It had been a few months since they "violated" Akane together, forcibly dragging her soul to the brink of Mangekyō evolution.
Life on Shūmoku Island had settled into its usual rhythm again ever since.
Today, Kimimaro was outside in the open sparring grounds, the wide clearing carved from the forest at the heart of their hidden base.
He and Saya were already mid-exchange, bone blade clashing against the curve of her three-headed Jashinist scythe.
Reika, Akane, and Emi watched from a distance, three silhouettes on a fallen tree trunk, all enjoying a rare pocket of free time.
Kimimaro wielded the Dance of the Camellia with the casual precision of someone who could end the match whenever he felt bored enough
He deliberately kept the bone's density low; his highest compression now surpassed diamond, and using it here would slice her scythe apart like wet paper.
Saya was the only one annoyed by that restraint.
She came at him again, laughing under her breath as the scythe whistled past his cheek before he slipped out of reach, the blade carving a shallow arc in the dirt.
Her appearance struck the eye before anything else.
Her robe, blood-red, split high along one thigh, caught the wind as she moved, flashing the mesh underlayer beneath.
The black sash drew tight around her waist, and a long black mantle draped off her shoulders, fluttering behind her as a shadow dragged along by the sun.
And her hair… that pale blonde-white of the Chinoike lineage, glowing with a soft gold tint under daylight.
When she turned sharply, it flashed almost luminescent, as though the light belonged to her alone.
Her eyes were deep navy blue now, focused, intoxicated by the thrill of combat.
But with every surge of emotion, crimson ripples threatened to spill through them, the Ketsuryūgan wanting to bloom.
Saya kept it restrained, mostly, letting it ripple instead of igniting.
"Kimimaro," she purred mid-swing, "you're slow today."
"You've said that every day," he replied, stepping inside her guard and tapping her throat with his bone blade's blunt edge, "yet you still can't land a strike."
The scythe fell slightly, and she exhaled a tremor, not frustration, but delight.
Her face had grown sharper over the years, a beauty edged with tension, as if something inside her was always whispering, always hungry.
It showed in the faint tightening near her eyes, the tilt of her smile, the posture too poised to hide the mania beneath.
Saya was elegance strapped over madness, refinement acting as a leash on a beast always ready to slip free.
Kimimaro had forged that restraint into something useful.
And she adored him for it.
The way she moved around him now, the way she bowed her head at the slightest correction, loyalty and desire braided together, all of it was the natural evolution of a girl raised among corpses, rituals, and despair.
She had always loved blood because it proved she existed.
Now she loved him because he made that existence mean something.
Another swing.
He blocked it without looking, sliding the bone along the scythe's handle, hooking her off balance.
She stumbled forward, breath caught, hair falling across her face, and that fleeting, unguarded expression flashed through her eyes.
Worship.
Challenge.
Hunger.
Reika watched with faint neutrality.
Akane watched with thinly veiled annoyance.
Emi was already taking mental notes about Saya's footwork.
Saya only smiled, recovering her stance, eyes darkening like ink swallowing light.
"Again," she whispered.
Kimimaro raised his blade.
Despite being a few years younger, in this timeline, his body had grown under all the right conditions, perfect nutrition, relentless training, and a Sage-Body foundation, enough to surpass even Saya's naturally athletic physique.
Meanwhile, Saya lunged again, a sweeping horizontal arc meant to bait his counter.
Kimimaro caught it with the flat of his bone blade and let the force slide harmlessly past him.
She clicked her tongue, annoyed and delighted.
Then his expression changed.
Just slightly, a narrowing of the eyes, a stillness in the shoulders, but enough that Saya froze mid-step.
From the tree trunk, Reika straightened.
Emi's Byakugan flickered open.
Akane's fingers hovered near her kunai pouch.
Kimimaro didn't even look at Saya anymore.
His gaze drifted past the treeline, toward the distant shore.
"…Impossible," he murmured.
Reika was beside him an instant later. "What is it?"
Kimimaro's voice remained quiet, even, but underneath it was something none of them had heard before — pressure.
"My sensory network didn't detect him. Not on the water. Not when he crossed the reefs. Not until he was already close enough to touch the outer seals."
Saya frowned, gripping her scythe.
"No one avoids your Uzumaki-inspired special clones. No one."
"Exactly," Kimimaro said.
A breeze cut across the clearing, brushing the grass flat for a heartbeat.
Emi swallowed. "So… who could slip past all that?"
Kimimaro finally turned to them, his face calm but sharp as a blade.
"A monster. One of the strongest this world has produced."
The air itself seemed to tighten.
Akane felt something cold roll down her spine. "Be specific."
Kimimaro's answer was almost too soft.
"Orochimaru. The Sannin. The only one I could think of right now."
Their reactions came in a staggered wave.
Reika's breath stopped for a second, pupils constricting.
Emi's chakra thread snapped involuntarily, her Byakugan flickering.
Akane's hand trembled, not from fear, but desire to fight.
Saya's grin evaporated, replaced with something darker, more feral.
Kimimaro continued, voice steady, controlled.
"He is on the island. Rapidly moving inland in the form of a strange but very fast snake. In our direction."
