"Tonbo, the higher-ups are counting this as an A-rank mission. You're my lucky charm." Dokuraku Meguri couldn't quite keep the grin off what little of his face showed above the bandages, and for once the bandages didn't hide much.
Tonbo felt a small glow of pride at that. During wartime, a recorded mission could be traded after the war for money, jutsu scrolls, or other resources the Village doled out.
An A-rank, by ordinary market rates, ran to at least a million Ryo — enough for eighty explosive tags on its own. For now, though, every resource the Village had went straight into the war effort. The reward would have to wait.
That wasn't all of it, either. Finding the enemy earned one mission; reading their minds earned another, and Tonbo picked up a B-rank for that alone.
The memories had told them plenty. The unit had been an Iwagakure decapitation squad, sent to hunt down Konoha's logistics — Intelligence, Corpse Retrieval, Interrogation, Analysis, Medical, all of it. Caught any later, unprepared, the losses would have been ugly.
"Anything else, Captain?" Tonbo asked.
"As a matter of fact." Meguri's smile faded. "We can't be sure they didn't pass word of our position back before we caught them. We're relocating."
Tonbo sobered at once. "Understood."
"Good. Get ready — we move tonight." Meguri was already moving on, off to spread the order to the others.
Left alone, Tonbo swept his senses out to a full kilometer, found nothing waiting in the dark, and only then let the jutsu go. He had no intention of letting the enemy find this station. Not while he still needed it standing, and not while there were still minds here worth reading.
Evening came, and with it dark shapes threading silently through the trees, packs and weapons bound tight against any sound. Not even the birds stirred at their passing — the whole column moved with a stillness so complete it left every nest above them undisturbed.
Before awakening in this world, he had understood such battles only through distant, borrowed images and had thought little of them. Living one now, he understood: ninja were assassins first and soldiers only after. The ones who fought like proper armies, banners raised and names remembered by history, were the exception, not the rule. Most of this war would be fought exactly like this, in silence, by men the histories would never name.
Even Hijiri Shimon, a genin the same as him, moved without a sound.
It got him wondering, in an idle sort of way, how a certain someone he half-remembered had ever passed his own graduation exam on nothing but a mass of clones. Politics, probably — a technique like that would never clear the bar on its own merits.
Not that it mattered to him. Every clone carried its experience back to the body that made it the instant it popped, which made the trick easier to break than people assumed: seed one clone with real pain, feed it in through his own reading technique run backward, and the hurt wouldn't disappear along with the clone that felt it.
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Psycho Mind Transmission: Pain. He had been building toward it for weeks now, one borrowed memory at a time.
Without a bloodline of his own, and with chakra reserves no better than an average genin's, he had needed an edge from somewhere else. He tested every nature transformation within his reach, and beyond that, began shaping a fighting style around what already set him apart.
Perception. The mind. That was where his gift lived, so that was where he built.
The technique gathered up every scrap of pain he had ever pulled from a stranger's memory — grief, torture, the death of people they had loved — sealed it away, and loosed it into an enemy's mind as genjutsu the instant their guard slipped. A heartbeat of hesitation was all a kunai ever needed.
He knew better than to think it would hold a strong opponent for long. It didn't need to. In a fight, a single heartbeat was often the whole fight.
His gift ran toward the mind, so genjutsu was the road he had chosen for himself. Only the Sharingan sat above it in the fragments he remembered; short of that, Kurenai Yūhi and her father were the names that came closest, if the two of them were even related the way he half-recalled.
His own talent, he was fairly confident, could hold its own against an Uchiha Itachi one day, given time and enough borrowed experience to season it. Worst case, jōnin wasn't out of reach. Best case, he let the era's chosen ones handle the rest while he stayed comfortably out of the history books, alive and unremarkable, which suited him fine.
"We've arrived. Set up camp." Whoosh, whoosh — the column broke formation at the call.
"ANBU, sensors — perimeter patrol. Don't let the enemy so much as smell us."
"Yes, sir."
Inoichi Yamanaka gave the order, and the whole Analysis Team fell into motion around it. Tonbo, sensor that he was, found himself folded into an ANBU patrol squad for the work.
Days passed, then a month, and the new camp settled into its own rhythm — tents in the same rough order, patrols on the same rotation, the underground cells filling and emptying at the same steady pace. Tonbo clocked in for mind-reading same as always, and spent his free hours refining ninjutsu and taijutsu, along with the genjutsu he was still teaching himself.
Much of it came stitched together out of techniques he had lifted from enemy minds and reshaped into something of his own. Reporting a genuine find back to Konoha — simplified hand seals, or a jutsu the Village had never seen — earned its own reward besides.
His chakra grew with it, faster than he had expected. A month earlier, three uses of Earth Release hardening would have emptied him out. Now he had five in him without strain, and holding a long fight no longer worried him the way it once had. Wartime, it turned out, built spiritual reserves at a pace nothing in peacetime could match — a small mercy, given everything else it cost.
Reading enough enemies over that month had also told him roughly where they had landed — near the Land of Fire's border, close enough to the front that new prisoners needed reading almost daily. No wonder, this close in, that the work never seemed to run dry.
Iwagakure was pressing hard on two fronts at once, against Konoha and Kumogakure both. Even with Konoha's medicine, its systems, and two of its brightest — the Yellow Flash and Orochimaru — carrying more than their share, the strain was beginning to show.
It left Tonbo more than a little tempted to go find Tsunade and Jiraiya himself and drag them both back to the front. If events had already diverged this far from what he remembered, there was no telling how much further it might bend before something broke — and he had no way of knowing anymore which parts of it still held true.
It was in one such stolen memory, not long after, that he caught a glimpse of them, fixed there in another man's dying recollection like a photograph: a white-haired shinobi already quick with Lightning Release, Minato Namikaze at his shoulder, and behind the two of them a boy in goggles and a girl with a short, plain-cut bob who looked barely old enough for the field.