Half a month.
The news from the Rain Country was almost entirely suppressed, which was the arrangement both Danzo and Finn had agreed to and both had implemented through their respective channels. Some information escaped, as it always does — there were reports of a civil conflict, of the Hidden Rain Village being contested between Hanzo's forces and the Akatsuki organization. But a civil war in a small country during the immediate aftermath of a major shinobi war was not the kind of news that moved large powers to act. The great nations had their own proxy situations to manage. The Rain Country could sort itself out.
Time smoothed it over, as time tends to do with things it is encouraged to smooth.
The inland lake outside the Hidden Rain Village was large enough that the water appeared flat in all directions, the sky and its reflection becoming interchangeable on overcast days. The island at its center was small, with room for perhaps a dozen people and whatever they'd needed to bring. Hanzo had chosen it because it had only one approach that didn't require swimming.
He had not anticipated that this would be insufficient.
He was on one knee on the island's stone surface, his left arm broken at an angle that told a clear story about what had happened to it, the bone visible through the muscle at the midpoint of his forearm. His gas mask was cracked along the left side, and the poison that leaked from him with every exhale had nowhere to go in the still air above the water. His sickle was in his right hand but the hand was barely holding it.
The man in front of him held a pipe and had not been touched.
Not defended — not touched. There was a distinction. Hanzo had fought well. He had fought as well as he had fought in decades. None of it had been sufficient to register as a threat.
"Who are you," Hanzo said.
"Rodriguez Finn." The pipe produced a thin thread of smoke. "The Yorozuya."
A flicker of something moved through Hanzo's expression. Recognition, connecting pieces. "Yorozuya..." His voice was not quite steady. "Danzo. He hired you from the start. He was never on my side."
"You're sharper than this conversation has given you credit for," Finn said.
Hanzo's jaw tightened. The calculation that followed was visible — the options, the remaining variables, what was still in his hands. Then, with the deliberateness of a man choosing a strategy over a reaction, his expression changed.
"I'll surrender," he said. "To you. To the Yorozuya, specifically." He met Finn's eyes. "A man of your ability is wasted on a small organization. With my prestige in this country, with my network, with what I know — I can help you. I'll serve. I'm asking to join."
He had chosen correctly, by any neutral accounting. He had nothing left to offer as an enemy and considerable assets to offer as a subordinate. The Rain Country's population still knew his name. The remaining loyalists in the Hidden Rain Village would follow someone they recognized. There was a legitimate argument that absorbing Hanzo was more efficient than killing him.
Finn had run that argument already.
"You'd be useful," he said, and meant it. "Genuinely. With your standing in this country, the consolidation goes faster and cleaner than it will without you."
Hanzo heard the pause in the word useful and waited.
"There's a woman," Finn said, "who I have already wronged considerably. She lost both of her closest friends in the same afternoon. The only reason she hasn't dissolved entirely is that she's pointed herself at you. That's the one fixed point she has left." He exhaled smoke. "I told her I would deliver you. I don't break that kind of promise."
He said it without particular emphasis, the way people state facts that are not comfortable but are settled.
Hanzo's expression moved through several things and arrived at something hard. He grabbed the sickle chain near the end with his good hand and swung.
The pipe in Finn's hand was already moving. The ivory-and-jade tip met the sickle blade at the intersection of its arc and redirected it — a gesture more like brushing away something inconvenient than blocking a weapon. The Armament Haki coating the pipe's tip held against the impact with the particular density of a surface that had decided not to yield.
Finn's other hand had been at his waist for half a second.
The Shindokutō cleared its scabbard and was back in it before Hanzo's sickle hit the stone.
Hanzo half-knelt. His hands opened. The sickle landed on its side, the chain settling beside it, and stayed.
Finn was behind him, the blade lowered, and he exhaled one long breath of pipe smoke and looked at the lake.
"You and I are even now, Konan," he said, to the water and the gray sky above it and no one in particular. "Whatever I owe you — this is it."
It was not, by any strict accounting, accurate. He had killed Nagato himself and arranged the conditions for this entire situation, and calling that settled with one act of declining to take the strategically superior option was the kind of reasoning that didn't survive close examination. He knew this. He also knew that humans needed the ability to mark moments as closed, even when the ledger didn't quite balance, or they would carry everything forever.
He marked it closed.
Behind him, he heard the sound of Hanzo of the Salamander completing his fall.
He did not turn around.
With Hanzo dead, the Hidden Rain Village stopped resisting in the coherent sense. Individual loyalists continued fighting because individuals take time to receive information and more time to accept it, but as an organized force, Hanzo's faction simply did not have a next move. Akatsuki moved through the village with the momentum of an organization that has been fighting for years and has just been handed permission to stop being careful about it.
By the time the week ended, the Rain Country had one power structure.
Hanzo had lived in a courtyard at the center of the Hidden Rain Village, which was also the administrative center of the village, because Hanzo had eliminated the distinction between his residence and the seat of government sometime during the Second Shinobi World War. There were no separate buildings for governance. There were Hanzo's rooms, and there were the rooms of people who served Hanzo.
Finn stood in the collection room.
The scrolls here were organized well, which said something about how Hanzo had spent his time in the later years. Not planning. Not strategizing. Cataloguing what he had.
Most of it was water ninjutsu. This was appropriate. The official records in the ninja world were clear about Hanzo's status in this area: no one alive surpassed him in water-style techniques, and the scrolls reflected a practitioner who had spent decades developing the style beyond what anyone else had thought to attempt.
Finn picked up an A-rank water technique and read the notation.
Rain Tiger at Will.
He recognized it. He had seen it deployed — or rather, he had seen its effects, the monitoring network embedded in the rainfall itself, the village's rainwater converted into a chakra-infused perception field. He had assumed it was Nagato's development, possibly a Rinnegan application. He turned the scroll over and checked the attribution.
Hanzo. Developed during the consolidation period following the Second Shinobi World War.
That made sense, actually. A man who had taken total control of a country and then spent thirty years afraid of losing it would develop exactly this kind of technique. Know who is where, at all times, within the range of your weather. It was the instinct of someone who had already eliminated every overt threat and had begun worrying about the quiet ones.
Finn set it aside in the group of things worth learning.
The forbidden scroll was at the back of the collection, marked clearly. He opened it expecting something in the water-style tradition, something Hanzo had developed and classified because of its destructive potential.
He read the title.
He read it again.
"Why is this here?" he said, to the room.
The Shapeshifting Technique. S-rank forbidden.