The Akatsuki Organization had begun frantically capturing the tailed beasts, throwing the shinobi world into a state of panic. To investigate the Akatsuki Organization's leader, Jiraiya bid Tsunade farewell and infiltrated Amegakure, a village plagued by war year-round, alone.
The cold, clammy rain poured down without pause, rattling against everything as it ran through the iron pipes and straight down his collar, carrying the sour stench of raw rust and stagnant water gone rotten.
Jiraiya lay sprawled inside an icy drainage pipe. His long white hair was plastered to his face by the rain, mixed with the sour reek of cheap liquor and his sweat-soaked body. The smell was truly awful.
He roughly rubbed his itchy nose, and Tsunade's worried face beneath the sunset from a few days ago flashed through his mind. He bared his teeth in a self-mocking smile.
"Enough. Quit playing dumb and tell me straight—is the guy in the tallest iron tower really Pain?"
Jiraiya pinned a badly beaten Amegakure chunin with half his face smashed into an open sewer, his rough fingers clamped tightly around the man's bloodied throat, black mud packed beneath his nails.
His narrow eyes gleamed like blades through the rain. He twisted his wrist, producing a faint grinding sound from the man's joints.
The Amegakure shinobi, held in the muddy water, choked down a mouthful of filthy, rust-flavored water and trembled like a leaf, coughing again and again.
"It... it's Lord Pain... He lives on the top floor of God's Tower..."
The Amegakure shinobi groaned in broken fragments, constantly spitting bloody foam from his mouth, his eyes filled with terror toward an unknown god.
"He... he's a god... He'll know you're here... You're dead... Cough, cough..."
Jiraiya snorted coldly, then struck with swift, practiced precision, knocking the man unconscious. He casually