"Minato really is worthy of being Jiraiya-sama's student," Inoichi said, working through a skewer of his own. "Half the battlefield turned on what he did alone."
He'd brought a handful of his people to the Akimichi barbecue house to thank them for the last few days' work, the grill between them crowded with skewers and the smell of charred fat and soy thick enough to cut. Tonbo swallowed a mouthful of grilled wing before he could answer — he hadn't touched barbecue in weeks, not since deciding Ayame was worth the detour every evening instead.
"Minato-senpai and Orochimaru-sama, both of them," Tonbo said around the last of it. "Truly something."
"I heard the Third Hokage brought up retiring, once the war's properly over," Shimon put in, unable to resist the rumor mill. "Something about wanting a quiet life."
Meguri's hand found the back of his head before the sentence finished. "Don't go spreading that around. Nobody's said who takes the hat next."
His eyes went to Inoichi anyway, waiting.
"It's true enough," Inoichi allowed. "Just nothing decided on who follows him."
"Has to be Orochimaru-sama or Minato-senpai," Tonbo said, with more certainty than the question strictly called for. "Kikyo Pass and Kannabi Bridge between them — nobody else in the running carries that kind of weight."
Inoichi's eyebrows went up slightly. Pulling that conclusion from nothing more than an offhand comment about the Hokage's retirement was sharper reasoning than he expected out of an intelligence chūnin still this green, and it did nothing to lower his opinion of the boy — Tonbo, for his part, kept his face carefully modest, the way a man does when he already knows he's said something clever and would rather let someone else point it out first. The rest of the table turned the idea over and, after a moment, came around to the same read.
"To that, then." Inoichi raised his cup. "Orochimaru-sama and the others are back in a few days. Get yourselves ready — there's a memorial to stand for."
"Yes, sir."
The war ended not long after, and the companies came home one column at a time.
At Training Ground Ninety-Eight, a scream went up that sounded like a man who'd just watched himself die.
"Would it kill you to practice dispelling genjutsu once in a while?" Tonbo asked, letting the Demonic Illusion: Hell Viewing Technique on Shimon fade out. "You're a sensory type. It's supposed to be your strong suit."
Shimon came back to himself shaking, giving Tonbo a look that hadn't quite let go of the fear yet. "I was practicing. You're just unnatural. I broke it clean, and then I was right back inside it."
"Guess I'm just that good." Tonbo scratched at his bandages, pleased with himself. A single genjutsu that had rattled Shimon this badly told him the last few weeks of tinkering hadn't gone to waste.
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"You still haven't told me how."
"I built on top of it." Tonbo tapped his own temple. "Folded in a piece of the Psycho Mind Transmission — the illusion doesn't just show you something anymore, it plants itself as a memory inside your own chakra. Accept even once that you've been caught in a genjutsu, and that acceptance becomes the seed. Miss that the seed's yours and not the enemy's, and you'll keep casting Hell Viewing on yourself, over and over, with no one else's chakra required."
"So if someone never figures that out—" Shimon's face had gone pale. "They'd just live inside your genjutsu forever?"
"Serves you right for still being a genin," Tonbo said, entirely too satisfied. "Face it without flinching and it can't take hold."
"Easy for you to say 'without flinching.'" Shimon scowled. He'd just watched himself cut down by shuriken and a stray round on some battlefield, dead before he hit the ground.
"There's a cleaner way to break it, if you want it," Tonbo offered. "The seed's still just a suggestion sitting in your own chakra. A sensor's perception is enough to find it once you've weathered the fear long enough to look — root it out, and the whole thing collapses."
"Try me again, then."
Shimon's eyes lit at the challenge, and Tonbo obliged him without much effort — the boy had all but asked to be caught a second time. A seal, a point of the finger, and Shimon was back on that same battlefield, stray fire and hidden blades on every side. This time he held on long enough to remember what he'd been told, rode out the fear, and went hunting through his own memory for the piece that didn't belong. He found it, nudged it loose with a thread of chakra, and the whole scene came apart like it had never happened.
Tonbo watched him surface that quickly and allowed himself a raised eyebrow. Room to refine yet, apparently — a technique that could be broken by a genin still shaking from the fear it had just fed him wasn't quite ready to be turned loose on a real enemy.
"Next time I'm ready for it, I won't lose," Shimon said, unconvinced by his own defeat. They'd graduated with similar marks once; a stretch on the front had left Tonbo not just stronger but a rank ahead of him besides.
"Think you could take Kakashi? Or Shirakumo Hayama?" Shimon pressed, still sore about it. The two of them had only shared a single term with Kakashi, but nobody forgot that name. Hayama had tested out early in his fourth year once the front needed him. Both jōnin now — one of them Special jōnin — and both only twelve.
Tonbo suspected Shimon just wanted somewhere to point his frustration, so he let him have it. "Those two? jōnin, both of them. Hardly a fair fight."
"Just — it's a lot, you know? Twelve years old and already jōnin. Even Uchiha Inabi's still stuck a chūnin, same as you." Shimon shook his head. "Feels like some people just keep pulling ahead."
"What's the use comparing that." Tonbo looked out past the training field, past the treeline, toward whatever came after this war. "Winter never says a word, and it still locks a thousand miles of river and mountain under ice. Wind never says a word either, and it still strips every color off the hills before spring comes back. None of us serve Konoha more nobly than the rest — some just draw a sharper gift, or a heavier duty to go with it. If you want to measure yourself against them, measure the good you've done, not who hits harder. Strength is for keeping the enemy off our people. It was never meant to be spent proving something to the ninja standing next to you."
Shimon went quiet at that, something in his chest settling that hadn't quite been steady since the promotion news. Tonbo was right. Whatever he was, he wasn't dead weight — not to Konoha, not to anyone.
Someone else had been listening the whole time.
Hiruzen Sarutobi, done for the moment with the paperwork piled on his desk, had thought of the bandaged boy and reached for the jutsu that let him watch over the village from where he sat. He'd found this conversation instead, and stayed with it rather longer than he'd meant to.
Winter never says a word, and it still locks a thousand miles of river and mountain under ice.
That much of a grasp on the Will of Fire, at that age. Fine work indeed, whoever had raised him.