Tsunade didn't hesitate for a single breath.
The instant her palm pressed into the substitution log and the smoke cleared, she was already out of the wreckage, a flash of motion that left the collapsed building behind her before the displaced air had time to settle.
Biwa Juzo materialized at the far end of the ruined street, and she was already there.
She came from above. One leg raised high overhead, the other locked straight beneath her, the full descending weight of her body channeled into a single overhead axe-kick.
"Heavenly Pain Kick!"
Juzo's water technique came a fraction of a second faster. He dropped both hands, shaped a single seal, and plunged straight down into the small puddle at his feet, a collection of standing rainwater no more than thirty or forty centimeters across, barely deep enough to cover a palm. A normal person looking at it would see nothing but rain gathered in a shallow depression in the stone. It shouldn't have fit him. It did.
Tsunade's heel connected with the street instead.
The ground didn't just crack. An entire section of it collapsed downward, every puddle and channel of collected rainwater thrown violently upward in a simultaneous wall of spray, the impact zone spreading outward across hundreds of meters of soaked and already-weakened stone. The reverberations moved through the soles of the feet at a distance. Shizune, watching from the mouth of a side alley, flinched backward without meaning to.
Juzo surfaced inside the spray column, rising with the scattered water and finding his feet before the mist had time to fall. He shook a streak of gray sewage from his face and rolled his jaw.
He hadn't been touched. But the gap that created was already telling him something he didn't particularly enjoy hearing: this woman was not going to let him pace himself.
A low anger settled in under the professional calculation. Not blind rage, just the particular irritation of someone who was being actively disrespected. He was a member of the Yorozuya. An S-rank missing-nin with a reputation that preceded him across three countries. He had no intention of letting Tsunade of the Sannin look at him like he was an obstacle she would walk through on the way to something more interesting.
Beyond that, practical assessment: with a fight of this scale already tearing the street apart, there was no point reporting anything. Finn would feel it. The patrols had already heard it. Whatever was going to happen next, it was happening without additional coordination from him.
His hands moved before his feet had fully settled, running through seals at speed.
"Water Escape: Water Rope Twisting Technique."
The rain responded. The Hidden Rain Village was saturated to the bone; the air itself held water. Five heavy ropes of condensed water formed around Tsunade and whipped inward, coiling around her arms, her torso, her legs, tightening.
She stopped moving. The ropes held.
Juzo raised one hand, palm out, and drove it through the air in a sweeping arc, his palm slapping through sheets of falling rain in rapid sequence.
"Water Escape: Water Continuous Bullet Technique."
Each impact against the rainwater expanded it outward into a high-velocity projectile. Five rounds in quick succession, moving like cannonballs, aimed at center mass.
Tsunade's arms spread.
The water ropes exploded off her in every direction, not cut, not slipped loose, just overwhelmed by pure outward force, disintegrating into spray against her skin. She didn't form a single seal. Her right foot drove into the already-collapsed ground, and the broken stone beneath her launched upward from the shockwave. She pivoted on her left heel, leg swinging in a wide horizontal arc, and her foot connected with the rising rubble in a sweeping kick that sent a dense wall of earth and shattered stone screaming into the path of Juzo's water bullets. Stone hit water at speed. Both fell apart in a cloud of wet debris.
Her hands were already forming seals.
Chakra surged visibly.
"Earth Escape: Four-Way Rock Sealing."
The ground around Juzo's feet erupted upward on four sides. Thick slabs of compressed earth rose faster than a wall being built, the four faces closing toward each other, the sky above him narrowing to a strip and then nothing as the ceiling sealed shut. A box. Solid on all sides.
The closing of the technique was clearly intentional: contain him, create a fixed target, follow through the gap before he could recover and hit him inside the prison with everything she had.
It was the correct play. Even Juzo had to acknowledge that.
He also acknowledged that his hand seal speed was not going to win a race with her.
He abandoned the seals he'd been forming. The Executioner's Blade was already moving.
A single horizontal slash tore through the approaching earth wall on his left, the fractured sword still carrying enough edge to split reinforced stone in one motion. He stepped through the gap while the wall was still falling, the pieces hadn't touched the ground before he was already outside them, and that was when Tsunade came for him again.
"Go to hell!"
The punch was exactly what he'd mapped: she'd wanted to seal him, close the distance inside the trap, and drop that fist into him with no room to dodge. He'd denied her the trap. That didn't mean she was changing the plan.
Juzo read it and went backward instead of forward. One step took him back inside the range of the crumbling earth wall, just enough, just far enough that her knuckles passed through air a hand's width from his chest. In the same motion he pulled the sword backward across his body, a flat, horizontal chop that split the remaining section of earth wall behind him, and then he was stepping through the opening before the pieces cleared, putting distance between them with fast, short steps.
His feet hit open ground. He turned immediately, reversed, and came back at her.
The Executioner's Blade came around in a wide, overhead arc. He moved into her range deliberately, accepting the gamble that her fists needed to build their strikes from a shoulder rotation and he could time the entry.
Tsunade was already dropping.
Her right leg slid out to the side, low and fast, carrying her weight with it. Her left knee bent, bringing her into a deep squat at the same moment the blade passed through the space her head had occupied, less than five centimeters above her hair. The sword's edge moved through empty air.
