Orochimaru turned back to Might Guy, tongue flicking briefly across his lips as he reassessed.
Annoying.
He wasn't certain he could alone finish him quickly anymore.
Earlier, he had already burned through a substantial portion of his reserves, holding the field alone, flooding the stadium with snakes, countering waves of Konoha shinobi, reshaping his body again and again to avoid being pinned.
Guy, blazing in the Seventh Gate, was relentless.
The Eight Branches Technique remained untouched.
Not because he couldn't use it.
Because he wouldn't.
That was insurance.
A final buffer, meant for one moment only, if Guy crossed the line and opened the Eighth Gate.
Something large enough, obscene enough, to buy Orochimaru space to shed a body, escape, survive.
Until then, he danced.
Guy pressed him with pure momentum, fists cracking air, Hirudora's aftershock still lingering in the ruined ground.
Orochimaru slipped, stretched, shed skin, reformed, his sword darting out at odd angles, snakes erupting from impossible joints to force half-steps and mistimed blows.
Then Kakashi tried his luck.
Twice.
Once from the blind side with a feint and a Lightning Cutter threaded through debris.
Once with coordinated pressure, clones, wire, seals, all timed to create a single opening for Guy.
Orochimaru clicked his tongue.
"Enough."
He shifted one hand, and the Sound Four moved without hesitation.
Kabuto followed a heartbeat later.
Kakashi found himself buried under layered pressure almost instantly. Tayuya's genjutsu gnawed at his timing, Jirobo's brute force collapsed cover, Kidomaru's threads restricted movement, Sakon and Ukon hunted openings inside his guard.
Kabuto stayed just out of reach, scalpels flashing, chakra precise and cruel.
Kakashi grimaced.
This wasn't a skirmish anymore.
It was an execution being scheduled.
Elsewhere, Saya laughed breathlessly as she fought the monk and the samurai at once.
Her scythe traced eager arcs, blood lifting in disciplined patterns, nets snapping shut the instant either of them overcommitted.
Yang Seal burned along her chest, feeding wider constructs, denser formations, crimson barriers that caught natural-energy-laced strikes just long enough for her to slip aside.
The monk met her head-on.
Every fist strike carried compressed natural energy, pulses meant to collapse organs and shatter bones.
Saya let them graze, skin splitting, blood bursting outward and hardening midair into intercepting blades and shields.
The samurai was quieter.
His blade sang once, twice, crescents of natural energy carving through blood constructs cleanly.
Saya adjusted immediately, blood thinning, flowing instead of hardening, tangling his arcs rather than opposing them.
"So old," she hissed, eyes shining. "And still standing."
They didn't answer.
They adapted.
That irritated her.
Strength mattered.
Always had.
Her clan had learned that lesson in a valley soaked with their own blood.
Weakness invited slaughter.
Isolation followed failure.
Never again.
Her gaze flicked, just once, to the distant flare where Kimimaro and Hiashi clashed, power folding the air.
She felt it then.
Urgency.
He was fighting something worthy.
Her grip tightened.
She would finish this quickly.
Akane, meanwhile, carved a path through Konoha's forces like a moving calamity.
Her Susanoo advanced step by step, each hammerfall erasing formations, Root and ANBU alike crushed beneath black armor and white-cracked fury.
Fire and lightning surged through the weapons, the impact zones collapsing into scorched ruin.
She didn't slow.
She didn't forget.
Faces from another day flickered through her mind.
Two Root masks.
Then the Uchiha compound burning months prior, fire climbing walls that had stood for generations.
Her grandfather's body lay among the dead, alongside countless other relatives and acquaintances alike, eyes still open, staring at nothing, as if waiting for an explanation that would never come.
Danzo was somewhere ahead.
She could feel it.
And she was going to reach him.
Yet, before breaking through to him, Akane chose something else suddenly as well. Her Susanoo halted mid-advance.
The black armor loomed over the battlefield, and when she spoke, her voice carried, amplified through the construct by her chakra, cutting cleanly through the clash of steel and jutsu.
"You're attacking us like we're monsters," she said coldly. "So hear it from one."
Some shinobi faltered. Others scoffed. She didn't stop.
"The Uchiha weren't born traitors. They were pushed there. Watched. Isolated. Blamed for crimes they didn't commit. Cornered until rebellion became the only language left."
Her hammers lowered slightly, not in mercy, but in certainty.
"And when Konoha decided it was inconvenient to deal with that failure openly, it chose a quieter solution."
Murmurs rippled through the ranks.
"Itachi Uchiha wasn't a madman," Akane continued. "He was a tool. Ordered to butcher his own clan.Every civilian. Every child. All of it sanctioned. All of it buried."
"Lies!" someone shouted.
Others hesitated.
Some looked away.
"You call him a criminal," she said. "But he only did what your village demanded."
Silence spread unevenly, fractured and unstable.
A few shinobi clenched their weapons harder, anger flaring brighter than doubt.
Others felt something colder settle in their stomachs, questions they had never allowed themselves to ask.
At the edge of the formation, Root still had closed ranks around Danzō.
He said nothing.
His single visible eye narrowed, sharp and calculating, as if dissecting damage rather than denying truth.
And within the green Susanoo, the masked man turned.
Not fully.
Just enough.
His head angled toward Akane with a stiff, almost mechanical precision, as if registering her words as data rather than provocation.
