The other shoe was going to drop eventually, things had been going entirely too well, and Sakumo guessed that this would be that shoe.

He swore under his breath as he looked up from the idiot on the floor to the dark armored figure that had replaced the young samurai girl that had caught them. She may have looked the age of a fresh graduate, but she certainly didn't fight like one. Her skill and age plus the black sclera that marked an active Shinjitsugan made identifying the girl easy.

Ericka Rhostana, the girl that his village was trying to court away from Iron so that their jinjuriki would be more likely to stay in the village. A girl that, in spite of their best efforts, they still hadn't managed to see fight seriously. But she'd single handedly taken down a group of four Kumo jonin a couple of years ago, and she'd presumably become stronger and more skilled since then. So on pure skill she'd likely tear through his squad of one jonin and three chunin without slowing down. Then there was the darker than black sword with the glowing sealing symbols and the frozen mist spilling from the blade that was making him extremely nervous. Sealing wasn't his specialty, he had no idea what those symbols might do, and he didn't really want to find out. And that wasn't even taking into account that they'd be hobbled by defending the VIP

He was thankful he didn't have to choose between the mission and his team mates. Sakumo hated it when that happened. This time though both actions required the same thing from him.

"Grab the idiot on the floor, the VIP, and run," he ordered his second, the other jonin present. "I'll stall her." He was gratified that his squad didn't hesitate. His second heaved the chunin on the floor over his shoulder, another did the same to the VIP, and they bolted.

The moment they started to move though, the samurai... Rhostana, he reminded himself, it was best to keep that in mind, Rhostana hummed. The air shivered as the sound filled the hallway like a physical thing, and a moment later Sakumo was struck by an intense vertigo. The rest of his squad stumbled, only barely managing to stay on their feet, which was a problem as Rhostana had already started advancing towards them down the hallway.

Running chakra to his ears, he worked counter to the usual purpose of doing so and deafened himself. A simple technique to counter audio genjutsu. One that didn't work as well here as it usually did. Still it helped enough that Sakumo could run through the few hand signs he needed and thrust a flattened hand forward. Lightning arced from his fingertips, the individual strands of electricity coiling together into a solid bar of lightning as big around as his arm. A bar that flew through the air at speeds only an elite jonin could hope to dodge.

But the girl didn't dodge. Instead she tilted her sword slightly, intercepting the jutsu with the black blade, and Sakumo watched in shock as the entire jutsu vanished into the sword. Still it stalled Rhostana long enough for the rest of his squad to work whatever countermeasures they had, and resume fleeing.

The humming ceased as the samurai growled for a moment, then, "GUARDS!" Rhostana's voice rolled through the air, the physical force of it knocking Sakumo off his feet and staggering his fleeing squad again. Though by now they'd reached the end of the hallway and turned the corner taking them out of sight, which he hoped would make them less vulnerable to whatever tricks Rhostana was using.

Sakumo didn't have more than a moment to think about it though as he had to roll to the side quickly to avoid that unnerving sword nearly fileting him like a fish. The ninja glanced to the side and found that Rhostana's sword had actually cut into the floor. Something that as far as he was aware was impossible. This reinforced his impression that the sword was something better avoided, even more than swords were usually to be avoided.

A quick roll backwards took him to his feet as Rhostana recovered from her blow. With only a moment before he again found himself in close quarters combat with a samurai, he used the quickest jutsu he knew. Drawing in a deep breath he overpowered the jutsu as much as he could, then exhaled a plume of white hot fire that enveloped the samurai completely.

A substitution that he activated on instinct was the only thing that saved him. The space time jutsu deposited him in a shadowed alcove, shadows that he instinctively pulled around himself with a genjutsu to help him hide. This gave him an excellent view as a gauntleted fist emerged from the lingering flames and hit the log he'd left in his place hard enough that the log exploded into splinters. Moments later the fire cleared, leaving the sight of Rhostana as unaffected by the torrent of flame as the corridor itself.

Sakumo was rapidly running out of options. Lightning had accomplished nothing. Fire even less. The dry air would make water prohibitively expensive, or require spending the moisture in his body. Earth would be impossible inside the fortress. Which left air, which was his worst element, his primary element being lightning. He was going to have to fight her up close.

Then he had no further time to think as she was on him. She went from standing still to moving impressively fast with zero time taken to accelerate, then slammed to a halt again just as quickly, her sword seeking his neck. He ducked under the blade, the frigid mist that spilled from it washed over him, as it carved another notch into the wall over his head. The feel of the blade passing so close to him was enough of a distraction that he almost didn't get the substitution off in time. Almost. Another log was reduced to splinters from the push kick that would have crushed him between her foot and the wall.

