The village had been emptied by the war. The people who had lived here were either dead or had packed what they could carry and left before the front lines caught up to them. What remained was a scatter of low buildings, a millstone near the entrance, some scorched earth, and silence.
Finn sat on the millstone with a cigarette between his teeth and thought, not for the first time, about the cigars from back home. The ones provided through Marine supply channels had been a different category of thing entirely. These local alternatives were functional and nothing more.
He exhaled slowly and watched Kakuzu work.
Roughly ten minutes earlier, they had walked into the village and found a skirmish already in progress: a Konoha vanguard unit, scouts most likely, caught in a running engagement with a Hidden Cloud advance team. Both sides had been moving fast and neither had been watching the tree line carefully enough. Kakuzu had handled it with the methodical efficiency of a man who had been doing this for fifty years. Not a single shinobi from either group had gotten clear.
Now Kakuzu was moving through the aftermath with a collection scroll and no visible sense of urgency.
Finn watched him crouch over a Cloud ninja who had taken the worst of a Fire Style exchange and was substantially charred from the shoulders down.
"That one's burnt through," Finn said. "You're still taking him?"
"Sasori will take any condition." Kakuzu pressed his hands together in a brief seal and the body compressed into the scroll. "Broken, burned, partial. He doesn't care."
"So in your professional estimation, the Red Sand Sasori is basically a very accommodating customer."
"He is an excellent customer," Kakuzu said, with a sincerity that suggested he meant it as the highest form of praise. "I like working with people like him."
Finn laughed. "You two deserve each other."
The wind shifted behind him. He turned, not quickly, and caught the kunai out of the air with one hand, closing his fingers around the handle a moment before the detonating tag attached to it went off.
The explosion wasn't large. The smoke cloud it produced was mostly theater. Kakuzu glanced at it, determined it wasn't his problem, and went back to cataloguing corpses.
From the edge of the village, something moved in through the settling dust.
It was not walking. It was low to the ground, its body covered entirely by a black windbreaker that dragged against the earth, only the head exposed above the fabric. The face was rigid in the specific way that faces are rigid when they are not actually faces: a mask of stiffened material over a hollow frame, with half a cloth wrap across the lower half. The limbs underneath the coat were not visible and did not move the way limbs moved.
It was a puppet. A human puppet, constructed with the particular care that only a craftsman who had been refining the same technique for years could produce. Its name was Hiruko. The man who had built it was somewhere inside it.
"I dislike people speaking poorly of me in my absence," the puppet said, in a voice that carried the slow, measured quality of someone who had chosen long ago to stop rushing anything. "Particularly people I don't know."
"You might want to open with an apology," Kakuzu said, without looking up. He sealed another body into the scroll. "Just a recommendation."
"Me?" The puppet's amber eyes moved toward Kakuzu. "Apologize for what, exactly?"
A figure stepped out of the dissipating smoke. Finn, entirely unmarked, the cigarette still in his mouth, smoke trailing from the end of it. He looked at the puppet with mild interest.
"He has a point," Finn said. "You threw a tagged kunai at someone who hadn't done anything to you yet. That's a rude way to introduce yourself."
The puppet's voice cooled slightly. "Is this what passes for confidence among young people these days?"
Finn was forty-four years old, which Sasori had no way of knowing. He looked younger. He didn't bother correcting the assumption.
"Confident individuals have their own personalities," he said. "I understand that. What I don't do is tolerate that personality being aimed at me before we've even established names."
He turned to Kakuzu. "Can I hit him?"
Kakuzu hesitated. "Not fatally. He hasn't paid me yet and I've already invested travel time in this job."
The exchange seemed to irritate Sasori beyond what he was willing to absorb quietly. A tail extended from behind the puppet, long and segmented, moving with the smooth mechanical precision of something that had been engineered rather than grown. The tip was wet with purple venom that caught what little light came through the overcast sky.
It drove forward at Finn's midsection.
It stopped.
The tail hung suspended in the air, the tip a hand's width from Finn's clothing, pressing against something that was not visibly there. Sasori applied more force through the chakra string. The tail did not penetrate. The invisible surface held.
Finn looked down at the tail with the expression of someone who had expected this and found it only mildly interesting. Then he raised one arm, extended it toward Hiruko, and said quietly, "Gravity Domain: Lockdown."
He felt a flicker of awareness about using something this visible in open terrain. White Zetsu and Black Zetsu moved through this world in ways that left no tracks, and a demonstration of this scale in the middle of contested territory was the kind of thing that attracted the wrong attention. He filed the concern and continued anyway.
The gravity pressed down on Hiruko all at once. The puppet's frame, built to withstand considerable punishment, began to creak and buckle under the weight, joints compressing, the elaborate internal mechanisms straining against a force they had not been designed to resist. A dark aura rolled outward from Finn in a spreading ring, thick and close to the ground, wrapping around the puppet and sealing its mobility.
"What technique is this?" Sasori's voice came through the puppet, less composed now, with a quality of genuine uncertainty behind it.
He did not wait for an answer. The puppet detonated from the inside.
From the wreckage of Hiruko, a young man dropped into the open air, short red hair, a face that was sharp and angular and genuinely young in a way the puppet's voice had not suggested. He was already moving before his feet touched down, both hands scattering hundreds of venom-coated senbon needles in a wide arc that covered every angle Finn might step into.