"How?" Saya hissed again.
"He somehow suppressed himself completely, until it was too late..." Kimimaro answered.
Reika stepped closer to him. "Can we… fight him?"
Kimimaro didn't answer immediately.
Instead, he looked at each of them — Saya's hunger, Emi's alert fear, Reika's icy resolve, Akane's rage — and then toward the shadows between the trees.
"He'll reach us within minutes."
Saya lifted her scythe, smile returning but smaller, stretched thin.
Kimimaro nodded once.
"Prepare yourselves."
Kimimaro had always known this day could come, especially recently.
He had even prepared for it, planned for it, told himself he was ready.
But when it finally arrived, even he felt his composure slip for a moment.
He had never sensed a chakra like this before.
So vast and monstrous at the same time.
Only now did he truly understand what a higher-Kage level shinobi was, a pressure that bent the world just by existing.
So, he quickly snapped into motion, already sending several earth-made clones scattering through the tunnels.
Their orders were simple.
Warn everyone.
Rally everyone.
Within moments, hundreds of cultists of varying strength, currently in this main hideout, would converge there
Even the weakest mattered now.
Every body, every blade, every scrap of chakra, all of it was necessary when something like that was approaching.
Eventually, a faint rustle finally sounded from the forest.
A flicker of chakra.
A presence too smooth, too controlled, too venomous, up close like that, to belong to anyone else. Orochimaru had arrived.
The clearing fell silent.
And the five of them stood together for the first time against a single, impossible opponent.
He stepped out from between the trees like a shadow peeling off the world itself, the grass barely rustling beneath his sandals.
Five relatively young figures.
Too young.
Too composed.
Too wrong for their ages.
His tongue clicked softly against the roof of his mouth.
"Well now," he murmured, eyes gleaming.
"What curious little treasures you've all turned out to be."
His pupils thinned as his sensory field swept over them in a single, elegant ripple.
The girl with midnight hair, posture too proud even while bracing herself, chakra coiled with that familiar, volatile sharpness.
Uchiha.
There was no mistaking it.
Perhaps the most densely charged three-tomoe aura he had ever tasted, compressed so tightly it felt one heartbeat away from breaking into something far darker. Perfect for him.
It seemingly had more than enough quality, not much different from Itachi.
The bright-eyed one beside her, chakra flowing in perfect, unbroken grids beneath the skin.
Hyūga, yet altered, something impossibly clean in the pathways, as if someone had clawed out the impurities the Main Branch always left behind.
Then the blonde-white one…
His breath almost paused.
That bloodline.
That tint in her chakra.
A missing branch in some equation he'd never personally dissected.
"Fascinating," he murmured, almost to himself.
And the last girl — the plum-haired one with steady eyes and a cold aura running deep.
Her chakra was not pure Yuki, but close enough to taste.
A diluted relic of Uzushio ran faintly inside her, too.
A little menagerie of impossibilities.
But his gaze finally stopped on Kimimaro.
Calm.
Bone blade still in hand.
Chakra dense, coiled, mature in ways his age had no right to show.
Orochimaru's smile widened by a fraction.
"And you," he said, voice dropping into a purr. "You're the most interesting of all. A rightful leader of such an exciting group... From a bloodline that should have died in the depths of Kirigakure's prisons not too long ago… yet here you stand, leading this little congregation."
He inhaled, slow and appreciative, as if savoring the scent of a ripe specimen.
"A Kaguya… and yet something far beyond that brittle clan. How exquisitely unnatural."
His eyes flicked once more between them — Uchiha, Hyūga, Chinoike, Yuki-Uzumaki hybrid, and the impossible Kaguya at their center.
A quartet of bloodlines orbiting a core.
He had expected the cult's leaders to be eccentric at best, interesting at most… but this — this was a jackpot far beyond even his most optimistic expectations.
The only reason he could identify so much in a single breath, simply by stepping close, was because a shinobi of his caliber naturally possessed sensory abilities on a world-class level as well. Not quite the instinctive depth of the best Uzumaki or Senju sensors, perhaps, but still leagues beyond anything an ordinary sensor-nin could ever reach.
And the second reason was simpler.
Orochimaru had spent years already studying every powerful and noteworthy bloodline in existence.
The ones he could get specimens of, he dissected.
The ones he couldn't obtain firsthand, he dissected through deduction instead, tracing them across history, battlefield records, chakra signatures, and half-forgotten clan legends.
He built entire mental frameworks of bloodline logic long before ever meeting the real thing.
Because in his mind, any of it might one day prove useful as a potential vessel, after all.
Every clan, every mutation, every anomaly, all were candidates waiting to be harvested.
So even here, even now, even without a single dojutsu activated before him, he could still place each of them with unnerving accuracy.
So, his smile sharpened.
"What a delightful welcome party… for someone merely passing through."
Kimimaro didn't move.
The girls behind him tensed, chakra rising.
Orochimaru let out a soft laugh.
"My, my. Such hostility from children."
He tilted his head, serpentine and amused.
"No need to fret. I only came to introduce myself…"
A pause.
A grin that cut like a scalpel.
"…and to see which of you survives long enough to entertain me and be useful later."