Finn looked at the two returning figures, then at the fish still turning on the grill, and offered it with the natural ease of someone whose priorities were entirely clear.
"Skewer?"
Uchiha Obito had been preparing himself. He'd spent four days inside Konoha moving carefully through the village he'd once called home, mapping Kushina's birthing location, working through the emotional residue of being back in a place he'd declared dead to himself. He had come out of that grove with his jaw set and his mind focused on the necessary sequence of what came next.
The grilled fish derailed approximately three seconds of this.
White Zetsu looked at the skewer with the particular expression of someone encountering something that produced a feeling they had no proper use for. "Can I? I really want to, but I can't, because I don't have the relevant internal infrastructure to process it. Lord Finn, do you know what it feels like? When you eat something and then later..."
Black Zetsu's entire posture changed in the way of someone calculating whether violence was warranted.
Finn touched his chin. He appeared to give the question genuine consideration, which was somehow worse than dismissing it.
"Very satisfying?" he said. "The whole process has a beginning and an end. A satisfying sense of completion."
A pause.
"You're genuinely unlucky that you can't experience it."
White Zetsu nodded with great feeling, the bobbing motion of someone who had found unexpected kinship. "I feel the same. The deprivation is real."
Black Zetsu looked at the sky.
Obito pulled himself together. "We don't have time for this. The Nine-Tails Jinchuriki is giving birth tonight. I've located their facility. I'm going in now." He looked at Finn. "From this point on, I'm counting on your support."
Black Zetsu straightened immediately, the conversation around grilled fish and digestive complaints falling away as something older and more practiced came to the surface. It was finally here. The Nine-Tails, after everything, was within reach. He contained his reaction and kept his voice level. "Then we begin. White Zetsu and I will stay out here. We'd be more problem than help inside."
Finn looked at his fish.
It was done. The skin had crisped exactly right, the smell was correct, and he'd been tending it for the better part of an hour. Throwing it away felt like an insult to the process.
He bit into it, chewed, swallowed, and stood up with it still in hand. "All right. Let's do it."
Obito glanced at the fish. He elected not to address it. "I can take you through Kamui."
Finn was already thinking about what that would mean for his chakra state. The passive space-time energy absorption that happened when Kamui operated in his vicinity was real and welcome in ordinary circumstances. But it came with a corresponding drain on Obito's reserves, and the current question was not how much space-time energy he could accumulate but how functional he needed to be once he was inside Konoha's walls. If Minato Namikaze was going to be operating at full capacity tonight, which he was, Finn did not want to arrive at reduced capacity.
"Go ahead without me," Finn said. "I'll find my own way in."
Obito looked at him for a moment, then nodded. He activated Kamui.
Then stopped, with an expression that was difficult to interpret through the mask.
The consumption had jumped again. He hadn't even transported anyone this time. Just himself. Was it cumulative? Was it the proximity? He genuinely couldn't work out the variable and there was no time to work it out, so he filed it as a problem for later and pushed through into Kamui's transit dimension.
He was gone.
Black Zetsu turned to Finn. "Konoha's defensive barrier isn't something you can walk through. If you force entry, the detection systems will respond immediately."
"I've been thinking about that." Finn stepped forward a few paces, hands coming up into a seal sequence.
"Ninja Art: Rain Tiger at Will."
The technique spread outward from him invisibly, chakra infusing itself into the water vapor already hanging in the evening air, and the sky above Konoha began to change. The change was subtle enough to miss if you weren't looking for it. The clouds thickened, but the sun had already gone down and the light was already gone, so the darkening meant very little. Then the rain started. Not heavy; a drizzle at first, the kind that a city accepts without comment.
Black Zetsu watched it. "That's the technique you use in the Hidden Rain Village."
"More or less." Finn was already reading what the rain was telling him. Konoha's barrier blocked conventional perception techniques. The Rain Tiger at Will was not conventional. The barrier's designers had not anticipated someone using rainfall itself as a sensory medium, and rainfall, once it was falling inside the barrier, was inside the barrier. The information it returned to him was complete.
He identified what he needed, located the seams in the barrier's coverage, found the specific zone with the lightest patrol density given that most of Konoha's active ANBU had repositioned tonight.
Then he formed another seal, the Boar seal, pressed his palms together, and pushed his chakra downward.
"Wood Release: Awakening Wood."
Black Zetsu's eyes went to the ground.
Finn sank into it. Not through it, precisely, not a technique that displaced matter. His body integrated with the root network beneath the surface, merged with the biological structure of the earth itself, and moved. The sensation was something between swimming and becoming. The tree roots were already there; he simply borrowed them.
White Zetsu watched the ground where Finn had been and then looked at his own hands and then at Black Zetsu with an expression that had several things in it.
Black Zetsu understood exactly what he was thinking and chose not to validate it.
Inside Konoha, near the memorial stone where names accumulated on a dark surface and the carved faces above it had watched the village across generations, the bark of an old tree shifted. What looked like a face appeared in the grain of the trunk. Eyes opened. The face turned and examined the immediate area.
