Sasori did not respond to the invitation over the next several days. He also stopped being idle.
He would disappear into the mountains in the morning and return in the afternoon carrying new information, moving with the careful economy of someone who had developed very specific habits around not being seen. Finn assumed he was meeting people. Assets, planted contacts, whoever was feeding him the intelligence he claimed was reliable. He didn't press for details. If Sasori wanted to volunteer them, he would.
Kakuzu, unable to sit still for extended periods, had developed a habit of running through his practice routines in the mornings and then taking up a position near Finn and finding things to be unhappy about.
"We've been here days," he said, settling onto the ground beside Finn with the deliberate patience of someone who had decided to voice a grievance rather than continue holding it. "Fifty thousand ryo for one target who hasn't appeared yet. We're running a deficit on this job."
Finn said nothing.
"I could continue your instruction," Kakuzu added, after a short pause. "On a per-session basis. Whatever you think is fair..."
The corner of Finn's eye twitched. The man had turned over financial management of the Exchange funds without a second thought when Finn had offered it, had accepted that arrangement as the clearest possible signal of trust between them, and was now looking for new angles to monetize from the same person who had trusted him with the money in the first place.
"I gave you the Exchange funds," Finn said. "You're holding our finances. What exactly am I supposed to be paying you with?"
Kakuzu considered this. "That's a fair point," he said, with the tone of someone making a note to revisit the problem from a different direction later.
The bird arrived mid-morning. Same bird, same unhurried approach, landing on Kakuzu's extended arm and producing the small scroll from its beak. Kakuzu unrolled it, read for three seconds, and looked up.
"Sasori found him," he said. "We move."
Finn was already standing.
He knew relatively little about Uchiha Kagami compared to the figures who had dominated the story he remembered. Kagami was the kind of person who existed in the background of historical accounts rather than at the center of them: present at important moments, trusted by important people, but not himself the protagonist of any particular arc. A disciple of the Second Hokage. One of the three shinobi Tobirama Senju had trained directly, alongside Sarutobi Hiruzen and Shimura Danzo. The only Uchiha Tobirama had ever publicly trusted without qualification.
That last point was significant when you understood Tobirama's actual orientation toward the clan. The man had built Konoha's police force specifically to contain Uchiha influence. His suspicion of the clan was not incidental; it was structural, embedded in the institutions he had designed. For him to exempt a single Uchiha from that suspicion was not a small thing.
Kagami had never become Hokage. In the original story he was simply gone by the time the main narrative began, dead by some unspecified cause before the plot needed him. Finn's best guess, working through the political logic of Konoha's internal dynamics, was that he had died during this war. The more interesting question was whether the death had been the war's doing or someone else's. Danzo had reasons to want Kagami removed. A man with Kagami's lineage, his relationship with both the Hokage and the Senju tradition, his standing within the Uchiha clan, represented exactly the kind of figure who could have redirected Konoha's internal conflicts toward a better resolution. Someone who did not want that resolution would have noticed the same thing.
Finn pushed the speculation aside as they moved through the mountain forest. It would resolve itself shortly.
They heard the battle before they saw it. Not a skirmish: this was a proper engagement, multiple teams on both sides, the overlapping sounds of jutsu and steel and bodies hitting the ground coming through the trees from a distance of several hundred meters. Sasori's signal came from the left, a brief flicker of chakra that Finn's Observation Haki read before Kakuzu's eyes found the source. They converged on his position and settled behind a rock formation that gave them a clear sightline to the clearing below.
The Hidden Cloud had the upper hand. Finn watched the engagement for a moment and understood why. The Cloud had deliberately maintained the close-quarters chaos that neutralized Konoha's ninjutsu advantage. Wide-range fire techniques, water techniques, anything that covered large areas with indiscriminate force became a liability when your own people were inside the blast radius. The Cloud's shinobi were pushing the engagement tight and keeping it that way, relying on combat taijutsu and close-range nintaijutsu that could be applied precisely without collateral damage to their own lines. It was a sound tactical choice and it was working. Konoha's forces were taking losses faster than they were inflicting them.
Finn noted this with the part of his mind that catalogued tactical observations. The ninja world's approach to organized combat had a different texture than the Marine's. More personal, more technically intricate at the individual level, more dependent on the specific qualities of each fighter rather than unit cohesion and mass application of firepower. The ceiling on individual performance was higher. The institutional pattern and scale of ambition were narrower. Different environments producing different optimization pressures.
"Where is Uchiha Kagami?" he asked, keeping his voice low.
Sasori turned to look at him with an expression that the puppet's constructed features managed to convey as genuine surprise. He had been hiding inside Hiruko for years. He had refined his chakra suppression to a level that had made him effectively invisible to most sensory shinobi. And Finn was right beside him and had produced no discernible presence whatsoever, not chakra signature, not killing intent, not even the ambient physical warmth that most human bodies radiated.
It was like sitting next to a gap in the air.
