The valley was a natural funnel, steep on both sides, the stone dark with permanent moisture. In the Rain Country, there was no such thing as dry stone. Even on a day without active rainfall the surfaces wept, slow seepage from the rock itself, and the valley floor ran with thin channels of water that had nowhere better to go.
Today it was raining.
The Akatsuki column moved through the valley in their black raincoats, the Hidden Rain Village forehead protectors marking them as locals to anyone who didn't know better. They were locals, technically — born here, grown up here, shaped by this country's particular combination of disaster and endurance. The forehead protectors just didn't represent what they appeared to represent. These were not Hanzo's ninjas.
Yahiko led from the front. Konan walked on his left, Nagato slightly behind.
"I've had a bad feeling since this morning," Konan said. Not quite a whisper. The words were quiet but not concealed.
Yahiko's expression shifted, the small adjustment of a face deciding to admit something. "So have I."
Nagato looked between them. "What kind of bad feeling?"
"Hanzo was hostile to us three days ago," Konan said. "Now he wants to negotiate. The change is too fast. That doesn't happen without a reason, and I don't know the reason."
"Then we should go back," Nagato said immediately. "We can turn around now, it's not too late—"
"If we turn around," Yahiko said, "he announces that Akatsuki refused peace negotiations. He called us. He showed us good faith. We walked away." He kept moving while he talked, his pace not changing. "The whole reason this organization means anything is that we don't do that. We don't refuse talks because we're afraid. The moment we do, he's given a story to tell about us, and the story is true."
Nagato understood this. He didn't like it, but he understood it.
"Jiraiya-sensei always said Hanzo was generous," Yahiko continued, his voice carrying the slight quality of someone using an old authority to steady himself against a present doubt. "With real talent, with real courage. Maybe that's still in there. Maybe we're building a threat out of a change in schedule."
Nagato exhaled. "You're probably right."
He didn't fully believe it. But Yahiko believed it, or was choosing to believe it, and Nagato had been following Yahiko's conviction for long enough that the distinction between belief and choice had become less important than the direction they were walking.
They kept moving.
An Akatsuki member came up alongside Konan from the rear of the column, speaking low and quick. His eyes, if anyone had been specifically watching his eyes, had a slightly unfocused quality, the look of someone whose attention had been redirected without their awareness.
Konan listened, then turned to Yahiko. "There's a problem. Village to the east — they're refusing our help again, they don't trust us yet. I should go talk to them. I'll catch up."
This was ordinary. The Akatsuki spent significant organizational energy on exactly these negotiations — local communities that had learned, across several wars, that trusting any outside group was how you got used. Konan was better at this than anyone else in the organization. She had the kind of face that made people believe she meant what she said, because she did.
"Go," Yahiko said. "We'll wait for you at the meeting point."
Konan broke off from the column and headed east.
No one watched the Akatsuki member who had brought her the message closely enough to see the vacancy leave his eyes the moment she was out of sight.
Several days later. The valley near the agreed meeting location.
The rain here was not heavy but it was thorough, the kind that didn't demand attention but was simply present in every direction, wetting everything it touched with patient consistency. The valley walls were close enough that the sound of it was slightly amplified, a continuous quiet percussion against stone and water and the leaves of whatever managed to grow at this altitude.
Finn walked through it without a raincoat.
The rain reached him. Or rather, it came very close to reaching him, and then it didn't. Within roughly five centimeters of his body, the water deflected — gravity repulsion, the Gravity-Gravity Fruit's passive field operating at low intensity, not dramatic enough to be visible as a technique but sufficient to keep his clothes entirely dry. The pipe in his hand produced a thin trail of smoke that the rain touched and didn't extinguish.
"Danzo's information said today," he said. "Nothing's happened yet. Either the timing shifted or he's wrong."
Beside him, Orochimaru was soaked.
He had been soaked since they arrived. Finn had offered to adjust the immediate air around both of them and Orochimaru had declined, which Finn had accepted without pressing. There was something about the way Orochimaru stood in the rain that suggested it wasn't discomfort. He was a snake-natured person in a country that was predominantly water. He seemed to find the conditions familiar.
"Danzo doesn't make mistakes on operational logistics," Orochimaru said. The rain ran down the pale length of his face and he didn't touch it. "His intelligence gathering is, genuinely, very good. If he said today, it's today."
"That's what I thought." Finn took a slow draw from the pipe. "We wait."
