Kimimaro didn't rush her.
He only lifted a hand, a precise signal.
"Keep the girl contained. And know this, the bulk of this sacrifice will go to you. The ones who lived will grow stronger."
He said it because he had to.
They were injured, bloodied, and half their comrades already lay dead.
But the promise struck deep.
One cultist raised a fist, shouting, "All for Jashin's blessing!"
Another barked, voice raw, "We live, so we take more!"
A ragged chorus followed, half-laugh, half-scream, as battered men and women found their spark again.
Some stumbled toward Emi, weapons in hand, surrounding her with renewed zeal.
Soon, all of the remaining survivors, around half of the initial forty, limped into position, forming a ragged circle around Emi.
Their cloaks were shredded and burnt, faces streaked with blood, but the gleam in their eyes said they were still eager to kill.
Emi's stomach knotted. 'So that's it. They're obviously not letting me walk away. I'm not just a witness, I'm another piece of loot to them.'
Her Byakugan caught every twitch, every smirk, every fanatic's grip on their blades.
She could dodge; she was in a better state than them, yes, but twenty bodies closing in meant she'd be drowned in seconds, even without their strange ritual technique, and then even the three other 'monsters' could also come.
A bitter laugh threatened to slip out.
'Figures. I wanted to leave Konoha's cage, and instead I stumbled into a madhouse even worse.' Her lips pressed thin, pale eyes flicking from Kimimaro to the sealing ritual.
The now unmasked Kumo shinobi was being prepared for storage in some cursed scroll.
And she was next, not to be killed outright, but taken, dragged wherever this nightmare cult called home.
Fear prickled her skin, but she held herself steady, breathing sharp through her nose. 'This wasn't the plan. But if I panic now, I really will end up as nothing more than another puppet.'
Kimimaro, meanwhile, remained still, seated back on his heels as his chakra crawled back into his coils.
He didn't even look at her for long.
She was simply waiting for her turn in his mind.
Kimimaro's eyes lingered on both, Saya with burns striping her arms, Reika pale and drained, frost at the edges of her cloak scorched black.
Yet even now, their chakra signatures were crawling back up.
He spoke first, voice low. "You're recovering already."
Saya grinned through her split lip.
"Tch. Don't act surprised. You think I'd still be on my feet if it wasn't for that little trick old Uzumaki ghost cooked up?"
She tapped her ribs where the seal burned faintly beneath her skin.
"Feels like cheating, honestly. Hurts like hell, though."
Reika brushed ice dust from her fingers, her tone calm as ever.
"Battery seals. They store chakra, drip it back when you're depleted. Cost is efficiency, but in prolonged battles… it changes everything."
Her pale eyes flicked toward Kimimaro.
"It's the only reason we lasted this long."
Kimimaro gave a faint nod, almost a smile.
"Exactly why I chose to risk this fight in the first place."
Reika's lips curved in the barest ghost of agreement.
Saya laughed hoarsely, shaking her head. "Good to know."
Kimimaro's gaze returned to the sealed jonin.
"Preparation is what wins battles. Not miracles."
'Or else how did we manage to spam that many techniques and stay upright for so long?', Kimimaro thought.
Against an elite jōnin in his prime, it was obvious why Gorō could hurl one devastating jutsu after another; that was his natural station, even if he didn't have a particular bloodline.
But even with their bloodlines, neither he nor Reika truly felt they could meet him evenly at their current age and level.
So, what shifted the balance were the seals.
Ashina's design was a game-changer.
Where the rich heirs of Konoha relied on soldier pills to give their genin and chūnin an edge, these fuinjutsu marks were their equivalent for jōnin.
A quiet advantage, hidden under the skin.
They weren't infinite, of course.
Beyond the scale of an ordinary jōnin-level, the seals wouldn't hold.
They would slowly become just a drop of rain for the stronger shinobi than that.
But here, they had been decisive.
You wore them during peace, fed them over time, and when battle came, you cracked them open like a hidden reservoir.
Kimimaro drew a slow breath, letting the ache in his bones settle.
His first true battle in this world, and already he had walked into it far more confidently than he should have.
'I actually had no idea what an Elite Jōnin really represented…'
He had gambled on fragments, memories from the original series, scraps of knowledge from Ashina, his own chakra sensing, and calculations.
Numbers, patterns, theories.
But theory was nothing compared to the reality of standing against one.
Only now did he fully understand the gap.
They hadn't won through raw strength.
They had survived because they carried weapons and methods this man had never faced: Saya's blood-binding curse, Reika's ice, the cultists' ritual, and the seals Ashina had crafted into their skin.
Together, those oddities slowed him, drained him, and forced him into exhaustion.
That was the real key.
The man burned himself out.
His speed and lightning had ripped them open more than once, but his reserves bled faster than theirs.
His mind and body wore down.
After all, just the Lightning Body Flicker alone obviously wasn't supposed to be used constantly.
Not to mention that the same man had also already burned a bit of chakra beforehand, when wiping out the Konoha team, negligible though it was, and spent more again to arrive here so quickly, too quickly for them to react before it was too late.
Meanwhile, Reika had nearly collapsed herself from those powerful few around the B-rank Ice Release jutsu.
Kimimaro, too, with his endless layering of C-rank earth and water tricks.
And yet, she barely endured it just like him.
She was part Uzumaki, after all; her stamina just refused to die.
Most of those Ice Release jutsu she had flung so relentlessly, and even some she hadn't dared or found opportunity to use yet, were born from their nights of joint study.
A blend of her clan's fragments and the compass of her own will, sharpened with a bit of his creative input.
What amazed Kimimaro was also Saya's endurance shown during this battle.
