But Kimimaro didn't fear that possibility.
If anything, he accepted it as the price for what he had gained.
A fair trade.
He still could barely believe the luck, or rather, the opportunity he had forced into reality.
Of all things, he had secured what was essentially the strongest variant among them.
And entirely by accident.
He had suspected something would be watching Konoha from below.
That was why his senses had been sharpened the moment they approached its borders.
He understood perfectly well why a creature like this would linger underground, observing.
But to catch this one, of all possibilities…
That, even he hadn't expected.
After all, while most fans in his past life had long forgotten, Kimimaro never did.
Out of every White Zetsu variant ever revealed, this one, the so-called "Guruguru" or "Spiral Zetsu", the true "Tobi," had shown the greatest feats.
The same creature that once wrapped around Obito during Rin's death.
The same creature with the most history bound to him.
The same creature Obito likely used as the inspiration for his later name and mask.
And canonically, during the Fourth War, Guruguru had displayed absurd capabilities.
His genetic makeup was almost indistinguishable from Hashirama's own, allowing him access to Wood Release, limited, yes, but still overwhelmingly powerful for a Zetsu or anyone else besides Hashirama, really.
Borrowing Yamato's chakra and physiology even further, he fought entire divisions at that time.
He conjured a massive wooden avatar.
He used all five elemental transformations at once.
And those thousand-armed strikes were devastating enough to overwhelm several Kage simultaneously.
He was, without question, the strongest Zetsu ever shown.
Kimimaro had always wondered why this particular specimen had never appeared earlier in the timeline before that final war.
Why he never stood beside Obito openly the way other Zetsu did.
Now it made sense.
Obito must have stationed him here semi-permanently at least.
A perfect spy, buried deep beneath Konoha, far enough that even the most refined sensory types never once detected him, despite years of heavy shinobi traffic and countless powerful visitors.
His sensing range, his subterranean mobility, his ability to remain undetected… it was the ideal choice.
And Obito had every reason to keep such a sentinel here.
Konoha held the Nine-Tails, the final and most troublesome piece of the sealing sequence.
It was also the strongest and most politically dominant of the hidden villages.
Watching it constantly with the best Zetsu available was nothing but logical.
Assuming Obito inherited Madara's entire global Zetsu network, positioning its sharpest spearhead beneath Konoha was practically guaranteed.
This also explained why Guruguru never appeared alongside Obito afterward.
He had been stationed here the entire time.
Now it had perhaps crept even closer to better monitor the sudden chaos in Konoha, a small adjustment that, ironically, only made it easier for Kimimaro to pick it up this time.
Another mystery solved.
Kimimaro still found it unreal that everything had aligned so perfectly for him.
He'd taken the rarest, strongest Zetsu alive, by pure coincidence, no less.
Sometimes, fate truly did kneel.
After all, Kimimaro understood that the White Zetsu were never uniform creatures.
They all originated from ancient humans caught in Kaguya's first Infinite Tsukuyomi, but not every victim transformed the same way.
Some emerged weak, barely more than hollow drones.
Others mutated far more deeply, depending on how their bodies interacted with the God Tree that fed on them. A few absorbed its essence more fully and adapted it into far stronger forms.
The same uneven evolution applied later, when Madara fused Hashirama's stolen flesh into the Gedo Husk and unknowingly infused those surviving Tsukuyomi bodies still tethered inside it.
They all accepted the Senju cells well enough, but each reacted differently to that unnatural mixture. Their mutations were a spectrum, not a single template.
Madara mistook this for his own genius, believing he had created them from nothing through that crude fusion of the Gedo statue's leftover vitality and Hashirama's cells, rather than realizing he was tampering with remnants of Kaguya's first victims.
Obito inherited this White Zetsu contingent from Madara, but at that time, it numbered only in the hundreds, maybe the low thousands at best, in Kimimaro's impression.
Their army wasn't originally that massive. The supposed figure of one hundred thousand only appeared much later, after Obito foolishly declared war on the entire world and needed an instant army to match the Five Great Villages.
Once Kabuto's sudden Edo Tensei breakthrough solved the problem of elite combat power, Obito no longer needed quality.
He needed quantity. So he poured everything into mass-producing White Zetsu clones as expendable soldiers, printing them in bulk as battlefield fodder.
As for Obito, Kimimaro no longer felt the slightest fear toward him the way he might have in the past.
In truth, it was almost fortunate that Akatsuki had never located him too early, the way Orochimaru once had.
The White Zetsu network was powerful, but it clearly wasn't omnidirectional.
