Toya had seen Might Guy in action exactly zero times in person.
Didn't matter. He knew enough.
He followed the man down the steps of the Hokage building and tried to look like he wasn't studying him. Guy moved like someone who couldn't hurt a fly if he wanted to. Just a guy taking a walk, except the guy in question had once opened his eighth gate against a man who had absorbed the power of the Ten-Tails and had been described by Madara Uchiha himself as the strongest taijutsu fighter he'd ever faced.
Toya looked at Guy's forearms.
Then he looked away.
Okay, he thought. Training under this man is either going to be the best thing that ever happened to me or it's going to kill me. Possibly both.
"Forty-fourth training ground," Guy said, glancing back at him with that easy grin. "This afternoon. Two hours." He held up two fingers. "I want you to formally meet the rest of team Guy!" The grin got wider. "I have high expectations for all four of you!"
"I'll be there," Toya said.
Guy stopped walking. Just for a second. He turned and looked at Toya with something direct and genuine, the kind of look that didn't perform itself.
He nodded. Simple.
Then he was gone down the street, moving at a pace that was technically a walk and somehow also wasn't.
Toya watched him go. Then he turned and headed home, scrolls under his arm, brain already moving.
Body Flicker and Shadow Clone. Neither of them was flashy offense. No elemental release, no damage output. What they were was options, mobility and multiplication. Body Flicker meant he could control where he was in a fight instead of just reacting to where the fight put him, and if he integrate the technique with boxing? Shadow Clone meant training at a rate that shouldn't be possible for one person. With his reserves, he guess he can make about two clones, which meant extended sessions, the math on that was genuinely exciting in a way he was trying not to get ahead of himself about.
What he still needed was elemental ninjutsu. He didn't even know his affinity yet. That was the next gap, find it, find techniques that matched, build something with actual range and firepower. The scrolls were the start. The affinity was the direction. But that's still far away, for now though, yeah team guy huh.
One thing at a time anyways.
He had more than he'd woken up with. That was enough for today.
The house looked like a training ground that had also decided to be a kitchen.
He'd cleaned it that morning, which meant the floor was clear and the weights were stacked against the wall instead of spread across every surface. This was the clean version. He didn't think about what it looked like on the bad days.
He put the scrolls on the high shelf, the one he used for things he wasn't going to be careless with, and left them there. Tonight. He'd look at them tonight when he had time to actually focus.
Then he went to clean up properly before the meeting.
The bathroom mirror was small. He wiped the steam off it and looked at himself.
Tall, which still felt slightly strange even after twelve years, he'd hit a growth spurt at nine and his body had apparently decided that was just his life now. Lean in the way two and a half months of serious training produced, the kind where the muscle was there but hadn't started announcing itself yet. Dark hair that fell across his forehead and did what it wanted everywhere else. Sharp features that made him look older than he was, which had been useful exactly once and mildly inconvenient several times.
His eyes were the thing people noticed. Dark, quiet, the kind that made people do a second take without being able to explain why. He'd spent years trying to make them look friendlier. It hadn't worked. He'd given up around age ten. Actually, now that he thought about it, he kinda did look like Rukawa from slam dunk.
He dried off and got dressed. Dark pants with enough give to move in. A black tanktop underneath. Then the hoodie, grey, faded slightly at the cuffs from use, simple cut, nothing on it that didn't need to be there. He'd found it in a market stall months ago and bought it without thinking too hard about it. It had become the thing he reached for first every morning, which told him everything he needed to know about it.
He opened the drawer. Two headbands. His, still relatively new, barely worn. And Ishida-sensei's, the metal plate chipped slightly on one corner, the cloth darkened from years of use. He stood there for a second looking at both of them. He picked up the older one and tied it on.
He looked at himself in the mirror. The headband sat on his forehead, worn and slightly wrong and completely right. His expression had settled into something a resemblance of determination.
Wrapped his hands, which has had become his habit since training. Checked his pouch. Headed for the door.
He spent the walk thinking about the team.
