"Leader! Leave this to me, you can focus on extracting the Tailed Beast."
With his crimson spiky hair and refined, handsome features, Sasori of the Red Sand stepped in front of Nagato.
Nagato gave Sasori a long, deep look, then nodded. "Then I leave it to you."
With Sasori holding back Jiraiya, although he still had to split his focus to control the Six Paths of Pain in tangling with the Five Kage, the speed at which he extracted the Tailed Beast was much faster than before.
Nagato did not ask why Sasori had only arrived now; simply being able to come and help was enough.
The Five Great Shinobi Villages' ability to surround the Rain Village meant, from certain perspectives, that the entire Akatsuki had turned against Nagato.
Intelligence regarding the Rain Village had been severed by Obito, so Nagato had not even realized he was surrounded.
Yet the Five Great Shinobi Villages assembling such a force created a massive commotion that was simply impossible to hide completely. The fact that other Akatsuki members had failed to report this to Nagato was proof enough of how bizarre this situation was.
Akatsuki members were not truly solitary figures in the strict sense; each of them maintained their own network of influence.
Orochimaru possessed his own team of researchers, which he later even used to establish the Hidden Sound Village.
Sasori of the Red Sand might have seemed like a lone wolf, but he likewise had his own subordinate forces—for instance, Kabuto Yakushi was his undercover agent.
Kakuzu earned bounties all over the world, which also required him to have his own intelligence network, otherwise searching for and hunting targets would have been no different from looking for a needle in a haystack.
In reality,
Nagato had misunderstood. The reason