She stood near the altar, trembling, but she didn't run.
Her breath hitched as Kimimaro turned toward her, bone armor hissing softly with each step.
He no longer resembled a man at all to her, but some predatory skeleton-thing torn from a nightmare.
Her Byakugan flickered open on instinct, but her chakra was frayed, unsteady, the way a candle flickers before wind blows it out.
"Y-you… who… are you…?" she whispered, voice faint, fear-struck but polite, as Hyūga children were raised to be even in terror.
Kimimaro stepped close enough to kneel.
"You don't need to know," he said quietly. "Your clan failed to protect what it treasures most. I'm simply correcting their mistake."
Her eyes widened, breath catching, but before she could scream or activate any technique, his hand rose, sealing array already formed at his fingertips.
"This won't take long."
A flash of white light.
Her Byakugan vanished into the seal.
Hinata gasped, dropping to her knees as tears spilled from her now colorless sockets.
She wasn't bleeding, Kimimaro inadvertently prevented that with perfect medical and sealing precision, but the loss left her trembling, disoriented, hands pressed to her face.
Around her, the other spoiled main-branch youths cried out.
"Lady Hinata!"
"Monster! Someone stop him!"
"How can a human— do that—?!"
Kimimaro ignored them.
He raised the scroll, unrolled the topmost compartment, and selected her pair.
He pressed the seal marks to his own eyes.
For a moment, the room went silent.
Then the chakra surged.
The fuinjutsu pattern spread like ink across his face, then retreated inward.
It wasn't surgery in any conventional sense.
He was sealing a new pair of eyes directly into his own and letting the chakra systems merge.
A process he had already perfected using Emi's original eyes as practice.
So, his original emerald gaze remained, and the Byakugan was sitting behind it until activated.
Perfect integration.
No rejection.
He blinked once.
The world lit up.
Every chakra coil.
Every vein.
Every seal woven into the chamber.
He exhaled calmly.
"Good. Very pure,"
"Very powerful vision indeed."
But before he could move to finish sealing the rest, a roar ripped through the compound.
A wave of killing intent slammed through the floors hard enough to warp the air.
A heartbeat later, Hiashi Hyūga arrived.
He finally caught up to what was happening there somehow.
Not walking.
Not running.
ERUPTING through the far wall in a burst of dust and shattered beams.
His chakra was enormous, ancient, eruptive, the kind of dormant Hyūga authority that had never surfaced in the original timeline.
His Byakugan blazed white-hot, veins bulging, aura twisting with something far older than polite clan kata.
And when he saw the state of the chamber—
His daughter kneeling blind.
His elites maimed.
Eyes sealed away into a stranger's scroll.
—his face contorted into something feral.
"You…" Hiashi's voice cracked like a whip.
"You dare violate the Hyūga under our own roof…?"
Chakra spiraled around his arms, dense enough to warp the air.
"I will erase you."
Kimimaro looked at him calmly.
The newly sealed Byakugan unfurled over his emerald irises completely, pale-white light rippling out in a soft pulse, and the entire chamber bloomed into a flawless crystalline map under his gaze.
And he smiled.
His tone softened with false sympathy.
"Clans that cling too tightly to their bloodline always meet the same fate. Someone stronger takes it."
He lifted the scroll between them as he glanced at the ravaged chamber.
"And today, that someone happens to be me."
Hiashi's answer came first as silence.
A silence so sharp it felt like the whole chamber inhaled with him.
He didn't look at Kimimaro immediately.
He looked at Hinata.
At the trembling girl on her knees, her empty sockets wet with tears, she didn't understand how to stop.
He knelt for exactly one heartbeat, touching her shoulder.
"Hinata," he said, voice low, taut, "I am here."
Then he stood.
And everything in him turned predatory.
His gaze swept the room once, taking in the maimed elites, the fallen side-branch, the scattered blood, the foreign sealing marks still hanging in the air like ghosts.
Only then did his fury truly ignite.
"Hyūga blood," he whispered, "is not a trophy for thieves."
His chakra surged again.
Not the usual clean, refined Hyūga flow.
Not even the brutal intensity of a clan head in battle.
This was different.
A white radiance roared around him, burning through the chamber like a flare.
Not gentle. Not elegant. Something primordial.
Kimimaro's eyes narrowed.
"White chakra..."
"A chakra mode of sorts, perhaps…?" he thought.
He didn't get long to analyze it.
Hiashi moved.
No hand sign. No stance. No warning.
Just impact.
A deafening explosion of strange chakra force blasted outward, a pressure wave that didn't behave like air, but something closer to spatial compression, a gravity-like crush that collapsed the chamber outward.
Kimimaro's body shot upward as if kicked by a giant.
His teeth clicked together from the force.
He had prepared for a counterattack.
He had not prepared for that.
Even as he flew back just now, he instinctively formed his hardest defensive structure, layers of bone erupting around him in a dome-like exoshell of interlocked spines and plates.
He named it as it formed.
Dance of the Iron Canopy.
His strongest instantaneous bone shield, forged with both Shikotsumyaku mastery and White Bastion reinforcement.
It lasted exactly a few seconds.
Hiashi's white-chakra shockwave struck it like a divine hammer.
The Iron Canopy cracked.
The White Bastion Frame beneath it splintered.
Kimimaro was hurled across the Hyūga compound, blasted through a roof, flung over the dividing wall, and sent crashing into the ruined Uchiha estate nearby, skidding horizontally toward the village center before the rubble finally stopped him.
Stone shattered.
Dust geysered.
Then silence.
Kimimaro stood amid the debris, body already knitting itself back together, bone armour plates reforming, his breath steadying.
He wiped blood from the corner of his mouth with a thumb.
"…Interesting," he murmured.
Then his Byakugan flared open again.