The substitution took him behind her, and he took the opportunity that was presented to him by her still recovering from her kick to try and take her leg out from under her. Except that his leg hit the skirt attached to her armor and stopped like he'd hit a wall. The skirt was made of cloth, he'd seen it move like cloth with every step the oddly armored samurai took. But when his leg hit it, the cloth didn't move an inch. There was no feeling of impact either, which left the Konoha nin somewhat at a loss about what had just happened.

Sakumo wasn't so distracted by his thoughts that he didn't duck as she spun towards him in a one handed swing. But instead of the wide swing that would have left her open, she relaxed the wrist holding the sword so the blade fell back into her waiting off-hand. This allowed her to smoothly transition from an overly dramatic swing, to bringing the hilt of her sword down at him using the cross guard like a hammer.

Sakumo flung himself backwards to avoid the blow that likely would have caved his skull in had it hit. He hopped further backwards expecting her to stick with him like she had been through the entire fight, only to find her still standing where she had been, her sword gripped by the blade in one hand, the cross guard resting on the floor. It was hard to tell with the hood of her armor rendering her faceless, but he was pretty sure that she was staring at the splinters of his substitution log.

"Where do they come from?" It took a moment for him to realize that it was the samurai speaking. Her voice was beautiful, she almost sounded like she was singing every word, but her voice wasn't carrying the same power, wasn't filling the air the same way it had been.

"What?" Ninja fights had an odd tendency to devolve into philosophical debates. Not always, but often enough that it wouldn't be unusual for a conversation to start up.

"The logs. They're not a genjutsu, those don't work on me. They're not a chakra construct, the splinters are still there. You're not hiding them on you somewhere, unless you've got a storage scroll full of logs on you?"

This was not the sort of conversation he was expecting though. "No... I don't keep them in a scroll."

"So where do they come from?" she demanded, her hood tilting up giving the impression that she was looking at him again.

"Well, you see..." he started speaking, then mid word substituted again, leaving another log behind and appearing inside her guard. His white chakra saber appeared in his hand and he drove it up into the seam between her breast plate and the armor that covered her stomach. Only to find the blade stopping again against... something. There was no sound, no feel of impact, just the blade stopping. Once again though, he didn't have the time to think about the armor's strangeness.

Rhostana immediately tried to bear hug him, and only a duck and quick roll backwards saved him from losing right there. The two of them took a moment to reset and breathe. A moment to think of what had happened so far in the fight, and try to come up with a better plan than they'd started with.

The ninja wasn't coming up with much. His specialty was ninjutsu, which between that sword and the fortress he couldn't do a lot there. In an open space outside there'd be more for him to work with, but here in a narrow corridor that was immune to chakra? His only choice left was fighting a samurai in close quarters.

He'd fought a number of ninja swordsmen in his time, and even a ronin Land of Iron samurai once. This girl was three quarters of the age of the youngest, and less than half the age of the eldest, and she was a better swordswoman than any of them. So unlike him, close quarters combat clearly was her specialty.

"You're Sakumo Hatake," Rhostana said, in a surprised voice. "The White Fang of Konoha. The hell are a squad of Leaf nin doing in Iron, kidnapping people during a civil war?" Sakumo just shrugged. Later he suspected it would be different, but he wasn't about to start spilling mission details now. "Right. Well be careful of Sclamhaire's edges. I'd hate to break your knife by accident, it looks important."

For a moment the ninja wondered who or what a Scalm... Shlem... he couldn't even pronounce that word in his head. For a moment he wondered what she was referring to, but as she returned to a neutral guard he decided that it was probably the name of her sword, and remembering what the blade had done to the theoretically impervious castle walls, she was probably giving him some good advice.

Then the time for thinking was over and she was on him again.

Up until this point the two fighters had been waging a war of speed and positioning. Now, though, it was a straight up fight. No ninja ever liked those, so he tried a genjutsu just to test her assertion that she was immune, but his chakra vanished into her armor the same way his lightning bolt had vanished into her sword. So he resigned himself to this new phase of the battle.

Very quickly he wished he'd found some other way to do this. He was stronger and faster than she was, but not by enough to negate what, he was a little embarrassed to admit, was a significant skill advantage on her part. Only his greater physical abilities and experience, her unfamiliarity with small blades, and her obvious effort to not cut apart his chakra saber was keeping him in the game. And worse yet, if he didn't know any better, he'd have thought she had a Sharingan. She didn't have the precognitive reflexes that Uchiha developed, but she was learning like one. She was adapting to his style impossibly quickly, quickly learning to anticipate him, read his tells. Tricks that actually got him through her impressive guard were negated by her armor and then never worked again. He didn't have a lot of his own techniques thrown back at him immediately like some Uchiha liked to do. But then most of his one handed short blade techniques wouldn't really work with her two handed sword. The few times she did try out one of his own moves on him, instead of the rote repeat of what he'd done, he got something that, while clearly unpracticed, showed actual understanding of the technique and how it worked. Which Sakumo found much more unnerving.

