What Happens in the Tale of Jiraiya the Gallant Arc?

Jiraiya goes to the Rain Village alone to investigate the Akatsuki's leader, knowing the odds. The Rain is a closed, surveilled country ruled by Pain, who is worshipped as a god, and Jiraiya's infiltration, through a frog, a bar and an interrogated rain ninja, is the series' most spy-thriller stretch. It ends when his former student Konan finds him, and behind her, Pain himself: Nagato, the orphan Jiraiya trained and believed dead.

The battle is fought through revelations. Pain fields multiple bodies sharing one vision through the Rinnegan, the legendary eye of the Sage of Six Paths, and Jiraiya answers with Sage Mode, imperfect and sung into being with the toad elders Fukasaku and Shima on his shoulders. The fight keeps rewriting itself: every body Jiraiya kills returns, the secret of the six paths stays one step ahead, and his arm is torn off before he understands that none of the bodies is the real one.

Beaten and with his throat crushed, Jiraiya makes the arc's defining choice. He could escape; instead he forces himself back up, by will alone, to confirm Pain's identity and carve the coded message into Fukasaku's back before sinking into the Rain's waters. His dying reflection, that Naruto is the true hero of the tale and his own life a worthy failure, gives the arc its title and its sting.

Interleaved with this, Sasuke finally confronts Itachi, and the two storylines, the mentor dying in the rain and the brothers' duel, run as a double funeral for the series' old order. The code Jiraiya died to send, that the real one is not among them, becomes the key intelligence for the Pain assault that follows.

These chapters sit inside volumes 40 and 41, surrounded by the Itachi material, and Jiraiya's death chapters are among the most excerpted in the whole back half of the manga. The toad sage's final novel framing also closes the loop opened by The Tale of the Utterly Gutsy Shinobi, the in-world book that gave Naruto his name.