"During the Second Ninja World War, Hanzo was a different kind of person," Sasori said, continuing from where they'd left off as they worked their way through the base. "Broad-minded. Genuinely magnanimous. He had a reputation for respecting ability regardless of whose side it came from — he spared Mifune of the Land of Iron on the battlefield because he was moved by the man's conviction. He gave the three Konoha shinobi their title because he was impressed that they survived. At that stage, he was the kind of person who could win and still appreciate the people he'd beaten."
"Yes," Finn said. That version of Hanzo matched what he knew.
"After the war ended badly, something changed. The confidence is gone. He's surrounded himself with personal bodyguards — I've heard more than a dozen elite protectors assigned specifically to him, rotating in shifts. He doesn't trust anyone who isn't in his immediate inner circle." Sasori finished rolling one of his supply scrolls and set it aside. "Someone who spent decades fighting three major village militaries simultaneously and never lost — that man is now afraid. The belief that sustained him isn't there anymore."
"The title held but the man behind it didn't," Finn said.
He thought about Hanzo's arc honestly. In his peak, the demigod designation had been entirely earned — during the Second War, Jiraiya, Tsunade, and Orochimaru had attacked him alongside an entire unit of Konoha shinobi. Hanzo had emerged from that engagement without meaningful damage, while every other person on the Konoha side was killed. The three who survived became the Sannin because Hanzo chose to let them live rather than because they'd pushed him to that point. That was the scale of the man at his best.
The only defeat on Hanzo's record, across his entire career, had come from Nagato. And that defeat had been final.
Before that ending, though: decades of unbroken success, a country elevated to genuine regional relevance by one man's force of will, and a reputation that the entire ninja world had recognized and named. The fall from that to a paranoid leader surrounded by guards, suspicious of a youth organization in his own territory, eventually conspiring with Danzo Shimura to kill idealistic children — it was not a small distance to travel.
"Once this war ends," Sasori said, "the Akatsuki conflict will surface immediately. Hanzo can tolerate the external pressure right now because he needs every functional force in the Rain Country pointed outward. When that pressure lifts, he'll turn his attention inward, and the Akatsuki have been growing large enough to qualify as a threat to his authority."
"And Akatsuki needs to keep growing to have any legitimacy beyond the Rain Country's borders," Finn said. "They can't claim to speak for regional peace if they don't actually represent their own country. The conflict is structurally inevitable."
Sasori nodded. He moved to the next storage area without breaking stride.
Finn watched him for a moment. He'd known Sasori was perceptive — that was apparent from their first meeting. But the quality of this particular analysis was something different. Sasori had grown up in the Sand Village's inner circles, absorbing the way people in positions of genuine power thought about regional dynamics and long-term stability. That background produced a specific kind of clarity about how institutions and individuals failed. He could map the structure of a situation and read its likely outcomes without sentiment getting in the way.
"I didn't know you had this in you," Finn said.
Sasori glanced at him. "What?"
"Strategic analysis. Real strategic analysis. If I'd had you in the Marine, I'd have put you directly into intelligence."
Sasori's expression did something brief and slightly uncomfortable, the way someone's face moves when they receive a compliment they don't know how to categorize. He returned to packing.
"Who wins?" Finn asked. "Between Hanzo and Akatsuki, if it comes to direct conflict."
"Hanzo," Sasori said, without hesitation. "It's not close. Yahiko is a capable person, but he has no combat reputation that matters at the level Hanzo operates. Hanzo's spirit may be diminished, but his actual technique isn't. He's not going to lose to someone whose primary weapon is persuasion."
Finn patted his shoulder. "You're still young."
"What does that mean?"
"It means the most dangerous weapon in the ninja world isn't any technique. It's someone willing to say things that other people won't." Finn smiled. "But we can debate that later."
Sasori frowned but didn't pursue it.
"Here's what I want to ask you," Finn said, shifting. "The Rain Country — what do you think about us using it as a base? Not the Land of Birds. The Rain Country."
Sasori paused. "With four people?"
"Four now. Possibly more later."
"We don't need a country," Sasori said. "We need a lab and a supply chain. This base was more than sufficient for what we actually do."
"Think about your materials," Finn said. "Every rare component you work with — how do you currently acquire it?"
"Dark world purchases. High prices, irregular availability, occasional quality problems."
"Right. Now imagine you have the administrative infrastructure of an entire country behind you. You can direct search and acquisition efforts. You have people, you have routes, you have institutional access to resources that aren't available on the open market." Finn spread his hands. "The Rain Country is small, but it's positioned centrally between the major powers. Anything you want to find or acquire, the access from there is better than from anywhere in the Land of Birds."
