Inside the crater he'd made in the rock wall, Jiraiya coughed once and released the Needle Jizō. His body's defensive technique had held — the needles had not broken — but the force behind Finn's kick had transferred through the defense regardless and put him through twelve meters of solid stone.
He spat blood, which helped. The pressure in his chest eased slightly.
Almost Tsunade's level, he thought, taking inventory of himself. Almost.
He'd underestimated. That was simply true and there was no point dressing it differently. The combination of the Lightning Release Chakra Mode's speed and whatever that physical constitution was — not quite Senju, not quite anything he had a category for — had produced an impact that he hadn't positioned himself to absorb properly. He'd know for next time.
There wasn't much space between that thought and Finn's return. The indigo lightning appeared at the edge of the crater rim, and then Finn was above him, one leg rising and coming down in an overhead drop kick that had the specific geometry of something meant to split the problem in half vertically.
Jiraiya's palm hit the blood on the ground in front of him.
"Summoning Technique!"
The white smoke that preceded every summon expanded across the crater floor, and through it came the impact — Finn's foot landing on something that was not the ground. The resistance that pushed back against the kick was substantial. Not enough to stop it entirely, but enough to absorb the momentum and redirect it.
The smoke cleared.
A toad nearly twice Jiraiya's height stood in the crater, iron bracers crossed over its forearms, those forearms taking the weight of Finn's leg with visible effort. Its face had the quality of someone who had been asked to do this before and hadn't gotten used to it.
"Jiraiya," the Iron-Armed Toad said, in recognizably human speech. "Every time."
"I didn't know he was this strong," Jiraiya said. He was already upright, wiping the blood from the corner of his mouth. "I apologize."
"My arm feels like it's inside out." The toad looked at Finn. "You're a new face. Jiraiya speaks of capturing you like it's already decided."
Finn retracted his leg and stepped back. "Rodriguez Finn. The Yorozuya." He was looking at the toad with the particular attention of someone examining something they'd been curious about for a long time. "From Myoboku Mountain."
"That's right." The toad rotated its forearm experimentally, checking for damage. Then it paused. "Your chakra is... that's tailed beast range. Are you a jinchuriki?"
"No," Finn said.
"Then what—" The toad looked more carefully. Its perception, whatever mechanism it used, was finding something else underneath the chakra volume. "That vitality. That's Senju-level biological activity. Are you from the Senju clan?"
"No," Finn said again.
The toad accepted this without visible frustration. "Unusual," it said, and seemed to mean it as a neutral observation.
Finn tilted his head slightly. "I've been wanting to ask someone from Myoboku Mountain something. I'm interested in senjutsu. What are the prospects for an outsider?"
The Iron-Armed Toad looked at him. Then at Jiraiya. Then back at Finn. The battle had paused in the way battles sometimes do when both participants have something more immediately interesting to talk about.
"Possible," the toad said, after a moment. "You'd need to find the Mountain, and pass the assessment. Whether you can learn after that is between you and what you can do."
"How do I find it?"
"That's—" the toad started, and then Finn's posture shifted very slightly. What came from him was not visible. But the Iron-Armed Toad, which had been preparing to say something diplomatic about destiny and the natural order of finding sacred places, found that it could not move. The darkness that had settled around it was not heavy in the physical sense but was absolute in the specific sense: it simply could not generate the chakra required to release the summoning connection and return to Myoboku.
"I'm not actually planning to keep you," Finn said. "I just wanted to demonstrate something." He withdrew the dark field completely. "Don't be confident about exits you haven't tested."
The Iron-Armed Toad looked at its own forearms for a moment. "What was that?"
"A bloodline limit," Finn said.
The toad was quiet for a moment. Then, with the bearing of someone making a considered decision: "If you make it to Myoboku Mountain, I'll put in a word with the Great Toad Sage. No promises about the outcome, but I'll speak for you."
"That's all I need," Finn said. He meant it.
Jiraiya, watching this exchange, had the expression of a man trying to identify the precise moment when control of a situation moved somewhere he hadn't intended. He shook his head slightly. "I'm not telling you where Myoboku Mountain is."
"You will eventually," Finn said, pleasantly.
"Hahaha—no."
"We'll see." Finn looked at him. "You were about to enter Sage Mode."
Jiraiya hadn't actually said that. But the gathering of natural energy that he'd been managing quietly in the background since the conversation shifted had apparently not gone unnoticed. He considered being offended by this and decided it was a waste of attention.
