During the four days Uchiha Obito had spent inside Konoha, he hadn't only gathered intelligence.
In a clearing inside one of the village's inner forests, hidden behind layers of natural cover and the particular invisibility of a place nobody had reason to look, he had built a formation. Twelve stone pillars arranged in a precise geometric pattern, their arrangement calibrated to contain and mask what was going to happen inside them. When the Nine-Tails was released, the formation would keep its chakra from bleeding outward into the wider environment, preventing the village's sensor network from pinpointing the source until the process was too far along to interrupt.
His plan for the Nine-Tails was not to absorb it into the Gedo Mazo. Black Zetsu had been clear about the reasoning: the Nine-Tails' chakra volume was simply too large for the statue to take in one transfer without damaging the vessel. The Akatsuki's standard operation in the original sequence had built up to the Nine-Tails as the final extraction for exactly this reason. You collected the smaller ones first, expanded the statue's capacity through use, and saved the largest for when the vessel could accommodate it.
Obito's alternative was control. Not sealing, not containment: direct Sharingan subjugation, binding the Nine-Tails as a summoning beast under his authority. It had been done before. Uchiha Madara had demonstrated it at the Valley of the End, standing across from Hashirama Senju with the Nine-Tails controlled through his eyes and deploying it as a weapon. The battle had not gone Madara's way in the end, but the control had been real. The Nine-Tails, despite being the most powerful of the tailed beasts, was not immune to the Sharingan.
None of them were. That was simply the nature of the thing.
Inside the stone pillar formation, in the forest clearing, Uzumaki Kushina hung suspended by chakra chains locked to the surrounding pillars. Her wrists and ankles were pinned. The chains were her own, technically, a property of her Uzumaki physiology now weaponized against her by the formation's configuration.
She'd recovered faster than a normal person would have. She'd given birth an hour ago. Her body had no particular interest in making concessions to that fact.
"Who are you?" Her voice was controlled under the anger. "What is this? What are you trying to do?"
Uchiha Obito stood in front of her and said nothing.
She read what she could from the mask, from the body language, from what was available. She was the wife of the Fourth Hokage. She had spent years adjacent to the village's most classified information. She knew the shape of the tensions that ran underneath Konoha's surface, the ones that didn't make it into official briefings but moved through the awareness of everyone connected to the Hokage's office.
The Uchiha clan. The growing friction between them and the institutional structures that had been built around Konoha's security since the war. The fact that Orochimaru's departure had somehow made things worse rather than better, the clan's relationship with the Hokage succession becoming something that people discussed in careful language in certain rooms.
The eye in the mask's hole was turning red.
"Sharingan," she said, and the word changed what she was thinking about.
The eye shifted. The tomoe of the Sharingan bled into the triple-pinwheel configuration of the Mangekyō, and then the power behind it came through the air and found her eyes.
It wasn't a question of resisting. The Mangekyō Sharingan's power at this range wasn't something you resisted. The genjutsu settled over her consciousness like a closing hand and she lost everything in an instant.
Her body went slack in the chains.
From her stomach, where Minato had maintained the seal through childbirth, the markings began to dissolve. The sealing technique didn't break suddenly; it ran downward like an inscription written in water, the characters flowing apart, the structure they composed losing coherence as the chakra holding them withdrew inward. Then the orange chakra came up, vast and immediate, pressing outward through the dissolving barrier.
The Nine-Tails' head tore through the gap in a way that didn't actually injure Kushina's body, which was its own kind of horror. It simply came through her, enormous and orange and screaming, and the eyes above the massive muzzle wore the Sharingan's pattern, the tomoe reflecting something that was both the Nine-Tails' awareness and the Mangekyō's control imposed over it.
It was already growing.
In the Hokage Building, on the administrative floor, the corridor outside the Hokage's office was dark. The day's staff had left hours ago. Finn had been in here long enough to understand the building's nighttime layout, which was sparse and getting sparser as personnel relocated to support Konoha's emergency response.
He watched the rain through the window at the corridor's end.
