Hanzo had not survived two Shinobi World Wars by winning fights cleanly.
He had survived them by understanding terrain. By understanding that a battlefield is not a neutral surface but a resource, and that whoever converts that resource first has already won half the argument.
The flooded valley was his now.
Two water clones materialized from the lake surface on either side of him, each forming different seals in parallel. Three sets of hands moving through three different sequences at identical speed — his clones always matched his pace exactly, that was the discipline — until all three finished simultaneously.
"Earth Style: Yellow Spring Quagmire!"
"Earth Style: Sky-Drop Clay!"
"Fire Style: Molten Flame!"
The ground beneath the lake turned. The water, already turbulent from the Great Explosive Wave, went viscous as the Yellow Spring Quagmire technique converted the valley floor into a bog that reached upward through the water above it. Clay fell from the sky in two massive quantities — not stone, clay, dense and glutinous, dropping onto the Gedo Mazo's surface where the lake hadn't already covered it.
The statue moved to avoid the drop. Its feet went deeper.
Nagato felt the change before he understood it — the Gedo Mazo's mass shifting, the legs pulling and finding resistance rather than ground, the lake around its waist thickening from water into something that wanted to hold. He looked down and found mud where water had been, the viscosity spreading outward from the statue's position in every direction, the whole valley floor converting beneath the lake surface.
The clay landed on the statue's upper body. Nagato had pulled it half a step to one side in time to prevent complete coverage. Half a step. The clay still found the statue's shoulder and chest and began its own kind of adhesion.
The fire came next.
Hanzo opened his mouth and the flame that came out was not the usual orange. It was white in the center — the kind of temperature that didn't announce itself with color but with the immediate sensation of air being removed from the space around it. The fire hit the lake and the clay and the mud simultaneously, and the chemistry of it produced steam in volumes that eliminated visibility in seconds. The valley became a white nothing. The temperature climbed with the speed of a pressure wave.
On the ridge, Finn felt it hit his face through what should have been adequate distance.
"He's vitrifying the whole valley," he said. "Water into steam, mud into fired clay, the clay into ceramic. The statue's feet are going to be cast into the ground."
Orochimaru was quiet for a moment. "I had not considered that he could do this."
"Neither had I, honestly." Finn watched the white wall below. "He used this combination to defeat an entire army when he was young. One man. I had dismissed the demigod title as generational inflation." A pause. "I was not entirely correct."
The steam cleared when the whirlwind came — a natural consequence of the temperature differential, hot air rising and cold air rushing in to replace it, the pressure difference generating its own weather. The valley resolved back into visibility in stages.
The Gedo Mazo was fixed.
Not restrained by chains or technique — it was simply in the ground, its lower half encased in what had been mud and was now ceramic, fired at temperatures that had turned the surrounding lake into scattered puddles of cooling material. The statue's surface was scorched and cracked where the clay had coated it. It could not move its feet. Its arms still worked, but the leverage was gone.
Hanzo looked at this and exhaled. Let himself feel the satisfaction of an old combination he had not used in decades executing exactly as designed.
Then he looked at the top of the statue's head.
Nagato stood there.
The black rods through his back were still there. The chakra drain was visible in his face and his body, the gauntness now severe, the Uzumaki reserves that should have taken much longer to deplete running out faster because the Gedo Mazo was taking more than it had been given. He looked like someone who had been sick for a long time and had recently gotten worse.
He did not look disheveled. His expression was blank in the specific way of someone who has moved past shock and arrived at something simpler.
"Damn it," Hanzo said.
Nagato's palm came up.
"Universal Pull."
The suction reached for Hanzo across the distance between them and found him before he finished the thought of avoiding it. His feet left the ceramic valley floor. His body was going in a direction he had not chosen.
His hands were already forming seals. Last time this happened he had converted the momentum into an attack. Last time, the sickle and the element of surprise had been enough to break the technique's hold.
This time, Nagato had a different expression. The last time's panic was not present. He had learned from the exchange.
From the ridge, Finn smiled under the mask he was pulling on.
The mask was plain white, the simplest kind — no design, no significance, just sufficient to make the face unreadable. He stepped to the edge of the ridge.
"Go!" he said, and his voice carried across the valley. "Master Hanzo — we're here on Danzo Shimura's instruction. We're here to help!"
Hanzo's head turned toward the sound involuntarily.
He processed what he saw: two masked figures, neither wearing Root uniforms, moving fast along the ridge. The larger one had a haori. The other — even through a mask, even at this distance — moved like someone he had faced once before, in a different war, when the world had been configured differently.
Orochimaru.
If Orochimaru was here on Danzo's behalf, then the mask beside him was presumably someone Danzo trusted to work beside Orochimaru, which placed them in a category that Hanzo classified as significant.
