Kakuzu was already moving when Juzo called after him.
"Don't you dare leave me behind," Juzo shouted, running hard to keep up down the corridor, his injuries pulling at him with every stride. "You abandon me here and I'll haunt your finances for the rest of your miserable life — and you'll have Rodriguez Finn and the entire Yorozuya looking for you on top of it. No one cheats the Yorozuya. No one cheats me out of my money, either."
The Earth Grudge Fear threads binding Juzo's wrists loosened and unwound. He was free, moving on his own, which was considerably less inconvenient than being carried.
"My sword," Juzo said immediately. "Give me the Executioner's Blade. It's a top-tier ninja sword. Without it I'm fighting at a fraction of my capability."
"You're doing nothing," Kakuzu said, not looking back. "Just don't slow me down."
The Executioner's Blade was staying where it was. Kakuzu had made this calculation cleanly. Juzo's survival value was unproven. The sword's value was concrete. If things went badly here, he needed to leave with something, and the Blade was an exceptional something. He was not sentimental about it.
Juzo cursed at him. Kakuzu ignored the sound.
They came out through the hotel's ground floor and into the courtyard. The grass was still there, the hedges were still in place, the morning light was sitting across everything at the same angle it had been a minute ago. It looked entirely peaceful.
The ground erupted.
Two pillars of high-pressure water burst from beneath the courtyard like fangs driving upward, directed straight at them. No windup, no warning. They'd simply appeared.
"Water Fang Bullet," Juzo said, already moving.
"I know what it is." Kakuzu was already airborne.
He'd been in the ninja world long enough that having techniques identified for him by someone younger was not a service he needed. Instead of explaining this to Juzo's face, he simply moved — a short burst of footwork that took him off the courtyard and onto the roof of the adjacent building, landing clean and immediately converting the momentum into stance.
His hands were already forming seals before his feet settled.
"Earth Release: Earth Dragon Bullet."
The roof tiles shifted beneath him. The front face of the building restructured itself. A dragon's head extended from the wall — thick, formed of dense earth chakra, jaw open. It didn't drive forward the way a Water Dragon Jutsu or Fire Dragon Jutsu would, the whole body pushing at the target. It anchored and it fired.
Six chakra bombs launched in rapid succession toward the rooftop where Yagura was standing. Each one was dense enough that the air displaced ahead of them was visible. They hit in sequence.
Yagura had not moved.
One seal. A single, unhurried hand seal. His lips moved slightly.
"Water Release: Water Array Wall."
A curtain of water rose from the air around him — not in front of him, not as a flat barrier, but encircling him completely. And it was rotating. The wall spun in place around his body as the earth chakra bombs struck it one by one, and the rotation absorbed and redirected each impact, sending the energy spiraling out and away rather than through.
Kakuzu's expression shifted fractionally.
Earth chakra suppressed water chakra in the elemental hierarchy. That was established fact, the kind of principle you didn't question because it had been confirmed by centuries of combat experience. He'd chosen the Earth Dragon Bullet specifically for that reason. And Yagura had answered it with a water technique.
Not only answered — neutralized.
What surprised Kakuzu further wasn't the choice of element. It was the execution. A standard Water Array Wall was a flat curtain, a square shield of pulled water, stable and static. It protected the user from one direction. This version rotated continuously around its caster like a second skin, covering all angles simultaneously, deflecting force at the point of contact rather than absorbing it. That was not a standard deployment. That was the work of genuine mastery.
He'd heard that Senju Tobirama, the Second Hokage, used the same variant — the rotating form. And the reason Tobirama had become the foremost water release practitioner of his era was often told as a joke, but it was probably true: the Uchiha were exceptional at fire release, and Tobirama had simply decided to master whatever the Uchiha were best at. A particular kind of competitive development, disguised as institutional strategy.
Whether the story was accurate or not, the technique was real, and Yagura had it.
Inside the rotating water wall, Yagura was forming more seals. Kakuzu couldn't see the hand signs through the curtain. He registered the danger of that half a second before it became visible.
Yagura inhaled.
"Water Release: Exploding Water Wave."
His chest expanded. Then he opened his mouth, and water came out — not a spray, not a stream, but a continuous high-volume output that behaved less like a technique and more like a geological event. The volume was enormous. Kisame Hoshigaki — a shinobi who would not exist as a problem for another decade — would later use this same technique and be named the tailless Tailed Beast for the chakra reserves it implied. Right now, Yagura Karatachi had access to Tailed Beast chakra for reasons that Biwa Juzo had just finished explaining inside the hotel, and that chakra fed the technique without meaningful limit.
The water spread. It didn't flow — it surged. It covered the courtyard, filled the street, rolled into the surrounding buildings and through their ground floors. It rose fast. Houses went under. People scrambled for upper levels. The capital of the Wave Country, in the space of under a minute, had become a shallow inland sea, with only the taller structures protruding above the surface like outcroppings of stone.
Kakuzu looked at what was around them. Then he looked at Biwa Juzo, who had somehow made it to the same rooftop.
"Your Mizukage does this in the capital of another country."
"Don't be fooled by the composed act." Juzo's voice was flat. "When he gets angry, he gets violent. This is relatively restrained. He's done worse in actual Water Country towns." He paused. "When cruelty comes from the top, that's the most dangerous kind. It sets the standard for everything below it. That's what Blood Mist means — not just the graduation exams, not just the swordsmen. Him."
Kakuzu had no immediate response to that.
The water surface in front of the rooftop broke.
