Uchiha Obito worked quickly.
The Nine-Tails came out of Kushina faster than anyone who hadn't seen it before would have expected it could. By the time Namikaze Minato, tracking through the Flying Thunder God's spatial markers, arrived at the stone pillar formation in the inner forest, the chakra chains had already released on their own, their anchor gone with Obito.
The logic of why Obito had chosen to extract the Nine-Tails here rather than taking Kushina somewhere remote and doing it at a safer distance was, in retrospect, simple: Kushina almost certainly had one of Minato's Flying Thunder God markers on her. She was his wife. She was the Nine-Tails' Jinchuriki. Of course she did. If Obito had taken her out of Konoha, across any meaningful distance, all Minato needed was a moment of attention and he would arrive at Kushina's location before Obito could complete the extraction. And then the Nine-Tails would still be sealed and Obito would be in a fight he hadn't arranged on terms he hadn't chosen.
Better to do it here, quickly, and leave before the marker could be used.
The problem was that by the time Minato arrived at the formation, Obito was gone and the Nine-Tails was already somewhere else.
Kushina was on the ground between the pillars. The chains had dissolved when Obito left, and she'd come down from their suspension without the benefit of a controlled landing. She was conscious. The Nine-Tails' forced extraction had opened something inside her that wasn't a wound in the physical sense but was a wound in every functional sense: a gap where the chakra of the tailed beast had been, a hole through which her own life force was running out in the way that light runs out of a room when the door opens.
Minato was down beside her before his momentum had fully stopped.
"Kushina."
She opened her eyes. The first thing she looked for was not him.
"Naruto," she said. "Where's Naruto? Is he—"
"Naruto is safe. He's fine. I'm going to take you to him right now, so don't—"
"Is he hurt?"
"No. He's not hurt."
Something in her face resolved. She breathed.
Minato used the technique, and they were home.
Naruto was on the bed where Minato had left him. He was no longer crying. At some point in the last hour, through everything that had happened and everything that was still happening, Uzumaki Naruto had fallen asleep, his small face composed and entirely unconcerned with the state of the world outside.
Kushina looked at him.
Minato helped her to the bed and got her settled as carefully as he could without taking time he didn't have.
"It was the Sharingan," she said. Her voice was quieter than he'd ever heard it. "The one who took the Nine-Tails. His eye was a Sharingan. He might be an Uchiha, Minato. You need to know that."
"I'll be careful."
"Go." She found his hand for a moment. "We'll be here. We'll wait for you."
He looked at both of them: the woman he had built his adult life beside, and the child who had been alive for approximately two hours.
He didn't say anything else. He looked at them long enough that they would know, from the way he looked, exactly how much there was to say.
Then he turned.
On the rooftop of the Hokage Building, Finn stood with his hands loose at his sides, watching the Nine-Tailed Fox move through Konoha.
It was very large.
He'd known, intellectually, how large the Nine-Tails was. He had the relevant information. But there was a qualitative difference between knowing the dimensions of something and watching it in actual operation, and the Nine-Tails in actual operation was the kind of thing that reset your understanding of scale. Buildings collapsed where its tails moved through them. Not deliberately, just through contact, the way your hand might sweep through a structure made of paper without trying to knock it over.
Uchiha Obito was standing on its head.
"And there it is," Finn said, to himself. "Poor Black Zetsu."
He'd wondered, briefly, whether his own presence here would change the sequence. Whether Obito, knowing Finn was in the area and nominally committed to the original plan, would make the rational calculation and extract the Nine-Tails cleanly. The rational calculation was: leave now, let Finn cover the retreat, walk away with the Nine-Tails intact.
The rational calculation was not what Obito had done.
Instead Obito had summoned the Nine-Tails inside Konoha's walls and climbed onto its head and was now directing it to destroy things. The Hokage Monument in the distance seemed to be catching his particular attention.
You could not apply normal logic to this person. Finn had always known this intellectually. The confirmation was still entertaining in a slightly terrible way.