Out of all of them, she had been the one he was most worried about.
Reika had kept her distance; her greatest threat was chakra exhaustion, something she managed carefully with pacing.
But Saya had thrown herself in again and again, always closest to the man, taking the brunt of his lightning's recoil head-on.
And yet, she had endured.
She gritted her teeth, took the burns, and forced herself forward anyway.
Now, standing alive after such an advanced battle, she would never be the same.
She was sharper, honed by fire.
Kimimaro realized then that her endurance was greater than his own.
It wasn't just her will; it was her body.
Most of the sacrificial essence they had gathered so far had gone into her, and it showed.
The technique worked differently on her blood than on anyone else's.
On the Chinoike body, the very bloodline that had birthed such jutsu, it fit like a key in a lock.
She wasn't immortal like Hidan, not even close, but she'd become something altogether different.
Her blood behaved in ways that defied reason.
It didn't merely clot; it drank the wounds, pulling the damage inward and stitching her back together in motions that looked wrong even to Kimimaro.
None of them had expected this.
In the chaos of battle, it almost seemed as if her veins themselves were healing her, swallowing pain and feeding strength back into her body.
And with every future essence she claimed, she would only become even more enduring.
Kimimaro's gaze moved between them, strangely a bit softer than ever before, lingering on the burns across Saya's arms, the faint pallor to Reika's face.
His voice came low, deliberate.
"You both held. Better than I expected."
Saya blinked, then barked out a laugh that cracked into a grin.
"That's it? After all that? I get half-cooked, nearly fried alive, and the bone prince gives me better than expected?"
She flexed her scorched hand, blood already slowly snaking through the veins beneath the skin to stitch it tighter. "Hah. I'll take it."
Reika tilted her head slightly, calm as ever, her eyes unreadable. "Coming from him, that's a compliment. He doesn't waste words."
Her voice cooled again, a subtle edge of pride beneath the indifference. "And he's not wrong. We stood against someone most shinobi would never even see and lived. That matters."
Saya smirked wider, licking a bead of blood off her lip. "Matters? It tastes better than matters. I want more of it. Next time, I'll carve deeper."
Kimimaro allowed himself a thin breath, not quite a smile, but close. "Next time," he said quietly, "we won't walk in half blind."
As for the cultists, they had brought forty in total, the entire current Inner roster.
Stronger than common rabble, hardier thanks to their twisted "immortality" tricks, but still only flesh and bone in the end.
Twenty lay dead now, half their number gone.
Kimimaro didn't flinch.
He didn't mourn.
He simply ran the math.
With the essence brought thanks to those twenty corpses, the survivors would grow stronger, perhaps even pushing into the level of high genin.
And with what remained, they could shape fifty more recruits into tools of similar previous low to mid-genin grade.
So, he actually didn't lose anything here, but even 'profited'.
That was with Saya taking her share into the bargain.
Cruel? Perhaps.
But to him, they were expendable.
Always had been.
Once, he had been expendable too, Orochimaru's sharpened knife, useful only until the day his body broke.
That lesson had cured him of sympathy.
If he were to climb higher, to seize what ambition demanded, then people could only ever be steps.
Tools. Pawns.
And pawns, by their nature, were meant to break.
That didn't mean Kimimaro intended to throw them all away.
Not foolishly, not in numbers that would cripple his foundation.
The strength of that elite jōnin had caught even him by surprise; this particular battle had been an exception, not a model to repeat.
The fodder weren't only useful as sacrifices.
They had another purpose; they had become his sealing tags factory.
Every one of them was drilled into basic fuinjutsu.
Not artistry, not theory, just enough to follow instructions.
Reika designed the patterns, Kimimaro and Ashina refined the methods, and the cultists assembled them.
Kimimaro had long understood what every great builder knows: a hundred hands move faster than one.
Even if those hands were clumsy, even if the minds behind them didn't grasp the greater design, they could still hammer out results under strict direction.
So he pushed them with brutality, punished mistakes without hesitation, and forced their labor into rhythm.
They weren't engineers; they didn't need to be.
A factory worker doesn't need to understand how a weapon works to tighten its bolts.
And under his command, they churned out results.
All those suppression seals they wore, for example, every last one, had been etched by their own hands.
Crude, imperfect, but functional.
And not just those.
Much of what had allowed this operation to even take shape today, long before they stepped into the clearing, had been born from that same endless, grinding work.
At last, Ashina's voice returned, heavy as stone after long silence.
He had watched everything, withholding judgment until the fight was done.
"You did well," the old soul said, "but don't mistake survival for mastery. You risked too much. If not for the seals I gave you, you would be a corpse by now."
Kimimaro's lips tugged into a thin grin.
"Without those seals, I wouldn't have bothered to come."
Ashina let out a low breath that might have been a chuckle, though it carried no warmth.
"Even so. Lately, you've carried yourself too confidently, like a man drunk on his own power."
"That is not a strength. That is blindness. Take this fight as a lesson; you needed it."
"You needed to bleed against something real to remember the truth."
Kimimaro's eyes lowered slightly, not in shame but in acknowledgment. He nodded once.
"I understand. For all my planning, I misjudged the scale. The world is not numbers on a page. It is infinite variables, too many for one mind to calculate. This battle reminded me of that. It humbled me. And it gave me more to refine."
Ashina's tone eased, though his words still cut. "Good. Then consider this the first time you've stepped into the skin of a true shinobi. Until now, you were only preparing."
Kimimaro's grin lingered, sharper now.
He had taken the loss without dying and taken the lesson without breaking.
That, to him, was progress, another step on the staircase.