"Biwa Hanzo," Kakuzu said, "tell me about your Fourth Mizukage. He's a Jinchuriki? The Hidden Mist's tailed beasts should be two — one sealed in the body of a child named Utakata, the other running free in some lake out in the wilderness. So where is he getting Tailed Beast power from?"
"It's Biwa Juzo!" The man tied to the chair pulled hard against the rope and glared. "At least get my name right, you bastard!"
"My apologies."
Kakuzu's expression didn't move. The word landed with exactly as much sincerity as his face suggested, which was none.
The situation had arrived at this point through a sequence of events that had not gone as planned for anyone involved.
Kakuzu had picked up the mission through the dark world network. The commission itself was unusual — a bodyguard contract, the objective being to shield the client from the Fourth Mizukage, Yagura Karatachi, and prevent his forced return to the Hidden Mist Village. The price on the contract had been set at a figure that Kakuzu found genuinely tempting, which was not easy to do.
The client was Biwa Juzo, one of the Seven Ninja Swordsmen of the Hidden Mist Village — or rather, former member, as of the moment he'd defected. The first active defection among the current Seven Swordsmen. This was significant on several levels. A shinobi of Juzo's rank and seniority carried considerable knowledge about the Hidden Mist's operational structure, its classified techniques, and its command relationships. His defection was not something Yagura Karatachi could allow to settle quietly. It set a precedent. It needed to be answered visibly.
So Yagura had come himself.
He'd tracked Juzo from the Water Country across the open sea, all the way to the Land of Waves. Kakuzu had arrived to find Juzo already in poor shape, running on adrenaline and stubbornness, and had immediately found himself in a fight with the Fourth Mizukage that he'd had no real time to prepare for.
In a straightforward exchange, Kakuzu had simply been at a disadvantage. That wasn't a conclusion he reached easily. He was five hundred years old and had fought opponents across every generation. Disadvantaged was not a state he found himself in frequently.
Part of the problem was a technique Yagura had deployed — something Kakuzu was mentally cataloguing as the Water Mirror Technique. It produced a perfect duplicate of its target, indistinguishable in every respect that Kakuzu had been able to test in the available time. Fighting a copy of himself had not been impossible, but it had been complicated in ways that fighting a different opponent usually wasn't. You knew your own techniques. You knew their limitations. So did the copy.
He'd concluded, in the abstract, that the technique couldn't be entirely without flaws — no technique was. A perfect mirror was theoretically invincible, and invincible techniques didn't exist. But finding the flaw required time and calm engagement, and he hadn't had either of those with a seriously wounded Biwa Juzo on his hands and a Kage-tier opponent actively pushing.
He'd burned two of his five hearts in the retreat. Left a pair of Earth Release Clones behind to cover the withdrawal, bought enough distance to lose pursuit, and gotten Juzo to the hotel room where they were now sitting.
Then Juzo had informed him that he had no money.
None. The bounty on the contract — the exceptional, difficult-to-ignore figure that had pulled Kakuzu here — was fictional. Juzo had set it high precisely because he'd assumed no one would actually accept the mission. The impossible price was a distraction, a piece of misdirection designed to confuse Yagura's intelligence network about his actual plans. He'd also, apparently, attached a small private hope to it — some residual optimism that maybe someone would come after all.
Someone had come. And Juzo had no money.
Kakuzu had confiscated the Executioner's Blade and tied him to the chair.
He'd spent some time seriously considering simply killing Juzo and recovering what he could from the transaction — the body had value, the sword had value, and the Hidden Mist would probably pay generously for both. But Juzo had no moral dignity about the situation and immediately offered to join the Yorozuya instead, asking for the chance to prove his worth.
That had given Kakuzu pause. Not because he was moved by the offer, but because Juzo's capability was a real factor. The Seven Ninja Swordsmen had taken significant losses fighting Might Dai on the southeastern coast — four dead, three survivors, the Hidden Mist's participation in the war effectively ended by a single Genin who had never passed a promotion exam in his life. What remained of the Swordsmen was publicly diminished. But Biwa Juzo, alive and functioning, was still considerably stronger than the majority of active ninjas in the world. And he'd survived being chased from the Water Country to the Land of Waves by the Fourth Mizukage, which demonstrated either extraordinary ability or extraordinary luck, and possibly both.
Finn had already said he wanted to expand the organization. Juzo was a plausible candidate. So Kakuzu had sent the message and was waiting.
Which brought them to the present moment, with Juzo tied to the chair and not inclined to cooperate freely.
"You're not planning to hide information about the Hidden Mist Village at this stage, are you?" Kakuzu said. "And I want to understand: the Fourth Mizukage and the Tailed Beast power. What exactly is that?"
Juzo's expression tightened for a moment. Then something in it settled, and he spoke with the deliberate flatness of someone choosing to be practical. "The more specific I am, the worse it goes for me if I get caught. But I'll tell you this much: I defected because I couldn't stand that environment anymore. That's the whole story. There wasn't a nobler reason than that."
"Fine." Kakuzu moved past it. "The Tailed Beast."
Juzo was quiet for a moment.
"There is no third Tailed Beast in the Mist Village," he said. "The Fourth Mizukage uses Three-Tails power. The Three-Tails you know about — Isobu — is still in the lake. That part isn't wrong information."
Kakuzu's eyes narrowed. "Then he's the Jinchuriki of the Three-Tails."
"No. He isn't. Not technically." Juzo paused. "He can use the power of the Tailed Beasts. But he wasn't sealed with one."
