Chapter 164: Contact Evolution

 

The Academy gates stood amid a crowd of children and parents. Tonbo held Tenyu's hand, and Ayame held Maki's. The twins looked about eagerly. Here were children their own age, future friends, and the beginning of their lives as shinobi.

"Grandpa, I don't want to go to school. I want to stay home."

The complaint came from a boy wearing a scarf despite the heat. Hiruzen held his hand with a patience that looked close to exhaustion. He wore ordinary clothes that morning, and for the moment his grandson seemed a greater concern than the village.

"You're old enough for school, Konohamaru. If you refuse to go, I won't speak to you."

He noticed Tonbo's family and brought the reluctant boy over. Tonbo greeted him, then looked down at Konohamaru. "You've grown."

"Who are you? I'm the Hokage's grandson. You should speak to me properly."

Maki made a face at him. "The Hokage's grandson doesn't want to go to school. How embarrassing."

"Maki, we're in public," Tenyu said solemnly. "We must be respectful in front of the Hokage. Even if Konohamaru behaves like a three-year-old, we shouldn't say so."

He turned to Hiruzen. "I'm sorry. My sister was rude."

For a moment Konohamaru stared. Then he lunged at them, shouting that he would beat them both. Hiruzen caught his scarf before he reached the twins.

"They're your classmates. You cannot start a fight."

Tonbo tapped both children on the head. "Is that how I taught you to speak? Apologize to the Hokage and Konohamaru."

They obeyed immediately. Experience had taught them when their father expected obedience. Konohamaru stopped struggling long enough to accept the apology with an air of triumph.

"I still haven't forgiven you."

Hiruzen laughed. "Your two are energetic as well."

Tonbo recognized the satisfaction beneath the remark. He had spent years telling Hiruzen how well behaved his children were. Now the Hokage could see that they were little different from his own grandson.

"They're finally going to school," Tonbo said. "I hope they grow into people like you."

The polite answer concealed how strange it felt to stand there as a parent. Naruto should graduate in another year. The Fourth Shinobi World War was no longer a distant event in his memories, and his children were taking their first steps toward becoming shinobi.

"I'm the one who's going to be Hokage," Konohamaru announced, unwilling to leave even an imagined challenge unanswered.

Tenyu pointed toward the Hokage Rock behind the Academy. "Would your face look good up there?"

Konohamaru looked up. The Fourth's carved face gazed over the school, and there was room beside it. He became absorbed in picturing his own addition.

"Of course it would."

Ayame greeted Hiruzen as the instructors began organizing the children. The opening ceremony was about to start. Parents remained outside while the new students passed through the gates.

Konohamaru and the twins walked in together, turning their faces away from one another. The apology had not made them friends.

"So much energy," Hiruzen said, still smiling.

"You're getting old, Third Hokage. So am I."

Hiruzen choked on the comparison. Tonbo was twenty-five. Counting both lives, however, Tonbo had passed fifty; watching his children disappear into the Academy made those years feel rather less abstract.

At the Analysis Team, Tonbo laid his hands upon the corpse of a Kumogakure shinobi.

"Contact Evolution."

Branching marks spread over the body. Information poured into him in a volume that exceeded ordinary mind reading. It carried no sequence of remembered events. He was reading the body's structure: its tissues and systems, the organization of its cells, and the information contained in its genes.

The second-generation Inner Archive served as the center through which the flood passed. Tonbo separated useless information from what he could understand and use. His nerves received the selected patterns; heat stirred briefly beneath his skin, then subsided.

Years of experiments had taught him where to look. The work was complicated, but familiarity let him complete that first passage almost instantly. To anyone watching, there would have been little to see beyond his hands and the marks on the corpse.

"The first complete stage," he murmured. "Now for the second."

He had spent more than five years developing the technique. It drew upon far more than those five years of study. Apart from the mind he had brought into this life, he expected it to become his greatest advantage.

Chakra remained the difficulty behind so many of his plans. He was not a jinchūriki, did not possess a sage's body, and had inherited no connection to Asura that would give him the reserves he wanted. If he meant to survive the Ōtsutsuki, he needed a way to change what his own body could supply.

Orochimaru pursued bodily modification. Tonbo wanted another route: evolution guided by information, rather than the kind of reconstruction that appealed to the Sannin.

Developing a bloodline limit offered a slower path toward such a change. A new ability could be created through talent and study, then established in the body over generations. By the time it became an inherited trait, the family might possess both the ability and the altered constitution that supported it.

Tonbo considered Dust Release. Ōnoki had learned it through talent and the experience handed down by the Second Tsuchikage. The transformation had not become something every descendant would simply inherit. Developing an ability and fixing it in a bloodline were different stages, separated by more time than Tonbo had available.

He thought too of Mei Terumī's abilities. In his understanding, marriage and children would not by themselves ensure their inheritance. Descendants might first receive the methods by which an ability was developed; only after generations of continued development would the change become established in the bloodline.

That interval was what Contact Evolution had to overcome. Tonbo could not wait for several generations of descendants to acquire the body he needed now.