Rock Lee. No ninjutsu, no genjutsu, pure taijutsu, and somehow one of the most dangerous people in his age group because he had decided limits weren't real and had been proving it every single day. Toya had a feeling about Lee that he couldn't entirely name. Something warm. Something that felt, underneath everything else, a little like recognition, a kinship.
Hyuga Neji. Genius and a walking pile of trauma. There were two things he would forever be grateful for, the first, not being born an Uchiha, the second, not being born a Hyuga. Toya knew exactly what Neji's problem was and where it came from. Sitting across from him was going to require a specific kind of careful.
Tenten. Sharp, practical, a weapons specialist who knew her specialty better than most jonin knew theirs. She was one of the few level-headed characters in the series, in other words, she was chill. Respect.
He thought about what gap he filled in that equation. Lee was close range, unstoppable. Neji was close range who could be mid range, Byakugan, precision. Tenten was long range, volume, overwhelming tool access.
What was Toya?
Right now, honestly? A distraction with good chakra control and two scrolls he hadn't opened yet. That was the real answer. He was the weakest link on this team and he knew it and he was going to do something about it and until he did he was going to be useful in whatever way was available to him.
He was okay with that. He'd started from worse.
He was first to the Training Ground, which he'd expected. He was always early when it mattered unlike a certain yellow-haired fastest man alive.
Lee arrived second. He came in at a run, not jogging, actually running, the kind of pace most people saved for emergencies, and pulled up short when he spotted Toya. Something moved across his face. Recognition, then a beat of something more careful, then a smile that pushed through it like it had decided the careful thing wasn't going to win today.
"Kobayashi-kun!" Lee bowed, sharp and genuine. "It's really good to see you again."
"Lee." Toya nodded. "You too."
They both knew what was sitting in the space between those words. Two names, specifically. They didn't say them. They stood in the particular not-silence of two people being deliberate about something and waited for the others.
Tenten arrived next, scroll case over one shoulder, and she was already looking at Toya with the frank assessment of someone who sorted the world into useful and not useful.
"Four genin," she said. Not a question, just confirming information she'd apparently already received.
"Apparently," Toya said.
She nodded. Then her expression shifted, still direct, but warmer. "I'm glad you're okay," she said. No fuss around it, just the thing itself.
"Thanks," Toya said with a small smile. "Me too, to be completely honest."
That got a small surprised sound out of her, almost a laugh. Good. He kept that in mind, Tenten responded to directness. Useful to know.
Neji was last. He walked in like he'd decided the exact speed he was going to arrive at and had held it precisely. Pale eyes swept the clearing once, landed on Toya, stayed there for a beat longer than they'd stayed on anything else.
"Kobayashi," he said.
"Hyuga."
A short silence. Neji's expression didn't change but he moved to his spot without further comment, which Toya was reading as acceptable.
There you are, Toya thought, looking at him. Such an unfortunate thing Kishimoto liked the Uchiha better, otherwise, you would have been a monster.
He looked away before it became a stare.
Something was coming down the road.
Toya squinted. There was dust. A lot of dust. And a sound, rhythmic, fast, getting louder. He couldn't make out what it was exactly. His brain offered several suggestions and discarded all of them because none of them made sense.
It got closer.
It was a man. Running. At full sprint. On his hands. Which he concluded was Guy, I mean what psycho would come running in a HANDSTAND, RIGHT?!
Guy arrived upside down, flipped upright at the last second, and stopped on a dime in front of them looking completely unbothered by everything that had just happened.
"I completed six hundred laps of the village on the way here!" he announced. "A new record!"
"THAT'S INCREDIBLE GUY-SENSEI!" Lee had actual tears streaming down his face. Toya wasn't sure when those had started.
"LEE!"
"GUY-SENSEI!"
They collided in the middle like two forces of nature that had been waiting for this exact moment. The hug that followed was aggressive in the way only genuinely emotional people could manage.