This was a two-person operation by circumstance. Kakuzu and Juzo were deep in the Rainbow Country, too far to return in time, and Finn had decided this didn't change the basic calculation. Sasori had assessed the situation, confirmed that Finn's capability was more than adequate for anything Hanzo could field, and had returned to the laboratory with the Sharingan slices and a reasonable lack of guilt about it. Finn had told him to keep an eye on Rin, which Sasori would interpret as a general security instruction and implement accordingly.
Two was sufficient.
The quiet stretched between them.
Orochimaru broke it eventually. "The Rinnegan. Are we actually going to see it today?"
"If everything goes the way Danzo says it will," Finn said, "yes."
"And afterward?"
"I'm not taking it." Finn's tone was settled, the voice of someone who has already closed the question. "The research angle is interesting, and you'll get your look at it. But the Rinnegan in Nagato's body isn't fully under his control — he can't even shut it off. There's no point acquiring something that resists being used." He exhaled another slow thread of smoke. "It's a bargaining piece. More useful as leverage than as a transplant."
Orochimaru accepted this without pushback. He had suspected as much from Finn's earlier statements. "And the Mangekyō is still your actual interest."
"The Mangekyō has better aesthetics," Finn said, which was not entirely a joke. The Rinnegan was power at a scale that was difficult to argue with. But aesthetics were not nothing. A technique that was also interesting to look at was simply better than one that wasn't, all else being equal.
Orochimaru made a sound that might have been amusement.
Then, with the particular accuracy that came from sensory ability developed over decades, he said: "Movement. They're here."
Finn let the smoke drift upward. "Finally."
Both columns entered the valley from opposite ends at roughly the same time.
The Akatsuki group came from the north, black coats dark with rain. The Hidden Rain Village contingent from the south, Hanzo's people, moving with the deliberate spacing of a group that knew exactly what it was walking into.
They came within speaking distance and stopped. The word "convergence" implied a warmth that was absent. These were two bodies of people standing in the same location and not lowering their guard, which was a different thing entirely.
Nagato leaned toward Yahiko. "Something is wrong," he said again, very quietly. "The way they're positioned—"
Yahiko was already reading the same pattern. Rain ninjas on the flanks, not the center. Not the arrangement of a delegation; the arrangement of an encirclement in early formation. His jaw set. "Where is Hanzo?"
As if the question had been heard — which, given what Hanzo had become, was always possible — a figure appeared on the high ground above the western wall of the valley.
He was large in silhouette, the sickle on his back adding another half-meter to an already imposing frame, the gas mask covering his face and the armor on his body both speaking the same language: this was not a man who had come to talk. He looked down at the valley with the specific coldness of a person who has already made a decision and is now simply watching it execute.
"Pull back," Yahiko said immediately. "Regroup now—"
And then the hostage appeared.
Two Rain ninjas had Konan between them, forcing her to her knees on the high ground beside Hanzo. Her hands were secured. She was uninjured but she was completely controlled, and the message was clear before anyone said anything.
"Are you going to leave your companion behind?" Hanzo called down. His voice carried through the valley without effort, the resonance of a man who had spent decades projecting authority in environments like this one. "How very committed to peace."
"Konan!" Yahiko's composure broke for exactly one second.
"Let her go!" Nagato said, and the Rinnegan in his eyes was fully visible now in the gray rain light, all six concentric rings, the pattern that didn't belong to this era.
"Hanzo of the Salamander!" Yahiko's voice had the particular heat of someone who had believed in the man whose name he was shouting. "You— you were supposed to be—"
"Naive," Hanzo said. The word came out like a verdict. "That's what you are. All of you. Do you imagine the Rain Country survived the last hundred years of war between nations because its leader was honest?"
On the high ground above the opposite wall of the valley, where the rain came down at a slight angle through a gap in the stone, two figures watched.
Orochimaru looked at Hanzo.
Something moved through his expression — not sentiment exactly, but something adjacent to it. Recognition, perhaps. He had faced this man once. Had survived it, which Hanzo himself had found remarkable enough to remark on. The person on that high ground bore the same name as the one he remembered but was not, in any meaningful sense, the same person.
"He is no longer a demigod," Orochimaru said quietly.
Finn exhaled the last of the smoke from his pipe and watched Hanzo hold a hostage above the organization he had decided to destroy.
"No," Finn agreed. "Even gods fall eventually."