The water Hanzo's broken wave had become did not simply fall.
His hands were already moving through the next seal before the repulsion field finished its work. The surging water reversed its nature mid-air, pressure collapsing inward, and what had been a broad crashing wave reorganized itself into something finer and far more pervasive — thousands of needles, thin as hair, dense as a curtain of rain, falling across every angle of approach toward Nagato simultaneously.
"Heaven's Cry," Hanzo said. Quiet. Certain.
He had been watching the intervals. Every time the red-haired boy deployed that invisible force, there was a use, and then another use, and then another. Hanzo had fought long enough to know that no technique was infinite, no defense was perfect, and continuous pressure was the method for finding the seam in something that seemed seamless.
The senbon came down.
Nagato raised one palm.
The repulsion erupted and every needle reversed course, bounced outward, buried themselves in the valley walls and the mud and the backs of anyone unlucky enough to be standing in the wrong direction.
Hanzo recalibrated without letting it show on his face.
The boy was not cycling through techniques with a cooldown. The repulsion was available every time he reached for it, which meant either the mechanism was not what Hanzo had assumed, or the Rinnegan's actual operating conditions were different from what the Rinnegan appearing on a dead man's face would suggest. He had seen the name on Nagato's body — the statue had clarified a great deal. This was not a bloodline limit in the conventional sense. This was something older and more dangerous, and Hanzo had been fighting it as though it were a Kekkei Genkai with a chakra budget.
He adjusted the premise and the tactics changed immediately.
"Poison Water Dragon Bullet."
He opened his mouth and the water came out of it purple, the Salamander's biological toxin carried in the chakra and the fluid both, the water dragon forming and launching in a single continuous motion that began in his chest and ended thirty meters away at Nagato's position.
On the ridge, Finn watched it track toward the boy and smiled at the color of it.
"Magellan," he said.
Orochimaru turned. "Who?"
"Someone I knew. A man whose entire body produces poison — he ran a prison with six levels and the sixth level was his stomach. The poison this man carries is similar in concept." Finn exhaled smoke. "Magellan's was considerably stronger."
"Your world has people like that?"
"My world has people like everything." Finn looked back at the valley. "I have a subordinate who produces poison as his base capability. Natural biological toxin, not chakra-derived. Same general principle as what Hanzo is working with."
Orochimaru filed this away — not for immediate use, but because information about Finn's world and its inhabitants was consistently more interesting than it appeared on the surface.
Below, Nagato had made a decision.
He had felt the Hungry Ghost Path's capability waking in him the way you feel a reflex before you can consciously direct it — the pull toward absorption, toward taking the incoming technique apart at the chakra level and internalizing the energy. He held it back. The water dragon was not pure chakra. The toxin riding in it was biological, the same category as natural energy: real physical substance that the Path's absorption couldn't neutralize, could only incorporate, and incorporating Hanzo's poison was not a trade Nagato's current body could survive.
He pushed instead.
The repulsion met the dragon and the dragon came apart, the water exploding outward in a radius, the toxin dispersing in the rain. Where the spray landed on stone it stained purple. Where it touched any of the remaining Rain ninjas who hadn't gotten distance yet, there were sounds.
Hanzo read the hesitation that had preceded the push.
He had noticed the moment of decision — the fractional pause, the eyes shifting before the hand moved. In a fight, a pause that small meant something. He turned it over while his hands formed the next seal.
Poison. Something about his poison had made the boy choose the deflection over whatever the boy had been about to do. Which meant the boy had a technique that could absorb or neutralize chakra-based attacks — straightforward, if the statue's previous behavior was any indication — but the technique had a limitation. Something it couldn't process. And Hanzo's poison was the thing that sat outside that limitation.
He didn't need to understand the mechanism completely. He needed to push in the direction that made the limitation relevant.
"Mist and Poison."
The dispersed water of the previous technique was still in the air. He gave it new instructions. The suspended droplets changed phase — not vapor exactly, something thicker, the toxin concentrating as the water thinned — and the cloud of it began moving toward Nagato on the valley's own air currents.
