The storm from Finn's sword slash had been unexpected.
Kakuzu, standing behind and to the left, had watched the blade come down and the fog tear apart in a single second, and the sight had produced a specific kind of silence in him. Not incomprehension — he understood clearly what he'd seen. It was more the brief stillness that followed when something exceeded what you'd been prepared for.
Biwa Juzo, mummified on the buffalo's back and unable to speak, conveyed a similar quality entirely through the rigid set of his bandaged figure.
Ahead, where the fog had been, the road was clear.
Yagura was already moving.
His hands were forming seals in rapid sequence — no pause between them, no wasted motion. Yagura's technique execution had the particular economy of someone who had spent years condensing his ninjutsu until the unnecessary parts simply didn't exist anymore. The last seal dropped.
"Combined Ninjutsu: Thunder Water Dragon Bullet."
Water rose from the flooded ground beneath Yagura's feet, shaping itself as it climbed — a dragon's body, broad and fast, the roar of its mass displacement audible before it had fully formed. Yagura drove his arm into the creature's tail mid-formation. Lightning chakra discharged from his hand directly into the water dragon's body, converting the technique in real time. The water dragon became something lit from the inside, coursing with electrical current, its power roughly doubled by the fusion.
It came at Finn roaring.
Finn raised one arm.
"Abyss of Darkness."
The black field expanded from his palm — not a wall but a web of darkness that spread and deepened, a gravitational void that didn't deflect but consumed. The Thunder Water Dragon hit the field's leading edge at full momentum and disappeared into it. No impact, no rebound, no splash. The darkness absorbed the entire technique without registering resistance.
Yagura's expression shifted fractionally. The look of someone recalculating.
His hands were already moving again. New seals forming. "Water Release: Water—"
"No."
Finn's Lightning Armor activated and he was already at range zero.
He didn't use a technique. He used his hand. He pressed his palm flat against Yagura's face, fingers wrapping around the back of his skull, and used the grip and the momentum behind it to drive Yagura straight into the ground. No buildup, no announcement, no arc — just force applied through a direct line from standing to floor. The impact cracked the road surface in every direction from the point of contact, a dense radiating web of fractures spreading outward through stone and packed earth.
Biwa Juzo stared at this from the buffalo's back.
He was staring at Yagura Karatachi. The Fourth Mizukage. The second most powerful person in his personal experience of the world, a man who had run him across the entire ocean without losing the trail once, who had flooded the capital of the Wave Country in under two minutes, who had casually deployed a technique capable of imprisoning a thousand-meter radius and then filled it with water.
That man had just been grabbed by the face and slammed into the road.
Juzo processed this with the particular careful blankness of someone who needed a moment.
"Cough."
Yagura was on the ground, and blood was at the corner of his mouth, and the recoil from being driven into a stone road had done what recoil did. He was not out. Orange chakra bloomed from somewhere inside him — the specific color of Tailed Beast power, warm and violent and wrong in the way that all truly vast chakra felt wrong to people standing near it. It flooded through his arm and into the grip Finn had on his face, and the pressure of it forced the grip open with the blunt efficiency of something that didn't negotiate.
Yagura's other hand went to the ground. He pushed himself back, sliding distance between himself and Finn in a controlled withdrawal, wiping his mouth in the same motion. The orange chakra settled across his body in a partial transformation — not full beast mode, but the beginnings of it, the red-orange aura giving his slight frame a ferocious layered presence that it hadn't had before.
He was taking this seriously now.
Finn glanced at his own hand.
Coral was spreading across the back of it. Fine pale branches, the signature of the Coral Palm, growing outward from the points where Yagura's chakra had made contact during the forced separation. The technique had embedded itself on contact, reflexively, the way a deeply practiced ninjutsu sometimes activated below conscious decision.
Interesting. Yagura had integrated the Coral Palm into his instincts at a level where it triggered through any sufficiently forceful physical contact. An elegant design, if the intent was to punish opponents who tried to fight in close range.
Finn watched the coral spread for about two seconds.
Then black smoke rose from his skin. It moved along the coral branches from the hand outward, following the growth pattern in reverse, and the coral didn't retreat so much as simply cease to be. The Dark-Dark Fruit's nullification, converted through world assimilation into something that recognized foreign chakra constructs embedded in the body and dissolved them. The arm was clear.