It focused on the major powers, the great villages, the jinchūriki, and the tailed beasts. Their entire long-term strategy revolved around those targets.
After all, didn't they also fail to capture Orochimaru after his defection?
A small, deliberately backward cult in Hot Water, presenting itself as nothing more than a scattering of fanatics, was beneath their notice.
Kimimaro had made sure of that for years.
With Ashina's expertise, their hideouts were also wrapped in sealing suppressions so dense and layered that even a perfect sensor would have had trouble noticing more than a faint echo. And an echo told you nothing.
Even if a White Zetsu patrol had wandered close, what would they see?
A trivial blip in a land with no strategic value. Nothing worth reporting.
If they had known where to look, if they had ever bothered to camp an army of clones around Hot Water or Shumoku, they might have sensed something.
But that was the beauty of it. Nothing about Kimimaro's operations was predictable enough for them to track. Not his movements, not his chakra signature, not even the layout of his cult. It was too irregular, too small, too… uninteresting.
Orochimaru found them only because he was a neighbor, a hunter by nature, and because he dominated the same high-grade black-market channels for equipment and rare materials. Their worlds brushed together by coincidence, not by surveillance.
Akatsuki never had that angle.
Yet now, the moment he seized that creature, he had almost certainly exposed himself to Akatsuki as well.
But Kimimaro didn't panic.
Not even a tremor of concern.
He just adjusted his grip on the sealed scroll and kept moving, as if he'd merely picked up a tool he'd been planning to acquire for years.
Previously, he had never been able to attempt something like this.
He simply wasn't strong enough, nor fast enough, nor concealed enough to approach Konoha without being detected, let alone snatch that creature before it slipped away.
If it had even been here in the first place.
But now everything aligned almost absurdly in his favor.
He stood at the peak of the Kage spectrum, perhaps even beyond it.
His sensory range was among the highest in the world, refined to a razor point.
Konoha was drowning in chaos.
And the White Zetsu had crept closer than ever, trying to get the perfect vantage.
All the conditions that once made this impossible… lined up flawlessly.
Ashina's voice stirred from the pendant the moment Kimimaro started moving back toward the surface, curious and faintly uneasy.
"What was that thing," the old Uzumaki asked, "that hollow-bodied creature? I have never seen anything like it."
Kimimaro's lips curved, a sharp, satisfied grin cutting across his face as he leapt upward through the earth.
"Your next body," he answered in amusement.
There was a beat of stunned silence.
"…Excuse me?" Ashina said flatly, genuine offense and disbelief tangled together. "You dragged me through decades of death and isolation, only to present that husk as a candidate? I may be a soul now, but even I have standards."
Kimimaro let out a low breath that almost counted as laughter.
Ashina being flustered, was not something he could've imagined.
"Calm down. I'm not turning you into that," he said. "I'll further refine the process properly. You'll look exactly as you did in your prime. The vessel will take your imprint almost entirely. We're only using its structure as the canvas to anchor your return, nothing more."
Ashina grumbled something under his breath, but Kimimaro continued before the ghost could regain the upper hand.
"That thing," he said, "is perhaps the only creature in the world that can naturally bear the weight of your soul and bloodline. It already houses the proven structure necessary to carry the Uzumaki lineage, and more importantly, it contains Hashirama Senju cells. Perfectly stabilized ones."
Ashina's irritation softened into wary intrigue.
"And it's like a living, breathing intermediary. A perfect vessel waiting to be rewritten. You just can't feel its full potential while you're stuck in a soul state."
Ashina went quiet again, the kind of silence that meant his mind was racing.
Kimimaro continued upward, earth breaking around his armored frame as he neared the surface.
"The only reason I caught it so easily, for example," he added, "was that it panicked. It wasn't weak. Just startled. Not to mention that its true value is in its structure, not its power level."
"…Hmph," Ashina finally muttered. "You're asking me to trust that I won't end up looking like a carved root vegetable."
"You won't," Kimimaro said simply. "I want a partner, not a mascot."
Ashina snorted at that, unwilling to admit that the line pleased him.
By the time Kimimaro emerged from the soil near the forest edge, the roar of chaos from Konoha's direction shook the air again: explosions, screaming, and the sound of giant serpents still collapsing structures.
Ashina's tone shifted, sharpened with hungry curiosity.
"So this is what the village looks like when it is finally forced to stop pretending to be beyond everything," he said.
"How delightful. Hurry. I want a better view."
Kimimaro moved, calm and precise, cloak settling behind him as he returned to his girls and toward the burning leaf village.
"Don't worry," he murmured to Ashina, eyes narrowing with satisfaction.
"You'll see everything."