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Itachi's short sword screeched against the enemy's kunai before he leapt back to a nearby tree, hearing the sound of the ground erupting, followed by a sickening crunch. He looked back and barely caught sight of the white serpent's twisting body as it burrowed back into the ground while the operative's body—the remaining bloody half—crumbled into the earth.
He fell upon Mitarashi Anko and recalled the words she had exchanged with Uchiha Gouki, whose presence was entirely a mystery, especially when he was supposed to be long dead. Her former master was the traitorous Snake Sannin, and if what Itachi heard was to be believed, then the man before him was supposed to be Orochimaru. The usage of snakes added weight to that hypothesis.
While there was no trail to prove their shared history, the partnership between Danzo and Orochimaru was known to ANBU—which would explain why he was present at ROOT's base of operations. Yet, there existed a disguise jutsu that could transform one's appearance to fool even the Sharingan, and someone else could have signed the summoning contract with the giant snakes of Ryūchi Cave. Furthermore, why would anyone take the form of a late Uchiha of no particular renown and then claim to be Orochimaru?
"Be vigilant! Hopper, take the lead."
The imposter made his move with a pop of air rushing into vacuums as he cut the gap of twenty paces between them in half with a terrifying velocity. He landed on a nearby tree trunk that cracked as he cut through the air right towards Itachi. Itachi's hands blurred in a motion too fast for the human eye, and six shuriken left his fingers. They didn't fly straight. Three struck each other in midair, sparking and ricocheting at impossible angles to catch the incoming enemy in the exact spot where he was. Orochimaru's head snapped back at a ninety-degree angle, the steel whistling past his throat. Even as he evaded, his sleeves erupted with a dozen vipers that lunged forth, their fangs dripping with neurotoxin.
Itachi didn't retreat and pivoted on his heel with the grace of a dancer. His short sword was back in his hand, coated in a thin, sharpening sheen of wind-natured chakra. The blade left a trail of blood as he decapitated the vipers, their bodies falling to the ground in a writhing mess. However, Orochimaru was already behind him as he slammed his palms into the earth. The ground beneath Itachi's tree disintegrated into a sludge. The massive cedar groaned, its root system snapping like dry twigs as it tilted towards the forest floor with other trees around it.
Itachi leapt into the air. In the heartbeat that he was airborne, he processed the battlefield and weaved hand seals.
Fire Release: Great Fireball Jutsu.
A C-rank ninjutsu is considered a coming-of-age rite for all Uchiha shinobi, with members not being considered true adults until they had learned to perform it. Itachi exhaled, and a miniature sun roared out of his lungs, the heat so intense that it rivalled some B-rank ninjutsu cast by jōnin and turned the falling cedars into charcoal before engulfing the target in its incinerating heat.
The ground below the airborne Itachi erupted in a geyser as a white snake similar to the previous one emerged, rising up towards him. Two hands slipped out of its mouth, pushing the fleshy, fanged maw open as a wet Orochimaru, covered in mucus, pulled himself out of the body with a grin on his face. He opened his mouth, and a forest green snake slithered out of his gullet; the snake then opened its maw to spit out a sword at the speed of an arrow.
The blade pierced Itachi straight through his chest, and a pained look appeared on his face as he fell down for a moment before he exploded into a hundred crows. The birds swirled, their discordant caws forming a grating symphony on the senses, coming together in a black hive that dove in unison.
Orochimaru landed on the churning mud, his eyes darting until he felt a string of disobedient chakra in his body. He laughed and weaved hand seals for a ninjutsu; the resulting chakra drowned the disobedience in his body, shattering the genjutsu while he simultaneously completed the technique.
The diving hive of crows turned into a carpet of falling kunai.
The mud around him rose up and hardened to form a curved shield with a three-headed snake on its surface that was instantly skewered by the hundred kunai, a quarter of which had explosive tags tied to their tails. The impact of the explosion was thunderous. The shockwave levelled the surrounding ferns, shattered the fallen trees, and cracked those still standing. The explosion added to the fires from the fireball and spread the flames further into the forest, putting more trees on fire.
