Fifty thousand ryo was not a low number for a single life, taken on its own terms.
For context: Kakuzu's six-month instruction contract with Finn had been settled at twenty thousand ryo, and that had covered the complete transmission of five-attribute ninjutsu theory from one of the most experienced missing-nin in the world. Fifty thousand was two and a half times that. As a raw figure, it was substantial.
The problem was that it was gold being priced in wartime currency, and wartime currency was doing what wartime currency always did. Most notes in circulation had begun depreciating sharply. Against a gold standard, fifty thousand ryo in gold could be exchanged for somewhere between seventy million and a hundred million ryo in paper, depending on the country. In the Rain Country specifically, the rate had climbed toward a hundred million before the fighting reached its supply lines. The fluctuation reflected how badly the war had disrupted ordinary commerce, and how much people trusted metal over paper when the alternative was watching their savings dissolve.
Point being: fifty thousand ryo in gold was worth considerably more than its face suggested, and Sasori was negotiating as though it weren't.
"Kakuzu," Sasori said, with a slight tightening around the puppet's eyes. "Fifty thousand ryo is not a small amount."
"The risk isn't small either." Kakuzu's frown carried genuine irritation, not performed irritation. "That's an Uchiha. A senior one. You've fought Uchiha before. You know what that means."
He had been spending time with Finn, who handed over gold without discussion or complaint and then went back to whatever he had been thinking about. That standard of generosity had recalibrated Kakuzu's sense of what clients owed him. Sasori, by comparison, was beginning to feel almost offensive.
"I've killed two," Sasori said. The puppet's voice carried a precise flatness that contained its own form of pride. "It's not as difficult as the reputation suggests. Frankly, if I didn't want to be cautious this time, I'd have gone alone."
This was not posturing. It was a statement of technical fact, and it was grounded in something that most people who had not studied Sasori's particular approach to his own body would have missed.
The man sitting inside the Hiruko puppet was not, in any conventional sense, a human being any longer. He had converted himself into a puppet over the course of years, replacing his own biological structure piece by piece until what remained of his original body was the core he called his regeneration center, seated inside the chest cavity of whatever puppet he was currently inhabiting. His perception did not run through his eyes. It ran through that core, through chakra, through the technical systems he had built into his mechanical body. The Sharingan worked on eyes. It worked on the visual processing pathway that connected the eye to the mind, and from there to the body's threat-response systems. Sasori did not have that pathway anymore. The genjutsu had nowhere to land.
The price of this was that he would never develop physical skills in any meaningful way. His body was not a body; it was a mechanism, and mechanisms did not grow stronger through training. They were upgraded through replacement. It was a trade he had made deliberately and he had never expressed regret about it. Different paths to different pinnacles. Might Guy had never cast a genjutsu in his life and had come closer than almost anyone else in history to killing Madara Uchiha with nothing but his body. The world had room for many ways of becoming extraordinary.
Sasori had killed two Uchiha, and the Sharingan had been essentially irrelevant to both encounters. The problem had been the aftermath: too much pressure, not enough time, and he had been unable to recover the bodies. He still had not been able to test whether a Sharingan-equipped human puppet could actually deploy genjutsu through the puppet's eyes, which was the question he was trying to answer with Uchiha Kagami.
Kagami specifically, because ordinary Uchiha corpses didn't interest him artistically. He had standards. Kagami had the background to produce something worth the effort: trained by the Second Hokage, trusted by the Third, with decades of active field experience behind him. A puppet built from that material would be exceptional by definition.
Finn had been listening to all of this and thinking about something adjacent.
He was not particularly concerned with the Uchiha clan's history or internal politics. What interested him was the Sharingan itself, and what it might represent as a solution to his most significant current vulnerability. In terms of direct confrontation, he was comfortable with his position in this world. Kakuzu at full preparation had not broken his defense. Sasori's venom tail had not penetrated Armament Haki. Against opponents who engaged in straightforward exchanges of power, he was not worried.
The problem was the category of techniques that did not engage directly. Genjutsu. Sealing techniques. Certain forbidden techniques with conceptual rather than physical mechanisms. These were areas where his One Piece background had left him completely unequipped, because that world had no equivalents to any of them. He had no trained resistance, no instilled counter-instincts, no framework for detecting them until they were already operating. That gap was a genuine liability, and it would become a fatal one if the wrong person decided to test it.
The Sharingan was the ninja world's premier genjutsu tool and, partly as a result of how it worked, also one of the premier genjutsu resistances. The Uchiha had built their entire illusion school around it. Anyone fighting an Uchiha who looked too long at the wrong moment was in danger regardless of their own skill level. And the Uchiha, because they lived with that reality from childhood, had developed the deepest instincts in the ninja world for recognizing and navigating genjutsu from the inside.
If he could acquire a Sharingan, through transplant if necessary, he might be able to address that gap directly. He was not excited about the prospect of transplant surgery in a ninja-world context, but he could accept it if the outcome justified it.
The Third Shinobi World War had produced a generation of Uchiha who were active and in the field. Kagami was the immediate target under discussion. Fugaku was somewhere in the operational theater. And then there was Shisui.