Toya looked at Tenten. Tenten looked at Neji. Neji had the expression of someone who had made peace with this a long time ago and had simply decided to wait it out.
Right, Toya thought. Forgot about this part.
"I'm sure you're all acquainted from your time in the Academy," Guy said, "so that saves time." He crossed his arms. The playfulness from a minute ago was still there but something underneath it had settled. "Now. I'll say this once. Kobayashi lost his team. That's not gossip material, not a conversation topic, not something we bring up unless he brings it up first. He's here. That's what matters." He looked at each of them in turn. "Understood?"
Lee nodded hard. Tenten nodded. Neji gave a single, precise dip of his chin.
Toya said nothing. He appreciated it more than he was going to say out loud.
"Please just call me Toya," Toya said. He looked at the other three. "All of you, actually."
Guy's grin came back full force. "Alright then, Toya!" He clapped his hands together once, loud enough to make Tenten flinch slightly. "Now, a SPARRING! The only way to properly measure your strength is to test it in real time!"
Lee's hand was already in the air.
Lee's hand was already in the air.
Guy looked at him with the expression of a man who had expected exactly this and loved it anyway. "Light contact only, Lee."
"Of course, Guy-sensei!" Lee was already moving to the center of the clearing, practically vibrating. He looked at Toya with his whole face open and eager and completely without malice. "I'll try not to go too hard!"
Toya looked at him. Then at Guy. Then back at Lee.
Right, he thought, rolling his neck and walking into the clearing. I hope I don't get hit in this blessed face of mine.
They formed the seal of confrontation.
Lee was fast.
Like, actually fast. Not fast for a genin, not fast for his age, fast in a way that made Toya's first read of the situation recalibrate hard and quickly. The first exchange lasted two seconds. Lee came in, Toya moved, felt the air from the strike brush his ear close enough to matter, countered, and Lee was already somewhere else.
They separated. Toya breathed.
Okay. So that was the level. That was the gap.
He wasn't going to win an exchange game with Lee. That wasn't a option. Lee's form was clean in a way that only happened when someone had drilled the same things so many times they'd stopped being decisions, the simplest explanation is instinct. He appears to no longer think of his actions, he just does them, based on instinct alone. Muscle memory.
So Toya didn't try to match it. He worked angles and controlled the distance. Made Lee work for every entry and tried to be somewhere other than where Lee expected. It wasn't pretty. Some of it was flat out accidental. But it was what he had.
Lee landed more hits. That was just the truth, three clean shots to Toya's one, none full force but all of them carrying enough behind them that his body registered and logged every single one. His ribs had specific opinions about the second hit. He kept moving.
From the edge of the clearing Guy watched everything, arms crossed, completely still in a way that felt more focused than stillness usually did. Tenten had her head tilted slightly, running her own calculations. Neji was watching with those pale eyes tracking the fight like he was taking it apart in real time.
About four minutes in, Lee shifted.
Toya felt it, something in the quality of Lee's stance changed, dropped lower, the specific stillness of a body right before it commits everything to one thing. Lee came in faster than anything before it and launched a spinning heel kick, full body weight behind it, aimed straight at Toya's left temple.
Toya's brain ran the options in the time available.
Step back, Lee had the reach. Step inside, wrong angle entirely. Block with his arm,his arm would lose that argument badly.
Nothing in the Academy curriculum covered this situation cleanly. Every trained response came up wrong.
Then, he just stopped thinking about it. At approximately 4.0002 seconds, he stopped thinking about what he could do. He just did.
Guy's stare changed into something else, and a smile widened on his face.
Without thinking he dropped into his stance, orthodox, left foot forward, right hand coming up across his centerline while his left shoulder rotated through and his left fist swung low and hard into the gap underneath Lee's guard. Non-dominant hand. He felt it the moment it left, weaker than it should be. But it was the only angle available.
The kick hit the side of his head.
The hook hit Lee's ribs.
The world went white and sideways. Toya hit the ground on one knee, hand down, ears screaming. He heard Lee land nearby, solid, surprised, the sound of someone who hadn't expected to land at all.