The thick black smoke that was filling the area began to swirl and spread until it had reduced the visibility of the area to nearly zero.
Wind Release: Great Breakthrough.
A localised hurricane pushed the black smoke from the area, stripped the bark from the trees around, and caused the fires around to burn hotter, fanned by the wind-natured chakra.
Itachi's Sharingan rotated in his eyes, and time seemed to slow down as he watched Orochimaru right in front of him with a sword in one hand and a half dozen snakes slithering out of his other sleeve. He instantly deduced that the snakes were going to bite and strangle him, and the sword's trajectory suggested it was going for his chest; more importantly, he only had the time to deal with one. The sword was undoubtedly more lethal, and as such, he moved to use his vambrace to parry the sword when a memory flashed by.
His mother's voice echoed in his mind. It was some time soon after he had awakened his eye; he was sitting on her lap as she talked about the Sharingan. Even though he didn't go down the route she did, he remembered everything she had talked about.
"—Our gift is much more than even we realise, Itachi. Even if you think you're seeing enough, look deeper, and I guarantee you will always find more—"
With the time he had, he didn't think he could affect 'Orochimaru' with a genjutsu—the man had shown enough skill—so he decided to switch his target. Within a flash, he sent a pulse of chakra forth towards the snakes, and then applied an illusion on them through his eyes.
Without changing his actions, he parried the sword, leaving his body open to the snakes that harmlessly collided with him, neither strangling nor biting him. Orochimaru didn't expect his snakes to fail and was thus a beat late to use the hand, the one near the snakes, to grab Itachi, whose eyes shone as he swiftly avoided the hand and leveraged his weight, kicking off Orochimaru's chest.
While in retreat, he performed a one-handed seal for Water Release: Water Fang Bullets.
From the mud beneath Orochimaru, circles of water rose and condensed into rotating drills. He leapt upwards as the water followed. He hissed while twisting his body mid-air and weaving a shortened chain of hand seals. The air around him shimmered before slamming in front of him to form a trapezoidal shield. The water bullets broke like waves hitting a bank, sending water everywhere in a short shower.
"As expected, your eyes are as magnificent as ever, Itachi!" Orochimaru said, his ecstatic laughter echoing in the burned clearing.
Itachi's expression behind his mask remained calm. Little by little, he was starting to believe that this man might really be the actual Orochimaru. But then why take over the appearance of Uchiha Gouki? Was he planning to infiltrate the Uchiha clan? That didn't make any sense because Gouki's death was public and well-known within the clan.
As Orochimaru's feet touched the ground, it caused a wave as though the earth was fluid. As the crest moved outwards, spikes exploded out of the ground in every direction. The spikes pierced the trees from below, de-rooting some and collapsing others altogether with the force of a B-rank ninjutsu. However, as the spikes were filling the area, he was already on his next set of hand seals for a second B-rank ninjutsu.
His chakra spread through the earth and then flooded every spike in the area to the point where the material couldn't contain it and exploded into flaming bullets of compacted earth harder than pebbles. And because of the sheer skill behind the ninjutsu, each bullet had a similar impact to the bullet from the Water Release: Spirit Water Wave, only there were hundreds of them going in all directions at the same time.
The jutsu was extremely hard to avoid in normal circumstances because there was nowhere to run, but the Sharingan could see the general flow of chakra, and he saw Orochimaru's chakra flood the spikes and was ready for it.
Water Release: Water Colliding Wave.
A volume of water, at least a few times larger than what a chūnin could produce with the same ninjutsu, flooded the surroundings in the form of a wave. The flaming earthen bullets coming towards him were met with a torrential wave of water that drowned the flames and sapped their velocity, rendering them inert.
