Neither Finn nor Orochimaru entered Konoha this time.
Danzo came out to meet them, moving quickly and with uncharacteristic energy for a man of his bearing, two mute Root operatives a few paces behind him. He was trying not to look eager and not entirely succeeding.
"How did it go?" he asked. "Was it successful?"
"The Yorozuya completes its contracts," Finn said. "We said we'd deliver a tailed beast. We delivered."
He shook a scroll from his sleeve and passed it to Danzo. Danzo opened it immediately and looked inside. The interior was entirely black, the contents of the sealing utterly opaque.
"Standard seal-breaking methods will open it," Orochimaru said, without being asked.
Danzo didn't question this. He'd had no reason to distrust the Yorozuya on operational matters before, and he had no reason to now. He closed the scroll and tucked it away, and something in his posture settled into the specific quality of a man who had just acquired something he'd been wanting for a long time.
"And the other matter?" he asked.
"Exactly as we expected," Orochimaru said.
Danzo smiled, and the smile had a quality that was not quite right, the way something well-made in the wrong material has a quality that isn't quite right.
This had been, by any accounting, an exceptional outcome. He had the Three-Tails. He had a completed operation that he could present — if he chose to present it — as a Root intelligence success: the identification and neutralization of a Hidden Mist conspiracy, and the recovery of a tailed beast as a strategic asset. The two things together constituted a genuinely significant achievement.
There had been a casualty. Some girl, a teammate of Sakumo's son and one of Minato's students — Nohara Rin. She was dead. Danzo had noted this the way you note a weather detail, and had moved on.
"Shall I verify the contents?" Danzo asked.
"Up to you," Finn said. "But our reputation is public record."
"True." Danzo shook his head. "I trust you." He meant it as a practical statement. The Yorozuya had killed the Land of Earth's daimyo when it said it would and had not deviated from agreed terms once in any operation Danzo could trace. Trust, in this context, was a word that meant consistent behavior more than it meant warmth. "The reward."
He produced a scroll from his own sleeve and extended it. "Two techniques. Both S-rank."
Finn took it without ceremony and opened it.
He read through the first entry. He moved to the second. His expression, by the time he looked up, had taken on a quality that was not quite a smile and not quite not a smile.
Danzo had the good grace to look marginally uncomfortable. He held the expression in place through apparent effort.
The two techniques were, in the strict technical sense of the category, both S-rank forbidden techniques of genuine power. Danzo had not lied. He had also chosen with some care.
The first was the Dead Demon Consuming Seal — the Shiki Fūjin. An Uzumaki clan technique that had found its way into Konoha's restricted archive, currently deployable by exactly three people in the village: Minato Namikaze, who had learned it from Kushina; Hiruzen Sarutobi, who had access to it by virtue of the Hokage's library; and Kushina herself, who had come by it through her bloodline. The technique summoned the God of Death — the Shinigami — bound the target's soul along with the user's own, and pulled both into the Shinigami's stomach for eternity. Mutual consumption. The caster did not survive the technique in any normal application.
Of the three current Konoha practitioners, two would eventually die using it. One would come very close.
The second technique was the Four Symbols Sealing Method — specifically the inner variant that Danzo had apparently included for reasons of his own. The Four Symbols Seal was principally used for Jinchuriki applications, a mechanism for binding a tailed beast's chakra within a host. The inner variant had a somewhat different character: deployed at its limit, it would consume everything within several hundred meters and drag it all into the underworld together. A complete dissolution. The kind of technique a person used when they had decided that dying alone was not an acceptable outcome.
Danzo knew exactly what both of these techniques did to their users. He knew because he'd studied sealing and curse techniques for decades — Root was built on them — and the Shiki Fūjin in particular was something he'd been aware of since Hiruzen's era.
He had given Finn two techniques that would, in any practical application, kill him.
Finn looked up at Shimura Danzo.
"You're pushing it," Finn said.
Danzo cleared his throat. "I have my own considerations."
"I know what your considerations are." Finn's voice had not risen. It was, if anything, quieter than it had been a moment before. "You're not going to give an outside actor anything that materially improves his position without some assurance it costs him something. That's a reasonable principle. You've applied it here about as aggressively as you could without it being an obvious insult." He paused. "At least you didn't hand me the Shadow Clone Technique. If you'd done that, we'd be having a different conversation."
Danzo made a sound that was almost a chuckle. "I'm glad your expectations were calibrated."
"I want you to understand something." Finn's expression shifted. The pleasantness was still there, technically, but underneath it something had changed — a quality in the eyes that hadn't been there a moment before, a weight that was separate from the conversation's words. Danzo's Root operatives behind him did not move, but the quality of their stillness changed.
"If we work together again, and you bring me something like this a second time," Finn said, "I'll know exactly what you think of me. And I will respond accordingly."
The murderous intent was not loud. It was present the way a depth is present — you couldn't see the bottom, and the awareness of that fact was the significant thing. Danzo had been in enough rooms with enough dangerous people over enough decades to recognize when he was in the presence of something that could end him without particular effort.
His hair stood.
And then Finn smiled — the bright, uncomplicated smile, as if the previous three seconds hadn't happened.
"When I get angry," he said cheerfully, "I worry about myself."
Danzo swallowed. "Next time, I'll be more sincere."
