Kakashi had been thinking for a moment, and whatever he arrived at produced a change in his expression that was either hope or a very specific kind of audacity.
"You're clearly strong," he said, to Finn's back. "And a friend of Konoha's. So why not help us deal with the Nine-Tails?"
Finn turned to look at him.
"You know," he said, "I've been thinking about extending an invitation to you. The Yorozuya has openings for people with your specific combination of qualities. Self-destructive, mentally unwell in a way that presents as competence, and completely shameless about it. We're growing the team."
Kakashi looked at him for a moment. "That's not really an answer."
"Here's an answer." Finn turned back toward the battle. "The Nine-Tails is currently loose and being controlled by someone. If I helped you kill it, what happens to the body? Can you contain it? Can you absorb it? Can you do anything with nine tails' worth of chakra except let it scatter?" He didn't wait for a response. "I'll give you advice as a friend. As something more than a friend, we'd need to talk about what you'd be offering in return. And separately from all of that, I came here with my own purposes tonight."
"What purposes?" Kakashi asked.
"The masked man," Finn said. "He has space-time ninjutsu I haven't encountered before. Under normal conditions you can't touch someone with that kind of technique. But Namikaze Minato is here, and if anyone can pin him down for long enough to study at close range, it's the Flying Thunder God."
This was, technically, nonsense. Finn had no interest in studying Kamui at close range in a combat context. But it was the kind of nonsense that made complete sense from Konoha's perspective: a powerful independent operator with a stated interest in an unusual technique, in the right place at the right time, cooperating in ways that were marginally useful without being formally committed. It left him a clean reason to be here that didn't require Konoha to assume the worst.
If anyone asked later, which they would, he had been tracking the masked man.
He turned to look at the battlefield and found that both Uchiha Obito and Namikaze Minato were no longer where they'd been thirty seconds ago.
"Apparently they sorted that out," he said.
He used the Lightning Body Instant Technique and was off the roof.
Finn landed on the top of Konoha's outer wall and extended his Observation Haki outward. Not the standard range he used for immediate threat awareness. The extended version, the wide-angle sweep he'd developed across years of operation in the One Piece world, covering the terrain in every direction.
He found them both in a dense forest outside the village walls.
Through his perception, he watched rather than intruded.
Namikaze Minato stood across from the masked figure with a Flying Thunder God kunai in one hand and a seal forming in the other. The space between them had the particular quality of two people who have been testing each other and have reached a point where one of them is about to show something new.
"Are you from the Uchiha clan?" Minato said.
Across the space between them, Obito held his own kunai, one in each hand, chains running from the handles.
"Uchiha?" He let the word sit for a moment, as if deciding something. Then, with a tone that had something performative in it, something trying very hard to sound like inevitability: "You could say so. I haven't introduced myself properly. To you, the Fourth Hokage of Konoha, I'll say this directly. My name is Uchiha Madara."
Minato's eyes showed the specific quality of someone filing a claim away for examination rather than accepting it at face value. The masked man had fought him in ways that suggested intimate knowledge of his patterns, his rhythms, his preferred spacing and timing. That kind of knowledge was possible from Sharingan-based observation, from intelligence work, from years of dedicated research. It was not the profile of an ancient warrior with decades of legendary combat behind him. It felt more like someone who had grown up watching him.
The claim would have to wait. What couldn't wait was ending this quickly enough to get back to the village.
Obito moved.
Minato's expression shifted into something that had no warmth in it at all.
The kunai left his hand on a line aimed at Obito's head. Obito saw it coming and didn't alter his approach, which meant Kamui was engaged. The blade passed through the intangible portion of Obito's upper body as Kamui took effect, and in the moment that the technique was sustaining that partial intangibility, Obito's reach extended toward Minato with the confidence of someone who had this move down.
If he could get a physical grip, Kamui could do the rest. Lock the target's space. Make them unable to use their own space-time technique. Then any number of things became possible that weren't currently possible.
But the kunai had already been thrown.
The technique was called Flying Thunder God: Second Stage, and Minato had developed it quietly, without announcement, and had deliberately not used it publicly until there was a specific reason to. It operated on a refinement of the original marker principle: the thrown kunai itself became a secondary teleportation anchor, allowing him to move to the kunai rather than a pre-placed marker. He appeared above Obito in a fold of golden light, took the kunai from the air, and had the Rasengan he'd been forming since before the throw ready in his other hand.
It connected with Obito's waist.
The force of a fully formed Rasengan at contact range with no defensive preparation in place drove Obito into the ground hard enough to remove any ambiguity about how the exchange had gone. In the same moment of contact, Minato's palm pressed the Flying Thunder God seal into Obito's back, the inscription taking hold before Obito's body processed the impact and began responding.
