Staring down at the white-eyed, rampaging toddler, Orochimaru didn't feel a single microscopic shred of fear. Instead, a twisted, maniacal grin stretched across his pale face, his long tongue snaking out to hungrily lick his lips.
So, this is the anomalous 'berserk state' specified in the intelligence data?
Fufufu... fascinating! I want to see exactly what level of physical destruction young Naruto Uzumaki can manifest when his mind fractures!
Orochimaru recalled the baseline analysis from the village council—rumor had it that Uchiha Fugaku had managed to single-handedly duel the child and suppress the outburst without sustaining severe damage. If a standard clan leader could handle the kinetic pressure, then this little monster's ceiling couldn't possibly be that high. It was the perfect opportunity to play with his food before hauling it to the lab!
Standing deep within the shadows of the vault, Danzo Shimura similarly tracked the violent shift in Naruto's biology. He mapped the boy's blank, stark white eyes with a deeply curious, calculating neutrality, quietly eager to observe exactly how much destructive utility was hiding inside the weapon.
But a microsecond later, a disdainful smirk twitched across the elder's wrinkled mouth. No matter how much raw physical pressure he manifests, he has surrendered his cognitive functions. A shinobi's absolute supremacy relies entirely on tactical warfare experience, strategic foresight, and cold wisdom. Unleashing raw, unguided physical instinct like a rabid animal is a primitive, low-level methodology of combat.
To Danzo, an unguided toddler was a non-threat. Even if this brat's physical parameters exceed my baseline projections... how strong can a mindless animal truly be? Is he honestly arrogant enough to compare his primitive strength to the apocalyptic dread of the true Nine-Tails? Ridiculous!
Faced with the Sannin's greedy, hyper-fixated expression, Naruto—having completely surrendered his rational mind to his ancient Super Saiyan fighting instincts—bared his teeth into a grotesque, terrifying grin. He slowly tilted his neck at a sickening angle, locking his blank, pupil-less gaze onto the pale scientist.
The visual aesthetics of the subterranean vault had completely devolved into a scene of pure, unadulterated body horror. In the dim, flickering candlelight of the damp underground bunker, a glowing, floating toddler tightly clamped the fractured wrist of a deathly pale, midnight-haired specter. Both entities stared into each other's faces while flashing hideous, monstrous grins. Had this specific frame been captured on celluloid, it would have immediately become an immortal, legendary hallmark in the history of cinema.
Orochimaru was the first to break the silent standoff. His jaw unhinged with a sickening crack, and a massive, venomous viper erupted directly from his throat. Before the snake could fully clear his lips, its own mouth violently tore open, regurgitating the legendary, blue-glowing blade of the Kusanagi Sword.
With a violent, serpentine snap of its torso, the viper launched the mythical blade straight forward, aiming the razor-sharp tip directly at the center of Naruto's forehead.
The thrust occurred at an catastrophic velocity, the kinetic light radiating from the legendary blade causing the surrounding elite Root operatives to shudder involuntarily.
Even Danzo's composure shattered. Is that absolute lunatic Orochimaru trying to execute the asset?!
Curse him!
The snake scientist could easily process a mutilated corpse for his biological experiments, but a dead Jinchuriki decoy was entirely useless to the Foundation's political agenda! Danzo required a living, breathing tool to act as his executive shield. He instinctively tensed his muscles to intercept the strike, but the spatial distance was too vast, and Orochimaru's execution speed was too terminal—he was mathematically too late to block!
However, the catastrophic perforation Danzo anticipated never materialized.
The razor-sharp tip of the Kusanagi Sword collided squarely with Naruto's forehead and came to a dead, absolute halt, completely unable to advance a single fraction of a millimeter.
Orochimaru's golden vertical pupils expanded to the absolute limit of his sockets, a wave of genuine shock shattering his victorious facade. Naruto hadn't even bothered to raise a defensive guard or manifest a concentrated barrier of ki; he had simply absorbed the direct, high-velocity impact of one of the sharpest mythical weapons in existence using nothing but his bare skin!