He had no immediate interest in a next time, to be clear. But there was no advantage in saying so.
"Good." Finn folded the scroll back up. "Accounts settled. I'm not going into Konoha — I have other things to attend to." He looked at Orochimaru. "You?"
Orochimaru thought about it. "Nothing pressing in the village. And I have a question for you. I'll come."
He turned to Danzo once more. "Don't attach my name to this operation. Attribute it however you like. I don't want the credit."
Danzo absorbed this with visible pleasure. Orochimaru had just handed him an uncontested success with no one else claiming attribution. "Understood. You won't be mentioned."
Orochimaru nodded and fell into step alongside Finn.
They walked.
Behind them, Danzo stood for a moment and then turned to his operatives. "Monitor the Rain Country closely over the coming weeks. I want regular reports on the situation there."
"Yes, Lord Danzo."
The road away from Konoha was quiet in the afternoon light. Orochimaru walked with his hands at his sides, and after a moment he said: "The Shiki Fūjin and the Four Symbols inner variant. I haven't handled either of them directly. Both are quite powerful."
"They are," Finn agreed.
Orochimaru glanced at the scroll in Finn's possession. "I've always had an interest in sealing techniques."
"Have you," Finn said.
A pause. "Yes."
"Interesting. So have I."
Orochimaru looked at him sideways. He understood the dynamic. He had found himself in this position once already, with a different scroll, and had needed to navigate the specific social geometry of asking for something from someone who was going to make you ask for it properly. He found this aspect of the relationship occasionally irritating.
He didn't say anything more.
Finn walked with him for another minute, and then laughed — a real one, with the quality of someone who had been waiting to see how long the standoff would last. He held the scroll out.
"Go study it. Danzo's intent was bad, but the techniques themselves are real. And there's a non-trivial chance he planned to request them back later through some mechanism or other — better to have someone who understands the contents fully." He paused. "Theoretically."
Orochimaru took the scroll with the composure of someone who had not been waiting for it. "Then I won't stand on ceremony."
They walked in silence for a moment.
"You didn't end the partnership," Orochimaru said. "Two techniques designed to kill their user, given as payment, and you walked away still willing to work with him."
"He's useful. The relationship has value even when the individual transaction is unfavorable." Finn turned this over with the ease of someone who had spent decades in environments where this calculation was made regularly. "Think about what he's going to do with the Three-Tails. If he has any intelligence, he'll attempt to create a Jinchuriki using it — try to control the power through a host. If he has less intelligence, he'll keep it sealed and do nothing useful with it." He shrugged. "Either way, when the time comes for someone to begin collecting the tailed beasts in earnest — and that time is coming — Danzo will be among the first to lose whatever he's holding. The tailed beast we gave him is eventually going to be reclaimed. Danzo's participation in its custody is temporary. I haven't actually given up anything of lasting value."
Orochimaru considered this. "And you don't need Isobu's chakra yourself."
"I have no shortage of chakra." This was, at this point, an understatement. The Dark-Dark Fruit's conversion of ambient dark elements had been running continuously for well over a year, and the total volume had long since passed any threshold where a tailed beast's contribution would register as meaningful. "A Jinchuriki enhancement would be redundant."
"I collected some of the Three-Tails' residual chakra during the operation," Orochimaru said, with the particular casualness of someone mentioning something they've thought about for longer than the casual mention implies. "For research purposes."
"I assumed."
"The Eight-Tails cells I obtained when we were operating in the Hidden Cloud region have been maturing for nearly two years now." Orochimaru's voice was even. "The development has been more interesting than I expected. The cellular structure is quite extraordinary. I've been working on a question that may seem impractical — whether the essential character of a tailed beast, the concentrated mass of chakra that constitutes its existence, can be approximated artificially."
Finn looked at him. "Artificially reproduced tailed beast chakra."
"In a limited form. Not a true tailed beast — the philosophical questions about what a tailed beast is become inconvenient if you take them seriously — but something functionally analogous in terms of concentrated chakra mass and output." Orochimaru paused. "The Eight-Tails material has produced something I could describe as a horn. A structure of concentrated chakra with properties consistent with what the original would produce. Incomplete. But real."
Finn found this simultaneously impressive and somewhat outside his ability to fully model. The nature of tailed beasts as chakra entities — the question of whether you could simply make more of that — sat at the intersection of questions about what chakra was and what identity was, and he wasn't sure Orochimaru's way of thinking about identity was reliable enough to trust on questions like these. But the practical result was apparently real, and Orochimaru's practical results generally were.
"The Kagami Mangekyō," Orochimaru said, moving on. "Is it still intact? I'd like to use it for the Sharingan research."
"Sasori has it," Finn said. "I'll have it sent to you. No objection."
"Good."
He had been expecting Orochimaru to come around to the Sharingan eventually. The observation in the rain-soaked field — watching Obito use Wood Release and Mangekyō simultaneously, watching Orochimaru's mind run the calculation about Sage Body and Sharingan as complementary poles — had clearly landed. All the seed had needed was the right moment.
They walked for a while longer before Orochimaru asked: "The full scope of Madara's conspiracy. Tell me."
Finn thought for a moment, organizing the shape of it.
"This is going to take a while," he said. "It's a long story." He began.