The wait ended when the ground opened beside his feet.
Black and White Zetsu emerged with the particular quality of bad news that knows it is bad news. Even the division of color on Zetsu's body looked wrong somehow — the black side darker than usual, the white side too still.
Obito looked at them. "What happened."
"A significant problem," Black Zetsu said.
Obito had been accumulating a private inventory of significant problems since waking up in this cave with half his body made of plant material and a dead man's plan loaded into his skull. He had lost Lin. He had inherited a centuries-long conspiracy. He had been turned away by Nagato on his first attempt at recruitment. He had watched the war end without anything useful happening. Now, apparently, there was more.
"Tell me," he said.
Black Zetsu told him methodically. The sequence in the Rain Country had gone correctly at first: Yahiko had died, Nagato had felt it, the grief had converted into the anger the plan required, and the Rinnegan had activated properly. The Gedo Mazo had been summoned. Nagato had deployed it against Hanzo, and by Black Zetsu's assessment the outcome was already determined — it was only a question of how long Hanzo could maintain the fight before the Rinnegan's power settled the matter.
Then Rodriguez Finn and Orochimaru had appeared.
"They had a contract on Hanzo," Black Zetsu said. "Through the dark world. There was a standing bounty. They used Danzo's name as cover to approach the fight — presenting themselves as Konoha reinforcements — and then used that position to attack Nagato."
"Used Danzo's name," Obito repeated, parsing this. "While actually working against Danzo's interests?"
"Apparently. The mechanism isn't clear. What's clear is the outcome."
White Zetsu finished the sentence: "Finn killed Nagato. He broke through the Almighty Push and killed him directly."
Obito said nothing for a moment.
He ran it back from the beginning. He had been given a plan by the most powerful figure in the previous century. A plan with moving parts that had been set in motion before he was born, including the Rinnegan transplanted into Nagato as an infant and the Gedo Mazo bound to it. He had been told that his role was to inherit this plan and carry it to completion. He had been given Madara's techniques, Madara's knowledge, Madara's organizational intelligence. He had said yes.
The first operational phase of the plan, which was specifically about Nagato and the Rinnegan, had been destroyed by a third party before Obito had done anything at all.
He thought about the Hokage's office. The view from the seat. Himself in it, having come back from the dead, telling the story of everything that had happened to him. Kakashi probably standing there, older, confused. The village welcoming one of its own back.
Is it too late, he thought, and the thought was completely sincere for approximately four seconds.
"Nagato is dead," he said.
"Yes."
"And the Rinnegan—"
"In Finn's possession," Black Zetsu said. The expression on the black side of its face was communicating something specific, which was that thousands of years of planning could, in fact, encounter a variable that hadn't been accounted for. "He extracted the eyes and took them."
"And the Gedo Mazo."
"Sealed. Finn sealed the Outer Path Statue into some kind of containment technique. It has not returned. The summoning anchor no longer functions."
Obito sat with this.
Without the Rinnegan, Uchiha Madara could not be resurrected. Without the Gedo Mazo, the collection mechanism for the tailed beasts — the apparatus through which they would be absorbed and the Ten-Tails reconstituted — was simply absent. Both of these things were now in the hands of a man who had no idea the Moon Eye Project existed and would not have joined it if he did.
The plan, as delivered to him by its architect, had collapsed before it started.
He was aware that he should feel anger or despair or the specific terrible energy that came from having one's purpose destroyed. What he mostly felt was a particular kind of tired bewilderment, the feeling of someone who has been handed a very complicated machine and then watched it break before he could figure out what it was supposed to do.
"What do we do," he said, which was the only question that remained.
"Contact the Yorozuya," Black Zetsu said. "Finn has the Rinnegan and the Outer Path Statue. If we can bring him into the plant then those assets come with him. The situation that looks like a catastrophe could become an accelerant."
It was a reasonable argument and Black Zetsu delivered it with the composure of an entity that had failed across multiple timespans and had developed methods for recovering from failure. Obito knew this, abstractly. Madara had told him something about the history of the plan, about the long patience required.
Obito had not expected to need the long patience on the first day.
"I'll go," he said.
"No," Black Zetsu said, immediately and sharply enough that Obito turned to look at it.
"Why not?"
Black Zetsu gathered itself. "Because the situation has deteriorated to the point where any further mistake is unacceptable. And going in person, at this stage, before we understand what Finn actually wants and what he actually knows, is a mistake." The reasoning came out organized, which meant it had been prepared. "He has the Rinnegan. He is demonstrably more powerful than Nagato. If you approach him directly and he decides you're a threat or a nuisance, we're finished. You need to be preserved as the final asset. The last person standing between this plan and collapse."
Obito thought about it. "So I stay hidden."
"You stay protected. We approach him through other means. We make contact through the Yorozuya's established channels — the dark world networks, the bounty and contract structures they use. We present something that interests him."
"And what interests him?"
"Power," Black Zetsu said. "Ninjutsu. He takes high-value missions and requires advanced techniques as payment — it's documented across multiple exchanges. He's a person who measures value in capability, not ideology. The Moon Eye Project cannot be the pitch. He won't accept it and it reveals too much. But power — access to techniques, to assets, to information no one else has — that's a language he understands."
Obito processed this. In the original shape of the plan, he had been the face — the person who confronted people, recruited them, intimidated them into cooperation when persuasion failed. Madara had designed the plan with Obito in the visible role. What Black Zetsu was proposing was that Obito become the hidden role, the final reserve, while something else made the initial contact.
He wasn't opposed to this on principle. He had been willing to bow his head to Nagato's theoretical superiority in the original plan's design. Bowing to Finn's demonstrated superiority was the same logic applied to a real situation rather than a hypothetical one.
"Fine," he said. "You make the contact."
"Carefully," Black Zetsu said. "And slowly. He's perceptive. Any approach that feels like manipulation will fail immediately and cost us the relationship."
Obito looked at the empty cave around him — the place where Madara had died, the tubes disconnected and lying on the floor, the chair that had kept him alive facing the wall.
"Take your time," he said. "We apparently have plenty of it."
He picked up the scroll he'd been working through before any of this happened and found his place.
Outside the cave, White Zetsu dissolved back into the ground, already moving through the root networks toward whatever direction Black Zetsu had decided to approach first.
Black Zetsu watched Obito read and conducted its own calculations.
The Rinnegan was with Finn. The Outer Path Statue was with Finn. Rin was with Finn. Every critical piece of the Moon Eye Project's infrastructure was now associated with a single man who had no stake in the project's success and had demonstrated, clearly, that he was comfortable acquiring things that belonged to other people's plans.
This was a very uncomfortable position.
It was also, Black Zetsu conceded to itself, a different kind of problem than it had faced before. The plan had run for thousands of years on the assumption that the Rinnegan would be the most powerful variable in the final phase. Now there was someone who had taken the Rinnegan from the person using it, in direct confrontation, and sealed the Gedo Mazo as a secondary action.
That was a new kind of variable.
Whether it was a catastrophe or a resource depended entirely on what Finn wanted, and what Finn could be made to want.
Black Zetsu began planning the first contact.