Kagami said it with confidence: two of them handled.
Under ordinary circumstances, he would have been right. A puppeteer caught inside his own senbon rebound, a thread-user run through with a blade. Those were killing hits against most opponents. The problem was that both Kakuzu and Sasori were specifically not most opponents, and the techniques that had landed on them had failed to account for that in ways Kagami was still processing.
"Overconfidence tends to produce these kinds of surprises," Finn said pleasantly. "Those two are not easy to put down."
Hiruko's shell disintegrated. Sasori stepped out from the wreckage looking annoyed in the particular way of someone who had been right about being cautious and was irritated that the caution had been necessary. He had not known the Mangekyō was a possibility. He was reconsidering his assessment of this whole situation, which was a familiar feeling, and not a comfortable one.
He had brought Kakuzu. Kakuzu had brought Finn. Looking at the current state of the engagement, he was becoming privately grateful for both of those facts.
Kagami registered Sasori's reappearance with visible surprise. He had assumed the puppeteer was neutralized. Then he accepted Finn's word that he had been wrong, and his focus immediately shifted: distance. He needed to create it.
He had recognized them while he was recalculating his position. Kakuzu first: the stitched face, the black threads, the longevity that had no clean explanation for anyone who hadn't dug into the Exchange's records. S-rank defector from Takigakure, active in the underworld for five decades. A name that didn't appear in most conversations but appeared in the files of every village's intelligence division with a note that said, roughly, do not engage without preparation.
Then Sasori: younger, famous in the Sand Village in the specific way that prodigies become famous before anyone fully understands what they're dealing with. Ten S-rank missions completed. Twenty-nine A-rank. And then gone, along with the Third Kazekage, and the Sand Village had been turning that absence over in its hands ever since.
"Kakuzu," Kagami said, from the tree trunk where he'd landed. His voice was level. "And Red Sand Sasori." He looked at the third figure, the tall one who still hadn't done anything that Kagami could straightforwardly categorize. "The other one I don't recognize."
"There are still people who know me," Kakuzu said, with the tone of a man who had lived long enough to find recognition flattering rather than concerning.
Sasori said nothing.
The confirmation hit Kagami in a specific way. Sasori's appearance complicated everything. The Third Kazekage's disappearance had started this war. Sasori had disappeared alongside him. The Sand Village's official position was that both were unaccounted for, which the other villages had interpreted in various ways: accident, capture, some internal Sand Village movement keeping both off the board for strategic reasons. No one had publicly concluded betrayal, partly because Sasori's background made it seem unlikely and partly because the alternative explanations hadn't been exhausted yet.
Seeing Sasori here, in the Land of Rice, operating with two other missing-nin, after a battle that had eliminated every other witness on the field, produced a chain of implications that Kagami's mind was running through very quickly. Whatever had happened to the Third Kazekage needed to reach Konoha. The identity of these three needed to reach Konoha. He was the only one currently in a position to make that happen.
He had been planning to kill them. He revised that plan in real time.
"He wants to run," Kakuzu said.
Kagami had not moved yet. He hadn't consciously decided to move yet. But Kakuzu had caught something, some micro-shift in posture or weight distribution or the quality of his attention, and named it before the body had finished committing to it.
There was no point in hesitating once the read was out. Kagami pushed off the tree trunk with his feet, fed chakra into his legs, and moved back the way he had come at the best speed he could produce.
It was fast. Genuinely fast. The body-flicker wasn't just a technique he used; it was something integrated into his movement style at a foundational level, the same way it apparently was for Shisui. He covered thirty meters in the time most shinobi would have covered ten.
"Kakuzu, Finn, stop him!" Sasori's voice came from behind.
"I've got it," Finn said.
He raised one arm, extended it toward the direction Kagami was moving, and opened his palm.
The Dark-Dark Fruit's pull came out differently than it usually did: focused, channeled through a specific point rather than radiating outward as a field. A black vortex formed in his palm, the center of it dense and absolute and very quiet in the way that things with genuine mass tend to be quiet. The ground around Finn's feet responded immediately: loose soil, stones, the scattered senbon needles from Sasori's earlier exchange, all of it peeling up from the surface and angling toward his hand, accelerating as it got closer, vanishing into the vortex without impact or sound.
Sasori stared at this.
He had a sophisticated understanding of what jutsu looked like at the mechanical level. He could classify techniques by their chakra structure, their nature type, their application method. What he was looking at right now did not fit any of his classification frameworks, and it was doing this while also reaching out across several hundred meters of open terrain to physically arrest the movement of a shinobi who had been at a full sprint a moment ago.