She came back up like something released from compression. Her entire body launched forward and upward, aimed at his center, both hands coming with her.
Juzo didn't retreat. He let the sword's forward momentum carry through, pressing the flat of the blade into the ground, and used it as a post. His hands gripped the back of the blade, and he pushed off it, his body rising and rotating through the air in a half-turn, feet clearing her incoming strike by the width of a breath. He landed three meters back.
The moment his feet found the ground, his arms were already pulling. The sword wrenched free from the stone with a sound like tearing, and he brought it up in a single wrist-driven motion, a low rising cut aimed at Tsunade's back while her momentum carried her through the direction she'd committed to.
Shizune, from the alley mouth, pressed her hand over her mouth. The blade was going to reach her. It was too fast and Tsunade was already past the point where she could turn in time.
Tsunade's head moved instead.
Her golden ponytail swung outward as her head jerked to one side. The tail followed the motion, long and heavy, and it caught around her raised fist like a rope finding a post, wrapping several loops in the brief fraction of a second the inertia carried it. Her fingers caught the very end of it, pinching it between two fingers, pulling the wrap taut.
She couldn't see the blade. She could feel where it was.
Her fist, wrapped in hair, drove backward into the path of the rising cut.
The Executioner's Blade hit the hair first. Several loops of it separated in the same instant, cut clean, the severed ends dispersing, and then the blade contacted her palm, opening a long cut across it, blood immediate and bright. But the blade stopped moving deeper.
She had the sword.
Her grip was closed around the flat of it despite the wound, and she was already rotating, using the completion of the turn Juzo's rising cut had started, pulling the blade with her as she came around to face him. The expression on her face was not pain. It was the face of someone who had just gotten what she was reaching for.
Her free hand rose and straightened into a ridged, open-palm strike, fingers pressed together, the edge of her hand aimed at the flat of the blade.
"Hah!"
The shout came from somewhere in her chest and the strike landed.
The Executioner's Blade broke.
It snapped along a stress line partway up from the grip, the break clean and total, and the front half of the blade was now in Tsunade's hand, its broken end jagged and bright. The handle and base section stayed in Juzo's grip.
She swung the front half at him immediately, a fast horizontal throw at close range.
Juzo's arm moved without consulting his mind on the matter. The handle came up, the broken base section struck the airborne piece of his own sword and knocked it wide, and it clattered into the rubble behind him.
Then his eyes caught up with what had just happened, and the expression that crossed his face was several things at once: acknowledgment that the deflection had been automatic, understanding that the deflection had been the wrong choice, and the particular sick recognition of someone who has just realized they have left themselves completely open.
Every defensive position he had was gone. Arm extended, weight shifted back, nothing between his chest and her.
Lightning crackled across his skin before he'd consciously told it to. A thin, rough shell of lightning chakra, thrown up from reflex rather than preparation.
"Oh no," he thought, with considerable feeling.
Tsunade's bloody fist drove forward.
It was slow.
He registered it before the punch had traveled half the distance: the speed was wrong. Not the explosive, annihilating speed her other strikes had carried. This one was labored. Heavy. Her eyes were closed.
Her aura had shifted. Something in the line of her shoulders was wrong.
He didn't understand why and he had the intelligence to recognize that understanding could wait. He was already moving.
His feet slipped sideways and he let his legs go out from under him, dropping full-length onto the broken ground, rolling along the debris in a lazy, uncontrolled tumble that carried him clear of the strike's path.
Tsunade's fist passed over him.
The air did not. The force of the punch hit the rain between her knuckles and everything in the space directly ahead of her, and the rain simply wasn't there anymore, compressed sideways and outward in a circular ring, a pocket of near-vacuum opening in the downpour for a full second before the rain fell back in to fill it. The rubble beyond the vacuum's edge was rearranged by the pressure wave. A stack of collapsed timber moved three meters.
Juzo lay on the ground, breathing.
"If that had connected," he said to no one in particular, "I would have been finished."
He wasn't certain if "crippled" or "dead" was the right word, and he found he didn't want to refine the distinction.
He looked at Tsunade. The abnormality was already gone. She was standing upright, eyes open, her posture steady. The rain had done something to her palm, the blood there had been washed away in the downpour, and the wound itself was already closing, the Hundred Healings Technique working underneath the skin in its quiet, constant way, sealing the damage before it could compound. Without the blood visible on her hand, without the color of it catching her eyes, whatever had gripped her had passed.
She looked down at him with flat, flat eyes.
Her foot rose.
Juzo planted one hand and shoved. The ground gave him what the fall had taken away, and he was in the air before her boot landed, the stomp driving another crater into the already-ruined street below him. He came down three meters away, feet first.
At that moment, Tsunade, who had every reason to press forward and close the gap while he was landing, did not.
She stopped.
Juzo noticed. He straightened and followed her eyeline.
At the edge of the ruined block, on top of a section of collapsed wall that jutted above the surrounding debris at a height, stood a figure. Unmoving. Neither of them had seen it arrive. It was simply there, in the rain, watching.
Tsunade's eyes narrowed.
"Who?" she said.