Yagura didn't press further. He dissolved back into the water the way a stone dissolves into shadow — no sound, no ripple that meant anything, simply present and then absent. The water level kept rising on its own, patient and methodical, no direction needed.
The footholds were shrinking. The rooftops that had been protruding above the surface were going under one by one, slowly and without drama. In a matter of minutes, there would be nothing left to stand on.
Kakuzu looked at the waterline. He shook his head once.
"I'll have to use that trick."
He put his thumb to his mouth.
Juzo had been watching the water with the resigned calm of someone who had already done the math on his options and found the column totaling toward zero. When he heard Kakuzu speak, something shifted in his expression. A small, involuntary movement — hope, which was not a thing he'd expected to feel in the next thirty seconds.
"What trick?" he asked. "Do you have a summoning contract? Something that can break this?"
Kakuzu bit his thumb. Blood welled up at the puncture. He pressed his bleeding hand to the roof beneath his feet and formed the summoning seal.
"Summoning."
White smoke burst outward in a thick ring, obscuring both of them for a moment. When it thinned, what was standing beside Kakuzu on the shrinking rooftop was a salamander — not enormous, medium in scale as summoned creatures went, its six horns fanned out from its broad flat head. It had the glazed, slightly vacant expression of an animal that was cooperating with events rather than engaged in them.
Juzo stared at it.
Kakuzu turned to look at Juzo. His expression carried something that might, in someone with more practice at it, have been interpreted as apologetic.
"Consider the debt cancelled," he said.
Then the salamander opened its mouth and swallowed him whole.
It turned. It slipped off the edge of the rooftop into the water without a sound. It dove. It disappeared.
Juzo stood alone on the narrowing square of roof that remained above the surface, staring at the spot where Kakuzu had just been.
He hadn't gotten on yet.
He hadn't even been asked.
He stood there for a moment in the rising water, working through several things at once that he didn't have adequate words for at the speed they needed to be said, and then he found some words and said them at the water.
Yagura noticed. He was tracking Kakuzu through the water medium the way he tracked everything in his water — not sight exactly, but a continuous awareness, the way a body knows the position of its own limbs. The six-horned salamander moved quickly once it submerged, driving down through the flooded streets and boring into the muddy substrate below, disappearing from the water medium into the earth beneath it where Yagura's awareness ended.
He let it go.
He knew who Kakuzu was. The Yorozuya. The organization that had killed the Third Raikage, killed the Daimyo of the Land of Earth, declared itself openly and by name. A genuinely strange group, and by available evidence a dangerous one. Antagonizing them for the sake of a captured fugitive who was already contained offered no benefit to the Hidden Mist Village. The calculation was simple. Yagura didn't pursue.
He turned his attention back to the remaining problem.
Biwa Juzo watched the water come up.
He could see the edge of the enclosed sphere above him — the wall of water curving up and over, the enclosure's interior lit by what filtered through from outside, diminishing as the water rose inside. The footholds were almost gone. The roof he was standing on was going to be underwater in a minute, maybe less.
He thought about it. He reached into his sleeve and found the kunai that was still there.
The punishment in the Hidden Mist Village was something he'd witnessed administered to others. He knew what it looked like at the stages. He knew how long it lasted. He'd rather die here, cleanly, by his own hand, than go back to that.
The math on fighting his way out was obvious. He was badly injured. His sword was gone. Yagura was somewhere in the water around him, undetectable, and even at full strength with the Executioner's Blade in hand, Juzo wasn't confident he could come out ahead of the Fourth Mizukage in a fair fight. This was not a fair fight by any measure.
He looked at the water. He exhaled slowly.
"I suppose this is how it ends."
He raised his arm and drove the kunai toward his own throat.
His arm stopped.
He couldn't move it. He couldn't move anything. His entire body had locked in place between one instant and the next, mid-motion, and what he felt spreading from the point of contact at his waist was a slow, creeping cold that moved through his flesh like roots spreading through soil.
He managed to look down. Something like coral was branching across his body, covering his skin in pale branching formations that spread with quiet methodical persistence.
"The Coral Palm," Juzo said, his voice very level given the circumstances. "When did you get behind me?"
