hold. Rally point, all of you."
"Hayama, why?" Guy demanded.
"Third Hokage's orders."
"We can pitch in too," Tonbo tried — he could manage a distraction the same as Chōza was, if nothing else, though he had no real idea yet whether his own genjutsu would so much as register against something this size.
"It's an order." Shirakumo Hayama didn't budge.
"Tch. Fine — orders are orders, and the Third's already in it himself." Tonbo turned for the rally point without further argument, judging correctly that whatever he had to offer still fell short of what the men already committed could do.
Guy and Kakashi followed, Guy grumbling the entire way about Hayama sending them off while staying to fight himself — "he's already jōnin, fine, but so's Kakashi, so why's he getting pulled too?" — until they reached the rally point and found the actual order waiting for them: guard the civilians, not the battle line.
Disappointing, and a little bit of a relief besides. Tonbo would have liked to test his new secret technique against something this size, but there was no shortage of terrified people who needed guiding to shelter, and that mattered just as much. He split off from Guy and the others to cover his own stretch of the evacuation, senses still stretched thin toward the fight even as his hands did the steadier work in front of him.
The Third Hokage had arrived by then with his old students in tow, and Tonbo caught his first real look at both advisors in motion. Homura Mitokado's scrolls opened onto a rain of oversized weapons that pinned the beast down bodily while exploding tags bound to them tore into it further; Danzō Shimura's Wind Release opened gash after gash along its flank, driving it wilder rather than calmer; Utatane Koharu held back to run support and field medicine, patching whoever the beast's thrashing had already caught.
Some kind of tool specialist, that Homura — closer to a war chest than a man, from what Tonbo could sense of it. Around the same moment, whatever Sharingan-born hold had been steering the beast's eyes went still and then vanished outright. The Fourth's doing, almost certainly, wherever that fight was actually happening.
Even with every hand thrown against it, the most anyone had managed was to slow the thing down. It was Hiruzen who finally ended it — a Summoning that pulled the Adamantine staffs up out of the earth in a scene Tonbo suspected people would still be telling stories about decades from now, driving clean through the Nine-Tails and forcing it back beyond the village walls at last.