Using his free left hand, Orochimaru frantically yanked the spent viper from his throat, screaming in utter disbelief, "How is this mathematically possible?! The Kusanagi Sword is an absolute pinnacle of cutting efficiency in the shinobi world! How can a toddler's skull completely deny its edge?!"
Naruto offered zero verbal communication. At this stage of the rampage, his human identity was entirely dormant, his physical container completely dictated by absolute, primitive martial instincts.
Having registered a direct assault, Naruto casually raised his right index finger, using the tip to lightly scratch the faint red indentation on his forehead where the sword had struck. His smile expanded into a terrifyingly joyful, bloodthirsty expression. He pulled his right arm back, compressing his muscles as his green ki flared with volcanic density.
Sensing a terminal counter-attack, Orochimaru frantically swung the Kusanagi Sword with his left hand, aiming a savage, full-power amputation slash directly at Naruto's left arm—the hand that still held his wrist in a pneumatic vice.
Snap!
A clean, violent acoustic vibration rippled through the vault. Orochimaru's left hand went completely numb from the kinetic shock, the vibrations rattling his bones, yet Naruto's left arm remained entirely unmarked, completely unbothered by the blade.
Before the Sannin could even execute a substitution sequence, Naruto's compressed right fist, heavily enveloped in a hyper-dense vortex of green Super Saiyan energy, violently detonated against Orochimaru's torso.
The kinetic shockwave of the green ki tore completely through the Sannin's physical container. Like a massive iron sledgehammer crushing a block of soft tofu, the sheer velocity of the punch instantly pulverized Orochimaru's entire upper torso into a fine, atomized red mist that splattered across the stone pillars. There was no anatomical structural integrity left; his upper body was entirely erased.
At this point, only the lower half of Orochimaru's legs—severed cleanly at the waist—remained standing on the floor, still held anchored in mid-air by Naruto's iron left hand.
In terms of pure metallurgy, the Kusanagi Sword truly earned its legendary status. Having absorbed the peripheral shockwave of a Saiyan strike, the mythical blade remained completely pristine, slipping from the meat-mist and hitting the stone floor with a echoing clang.
The sharp, metallic ring of the sword hitting the concrete reverberated through the vast, empty Root base. A suffocating silence fell over the chamber, the remaining occupants completely paralyzed, their brains entirely melting down as they tried to process the reality of what they had just witnessed.
Danzo Shimura's single eye nearly popped clean out of its socket. He stared at the twitching, severed legs of his legendary research partner, his mind entirely locking up in absolute disbelief.
He's dead? One of the legendary Sannin... snuffed out in a single punch?!
This defies all tactical logic! Danzo knew the terrifying parameters of Orochimaru's personal power better than anyone in the village; the snake was a generational apex predator, standing second only to Hiruzen Sarutobi himself. He was an absolute titan perched at the very peak of the global shinobi hierarchy. How could an existential force of that magnitude be casually vaporized like an insect by a three-year-old child?
The faceless Root operatives similarly lost their mechanical composure, their jaws dropping beneath their porcelain masks. But their tactical conditioning swiftly overrode their shock; flickering through the shadows, they formed a tight, multi-layered defensive wall directly in front of Danzo, drawing their blades to protect their supreme commander at all costs.
But before Naruto could pivot his attention to the new targets, a sudden, wet squirming sound erupted from the bleeding fracture of Orochimaru's severed waist. The flesh began to twist and dilate violently, as if a massive, foreign organism were desperately trying to dig its way out from the inside.
A microsecond later, a completely pristine, fully reformed Orochimaru violently erupted from the cross-section of the severed torso. His entire body was heavily coated in a thick, translucent, highly viscous layer of protective amniotic fluid, gasping for air as his new skin slid across the stone floor—an absolutely repulsive, visceral manifestation of the Orochimaru Style Orochi Shedding Technique.