"That's not how it works."
"It's how it worked for Kinkaku and Ginkaku."
Kakuzu had no immediate answer to that.
He knew the story. Everyone in the ninja world who had lived through the Second Great War knew it in outline. The Gold and Silver Brothers of the Hidden Cloud — two brothers who, through some process that had never been fully explained to the public, had acquired the ability to use Nine-Tails chakra without a sealing. Neither of them had been a Jinchuriki. They were simply people who could do something that, by all standard understanding of how Tailed Beasts worked, they should not have been able to do.
Then they'd staged a coup against the Second Raikage and seized power within the Hidden Cloud for a period. Eventually they'd collided with Senju Tobirama and the Second Hokage's life had ended in that engagement. Both brothers had survived it. They were still out there somewhere, older and considerably more dangerous.
The point was that Kinkaku and Ginkaku were a proven example of non-Jinchuriki Tailed Beast power. It was documented. It had been confirmed on battlefields in front of witnesses. If it had happened once, the possibility that it had happened again was real.
Kakuzu didn't push back. He waited.
"The Mist Village was researching the same question," Juzo said, after a moment. "After Kinkaku and Ginkaku. Trying to understand how it worked and whether it could be reproduced. Yagura wasn't the Fourth Mizukage then — he was a child. He became one of the test subjects. There were many of them." His voice was flat when he said it. "He was the only one who came through the experiment alive. The price was that his body stopped growing. He stayed exactly as he was at that moment. He hasn't aged visibly since."
Kakuzu said nothing.
"I don't know the specific mechanism. I wasn't read into that research. What I know is the result: Yagura can draw on Tailed Beast power to a significant degree without being sealed with one. He can transform, partially or fully. I've seen it."
Kakuzu had seen it too. That was precisely the problem. He'd gone into the engagement expecting a Kage-level opponent — strong, technically skilled, dangerous in the way every Kage was dangerous. He'd found something that escalated beyond that scope in a way he hadn't been prepared for. He'd left two hearts behind in the retreat, which was a cost he measured in lives, not ryo.
He'd come very close to not getting out.
If anything, what bothered him most was the possibility that Yagura hadn't used everything he had. The Water Mirror Technique had been the main complication, and Kakuzu was increasingly confident he could find the flaw in it given time. But the Tailed Beast transformation suggested there was a ceiling to Yagura's power that Kakuzu hadn't yet located. A technique he was certain he could eventually counter meant little if there were other techniques underneath it waiting.
"Are you afraid of him?" Kakuzu asked.
Juzo thought about it for a moment with visible sincerity. "Being caught by him is what I'm afraid of. Not the dying part. I've made peace with dying." He shifted in the chair. "He's the second strongest opponent I've ever been in the presence of. By a considerable margin over third place."
Kakuzu noted the phrasing. "Second."
"Second."
Kakuzu waited. Juzo didn't volunteer the first.
The first, as it happened, was a man named Might Dai — a Genin who had never been promoted, a commoner who had spent twenty years completing a technique the Second Hokage had entrusted to him, a man who looked like an affectionate fool and had opened the seventh gate and killed four of Juzo's colleagues in a single sustained engagement before dying. Juzo had been there. He had watched it happen from a distance that felt deeply insufficient.
Might Dai was dead. But the scale of what Juzo had witnessed that day had permanently recalibrated his internal ranking of what dangerous meant.
"Your boss can handle Yagura Karatachi?" Juzo asked. Something in his voice was genuinely curious, not just skeptical.
"Yes," Kakuzu said. He didn't hesitate, which was notable. Kakuzu did not generally express confidence about other people's abilities without evidence.
Juzo processed this. "The second strongest person I've encountered is a Kage who can transform into a Tailed Beast. And you're saying your organization's leader is above that."
"I'm saying it won't be a problem."
Juzo looked at him for a moment. "Then I suppose the only question is whether your boss wants anything to do with me."
"That's exactly the question." Kakuzu's expression had shifted slightly — not to warmth, but to something like the specific calculation of a man who had spent centuries making financial assessments and was doing it again. Whether Biwa Juzo's future value exceeded the certain return of selling his body and his sword. The math was close. The organizational potential might edge it out.
He was about to ask about the Water Mirror Technique's mechanics when something changed in the room. It wasn't loud. It wasn't visible. It was the particular quality of the air that Kakuzu had trained himself over five hundred years to recognize — the specific density of intent that preceded a precision strike from outside.
He was on his feet before the thought completed.
He crossed the room in two strides, grabbed Juzo by the back of his bindings, and drove his shoulder into the wall hard enough to punch through the plaster and the wood framing behind it.
They came out on the exterior side of the building and dropped.
Behind them, the room they'd just been in was obliterated. Water flooded through the window and filled the space in an instant — a Water Dragon Jutsu, perfectly formed, delivered with the kind of control that wasted nothing and left no margin for the occupants to have survived if they'd still been inside.
"Let me go and give me my sword back," Juzo said from Kakuzu's shoulder, his voice fraying at the edges. "There's no point in me surrendering at this stage. I'll run with you. Just give me the sword."
On a rooftop across the street, standing utterly still, Yagura Karatachi looked at the ruined hotel room with an expression that said nothing at all. He was adolescent in height and proportion, slight in build, his face young and unlined in the way that hadn't changed for years and wouldn't. He held his coral-topped staff loosely at his side.
He looked like a child who had wandered somewhere he didn't belong.
The chakra coming off him said something entirely different.