Yagura surfaced from below in a single smooth motion, feet catching the water's surface and stopping him cold. No splash, no stumble. His weapon rose with him — a long staff, thick at one end and narrowing toward the other, a hook on the thin end, what looked like a coral bloom decorating the thick end. The hook was already angled.
He looked at Juzo.
"Traitor," Yagura said quietly. "Death penalty."
He moved.
The speed was sharp. Juzo was injured. He caught himself mid-dodge, too slow, the hook angling toward him at an angle that was going to connect.
Kakuzu stepped across in front of him with visible contempt for the necessity of the gesture.
His arm extended. The Earth Grudge Fear threads unraveled from beneath his sleeve — black and dense, erupting outward like roots from disturbed ground, covering the space between them and Yagura in a web that offered no clean path through. They wrapped Yagura's weapon first, winding around the staff and locking its arc. Then they fell across Yagura's body and began to press inward, searching for the resistance of flesh.
If this worked, Kakuzu could take his heart.
Whether that outcome constituted killing the Fourth Mizukage was a question he addressed with complete pragmatism: it was irrelevant. He and Orochimaru were the only members of the Yorozuya who hadn't yet killed a Kage. Orochimaru had been a member for a short time, which was a reasonable excuse. Kakuzu had no comparable excuse. Finn had killed the Third Raikage. Sasori had killed the Third Kazekage. The disparity was quietly irritating.
So. It was fine.
The threads reached Yagura's torso and pressed in.
Yagura dissolved.
The entire figure — weapon, body, the weight of presence — collapsed into standing water and sank away. Nothing left but wet rooftile.
"Water Clone," Juzo said.
"Shut your mouth." The threads retracted. "Who asked you?"
"I'm trying to help!"
"You're trash and you have no money. Stop talking."
"Give me my sword and I'll show you exactly what kind of trash I am, you grasping corpse-eater!"
Kakuzu let the insult pass without processing it. His perception chakra was already extending outward, spreading through the flooded streets and the surface of the artificial lake in all directions. He pressed it as far as it would reach.
Nothing. Yagura was somewhere in the water and the water wasn't giving him up.
Juzo seemed to read the situation from Kakuzu's posture. "You won't find him like that. As long as there's enough water around him, the Fourth Mizukage is essentially invisible. His presence in water doesn't read like a person anymore — it reads like water. I know because I've tried finding him. That's why he chased me across the entire ocean. I couldn't get distance from him. There was always more sea." His voice had dropped to something more clinical. "It's not just speed. He becomes part of the environment."
Kakuzu held the kunai he'd drawn and said nothing. His expression, if you read it carefully, had become more serious than it had been at the start of the fight.
At the edge of the artificial lake — at the perimeter where the Exploding Water Wave had defined its outer limit — the water was behaving strangely.
It was rising. Vertically. Not in waves, not cresting, but lifting — the surface at the edge bending upward and continuing, drawing inward and upward at the same time, as if the entire lake were deciding to become a sphere. The water at the edges climbed toward the sky and curved together, a closing curtain moving from every direction at once.
"The Super Water Prison," Juzo said, and his voice had changed. "Move. Now. We need to be outside the radius before it closes or this entire area becomes a water prison. Thousands of meters across. Move!"
He was already off the roof.
Kakuzu was right behind him.
They went up — straight vertical, maximum speed, heading for the gap in the sky where the water curtain hadn't closed yet. The opening was narrowing. The curtain moved slowly enough to track but quickly enough that the math on the gap was getting worse with every second of altitude they gained.
Yagura materialized in the sky above them.
He was high up, already positioned above the closing gap, hanging in the air with the ease of someone standing on solid ground. One hand held a seal — the Ram — loose and steady.
"Senei Rain."
The drizzle started immediately. Fine, light, unremarkable — the kind of rain that you'd dismiss as weather if you encountered it anywhere else. It fell through the narrowing gap in the water curtain and touched them.
Juzo recognized it first. His hands were already moving, forming seals of his own, and he threw his arm out.
"Clay Surge!"
A dense mass of clay erupted from his palm and spread into a flat barrier above both of them, covering the sky. The rain hit the clay surface instead of them. For exactly one second, the clay barrier held.
The drizzle hardened. What touched the clay was no longer rain but a dense volley of needles — water-formed, chakra-dense, hammering the clay surface with the sound of ten thousand small impacts compressed into a moment.
The clay held the needles. It did not hold long enough.
By the time the barrier cracked and the technique spent itself, the water curtain above them had closed. The gap was gone. The sphere was complete — a vast enclosed space, the scale of it absurd, the walls made of the same water that had flooded the capital. They were inside it. The interior wasn't filled. Not yet.
They landed on a rooftop together. The water level inside the sphere was at street level, the same lake it had been. But the walls curved away above them and met overhead, sealing the sky out.
From somewhere inside the water — everywhere and nowhere — Yagura's voice reached them.
"Water Release: Great Waterfall Technique."
The walls began to weep inward. Water poured from the inside surface of the sphere in sheets, cascading down and adding volume to the lake below. The lake began to rise. Slowly, steadily, without urgency.
Kakuzu watched it. Juzo watched it beside him.
"It's over," Juzo said.
Kakuzu didn't answer. He was looking at the rising waterline and doing a calculation that was arriving at the same conclusion from a different direction.
How, he was thinking, had Biwa Juzo outrun this man across an open ocean? The more he understood of what Yagura could actually do, the less plausible that escape seemed. It was almost impressive, in a way that Kakuzu would not be admitting aloud.
The water kept rising.