Akane met that gaze through layers of chakra and armor.
"Remember this," she finished quietly. "When you die for this village, it won't even remember your names."
Then her Susanoo moved again.
Straight toward Danzō.
Reika, meanwhile, met the green Susanoo of her own opponent head-on the entire time.
It was also very large, not much smaller than Akane's, and armored on its edges, but its true structure was stranger.
Its torso remained partially open, fluid, the armor constantly reshaping itself.
From that hollow center, chakra condensed and unfolded into purpose, shields sliding into place, lances extending and retracting, kunai firing on and off, drills forming for close-range thrusts, then breaking apart into sweeping, thrown barrages as well.
Nothing decorative. Everything functional.
Every weapon formed because it made sense to exist.
Reika fully answered with chains.
Adamantine Sealing Chains erupted from her back, not merely golden chakra constructs created from thin air, but living symbols given form.
Years of Ashina's instruction finally bore fruit.
This was the Uzumaki elite's true inheritance, sealing theory turned tangible, Yin Release logic woven into fuinjutsu geometry, offense and defense unified.
The chains multiplied, lengthened, thinned, thickened, reacting to her intent alone. Each link suppressed chakra on contact, sealing, siphoning, weakening, the effect deepening the longer they bound their target.
Mastery decided everything, and Reika's was already high.
Ice crept along them.
Yuki chakra flowed into the seals without resistance, turning the chains pale, then white, frost blooming across their surfaces.
The gold vanished entirely, replaced by something colder, more ethereal.
They no longer looked forged. They looked born.
They lashed out, seeking blind spots, trying to freeze and suppress the Susanoo's flow, trying to pierce inward, toward whoever stood inside.
The Susanoo responded instantly.
From the hollow core, weapons bloomed and collapsed in rapid succession, intercepting chains mid-motion, redirecting pressure, breaking bindings before suppression could fully set in.
The construct was not fast, but it was endlessly adaptable.
When Reika pressed harder, an unexpected elemental force answered her.
Fire to melt, wind to shear, lightning to disrupt, earth to anchor, water to deflect.
All five.
She clicked her tongue softly.
"So that's how you're built."
She pushed harder anyway.
Fire surged, roaring wide, and died mid-bloom, flash-frozen into brittle scarlet crystal before shattering into harmless shards.
Water rose in crushing arcs, only to seize solid in an instant, Permafrost Prison locking it in place like a caught breath.
Wind blades howled toward her, invisible and lethal, and met Ice Dome Defense instead, the currents screaming once before entombment silenced them.
Even lightning didn't escape her reach.
Bolts snapped down with shrill violence, and she answered by prying open more of her reserves, more of the stored chakra detonating outward as Absolute Zero.
The air collapsed.
Electricity lost motion, lost identity, crystallizing into jagged veins suspended in frozen space before crumbling into frost.
She moved through it all without pause.
Ice Fang Spears tore through the air in disciplined volleys, precise and unforgiving, forcing the Susanoo to reconfigure itself again and again under the combined pressure of her unique Adamantine Sealing Chains.
When pressure built too high, when the field itself threatened to destabilize, she widened her stance and released her strongest Frozen World Burial, an S-rank wave that swallowed terrain, jutsu, and momentum alike, flattening everything into a silent white grave.
Nothing was allowed to escalate.
Nothing was allowed to run wild.
As long as she stood there, the environment obeyed her.
The supreme form of Ice Release, fueled by the excess chakra stored within her Yin Seal.
There were even other deeper fuinjutsu conceptual techniques Ashina had shown her in theory, advanced ones that went beyond those chains, constructs that rewrote reality itself.
But those belonged to monsters like Ashina Uzumaki alone.
Even after years submerged in jutsu-shiki and sealing arrays taught by him, she hadn't reached that level yet.
So she fought with what she had.
And it was enough to hold.
She didn't question who stood inside the armor.
Whoever it was, they were opposing Kimimaro.
That alone decided everything.
An Ice Dragon coiled out from the frozen ground, massive and serene, jaws snapping shut around elemental constructs, crushing them down into raw, inert chakra she could control.
Her chains snapped outward again, even as a few split off, quieter, subtler, slipping around the battlefield's edges.
They wrapped around fallen bodies, sealing them away piece by piece, preserving them for later, for ritual, for essence.
Efficiency mattered. Even now.
As she fought, her resolve never wavered.
Kimimaro had pulled her from the certain death that day. Warned her.
Given her a boat when Kirigakure shinobi were already closing in.
He had shown her the path to her quarter-Uzumaki blood, placed Ashina in her path, opened doors she hadn't even known existed.
Since following him, she had only grown stronger. Clearer.
And for the first time, the future stopped feeling distant.
One day, Kirigakure's leadership would answer for her mother.
For the Yuki clan. She had no doubt of that anymore.
Konoha earned no warmth from her either.
No hidden village did.
The system itself disgusted her, villages built on fear of bloodlines like hers, suppressing what they couldn't control.
That belief had always lived inside her.
Kimimaro had simply stripped away the lies hiding it.
Her chains cracked against the Susanoo again, ice and seals flaring bright.
She smiled faintly.
Whoever stood in her way today would fall.
Because she had chosen her future.
And she would protect the man leading her to it, no matter what stood between them.