Jiraiya landed twenty meters back and completed the second summoning before his feet fully settled. White smoke, smaller this time, and then two toads appeared — one on each shoulder, small enough that the size difference between them and the Iron-Armed Toad was considerable, but the weight of their presence was something else entirely.
The one on his right shoulder looked at the field in front of them. The one on his left looked at the field in front of them. Both of them appeared to be cataloguing.
"Little Jiraiya," said the right one. "You called for us."
"A serious opponent?" said the left. "It's been a while since that happened."
These were the Sage Toads, Fukasaku and Shima — the pair who had trained Jiraiya in the sage arts, who could merge their own natural energy with his to extend Sage Mode beyond what any single practitioner could maintain alone. Together on his shoulders, the three of them formed a combined system that was qualitatively different from what Jiraiya could do individually.
Both of them looked across at Finn. Then they looked at the residue of the Super Great Ball Rasengan, which had been absorbed so completely that there was nothing left to mark where it had been.
"That absorption technique," Jiraiya said. "It's taken two of my largest techniques already. I need something with a wider coverage area to test whether there's an upper limit."
Across the distance, Finn watched all of this and conducted a brief, honest internal assessment.
He had started this fight with a genuine intention to experience high-level ninja combat as a practitioner rather than as someone simply using power to end things. That was still a worthwhile goal. The problem was that Jiraiya in Sage Mode had exceeded what "experiencing it as a practitioner" was capable of producing. After the first several exchanges in Sage Mode, the educational return was diminishing rapidly toward zero and the physical accumulation was not. He was getting hit more than he found instructive.
The pragmatic conclusion was simple: stop being an honest student and start being whatever he actually was.
He raised one finger.
"One more move," he called across to Jiraiya. "After this one, you won't have another chance."
Jiraiya looked at the raised finger for a moment. "You're saying one technique finishes this."
"Roughly."
The expression that moved across Jiraiya's face was the specific expression of a man who decides to take something seriously. He looked at Fukasaku, then at Shima. Something passed between the three of them that didn't require words.
"That technique," Jiraiya said to them. "The big one."
"Little Jiraiya," Fukasaku said. "That technique could kill him."
He glanced across at Finn. He had been a sage long enough to read the quality of someone's presence more accurately than most, and what he read from Finn was not murderous intent and was not the presence of someone building toward a kill. Neither was Jiraiya's. The whole engagement had a quality he couldn't quite categorize — two people fighting as though they were testing something, with a layer of respect underneath the conflict that made the word "enemy" not quite accurate.
"I'm aware," Jiraiya said. "But that dark technique has taken everything else. The only variable I haven't tested is scale and coverage. If his darkness has a limit, the way to find it is maximum output across maximum area."
"Since you've decided," Shima said, and her tiny hands came together in front of her.
Fukasaku followed. The natural energy that Jiraiya had already integrated began to surge — not from him alone but from all three of them together, the combined pool of what a trained sage pair and a seasoned practitioner could accumulate in a short window. The air around them changed quality.
Jiraiya drew a slow breath. His chest and abdomen expanded.
Finn watched. The dark power between his fingers extended slightly, a quiet preparation, a field beginning to build.
"Sage Art—" Jiraiya opened his mouth— "Goemon!"
What came from him was not fire. It was oil — a surging, pressurized stream of it, viscous and reaching, covering the distance between them faster than something that dense should move. Fukasaku's technique came simultaneously from his left shoulder: fire, specifically shaped, the Dragon Fire Technique executed with sage chakra behind it so that the quality of the flame was already different before it combined with anything else. Shima's contribution was wind — a sustained directional output that knew exactly which way to push.
The oil ignited halfway between Jiraiya and the point of origin. The fire met it and the reaction was not additive but multiplicative, the fuel and the flame and the wind all arriving at the same point in the same moment and producing something that was no longer three techniques and was not quite a single technique either but was instead an event. A wave of fire that did not project in a line but covered a volume of space, rolling forward across the terrain with the specific sound of something that had decided to consume everything in its path.
The heat arrived before the flame. It was the kind of heat that didn't just warm — it was the kind that began converting things at the molecular level before the visible fire made contact.
Finn looked at it coming and felt a small adjustment happen in his thinking. This was Sage Art level output. The natural energy catalyst had transformed three techniques into something that was no longer ninjutsu in the ordinary sense — it was a force that participated in the world's foundational energy layer rather than operating on top of it.
"You picked the wrong test case," Finn said quietly. "Testing my darkness with coverage only makes the result more complete."
The dark aura that came from him was not the precise absorption he'd used on the fireball and the Rasengan. This was the other mode — not targeted, not focused, but spreading, the way the Dark-Dark Fruit could spread when it stopped being conservative about its own output. It rose from the ground, spread outward from his frame, and moved to meet the incoming fire with the specific quality of something that had decided to consume everything in its path in return.
"Abyss of Darkness!"
The two forces met across the middle distance and the fire lost.