From directly behind him, close enough that Yagura's hand was still resting against his waist, the Fourth Mizukage's voice came — young in pitch, absolutely without inflection.
"Didn't you say it yourself? In the mist, no one can detect my presence."
The coral continued spreading.
"Give me a quick death," Juzo said.
A pause.
"No." Yagura removed his hand. The coral formations were already self-sustaining, holding Juzo immobile without further contact required. "A traitor has no right to make requests. You'll come back to the Hidden Mist Village. Everyone there is going to understand clearly what the cost of betrayal looks like."
"Damn you," Juzo said quietly. There was no energy in it. Just the last thing he had to say.
The Super Water Prison collapsed outward when Yagura released it. The sphere's walls came down in a rush, the contained volume of water spreading back into the streets in a wave that carried everything loose with it. Within the thousand-meter radius where Yagura had flooded the Wave Country's capital, the damage was severe. Houses had collapsed. People who hadn't reached high ground in time had drowned. The count of casualties in a country with no ninja corps, no civil defense infrastructure, no protective force of any kind, was significant and would be difficult to establish accurately because there was no organization left to do the counting.
This was the Fourth Mizukage. Yagura Karatachi. Cold, technically exceptional, and entirely indifferent to the distinction between a declared enemy and a civilian population in a foreign country that had nothing to do with him.
It reflected something true about this era. Small countries without ninja villages and without daimyo who could claim any political protection had no recourse when major village shinobi used their territory as an operational space. The Wave Country had no ninjas to object. It had no daimyo to invoke diplomatic standing. It was, in the practical calculus of the era, simply geography — terrain that could be flooded or burned or torn apart because the cost of doing so was nothing. If a daimyo had been present, Yagura might have exercised some restraint; the daimyo system represented the civilian-shinobi social compact that everyone found it convenient to nominally respect. Without one, the restraint had no hook to hang on.
Yagura wrapped Biwa Juzo in bandages — thorough, professional, covering everything except eyes and nostrils. Mummified rather than bound. No limb movement, no jaw movement, no way to form seals or speak anything useful. He then summoned a water buffalo, mounted it, placed Juzo across it like cargo, and set off.
Outside the capital, at a reasonable distance through the scrubland and tree cover, the ground broke open. The six-horned salamander pushed out of the earth, sat for a moment with the indifferent expression of its species, and then opened its mouth and deposited Kakuzu onto the ground before dispersing in white smoke.
Kakuzu was covered in salamander mucus. It coated his arms, his face, his clothes, his hands. He stood for a moment and then began the process of removing it, which was not a fast process.
In his private accounting of the situation: two hearts gone, which was two lives spent. No payment received for the original contract. The target had almost certainly been captured alive rather than dead — Yagura had wanted him alive, and with that disparity in power it was entirely feasible. The Executioner's Blade was still in his possession, which was the one concrete asset remaining from this entire exercise. Whether the blade could be sold was an open question. Selling it back to the Hidden Mist Village would mean interacting with Yagura's organization. Selling it to someone else required finding a buyer for a top-tier ninja sword without the original owner's family coming after both the buyer and the seller.
He wiped mucus from his face and considered his options.
Orochimaru, when he traveled inside a summoned snake, emerged clean. Kakuzu had observed this. There was apparently a membrane that formed between the traveler and the snake's interior during the technique, and when the snake was dismissed, the membrane and whatever it had caught came away with the smoke. A preparation. A studied adaptation of the technique. Orochimaru had developed it because he cared about arriving intact and presentable, and had invested the time in the technique accordingly.
Kakuzu had never developed any such refinement because he almost never traveled this way, and now he was standing in an empty field covered in slime and reconsidering that decision.
"You look uncomfortable, Kakuzu." The voice came from above and carried the specific quality of someone who was genuinely entertained. "For a veteran of the ninja world, it seems like this one cost you something. Am I wrong?"
Kakuzu didn't look up. He continued removing mucus from his left forearm.
Finn was sitting in the branches of a tall tree at the edge of the field, one leg folded under him, watching with a mild smile. He had the posture of someone who had arrived some time ago and been perfectly happy waiting.
"If the leader of the Yorozuya had arrived earlier," Kakuzu said, "I wouldn't be in this condition."