Instantly, the forest terrain was turned into a swamp. Almost no trees stood safe around; all of them were in some state of destruction and were submerged in a layer of water. The only positive was that a lot of the fire from the fight had been put out by the jutsu. And in between all of that stood two men, neither of them with an injury on their bodies.
They stared at each other across the graveyard of trees.
The silence only lasted a few moments before they raised their hands to form hand seals. As Orochimaru's fingers moved, he kept an eye on Itachi's hands. He would never admit it, but it was a habit he had picked up from the 'Professor,' who would read his opponent's hand seals to use the perfect counter. He never managed to be as good as his former master, but what Orochimaru saw in his opponent's hand was the perfect counter to his ninjutsu. However, Itachi had only started a couple of hand seals later, which wasn't enough time to predict his jutsu perfectly, and yet, as their hand seals progressed, he continued to see the perfect counter.
Their eyes met, and he found the red eyes staring at him. With the mask on, the eyes were all he could see. And then it struck him. The Sharingan could see the rough flow of the chakra even if it was nowhere near as capable as the Byakugan. Itachi used that rough flow of chakra and the few hand seals to predict his ninjutsu?
"Looking like an Uchiha doesn't make you one. Allow me to show you the power of a real one," Itachi said.
Orochimaru chuckled before laughing out loud.
A 'real' Uchiha couldn't do that, and he knew it…
Their hand seals ended at the same time, and the two B-rank ninjutsu, pushed by two jōnin's understanding, came alive.
Orochimaru's Wind Release: Typhoon Crushing Cannonball.
Itachi's Fire Release: Dragon Killing Harpoon.
Winds from the surrounding rushed before Orochimaru's palm as though a vacuum was sucking in, and those winds began to gather into a dense ball containing a tornado-like mass. On the other hand, a large amount of chakra rose from Itachi's body to take the form of a large flaming harpoon big enough to hunt a whale.
The two chakra objects shot at each other.
A smile appeared on Orochimaru's face. "A real one…"
The harpoon was faster and covered a larger distance than the cannonball before it struck the dense mass. It wasn't able to pierce through it and even crumbled; however, it also caused the cannonball to explode into a rotating blast of typhoon winds that enveloped Orochimaru in a dome. That was expected of the jutsu, but then a spark flashed, and the fire-natured chakra flooded in with the winds, which acted like a super-accelerant. The typhoon's blast caught fire and turned into a hell that incinerated everything inside and released a light that stood out even against the afternoon sun.
When the blast subsided, the water that had flooded the surroundings was nowhere to be seen, and the ground had turned into swirling embers and spots of bubbling magma. In between all of that stood Orochimaru. Everything from the head to the toes was charred black and burned beyond any saving. It didn't look like he had used anything to protect himself and had taken the full brunt of the damage.
Yet, Itachi frowned as he saw the condition of the body through his eyes. For a heartbeat, there was silence. Then, the 'corpse' began to vibrate.
A wet, rhythmic squelching sound erupted from the charred torso—the sound of muscle tearing away from muscle, the jaw of the head unhinged to an impossible degree, the skin of the cheeks stretched until they went from black to grey. Suddenly, a pair of pale, slender hands reached out from the depths of the stretched throat. They gripped the blackened teeth and pried them apart like a set of heavy doors, and with a sickening, slippery slide, a new man slithered out of the mouth of the old. He emerged headfirst, his skin covered in a thick, translucent layer of protective bile. Behind him, the original body didn't bleed; it simply deflated—collapsing into a hollow husk.
"A real one, huh? Then how about this: Am I a real one now?" he said.
Itachi's eyes narrowed with a rare flash of anger.
Everything was the same from the hair to the body to the attire; instead of Uchiha Gouki, the face on the body was Orochimaru's notorious face, but instead of those yellow serpentine eyes, Itachi stared at the red of the Sharingan with three tomoe revolving in his damnable sockets.
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The link is in the synopsis!