The Gedo Mazo's hand came down.
Hanzo was already gone when it hit — the flicker was clean, combat-conditioned, the kind of movement that didn't require thought because it had been drilled past the level of thought. The hand struck the valley floor and the stone beneath it simply ceased to be flat, the impact radiating outward in a fracture pattern that would have made the ground impassable for anyone on foot.
Hanzo landed twenty meters back and took stock.
He had been fighting for less than two minutes. In those two minutes, the Gedo Mazo had eliminated every other combatant in the valley — his Rain ninjas, the Root members, the Akatsuki fighters who had come to this meeting — with a thoroughness and efficiency that fell outside his existing categories for what summoned creatures were capable of. The tailed beasts were the upper limit of that category, in his understanding. This thing was not a tailed beast. It was something that made the tailed beasts look like a subcategory.
The thought that had been sitting at the edge of his awareness pushed further in: I cannot win this.
He was Hanzo of the Salamander. He had survived two Shinobi World Wars. He had faced the three legendary Sannin simultaneously and found them collectively insufficient. The idea of not winning was not something he had needed to hold in his head for several decades, and the fact that it was there now, fully formed and clear, told him something about what was standing across the valley on a pair of destroyed legs.
He was not going to admit this thought's existence to any part of himself that would act on it yet. There was still the poison. There was still the Water Style that no one in this era could match. There was still the weakness he had found: repulsion and attraction could not operate together.
The boy's chakra surged into the statue again.
"Hah!"
The statue opened its mouth. What came out was not the chakra dragon from before — it was chains, dozens of them, moving with the directional intelligence of living things, spreading across the valley floor and through the air simultaneously. They came for Hanzo with the specific, targeted quality of something that had already decided where it was going.
The moment they appeared, Hanzo's instincts registered a threat response that bypassed analysis entirely and went straight to motion. He was sliding backward before he had consciously identified what was happening. A chain passed through the space his torso had occupied. Another clipped his shoulder guard and left a gouge in the metal that had no business being there.
Once those lock on, there is no getting free. He didn't know how he knew this. He knew it.
His hands moved while he was still moving backward. "Water Style: Great Explosive Wave."
His chest expanded. What came out of his mouth was not a technique so much as a fact — the water simply arrived, immediately and in vast quantity, a lake deciding to exist where a valley floor had been. The Great Explosive Wave was the technique that had made his water ninjutsu reputation in the Second Shinobi World War, the one that had established the principle that Hanzo of the Salamander could not be fought on flat terrain because Hanzo of the Salamander would make his own terrain. The valley filled in seconds, the water turbulent and purple-tinged where his toxin diffused through it, Yahiko's body somewhere in it, Konan somewhere in it, everything within range swallowed by the sudden lake.
On the ridge, Finn stopped.
He was running the battle against his memory of how this was supposed to go, and the numbers were not matching. In his recollection, this engagement had been significant but not catastrophic in terms of scale — Hanzo had pressed Nagato, Nagato had held on through the Gedo Mazo, Hanzo had eventually assessed the situation and withdrawn. The subsequent years of Nagato developing the Six Paths of Pain were what finally brought Hanzo down, inside the Hidden Rain Village, in a very different kind of fight.
The Great Explosive Wave had not been in the version of events he remembered.
The terrain was changing. That detail mattered.
The Gedo Mazo reached down and pulled Nagato upward, lifting him above the rising water. Nagato's legs were still not functional. Being in the water would have been dangerous in ways that had nothing to do with chakra.
Konan was in the water.
She was moving toward Yahiko's body, which was also in the water, and the current from the Wave was turbulent enough that the movement was difficult. Finn watched her reach for Yahiko and made a decision.
"Orochimaru. Put her under."
"Without hesitation," Orochimaru said pleasantly.
He formed the seal, pressed his fingers lightly against the stone of the ridge, and said something below the volume of the rain.
No smoke. No dramatic summoning signature. Finn raised an eyebrow at the absence and then decided it was simply Orochimaru being Orochimaru — technique adapted to circumstances, elegance over convention.
