The Land of Stone sat only a short distance from the Land of Rain, with nothing but the small Bird Country wedged between them. Tsunade and Shizune made no effort to be leisurely about it. They kept a punishing pace and stopped for nothing. Three days of hard travel brought them to Rain Country's border; by the fourth they could smell the wet.
The rain here never truly stopped. It didn't so much fall as it did simply exist, a permanent grey curtain drawn across the sky. In a small forest on the outskirts of the Hidden Rain Village, two figures stood on a rocky outcrop, both wearing long travel raincoats, peering through the downpour at the village walls rising in the distance.
"There's still a queue at the gate?" Tsunade murmured, her brow furrowing.
"Lady Tsunade, what should we do? Should we go line up?" Shizune asked.
Tsunade turned her head and fixed Shizune with a flat stare.
"Hanzo of the Salamander may have killed Orochimaru," she said. "I came here to find out if that's actually true. Do you think I can walk in through the front door and sign my name?"
"Probably... not?" Shizune said carefully.
"Absolutely not. We sneak in." Tsunade dropped into a crouch. She pressed one hand flat against the surface of the rock and closed her eyes.
Shizune stood behind her and watched. She felt nothing shift in the air, no visible ripple of chakra, no sound. But she knew what Tsunade was doing.
The Senju clan had one of the longest lineages in the shinobi world, once undisputed as its foremost family. The techniques preserved in that bloodline were numerous and varied. It would be a mistake to look at Tsunade's reliance on her Yin Seal, the Hundred Healings, her monstrous physical strength, and her summoning contract and conclude that was the whole of her. The reason she rarely reached for other tools was simple: she had never needed to. Her teams had always been complete. Her role was to be the wrecking force that bought her partners the room they needed. A kunai launched in the right direction by someone else was as good as any escape technique she might deploy herself. And beyond that, Tsunade had a short temper and an instinct that always bent toward direct physical engagement.
But she knew the other techniques. She simply didn't bother with them often.
Chakra attribute-wise, she had everything except wind-style. It would be strange if she had nothing else to show for seventy years of Senju heritage.
The Senju clan's chakra reserves had always been enormous, and that abundance had produced a particularly powerful branch of perception ninjutsu. The Second Hokage, Tobirama Senju, had once used a technique of this type to detect Kinkaku, Ginkaku, and the entire pursuit force they led from a staggering distance. Tsunade had inherited that same technique, and now she sent it spreading outward across the Hidden Rain Village like ink soaking through paper.
She held it for a long moment. Then her eyes opened.
"This village has no outer barrier," she said. Her voice carried genuine surprise. "What is Hanzo thinking?"
The perception had confirmed it. The Hidden Rain Village had no perimeter defense to speak of, only isolated barriers layered around a handful of key locations. Those particular spots blocked her entirely, black spots in her sensory field where nothing could be read. But the absence of outer fortification was unusual for a major village, particularly one supposedly in the middle of a civil war. And paradoxically, those sealed-off locations now acted as a map. The most important places in the Hidden Rain Village had just announced themselves.
"Maybe... Hanzo of the Salamander is very confident?" Shizune ventured quietly.
Tsunade shook her head. "No. That man has always been careful. Overly careful." She paused, then her expression settled into something firm. "Forget trying to understand his reasoning. It just means our entry will be clean. Let's move."
Tsunade's perception had been accurate as far as it went. There was, in fact, no large outer barrier surrounding the Hidden Rain Village, and the reason for that was not Hanzo's confidence.
There simply wasn't much need for one.
What Tsunade's technique could not detect was the Rain Tiger at Will technique operating across the entire village. Finn had it running continuously, twenty-four hours a day, using the rain itself as his perception field. It was more versatile than any barrier, far more difficult to sense, and required no visible infrastructure. Any barrier laid over that would have been redundant and conspicuous.
Before Shizune could add anything, Tsunade was already on her feet.
"Let's go."
She used a flash technique and vanished from the rock. Shizune scrambled to follow. They bypassed the main gate entirely, chose a lower section of the perimeter wall, and slipped over it into the village.
On the roof of the tallest building in the Hidden Rain Village, Finn sat cross-legged at the edge of the parapet.
