A pale, titanic serpent erupted upward, its body so large it crushed entire bone pillars beneath its weight.
The creature's scales were slick and waxen, almost corpse-like, and each movement made the earth heave in protest.
The ground tore apart in a violent ripple, eight colossal serpent heads erupting.
Kimimaro stood alone beneath them, White Bastion Frame humming quietly around him, breath steady.
He narrowed his eyes.
The Eight Branches Technique.
Orochimaru's monstrous true form.
The strongest incarnation Ryūchi Cave ever allowed him to wield.
Kimimaro understood one thing immediately.
With Orochimaru's usual level of chakra, which was now noticeably drained after fighting all five of them for so long, on that level, something like this should have been impossible.
Transforming into a creature of this magnitude required far more power than he should realistically have left.
And this wasn't even a Ryūchi Cave summon.
Manda had been the strongest one available, the highest among the boss serpents.
Kimimaro had already killed him.
Yet the thing rising before him was stronger than Manda by a terrifying margin.
So the logic was simple.
Orochimaru wasn't summoning this.
He was only using himself as the medium.
Kimimaro could sense it in the way the chakra twisted.
Orochimaru had forced his so-called white snake "power of reincarnation" into overdrive, piling countless lesser snakes together, merging their bodies and residual souls into a single, monstrous whole.
A composite abomination pushed to its limit.
If Kimimaro had to guess, some amount of senjutsu, or at least borrowed natural energy, had to be mixed in as well.
Not true Sage Mode, which Orochimaru's original body could never handle, but a workaround through the snakes themselves.
They were organically more attuned to natural energy, after all, so a form built entirely from them could bypass that limitation.
No wonder it felt so overwhelmingly strong.
A form like this could contend with Susanoo in certain ways, depending on how it was used.
And if it could regenerate even partially like Orochimaru's normal body, it would be even more troublesome.
This felt like the ultimate Ryūchi Cave technique, the final evolution of what their serpent lineage was capable of.
At this point, Kimimaro even doubted whether the White Snake Sage had been involved somewhere behind the scenes, perhaps contributing knowledge to Orochimaru's own white snake mutation.
Nothing in canon ever mentioned it… But the result spoke for itself.
Whatever this form truly was, it had already surpassed anything recorded.
And now it was aimed entirely at him.
One of the monstrous jaws split wider.
From the dark, glistening throat, a pale shape pushed its way forward, sliding through the serpent's mouth with a slow, wet peel of flesh.
Orochimaru emerged half-formed, upper body rising from inside the beast as if it were merely a puppeted shell.
"My my. You are… quite the anomaly."
His first words were almost gentle.
"Fascinating. Truly fascinating."
His eyes narrowed with an alchemist's hunger, studying Kimimaro as if trying to dissect him from a distance.
"I reveal this form only for opponents who exceed all prior estimation. And you, boy, whom I encountered for the first time today… You have forced me into it."
A soft, fascinated chuckle escaped him.
"You truly killed Manda..."
His tongue flicked out, tasting the remnants of Manda's blood still hanging in the air.
"What a remarkable little creature you are."
The eight heads hissed around him, their bodies shifting like a living hurricane.
Orochimaru leaned just a little farther out of the serpent's maw, expression sharpening into predatory delight.
"But this ends now."
The words rolled out cold and certain, not a threat but a simple verdict.
The air thickened with killing intent so tangible it felt like the world itself was being pressed downward.
The ground cracked in a widening circle around Kimimaro.
Each head drew back, jaws stretching open until they resembled cavernous maws waiting to swallow daylight itself.
Orochimaru rose another inch from the serpent's throat, spine bending in a slow, delighted arc as if savoring the moment before the strike.
"Be honored, Kimimaro," he said softly. "You will be erased by a form crafted to devour armies."
Chakra flooded outward like a tidal wave, the soil vibrating under the growing pressure.
Kimimaro inhaled once.
He raised his eyes toward the eight heads looming above him.
"Come then," he said. "Show me how you end things."
