Kunai met kunai in the middle of Training Ground Ninety-Eight, two figures trading blows fast enough to blur.
Shuriken chased Hiruzen Sarutobi's retreat and forced his hand. Tonbo's own hands were already moving through the seals.
Psycho Mind Transmission: Melancholy.
Hiruzen took one look at him and felt, all at once, that none of it mattered anymore — not the fight, not the village, not any of it.
I'm an old man. What's the point of holding on this long? Might as well let go.
The thought passed through him complete and entire, and for that one instant he made no move to block what was coming.
Holy hell, did I just talk the Third Hokage into dying? Seeing him stand there dazed, weapons forgotten, Tonbo felt something close to panic. Killing the actual Hokage would be the end of him too — he had no ambition of ruling the shinobi world from its ashes, only of surviving the century.
The kunai and shuriken struck home. Hiruzen dissolved into smoke.
A Shadow Clone. Tonbo let his breath out. Underneath the relief sat something almost like satisfaction — his theory had held. Whatever the fish's problem had been, it wasn't a flaw in the technique itself, just a fish's mind being too simple to carry the weight of the idea.
But where had the real Hiruzen gone?
He swept his senses out looking for him, pushing his range as far as it would go.
Behind a wide tree some distance off, Hiruzen sat slumped against the trunk, staring up at clouds crossing a clean blue sky, muttering to himself without seeming to notice he was doing it. Why be Hokage at all? I should've just raised my boy properly, let him give me a grandson, handed the hat to someone else, and spent my last years doing nothing in particular. I don't want to move. Not one step. I'm old enough that no one would say a word if I just lay down right here and stayed.
Then, abruptly, his hand found a seal. "Release."
The dullness in his eyes burned off in an instant.
A frightening jutsu, he thought, still feeling the aftershock of it. Feeding an enemy's mind something that ugly through genjutsu — and having it hold even after the clone carrying it had already dissolved. That kind of aftereffect shouldn't have been possible.
Even a man who'd survived as many wars as he had felt shaken by how close that mood had come to swallowing him whole.
"Not bad. Not bad at all." Composed again, Hiruzen stepped out from behind the tree and found Tonbo waiting. "That's a dangerous piece of work you've built yourself. Don't ever turn it loose on one of ours, understood?"
"It's really that strong?" Tonbo asked, more surprised than convinced. To him it had felt like a fair result, nothing more — both of his Melancholy and Pain worked the same way, catching an opponent through sight or touch, useful mainly for the half-second of hesitation they bought in a fight. Effective, sure. Not the weapon of mass devastation Hiruzen seemed to be describing.
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Hiruzen looked ready to say more when a masked figure dropped into the clearing.
"Hokage-sama. Urgent word from Orochimaru, on the front."
Hiruzen nodded to the ANBU, then back to Tonbo. "Duty calls. Keep at it." And then he was gone, the ANBU with him.
Tonbo watched them go in reasonably good spirits. Clearly there was more to learn about his own jutsu than he'd assumed — testing on real people mattered more than he'd wanted to admit. Still, judging by how rattled the old man had looked, the technique carried more weight than he'd credited it.
Something to do with actual depression, probably, not just the fish's blank confusion. His work put him in contact with more borrowed experience than most, medical experience included, and it was one such memory, some field medic's understanding of the mind, that gave him the shape of it: depression came in two kinds, mental and physiological, and willpower could only touch the first. If the body itself was the thing pulling a mind down, no amount of resolve would climb back out of it alone. Push the technique from the mental strain toward the physical, and he'd have something genuinely worth fearing on his hands.
Taijutsu could wait for the rest of the day, then — a discipline that mattered more than people gave it credit for, in his experience and in what he remembered of how this war eventually turned. Genjutsu would let him trouble opponents above his weight class; taijutsu was what kept him alive against everyone else, chakra or no chakra.
Back at the Hokage's office, Homura Mitokado and Utatane Koharu were waiting when Hiruzen returned.
"Orochimaru's intelligence confirms it," Homura said. "The Third Raikage died holding the line himself, covering Kumogakure's retreat from Iwagakure."
Hiruzen went still for a moment. "Then the end of this isn't far off." He turned to the door. "Send word — Team Minato reinforces Orochimaru's position. I want the fighting against Kumogakure settled, and settled soon."
An ANBU acknowledged the order and was gone before it finished echoing. The Raikage's death would ripple through every plan on the board; Hiruzen spent a moment considering which ones, then set the two elders aside for a smaller matter.
"Bring me Tobitake Tonbo's file."
He remembered every ninja to graduate the Academy under his watch, and this one he'd personally signed off on for chūnin besides.
An ANBU returned with it inside the minute, and Hiruzen paged through it standing at the window. Sensory-type, Analysis Team, exceptional aptitude for the mind-reading line, strong showing in both taijutsu and genjutsu under fire. Father also Analysis Team once, before an injury took him out of service for good. Stated ambition: a peaceful world, and the Will of Fire carried forward.
A fine prospect, Hiruzen thought, satisfied. A boy who'll carry the will forward.
First. Second. I'm passing your fire on, same as you asked of me.
Tonbo, meanwhile, was working through a popsicle on his way down one of Konoha's busier streets, in no particular hurry, taking in the crowd and the stalls and the ordinary business of a village that was, for the moment, at peace. Being singled out by the Hokage himself had to mean something, he supposed, though he wasn't inclined to worry about what. His own ambitions ran smaller: quiet work, a kind and pretty wife with money of her own, two sons and two daughters to watch grow up in peace. That was the whole plan, and he intended to keep it that simple.
Though clearly he still had ground to make up — if that had been a hostile ninja instead of the Third, he'd have been dead before he even registered the danger. Some sensor he was, if a man that powerful could walk right up to him unnoticed.
A storefront caught his eye. Ichiraku Ramen.
He checked his wallet, found it comfortable enough, and went in — half for the food, half for the chance to taste something everyone he half-remembered had loved. Still just a working man, after all. Work paid for good food. That was the whole of his ambition, and saving the shinobi world had no part in it.
"Welcome!"
A middle-aged man's voice greeted him from behind the counter — someone close to his father's age, eyes creased shut in a permanent, easy smile, hands already busy with another order.
Beside him stood a girl about Tonbo's own age, pretty enough that he noticed at once. Ayame, unless he missed his guess.
"Hi there! What can I get you? The seafood ramen's new — I'd really recommend it," she said, smiling at him as he took a seat.