His eyes were closed. His breathing was measured, slow, the cadence of someone who had lowered himself to the pace of the air itself. He was working with natural energy, not forcing it, just guiding it. Sage Mode had taken him months of patient accumulation to master; using it now was less like activating a technique and more like leaning into a river's current. The practice he continued these days was refinement. Learning how to apply that current precisely rather than simply surviving inside it.
The moment the two figures crossed the wall, his eyes opened.
Through the Rain Tiger at Will, he knew immediately. Two people had entered the Hidden Rain Village without permission, bypassing the gate entirely. He didn't reach for his Observation Haki.
Truthfully, he'd stopped bothering.
Ever since the news of Orochimaru's death had been circulated, along with the physical evidence that corroborated it, the Hidden Rain Village had been receiving uninvited guests at irregular intervals. Foreign shinobi slipping in to verify the story, to confirm the intelligence with their own eyes before they trusted it. In the beginning Finn had tracked each one, spending the attention to identify the infiltrators. Invariably they were unrecognizable to him, nobodies, extras with no relevance to the operation. After enough repetitions, he had stopped spending the energy.
But he couldn't simply ignore them either. Let too many rats run loose through the walls without consequence, and the village would start to look like a public road.
Finn extended one finger and pressed it lightly to the stone edge of the parapet. A small pulse of chakra went with it, something quiet and steady, threaded through with the particular quality of Wood Release.
Down below, in a room near the center of the compound, a small ceramic flowerpot sat empty on a table. A shoot emerged from the soil inside it with no warning, growing fast, thickening as it rose. Within seconds it had become a trunk roughly the diameter of a forearm. Characters formed along its surface on their own, emerging from the grain of the wood like they had always been there, waiting to be read.
This was what Finn had taken to calling Communication Wood. Within the boundaries of the Hidden Rain Village, he could inscribe his intentions directly into living wood without being in the same room. It was an improvised solution born from necessity. Communication in the shinobi world was primitive in ways that still occasionally surprised him. No Den Den Mushi, no relay infrastructure worth the name. Information moved on foot or through summoned creatures, or occasionally through jutsu that required elaborate prerequisites. The only rapid long-range method that had impressed him was the Phantom Body Technique used in the original Akatsuki, but that required the Rinnegan, which was currently sitting in a preservation vial and not going anywhere near his eye sockets.
He had developed Communication Wood because the alternative was shouting down a hallway.
Biwa Juzo read the trunk. It told him the entry point and projected trajectory of the two infiltrators, marking the most probable path they were taking toward the restricted core of the village.
He set down the ninjutsu scroll he had been studying, picked it up again, looked at it, and set it down a second time.
"One after another," he muttered, standing. "It never ends."
He had handled several of these situations over the past few days. It had started to feel routine.
Tsunade moved through the village's back alleys with practiced efficiency. She stayed close to walls, tracked the patrol routes from a distance, and adjusted accordingly. But her expression had been growing more complicated with each block she covered.
Something was wrong. She couldn't name it precisely. The intelligence she had gathered suggested a meaningful degree of civil conflict ongoing inside Rain Country. But the village felt nothing like a war zone. The patrols were organized. The streets were quiet. There was an orderliness to the place that didn't match a village tearing itself apart.
She filed the observation away. It wasn't her problem. She was here for one thing: to find out if Orochimaru was actually dead. Everything else was secondary.
She had not wandered or searched blindly. From the moment she used her perception technique, she had identified one clear destination. The tallest building in the village. That was where the heaviest barriers were concentrated, where the sensing blackout was most complete. That made it the center of power in this place, or close enough that going there first was obviously correct.
She waited in the shadow of a narrow alley, watching a patrol move through the intersection ahead. Two guards on a standard circuit. She tracked them until they rounded the corner and their footsteps faded.
"Patrol's past. Let's move," she said to Shizune behind her.
She didn't finish the sentence.
Her body moved before her mind fully processed the input, the particular reflex of someone who had survived long enough that threat response operated below conscious thought. She grabbed Shizune's wrist, drove her feet into the ground, and launched them both backward in a single motion.
The figure hit the alley where they had been standing a half-second later.
