zabuza was the first major villain kakashi and his team faced. he was hired by gatou to assasinate tazuna. after the demon brothers failed to kill tazuna, he personally set out to see why they failed and of course to do the job himself. from up a tree, he saw that it was the kakashi team that was acting as tazuna's bodyguards. he sent his cleaver flying in the air wherein it struck a tree (nobody got hurt since kakashi of course felt it and warned everybody to keep their heads down), and then we see zabuza-san standing on its handle, his back to them...astig ang entrance!

amiable words of greetings and introductions were exchanged and then zabuza was honored by kakashi by showing the sharingan who admitted that it would be a little tough unless he used it. the good sensei told the team to standback, just guard tazuna and not to interfere as 'this one's on a whole new level' than the demon brothers.

zabuza then transfer on top of a near by water source then released huge amounts of chakras to create a thick mist so as to hide from the sharingan and not have his jutsus copied. fom the depths of the mist, he terrorized the genins as he whispered his 8 choices of vital organs to hit. sasuke was shaking and sweating as he felt how dangerous and intense zabuza's ki was.

as kakashi was comforting sasuke, suddenly he appeared in front of tazuna wherein kakashi rushed in and stabbed him. turned out it was just mizu bunshin and zabuza appeared behind him. slashing thru kakashi, he was surpised that it was also mizu bunshin that kakashi was able to copy from him despite of the mist. he figured out that the copy ninja already did it just before he comforted sasuke and it was the clone who did the comforting as the real kakashi hid in the mist and watched him.

as kakashi held a kunai to his throat, suddenly another zabuza appeared behind him. this time it was the real zabuza who swung the kubikiri houcho. kakashi ducked. as the cleaver struck the ground, zabuza turned around as he quickly released the houcho from his right, grabbed it with his left and delivered a whopping kick into kakashi's guts. it sent kakashi flying into the water. as zabuza ran to follow him, he found the ground was littered with mikibishi (tiny caltrops) but he 'teleported' into the water. as kakashi landed in the water, he struggled to get up as he found it uncharacteristically heavy. from behind zabuza appeared and cast him into his water prison. with kakashi trapped he turned his attention to the others.

he had to create a mizu bunshin since he has to keep an arm in the bubble. kakashi was urging the others to just ran away with tazuna as the mizu bunshin can't go far from the original. this of course went unheeded. the genins were prepared to fight it out. zabuza first struck naruto. then naruto got into his 'i'll be the hokage' routine and told sasuke he has a plan. he mock them that they were just pretending to be ninjas and that they shouldn't call themselves ninjas till they were good enough to be included in his black nin handbook.

then flashback on how zabuza got to be called devil zabuza. suddenly zabuza struck out at sasuke. naruto did the kage bunshin no jutsu and swarmed in on zabuza. zabuza swung around the houcho to scatter the narutos. as naruto landed he got out a large shuriken which he passed on to sasuke. sasuke did this evil wind shuriken shadow windmill and threw it towards zabuza who caught but it appears that another shuriken was hiding in the first shuriken's shadow (which is the whole point of the jutsu). zabuza jumped to avoid it.