He reached into his haori and pulled out the scroll he'd obtained from the hidden compartment behind the bookcase. The Scroll of Seals. He unrolled the edge enough to confirm the content without reading through it here, then rolled it back and secured it.
The hidden compartment had also contained several dozen other scrolls, most of them labeled in Sarutobi Hiruzen's own handwriting, compilations of techniques that had accumulated through three Hokage's worth of institutional research. Tobirama Senju's work. Hiruzen's own developments. A significant body of material that Konoha's restricted archive had been sitting on for decades.
All of it was in the storage scroll at his waist.
The primary objective was complete. The secondary material was a bonus. Finn was, at this point, in Konoha with no remaining operational necessity and a great deal of flexibility about what came next.
He watched the Nine-Tails move through the village and thought about his options.
Danzo was not visible anywhere in the field below him. Finn had been surveying the deployment pattern through the Rain Tiger at Will's coverage, which the rain he'd induced was maintaining across the village, and the pattern was consistent: everyone connected to the Hokage's authority was engaged, or organizing to engage, or managing the civilian evacuation. Danzo's infrastructure was not present.
This was not a surprise. Danzo's operational philosophy treated Konoha's institutional strength as a personal resource to be managed rather than a common good to be defended. An event that weakened the Hokage lineage, that drained the village's senior military talent, that deepened the fractures between the Uchiha clan and the Hokage's authority, was an event that served Danzo's trajectory. He had no incentive to spend his assets defending against it.
The long-term consequences of this particular evening were ones Finn had already mapped. The Nine-Tails attack would hollow out a generation of Hiruzen's most capable officers. Yuhi Shinku was going to die here. Several others like him, senior-tier shinobi with deep institutional relationships to the Hokage's office. After tonight, Hiruzen would return to the position of Third Hokage but with substantially reduced political capital and a security apparatus that had taken serious losses. Danzo would be positioned to fill the gap, gradually, carefully, with the patience of someone who had been waiting for exactly this configuration for a very long time.
It was, in a cold strategic light, almost elegant.
Finn found Danzo genuinely useful. A man who would operate this way during a crisis was a man whose priorities were reliably self-serving, which made him predictable in the ways that mattered.
He looked at the Nine-Tails again. Hiruzen was fighting it, or trying to, which was the kind of thing you could describe as "fighting" in the technical sense while still acknowledging the asymmetry.
The question was whether to do something.
He turned it over.
Outside the walls, in the grove where they'd set up camp, Black Zetsu watched the Nine-Tails through the gap between the trees.
It was visible over the walls. The tails were the most visible part, moving in wide arcs, each arc corresponding to a sound that reached the grove a moment later.
Black Zetsu had been watching for approximately four minutes and his understanding of what was happening had not improved from the initial moment of comprehension, which had been: Uchiha Obito had gotten the Nine-Tails and then done exactly the opposite of the plan.
The plan had been clean. The plan had been constructed carefully. The plan had accounted for variables, had identified contingencies, had been designed specifically to get the Nine-Tails out of Konoha in the most efficient way possible with the lowest probability of interference. Finn's involvement had been positioned as a strategic asset: a powerful figure with his own objectives who would provide cover as a natural consequence of pursuing those objectives, costing nothing, adding significant operational value.
Instead, Uchiha Obito was standing on the Nine-Tails' head and directing it to destroy structures inside Konoha while Namikaze Minato was presumably somewhere in that village at full capacity and ready to respond.
Finn was not going to cover anyone's retreat. That part of the agreement was null the moment Obito broke the original arrangement.
Which meant Finn might reasonably conclude that Black Zetsu had planned this. That the retreat cover had been an empty promise from the start. That the entire arrangement had been structured to put Finn in Konoha on a night that looked like this.
The relationship that Black Zetsu had spent four days carefully building.
He stared at the Nine-Tails' silhouette above the walls.