Biwa Juzo dropped from directly above, and the Executioner's Blade came down with him. The sword was an enormous thing, a cleaver more than a blade, built for impact rather than precision. It fell in a downward arc that split the air itself, rain scattering from the pressure wave ahead of the edge. When it hit the ground it met no resistance. Stone. Solid, tamped earth. The blade sank into it like pushed into water, no bounce, no drag, just depth.
Tsunade looked at the sword embedded in the ground. Then she looked at the man holding it.
She recognized the blade first. That was one of the swords. One of the seven.
"The Executioner's Blade," she said, keeping her voice low. "Seven Ninja Swordsmen of the Hidden Mist." Her eyes moved up to the wielder and confirmed it. "Biwa Juzo."
Juzo pulled the sword free from the earth with one hand and set it across his shoulder, studying the two women who had almost been under it a moment ago.
"Quick reaction, little mice." He paused. His eyes settled on Tsunade's face and stayed there. Recognition moved across his expression slowly, like the problem being solved in real time. "...Wait."
He knew this woman. Not personally. But the face was famous enough.
Tsunade. One of the Sannin. The same tier as Orochimaru. The Slug Princess.
And then a secondary thought, quieter: the boss engineered this whole situation to draw her here on her own initiative. She came exactly as intended. Which means she's here to see him. Which means I technically don't need to do anything at all.
Besides, he thought, he probably couldn't beat her.
Juzo opened his mouth to explain all of this.
He did not get to say anything.
Tsunade's figure blurred. She closed the distance between them before the space had time to register and drove a fist directly into his chest.
She moved so fast that there was no time to dodge and barely enough to react. Juzo swung the Executioner's Blade across his body as an emergency shield, the only thing he could put between himself and her in the fraction of a second available.
The punch connected with the flat of the blade.
The steel cracked. Not at the edge, not at the tip, but through the body of the blade itself, a fracture ring spreading outward from the impact point in an instant. The force did not stop there. It transferred through the metal and into Juzo's arms, ran through his shoulders and down into his core, and hit the ground under his feet so hard the stone compressed visibly beneath him.
He'd never felt strength like that. There was nothing to pit against it. No technique of resistance that had any real traction against a force of that magnitude.
Juzo's body left the alley in a horizontal line, blown backward by the punch like a stone from a sling. He cleared the alley entrance, crossed open ground, and hit the wall of a building across the lane. The wall gave. The building behind it collapsed inward, folding over him, tiles and timber and rain-soaked plaster all coming down at once.
The sound reached every street within two blocks.
Tsunade was already moving.
She had known from the moment she recognized Juzo that this would not be quiet. Biwa Juzo was not the type of opponent she could dispose of without leaving marks on the landscape. The moment she saw his face she had adjusted her plan: knock him down hard and fast, find cover, wait out the patrol response, and reassess. She had no intention of killing him, but she also had no intention of giving him time to recover.
Her feet hit the ground outside the alley in a single stride and she drove herself forward into the wreckage of the collapsed building, moving at a speed that suggested she weighed nothing at all. Chakra was already gathered in both hands.
A thin, brilliant light ran along her fingers. Not a blade exactly. More like the visible edge of precision itself.
Chakra Scalpel.
A surgical technique. Developed for battlefield medicine, for reaching inside a body and doing there what blunt force could not. In Tsunade's hands it had evolved into something cleaner and more lethal than most weapons, a tool that destroyed from the inside, left no external wound, and shed no blood. That last quality mattered to her more than she generally admitted.
She found Juzo in the wreckage and dropped onto him, palm descending toward his chest with the scalpel at its center.
"Die," she said flatly.
That palm, landing cleanly, would have simply stopped his heart. Mechanical. Irreversible.
"Damn it!"
A flare of blue-white light burst from Juzo's body. Lightning chakra shaped into a surface layer, crackling across his skin and outward, rapid and rough, the compressed-time construction of a man who had very little of it left.
Lightning armor.
Tsunade's palm struck it.
The armor shattered under her enhanced strength, breaking apart in a scattering of sparks, but the fraction of a second it bought was real. She felt the resistance go and her palm continued downward.
Smoke erupted. The displaced air popped. And when the clearing came, she was pressing her hand into a section of log.
Substitution technique. He was gone.