Seeing this miraculous recovery, Danzo let out a sharp, ragged breath of relief. That had given him a massive heart attack! He had genuinely believed Orochimaru was going to be snuffed out by a single punch. Thank goodness it was just a false alarm.
Naruto, completely lost to his primitive rage, blinked in brief surprise as the upper body vanished. Shrugging, he unceremoniously tossed Orochimaru's severed right arm aside and locked his blank, terrifying gaze back onto the newly emerged Sannin. An excited, bloodthirsty grin split his face. This particular sandbag was incredibly durable; he loved it!
Having just executed the Orochi Shedding Technique, Orochimaru no longer harbored a single shred of contempt. His face was dead-serious. He scooped up the blue-glowing Kusanagi Sword from the stone floor and executed a swift leap backward, desperately trying to open a safe perimeter between himself and the child.
Once he pulled away, Orochimaru stared at Naruto with unprecedented solemnity.
The raw kinetic output of that single punch was simply catastrophic. His own physical container had been heavily structurally altered through his signature Soft Physique Modification, making it nearly impossible for standard, blunt-force impacts to leave a scratch on him; his tissues were designed to seamlessly bend and absorb the shock. Yet, Naruto's fist carried such a pure, dense, and concentrated wave of raw impact—entirely devoid of elemental attributes—that his body's kinetic redirection techniques had been completely overwhelmed.
The sheer strength this brat could manifest during a rampage was deeply alarming. He could no longer afford a single microsecond of carelessness.
Under Orochimaru's guarded, hyper-vigilant gaze, Naruto slowly raised his right hand.
The Sannin subconsciously flinched, taking a defensive half-step back. However, he quickly realized Naruto wasn't launching an immediate strike. Instead, the toddler tilted his head, bringing his right hand up to grip his own left shoulder.
What happened next shattered Orochimaru's comprehension.
A blinding, vibrant green ki flared around Naruto's shoulder blade. Under the immense pressure of that energy, the deeply anchored Cursed Seal was physically repelled and forced right out through his skin. Naruto's small right hand clamped tightly around the manifesting curse, and with a single, violent yank, he tore the entire curse—along with the fragment of Orochimaru's soul bound within it—clean out of his flesh.
Staring down at the gray, writhing piece of parasitic mass desperately squirming within his fist, Naruto bared his teeth into a savage grin and crushed it into nothingness. He raised his eyes, locking his pure, unadulterated fighting intent right back onto the Sannin.
Beads of cold sweat broke out across Orochimaru's pale forehead. What kind of evolutionary monster is this child? He actually forcefully exuded a Cursed Seal with raw physical force?
Even if Naruto had utilized a master-level Fuinjutsu sealing technique to entirely bind and suppress the mark, Orochimaru wouldn't have been this flabbergasted. But this brat had physically overpowered it. The Cursed Seal was engineered using a corrupted variant of Senjutsu (Sage Chakra)—meaning its spiritual quality was multiple times denser than standard shinobi chakra. For a foreign energy to forcefully evict a Senjutsu matrix from a host's pathway system, it meant the green energy circulating through Naruto Uzumaki's veins was of an entirely superior order of magnitude.
Just as Orochimaru's internal alarms reached a fever pitch, Naruto suddenly vanished from his field of vision.
The Sannin scanned the perimeter in pure, unadulterated horror. Where did he go?! Did he execute a space-time ninjutsu?!
Before his brain could even formulate a hypothesis, a sickening, agonizing rupture tore through his midsection. He looked down slowly, his breath catching. A tiny, blood-slicked arm had perforated his torso, protruding cleanly out from the center of his chest.
Naruto had materialized directly behind his blind spot, driving a fist straight through his spine.
Gasping for air, Orochimaru's vision began to blur. He frantically unhinged his jaw, shedding his mangled skin a second time to forcefully reset his physical container back to its pristine template.
The instant his body slid free and regained its integrity, Orochimaru abandoned all pretense of combat. Without a single fraction of a second of hesitation, he spun on his heel and fled down the corridor at maximum velocity.
