Dokuraku Meguri had expected competence. What he got from Tonbo exceeded it enough to unsettle him — a genin fresh out of the Academy shouldn't have found the nerve points on his first try, let alone found the fastest ones.
The next day, Tonbo was folded into the Analysis Team's actual work: mind-reading, one captured shinobi after another. Through their fractured memories, he learned exactly how ugly this war really was.
The Third Shinobi War was at its height, and Konoha fought it shorthanded. Orochimaru carried the weight of command almost alone — Jiraiya and Tsunade had yet to set foot on any battlefield, and Sakumo Hatake, the White Fang, had taken his own life years before. It was, by most measures, the weakest Konoha had been in a generation. Into that gap stepped Minato Namikaze, whose growing reputation as the Yellow Flash was already, from what Tonbo read in captured minds, every bit as fearsome as Tonbo's borrowed memories suggested. Enemy ninja who crossed his path were known to abandon their missions outright and run.
War is too ugly for me. I'll be a good little clerk in the Analysis Team and nothing more, Tonbo thought, wandering from one borrowed memory to the next. Saving the world could wait for whoever the era had picked to do it. That wasn't going to be him.
Weeks passed. The more minds he read, the more fluent his technique became — fluent enough that even Meguri, his captain, started to take notice, and fast enough that the other genin in the Analysis Team began to give him a second look whenever his name came up. In whatever hours were left to him, he trained taijutsu and weapon-throwing alongside the others; on this battlefield, that was worth more to a genin than any jutsu, and it kept him from standing out as anything more than a hard worker with a gift for sensing.
It was around then that he met Hijiri Shimon, another recent transfer.
"I hate this war," Shimon said one evening, without much preamble.
"So do I," Tonbo answered. "But we're Konoha ninja now. We do the work anyway."
Their task that night was light — a patrol around the base's perimeter, paired off for the exercise more than the need, since ANBU already held the real line. Tonbo made sure to say something about the Will of Fire in front of the others every so often. It never failed to land.
The two of them wound through the dark treeline, chakra senses open, watching for anything that didn't belong. Insects droned in the underbrush, and somewhere beyond the tree line the war went on making its usual noise, distant enough tonight to ignore. It was routine work, and Tonbo used it the way he used everything else: to learn. Every stolen memory had left him a little richer in things that mattered on a battlefield — foreign taijutsu quirks, a dozen ways to throw a blade, scouting habits, code-breaking, tracking. It turned out, more than once, that a ninja's theory training carried him further out here than any flashy jutsu could, especially for someone like him with no Kekkei Genkai to fall back on.
"Something's wrong."
Tonbo stopped and let his sensory jutsu spread out, chakra signatures blooming across a two-kilometer radius in his mind.
"A unit, one kilometer east. Just appeared."
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"Feels elite," he added, reading the size of the chakra reserves flaring through his awareness — the smallest of them was a match for Meguri.
"Let's report it." He didn't know why the ANBU screen had missed them, but that wasn't his problem to solve.
Shimon confirmed the reading with his own jutsu, and the two sprinted back to base.
"Report — there's a situation."
Meguri passed it straight up to Inoichi Yamanaka, who arrived within moments leading four squads behind him.
"Good work. Follow me."
That single line did more to Tonbo's nerves than anything since the graduation ceremony. The Analysis Team, fighting?
They were — though only to seal the perimeter. Inoichi's main force would strike the enemy alongside the patrolling ANBU; Tonbo, Shimon, and Meguri would hold the outer edge and catch whoever slipped past. Training, of a sort, done from the shadows with their presence smothered down to nothing.
"Nervous, for your first fight?" Tonbo asked.
"No," Shimon said. "It's a ninja's duty."
That left Tonbo without much to say. He wasn't nervous either, though for a different reason — he had lived through more battles secondhand, in other men's memories, than most genin saw in a year. Fear had a way of dulling once you'd already died once and found the process almost painless.
While they waited, he laid steel wire and explosive tags at the likeliest points of approach, the placement drawn straight from the terrain instincts he'd picked out of a dozen captured minds.
"Didn't expect you to be this good at trap work," Meguri said, impressed despite himself. Years on the front had taught him to recognize quality when he saw it.
Tonbo only smiled. Whatever those fragmented memories had left behind, his sharpened mind now turned terrain, timing, and an enemy's habits into tactics almost before he noticed the pattern forming.
Steel clashed somewhere beyond the treeline. Through his sensory range, Tonbo felt the enemy's chakra flare and scatter as the fighting broke out, explosive tags punctuating it like drumbeats. He had read enough to know Inoichi Yamanaka came out of this war alive; that much, at least, wasn't in question.
Before long, a handful of enemies broke off and fled in every direction. One of them was coming straight at their position.
"Here." The three of them tensed as one, falling into the academy's basic three-man formation to lie in wait along his escape line.
Tonbo threw first — several shuriken from staggered angles, a probing attack more than a killing one. The Iwagakure forehead protector marked him as a chūnin, which meant real combat experience, which meant testing him before committing.
The enemy proved it: he sidestepped two blades, batted a third away with a kunai, eyes never losing their edge, already scanning the treeline for whoever had thrown them. When a hurled log came down from above, he hardened his arm with stone and shattered it with one punch, the impact splitting bark and echoing off through the dark.
More shuriken followed — Shimon and Meguri working in tandem this time, driving him back a step — and Tonbo's wire closed around him at speed, drawn tight from three directions at once. His face soured. Then he vanished.
Hiding Like a Mole Technique. Tonbo placed it at once. Let's see if it actually works on me.
He'd only ever drilled the counter a handful of times, never expecting to need it so soon. His hands moved through the seals.
Earth Release: Turning Earth to Steel.
No sensory ninja worth the name could miss a man burrowing beneath his own feet. He drove his palm into the ground above the tunnel, and the soil hardened to rock in a widening ring.
The enemy realized his mistake a heartbeat too late. He tore free of the collapsing earth, bloodied and misshapen from the effort, dirt and blood streaking down a face still twisted with the will to keep fighting — still enough fight left in him to lunge once at Tonbo before he went down for good.
Meguri finished it, driving a kunai through the man's heart before he could fake his death and try again.
The clash beyond the treeline had already gone quiet by the time Inoichi Yamanaka found them, his squads fanning out behind him to secure what remained of the battlefield.
"Remarkable handling," he said, taking in the trap lines, the wire, the dead chūnin, without needing to ask who'd planned it.