"His water ninjutsu," Orochimaru said, from the ridge, with the particular tone of someone who doesn't concede admiration casually and is conceding it anyway. "He was already doing this when we faced him during the Second War. It's stronger now."
Finn nodded. The water techniques of the ninja world had always impressed him for their flexibility — not raw power, but the capacity for continuous transformation, one form dissolving into another without returning to neutral. Hanzo was doing that on every exchange: each technique becoming the setup for the next one, the water never simply stopped but always redirected. Among water-style practitioners he had read about or encountered, the range was extraordinary — the Second Hokage, the Second Mizukage, Yagura, Kisame, Mei Terumi in the future. Every generation produced someone who took the style further. The official texts in this world described Hanzo's water ninjutsu as unmatched in recorded history, and watching it live, Finn had no particular reason to argue.
Below, the poison cloud advanced.
Nagato felt it coming with his eyes more than his nose — the Rinnegan tracked chakra signatures and the mist carried enough of Hanzo's to be visible to it. He had time. Not a lot, but enough.
His hands moved through two seals.
"Earth Style: Tremor Core."
The ground under him split upward — not an explosion, a deliberate lift, a column of stone rising and carrying him above the floor of the valley in the time it took the mist to cover the distance. From the elevated position, still rising, he exhaled the wind chakra he'd already been building.
"Wind Style: Great Breakthrough."
The gust moved outward and down, and the mist scattered.
Hanzo watched the boy handle the sequence without visible distress and updated his assessment again. He had made the same mistake as everyone else who had encountered Nagato and stopped there — he had seen the damaged legs, the depleted appearance from the statue's drain, the general physical deterioration of someone who had just absorbed a significant explosion, and had categorized this as a target with limited mobility and limited options. The legs were genuinely destroyed. The options were not limited.
Nagato was breathing harder now, the effort of the last several techniques stacking against the ongoing cost of the Gedo Mazo's connection to his chakra reserves. His face had not recovered any color since the drainage began. He looked like a much older person in a young person's clothes.
He formed a single seal. His chest expanded.
"Fire Style: Great Fireball."
The fireball was large and direct, the kind of technique that didn't need elegance because the mass of it handled the problem. It moved toward Hanzo on a flat trajectory.
Hanzo prepared to flicker.
He felt the pull before he understood it.
The fireball was blocking his direct line of sight to Nagato — and something from Nagato's direction was reaching for him, a suction, a gravitational claim on his body that bypassed the normal channels of physical force and simply asserted that Hanzo was going in that direction now. It was the same category of technique as the repulsion but inverted, and he had not seen it coming because he had been watching the fireball.
He had perhaps two seconds before the fireball and the suction resolved simultaneously.
Hanzo's hands moved.
"Water Style: Dragon Bite."
The water technique formed in the fraction of a second he had and crashed into the fireball before either one reached him. The explosion was mutual — fire and water coming apart in the same moment, producing a wall of steam that temporarily eliminated visibility in both directions.
Hanzo was still being pulled.
He stopped fighting the direction and committed to it, the sickle already swinging as he moved through the steam, the chain extending. If the boy was going to pull him in, Hanzo would arrive as a weapon rather than a projectile.
The steam was everywhere. He couldn't see Nagato. He could feel the suction's origin.
The sickle swung toward that origin at full extension.
A repulsion field exploded outward and the sickle was thrown back, the chain going taut against Hanzo's arm with enough force to jar his grip.
The suction stopped.
Hanzo landed, found his footing in the mud, and looked at Nagato through the dissipating steam.
The boy's legs still hadn't moved. He had deflected the sickle on pure reflex — the same reflex that had stopped the kunai volley and the water wave. But there was something in the exchange that Hanzo filed away immediately, the specific detail that made the difference between a strong opponent and a manageable one:
The repulsion had fired in response to the sickle.
And the suction had stopped at exactly the same moment.
They could not operate simultaneously.