On the wall, Finn watched this and said, "His combat experience is too limited. You don't telegraph that move to someone like Minato and then get surprised when the trap was the point."
He wasn't wrong. The Obito of the Fourth Ninja World War would make different choices in this exact situation. Years of operation, of actual sustained combat, would fill the gaps that Obito's current profile had. Right now he was a young man with extraordinary tools and the fighting instincts of someone who had spent most of the intervening years planning rather than fighting.
Obito didn't stay on the ground. The Kamui activated again, his form pulling out of the solid world into whatever dimensional space the technique used, and he withdrew. The word "retreat" was too orderly for what it actually looked like.
Minato didn't chase him.
The Nine-Tails was still in the village. Kushina was at home with their son. The masked man now carried a Flying Thunder God seal on his body, which meant the distance between them was no longer defined by geography. Minato could go find him at any time.
He turned toward the village and used the technique.
The fight against the Nine-Tails had been going for long enough that people were tiring.
The Nine-Tails was not tiring. This was one of its primary tactical advantages.
Hyuga Hiashi had been rotating through defensive positions, coordinating with the shinobi around him, buying meters of ground and losing most of them back. He was one of the best available, which told you something about the situation the people around him were in.
"How much longer?" he called out.
The Nine-Tails answered by raising one massive claw and bringing it down.
"Don't count us out yet."
The chakra gathered in Hiashi's hands was dense enough to be visible, a luminous concentration that followed the principles of the Hyuga clan's internal chakra control taken to their upper limit. His waist rotated, weight transferring, the mechanics of the strike moving through his entire body into the point of contact.
"Eight Trigrams: Mountain Crusher!"
The strike hit the descending claw at the point of maximum leverage. The claw didn't stop, but it broke, the outer portion shattering, and the force transmission through the Nine-Tails' limb was enough to knock it backward a step. For something that size, one step was a significant spatial concession.
Beside him, Hyuga Hizashi let out a breath that had more relief in it than he wanted to show.
Some distance away, in the space between two collapsed buildings, Yuhi Shinku was watching the Nine-Tails' eyes.
He was one of Konoha's genjutsu specialists. Not the most powerful in the village by any measure, but experienced, and his particular expertise was exactly the kind of pattern recognition needed to see what he was seeing: the control structure underneath the Nine-Tails' movement. The Sharingan's influence on the tailed beast was real, but it was also a technique. Techniques had seams.
The blow from Hiashi, combined with whatever had happened to the masked man's concentration, had introduced a gap.
Shinku formed the seal and channeled everything he had left into the release.
"Open."
The Sharingan's signature in the Nine-Tails' eyes fractured and dispersed. The hypnotic pattern that had been sustained across the technique's duration simply wasn't there anymore. The Nine-Tails blinked, and for a moment its eyes were nothing but nine-tailed beast, enormous and furious and its own.
What a nine-tailed beast directed its attention at, immediately and without deliberation, was the thing that had just removed the constraint it had been experiencing.
It found Shinku.
The tail moved with a speed that was disproportionate to the size of the body behind it.
Shinku registered this, assessed the angle and the remaining distance, calculated the chakra he had left. The calculation was brief.
He thought of Kurenai. Then he thought, with a flash of irritated parental protectiveness, that Asuma Sarutobi had better not make his daughter cry. He would be very difficult to ignore as a ghost.
The tail reached him.
It didn't reach him.
A hand on his arm, a spatial displacement in the exact moment between the tail's arrival and where he was standing, and then he was elsewhere. The tail passed through empty air. The ground where he'd been standing was simply gone, compressed by the impact into something that had no relationship with its previous shape.
The person who had moved him was already looking at the battlefield rather than at him.
"That's a bad habit," said Namikaze Minato. "Making up stories about the Third Hokage's son."
Shinku looked at him for a moment.
"The Fourth Hokage," he said, with the emphasis of someone confirming they are seeing what they think they're seeing.
Minato had already assessed the battlefield and was calculating his next movement.
In the original sequence of events, Yuhi Shinku died here. The tail found him and the outcome was the one that left Kurenai without a father and Konoha with one fewer of its capable senior specialists.
The change was small, as changes went. One hand on an arm. One displacement through space. The kind of thing that happened in the margins of large events when someone was present who wouldn't otherwise be.
Finn, watching from the wall, noted it without satisfaction or disappointment. Just noted it.
Some people who were supposed to die tonight wouldn't. Some people who weren't supposed to die would. That was the nature of a night this large when an additional variable was in play.
He watched Minato move back into the fight and began calculating when the next significant moment would arrive.