Empty. The patrols that would normally move through here had other priorities tonight.
The bark parted. Finn stepped out of the tree the way someone steps out of a room, with the same matter-of-fact quality. He adjusted his haori, checked his waist, and confirmed that the fish skewer, somehow, had made the transit intact.
He finished it standing there by the memorial stone in the rain.
His hands went to another seal sequence before he moved.
"Water Escape: Art of Flowing Water."
He'd found this technique in Hanzo's scroll collection and had taken an immediate interest in it. The application was exactly what the name suggested and more remarkable than the name suggested. He became water. Not a metaphor, not a transformation that kept some approximating shape. His body dispersed into the rain-wet surfaces around him, the puddles, the channels, the accumulated moisture on every stone and root, and flowed.
He moved through Konoha as drainage.
Past a group of shinobi who were talking quietly at an intersection and saw nothing unusual. Past the outer wall of the Hokage Building's ground floor courtyard. Through the courtyard itself, past the guards stationed there, who watched the perimeter in every direction that mattered and not at the water running in thin lines across the stone.
He seeped up through a gap at the base of the building's entrance and collected himself in the corridor inside.
Finn coalesced from the floor of the main hallway, water gathering into a shape, the shape gaining detail, detail gaining the specific arrangement of Rodriguez Finn. He stood in the dark corridor and listened. The building was quiet in the particular way of a place where people have recently been and recently left.
Minato had gone home early. The staff had followed. The ANBU that normally rotated through the building's upper floors were stationed elsewhere tonight, the Uzumaki Jinchuriki's birthing location requiring every available trained body.
"Successful infiltration," Finn said, to himself, in the dark.
He was slightly pleased about this. Not the result, but the process. He had spent enough of his life solving problems by walking through them that moving through Konoha without making contact with a single person felt like a different category of accomplishment.
He took the last piece of the grilled fish off the skewer, ate it, and dropped the skewer on the corridor floor.
The stairwell was where he remembered it. He'd been in this building once before, with a different Hokage in the office and a chess game on the table between them, and the building's internal geometry hadn't changed in the years between.
He reached into his sleeve and pulled out a scroll. Inside it was a set of black clothes and, separately, a mask. The mask was a particular shape: a spiraling pattern centered over one eye, the distinctive marker of the man Konoha would be looking for tonight.
He changed in the stairwell.
The clothes went on, the mask covered his face, and Rodriguez Finn became, to anyone who encountered him in the next several hours, the masked man. Obito's mask. Obito's silhouette. Obito's crime.
If something went wrong and someone caught a glimpse, the report would go directly to Minato Namikaze, who was already dealing with Obito, and the response would focus on the entity Minato already knew about.
It would have nothing to do with Finn.
He climbed toward the Hokage's floor, thinking about the Scroll of Seals.
The scroll's canonical security was something he'd thought about before. In the original timeline, a Chunin instructor who'd failed the promotion exam had known the scroll's location well enough to steal it, which was on its face ridiculous. The Scroll of Seals was supposed to be the most classified document in Konoha's possession, accessible only to successive Hokages and their most trusted direct subordinates. Iruka had known it existed. Mizuki had known where to find it and how to take it.
Either Konoha's information security was genuinely catastrophic, or the accessible version was meant to be accessible. Finn had come around to the second interpretation. Sarutobi Hiruzen was not a stupid man. The scroll that Naruto had retrieved from the building's accessible dark room, that any determined chunin apparently could reach, was probably a prepared version. Placed there intentionally, surrounded by lower-tier security, containing the techniques appropriate for a young Jinchuriki to discover on a particular evening. The whole sequence had worked out too conveniently for it to have been unplanned.
Hiruzen had given Naruto something that night. Given him a reason to prove himself, a technique that changed his trajectory, and a justification for getting rid of Mizuki cleanly. All at once. With plausible deniability.
Finn felt something that was almost admiration.
The actual Scroll of Seals, the real one, was somewhere else in this building, in a room with security that reflected what it actually contained. He would need to find it rather than simply retrieve it.
Which was fine. He had all night, or as much of the night as the disturbance unfolding on the other side of Konoha would give him.
At the top floor, he turned toward the Hokage's office wing. Something in the rain's feedback, something the Rain Tiger at Will was returning from the water falling on a particular building some distance away, caught his attention.
He stopped in the corridor.
His perception moved through the rain toward the source and registered something he hadn't expected, a density of chakra that made the surrounding area feel thin by comparison. Not the Nine-Tails, or not only the Nine-Tails, not the quality of a tailed beast's power. This was something different, a chakra of a specific character he recognized from his knowledge of the original sequence of events.
He stood in the dark corridor with water dripping off the mask's edges and felt it.
"Is that Asura's chakra?" he murmured.
Immense, patient, old in a way that individual chakra wasn't old, it hung above the building where Kushina was giving birth as though waiting, as though a particular container were being prepared for it at this exact moment.
He stood there for a long moment and looked toward it through the rain.