How powerful can love be?
In Uchiha Obito's case: he had been throwing himself against the gate-sealing stone for the better part of six months without producing so much as a hairline crack. The moment he heard that Nohara Rin was nearby and in danger, he put his head down and broke through it in a single charge.
It was partly that his White Zetsu body had surged into full output under the pressure. But mostly it was that the gate had stopped being an obstacle and started being something between him and her.
He came out of the compound at a pace that the White Zetsu accompanying him couldn't match. Perhaps the White Zetsu wasn't particularly trying to. There was another one — the one Obito called A-Fei, the stub of White Zetsu that had been merged with his body since his reconstruction — that could give him directions from the inside without needing to keep pace.
He ran.
He thought about Minato as he ran. The Yellow Flash. The fastest man in the ninja world, who had inherited the Second Hokage's claim to that title and then exceeded it. And yet — at the Kannabi Bridge, Minato hadn't made it in time. Now this. There was a bitterness in the thought that Obito noticed and pushed aside, because it was directed at someone he loved and the direction felt wrong. He had been the one who'd separated from Minato at the Kannabi Bridge. He'd been the one who'd walked into the cave. He could not assign that to Minato.
But this time the thought wouldn't entirely go away.
He replaced it with other thoughts. Better ones.
Kakashi is strong. Kakashi will protect her.
When we meet, I'll say I survived against all odds. I'll say I've been hiding in the countryside gathering strength. I'll say: surprise. And they'll be surprised, and there will be shouting, and then probably ramen, and eventually I'll have to start the long process of catching up on everything I've missed.
He was going to eat a bowl of ramen. He was going to challenge Kakashi. He was going to become Hokage.
He ran.
On a rain-soaked plain in the borderlands of the Land of Rain, Kakashi ran with Rin at his side.
The Hidden Mist ANBU had found them. Too many of them, and in exactly the configuration you'd expect from a pursuit force that had been told precisely where to go rather than having tracked them. This wasn't chance contact.
"The intelligence was compromised," Kakashi said, his voice clipped. "A trap. This is the Land of Rain — there shouldn't be Hidden Mist forces here at all." His Sharingan was tracking positions through the driving rain, mapping the encirclement as it closed. "Minato-sensei is occupied elsewhere. We're on our own."
Rin ran beside him and didn't answer.
She knew what she was.
She had been captured. She had been unconscious for much of it, and when she'd come back to herself the seal was already in her body — the Three-Tails, Isobu, forced into her against her will while she was incapable of resistance. And she understood, with the cold clarity of a medical ninja who understood how sealed things worked, exactly what the plan was. She would return to Konoha. The seal would be released, or would release itself, and the Three-Tails would emerge inside Konoha's walls. The Hidden Mist would have used her as the weapon, and Kakashi as the unwitting delivery mechanism, and Konoha would burn.
She could not harm herself. She had tried and found that something in the seal prevented it — a compulsion, subtle and absolute, that stopped any motion that would end her own life.
She had been thinking since she realized this.
The ANBU completed the encirclement. The rain came down steadily.
"Rin, stay close and protect yourself," Kakashi said. "I'll open a path."
He turned toward the nearest cluster of ANBU and Raikiri flared in his hand — the thunderclap, the smell of ozone cutting through the rain, the concentrated lightning wrapping his arm from shoulder to fingertips. The sound of it reached across the entire plain. Kakashi moved.
The ANBU had been running a controlled pursuit. Their formation was designed to maintain pressure and drive the targets toward urgency rather than to actually close and kill — the girl had to arrive in Konoha alive and unsealed for the plan to succeed, and a full engagement risked damaging that. They had gaps in their encirclement, gaps that a skilled enough shinobi could find and exploit. One proper breakthrough attempt would open a lane.
Raikiri took the first ANBU through the chest before he could react.
Kakashi felt what he always felt in that moment: the specific physical knowledge of the technique completing itself. The resistance. The brief pause. The give. In a war, he had killed enough enemies with this technique that the sensation had become neutral — information, not emotion. Strike, contact, result.
He was already past the first ANBU when he registered that something was wrong.
Rin was there.
She was not behind him where she'd been standing. She was in front of him, between his outstretched arm and the direction he'd been moving, and his Sharingan had tracked a dozen threats in a dozen places but it had not tracked her because he had no defenses against Rin, no part of his awareness that was monitoring her as a threat, and she had moved with the deliberate quietness of someone who had made a decision and was not going to announce it.
The Raikiri was already committed. He couldn't take it back.
The sound it made was the same.
"Rin—"
She was looking at him. There were tears on her face. The rain was on her face. He couldn't tell, from where he was standing, which was which.
"Kaka..." Her voice came out broken. Just the beginning of his name. The rest of it didn't have enough breath behind it.
She said that much and then the light went out of her eyes and the strength left her body all at once, and she fell.
Kakashi pulled his arm back. He did it because his body still had instructions and his body followed them. The Raikiri dissipated. He was standing in the rain with his arm at his side.
Kakashi was a complicated person. He had spent years unable to resolve whether his father had been right or wrong until Obito had cut through all of it and given him a different way to think about what it meant to be a Konoha ninja. Since that day, he had treated his companions — Rin specifically — as something he would not sacrifice, not for a mission, not for anything. It was a wound re-opened rather than a new one.