"How are you doing that?" Sasori asked.
"Observation Haki," Kakuzu said, without inflection, answering on Finn's behalf. "Where is the Uchiha?"
"He hasn't arrived yet." Sasori refocused. "He'll come. I sent word that Konoha's position here was collapsing. He won't abandon his people if he has any choice."
The trap was already set, then. The skirmish below wasn't an accident; it was bait. Sasori had spent his disappearing days arranging this, feeding information to the right ears through whatever channels his network maintained, engineering the precise situation most likely to draw a specific person out. Finn filed that capability away without comment.
They waited.
Thirty minutes. The Konoha forces below were beginning to fragment, the pressure from the Cloud's close engagement starting to push individuals out of their formations. Another ten minutes and the structure of the Konoha line would collapse entirely.
"Here," Finn said quietly.
Kakuzu and Sasori both extended their senses. Nothing resolved at first, then, five or six minutes later, movement at the far tree line.
Konoha reinforcements arrived in force, moving fast, spreading into the engagement before the Cloud had time to reorient. And among them, one figure stood distinct enough that even at distance, across the noise and movement of the battle, he was not difficult to identify.
He was not particularly large. His face, from this distance, was not particularly striking. But once he entered the fight, everything around him reorganized itself in relation to where he was. He moved through the Cloud's line with a blade that he handled the way a skilled craftsman handles a familiar tool, efficiently and without excess, and the technique behind each motion was clean enough that it read as simple even when it was not. Between kills he was already forming seals, already placing support techniques into the gaps where his teammates needed coverage, the ninjutsu landing with a precision that came from being able to see every angle of the battlefield simultaneously.
And when the light caught his eyes at the right angle, even from this distance, the red was unmistakable.
Uchiha Kagami. The Sharingan working exactly the way it was supposed to work: not as a weapon in itself, but as a perceptual layer that made everything else sharper, faster, more economical.
"What's the approach?" Finn asked.
"Wait until both sides have taken enough damage," Sasori said. "Then we move. We only need Kagami. The rest are irrelevant."
"They'll scatter if we give them the chance," Kakuzu said. "Some of them are worth money."
"Finn's here," Kakuzu added, with the mild satisfaction of someone stating something obvious. "Nobody runs."
Sasori looked at Finn again. His understanding of what "Finn is here" actually meant was still imprecise. He had the data point of their first encounter, which had been quick and not fully representative because he had been caught unprepared. The rest was inference.
Finn pressed his hands against the ground. The chakra in his body and the fruit abilities had not yet completed their merger, but after six months of training the boundary between the systems had thinned enough that both could move simultaneously. He let them both rise.
"No hand seals," Sasori noted, partly to himself. "And the range on this..."
On the battlefield below, Uchiha Kagami stopped mid-motion. His Sharingan swept the tree line, and when the three-magatama pattern locked onto the direction of the incoming aura, his voice cut across the noise of the engagement with the authority of someone who had been commanding in combat for a long time.
"Hidden forces to the north. All teams, pull your perimeters."
The Cloud and Konoha shinobi both paused fractionally, registering the warning without knowing what it meant for them specifically.
"Abyss of Darkness," Finn said. His voice was quiet but carried. "Gravity Domain."
The two abilities came out together. The gravity arrived first: a pressure that was not directional in the way that most techniques were directional but simply existed, pressing down on everything within the field from every angle simultaneously. The ordinary shinobi went down immediately, their bodies not built to resist that particular category of force. The Cloud and Konoha fighters dropped to their knees, then further, the weight compressing them toward the earth.
Uchiha Kagami did not fall. He bent under it, one knee touching the ground, and held there with the visible effort of someone pushing against something they could not see or fully understand but had decided to resist regardless.
Then the darkness came.
It spread from Finn's position outward along the ground, moving fast, the texture of it like something poured rather than projected. It followed the terrain, moving between the trees and across the clearing below, and where it reached the fallen shinobi, they sank into it, absorbed, held. Kagami watched it arrive with his Sharingan turning constantly, trying to categorize it.
"Earth Release?" he said, half to himself. "No. The structure is completely different. What is this?"
It looked, from a certain angle, like the Nara clan's shadow technique taken to an extreme he had never seen. But the Nara shadow worked through line of sight and had a fixed extension limit and required the user to maintain a connected line from themselves to the target. This had no such constraints. It had no line. It had no limit he could currently identify. It was simply everywhere the darkness had reached, and the darkness was reaching very far.
The shinobi caught in it were not being cut or burned. They were being held, pressed into the ground, unable to generate enough force to break the contact between their bodies and the dark surface. Their chakra was moving but producing nothing, like a wheel spinning without traction.
"What technique is this?" Sasori said, from beside Finn. He was watching the battlefield below with an expression the puppet's face managed to convey as something between scientific interest and involuntary awe.
"Finn's bloodline limit," Kakuzu said, and there was an undeniable satisfaction in his voice as he said it.