Three days into his stay in the Hidden Rain Village, Jiraiya had settled into the rhythm of it without particularly meaning to.
He had maintained a shinobi's schedule throughout — early to rise, early to train, the discipline of decades overriding whatever his body might have preferred given the option. The village's perpetual rain didn't help his mood. He was a man built for sunlight, for open roads and cheerful noise, and the Hidden Rain Village offered exactly none of those things. The climate pressed down on everything, grey and continuous, the kind of weather that made a place feel like it was being kept rather than lived in.
The accommodations were excellent. He didn't say this out loud because it felt like conceding something, but the accommodations were excellent.
He opened the curtain on the third morning and looked at the rain falling on the rooftops below, water running along the drainage pipes in familiar silver threads. He had been here before, in different circumstances, in a different era. The village had changed. Everything about it except the rain had changed.
He washed up and stepped into the corridor. A maid was waiting.
"What would you like for breakfast, Jiraiya-sama?"
"Anything," he said, with complete sincerity. He had never been difficult about food. "Surprise me."
Breakfast was presented in a small dining room off the main corridor — better than he had expected, which seemed to be the pattern here. He ate methodically and considered the fact that he had not seen Finn since the day of arrival.
"Where is he?" he asked the maid, who was maintaining a respectful distance near the doorway.
"Practicing, Jiraiya-sama."
"For three days?"
"Lord Finn practices every morning. He said that if you wanted to observe, you were welcome to the rooftop terrace at any time."
He remembered the walk through the village yesterday, the encounter with Yui — composed, cool, with the particular grace of a woman who understood exactly what impression she made and had chosen not to do anything about it. He had recognized her immediately from the oiran register in the Land of Earth. He had also recognized, in the same moment, that whatever thread of possibility he'd been cultivating in that direction had been quietly and completely severed.
The bastard Finn had gotten there first. Of course he had.
Jiraiya finished breakfast without lingering on it and followed the maid to the rooftop door. She opened it and stayed inside — the rain decided that for her, and for anyone without a specific reason to stand in it. Jiraiya stepped through.
The wind came first, cold and sharp, carrying the smell of wet metal and old stone. He wiped his face with the back of his hand and squinted through the drizzle.
Finn was at the far edge of the rooftop, cross-legged, facing outward over the village. He was sitting close enough to the edge that a firm push would have settled the question of his relationship with gravity.
He was also completely dry.
Jiraiya stopped walking. He looked more carefully.
The rain was falling on the rooftop. It was falling in every direction around Finn. But on Finn, nothing landed. The drops reached a certain proximity and veered away — not dramatically, not visibly unless you were paying attention — as if the air immediately around him had decided to conduct itself differently. The puddles were everywhere else. Around Finn, the surface was clear.
That's, Jiraiya started to think, and then his senses went somewhere more specific.
He was a Sage. He had been absorbing natural energy since he was a teenager, had trained at Mount Myoboku under the old frog sages until the technique was as natural as breathing. He knew what natural energy felt like in the air. He knew how to recognize it moving, settling, pooling, dispersing.
He was sensing it moving now.
Toward Finn.
Jiraiya's eyes widened.
The volume was wrong. The volume was completely wrong. Natural energy at this scale was the kind that turned uncontrolled practitioners into stone — not a risk, not an exaggeration, a literal biological fact that the sacred training grounds of the three great summoning sanctuaries had been specifically developed to manage. You could not absorb this much natural energy this quickly without the frameworks that those places provided unless your own chakra was large enough to receive it without losing the balance.
Finn's chakra was large enough.
Jiraiya could feel it — the chakra acting as an anchor, pulling the natural energy into integration rather than collision, the two forces finding a relationship that should have taken years of careful incremental practice to establish. He had seen the learning process up close. He had been through it himself. He knew what the threshold looked like as you approached it.
Finn was approaching it very fast.
How, Jiraiya thought, and then: Orochimaru. And then: If Orochimaru has actually cracked the underlying mechanism of Sage Mode, not just the practice methodology but the actual structure of what it does to the body...