Sasori was quiet for a moment. "That's... actually reasonable."
"Of course it's reasonable."
"You have other reasons," Sasori said. He was looking at Finn with the quality of attention that was measuring rather than casual. "You're framing this as a resource argument, but you're thinking about something else."
Finn held his gaze without expression.
"It doesn't matter," Sasori said, and turned back to his packing. Whatever Finn's actual reasons were, the practical argument stood on its own merits. That was sufficient for Sasori's purposes.
Finn stood at the doorway and let the full plan assemble itself in his mind.
The public version was true as far as it went: the Rain Country's central position and accumulated infrastructure made it genuinely useful. But the deeper objective was specific. Nagato had been born with the Rinnegan — or more precisely, Nagato had been given the Rinnegan by Uchiha Madara as an infant, a long-term investment in a plan that would outlast Madara's own life. Those eyes represented the most sophisticated optical technique in the ninja world's history, capable of accessing the full range of the Six Paths' power. Studying them while they were still in active use in a living person was a research opportunity that wouldn't present itself under normal circumstances.
Madara himself was barely alive at this point. Ancient, sustained only by the Outer Path Demon Statue's life-extending properties, waiting out his final years until he could hand his plans to someone else. After the Battle of Kannabi Bridge, after the Water Country's conspiracy against the Hidden Leaf played out, he would entrust everything to a young man named Obito and then die. Obito would eventually come to the Rain Country to find Nagato, hoping to build the cooperation Madara had envisioned.
But if Finn intervened before that — during the Hanzo-Akatsuki conflict, when both sides would be focused entirely on each other — he could remove both obstacles simultaneously. Hanzo and whatever remained of the early Akatsuki. Seize the Rain Country in the aftermath. Acquire Nagato and the Rinnegan for study.
The Moon Eye Project, Madara's grand design for an infinite illusion cast over the entire world — Finn had no particular investment in preventing or enabling it. It was Obito's inherited obsession, and without Nagato and without the Akatsuki apparatus, Obito would have considerably fewer tools available for pursuing it. Whether that changed the eventual outcome wasn't something Finn needed to calculate right now. He had his own objectives.
Black Zetsu would be a complication, almost certainly. Kaguya's will made manifest, operating as Madara's shadow and steering events toward the revival of its creator. Finn had no illusion that it would simply allow the Rinnegan to be redirected out of the plan. That particular battle of wits might be interesting.
He was still thinking through the details when a small bird appeared at the cave entrance, spiraling down from somewhere above the tree line. He recognized it as Kakuzu's messenger — one of the ninja beasts used for communications through dark world channels. It had apparently been diverted, which meant it had already made a delivery somewhere else first.
Orochimaru had not walked far down the road from the Land of Birds when the bird found him.
He recognized it at once — Kakuzu's messenger. He hadn't expected to hear from the organization within hours of leaving. He caught the scroll it produced and unrolled it.
He read it twice.
They had decided to assassinate the Daimyo of the Land of Earth. They had given the organization a name — the Yorozuya, which was a word Orochimaru recognized and which sounded nothing like the kind of name a serious organization should carry. They were informing him as a courtesy. Did he want to participate?
He stood in the middle of the road and considered this for a moment.
He had been gone for less than half a day. He had left during dinner and apparently missed the entire decision-making process for an operation that would designate them all as international terrorist threats. No one had waited. No one had even sent a message before acting. The scroll he was holding was notification, not consultation.
And they had picked the name Yorozuya over the Azure Dragon Study Group.
He turned this over. If he had been present, he would have voted for Finn's suggestion. Not because it was a better name for an organization — it clearly wasn't, it was the nostalgic choice of a man who had been a student once and hadn't fully recovered from it — but because the Azure Dragon Study Group at least sounded like it might be doing something interesting. The Yorozuya sounded like a shop that fixed umbrellas and found missing cats.
One vote. One vote, and the outcome would have been different.
He picked up a pen from his sleeve, wrote four characters on the scroll, rolled it, and held it up. The bird took it and left.
The four characters were: Don't worry about me.
He stood on the road and looked at where it went ahead of him. Konoha was in that direction. Root's underground laboratory was in that direction. Danzo, and his demands, and the increasingly suffocating sense that the village had run out of room for someone with Orochimaru's specific ambitions — all of that was in that direction.
It felt, standing here, like a road that led somewhere he had already been.
He began walking anyway. Some things needed to be finished before they could be left behind.