His arms were still being pulled by Nagato's suction.
The masked man in the haori was forming hand seals. Hanzo watched the seals and noted that several of them were not recognizable — not misexecuted, not simplified, simply not in any sequence he had encountered before. Either this person had developed original technique, or the seals were decorative. Either option was concerning in different ways.
"Universal Pull!"
The shout came from Finn's direction, and then it arrived — the same suction force that Nagato was already deploying, but from the opposite direction, pulling Hanzo back toward the ridge while Nagato was pulling him toward the statue.
The two forces met inside Hanzo's body.
He felt them as competing pressures, one forward, one back, neither yielding, both operating through the same mechanism with similar authority. His internal organs registered an opinion about this that he did not have time to fully hear. He coughed blood.
Nagato stared at the masked man. He stared at the technique. He was running a check against everything he knew about what he was doing, and the check was not completing cleanly.
That is my technique.
The masked man formed another seal — this one deliberate, unhurried, the contrast with the previous random sequence making it feel like punctuation.
The ceramic valley floor — the material Hanzo had just manufactured — responded. The fired clay fractured under the instruction of gravity, the pieces lifting, the gravitational field that Finn applied redirecting the mass upward and outward toward Nagato's position with the efficient economy of a technique that was borrowing the work someone else had already done.
The debris field moved toward Nagato and the statue.
Nagato straightened.
"Almighty Push!"
The repulsive force exploded outward and met the debris field in the air between them. The two forces — Finn's gravity pulling everything toward Nagato, Nagato's repulsion pushing everything away from himself — locked in the space above the valley and the rock ground between them became powder in the compression, became floating dust that neither force could quite claim.
The sky had cleared. The clouds that had been permanent features of the Rain Country sky were physically displaced by the pressure differential, pushed outward in a ring, and for a moment the valley had actual light in it — pale and thin, but light.
Nagato's body was getting smaller again. Not metaphorically — the drain of maintaining the Almighty Push against a force that was not stopping, while the Gedo Mazo's connection continued pulling chakra from his reserves, was registering on his physical frame in real time. He was being consumed by his own power.
Under his mask, Finn was still smiling.
"Black Oblivion," he said, quietly enough that only Orochimaru heard it.
The Gedo Mazo's surface began to change. The darkness that belonged to the Darkness-Darkness Fruit moved through the ceramic around the statue's base and into the statue's surface itself — not attacking it, not sealing it yet, simply introducing an element into the equation that the Almighty Push had not been designed to account for. The dark energy diffused into the space around Nagato, threading through the repulsion field without triggering it, arriving where the repulsion was generated.
The Almighty Push dimmed. A fraction. Enough.
Gravity closed the fraction.
The debris hit the statue with the weight of a collapsed ceiling. Nagato stumbled — his legs were not working, they had not been working, and the impact through the statue's frame translated upward and he came off the top of the statue's head and was falling.
"Move," Finn said.
Orochimaru was already gone from beside him.
The movement that followed was not human in its geometry — Orochimaru's body extended, joints releasing their expected constraints, the snake nature that sat below the surface of everything he did expressing itself directly as he crossed the distance to the valley in a line that bypassed the concept of the ground. He reached the statue, collected Konan from where the Gedo Mazo's hand had deposited her, collected Yahiko's body, and was retreating before the next second had fully arrived.
Finn turned back to the valley.
He raised one hand toward the Gedo Mazo — still fixed in the ceramic floor, still roaring, still massive in every dimension that mass could be measured.
He brought his palm closed.
The dark energy that had been threading through the statue's surface answered. The Darkness-Darkness Fruit's sealing function was not subtle — it did not negotiate with what it enclosed. The center of the Gedo Mazo became a point of absolute absorption, the mass of the statue folding inward toward that point, and the roar it produced became the sound of something very large being reduced to something that fit inside a defined boundary.
Thirty seconds.
A dark cube hung in the air above the valley floor. Three to five meters on each side. Perfectly still. The Gedo Mazo was in it.
The suction forces on Hanzo's body had stopped when Finn sealed the statue. He landed badly, his feet finding the ceramic at an angle, and coughed blood again as the competing pressures he had been absorbing for the last thirty seconds finished their work on his internal state.
He looked at the cube.
He looked at the valley, which had been a valley and was now a geological statement about what happens when water, earth, fire, gravity, and a sealed legendary entity interact in the same space.
He looked at the masked man in the haori.
Hanzo of the Salamander had, in his career, made a practice of accurate threat assessment. He was making one now. It was completing very quickly and the output was unambiguous.
He did not say goodbye. He used the first body-flicker, then the second, then the third, and the fourth, each one carrying him further from the valley and faster than the one before.
In seconds, he was gone.
The Rain Country's sky, briefly cleared of cloud, was already drawing the gray back in from the edges.