Somewhere in the purple-tinted water below, something thin and white and no longer than a finger found Konan in the current. The bite, when it came, was light enough to feel like debris — the kind of small impact you register and dismiss when you're fighting a current and holding a body simultaneously.
Konan grabbed Yahiko and felt the water trying to take him from her and kept pulling. Then she felt the edges of her vision doing something that edges of vision were not supposed to do.
She saw the purple in the water and understood what she thought it was. Hanzo's poison, in the Water Style, had already been demonstrated. Being hit by it while submerged, while handling Yahiko, while exhausted — she put the pieces together quickly and arrived at the wrong answer, which was the answer Orochimaru had designed for her to arrive at.
The Gedo Mazo's hand found her before she went fully under and pulled both her and Yahiko's body to the surface.
"Nagato," she said. Just his name. Then her eyes closed.
"It's done," Orochimaru said. He sounded satisfied in the way of someone whose technique had executed exactly as intended.
Finn looked at the valley — the flooded floor, Nagato suspended above it in the Gedo Mazo's grip, Hanzo standing at distance with his assessment clearly still running, the bodies of several dozen ninjas scattered across whatever remained of dry ground. He had watched this fight develop from the moment Yahiko walked into the kunai, and the shape of what needed to happen now was clear.
"First, we help Hanzo kill Nagato," he said. "Then we force Hanzo to retreat."
Orochimaru nodded without requiring elaboration. They had agreed on the outlines before they arrived.
The logic was not complicated, if you were willing to follow it somewhere uncomfortable. The Rain Country had two power structures. Hanzo held one. Akatsuki held the other. Finn had looked at Hanzo's power base — his diehard loyalists, the faction that had followed him through two wars and would continue resisting Akatsuki for years after his death, requiring a sustained campaign of what Nagato's history called a reign of terror to finally suppress — and had decided it was not worth inheriting. Too much friction. Too many people with too specific a loyalty to a man who would be dead.
Akatsuki was simpler. Yahiko was dead. The next leader would be Nagato, and Nagato with the Rinnegan and Yahiko's death reshaping his worldview would become someone who called himself a god and would not be approached as a potential subordinate from below. That version of Nagato — Pain, the leader of an organization that had been radicalized by trauma — was not the entry point.
The entry point was Konan.
Konan alone, after Nagato died here. Konan holding together an organization that had lost both its leaders in the same afternoon, facing the man who had engineered the trap, with nothing in her arsenal sufficient to reach Hanzo directly. Konan who would want revenge and would not have the power to take it alone.
Finn would be the power she couldn't generate herself.
And in exchange for that service, rendered cleanly and at real cost, the Akatsuki's structure — its people, its networks, its presence throughout the Rain Country — would transition to new management. With it, the country itself.
The Rinnegan was the secondary gain. With Nagato dead here, the eyes stayed. Orochimaru would get his research access. And more practically: the Rinnegan in Finn's hands — even as a study object, even as a bargaining piece rather than an active weapon — would change the calculation for every party watching the Rain Country situation from outside. Black Zetsu, in particular, would find the situation difficult to ignore.
Black Zetsu needed the Rinnegan to be in Nagato, operating the Moon Eye Project's infrastructure. Black Zetsu also needed Obito to remain committed to a plan that depended on Rin being dead. Finn held both of the pieces that complicated that picture. Holding them both meant the initiative was his, not Black Zetsu's, and whatever that old entity tried to arrange, it would have to come to Finn to do it.
That was preferable to the alternative.
He was aware that Konan was the person in this sequence who absorbed the cost without having chosen to. She was going to lose Yahiko today and Nagato today and then be offered help by the man who had made the second loss happen, and she would not know the second part. He had looked at this part of the plan and found it genuinely unpleasant, in the way that things are unpleasant when you can see them clearly and choose to proceed regardless.
He was not under any illusion about what that said about him.
Neither was Orochimaru, and Orochimaru was ready to move.
"Begin," Finn said.