White Zetsu was beside him, watching with an expression of abstract interest. He said nothing, which was the correct choice.
"He still has the Nine-Tails under control," Black Zetsu said, as much to himself as to White Zetsu. "The Sharingan is still active. He can still summon it out of the village if he decides to leave. The Nine-Tails isn't lost yet."
This was true. The situation was recoverable. There was still a path to the objective.
The path was narrower than it had been an hour ago, and considerably more expensive, and was going to require Obito to make a rational decision in circumstances that had already demonstrated his capacity for irrational ones, but the path existed.
Black Zetsu thought about Finn standing on the Hokage Building's rooftop watching this unfold.
Then he thought about Finn watching Obito stand on the Nine-Tails and destroy Konoha and understanding, with the clarity of someone who had correctly predicted this exact outcome, that the retreat cover had never been going to happen.
And then, quietly, Black Zetsu thought about how Finn had spent four days in the woods with him, talking, genuinely interested, the kind of engaged and curious presence that Black Zetsu had not experienced in the thousands of years he'd been operating in careful isolation.
And Uchiha Obito was out there on a tailed beast's head, breaking things.
"Finn still understands how plans work," Black Zetsu said, very quietly.
He did not finish the thought. But the thought was complete.
In the village, Sarutobi Hiruzen was buying time and spending it as efficiently as he could.
He'd seen the Sharingan in the Nine-Tails' eyes. He'd processed what it meant: someone was controlling it, and the someone had those eyes, and the implications of that were things he couldn't fully address at this moment because the Nine-Tails was directly in front of him. He filed the implications for later and concentrated on the problem that had immediate physical consequences.
He pressed his palm to the roof, and the summoning technique brought his oldest partner into the world in a cloud of smoke.
Enma looked at the Nine-Tails and then looked at Hiruzen.
"Every time you summon me," he said, with the particular tone of someone making a point they've made many times before, "it's always like this."
"If I called you when things were going well, what would be the point?"
"I might enjoy it. That is the point." But he was already shifting, already responding to the chakra Hiruzen was pushing through the summoning link. "All right. Let's go."
He transformed, the Monkey King's body elongating and hardening and simplifying into the Adamantine Staff, which was exactly what it sounded like: a staff made of something harder than diamond, of a size that could be wielded against something the size of the Nine-Tails.
Hiruzen took it and moved.
The Nine-Tails had stopped paying attention to Hiruzen. Its attention was on the Hokage Monument, the four faces carved into the rock face in the middle distance, and specifically on the fourth face, which was Minato's. The Tailed Beast Ball was forming in front of its muzzle, compressing from a rough sphere into something dense and dark and stable.
Inside the monument, behind those faces, in the emergency shelters Konoha had carved into the rock for exactly this kind of situation, civilians were present.
Hiruzen extended the staff.
It grew, lengthening toward the Nine-Tails' body, and when it connected it was with enough force to stagger something that weighed what the Nine-Tails weighed, pushing it backward and off its aim. The Nine-Tails slid across the ground, leaving furrows, and the Tailed Beast Ball's aim shifted.
But the ball was already formed. It was already fired. The Sharingan's control held Obito's grip on the Nine-Tails stable enough that the disturbance didn't break it.
The ball left the Nine-Tails' muzzle on a trajectory that was still uncomfortably close to where the civilians were.
Hiruzen watched it go and felt the particular emptiness of having done everything correctly and having it not be enough.
Then the barrier opened.
It appeared between the Tailed Beast Ball and its destination, a large geometric formation positioned in the air with the spatial precision of someone who had marked the relevant locations in advance and could arrive at them faster than the problem could. The ball went into the barrier and was redirected, the trajectory bending, the energy exiting somewhere else, somewhere without civilians.
Flying Thunder God: Guiding Thunder.
Hiruzen recognized it immediately. He breathed out through his nose, the breath of someone who had been holding something in and can now release it.
Namikaze Minato was back.