Kakuzu and Biwa Juzo walked out of the Bear Country Gold Exchange in matching black cloaks.
The cloaks were striking — floor-length, black as good ink, with red cloud patterns distributed across the fabric in a way that was too deliberate to be decorative and too bold to be practical. Anyone who saw them was going to remember them. That was, as Kakuzu had explained when he designed them, precisely the point.
Kakuzu had designed them. This was still something Finn found mildly astonishing whenever he thought about it. The man was five hundred years old, had spent most of that time cutting hearts out of people and hoarding money, and had apparently been carrying an untapped sense of organizational aesthetics the entire time. The uniform sent a message. A consistent, visible presence across multiple theaters of operation built a recognizable brand. Clients took organizations with uniform dress codes more seriously. Commissions were higher. Cohesion improved.
All of this was, by Kakuzu's lights, simply financial reasoning applied to clothing.
The result was a black cloak with red clouds, and it had become the de facto uniform of the Yorozuya in the field. Sasori wore it. Kakuzu wore it. Biwa Juzo had started wearing his within two days of receiving it, with visible satisfaction.
Finn didn't wear it regularly. The haori hakama was more comfortable and, more importantly, projected the kind of ambiguity that was operationally useful. Wearing that cloak announced something specific about the person inside it. A haori said "traveler," or "merchant," or "retired swordsman," depending on who was looking and what they expected. He'd tried the cloak a few times. It looked excellent on him — he could admit that freely — but the sense of purpose it communicated sat wrong with how he preferred to move through the world.
Orochimaru, for his part, still had a Konoha affiliation in the technical sense, or at least maintained the pretense of one. The cloak was incompatible with that particular charade.
So the field uniform of the Yorozuya was, at present, Kakuzu and Juzo.
They were a known quantity in the ninja world now. A year had passed since the Wave Country, and the partnership had accumulated a track record that was being discussed in the relevant circles with a mixture of professional respect and genuine unease. They had killed a general of the Demon Country.
They had hunted down senior Jonin from Konoha, Iwagakure, and the Hidden Mist without apparent preference for which side was paying. They had displayed the head of a prominent Lightning Country merchant lord on a city gate. Kakuzu had planned an assassination attempt against the Iron Country's field general that had ultimately failed, but had been executed cleanly enough that the failure produced no captures and no identified trail — which in that context was considered an acceptable outcome.
The ninja world had begun to understand that Kakuzu and Biwa Juzo operated without allegiance, without consistent targeting criteria, and with a completion rate that made the combination tactically concerning.
The Hidden Cloud had dispatched a fifteen-man Jonin hunting team after them. The team had not succeeded. Three of the fifteen had died in the engagement. Kakuzu had burned through three of his five hearts in the fighting, which was a cost measured in lives rather than ryo and had irritated him considerably, but the fact that two career S-rank threats had walked away from a fifteen-Jonin coordinated kill operation was itself a data point that the remaining nations were now incorporating into their assessments.
The Bear Country Gold Exchange was still under the Yorozuya's nominal control, which remained technically outrageous. No one had managed it in any active sense for months at a time. Kakuzu simply collected the accumulated proceeds when he passed through the region. The Exchange continued operating because Finn's name attached to it was sufficient deterrent against anyone within the organization attempting a takeover. The staff had apparently concluded that the risk calculation did not favor making a move against someone who had a 500-million-ryo wanted designation and a demonstrated willingness to collect tailed beasts for side projects.
Walking out of the Exchange with a full bag, Kakuzu asked: "Any developments from the Hidden Mist? You were going to keep watching."
Juzo shook his head, with a trace of genuine regret. "Fuguki Suikazan was interested. He was ready to make a move. But all three of you had reservations, so nothing came of it. After Yagura got back from the Land of Waves, he apparently handled some internal matters — the mood in the village stabilized. Whatever Juzo's situation was supposed to demonstrate as a cautionary example, Yagura managed to contain the fallout."
This was the frustrating logic of it. Juzo had been waiting for the Blood Mist's internal pressure to produce the next defector, which would have moved him out of his position as the organization's newest member. Instead, Yagura's competent response had temporarily reduced the pressure, and no one had followed Juzo out the door.
Fuguki Suikazan had been the most likely candidate. One of the remaining Seven Ninja Swordsmen, wielder of the great sword Samehada, and apparently restless enough about the village's direction to have made quiet inquiries about the Yorozuya through Juzo's contacts. But the response from the organization's senior members had been consistent: no.
The aesthetic objection was the more politely stated one. The real objection was the one Juzo himself had provided, because he knew the man. Fuguki was selfish, greedy in ways that went beyond Kakuzu's principled mercenary self-interest, and fundamentally unreliable in the specific manner that got people killed. He would sell you out when it was convenient and then construct a story about why it had been necessary. The exact pattern, as Finn recalled it, that would eventually lead to Fuguki selling the Hidden Mist's information to outside parties, being discovered by his own student, and dying for it — after which his student Hoshigaki Kisame would inherit Samehada and the position, and go on to be a genuinely different category of problem.