Kagami felt it the moment the pull found him. It wasn't directional pressure the way a Wind Release technique pushed; it was more like the ground in front of him had ceased to exist as a destination. His feet were still moving but he was no longer going anywhere, and then he wasn't moving at all, and then he was moving backward through the air without having chosen to.
The pull brought him back across the open ground fast.
Finn had closed his eyes. Observation Haki carried Kagami's position and trajectory without needing visual confirmation. His other hand dropped to his hip, found the handle of the Shindokuto where it hung at his waist, and drew it slowly.
The blade came out of the scabbard and the air around it changed quality immediately. Something about the sword's presence altered the texture of the space it occupied: heavy, still, carrying a pressure that was not physical force but something older and less negotiable. Sasori felt it from twelve meters away and did not like the feeling at all.
Finn raised the Shindokuto and aligned it with the trajectory of the incoming Kagami. At the current rate of approach, the geometry resolved in a way that did not require any further action on Finn's part.
Kagami's Mangekyō began to move. The pattern in his eyes spun, the fused magatama accelerating. Whatever it did, he was invoking it, and he was invoking it at Finn.
Finn's eyes had gone black.
The effect of the technique, whatever it was supposed to accomplish, met the surface of Finn's presence and produced no visible result. Finn did not flinch, did not stumble, did not show any indication that something had reached him. He looked up at the approaching figure with the same quiet attention he had been giving to the entire engagement.
Kagami's expression shifted.
He was close enough now that the Shindokuto's angle was unavoidable. He made the only decision that remained: he let the chakra build, let it burst, and called it by name.
"Susanoo!"
The red chakra came out in a rush, massive and immediate, wrapping his body in the incomplete skeletal frame of the technique's first manifestation. Half a body, ribcage and arms and skull, the right hand gripping an enormous blade that was itself made of condensed chakra. The skeleton braced against the pull of the vortex and held. The enormous sword came down at Finn in a single committed arc.
Finn did not step back. He did not raise the Shindokuto to block. He looked up at the falling blade with the mild, evaluating expression of someone checking the weather.
The blade reached half a meter above his head and stopped.
Not slowly. Not with visible resistance. It simply ceased its downward motion, the way water stops at the rim of a full glass, and a shockwave rolled outward from the point of contact with the invisible surface of Finn's Armament Haki, destabilizing the Susanoo skeleton enough that its frame shuddered and its grip on the sword loosened fractionally.
Kagami stared at his own technique.
Finn put the Shindokuto back in the ground point-first without rushing. He brought his hands together in front of his chest, pressed his palms against each other
The ground detonated.
Not an explosion, not heat or fire or concussive force: the earth simply broke apart and accelerated inward, pulled toward the space where Susanoo stood, rock and soil and root systems all converging on the same point with the focused inevitability of a closing fist. The Susanoo skeleton had mass and chakra reinforcement but neither was sufficient counterweight to the scale of what was being applied to it. The framework compressed. Kagami compressed with it, the technique and the man inside it drawn together into a dense sphere of compacted earth and dark-threaded stone that settled to the ground and held.
Black smoke rose from the sphere's surface. The Dark-Dark Fruit was working through the stone matrix, eating at the Susanoo's chakra from the outside in.
Finn looked at the sphere for a moment.
"That's it?" he said. There was no contempt in it, just a genuine, slightly puzzled assessment. He had expected more difficulty. It had not felt difficult.
Behind him, Kakuzu was very still. He had been recalibrating Finn's ceiling since the first month of instruction, adjusting the estimate upward each time he collected a new data point. He had believed he had arrived at a reasonable approximation. He looked at the sphere and quietly moved the estimate again.
Sasori was doing something different. He was looking at the sphere, then at Finn, then at the space where the vortex had been, then back at Finn. He was running the engagement from the beginning in his mind, placing each technique in sequence, estimating force output and range and the absence of hand seals and the complete lack of chakra signature at any point during any of it. He was arriving at a specific conclusion about what it would feel like to be on the other side of any of that.
It would not feel good.
And then, following directly from that: if he was standing next to this person rather than across from him, the calculation reversed entirely. A powerful independent operator was a threat to be managed. A powerful allied operator was something else. A shield of a very specific and very effective kind.
He had been thinking about Finn's invitation for days. He had not yet answered it.
He was still thinking about it. But the thinking was moving in a more definite direction than it had been this morning.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Writing takes time, coffee, and a lot of love.If you'd like to support my work, join me at [email protected]/GoldenGaruda
You'll get early access to over 50 chapters, selection on new series, and the satisfaction of knowing your support directly fuels more stories.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~