He had once, briefly, considered leaving her behind on the original mission. He had had the thought and had turned away from it. He'd promised Obito. He'd promised himself. And it hadn't mattered, and it hadn't mattered, and now she was on the ground in the rain and his arm still felt like his arm.
His legs gave.
The ANBU of the Hidden Mist Village stood in their encirclement formation and stared.
Their pursuit had been controlled. That was the job: create urgency, guide the targets, let the panic do the work. They hadn't been supposed to actually close. And now the girl — the core of the operation, the one carrying the Three-Tails — was dead. By a Konoha blade. The plan had failed in a way that hadn't been anticipated because no one had anticipated this.
The blood spread out from Rin and stained the rain-soaked ground and the world was that color for a moment.
Kakashi fell.
In the forest at the edge of the plain, Uchiha Obito arrived.
He had been almost there. He'd seen the encirclement closing, he'd seen Kakashi moving with Raikiri, he'd been about to break through the tree line when he'd seen Rin step forward.
He saw it. He saw her do it.
And then he saw what happened.
He stood in the trees and did not move. He was still processing what his eyes had given him. He understood it, on some level. He understood it as a sequence of events: Rin moved, Kakashi's technique connected, Rin fell. He understood it as a sentence.
He did not accept it.
"Rin!!!"
The sound that came from him was not a human sound. It was the sound of something with no more restraint in it, no more structure, no more of the scaffolding that keeps a person assembled as a particular person rather than just force and pain. The White Zetsu tissue in his body responded to it — wooden thorns erupting from his arms and torso, the organic material expressing the emotion because the emotion was too large for normal channels.
And his eyes changed.
He had never opened the Mangekyō before. He had never had reason to. The pattern appeared in his right eye with the inevitability of something that had always been there waiting for the correct key, and the power behind it — the space-time technique that was his Mangekyō's specific nature — activated with an instinctive fluency that had nothing to do with training. As if the technique had been assembled in him across all the years he'd lived and was simply now being used for the first time.
The ANBU turned at the sound.
They assessed. They gave orders. They moved to intercept.
The massacre was brief.
At a somewhat greater distance, in the shelter of a different section of the tree line, two figures watched.
Orochimaru's eyes were wide. "Wood Release. And a Sharingan — is that a Mangekyō?"
"Mangekyō," Finn confirmed.
The blade passing through Uchiha Obito's body without producing so much as a surface wound stopped Orochimaru mid-sentence. The attack completed its arc and came out the other side, and Obito kept moving as if the impact had been irrelevant.
"Space-time," Orochimaru said. Not quite a question.
"It seems so." Finn watched Obito move through the Hidden Mist ANBU with the specific quality of attention he gave to things he found genuinely interesting. "You noticed the Wood Release."
"I noticed it." Orochimaru was still watching. "The Hashirama cells are well-known for their aggressive integration properties. Most hosts don't survive them, or survive in a degraded state. But this one is using them with full command." He paused. "The Uchiha bloodline."
"You told me yourself that Wood Release requires the nature combination, sufficient chakra volume, and sufficient physical vitality. All of those conditions he meets. But so did Yamato, and Yamato's Wood Release was limited." Finn kept his voice level. "You said it yourself — Sage Body and Sharingan are opposite poles. But that boy has both now."
"Harmonizing them," Orochimaru said slowly. He turned to look at Finn with an expression that was processing something at significant speed. "The Sharingan. You mentioned it to me before—"
"I said it was worth your attention."
"Yes." Orochimaru looked back at the field. Whatever he'd been thinking about the Sharingan before had been passive interest. What he was looking at now was making it something else.
After a moment, he said: "The girl that Kakashi killed. That's the one you wanted to save."
Finn's gaze was on the ground where Rin had fallen. "Is there anything to work with?"
Orochimaru considered it clinically. "The heart is destroyed. That's outside what I can repair. But I can stabilize the soul's departure — prevent it from crossing into the Pure Land for a period. That buys time. Whether it's enough time depends on what Kakuzu can do with the underlying damage."
"Kakuzu said there was a possibility," Finn said.
"Then it's worth trying." Orochimaru made the calculation the way he made all calculations. "I can hold the soul in place. You said Kakuzu might be able to repair the heart. If those two things together are sufficient, then reversing this is theoretically achievable. Life and death in this world are..." He paused, briefly, with something that might have been appreciation for the subject matter. "More negotiable than most worlds acknowledge."
"Then you take the girl," Finn said. "I'll handle the Three-Tails."
With Rin dead, the forced sealing had broken. Isobu's chakra was still present in the field — the sheer mass of a tailed beast's life force didn't dissipate instantly, and a tailed beast didn't truly die in any permanent sense; it would reconstitute itself eventually, but that process took years. Finn had no interest in waiting years. The chakra and vitality were still concentrated here, available to be captured, and Danzo's commission was overdue.
"An interesting research problem," Orochimaru murmured, to himself rather than to Finn, and began moving.
Finn watched him go, then turned back to the field.
He moved.