Kisame was the one Finn would actually have been interested in. Capable, direct, and at this stage genuinely loyal to the Hidden Mist in a way that was going to require a specific kind of disillusionment to break. The disillusionment was coming — Fuguki's betrayal was still ahead, and after it Kisame would encounter someone presenting himself as Uchiha Madara who would reframe everything Kisame thought he understood about what he'd been serving. But that sequence hadn't started yet, and Kisame as he currently existed was not a person who could be recruited away from a cause he still believed in.
Finn had noted this and moved on.
Outside the base in the Land of Birds, Finn was sitting on a broad flat rock with his legs crossed and his eyes closed.
The pipe was at his waist. Shindokutō was at his hip. He wasn't doing anything that looked like active practice. He was simply sitting.
Sasori came out of the base with a scroll in hand. He covered the distance between the entrance and the rock without hurrying, and stopped a few paces away.
Finn said, without opening his eyes: "What is it?"
The black eye shadow was visible even from a distance — a smudged arc spreading from the inner corners of his eyes outward and downward, denser and more defined than it had been a year ago. The diamond-shaped mark at the center of his forehead was faintly there, a suggestion of something forming, but still not fully solidified. Not the clean, complete Yin Seal-like mark of a perfected Sage Mode entry. Closer than it had been six months ago. Closer than it had been three months ago.
This was the math of Finn's Sage Mode development: the channel was open, the integration was happening, and the pace was entirely dictated by how long it took to fill a reservoir that was, by any ordinary standard, absurdly large. No toad oil, no sacred place shortcut, no external amplification. Just time and accumulation, grinding at the volume problem from the outside.
It was going to get there. It was taking its time about it.
"The situation you asked me to monitor," Sasori said, holding out the scroll. "The Hidden Mist has sent ninja forces to the Land of Fire's coastal territory again. Konoha dispatched a response. The unit leading it is—"
"Minato Namikaze?" Finn asked. "The Yellow Flash?"
Sasori paused. "Yes."
Finn opened his eyes. The eye shadow dissipated as he came out of whatever state he'd been in, fading like morning condensation. He sat with this information for a moment, and then something settled in his expression — not quite concern, not quite resignation. The specific quality of someone watching an event they've been waiting for begin to arrive.
"Something interesting is about to happen," he said, more to himself than to Sasori.
He was quiet for a moment. Then: "If a person's heart is completely shattered — their reason for existing destroyed from the inside — is there any way to save them from what follows?"
Sasori regarded him for a moment with the particular detachment of someone who had spent decades converting human beings into art objects and had a correspondingly practical relationship with questions about the human condition.
"For something like that, ask Kakuzu," he said. "His techniques run toward keeping bodies functional. That's outside what I work with."
He wasn't wrong. Kakuzu's Earth Grudge Fear could thread wounds shut and maintain vital functions in ways that went beyond normal medical ninjutsu. If anyone in the organization could address a physical problem adjacent to this situation, it was Kakuzu.
But Finn had been asking about something more than the physical.
"There's a girl," Finn said, after a pause. "I've only met her twice. She made a specific impression. The kind that's hard to explain and doesn't need to be explained." He thought about the Ichiraku Ramen counter. Purple markings on her face. Quiet. The way she'd followed Minato without the nervousness that the situation should have produced — not because she was fearless but because she trusted the people around her completely. "She might be in trouble soon. Not the kind of trouble that fighting helps with."
He didn't say Rin's name. Sasori didn't ask.
"You can tell fortunes as well," Sasori said, and it was genuinely unclear whether this was a question or a statement.
Finn looked at him for a moment. "Go make yourself useful somewhere else." He waved a hand. "Where are Kakuzu and Juzo? When are they expected back?"
"I don't know." Sasori started walking back toward the base entrance.
"I wasn't finished."
Sasori stopped. There was a beat of identifiable reluctance in his posture. He turned back.
"I'm going to find Orochimaru. We're taking on the Three-Tails capture — the Danzo commission. When Kakuzu checks in, pass a message. Ask whether what I mentioned is actionable. If it is, good. If it isn't, leave it alone." Finn stood from the rock and brushed off the back of the hakama. "That's all."
"I understand." Sasori turned and left without further discussion.
Finn looked in the direction of the Land of Fire for a moment.
The Three-Tails commission was overdue. Danzo had been patient, which was not a state Danzo maintained indefinitely without good reasons, and eventually the impatience would express itself as a problem Finn would have to deal with from the wrong angle. Better to move first.
As for the other thing — Nohara Rin, and what was coming for her, and whether any of it could be redirected — he'd asked. He would wait to hear back. If there was a viable intervention, he'd take it. If there wasn't, then the sequence that had been set in motion long before Finn arrived in this world would run its course, and the people it happened to would become what they would become.
He had learned, over the past year, not to reach for every thread.
He set off to find Orochimaru.