Whoosh. Whoosh.
Tobitake Tonbo dropped from a rooftop and continued along the patrol route assigned to him, pausing now and then to let his sensory ninjutsu unfurl through the crowd below.
He had lived through one war already, and even with a stranger's memories tucked behind his own, he refused to grow careless. Every Village kept its share of quiet men who watched from behind ordinary faces, men like Kabuto. It was simply the nature of the profession, and there was no reason to assume Konoha's streets were free of them now, in the middle of such chaos.
No. There would be spies here. There always were.
And yet the day passed without incident. Below him, the people of Konoha had begun to climb out of their grief and back into the slow work of rebuilding.
When he reached the Memorial Stone, he settled onto a tree branch overlooking it and stopped. Iruka sat below, a bouquet of white chrysanthemums in his lap, weeping quietly before the carved names.
Tonbo watched him for a while before moving on. There were too many like Iruka this season for him to linger over any single one of them, and he had only slowed at all because the boy's face was familiar. Besides, if his knowledge of the future remained accurate, the Third Hokage would come to comfort him before long. Tonbo wasn't needed here.
Whoosh. Whoosh.
He kept moving, using the patrol as an excuse to drill his Body Flicker Technique — the ordinary D-rank version, and the sharper variants he had picked up from the borrowed memories of shinobi from other Villages. A man with his reflexes and his appetite for learning had no business leaving a technique like that unpolished.
A patrolman from another Village passed him along a nearby roof. Tonbo caught his eye, made the standard hand sign for an ally, and vanished before the man had finished blinking.
The stranger scratched his head, impressed despite himself.
Night fell before Tonbo noticed it coming. He handed his stretch of the patrol to the next shift and made his way to Ichiraku, where Ayame already had a bowl waiting for him, made with more care than the job strictly required.
"Dragonfly, you've earned this," she said, setting it down in front of him.
"It smells wonderful. I think your cooking's already better than your father's." Tonbo said it with his mouth half full, savoring the broth.
"Watch it, brat, or I'll make you eat outside." Teuchi's ears twitched, though the grin never left his face. He was plainly pleased with the boy, whatever he pretended otherwise.
"Teuchi, yours is still the best in the Land of Fire," Tonbo said, all flattery, though privately he suspected only his own cooking came close these days. His hands had always learned quickly, and cooking had proven no exception.
Ayame leaned against the counter, watching him eat with open fondness, and it was some time yet before he finally pulled himself away and started for home.
His father was bent over his work when he arrived, weaving dried reeds and split bamboo into shape with his one good hand. It had taken Tobitake Tōsei the better part of a year to relearn the craft after the injury that ended his shinobi career, and it had become both his hobby and a modest source of income ever since. Under his fingers, a length of reed was slowly becoming a dragonfly.
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Something in the shape of it caught at an idea Tonbo had been turning over for weeks.
"Dad. Teach me this."
He had been developing a new branch of genjutsu, built from the same root as the Psycho Mind Transmission line but running in reverse — instead of unraveling an enemy's nerves, it gave shape and motion to something that had none at all. Its weakness was the same as any Genjutsu: break it once, cleanly, and the rest tended to unravel with it. Against an enemy who blocked nerve transmission outright, he would have only taijutsu and ninjutsu to fall back on, and while he trusted himself well enough in both, neither carried quite the same weight as his genjutsu did.
Watching his father's figurines take shape, he thought he had finally found where the last piece belonged.
Tōsei frowned at the request. "Why? Making Ayame a gift?" A shinobi already had enough to study without wasting time on a craft with no use in the field.
"Wish it were that simple. It's for something I've been working on — a new technique. Figurines like these suit it perfectly."
"A technique? Since when? You never mentioned it."
"Only just finished it, Dad. Haven't even tested it in the field yet."
"Hmph. You've always had your own notions since you were small." Tōsei gave in, so long as it served some purpose in the end.
He regretted it almost immediately. Within the hour, Tonbo had gone from watching a single demonstration to weaving a passable figure of himself, then improving on shapes his father hadn't even fully mastered. No second explanation was ever required. It never had been.
"Not bad, really," Tonbo said, turning a length of reed that had somehow become a small woven Ayame in his hands. To him the craft felt about as difficult as making ramen. Simple enough, once you had the trick of it.
"Go on, then. Go bother someone else," his father said, waving him off before the cold sweat on his brow could turn into something worse.
Tonbo laughed and carried the little Ayame back to his room.
Alone, he ran through the hand seals he had spent weeks refining, drawing out a particular thread of chakra and letting it settle over the figure.
"Secret Technique: Living Weave."
The woven shape did not remain wood and reed for long. Before him stood something that looked, in every particular, like Ayame herself — silent, watching him, unable to speak but plainly aware of the room around her.
It worked.
He tested her a while longer, guiding her steps across the floor like a puppet with unusually convincing joints, though nothing about her was real in the way she appeared to be. What he had built was genjutsu through and through: whoever looked upon a figure marked by this technique would see it exactly as he intended, indistinguishable from life, without any need to touch the target's chakra at all. To the one caught in it, the illusion simply was the truth, solid enough to leave marks on the ground itself.
In practice, it meant he had built something close to a living thing — except that life required more than shape. Without something of his own poured into it, the figure had no thoughts to draw on, no instincts to fall back on in a fight. That part he would still have to build by hand, piece by piece: memories sorted and measured out according to whatever body a given figure happened to wear.
It bore some resemblance, he thought, to the Super Beast Imitating Drawing technique — one relying on ink, his on woven reed — both drawing on the same principle that let Yin Release conjure form out of nothing at all.
With Inoichi's patient teaching behind him, and no shortage of talent of his own, the secret technique had finally taken proper shape. What remained now was refinement: sorting through his own memories, deciding what a given figure ought to know, tailoring each construct's mind to the body it wore.
None of that was finished yet. As it stood, the technique had no place on a battlefield.
Something to keep working at, he thought, setting the little Ayame gently aside. The Analysis Team still came first, and its work could not be neglected for the sake of a hobby, however promising. Whether these figures could ever hold anything resembling real judgment of their own — that alone would decide whether the whole idea was worth anything at all.