He wasn't sure how long the fight had been going on. A minute? Two if he was lucky? However long it was, a long fight wasn't in his favor. The longer the fight went on the longer the samurai was stalled, but she'd already called for backup which should be here at any moment, backup she'd probably send after the rest of his team. Not to mention that the longer the fight went on, the better Rhostana got at fighting him. He could actually see it happening, new tricks were working less and less. He actually had to borrow ones from other jonin at this point to accomplish anything. Even then if they matched his style she'd catch them. He had to end this soon if he was going to get away while he still could. By this time he'd determined that her armor was impregnable. The only point of possible vulnerability was the narrow gap between her hood and face mask that let her see. It would be a blow that would normally be crippling and something he'd never do to somebody he was hoping would still be a friend to his village after the fight, and especially not somebody with a doujutsu.

He was running out of options. He'd heard that she had some impressive regeneration, so he hoped it wouldn't be as big of a deal as it would with others.

He substituted again, something he'd stopped doing once they'd really gotten into the purely physical fight, so he hoped it would be a moment of surprise that would help him. He vanished from in front of her leaving a log behind, partially just to bug her at this point he'd admit, and appeared mid air over her. He dropped onto her back, using his sudden weight to stagger her. He tried to pin her arms to her sides with his knees, wrap an arm around her neck, and stab at her eyes with the chakra saber.

But before he could do more than grab onto her, things started going wrong. She didn't stagger, because she didn't try to keep her balance at all. Instead she just fell over backwards. He tried to escape, but she'd dropped her sword and grabbed his legs, keeping him in place. Sakumo was crushed between the massive weight of her armor, how she could move in it he had no idea, and the stone floor. His breath was pressed out of his lungs in a rush and only his instinctive reinforcement of his ribcage kept it from shattering. For just a moment he was stunned enough that his grip on Rhostana relaxed the slightest bit for just a moment.

That was enough.

She spun in his grip so she was facing him and then... and then Sakumo wasn't quite sure what happened. He struggled against her, but his arms were twisted and restrained in ways he couldn't quite grasp. She stayed on top of him, pressing him into the floor and manipulating his position, his limbs, and the more he struggled the less he accomplished. His breath came in desperate gasps, and his muscles began to burn with exhaustion. Which was, a strangely idle thought informed him, wrong. He could fight for hours, days at a time before he began to feel it. Now he could feel weakness curling through his muscles along with the burn. Soon he would be too tired to fight back at all. His face was pressed into her breastplate, her arms pressing him painfully into the cold metal.

His arms were free, he realized suddenly, but this bit of hope faded away as she stretched him somehow. He could feel her almost pulling at his skull. And as she did his vision began to dim. His breath came in increasingly panicked shallow gasps, his arms desperately scrabbled at her armor, finding no purchase. Darkness began to creep in at the edges of his vision, he got light headed and the weakness he'd felt creeping up on him spread faster.

The last thing he heard before passing out was the sound of armored boots arriving at a run.

###

Sakumo awoke when the bucket of cold water hit him, though he very carefully didn't so much as tense a muscle when he did. He needed to figure out what was going on before whoever was holding him knew they should be censoring themselves.

"Huh, that usually works," a male voice said with some bemusement.

"It did work," a musical voice he could only describe as beautiful said with a wry twist of dry humor he could almost feel. "He's faking it."

Sakumo sighed. "Well, you can't blame me for trying," he said, keeping his voice pleasant as he raised his head and opened his eyes to look around.

He was still in Center Gate, from the construction of the walls. He was sitting in a surprisingly comfortable metal chair, though how long it would stay comfortable he had no idea. His arms were bound with manacles built into the arms of the chair. Just like the manicals that bound his ankles, and the single band of metal wrapped around his torso just below his ribs. The chair itself wasn't bolted to the floor. You couldn't put bolts into the stone of the fortress, but the legs were welded to a plate of metal that covered the entire floor of the room, so it achieved the same result. His hands were trapped in metal gloves locked around his wrists that kept his fingers trapped in a straight and spread position, making any kind of hand signs impossible. He might be able to substitute himself out of the chair since substitution was a space time technique and he had mastered it without hand signs. He doubted it though as the chair and manacles were covered in softly glowing seals that he didn't recognize. He was not a seal master, but every jonin learned to recognize seals when they saw them, and the smart ones learned enough to make at least decent guesses as to what the seal did. But this didn't look like even the same language as any other seal he'd seen. They did kind of remind him of the symbols that lined the flat of Rhostana's sword though.

