"Taijutsu?" Might Guy blinked. "The Eight Gates?"
"That's right." Finn nodded, smiling. "I won't lie to you about what I'm after. I know exactly what the Eight Gates are. The strongest taijutsu in existence, arguably. It's worth a great deal."
Might Guy went quiet.
His favorable impression of Finn had been growing since the first time they'd spoken, and this confirmed it further. The man didn't dress things up. But even so, the answer had to be what it was.
Before his father died, Might Guy might have said yes. Might Dai had poured his entire life into that technique and left it to his son. What Guy did with that inheritance had felt, until recently, like his own choice to make.
Then Might Dai used the seventh gate to kill four of the Seven Ninja Swordsmen in a single engagement, and the village finally understood what they had in the Scroll of Seals.
Sarutobi Hiruzen was not a fool. The day Might Guy returned to Konoha alive, the Third Hokage had called him in personally and spoken to him plainly: the Eight Gates were one of Konoha's core inheritances. They were not to be passed to outsiders without explicit sanction.
The thing was, Guy knew the technique wasn't really his to begin with. It had come from the Second Hokage, given to his father on behalf of the village. Whatever claim a family had over a secret passed from parent to child, this was different. The Eight Gates had never been Might Dai's alone, and they were not Might Guy's alone now.
They belonged to the village.
He couldn't just hand them over, no matter how much he liked the person asking.
"I'd be happy to share everything I know about the spirit of taijutsu," Guy said, a trace of reluctance in his voice. "The passion, the will, the dedication — all of that, freely. But the Eight Gates themselves, I really can't. The village gave me specific guidance on this."
"That's fine." Finn let it go without any pressure. He felt a small flicker of genuine disappointment, but he let that go too. "I don't like pushing people."
Might Guy's face broke back into a grin almost immediately, the relief obvious. "Uncle, I'm really glad you understand!"
And then, almost at once, he looked embarrassed.
That was just how he was. He hadn't done anything wrong. The limitation was real and the decision was reasonable. But Finn had come to him with a request and left without what he'd come for, and Guy found himself feeling responsible for that outcome despite having no hand in creating it.
He reached into his training gear — from where, exactly, was unclear — and produced a folded set of green tights.
"I don't have much to offer," he said, holding them out with a combination of genuine pride and visible uncertainty. "But this is a treasured possession of mine. I was actually planning to keep it until I turned eighteen, but... here."
Finn looked at the green tights.
He looked at Might Guy's face, which was somewhere between hopeful and shy.
He looked back at the tights.
The immediate question that came to mind was whether he looked like a man who wore that color, let alone that cut of garment. The secondary question was why Guy had been carrying it at all. The aesthetic concern wasn't even worth putting into words.
In Finn's view, nearly everything about Might Guy was admirable. His conviction, his work ethic, his straightforwardness, his respect for his father, his complete refusal to let other people's opinions determine what he valued. All of it: admirable.
This was the one exception.
But then Finn looked at Guy's expression again. The slight shyness. The way he was holding out something he'd been saving for himself, something he'd apparently been planning to give himself as a gift on the occasion of his eighteenth birthday, because he felt bad about not being able to give Finn what Finn had actually asked for.
That was too sincere to turn away from.
Finn forced a composed smile, reached out, and took the green tights.
"Thank you," he said. "I'll keep it safe."
As a collector's item. Unworn, sealed away, never spoken of. But he would keep it.
Might Guy nodded with visible satisfaction, as if some instinct in him recognized a kindred spirit and was satisfied by the recognition.
Finn looked down at the garment in his hand for a moment. Then he said, "By the way — do you have lightning-attribute chakra?"
Might Guy blinked. "Don't let the look fool you. I actually have two types. Fire and lightning."
Finn raised an eyebrow. He genuinely hadn't expected that. In his mental model of Guy, fire made obvious sense. Lightning was a surprise.
But it was true. Might Guy had lightning-attribute chakra. He simply hadn't developed it in any meaningful direction, because nothing in his life up to this point had pointed him toward that path.
"And your ninjutsu overall," Finn said. "You're not particularly strong in that area?"