Internally, however, Kimimaro's focus narrowed to a single point.
He knew, to make matters worse now, that he himself was heavily depleted of chakra.
That Dance of the Seedling Fern had consumed far more than he expected.
Maintaining the new armor also drained a steady trickle of chakra, but keeping it active was still far cheaper and far safer than trying to re-form it later in the middle of this chaos.
The only reason he was still on his feet at all was that, until now, he had relied almost entirely on the Yang Release stored in his seal.
But that reservoir was gone.
Completely gone.
Everything he had gathered over the last few years had been burned out in a single exchange.
Yet, he had no time to dwell on it.
The serpent was already closing in, eight colossal heads circling him like predators tightening a noose.
And beneath the shifting mass of scales, two more problems rose.
Below and behind him, the soil stirred as Tobirama and Hashirama's Edo bodies completed their regeneration, ready to strike the moment he committed to movement.
Akane, however, was nowhere near this cluster of threats.
She was still in the other sector of the battlefield, too far to see him fall, too far to witness anything that might trigger her Mangekyō.
Which meant the situation was even tighter than it seemed.
Kimimaro had to defend himself with precision, with what little he had left.
And at the same time, he had to drag this entire nightmare closer to where Akane could see him "die."
Only then would there be any chance to reverse the situation.
And he had to do all of it now, before the Eight Branches swallowed him whole.
The eight serpent heads lunged in the same instant.
By this point, Kimimaro could obviously use the basic Body Flicker.
Most jōnin knew the basic principle: a brief surge of chakra-enhanced motion through the legs to vanish and reappear with explosive speed.
But what he did now went far beyond that.
Through the cracks and pressure-vents he had engineered along his leg armor, he forced water chakra into a burst of directional pressure, using nothing more than basic physics he remembered from his past life.
The result was a violent, controlled launch that sent him shooting higher and sideways far faster than ordinary flicker movement allowed.
Two of the massive serpent heads crashed down where he had stood a heartbeat earlier.
Kimimaro spun through the air, already shifting into the patterns of the Dance of the Willow.
Through the open slots of his White Bastion Frame, hardened bones could slide smoothly from his palms, elbows, knees, and shoulders, each one sharpened to effortless lethality.
His movements, in the air and mid-motion, were still fluid, evasive, and ever-changing, the branches of a willow swaying freely in the wind.
There was no fixed pattern to this dance.
No rigid stance.
Willow was a style built on reaction, on reading momentum, turning an enemy's aggression into an opening.
Parry, slip, counter.
Parry, slip, counter.
And Kimimaro executed it with such clarity that it bordered on instinct, just as two more shapes burst from somewhere behind him.
Tobirama and Hashirama's Edo bodies, fully regenerated, lunged up from below and behind just as he arced backward through the air.
Kimimaro's bones met them instantly.
Palms first, sliding through their chests like needles.
Then elbows and knees, angled to intercept their follow-up strikes.
Shoulders next, sweeping outward to cut through the arms they raised in defense.
Every bone manifested was chosen deliberately, the exact length, angle, and pressure required to pierce their reanimated bodies cleanly.
This was Willow, not Larch.
Larch was a stationary, brutal, last-ditch defense once the enemy was confident he got him.
Willow was dynamic and proactive, meant to flow through enemy formations even as you avoided their strikes.
And Kimimaro's Willow was far beyond the original Kimimaro's version.
Sharper.
Faster.
Longer reach.
More durable bones.
More precise control.
He tore through the two Edo Tensei again, their bodies distorting as the bones passed cleanly through them.
But the serpent heads were closing in once more, tightening the circle.
Kimimaro landed lightly on a fragment of shattered bone and immediately launched himself again with another pressure-boosted burst, weaving between the rushing maws.
He recognized the shift in the terrain.
He had moved closer.
Just a few more enhanced leaps, a few more exchanges, and he would reach the section of the battlefield where Akane fought.
Where she needed to see him fall.
Where her eyes needed to break and awaken.
He exhaled once, steady.
He just had to survive long enough to get there.