"You actually did it," Jiraiya said, still standing where he had stepped back to. He was looking at Finn with the expression of a man whose understanding of a situation has just been revised in a direction he hadn't prepared for. "You actually taught yourself."
Finn had not cancelled the Sage Mode. The marks remained on his face, steady, the diamond between his brows as solid as if it had always been there. He looked out over the village with his hands loose at his sides and smiled.
"What's so surprising about it?"
"What's — " Jiraiya repeated the phrase and then stopped himself, pressing his palm to his forehead. "This technique has been the exclusive domain of the three sacred summoning grounds for thousands of years. You're the first person in recorded history to develop it without their framework. The First Hokage himself — Hashirama Senju, the man who had a body that made Sage Mode look like it was designed specifically for him — went to the Shikkotsu Forest to learn it. He didn't figure it out alone." Jiraiya shook his head. "You've done something he didn't do."
"He had a path available," Finn said, without particular pride in the statement. "I didn't. If someone had offered me a seat at Mount Myoboku or the Shikkotsu Forest, I would have taken it without hesitation. Why choose the harder road when an easier one exists? The result is the same either way." He touched the diamond mark on his forehead lightly. "But since the easier road wasn't available, I found another one. That's all."
Jiraiya looked at him for a moment. He wanted to push back on the modesty, but the modesty wasn't false — it was the specific honesty of someone who had accurately assessed what they'd done and declined to inflate it. Finn had done something unprecedented, and he knew it, and he also knew why it had happened, and he was not confusing the achievement with the person.
"Your Sage Mode is more stable than mine," Jiraiya said finally, deciding that the straightforward assessment was the only thing left to offer. "More durable. The chakra you're mobilizing for it is in a different category. In terms of what Sage Mode actually gives you in combat... you're considerably ahead of me." He paused. "Which was already the case before today."
"That's true," Finn said, without softening it.
Jiraiya clicked his tongue. "You killed Hanzo before you had this. Now — " He looked at the still-rising mist around them, the rain that had not entirely returned to its natural fall. "In the entire ninja world, as far as I can tell... there's no one left who can match you."
Finn touched his chin and thought about this seriously for a moment.
The benchmarks in his mind were the ones who had set the scale for everything else: Hashirama Senju and Uchiha Madara, the two poles of an era that had defined what strong meant in this world. Tobirama Senju, who was a different kind of dangerous — the kind whose ceiling was difficult to locate because his approach to combat prioritized preparation over power, and a fully prepared Tobirama with access to Impure World Reincarnation was the kind of problem that didn't have a clean solution. You could beat him and then find yourself dealing with Hashirama.
But they were all dead.
The Rinnegan was sealed in a scroll two floors below him. The Gedo Mazo was in the dark space. The new generation that would eventually reshape the power scale — the hot-blooded young man with the Nine-Tails sealed inside him, the last Uchiha survivor with the Eternal Mangekyō — hadn't been born yet. And when they were born, they would spend years being children before they spent years growing into anything that posed a genuine problem for someone who was already here.
The Sharingan-based genjutsu field — the one vulnerability he had spent real effort hedging against since his arrival in this world — was effectively addressed. Sage Mode carried a natural resistance to genjutsu that derived from the integration of natural energy with the user's own sensory field. The standard applications, the mid-tier techniques, even the high-end ones outside the absolute apex category — they would find less purchase now. What remained were the truly exceptional cases: Kotoamatsukami, Tsukuyomi, the Infinite Tsukuyomi itself. The top of a category he had always known was the real concern.
Everything below that top had just become manageable.
He had been overcautious in the early period, he understood that now. The genjutsu worry had been the worry of someone who knew the name of a danger but not its actual dimensions. Now that he understood the dimensions, he could see that the worry had been disproportionate. He had never actually been caught by genjutsu in this world, in part because he had been careful, but also in part because the technique was not quite the absolute threat he had imagined when he had only textbook knowledge of it.
"There's a particular loneliness," Finn said, with a thoughtfulness that was only partially mock-dramatic, "in reaching a peak where no one can follow you. The snow is very clean up there. Very quiet."
Jiraiya's tooth ached at the phrasing. He looked away.
He was also doing something else, under that mild irritation — something he noticed a moment later and caught himself doing. He had been running through the problem of Finn the way a person of conscience runs through problems: this much power in the hands of this kind of person, what does that mean, who can check it, what happens if it goes wrong. The Five Kage. The village structures. The balance of the ninja world.
And then he remembered, with a clarity that landed like a splash of cold water, the thing Finn had said to him after their fight.
