"A pity. The power output is still far too small," Shiro shook his head indifferently, standing calmly atop a massive, surging tree root.
"Forbidden Secret Art: Instant Hell Murder Formation."
Standing above the turbulent sea of trees, Shiro vanished instantly.
In the very next fraction of a second, he materialized directly behind Temari. He raised his hand, gathering dense chakra into his palm. If this strike landed cleanly, there was a very high probability Temari would be unable to withstand the kinetic force.
"Enough! Stop right there!"
A thick, compacted Shield of Sand abruptly materialized between Shiro's palm and Temari's back, intercepting the blow.
*CRACK!*
The supposedly absolute defense of the Sand Shield shattered instantly upon impact, exploding into loose grit. However, it served its purpose; it absorbed the lethal force. Temari was merely sent tumbling forward by the residual shockwave, gasping for breath but largely unharmed.
At this critical, life-or-death moment, Gaara finally couldn't help but intervene.
"You can kill Kankuro if you want... but this foolish woman is still somewhat useful to me," Gaara growled, his sea-foam eyes staring coldly at Shiro, sand swirling frantically around him.
Temari barely managed to push herself up from the dirt, looking at her youngest brother in utter disbelief.
She hadn't expected Gaara—the monster who threatened them daily—to actually step in and burn chakra to save her life! But at the same time, her heart twisted. Why was Gaara perfectly willing to let Kankuro die?
"Oh? Are you attempting to command me?"
Shiro slowly turned his gaze to meet Gaara's. The sheer, abyssal emptiness and oppressive weight behind Shiro's dark eyes made Gaara subconsciously tremble, the demon inside him recoiling.
In the next millisecond, Shiro bypassed the swirling sand defenses and appeared directly in front of Gaara, face-to-face.
"Sand Armor!" Gaara yelled in a panic, hurriedly compacting a dense, secondary layer of chakra-infused sand tightly over his entire body, forming a supposedly impenetrable shell.
It didn't matter.
*SMASH!*
Even a highly compressed, absolute defense like the Sand Armor was violently shattered by a single, casual, chakra-enhanced punch to the gut from Shiro.
"Ghk!" Gaara coughed, the air driven from his lungs as he was launched backward off his feet, crashing heavily into the underbrush.
Seeing her little brother sent flying, Temari desperately wanted to step forward to help, but as she tried to put weight on her leg, the accumulated stress and injuries finally caught up with her. She tripped, her vision darkening, and she fainted on the spot.
After effortlessly dismantling the Sand trio, Shiro casually walked over and plucked their Heaven and Earth scrolls from Kankuro's unconscious form.
He didn't bother finishing them off. He simply turned and walked away, leaving the groaning Gaara with nothing but the sight of his retreating back.
"I... I will definitely... survive... and surpass you," Gaara rasped silently in his heart, clutching his bruised stomach as he watched the monster disappear into the forest.
---
A few minutes later, Gaara endured the throbbing pain and slowly forced himself to stand up.
The casual punch Shiro had delivered was incredibly heavy. It felt as if his internal organs had been violently rearranged.
It was so debilitating that Gaara had to rely on a platform of his own sand to slowly levitate himself over to where Temari had collapsed. He breathed a shaky sigh of relief after confirming his sister's pulse was steady and her life was not in immediate danger.
Then, with great reluctance, he floated over to Kankuro's side. Gritting his teeth, Gaara carefully pulled the thick wooden thorns out of Kankuro's thigh and shoulder, decisively using his own chakra and sand to apply pressure and staunch the bleeding.
"We are fortunate... that monster clearly didn't have the intention to kill us today," Gaara muttered, looking at the devastation around them.
He was now incredibly grateful. To only suffer heavy injuries and bruised egos, rather than all three of them dying meaningless deaths in this forest, was a miracle.
---
Meanwhile, Shiro decided it was time to stop bullying the weak. He had to give the Third Hokage at least a little bit of face.
He had already snatched over a hundred scrolls along his warpath, essentially disqualifying dozens of teams. He couldn't eliminate absolutely everyone in a single exam, or the finals would be incredibly boring!
So, Shiro shifted his focus and began actively tracking Orochimaru's elusive, sinister chakra signature.
However, deep in another sector of the forest, Orochimaru had finally cornered his true prize: Sasuke Uchiha.
"Sasuke..." Orochimaru hissed, looking at the exhausted, terrified Uchiha boy with a face full of naked greed. It was as if Sasuke's very existence, his Sharingan, exerted a fatal, irresistible attraction over the Sannin.
As for Shiro?
Right now, Orochimaru couldn't avoid the boy fast enough. Let alone entertain the thought of making a move on him or his Wood Style. The risk was simply too astronomical.
Because Shiro had been aggressively routing and forcing dozens of teams to flee in panic toward the central tower, the chaotic displacement of Genin meant that many people ended up accidentally running straight into Orochimaru's hunting grounds!
It was a classic butterfly effect. Just like how, in the original timeline, Jiraiya was supposed to meet Naruto much later, but due to spatial and temporal shifts, they had already crossed paths.
"Something is very wrong with that person," Neji Hyuga whispered from a high branch, his Byakugan flaring.
As soon as Team Guy entered this specific sector of the Forest of Death, Neji's eyes had immediately locked onto the horrifying, massive chakra signature of Orochimaru, who was currently disguised as a Grass Genin.
"Look! That's... Sasuke and his team down there!" Rock Lee pointed, his thick eyebrows furrowing in concern as he saw Sakura crying and Sasuke frozen in fear.
Rock Lee wasn't clear on what terrifying level of enemy Sasuke was facing, but his code of youth demanded he act.
"Stop right there!"