Uchiha Shisui was one of the few names in this war that Finn considered on a different tier entirely. In a conflict that had produced Minato Namikaze as its defining figure, Shisui had managed to be mentioned alongside him. The Body Flicker Technique as practiced by Shisui had reached a level that went beyond speed into something closer to discontinuous movement; the technique's name, "Shunshin no Shisui," had become more title than description. People called him the flawless ninja without irony.
But the ability that made Finn genuinely cautious was Kotoamatsukami. That was something else entirely. The Mangekyo technique that rewrote the subject's perception and will so completely that the subject themselves had no awareness of being influenced, no felt discontinuity, no moment of recognition that something had changed. Itachi had used it to break the Impure World Reincarnation's control, which meant it operated at a level that could override techniques designed to transcend death. Against that, there was no counter Finn could currently name. No Haki, no physical resistance, no amount of willpower would help if the technique had already completed before he registered it.
The problem with possessing something that powerful was that everyone who understood what it was wanted it neutralized or controlled. Shisui's fate, Finn knew in broad outline, had been determined largely by the fact that other people knew he had it. Fugaku had been more careful; the Mangekyo he carried had remained private enough that almost no one knew about it before he died.
Finn filed this away and turned his attention back to the immediate conversation.
"Kakuzu," he said. "You've had a good working relationship with Sasori for a long time. Fifty thousand ryo is a reasonable starting point for something this delicate. Pushing harder now risks the whole arrangement, and the long-term value of that relationship is worth more than the gap you're arguing about."
Kakuzu was quiet for a moment. Then: "Fair enough."
Sasori's puppet eyes moved between the two of them. He had known Kakuzu for years and had never once seen the man yield on a money argument without extended pressure. The guy would go back and forth over a handful of ryo for twenty minutes if he thought there was any chance of winning. And Finn, with a few measured sentences, had simply ended it.
That was interesting. What exactly was the relationship between them?
The explanation, which Sasori did not have access to, was simpler than he would have guessed. Kakuzu had spent six months watching Finn respond to cost discussions by handing over whatever was requested without negotiation. That had recalibrated his instincts. When he pushed now, part of him was genuinely testing to see if the same response would appear in other contexts. It usually didn't, because Finn was not actually careless with money, just indifferent to it in ways that most people who dealt with Kakuzu were not. But the habit of testing had developed anyway.
Sasori let the money subject drop and moved to the operation itself.
"My intelligence indicates that when the Hidden Cloud and Konoha engage in the Land of Rice, Uchiha Kagami will be commanding Konoha's vanguard element. The skirmish you saw earlier was the preliminary contact phase. In a few days, both sides will commit to a larger exchange. We wait nearby, confirm his position, and move when the battlefield gives us cover. Chaos is its own kind of concealment. Anyone who sees us take him will assume we're rogue shinobi working a contract."
The logic was clean. A major battlefield produced casualties at a rate that made attribution difficult. Even if someone witnessed the moment, the most natural interpretation was independent operators moving opportunistically through contested terrain. There was nothing unusual about that in wartime.
"One question before we continue," Kakuzu said. He was looking at Sasori with an evaluating expression. "You're operating alone out here. No village affiliation. Where is intelligence this specific coming from? Kagami's role in the vanguard, his exact positioning, that's not the kind of information that wanders into open channels."
He was not being suspicious for its own sake. The concern was practical: if the intelligence had bad sourcing, they could be walking into a setup. Kakuzu had survived fifty years partly by not trusting information he couldn't trace.
Sasori's puppet eyes carried something that might have been amusement, or might have been mild contempt. It was difficult to tell with a face that had been engineered rather than grown.
"I have my methods," he said. "The intelligence is solid. Don't concern yourself with the source."
Finn had been half-listening. Now he pulled the thread the rest of the way.
Sasori was not simply a puppeteer and an artist. In the Akatsuki, the role he had filled alongside Black and White Zetsu was intelligence. His specific technique, the subconscious sand manipulation, allowed him to embed influence in targets without their awareness: their movements, their decisions, the information they handled, all of it could be shaped and accessed remotely. It was a form of intelligence gathering that left no obvious trace because the source didn't know they were a source. The level of penetration that allowed was significant, and Sasori's confidence in the information reflected that.
The downside of being very good at that particular kind of work was that it created a specific kind of blind spot. People who manipulated others' perceptions professionally tended to develop the assumption that their own perceptions were reliable. Sasori had later handed Kabuto Yakushi to Orochimaru based on that assumption, and it had cost him more than he expected.
But right now, in this context, the intelligence was almost certainly good.
Finn looked at Sasori with an attention that had not been there a moment ago. An intelligence specialist working through embedded subconscious influence, operating independently across the full scope of the Third Shinobi World War, with a network that extended into village command structures without those structures knowing it was there.
That was a genuinely useful asset to be sitting across from.
Something shifted in his expression. The ambient calculation that he usually kept internal became briefly visible.
Sasori noticed. The puppet's eyes settled on him with a gaze that had gone cold and precise, the particular quality of a predator registering that it was being looked at by something that might be worth being wary of.
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