Naruto: Starting by Reading Minds in Naruto

Tonbo turned the problem over long after Inoichi had dismissed him for the evening, sitting cross-legged on the floor of his room with the weight of it laid out plainly in his mind. A Ketsuryūgan, the kind of bloodline eye born when different elemental chakras met and fused in some rare combination, needed no explanation — half the shinobi world had heard the name by now, even if few had seen one worked in earnest. Secret arts were another matter. Somewhere in the tangle of a life not entirely his own, he remembered Shikamaru — or would remember him, one day, in a future that hadn’t happened yet — describing them as a question of ratio: not the ordinary one-to-one balance of spiritual energy against physical, but something skewed, deliberately unbalanced, and dangerous precisely because so few ever learned which direction to skew it in. Lean too far toward the physical and the chakra a man built would start devouring his own reserves of spirit; lean the other way without knowing the line and the reverse happened just as fast. That uncertainty was the whole of the risk, and it was exactly what he needed to solve.

He already had the shape of an answer. Weight the ratio toward spiritual energy, first — his own reserves ran that way besides, so the imbalance would cost him less to correct than it might another man. Second, he knew a senior with a family history in secret arts, someone he could ask about the principles of cultivating one without ever prying into the technique itself. That much courtesy, at least, he intended to keep.

Dinner came before anything else could. A man thought clearer on a full stomach, and there was no sense chasing a breakthrough on an empty one. He’d barely finished eating when Inoichi summoned him back to the office, and when he opened the door he found the Hokage waiting there as well.

”Hokage-sama.” Tonbo bowed.

”Tonbo. I came to hear the rest of it myself, and get anything clearer than what reached my desk.” Minato’s smile was easy, but his eyes weren’t idle.

”About Hidden Mist?”

”That’s the one.”

Tonbo walked him through the memory again from the start, careful not to let his own conclusions bleed into what the Hokage ought to weigh for himself. Minato listened without interrupting, nodding at intervals, and by the end of it something like satisfaction had settled into his face. The Third had been right about him, he thought — Tonbo’s report was thorough enough that little needed asking twice, and after their first meeting Minato had gone looking into the boy’s record on his own, only to find Hiruzen had already met him personally and thought well of him. Whatever talent the old man had seen in the boy, it held up.

”Good work.” Minato inclined his head, and then he was simply gone — no motion Tonbo’s eyes could follow, just the office a fraction emptier than it had been a breath before.

”What was that?”

”Flying Thunder God,” Inoichi said, not bothering to hide his amusement at the boy’s wide-eyed confusion. ”A forbidden technique from the Second Hokage’s own hand. The Fourth is the only man alive with the talent to use it properly.”

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”I want to learn it.” Tonbo meant it. His reflexes were good, his chakra control finer than most his age — chakra reserves aside, he doubted there was much holding him back.

”Not a chance. Forbidden means forbidden, and the training alone could kill you. Nobody touches it without the Hokage’s own word.” Inoichi’s tone allowed no argument, though the grin underneath it did. ”Something else on your mind?”

”Secret arts, actually. I wanted to ask you about them.”

Inoichi’s eyebrows lifted, some genuine surprise breaking through. ”Didn’t expect that out of you. It’s dangerous ground, but I’ll walk you through what I know.” And he did, generous with it the way he always was outside of work, careful — as any man from Intelligence would be — about which parts he chose to share and which he didn’t. Tonbo also learned, in the same conversation, that his report on Hidden Mist had already been logged as a considerable merit to his name.

Time moved quickly after that. The war was over, but the rebuilding it left behind took just as much tending. Exploding tags and shuriken, rationed by requisition slip during the fighting, went back on the shelves of ordinary tool shops. With fewer enemy minds worth reading, the Analysis Team’s workload thinned, and Tonbo filled the gaps with whatever odd work the village needed — sorting the Hokage’s paperwork some days, standing gate duty on others. Wherever a hand was short, he made himself useful. Ayame, watching him run himself ragged between the Village’s errands and his own training, took to packing him a bento every morning, and it did more for him than she probably knew.

His progress showed for it. His genjutsu climbed to a level that made sparring against him a genuine hardship for Shimon, for Guy, for Ebisu and the rest — even Guy, for all his hunger for a fight, had learned to ration his challenges to once every few days. The trouble wasn’t the illusion itself so much as what it left behind: dispel Psycho Mind Transmission: Melancholy and the feeling clung on regardless, a weight in the chest that lingered long after the technique itself was gone. Guy could barely claw his way clear of it even knowing what it was. Ebisu didn’t stand a chance.

Steel rang against steel. A blade caught his kunai and swept it wide, and before Tonbo could recover, its edge had settled against his throat.

”You lose.” Kakashi said it flatly, mask hiding whatever satisfaction he felt, his one exposed eye slowly turning back to its resting state.

”Can’t beat you yet, huh.” Tonbo lowered his hands, more resigned than upset.

”Only because of the Sharingan.” Kakashi sheathed the blade. He hadn’t expected the man Guy kept recommending to him to be this dangerous with genjutsu — without the eye’s own defenses, he doubted he’d have walked away clean.

”Ninja don’t lean on excuses. If you’re leaning on anything, make it your head.” Tonbo wasn’t about to hand him the easy line — you’d have lost without the Sharingan — that was the kind of thing fools said to flatter other fools, and there was no room for that kind of fairness between shinobi anyway. Fairness was for civilians. ”Next time, though. That eye of yours won’t save you.”

Kakashi went still at that, studying him a moment too long. It took the Sharingan to understand exactly how much it was worth — the clarity it lent, the resistance it built against every illusion thrown its way. It was the only reason Tonbo’s genjutsu had broken at all just now.

”My eternal rival!” Guy’s voice cut through before Kakashi could answer, already crowing about the day Kakashi had finally struck down the Dragonfly, vowing five laps around the village walls to celebrate. Tonbo’s expression went flat. Nothing about the boy’s antics got any less absurd with time, and Kakashi, judging by the twitch under his mask, felt exactly the same. Guy’s challenges had only sharpened since his promotion to chūnin a few months back, each one aimed squarely at closing the distance between himself and his self-declared rival.

Tonbo tipped his head back toward the sky instead of answering. Somewhere beyond it, on a clock only he could read, the Nine-Tailed Fox’s rampage was drawing closer.