Naruto: Starting by Reading Minds in Naruto

The six Cloud shinobi began their techniques.

The earth burst open behind one of them.

A second woven pangolin drove its claws through the man's chest before he could complete his seals. His companions turned in alarm, and a kunai struck another attacker through the heart.

The remaining four retreated together.

Tonbo stepped between the trees carrying Kawasuke's corpse. The pangolin emerged beside him, dirt falling from its armored back.

"Lord Kawasuke," one of the Cloud shinobi whispered.

The sight of their dead commander broke something that the earlier traps had not. These were trained shinobi, but their certainty vanished. If Tonbo had killed a decorated jōnin and arrived without visible injury, remaining to fight him promised nothing but death.

Anko released a long breath and let her shoulders sag. Itachi's Sharingan remained active, though relief passed across his expression.

Tonbo used the enemy's distraction.

"Demonic Illusion: Tree Binding Death."

Trees seemed to grow behind the four survivors. Branches wrapped around their arms, legs, and chests, leaving them conscious but unable to move.

Terror replaced indecision.

They knew it was genjutsu. Knowledge alone did not free them. Their chakra reserves had already been depleted by the long pursuit, and Tonbo's control of the technique exceeded Itachi's earlier use.

One prisoner tried the standard release method, gathering what remained of his chakra and interrupting its flow. For an instant the bark around his wrist blurred. Tonbo adjusted the illusion before the opening widened, and the phantom branches tightened again. Another attempted to injure himself against the restraint, but his own senses insisted that there was no room to move.

"I don't have enough chakra for Lightning Body Rush!" one shouted.

The four strained until their muscles shook. The illusion did not bind their bodies from the outside; it made their own minds enforce the restraint. Brute force could not tear apart a tree that existed only in perception.

Tonbo surveyed the battlefield while they struggled. Scored bark, embedded weapons, blast patterns, blood, and disturbed earth allowed him to reconstruct much of the fighting. He compared angles and distances almost by habit, combining mathematics, terrain, and experience.

Then he grinned at his teammates.

"Not bad. You eliminated five enemies and held the rest until I arrived. Exactly what I would expect from my team."

The tension left Anko all at once. She sat heavily on the ground, breathing hard.

"Save the compliments. A minute later and we would have been dead."

Itachi lowered himself more carefully. He recognized the illusion restraining the prisoners as Konoha's Tree Binding Death, but the ease with which Tonbo controlled four exhausted shinobi raised his estimate of the man's skill again.

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Tonbo had not merely described his own Will of Fire. He had built his strength around it. His techniques, preparation, and refusal to depend on a single specialty gave him options with which to protect both family and village.

He had also returned when his teammates needed him. To Itachi, that mattered more than the speed with which Kawasuke had died. A shinobi's strength could not be measured only by the enemy bodies at his feet; it had to include the people still standing behind him.

Could Itachi do the same?

The answer did not come easily. Hashirama Senju and Madara Uchiha had possessed power beyond ordinary shinobi, yet even they had negotiated with foreign lands and ultimately died. Konoha's records did not describe either founder reaching old age.

If even they could not protect everything, strength alone might never be enough.

The thought reinforced Shisui's warning: peace could demand the resolve to abandon what one loved. Itachi had seen battlefields while still a small child. He knew peace was not the natural state of the world.

Tonbo remained unaware of the direction of his thoughts.

He approached the first captive and placed his right hand against the man's temple, near the densest network of nerves.

Illusion opened the path. Psycho Mind Transmission carried him through it.

The prisoner's life unfolded around Tonbo as a sequence of memories observed at intimate distance. Years passed in fragments—training, missions, faces, orders—until Tonbo located the information that mattered: the purpose and command structure of the current operation.

The technique did not present memory like a neatly written report. Tonbo had to distinguish genuine recollection from assumption, identify which voices belonged to superiors, and follow emotional associations toward guarded details. The prisoner's fear of failure led him to the briefing; resentment toward an officer exposed the chain of command.

He withdrew with a frown.

"Stop!" another prisoner shouted. "What did you do to him?"

"You Konoha filth! Our other captain will kill you!"

"Give us a clean death if you have any courage!"

Their insults grew louder as they understood his purpose. They wanted anger to replace interrogation, hoping Tonbo would kill them before taking what Kumogakure had placed in their minds.

"Do not worry," Tonbo said. "You are next."

The provocation was crude. Tonbo could already sense the chakra of the second enemy jōnin fading. The battle elsewhere had ended; Hayama was on his way.

Tonbo read the captives one after another. When the fourth was finished, he extracted what remained in Kawasuke's final memories as well.

Repetition allowed him to compare their accounts. Details that appeared in several minds carried more weight than a single recollection. Contradictions were not discarded; they revealed which members had received incomplete orders and which parts of the plan Kumogakure had compartmentalized.

Anko watched him touch temple after temple.

"Does he have some strange obsession with people's heads?"

Itachi looked at her. "Anko-senpai, Tonbo-senpai is using Psycho Mind Transmission to collect intelligence. He explained that when the team introduced its abilities."

Pleasure at receiving the respectful address lasted only until the rest of his answer registered. Heat climbed into Anko's face. Forgetting a teammate's declared specialty during a mission was not a mistake a chūnin should make, especially when an eight-year-old genin remembered it perfectly.

Itachi watched her embarrassment turn to irritation and then to stubborn self-justification. He had studied psychology carefully, yet her changing expression remained impossible to interpret.

Tonbo ended the prisoners with four quick kunai strikes.

He gathered every enemy corpse, including those killed by the traps, and unrolled a storage scroll. After a single seal and a press of his palm, lines spread from the prepared formula. The bodies dissolved into bands of light and vanished into the scroll.

"Why are you taking the bodies?" Anko asked.

Itachi answered before Tonbo could.

"Bodies are intelligence sources. A village can study an enemy's techniques, anatomy, modifications, equipment, and methods of countering their ninjutsu. Memories may also remain accessible. The Academy covers the Corpse Disposal Unit in second-year intelligence classes."

Anko's face deepened from red to crimson with every sentence.

"Exactly," Tonbo said, unable to resist. "And as Orochimaru's former student, I assumed you would know more than most about the handling of bodies and experimental evidence."

"Orochimaru sealed parts of my memory!" Anko snapped. "That is the only reason I forgot. And since when are you the captain? Stop acting so superior!"

The exhaustion that had nearly dropped her moments earlier found a new outlet. She continued shouting at Tonbo, punctuating every accusation with increasingly elaborate gestures.

Tonbo endured the attack with a grin while Itachi watched in solemn confusion.