The implications of that unfolded in several directions at once, none of them small. The three sacred grounds — Mount Myoboku, the Ryuchi Cave, the Shikkotsu Forest — had maintained a near-complete monopoly on Sage Mode for as long as the technique had existed. Not because they were selfish, exactly, but because the technique was genuinely bound to the natural energy of specific places, specific lineages, specific contracts. You could not simply teach it to a person without the surrounding infrastructure. Jiraiya himself, who understood every facet of his own Sage Mode intimately, could not transmit it to a student without bringing that student to Myoboku. Minato had gone through Myoboku. The chain of inheritance was the technique.
If Finn had broken that chain...
If what Orochimaru had worked out gave Finn the ability to teach this independently, to bring Sage Mode out of the sacred grounds and put it in the hands of whoever he chose to teach...
Founding a new lineage, Jiraiya thought, with a quality of recognition that was not quite admiration and not quite alarm. That's what this is.
The natural energy on the rooftop shifted. What had been a steady inward flow became something more concentrated, a pull that drew the rain itself into a slow spiral above Finn's seated form. Water that had been falling vertically began to curve, then to orbit, a translucent column of mist and rain rotating around his position with a sound like something deciding.
Finn moved.
He came off the cross-legged position in a single motion — not a lurch, not a stumble, a controlled surge upward that landed him standing with both feet flat and his weight centered perfectly. He pushed into the ground, spine straight, shoulders back, hands moving from the circle they had held at his abdomen into a wide arc that swept out around him before drawing inward and pressing together at his chest.
The aura that had been building slammed upward.
Jiraiya stepped back. He hadn't meant to. His body had moved before his mind finished the instruction.
"Sage Mode." Finn's voice had dropped to something low and resonant. "Activate."
The rain within a hundred meters reversed.
Not all of it. Not completely. But the water that had been falling toward the rooftop was now lifting — drops catching, reversing, rising in a curtain of mist that climbed away from the surface and into the air. The chakra and natural energy that Jiraiya was sensing had compressed into something nearly visible, a density in the air around Finn that pressed outward in all directions without quite leaving him.
The marks on his face were black. Two horizontal lines crossing the eyelids, and between his brows, a diamond shape rendered in sharp, solid black — not the incomplete form Jiraiya had half-glimpsed in passing months ago, but finished, set, real. A Sage Mark that belonged to no lineage Jiraiya had ever seen.
The first Hokage, Jiraiya thought, involuntarily. Hashirama. Is this what Hashirama looked like?
He didn't know. He had known Hashirama as a very old man who didn't need to use his full power on anything that had presented itself recently, and then as a memory. He had never seen the Sage Mode of the God of Ninja. He had no comparison point.
What he could estimate, standing here, was duration. Jiraiya's own Sage Mode, at full commitment, gave him five to ten minutes before the natural energy balance became unsustainable without the Toad Sages' supplementation. That was his ceiling, established by a body that was substantial and a chakra reserve that was not modest by any normal measure.
Finn's ceiling, by the same estimation, was somewhere past two hours.
That's terrifying, Jiraiya thought, with the candor of a man reviewing a calculation he didn't like but couldn't argue with.
Finn turned around.
The marks made his face strange and striking in equal measure — the black lines against his skin giving him something between severity and a kind of cold authority, the diamond on his forehead like a seal that had finally found the surface it was meant for. His eyes had the quality Jiraiya had only ever seen in the eyes of people who had just stepped into something larger than themselves and realized they fit.
He looked at Jiraiya.
And then he grinned.
"Perfect timing," Finn said, with the specific warmth of someone who has just accomplished something exceptional and is delighted to have a witness. "You see that? No Mount Myoboku, no toad oil, no frog sages standing behind me with their hands on my shoulders. Just me." He let the grin settle into something more satisfied. "I am a remarkable talent, Jiraiya. I'm saying that without the slightest embarrassment. Remarkable."
Jiraiya looked at him for a long moment.
Then he sighed, and it was the sigh of a man who has genuinely been impressed by something and finds the experience slightly inconvenient.
"Yeah," he said. "You are."