Namikaze Minato was standing on the carved face of his own portrait.
He held the specially forged kunai in both hands, raised in front of him, the Flying Thunder God's formula inscribed on its blade. The Tailed Beast Ball was enormous and close and moving toward the monument at a speed that left very little room for error.
The technique met it.
The Flying Thunder God's spatial barrier had none of the qualities a physical barrier had. It didn't block, didn't absorb, didn't resist. It received. The Tailed Beast Ball hit the technique's field and the field bent inward around it, the spatial formula wrapping the energy rather than opposing it, and then the destination changed.
The ball reappeared over the Death Forest several kilometers outside the village.
It hit the treeline.
The explosion was visible from the Hokage Monument as a column of light that went up for a very long time, and the sound came after, a bass resonance that moved through the ground before it moved through the air. The trees in that section of forest were simply gone.
Minato let out a breath.
If the civilian shelter had taken that, there would have been no recovering from it politically, morally, or personally. He pushed the thought away and looked at the battlefield below.
"Sandaime!" he called down.
Hiruzen already understood. He put more force into his grip. The Adamantine Staff, which had been holding against the Nine-Tails' chest, extended further, the length increasing rapidly until the leverage it produced against something the Nine-Tails' size became irreversible. The Nine-Tails slid backward, the ground under it collapsing and scoring into long furrows, and then the outer wall was behind it and then the outer wall was gone, the wall section collapsing inward as the Nine-Tails passed through it going the wrong direction.
It was outside Konoha's perimeter.
Hiruzen recalled the staff to normal size, and was already moving.
"After it! Don't let it back in!" The order was unnecessary given what everyone had already understood, but an order spoken aloud in a command voice had a different function than the shared understanding it confirmed. It told everyone where they were in the decision. Hiruzen's forces, which had been flowing out behind him throughout the exchange, poured through the gap in the wall. A cordon began to form around the Nine-Tails' position.
In a back alley three blocks from the outer wall, two figures had been watching the same events from a different angle.
Might Guy's expression was the expression of someone who had been trained his entire life to respond to exactly this kind of situation and was being prevented from doing so by circumstance.
"Kakashi," he said. "We should go."
Kakashi was already looking toward where the cordon was forming. "Yeah."
Two senior shinobi appeared at the alley's mouth before either of them could take a step.
Yuhi Shinku was a compact man with the particular physical quality of someone who had spent several decades in the field and hadn't wasted any of them. He looked at Kakashi and Might Guy with the assessment of someone who had also been that age once and remembered exactly what it had felt like.
Hyuga Hiashi was beside him, the Byakugan's activation visible in the branching pattern around his eyes.
"Not your fight," Shinku said.
"We're Jonin," Kakashi said. "We've both been in actual wars."
Shinku paused for long enough that it looked like consideration rather than dismissal. Then Hyuga Hiashi spoke.
"Look at its eyes." He said it flatly, no elaboration. "The Sharingan. Something is controlling it. The Uchiha clan has the security detail tonight. We haven't found any movement from them yet, but the Sharingan is there and the timing is not a coincidence." He looked at both of them. "You staying in the village isn't wasted. Watch the Uchiha. If something happens from that direction, you'll be the first to know."
Guy opened his mouth.
"This is an order," Shinku said, with the specific quality that ended the conversation.
Kakashi looked at him. At the expression on his face, the particular settled quality of a senior shinobi who has decided to go somewhere difficult and knows it.
"Yes, sir," Kakashi said. "Be careful."
Shinku smiled at that, the quick smile of someone who appreciates the sentiment and doesn't want to make anything of it. Then he was moving, Hiashi beside him, and they were gone.
Guy was quiet for a moment. "Kakashi."
"I know." He looked at the alley, the direction Shinku had gone, and then the other direction. "We watch the Uchiha. Come on."
They moved.
Kakashi had taken three steps when the feeling reached him, the particular pressure of a presence in a shadow that was too still. He was throwing the kunai before he'd finished identifying the shape of the feeling, the reflex that came from years of operating in the Anbu completing the motion before conscious thought could.
Lightning crackled across Guy's body in the same moment, the Lightning Release Chakra Mode activating in a single instant. He stepped forward and to the left, putting himself between Kakashi and whatever was in the shadow, the formation of two people who'd trained together long enough that they didn't need to communicate the role assignments.
"Who's there," Kakashi said.
