Naruto: Starting by Reading Minds in Naruto

”So it’s classified, then.” Tonbo said it more to himself than to Guy, the two of them alone at the edge of the training field.

”The Third-sama told me himself not to speak of it,” Guy said.

”Fair enough. I was only curious how a genin holds off seven jōnin.” Seeing that Guy had steadied some, even if the sadness hadn’t left him entirely, Tonbo let the question drop where it was. He’d have liked to know more about the Eight Gates — Konoha’s finest taijutsu discipline, by any measure — but a secret like that was never going to be his to touch, chūnin or not.

”Right! Tonbo — a duel, in the name of youth!” Whatever grief Guy carried, it hadn’t dimmed the fire under it any.

Please, not this again. I can’t handle another dose of that particular flavor of enthusiasm. ”Wasn’t Kakashi your target?” Tonbo asked instead, hoping to redirect it.

”Kakashi’s still out on the front. You made chūnin, though — you’ve got to be strong. I want to test myself against you.”

”Well. Since you’re asking so nicely.” Tonbo shrugged. ”I’ll go a round or two.”

He wanted to see for himself what Guy’s taijutsu had grown into, if he was honest about it.

They put distance between themselves, hands moving through the Seal of Confrontation, eyes sharpening at the same moment, the dust of the training field settling around their feet as they squared off. Ebisu and Genma watched from the sidelines, torn between amusement and genuine interest — they knew exactly what Guy could do by now, but Tonbo, sensor and Analysis Team both, was still mostly a mystery to them beyond the fact that he’d already outranked them both.

The clash opened fast. Guy’s taijutsu held up exactly as advertised — thirteen years old and already fluent in Konoha’s Strong Fist, meeting Tonbo’s shuriken with shuriken of his own or knocking them wide with a kunai. Whatever the battlefield had done to the rest of them, it clearly hadn’t spared Guy either.

Tonbo gave up quickly on the idea of finishing this cleanly without some kind of edge, and settled into pure taijutsu instead, no jutsu yet, just testing.

”They’re both moving too fast to track properly,” Genma said, skin prickling at the pace of it.

”Didn’t expect Tonbo to keep up with him blow for blow,” Ebisu agreed. On paper, a sensory-type with middling academy marks had no business matching a taijutsu prodigy like this.

”That style’s familiar, somehow, and it isn’t Konoha’s.” Genma studied the footwork as it passed.

”Iwagakure in the legs, Kumogakure in the guard — grafted onto Strong Fist underneath,” Ebisu said, working it out in real time. ”Picked it up secondhand, probably. Reading enemy minds long enough, some of it sticks, and he’s clearly reshaped what stuck into something of his own.”

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Both of them had always led their class in theory, and it showed — they’d read the whole pattern correctly within a minute. It was exactly what it looked like: taijutsu Tonbo had built up deliberately over the better part of half a year, because no ninja survived long on jutsu alone, and because a style immune to genjutsu or resistant to absorbing chakra needed a body that could still fight without either.

That groundwork was exactly why Guy’s attacks weren’t landing.

”And—” Tonbo’s mouth curved as he caught Guy’s next strike one-handed and finished a seal with the other.

Guy’s pupils went tight at the sight of it.

”Phantom Clone.”

Suddenly Guy was surrounded — a ring of Tonbos, all of them already moving, shuriken and kunai and half-formed jutsu converging from every side. He barely had time to flinch before the real strike landed and sent him rolling.

He came back up on his feet a moment later, but the fight was already over, and his teammates were still catching up to what they’d just watched.

”Ha — that’s a match.” Tonbo formed the Seal of Reconciliation, grinning even as he thought, privately, that Guy still had a long way to grow. The taijutsu itself was solid enough, but the instincts under it were green — that genjutsu shouldn’t have closed things out quite that fast.

Guy rubbed the back of his head and gave a thumbs-up anyway. ”As expected of a man who made chūnin. I’ve still got miles to go — fifteen hundred kicks, starting now, as punishment for my own softness.”

”What happened out there? You just froze,” Genma asked, jogging over. He hadn’t caught the angle on Tonbo’s hands.

”Got caught in one of Tonbo’s clone tricks before I even noticed,” Guy admitted, punishment temporarily forgotten.

”Clone tricks? We didn’t see any clones.”

”A genjutsu clone — only the target sees it. Standard dispelling breaks it clean, same as anything else taught at the Academy,” Tonbo said. ”I built it off something I half-remember Amegakure ninja using — a haze clone, more illusion than substance. Cheap on chakra, but it folds the moment you know the trick, nothing like the real thing.”

That satisfied them both, and Tonbo could see them quietly filing it away all the same, already turning over how they’d counter it if they ever had to.

Good instincts, that. Ninja survived on exactly that kind of habit.

He’d absorbed enough borrowed memories himself to know how much intelligence was worth in this line of work, which was also why some part of him stayed alert to the possibility of a certain black-and-white watcher taking an interest in conversations like this one. No bloodline limit meant he likely wasn’t worth that kind of attention. Likely. He kept his countermeasures in place regardless, on the chance he was wrong.

From there the conversation drifted somewhere more useful, the four of them settling into the grass while the afternoon wore on — survival, mostly, dissected the way only a handful of former top students could manage: intelligence gathering, chakra economy, the fine detail underneath both. Even Guy, for all the noise, turned out to have real insight buried under it — nothing like the simple-minded taijutsu enthusiast people assumed him to be. No wonder, Tonbo thought, that a man like this would one day talk a boy with no ninjutsu at all into believing hard work could still carry him.

He came away from the exchange having learned something himself, mildly amazed at how much sharper his own thinking had gotten these past months. And by the end of it, the three of them had plainly revised their opinion of him too — every observation he’d made had landed exactly where it needed to, as though he’d already lived through a hundred battles rather than a handful.

”A genius. Same as Kakashi.” All three of them settled on it, without needing to discuss it first.