Just as Orochimaru's neck elongated, preparing to strike and brand Sasuke with the Cursed Seal, Rock Lee resolutely leaped down from the canopy, interposing himself between the snake and his prey.
Unfortunately, Orochimaru didn't take the green-clad genin seriously in the slightest. With a casual flick of his sleeve, he batted Lee aside like a nuisance and struck.
"GAAAHHH!"
Bitten deeply on the juncture of his neck and shoulder by Orochimaru's fangs, Sasuke immediately screamed in sheer agony. At this moment, the searing pain and absolute, primal fear completely short-circuited Sasuke's brain.
Rock Lee, recovering from the blow, stared in shock. *A feeling of total powerlessness! I couldn't even slow him down!*
"Sasuke!" Naruto roared, completely enraged upon seeing his teammate fall. But it was useless; Naruto himself was already heavily injured from a prior skirmish with Orochimaru's giant snake summon and was unable to get up.
"Truly interesting. Has another little fly arrived to buzz around me?" Orochimaru licked the corner of his mouth with a long tongue, his gloomy, slit-pupil gaze shifting to stare intently at Rock Lee.
Since his primary goal of marking the Uchiha vessel had been achieved, he figured he might as well give these interfering Konoha brats a lethal little lesson before departing.
Subsequently, Orochimaru began to casually, effortlessly toy with Rock Lee, dodging his fastest taijutsu strikes with sickening fluidity.
"Neji, we have to go down there and help Lee!" Tenten urged urgently from the branch. She saw at a glance that Lee was absolutely not a match for this freakish Grass Ninja.
But before Neji could even speak, a pair of hands firmly clamped down on both of their shoulders, pressing them flat against the thick branch.
"Shh."
"Ah—!"
"Shiro?!"
Tenten turned her head and was almost scared out of the tree by the sudden, silent appearance of Shiro right behind them. Thanks to Shiro swiftly covering Tenten's mouth with his hand, the group's position wasn't exposed to the monster below.
*Damn it! When did he get here?!* Neji was inwardly shocked beyond measure.
His absolute pride and joy, the 360-degree vision of the Byakugan, had been active this entire time! Yet, he hadn't seen a single anomaly or fluctuation. Shiro had approached and physically touched them in a completely mysterious, undetected manner.
"What do you think you're doing, holding us back?" Neji glared fixedly at Shiro, wanting to know what the other prodigy was plotting while their teammate was being beaten.
"Calm down. This is the first time I'll get to see a practitioner of the Eight Inner Gates open them with my own eyes in live combat. Don't disturb his focus," Shiro whispered, his eyes fixed on the battle below.
Shiro stopping them naturally served his own plans. As someone who had mastered the theory of the Eight Gates from the forbidden scroll, he wanted to observe the physical mechanics of a specialist using them before he attempted his own modified version. Rock Lee's dedicated taijutsu strength was naturally not to be underestimated.
"How is that possible? How could Lee be a match for that monster?" Neji hissed, refusing to believe it. "Even Uchiha Sasuke was paralyzed by fear!"
"Who knows?" Shiro replied cryptically, a faint smile on his lips. "Pay close attention, Neji. Maybe Lee is saving a special kick just for you when the time comes."
Down in the clearing, Rock Lee was indeed finding that his conventional, weighted taijutsu was completely ineffective against Orochimaru's fluid, snake-like evasions.
"There's no other way. I have to use *that*," Lee muttered, his face bruising as he assumed a unique stance.
"Eight Inner Gates... Fourth Gate: The Gate of Pain... OPEN!"
*WHOOSH!*
A powerful, visible aura of green chakra and pressurized airflow surged out from Lee's body, tearing up the grass around him.
Lee's attack power and speed both received a massive, explosive boost. He vanished from sight, initiating a high-speed assault. At the same time, the immense strain began to show; his skin turned red, and his veins bulged, entering the true danger zone of the Eight Gates.
"What is this? The Eight Inner Gates?" Orochimaru's eyes widened slightly in surprise as he parried a strike that cracked the earth beneath his feet. He hadn't expected a mere Genin to be capable of opening the celestial gates.
"Well, well. It's getting more and more interesting!" Orochimaru chuckled darkly. "In that case, I suppose I should get a bit more serious too!"
Orochimaru rapidly wove hand seals with blinding speed. "Wind Style: Great Breakthrough!"
With a mere C-rank jutsu, Orochimaru exerted a destructive force equivalent to a high-level A-rank technique. In the ninja world, whether a jutsu is devastating or not doesn't just depend on its official classification; it depends entirely on the monstrous chakra capacity and skill of the caster.
Orochimaru spat a localized hurricane from his mouth, the violent wind tearing up the ground and blowing Rock Lee, along with a massive swath of the forest behind him, into absolute ruins.
"Is this person really just a Genin?!" Tenten gasped, horrified by the scale of the destruction.
"He's too strong..." Neji muttered, his Byakugan straining. He was completely unable to sit still; how could a single Chunin Exam attract so many incredible, horrifyingly powerful people? And the fact that Lee had hidden such explosive, self-destructive strength from him was a bitter pill to swallow.
"Wait... Shiro has disappeared!" Tenten suddenly noticed that the boy who had just been holding them down was gone.
Down in the decimated clearing, as the dust from the hurricane settled...
"Orochimaru. You certainly have quite the nerve, making a mess in my village's backyard."
"This voice..."
Orochimaru's slitted pupils constricted to pinpricks. That calm, familiar voice instantly made his blood run cold.
*He found me so quickly?!*
"Look! It's Shiro! He saved Lee!" Tenten cheered quietly from the tree, realizing that Shiro had materialized in the clearing and effortlessly blocked that terrifying, forest-leveling wind strike, shielding the exhausted Rock Lee behind him.
__________________________
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