The evacuation had been going cleanly. No panic. The villagers were confused, most of them pulled from their evening routines by ninja who gave no explanation, but the ninja were organized and the organization was enough. The village itself hadn't been struck yet. The crisis was real but not yet visible to the people being moved away from it.
Soon.
"Time to move," Finn said.
He walked to the Hokage's office door, tried the handle, found it locked, and pulled the entire door frame out of the wall. It came away with a crack of wood and plaster. He set it aside and stepped through the opening.
The office was familiar in outline, the same furniture arrangement he'd seen years ago when Sarutobi Hiruzen had been on the other side of the chess table. The Kage portraits along the wall, the desk, the window. He closed his eyes, sent his perception through the room, and read the spatial relationships.
One bookcase.
He walked to it, extended his hand, and touched the cabinet door.
The barrier activated immediately. It came out as fire, which was the appropriate first response to an unauthorized hand on a restricted container: fast, expansive, designed to spread along the contact point and up the intruder's arm before they could respond. In a fraction of a second it was running up Finn's fingers toward his palm.
Black smoke rose from the contact point.
The fire met the Dark-Dark Fruit's field and ceased to exist. Not extinguished. The fuel was simply no longer there.
Finn's smoke-covered hand closed around the cabinet door and pulled.
Outside the building, moving at a pace that covered considerable ground very quickly, Sarutobi Hiruzen had arrived at the Hokage Building's outer perimeter with several dozen ninja following him. He had been in the middle of explaining the situation to the assembled leadership of Konoha's military apparatus when the barrier's alert reached him: not an audible sound, but a chakra signal, the specific disruption signature of a protected container being forced open. He'd felt it through the link he maintained to all of the Hokage office's sealed locations.
The Scroll of Seals was in there.
Behind him, he left the situation in capable hands.
Nara Rakuzen, clan head and current commander of the Jonin squad, a man who had been doing this work since the Third Raikage was still alive, stood where Hiruzen had been standing and began issuing orders. Uchiha Fugaku had already been given his assignment: the Uchiha clan's security forces were to maintain order in the civilian evacuation zones and protect the population. It was an assignment that carried subtext Fugaku read clearly. Keeping the Uchiha clan out of the main combat line was a statement about trust, or the limits of it.
Fugaku understood it. He didn't like the subtext, but he understood the logic behind it, and he understood that Sarutobi Hiruzen had offered the assignment in a spirit that wasn't purely restrictive. If the Uchiha clan performed well tonight, did the visible protective work that citizens would remember, the relationship with the Hokage office had somewhere to improve toward. That was not a small thing. He nodded without argument and began coordinating his people.
Hiruzen had also seen Homura Mitokado, one of his two senior advisors, among the assembled group. Mitokado had asked about Danzo. Hiruzen's response had been characteristically brief: Danzo had his own networks and had almost certainly been informed before anyone else, and Hiruzen was not going to spend attention on him when the attention was needed elsewhere.
Mitokado hadn't pushed it.
Hiruzen was three steps from the Hokage Building's entrance when the sound came.
Not from the building. From the direction of the inner forest. A deep, resonant boom that moved through the ground rather than the air, followed by something that wasn't quite a roar and wasn't quite a scream and was too large to be easily categorized by ears that had only heard it at a distance.
The smoke column rose in the same instant. White, enormous, the kind that came from a summoning technique at a scale that hadn't been deployed in this village since the village was young.
And then the Nine-Tails was visible above the roofline.
Nine tails spread behind it in the darkness, each one thick enough that it would have been meaningfully large on its own. The body itself blocked the sky in the direction it faced. The blood moon sat behind it, doing nothing to help the aesthetic situation. The drizzle that had been falling across Konoha all evening stopped for a moment, as if the air in the Nine-Tails' immediate vicinity had different ideas about weather.
Sarutobi Hiruzen stopped moving.
The Scroll of Seals, the barrier breach, the intruder in the Hokage's office. All of it was still there, all of it was still real. And all of it was going to have to wait.
"Nine-Tails," he said.
The word came out with the particular weight of someone who had spent thirty years hoping to never use it in this specific context.
The creature's roar hit the village like a physical impact.