Guy scratched the back of his head. "I'm from a commoner family. We didn't inherit any clan techniques. The academy taught some basics — clone techniques, that sort of thing — but beyond that I've never had much guidance. My teacher died in the war, so..."
He trailed off, and Finn didn't push on that.
It was worth pausing on, though, because the gap Guy was describing wasn't a personal failing. It was structural. The village had come a long way since this era in terms of how it educated and developed its ninjas. By the time Naruto's generation attended the academy, there were standardized curriculum tracks, post-graduation Jonin instructors assigned to each team, and reasonably consistent access to technique libraries for promising students.
That wasn't the case now. Not really.
Right now, instruction beyond the academy's baseline depended almost entirely on who your team's senior ninja happened to be and what they chose to share. Some instructors taught their students generously. Others kept their techniques within their own clan lineage as a matter of tradition and self-interest. Sectarian practice still ran deep through the village, and the war had thinned the population of available teachers considerably.
What that meant in practice: a civilian ninja without clan backing, without a generous senior instructor, without the specific luck of landing under a teacher who chose to invest in them, could reach Jonin level with technique gaps that a clan child from the same graduating class would never have encountered. It was a real inequity, mostly invisible to the people it didn't affect.
That was also why Minato Namikaze's existence was so remarkable. A civilian ninja who had reached the absolute peak of the profession, mastering techniques that even clan prodigies struggled to approach. Though to be accurate about it, Minato wasn't entirely "civilian" anymore, in the social sense of the word.
He had married into the Uzumaki clan.
Technically, Kushina was the only acknowledged Uzumaki still living in Konoha. But technically wasn't the same as practically. The Uzumaki name still carried weight across the entire ninja world, long past the destruction of Uzushiogakure. It had been that kind of clan. During its height, it had built and governed its own village independently on the strength of its bloodline alone. Its sealing techniques — comprehensive from the most basic applications to the most advanced — remained the recognized authority in that discipline. Its physical constitution and chakra reserves were spoken of in the same breath as the Senju family's. The marriage between Uzumaki Mito and Senju Hashirama hadn't been a political arrangement between unequals. It had been a meeting of genuine peers.
Marrying into that lineage, even a diminished and nearly extinguished one, carried its own quiet form of capital. Minato clearly understood this. He hadn't changed his name, but the fact that his son would eventually carry the name Uzumaki Naruto said everything that needed to be said about which direction the social gravity of that marriage ran.
And beyond the political dimension, Minato had also gained access to a substantial sealing arts inheritance through that relationship. It had raised his capabilities another tier, and he was the kind of person who would use every tool available to him to their fullest possible extent.
In short, Namikaze Minato was not a pure commoner success story. He was a partial commoner success story, significantly amplified by a remarkable marriage. Still exceptional — the foundation had to be there to build on — but not quite the same thing as Might Dai, who had nothing except himself and twenty years on a borrowed scroll.
Finn looked at Guy again. The slightly sheepish expression. The big frame. The complete absence of the self-pity that could so easily have taken root in someone with his background.
He reached into the sleeve of his haori hakama and slipped out a small scroll.
"The Eight Gates, in your hands, already puts you ahead of ninety percent of powerful shinobi in this world, regardless of what clan they're from," Finn said. "Don't carry that look on your face. But — the Eight Gates is a forbidden technique. You can't fight every enemy at full burn every time. You need a proper ninjutsu set to fill the space between." He held out the scroll. "Here. Take it."
Guy accepted it. He unrolled it carefully, eyes moving across the text — and then he snapped it shut.
"This is... a Lightning Release ninjutsu. B-rank." His voice had gone a little stiff. "I didn't memorize it. It's too valuable. I can't accept this."
B-rank tended to sound modest to people who hadn't thought carefully about what rank actually measured. It was worth setting straight.
The grading system for ninjutsu had almost nothing to do with combat power. What it measured was the difficulty of learning. Above B-rank sat A-rank and S-rank — techniques that only exceptional practitioners could acquire regardless of effort, where the barrier was intrinsic aptitude rather than dedication. B-rank sat just below that ceiling. In practical terms, it meant the technique normally required Jonin-level chakra control and a meaningful theoretical understanding of ninjutsu to master. Not something a Genin was expected to pick up casually.