You're a good person in every way except that you love to meddle in other people's affairs. If you don't change, sooner or later, you'll die from that habit.
He had been meditating on someone else's problem. Again. When it wasn't his problem. When he had already decided — or thought he had decided — that he was done carrying the weight of the entire world's structural concerns on his personal conscience.
The Five Kage could worry about Finn. That was their job. He was a writer now. A wealthy, comfortable, well-traveled writer who had simply come here to see an old friend.
Mind your own business, Jiraiya.
"What are you thinking?" Finn asked.
Jiraiya came back to the present. He looked at Finn's face — the black marks, the calm eyes, the Sage Mode still running without effort — and shook his head.
"Nothing serious," he said. "Just thinking that I have friends in unusual places. You're the most unusual of them."
Finn laughed. "I'll take that."
"How long can you hold the Sage Mode?" Jiraiya asked, because he genuinely wanted to know and because it was the most natural next question and because he had decided not to examine his motivations too closely.
"Are you gathering intelligence, or asking out of curiosity?"
"Curiosity," Jiraiya said, firmly.
Finn raised one arm and extended it slightly, fingers spread. He appeared to be checking something internal — listening to the balance of forces in his own body the way you listen to a sound you want to make sure you've identified correctly. Jiraiya watched him, and noticed, with a second jolt of surprise, that Finn was still absorbing natural energy while standing here having a conversation. The intake hadn't stopped when he stood up. It was ongoing, continuous, integrated into his baseline state.
That's perfect control, Jiraiya recognized. That's what it looks like when someone has completely internalized the balance — when the absorption isn't a technique you perform but a state you inhabit.
Finn lowered his arm.
"There's no fixed limit," he said. "I can hold it until my chakra runs out. I could activate it again the next day. At this point it's..." he considered the word. "It's just how I am now. My default state, more or less."
Jiraiya stared at him.
He had estimated one to two hours. He had thought that was generous.
"How long before your chakra runs out?" he asked, and then immediately wanted to retract the question, because he could already see where this was going.
Finn's expression took on the quality of a man presented with an excellent opportunity he had no intention of wasting. "That is genuinely a hard question to answer," he said, with transparent satisfaction. "Because in all my time here, I haven't exhausted it. I haven't come close. I haven't felt the approach of a limit."
He said nothing further. He didn't need to.
Jiraiya closed his mouth and looked at the rain.
The source of it, he knew, was the Dark-Dark Fruit — the Logia foundation that had integrated with this world's chakra system at a level that neither Finn nor anyone else could fully map. It produced chakra the way the ocean produced water: not from a tank with a bottom, but from something that treated the concept of running out as a category error. Finn had merged with the darkness so completely that the boundary between his chakra and its source had become notional rather than functional.
If everyone else was playing a game with limited resources and winning required managing those limits, Finn had arrived at the table with a wallet that didn't appear to have a back.
"Right," Jiraiya said. "Fine."
Finn clapped him on the shoulder with the easy authority of someone who has just established their position in a conversation and is ready to move on from it.
"Training's done for the morning. I should—"
He stopped.
His feet, which had been completely steady for the entire conversation, lost something. The floor tile under his right foot cracked. Then the one beside it. His stance shifted, overcorrecting, and he went slightly sideways before his balance found itself again.
Jiraiya caught his arm by reflex.
"What happened? Are you—"
He looked at his own hand where it had closed around Finn's arm.
The arm was green.
Not discolored. Not bruised. Green. The specific, vivid, unmistakable green of living plant matter — and from the skin of Finn's forearm, small branches were emerging. Thin, delicate, the pale color of new wood, with leaves the size of thumbnails already uncurling from the tips. They grew as Jiraiya watched, extending a centimeter, another centimeter, the leaves spreading into their full small shape, catching the rain.
"Are you a tree?" Jiraiya said, and the question was so far from any question he had prepared to ask today that it came out with the flat delivery of someone whose capacity for normal reaction had temporarily left the building.
Finn looked down at his arm. His expression went through several things very quickly — surprise, assessment, recognition — and then landed somewhere that was absolutely, completely, and thoroughly delighted.
"That's not a tree," he said. "That's Wood Release." His voice had climbed into something bright. He looked up at Jiraiya with the expression of a man who has just received the thing he has been waiting for without knowing exactly when it would arrive. "It woke up. Wood Release woke up."
He held his arm up and looked at the branches and leaves still growing from it with an expression that would have been more appropriate for receiving a gift.
Jiraiya stared at him.
"How," Jiraiya said, "do you have Wood Release."