"What? The Raikage is dead?"
"Impossible. He's the strongest man in the whole Village!"
"Those Iwagakure bastards, ganging up on him three to one—"
"The front against Iwagakure's finished. The Yellow Flash walked onto the field and the whole balance of it just tipped over."
Fragments only, torn loose from whatever was left of the mind under his hands. Wearing the amplifier, Tonbo found the reading came easier than it ever had bare — less like forcing a door and more like walking through one already open.
The device sat heavier than he'd expected, cool metal pressing along his temples, and yet the strain that usually came with a deep reading simply wasn't there. He made a note to ask, later, whether the Village had more than the one of these lying around, and whether a chūnin fresh off his first group assignment had any hope of being trusted with one permanently.
So the Third Raikage really had fallen, and it was that, as much as anything Konoha or Iwagakure had done, that had finally tipped the front. From what little he could piece together, the two Kumogakure ninja everyone on this dead man's side of the war had simply called A and B were already a name to conjure with this far back, a pairing formidable enough between them to have carved through whatever Iwagakure sent against them.
Minato had been pulled off his own front by Orochimaru's order to intercept the pair directly; a handful of exchanges, and both sides had broken off rather than press it further. But losing the man who held Kumogakure's chain of command together had left that chain in pieces, and a village already fighting Konoha and Iwagakure both had no strength left over to spend holding itself steady besides.
Impressive people, whoever ran Kumogakure's war effort. Starting a fight with Iwagakure on top of everything else took a particular kind of confidence.
The head itself had belonged to nobody important — a chūnin, and a dead one, which meant nothing here worth reporting to his superiors. What was worth keeping, though, was the shape of the man's own instruction in nature transformation, the feel of Lightning Release under a trained hand.
It put Kakashi's Chidori in a different light entirely, a jutsu built by a boy who by every account was barely old enough to be trusted with it. No wonder the rank of jōnin had come to him so young — that kind of mastery, shape and nature both bent to a single purpose, usually took years most chūnin never got the chance to put in. There was more folded into it than a single clever idea; replicating it for his own amusement, he understood now, was well out of reach.
The Rasengan was no different. He'd tried his own hand at it months back, chakra reserves thin but willing, mostly to see whether he could manage the trick he half-remembered some yellow-haired hero making look effortless one day.
What he'd found instead was a technique with a great deal more folded into its construction than the two offhand lines a certain toad hermit was ever recorded giving out about it — as though his borrowed knowledge had preserved only the barest sketch and left him to rediscover the rest the hard way.
The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.
Reading complete. Tonbo took up pen and paper and set down everything he'd pulled free, methodically, snippet by half-formed snippet — a boy relieving himself at three, the first fumbling attempt at a hand seal, whatever scraps a mind left behind when there was nothing else left to hold onto.
He recorded all of it without complaint. This was simply how the Analysis Team's work moved: down onto paper first, up through the ranks after, sorted and weighed until only what mattered reached the ANBU, and through them, the Hokage.
"Lord Inoichi mentioned you're new to this — asked me to walk you through a few things," the attending ninja said once Tonbo had turned the pages over.
"There's more?" He'd assumed he was done for the day.
"Reading work inside the Village doesn't come often. Rather than waste the hours, most of us use the library — case files, analysis method, the sort of thing worth knowing if you mean to stay in this line of work. Or, if you'd rather, there's always some errand or another that needs an extra pair of hands."
He went on listing them, and Tonbo took the shape of it well enough: with nothing pressing, an Analysis Team ninja became a brick, set down wherever the Village happened to need one.
It explained the two gate guards he half-remembered from somewhere — men who turned up doing everything from hauling supplies to sitting exams, never quite fixed to one post. Izumo Kamizuki and Kotetsu Hagane, if the names he was chasing were the right ones. Old classmates, as it happened. He wondered, briefly, how they were getting on.
The library ran the length of something close to a training field, shelf after shelf of case work stretching back further than he cared to guess, the air inside gone dry and quiet in the particular way of rooms nobody hurried through.
He pulled one volume down at random and found it dense with old analyses — the broad shape of a campaign first, then the details filled in beneath it, mathematics and geography and medicine and sealing all pressed into service just to work out where an enemy might be standing an hour from now, and where he'd been an hour before that.
Understand a thing and it turned interesting almost against your will; fail to understand it and the same material would have put him to sleep standing up. A mind sharpened the way his had become took to it easily, and the days went by without much complaining on his part.
Work, then reading, then whatever intelligence needed sorting after — and evenings, more often than not, at Ichiraku Ramen, until the walk there stopped needing any thought at all.
His father noticed the pattern before a week was out, wondered aloud what had gotten into a son who kept abandoning a home-cooked dinner for noodles bought off a stranger, and finally followed him one evening, quiet as his missing arm would allow, to see for himself. One look through the window at Ayame settled it.
Tōsei went home satisfied that his boy had turned out fine after all — a chūnin, and apparently smart enough to have already found himself a wife worth keeping — and from then on cooked for one without complaint, humming to himself over the stove some nights in a way he clearly thought went unnoticed.
Ninjutsu filled what free time remained, along with whatever genjutsu he could trade Village funds for. Neither Iwagakure's stone-willed veterans nor Kumogakure's hot-blooded line had ever put much stock in illusion, which left the field wide open for a man willing to specialize.
The war wound down the same way he'd expected it would. Kumogakure fell back first, drawing in around what was left of its command. Iwagakure followed once Kumogakure had gone quiet.
Sunagakure sued for peace not long after, and word reached him that a man called Rasa had taken up the Kazekage's hat, though how much of that account he could trust, secondhand as it was, he couldn't say for certain. What remained on the field now was cleanup, nothing more.
Steady work, as he'd guessed it would be — easy, at least for him. Others carried it worse. Hijiri Shimon complained about it daily, half-convinced the endless reading was going to leave him properly out of his mind before the year was through, and Tonbo never quite found the heart to tell him it only felt that way because he was doing it wrong.