He had finally recognized the absolute, impassable chasm in their power metrics. The two of them were fundamentally operating on entirely different planes of existence. The brat's velocity was sheer insanity, his kinetic force was absolute, and there was a zero percent chance of surviving a prolonged engagement.
Shinobi sitting at their legendary tier of combat did not suffer instant, back-to-back assassinations unless the disparity in their power was cataclysmic. Even during the bloodiest heights of the Third Great Shinobi War, when the Third Raikage—renowned globally as the 'Strongest Spear and Shield'—perished after battling a ten-thousand-man army for three consecutive days, even an absolute engine of destruction like that lacked the capacity to instantly vaporize Orochimaru twice.
Yet Naruto was processing him like an absolute joke. If Orochimaru couldn't swallow his pride and read the structural writing on the wall after that, he wouldn't have survived the cutthroat politics of the shinobi world for all these decades.
But he had only managed to sprint a meager three or four meters down the stone hallway before a small silhouette materialized directly in his path, completely cutting off his escape route. It was Naruto Uzumaki.
Vibrant ripples of green energy bubbled furiously across Naruto's skin. A grotesque, predatory grin stretched across his lips as he tilted his neck, locking his terrifying, pupil-less gaze onto the hyper-ventilating Sannin.
The contrast between the two entities had completely flipped. Naruto's monstrous, bloodthirsty expression remained identical to his initial state, but Orochimaru's calm, analytical, and calculated superiority had evaporated entirely, replaced by a mask of primitive, trembling panic.
Back in the alcoves, Danzo Shimura and his elite Root operatives stood entirely paralyzed in place. The sheer depth of Naruto's operational capacity had violently pulverized the elder's cognitive parameters.
Hiruzen, you absolute, incompetent fool! Danzo screamed in his thoughts.
During their private briefing, the Third Hokage had solemnly sworn to him that Naruto Uzumaki's rampaging parameters capped out precisely at the tier of a standard Elite Jonin. Now, looking at the catastrophic field, Danzo realized Hiruzen was nothing but a clueless, armchair analyst—standing safely in the back row pointing fingers and delivering highly eloquent, logical-sounding theories that ultimately turned out to be a pile of pure, unadulterated garbage!
The raw power this child was manifesting had sailed completely past the parameters of a standard Kage. Leave aside Orochimaru—if this mindless beast pivoted its attention toward the leadership, even Danzo himself was going to meet his definitive execution inside this ditch tonight!
Driven by pure survival instincts, Danzo violently gestured to his guard detail, barking, "Move! Intercept that monster immediately! Buy me whatever fraction of time is required to secure my retreat!"
The faceless Root operatives didn't hesitate for a heartbeat, immediately leaping from the architecture to reinforce Orochimaru and stall Naruto's trajectory.
But right at that microsecond, a cataclysmic, deafening explosion shattered the far end of the hall. Before Danzo could even execute a single step backward, a pale, blood-spattered object violently bounced across the stone floor, skidding to a halt right before his boots.
Danzo looked down. It was the severed, deathly pale head of Orochimaru—his body once again entirely atomized into red foam, leaving nothing behind but his skull.
Danzo involuntarily shivered, a cold, systemic tremor rattling his ancient bones. He slowly, rigidly lifted his chin.
Bathed in a blinding, crackling aura of green ki, Naruto was floating directly in front of his face. The child was staring down at him with the exact same hollow, predatory white eyes that had just systematically dismantled a legendary Sannin.
Danzo panicked, screaming at the vanguard operatives behind him, "What the hell are you useless garbage standing around for?! Look ahead of you—Naruto Uzumaki is already standing right here!"
Only then did the elite Root operatives manage to snap their heads around, their brains entirely melting down as they tried to parse the timeline. Naruto's displacement velocity defied the laws of physics. To cross hundreds of meters of stone corridor, vaporize a legendary Sannin, bypass their defensive perimeter, and corner their supreme commander had occurred in a literal blink of an eye. Against a speed parameter that absolute, how could a normal human network hope to react?