Not quickly. It took time, the way large things take time. The Goemon technique pushed against the darkness with genuine force — Jiraiya could feel his own technique's power, could feel how much energy was in it, and could feel the darkness working against it steadily. But steadily was enough. The fire that had covered a hillside's worth of terrain shrank, consumed from its edges inward, until there was nothing left and the darkness itself began to recede back toward its source.
When it was done, Finn was standing where he had been standing. His hakama was undamaged. The ground behind him was not scorched.
Jiraiya looked at this. Fukasaku looked at this. Shima looked at this.
"Extraordinary," Fukasaku said quietly, in the voice of a sage who has seen many extraordinary things and is acknowledging that this is one of them.
"What is that power," Shima said. It came out flat rather than as a question, because the question implied there was an answer she expected to receive.
Jiraiya said nothing for a moment. Then: "I think we may lose this one."
Finn looked at them across the distance that separated them. "My darkness is boundless," he said. "I haven't found anything that can break through it yet. So, Jiraiya — you've lost."
"You said one technique finishes it," Jiraiya said. "That was the absorbing technique. What's the finishing technique?"
Finn's eyes changed.
The process was slow enough to be visible — the color leaving first from the iris, then from the surrounding white, until both eyes were entirely dark, a uniform deep black that took the light coming at them and sent nothing back.
Jiraiya's instinct fired without his direction.
"Domain: Arena of the Endless Black!"
Finn closed his open hand into a fist.
Jiraiya felt a palpitation that arrived before he could identify what had caused it. And then his vision was gone. Not darkened — gone, completely, as though the concept of seeing had been temporarily suspended. He could hear. He could speak. He could think. He could not see, and he could not move.
"Illusion?" he said.
"It's not an illusion," Fukasaku said, from somewhere near his right ear. The sage's voice was completely calm, which was more unsettling than alarm would have been. "I'm mobilizing natural energy to verify and it makes no difference. I can't move either."
"What is this," Shima said.
From the outside, the Iron-Armed Toad looked at the three of them and looked at Finn. What had been three figures standing on a mountainside was now a rectangular block of darkness, roughly coffin-shaped, containing what had previously been two sages and a toad sage and appeared to be holding them without requiring any apparent ongoing effort from Finn's end.
"Some kind of sealing technique?" the Iron-Armed Toad said.
"That's roughly accurate," Finn said. He sounded less winded than the sequence of events seemed to merit. "Can they break out?"
"Probably not," the Iron-Armed Toad said, with the honest assessment of someone who had just watched Sage Mode Jiraiya plus two toad sages be simultaneously contained. "Can I ask you something?"
"Go ahead."
"If you captured the two sages, would Myoboku Mountain teach you the sage arts to get them back?"
Finn looked at the coffin-shaped darkness. Then at the Iron-Armed Toad. "You know, that occurred to me."
A pause.
"Joking," Finn said, and his eyes returned to their normal color. The darkness structure dissolved and the three figures inside it reappeared, slightly disoriented, all of them moving cautiously to confirm that movement was available again.
"Released?" Fukasaku said.
"Apparently," Shima confirmed.
Jiraiya scratched his head with the expression of a man cataloguing an experience he doesn't entirely know what to do with. Strong. Genuinely, uncomfortably, category-defyingly strong. Sage Mode and he still hadn't managed to produce a result. That was a short list, historically.
Finn looked at him across the distance. "I have a friend whose grandmother lived to be a hundred and four years old," he said. "You want to know her secret?"
Jiraiya waited.
"She never meddled in other people's business." Finn smiled. "You're talented, Jiraiya. You're a bestselling author. You could have a long, comfortable life if you stopped inserting yourself into situations that had nothing to do with you." A pause. "Think about it."
Jiraiya was quiet for a moment. "I understand what you're saying."
"But?"
"But I've never actually been able to stop."
He said it with the rueful honesty of someone who has examined this aspect of himself enough times to have stopped pretending it was something he was going to change.
Finn nodded. "I thought so. We'll meet again. Next time, maybe tell me how to find Myoboku Mountain."
The gravity shifted. Not explosively — gradually, the way a change in air pressure shifts without announcement, and then Finn's feet left the ground. He rose slowly, the hakama's lower edge moving as the wind changed its relationship to his weight, and then he was moving — not running, not jumping, simply moving through the air at an angle that carried him away from the mountain and toward the dark horizon.
Jiraiya watched him go.
The method of departure looked, from certain angles, like a specific earth-style technique he knew of — the one the Third Tsuchikage used to alter the weight of objects and people. The Light and Heavy Rock Technique. If Finn could do that—
His eyes narrowed slightly.
The Third Tsuchikage was currently in the Land of Earth. Alive. With the daimyo freshly dead and the Yorozuya's name now very publicly attached to that outcome, the question of what their next target might be was not an idle one.
He stood on the mountain in the dark, watching the figure disappear into the night, with the specific uncomfortable feeling of someone who has done the arithmetic and doesn't like the answer.