Yagura, across the field, had been watching this and was now watching it end.
What on earth is that dark energy?
Finn raised Shindokutō and swung it in a broad, unhurried arc through the air — not at Yagura but through the space between them, a sideways motion that released something that wasn't quite a technique and wasn't quite just wind.
" Gravity Domain — Lockdown."
The word "gravity" in the name wasn't rhetorical. The Press-Press Fruit's compression property, channeled through the sword and expressed through its arc, descended on the space where Yagura was standing as a weight. An invisible one, proportioned to the chakra behind it, designed not to damage but to pin.
The ground under Yagura's feet collapsed inward. He was pressed down to it, the gravitational field landing across his whole body and holding there. The partial Tailed Beast transformation significantly enhanced his physical resistance — without it, the sudden application would have been crippling. With it, he was pressed against the earth and held there, struggling.
"Damn it," Yagura said.
His palm was against the ground from being forced down. The blood from his mouth was on that palm. He pressed it into the earth without hesitation.
"Summoning Technique."
White smoke erupted from the ground beneath him — more than white smoke, a pressure that preceded it, a density of presence that rolled outward from the summoning point before the form had even emerged. Kakuzu, standing at the field's edge, felt it hit him and his eyes narrowed. He'd experienced this once, decades ago, during his time as a mission captain for Takigakure. A real Tailed Beast in the field. Not a Jinchuriki drawing on stored chakra — the actual thing, summoned or released or simply present. The sensation was distinctive. A disaster that walked.
The Gravity Domain shattered outward. Whatever Finn had anchored to the ground, the presence rising through the summoning had simply overridden the anchor.
The smoke cleared.
The Three-Tails, Isobu, occupied the field.
Primarily gray-white in coloration, its bulk was enormous — the scale of a large building, not the scale of an animal in any sense a person normally calibrated against. Three tails swept behind it in slow arcs, each one massive. Its shell covered its dorsal surface in dense irregular plates, bone spurs protruding from every edge. Its face was something between a turtle's and something older and more hostile. The aura coming off it was the same orange-warm-violent pressure that Yagura's partial transformation had carried, multiplied to the point where the air in the field tasted different.
Yagura stood on Isobu's head, the contact seeming to deepen the Tailed Beast chakra in his own body through proximity.
He had a summoning contract with Isobu. Directly, personally, independent of any sealing. This was why the Hidden Mist had been willing to plan the operation of sending the Three-Tails into Konoha as a weapon — they weren't afraid of losing it to an enemy sealing, because Yagura could simply summon it back. Deploy, cause damage, recall. A Tailed Beast used like a specialized tool rather than a sealed living weapon. The kind of strategic capacity that only existed when the Tailed Beast and its partner had this specific relationship.
And it explained, better than any intelligence report, why Yagura was going to become the perfect Jinchuriki when the sealing eventually occurred. He already knew Isobu. The relationship was already established. The gap between using a Tailed Beast's power through a contract and fully merging with it through a sealing was narrower when you started on speaking terms.
Yagura didn't speak. He began condensing chakra between Isobu's open jaws — the familiar compression and darkening that indicated a Tailed Beast Ball forming. It was a small one, relatively. Roughly the size of two people standing together, which was small only in the sense that "small" was relative to what the technique could theoretically produce.
"Tailed Beast Ball!" Kakuzu called out. The warning was genuine and immediate.
Finn glanced at the forming ball. He did not move toward cover. He did not activate any visible defensive technique.
Kakuzu looked at the back of Finn's head and experienced something close to exasperation.
The Tailed Beast Ball launched — straight, fast, with the specific characteristic of the technique that it didn't just carry force but carried a compression that affected the air ahead of it before contact.
Finn drew Shindokutō with both hands. He shifted his grip, adjusted his stance, and the sword's dark resonance deepened as chakra flowed through his palms and into the hilt — wind-attribute chakra layered over the blade, and underneath it the Armament Haki coating that made the edge something that could affect things on a deeper level than physical contact normally reached.
He faced the incoming Tailed Beast Ball directly.
"Void Slash."