The shadow was quiet for a moment.
"You really do have good instincts." The voice was easy, no tension in it. "That Lightning Release Mode is coming along."
A figure walked out of the shadow.
Finn, for some reason, was holding a lit pipe.
He was wearing his normal clothes, the haori with the tiger descending a mountain embroidered across the back, Shindokutō at his waist. No mask. No black infiltration clothing. He looked like someone who had stepped out for an evening walk and found the neighborhood somewhat more active than expected.
"Lord Finn!" Guy said.
Kakashi did not lower his guard. His mind was doing several things at once: processing that this was Finn, processing that Finn was here in Konoha during a Nine-Tails attack, processing the possible connections, processing whether the connections were actually connections.
"When did you get here," he said. "And did you—" He stopped himself. He looked at the Nine-Tails in the distance, the visible Sharingan in its eyes. "No. That's not yours."
"Are you telling me or asking me," Finn said.
"Telling you." Kakashi paused. "Because you're here and not over there."
"There's also the part where it's a Sharingan," Guy offered, helpfully.
"Yes. There's that." Kakashi's shoulders came down a fraction. "Is that someone from your organization?"
"No."
It was said simply enough that Kakashi accepted it.
"Who is it," he said.
Finn exhaled a slow line of smoke and looked toward the battlefield. At this point the action had split between two engagements: Minato pursuing the masked figure, the two of them trading techniques somewhere in the middle distance in flashes of light that indicated speed Kakashi could track only roughly from here; and Hiruzen's forces working the cordon around the Nine-Tails with the patient professionalism of people who had done this before in different forms.
"He called himself Uchiha Madara," Finn said. "I don't know whether that's true."
Silence.
"Madara's been dead for decades," Guy said, after a moment.
"Which is why I said I don't know if it's true. What I do know is that the person is operating with genuinely dangerous intentions and enough capability to back them up." Finn turned to look at Kakashi directly. "Especially be careful around that particular individual. He seems to have a specific issue with Sharingan users. And with the Uchiha clan."
Kakashi's eyebrows moved. "Not an Uchiha operation?"
"I didn't say that. I said he has an issue with them. The distinction matters."
Kakashi thought about this and found it moved the picture in a way he couldn't fully map yet.
"He came with companions," Finn continued. "They're not inside Konoha right now. They should be outside the walls, waiting. Strong concealment ability, probably won't be found through a standard search. I wouldn't spend too many resources looking."
Guy looked at Finn. "Why are you telling us this?"
It was an honest question, asked in the straightforward way that Guy asked most things.
Finn seemed to consider it. He knocked the pipe against the alley wall, clearing the ash from the bowl, and looked at it for a moment.
"I've got a certain amount of goodwill toward you two specifically," he said. "That's part of it." He put the pipe back to his lips. "Beyond that. Jiraiya is a friend. Orochimaru is a colleague. I played chess with Sarutobi Hiruzen. Tsunade and I have an understanding." He exhaled. "I've been to the Rain Country. I've been to the Land of Waves. I've been through half the countries on this continent and nobody who matters to me in any of them is in any of those places. Most of them are here."
He looked toward the Hokage Monument in the middle distance, the four faces carved into the rock, and specifically the fourth one.
"The people who call themselves my friends are Konoha people. That probably makes me a friend of Konoha." He paused. "Roughly. In a general sense."
Kakashi processed this.
He thought about what he knew about Finn. An S-rank missing-nin with a five-hundred-million-ryo bounty. A man who had killed the Third Raikage and the Land of Earth's Daimyo and had taken the Hidden Rain Village and had somehow collected Jiraiya and Orochimaru and Tsunade as acquaintances. Who had walked into this alley in the middle of a Nine-Tails attack without a scratch on him and was smoking a pipe.
A friend of Konoha.
It had a quality that defied conventional analysis.
"Roughly," Kakashi said.
Finn smiled. "Roughly."
Out beyond the walls, the Nine-Tails roared at something, and the cordon flared with responding techniques, and somewhere in the darkness between the flash of one Flying Thunder God mark and another, Namikaze Minato was closing on the masked figure with everything he had.
Finn watched it and waited.
There was an opportunity somewhere in this evening, beyond the Scroll of Seals already secured in his storage scroll, beyond the supplementary material from the Hokage's hidden archive. He could feel the shape of it somewhere in what was still unfolding. He was patient. It would present itself.