But the ranking told you nothing about what the technique did in a fight.
The Lightning Release Armor, the Hell Stab series, the techniques Finn had extracted from the Third Raikage's lineage — those were B-rank. Uchiha Madara's Great Fire Annihilation was B-rank. Senju Tobirama's Flying Thunder God Slash, was B-rank. Kitsuchi's Earth Release technique that had checked Finn's Starfall Impact and later suppressed the movement of a Ten-Tails — B-rank. The grade described the barrier to entry, not the ceiling once you were past it.
A B-rank technique in the hands of the right person, fully developed, could shake the earth.
Finn looked at Might Guy and said: "Go study it. B-rank means it normally takes Jonin-level understanding to learn. But this particular set is a ninjutsu-taijutsu hybrid. It has more in common with physical technique than with standard ninjutsu, which means your foundation is actually an advantage here. You have a real chance of teaching it to yourself." He paused, then added, "I'd keep it between us, though."
He didn't spell that out further. With Might Guy's personality, if he decided something was his to protect, it stayed protected.
Thinking about it confirmed the other thing Finn wanted to say.
"You're going to become a Jonin eventually. And you're going to take on students. If you're going to lead disciples someday, you should have something to teach them beyond what they can see on the surface."
Might Guy's expression shifted. Something moved through it — the start of excitement, and then, under that, a renewed embarrassment. He held the scroll a little tighter. "Uncle, I really don't know how to thank you. It's just that — the Eight Gates — I really couldn't—"
"Don't." Finn stopped him, smiling. "You've already given me a gift, haven't you?" He raised the green tights slightly.
The effect was immediate. Guy's face went through several things at once.
He knew, obviously, that the two gifts were not remotely comparable. A set of B-rank Lightning Release ninjutsu against a pair of green training tights was not an exchange that balanced. He was not without judgment. But Finn had held up the tights with such a straight face, with such complete seriousness, that there was nothing left to say.
Before Guy could find any words, Finn raised his hand and said, "Use your youth to write your own legend, Guy. I'll be going."
Then he was gone.
Might Guy turned in place, scanning the street. Nothing. A few passersby who hadn't noticed anything, and a blank stretch of road where a man had been standing a moment before. He wasn't going to find him; there was no point looking.
He stood there for a while with the scroll in both hands. He took a breath. Then another, slower one.
"I won't let you down."
With no particular agenda, Finn made his way to Ichiraku Ramen and sat down for a meal.
He was somewhere between the first and second bowl when a small bird landed on his outstretched arm with the purposeful precision of an animal that had been flying for a long time. It opened its beak and produced a scroll that was noticeably larger than any part of its body.
Finn picked the scroll up and sighed quietly. "There really should be a better system for this. I wonder if there are summoning animals in this world that work like Den Den Mushi."
The ninja world's relationship with technology was genuinely strange when you looked at it directly. In some respects it was remarkably advanced — Orochimaru's lab had a functioning television, and Konoha's infrastructure included a complete grid of electric poles and street lighting; the village had essentially entered an electrical age without any particular fanfare about it. The surveillance network was sophisticated by any reasonable measure.
And yet there were no phones. None. If you needed to send a message to someone more than a day's run away, your options were: travel there personally, dispatch a ninja messenger, or use a trained animal. Summoned beasts filled the long-distance gap, but only if you had a summoning contract and a cooperative animal willing to serve as a courier.
It was a peculiar gap for a society that had clearly solved the problem of generating and transmitting electrical current.
Finn didn't know where to begin with a complaint about it, so he unrolled the scroll instead.
It was from Kakuzu. Brief, as Kakuzu's communications always were — contact coordinates, a named location, no explanation of purpose. The meeting point was in the Land of Waves, across the southeastern coast of the Land of Fire.
Finn rolled the scroll back up and waved his arm. The bird launched itself into the air and was gone.
"The Land of Waves," he said, to no one. "A country that technically doesn't have ninjas." He picked up his chopsticks. "What's Kakuzu doing all the way out there?"