The sword came down.
Kakuzu saw, or thought he saw, for the fraction of a second that the blade connected with the Tailed Beast Ball — a shape in the wind, in the force of the cut, something with presence and forward motion that wasn't just the blade itself. Gone before it could be fixed as real.
Then there was resistance. A half-moment of it. Then the resistance gave.
The Tailed Beast Ball split along the line of the cut. Clean. Two semicircles, separated from each other by the path of the blade, spinning outward from the axis of the cut in opposite directions. They hit the forested slopes on either side of the road at roughly the same moment and detonated in parallel explosions that sent trees into the air and left craters that were going to exist for decades.
The field was quiet for about two seconds.
Yagura stood on Isobu's head and said nothing. Juzo was frozen on the buffalo's back. Kakuzu was not moving.
"About what I expected," Finn said. He pushed Shindokutō back into the scabbard with his thumb until the guard clicked.
He turned to face Isobu directly. He rolled his shoulders once. Then he set his feet and the Armament Haki rolled through his whole body and concentrated — densest at his right fist, building through his forearm, his shoulder, his core, drawing everything into the torque of the movement before the movement started. The hakama shifted slightly with the beginning of the wind-up.
"Six Secrets: Six King Spears — Violent Tiger."
He punched.
The fist hit the outer edge of Isobu's shell — the dorsal plating that was, among the Nine Tailed Beasts, the defensively most renowned. Not just thick but the specific composition of a chakra entity's physical anchor, fundamentally different in character from any material armor.
The shell fractured. A wide, spreading pattern of cracks running out from the impact point in all directions, and then several sections giving way entirely and falling.
Isobu wailed.
The sound of it was not like anything with a throat. It was the sound of something enormous in pain, resonant at a frequency that Kakuzu felt in his ribcage from thirty meters away.
Isobu left the ground. The Three-Tails — enormous, ancient, possessing the kind of mass that resisted being moved — came off its feet from the force of the punch and went airborne. It traveled in a low, fast arc across the treeline, hit the distant cliff face, and impacted with a concussive force that sent rock cascading down the slope.
In the silence that followed, Yagura had already moved.
He'd lost his footing when Isobu left the ground. He hadn't wasted time recovering it — he'd used the wail and the impact as cover to move, dropping from Isobu's position, landing on the Three-Tails' lowered jaw as it wailed in pain. He stepped into the open mouth. There was a flash of white smoke, sharp and total.
The summoning ended.
Isobu was gone. Yagura Karatachi was gone. The cliff face had a new scar in it, and the road had craters on both sides, and the forest was burning in two places from the Tailed Beast Ball's detonation. Otherwise the field was empty.
"He's gone," Finn said. The grin was slight and genuine.
Biwa Juzo had been struggling against his bandages for the last thirty seconds — not to escape, but from the sheer pressure of having no way to express what he was experiencing. He was still mummified. He was still on the buffalo. He couldn't speak, couldn't move his arms, could only lie there and stare and do nothing while his entire internal ranking of what power meant got completely rewritten.
Cut a Tailed Beast Ball in half with a sword.
Shatter the Three-Tails' shell — the hardest defense among all the Tailed Beasts — with a single punch.
Drive the Fourth Mizukage, Yagura Karatachi, the second most powerful person in Biwa Juzo's entire experience of the world, into a running withdrawal with four or five moves over the span of maybe two minutes.
He thought about what he was going to say the moment someone freed his mouth.
He was going to say: he was joining the Yorozuya. Full stop, no conditions, and if they still wanted to call him Biwa Hanzo he would accept that too because at this point it didn't matter. He was going to say this, and he meant it, and it had nothing to do with worshipping strength. It was gratitude. Repayment of a life-saving debt. That was the only reason. Completely pure.
He thought about this very earnestly while lying motionless on a water buffalo.
Kakuzu was looking at Finn.
The look lasted a moment and then Kakuzu looked away, and the particular thing that had been in his expression — something that didn't quite resolve into any of his normal categories — went somewhere internal and stayed there. He didn't find words for it. The gap between his ceiling and Finn's wasn't something words covered cleanly.
He started walking toward Biwa Juzo to unwrap him.
It seemed like the practical next step.