"I was," he said. He settled his hands in front of him, closed his eyes, and began the process properly.
Finn waited. The Iron-Armed Toad, apparently also curious about the outcome, remained present rather than departing.
Sage Mode was not something that activated like a switch. It required sustained receptivity — the practitioner opening their physical and chakra systems to the natural energy that permeated the environment, drawing it in slowly enough that it integrated rather than disrupted. Too fast and the energy overwhelmed the biological container and began converting it. The balance was the skill, and the skill took years. Jiraiya had years.
The change was visible as it progressed. Pigmentation appeared around his eyes — the dark marking that was the external sign of successful natural energy integration. His skin developed a slightly different quality, the faintest texture of something that was not quite human physiology anymore. His presence in the space around him increased, not louder but denser, as if the air had decided to accommodate him more seriously.
"Sage Mode," Jiraiya said quietly.
The momentum that came off him was different in character from what Finn had been dealing with before. Jiraiya without Sage Mode was a top-rank combatant with decades of experience and technically refined ninjutsu. Jiraiya with Sage Mode was something that had integrated with the world's foundational energy layer and was operating from inside it rather than on top of it.
He disappeared.
Finn's Observation Haki extended automatically — and found something it wasn't used to finding. Not nothing. Not a clean absence. Something more like interference, the way very bright light doesn't make objects more visible but less. Jiraiya's integration with natural energy meant that his presence was distributed through the environment rather than concentrated in a single location. Haki, which read intent and life force, was finding those qualities everywhere rather than in one place.
Finn's eyes sharpened.
This was new. Natural energy was the foundational law of this world, and that meant it was older and more fundamental than any power system he'd arrived with. Of course it interacted with Observation Haki in ways that individual techniques didn't. The logic was consistent. It didn't make it less inconvenient.
The first strike came from his left. He turned to meet it — the force behind it was considerably greater than anything Jiraiya had produced before Sage Mode, speed and strength both elevated in the way that natural energy amplification produced when it was done correctly. Finn blocked, felt the impact, and gave ground because giving ground was more efficient than absorbing it.
They moved across the mountain terrain in exchanges that were fast enough that the Iron-Armed Toad was following it with effort. Sage Mode Jiraiya's physical parameters had moved into a different tier — not Finn's tier, but close enough that the gap which had been comfortable before was now merely present.
Finn raised his arm to block a punch. Both of them stopped for half a second, breathing, a mutual pause in which both of them assessed their position.
Jiraiya's free hand moved without announcement.
"Rasengan!"
Not a large one. Not a technique-sized one. The Rasengan Jiraiya had been developing since the Fourth Hokage's concept was handed to him had none of the limitations that a technique dependent on hand seals would have — it was pure chakra control, generated and maintained through sustained rotational discipline, scaled to whatever the user's control and volume would support. Jiraiya's control was extraordinary. The Rasengan that appeared in his palm was compact and precisely calibrated and moving at Finn's abdomen before the word finished leaving his mouth.
The Lightning Release Armor registered the incoming force. It pushed back. The Rasengan pushed through it — not completely, not catastrophically, but enough. The rotational energy of the technique was of a different quality from a straight physical strike, and the lightning armor's resistance, which had been built up across months of practice rather than decades of refinement, was not as solid against it as it was against simpler forces.
The impact hit Finn's midsection and pushed.
He went back five steps. Each foot left a deep impression in the rocky ground — he was driving the force into the earth through his legs rather than letting it carry him, distributing it through his own structure. He stopped moving on the sixth step.
Jiraiya's eyes had the brightness of a man who has found the angle. He leaped — high, covering the distance in a single movement — and the chakra in his hand had already expanded, fed by natural energy, becoming something that filled the air around it rather than occupying a specific point in it.
"Sage Art — Super Great Ball Rasengan!"
The technique that descended toward Finn was not the size of a hand or an arm or even a person. It was the size of the Iron-Armed Toad, which was watching from the perimeter with both forearms raised slightly in unconscious reflex. The rotational force it contained was audible before it arrived.
Finn didn't move sideways.
The darkness that came from him was dense and immediate, spreading from his frame outward in every direction with the specific gravity of the Dark-Dark Fruit's absorption working at full output. It rose to meet the descending Rasengan and wrapped around it, the dark field conforming to the technique's shape and pulling inward—
"Black Void."
The two forces met.