At the same moment, his hands came up to manipulate the chakra strings connected to something else, another puppet, pulling it into position.
The gravity caught him before the strings finished moving.
It came down on him like a physical weight, sudden and total, pulling him out of the air and pressing him flat against the ground. He hit the earth hard, both palms down, and found he could not push back up. The pressure was not pain; it was simply immovable, a force that had decided he was staying there and had no interest in being argued with.
The earth around him surged upward, rocks and compacted soil rolling over him in a quick spiral until he was encased up to the neck in a rough sphere of stone and dark-threaded earth. His head remained free. He could breathe. He could not move anything else.
Kakuzu watched from across the clearing with an expression that was difficult to read. He had fought alongside Sasori before, in a loose sense, and had a reasonable calibration of the man's actual capability. Sasori had been caught off-guard, which mattered. Given preparation time and room to set his formations, the outcome might have been different.
But "might have been different with better conditions" was the kind of argument that had a low ceiling when the other party had just done that in under twenty seconds.
He had suspected, since the first month of instruction, that Finn's actual ceiling was significantly above his own. Now he had a more specific data point.
"Don't kill him," Kakuzu said. "I haven't collected my commission yet."
Finn glanced back at him. A corner of his mouth moved.
"Fine," he said. "One favor."
The gravity released. The stone sphere crumbled. Sasori's figure dropped free, disheveled, dust in his hair, his posture carrying the specific rigidity of someone choosing to hold themselves upright through will rather than ease.
"Bastard," Sasori said, looking at Finn with anger that was sharp and clear and entirely genuine.
He was not panicking. His mind was already working through what had just happened, cataloguing what he had felt from those techniques, assessing what had blocked the venom tail, what the gravity mechanism actually was, how the dark aura interfaced with the physical compression. He wanted to know. He also wanted to not be held down again.
He had not prepared. He acknowledged that, internally, without pleasure.
Finn's eyes went flat. The amusement dropped out of his voice entirely.
"If you say something that irritates me again," he said, "I'll send you to join your parents."
The anger in Sasori's eyes didn't leave. It shifted slightly, becoming something more internal, pointed inward rather than out. His jaw set. He said nothing.
He was not a fool. At this range, against that kind of gravity control, there was no opening. This was not the time.
"Hmph."
He held his silence after that.
Kakuzu walked up beside him, looked him over once, and then looked at the clearing behind them with the expression of a man reviewing inventory.
"Twelve corpses," he said. "Konoha and Iwagakure, various ranks, all notable. Name your price."
Sasori's expression developed a quality that suggested he was very aware of what was happening and did not appreciate it in the slightest. One of them had just physically suppressed him. The other had walked up immediately afterward to discuss purchasing terms. The coordination between them had not been planned. It was simply what they each naturally did in any given situation.
He paid. Kakuzu's expression brightened perceptibly upon receipt.
"Well?" Kakuzu said, looking satisfied. "My partners."
Sasori's pride clearly wanted him to say nothing. He settled for: "Tigers and leopards walk alone. Cattle and horses travel in herds."
Neither Finn nor Kakuzu responded to that.
Sasori pressed on, pushing past the awkwardness. "I invited you both here because I intend to move against a member of the Uchiha clan. A specific target."
Kakuzu's posture changed. The satisfaction of moments ago drained out of it.
"Which Uchiha?" he asked.
"Uchiha Kagami."
Finn looked at Sasori with genuine interest.
Uchiha Kagami was the kind of figure who did not appear in the stories people told about Konoha's history, mostly because the stories tended to organize themselves around the Hokage line, and Kagami had never been Hokage. But he had been something arguably more consequential: a contemporary of Sarutobi Hiruzen and Shimura Danzo, all three of them trained under the Second Hokage Tobirama Senju at the same time, all three of them present for the transition between the Second and Third Hokage. When Tobirama had finally made his choice, he had chosen Sarutobi. But he had said, repeatedly and without qualification, that Uchiha Kagami was the only member of his clan he trusted completely.
That statement meant more coming from Tobirama than it would have from almost anyone else. The Second Hokage's institutional distrust of the Uchiha was not a secret; he had built entire administrative structures around containing what he saw as their potential for destabilization. His trust in Kagami was not a default. It was specific, earned, and deliberately extended against his own general orientation toward the clan.
A man trusted by Tobirama Senju and counted among the contemporaries of the current Hokage was not a target you approached carelessly.
Sasori's logic, Finn had already worked out, was straightforward. He had the Third Kazekage as a human puppet. The Third Kazekage's kekkei genkai was Magnet Release. Sasori could now deploy Magnet Release through the puppet, which had expanded his combat options considerably. The Sharingan was in a different category entirely, but the principle was the same: if he could acquire Uchiha Kagami's body and convert it, he would have access to Sharingan capabilities through the puppet. Even a base Sharingan, without Mangekyo, was something the rest of the ninja world took seriously enough to fight with their eyes down.
"No," Kakuzu said.
Sasori blinked. "You know him personally?"
"Uchiha Kagami is a Second Hokage-trained veteran, a trusted figure of the Third Hokage, and a senior Uchiha. Whatever you're paying doesn't reflect what that job is actually worth." Kakuzu said it evenly, with no posturing in it. "We don't move on someone at that level unless the number is right."
"Unless what?" Sasori asked, his voice carrying a fresh edge of irritation.
"Unless you add more money," Kakuzu said, without any hesitation at all.