"Blaming others for your own choices isn't like you."
A brief pause.
"You're right," Kakuzu said. He said it without particular discomfort, the way he acknowledged any accurate statement. "It's a wasted trip, regardless. Biwa Juzo is gone. Either the Fourth Mizukage captured him alive or he managed to kill himself. My assessment is that Yagura wanted him alive and had the means to ensure it. So: captured."
Finn dropped from the tree. He landed lightly and looked in the direction Kakuzu had come from, as if he could read the situation's geometry through the undergrowth.
"What happened?" he asked. "The full account."
Kakuzu gave it to him concisely — the contract, Juzo's lack of payment, the fight, the Water Mirror Technique and the Exploding Water Wave, the Super Water Prison, the escape. He kept it efficient. Details that had bearing on capabilities and decisions, nothing that didn't.
Finn was quiet for a moment when it was done. Then something sharpened in his expression.
"Biwa Juzo," he said. "Interesting."
He was thinking about the kind of person Juzo was — not the fighting capacity, though that was worth accounting for, but the character. The thing that Juzo had done, or would do, in circumstances that would come later: partnered with Uchiha Itachi in an organization neither of them fully chose, not particularly familiar with each other, operating in the specific cold-professional way that the early Akatsuki ran missions. And then Yagura had appeared, and Itachi had been hit by the Coral Palm and couldn't move, and Juzo had interposed himself with the Executioner's Blade between Itachi and the Tailed Beast Ball. Someone he barely knew. Someone who was his partner in a transactional sense and nothing more, as far as anyone external could have measured.
He'd done it anyway. He'd held the blade up and taken the impact that should have killed Itachi, and the blade had shattered from it, and Juzo had gone down. And his last instruction had been for Itachi to run, because the Mist's backup forces were coming and Itachi needed to leave before they arrived.
Then he'd died.
With a smile, apparently.
Finn found that genuinely admirable. Not useful, not strategic — admirable, as a quality of person. He'd take someone with that quality in the Yorozuya over someone with twice the combat output and none of it.
"How strong is Yagura?" he asked.
Kakuzu thought about it for a moment — the specific, professional pause of someone who calibrated these assessments carefully. "I haven't fought the Third Raikage directly. Our only contact was the body after his death. But from what I experienced today, my instinct is that Yagura is stronger. The Third Raikage's specialty was taijutsu and physical endurance — that's a specific kind of strength. Yagura's specialty is large-scale water ninjutsu, and the Tailed Beast power behind it makes the volume essentially unlimited. The comparison isn't clean, but if I had to choose one to fight, I'd rather fight the Third Raikage."
Finn nodded, turning this over. He thought Kakuzu's instinct was probably somewhat off — the Third Raikage was, in terms of raw individual combat ceiling, about as high as any of the Five Kage could claim. But different tools, different contexts. Yagura in a flooded environment, with Tailed Beast chakra and the Water Mirror and the Super Water Prison, was something different from a straight individual matchup. He wasn't necessarily stronger. He was more comprehensively dangerous in his chosen conditions.
"Biwa Juzo is probably still alive," Finn said. "Yagura wanted him brought back. With that kind of power differential, keeping him alive wasn't a problem."
Kakuzu considered. "Probably."
"Then we should be able to catch up to them." Finn smiled. "Come on."
Kakuzu straightened. He had just been thoroughly outclassed by a Kage in a fight he hadn't prepared for, had lost two hearts in the process, and was standing in a field covered in salamander slime. His financial situation had materially worsened in the last two hours.
He looked at Finn and felt, without being able to precisely name it, the particular confidence of a man who was operating under a large umbrella. It didn't change the facts. It changed the weight of the facts.
"The Fourth Mizukage?" Kakuzu said, as they moved. "You want to kill him?"
"No." Finn shook his head once. "He's still useful, and taking him out conflicts with something I'm planning. We force a retreat and we take Biwa Juzo back. That's all."
Kakuzu had no objection. They set off at pace into the trees, tracking the direction a water buffalo would have taken from the capital of the Wave Country, with the man who had just been completely unable to handle the situation leading the way.
Somehow, this felt less dangerous than it had ten minutes ago.