Everything was very loud and then very quiet.
Toya stayed down and breathed. Waited for the white to clear. His head felt like it had been used as a demonstration tool. He tried to breathe through it, four counts in, four counts out, but somewhere in the middle of that his body did something different. Something he hadn't told it to do. The rhythm shifted, deepened, the inhale pulling from somewhere lower than usual, filling out in a way that his month of half-figured theory had never quite produced. His lungs expanded further than they normally did. The oxygen hit differently.
The white started clearing faster than it should have. The ringing dropped. His vision sharpened. The pain was still there but it had moved, from the front of his awareness to somewhere further back, like it had been thrown away rather than fixed. His hands steadied. His head felt, not fine, but functional. More functional than a kick from Rock Lee had any right to leave him.
He blinked. Wait.
He ran it back. The breathing pattern. The way it had felt. The results.
...Did he just actually use total concentration breathing?
In the middle of a spar. Unconsciously. After one month of breathing exercises and theory and getting lightheaded in his backyard. He sat with that for a second.
Holy shit.
He looked up.
Lee was sitting up across the clearing with one hand pressed to his ribs and an expression on his face that had moved all the way through surprise and landed somewhere that looked a lot like delight.
"That was not a standard stance!" Lee said, slightly breathless but grinning. "Where did that come from?!"
Toya laughed. Not because it was funny. Because a month of training alone in his backyard had just worked. The breathing technique. The boxing Taijutsu. Both of them. In real time. Against Rock Lee. That meant they were real, that meant he wasn't delusional, that meant every early morning and every sore muscle and every moment of wondering if he was just making things up had actually meant something.
He laughed until it hurt his ribs and then he laughed a little more.
He got up after a while. His legs had notes about the timeline but cooperated. He straightened, checked his jaw was still where he'd left it, and turned to face Guy.
Guy wasn't wearing the grin.
He was wearing something else, focused, quiet, the expression of a man who had just updated his read of a situation and was deciding what to do with the new information. It lasted only a second. Then the grin came back, but different this time. Slower. Like it meant something more specific.
That stance," Guy said, pointing at him. "The one at the end. I've never seen it before. Where did that come from?"
"I... made it myself," Toya said, slightly hesitant. "It's still rough."
Guy stared at him for a second.
Then he threw his head back and laughed, loud, full, the kind that came from somewhere genuine and didn't care who heard it.
"BUILT IT HIMSELF!" He spun to face Lee. "LEE! Did you hear that?!"
"I HEARD IT GUY-SENSEI!"
Guy whipped around to Tenten, grabbed her by the shoulders, and shook her once. "TENTEN! Did you hear that?!"
"I — yes — you're shaking me —"
He released her and grabbed Neji by the shoulders. "NEJI! Did you hear that?!"
Neji's expression did not change. "You are touching me."
"MAGNIFICENT!" Guy released him, completely unbothered, and turned back to Toya with tears, actual tears, forming in the corners of his eyes.
"THE SPRINGTIME OF YOUTH BLOOMS IN UNEXPECTED PLACES!"
Tenten was bent over with her hand on her knee, shoulders shaking. Lee was still on the ground pumping his fist with tears streaming freely now. Neji had the expression of someone who had wanted to be somewhere else and had lost track of that want somewhere in the last thirty seconds.
Guy put one foot up on a rock, pointed at the horizon, and declared: "This team is going to be something special. I can feel it in my bones!"
Nobody said anything for a moment. Then Tenten lost it completely. Lee's laughter from the ground set her off further. Even Neji, stone-faced, composed, fate-of-the-universe Neji, had the very faint suggestion of a curve at the corner of his mouth that he was clearly not going to acknowledge.
Toya looked at all of them.
And laughed. Really laughed, the kind that came up from somewhere he hadn't visited in a month, loud enough that it surprised even him.
It felt like something unclenching.
Guy beamed at all of them like this was exactly what he'd planned.
Maybe it was.