Rhostana was the female of his two jailers. The armor she'd worn before was gone, along with the sword, leaving her in the samurai casual uniform of a wrap shirt and hakama. Though how much that mattered, given she'd managed to acquire both between one moment and the next before the hallway fight, he had no idea. He wasn't betting on their apparent absence meaning much.

The male in the room was standing off to the side, spinning an empty bucket by the handle and grinning at him with a certain amount of malice.

Against the wall directly in front of him was a table filled with instruments of torture artistically displayed. A quick glance at Rhostana showed her examining him intently, her face carefully blank. It was a good mask, but she was young and Sakumo was very good at reading people. He could tell she really wasn't entirely, or even mostly comfortable with the tools or their intent. It probably spoke well of her morals, though many would say such squeamishness was a weakness.

Finally he turned his gaze back to the man with the bucket. "Torture? Don't you know that doesn't work?" It was an idea that was frequently told to civilians to calm them down, and in some circumstances it was even true. Reality, as was frequently the case, was more complicated than such a simple statement could really cover.

The interrogator with the bucket placed it on the floor before wandering over to the table, "I have heard that, yes. Personally I think a lot of the problems with it go away when you have a method of knowing for sure when somebody is telling the truth." Sakumo glanced at the tall woman in the corner of the room who continued to study him with an imposing blank expression. "So unless you just want to volunteer the answers we want...?" The interrogator, now probable torturer, turned back to his prisoner with an unnerving grin and a shrug.

Having seen Ibiki at work though, Sakumo gave the intimidation attempt a six out of ten at best.

The ninja shrugged as well as he could, secured in his chair, "Sure." Rhostana blinked in surprise and the interrogator's mask cracked slightly. "The woman in question was born a noble of the Land of Fire, her father married her to one of your nobles to try and get more favorable trade agreements, which I'm pretty sure didn't work. When your civil war began to kick off in earnest, her father hired us to extract her before she could be caught up in things. The plan was to smuggle her out with the rest of the refugees, but bad timing had us arriving just as you took and secured the fortress. It didn't change our plans much but delayed us enough to get caught." Sakumo blinked as something occurred to him and he turned to Rhostana, "By the way, what tipped you off?"

Rhostana blinked, "I'd gotten an assignment to recover her from her home to help her husband pick sides. Part of that was an image of her. Her eyes are pretty distinctive, and hard to hide or change. Once I thought those looked familiar I... checked more thoroughly and everything about all of you were lies." The samurai shrugged.

Sakumo could put the rest together. Once she knew that they weren't what they appeared to be, what they actually were was almost immaterial, she had to stop and check them.

"Wait," the interrogator/torturer raised a hand, cutting them off, "Is he telling the truth?" Rhostana shrugged and nodded. "Why are you telling us this?"

"Well..." Sakumo started slowly, "first off, Konoha has no desire for Iron to think that we're picking a side in your internal conflicts. This was an extraction of a Fire citizen, nothing more or less. Second," his eyes drifted to the samurai's gold on black eyes, "there are certain members of Konoha that would be most upset with me if I were somehow responsible for alienating certain samurai." He almost laughed, as in spite of Rhostana's expression not shifting from its stoic stillness in the slightest, a rose tint faintly colored the samurai's cheeks in a pretty blush. "Finally, because while I would never give away the details of a mission in progress, either my team has escaped with the lady, or you've caught them, and either way the mission is over."

The interrogator sighed and pinched the bridge of his nose. His entire attitude changed from the vaguely off putting mien he'd displayed, to the attitude of somebody who'd just discovered that what they'd thought was a simple problem actually involved entire cart loads of paperwork. "I need to report how cooperative the prisoner has decided to be. Keep him company while I figure out what to do with him." He glanced at the ninja, apparently deciding that he could be somewhat friendly with such an accommodating prisoner, "We're probably going to hang on to you for at least a while, just to keep your village honest. You'll be treated well though, and released when the war ends at the latest." With that the man left, leaving him alone with the samurai that had so much of Konoha's upper rank's interest.

After a moment he decided that if he was going to be here for a while he might as well keep trying to leave a positive impression on the girl, "So... do you play Shogi?"

Rhostana blinked at him, "I generally prefer Go..." she answered hesitantly.

Sakumo could work with that. Hopefully his wife wouldn't be too mad at him for however long he'd be stuck here away from her and their young son. Because it looked very likely he'd be stuck here for a while.

At least she could be certain that he'd be coming back alive, which was more than could be said about most of his missions.