Chapter 366: That's Rock Hard
Orochimaru would have sworn, on however many years he'd spent making his way through the shinobi world, that he had never once laid eyes on a creature like the ones in front of him. He genuinely found himself wondering whether these things even belonged to this world at all.
Their sheer bulk dwarfed even the Tailed Beasts. His own summon, the Great White Snake, could barely have matched one of these things' tail in scale.
This was, without question, entirely outside anything Orochimaru had ever studied. What could a creature possibly eat to grow to the size of a small mountain?
A body that size — even just sitting down, it could probably level half of Konoha in one motion.
And the real question that mattered: who had killed something this massive?
A Hokage? Please. Not a chance — not unless it was the First Hokage himself.
As for the rest of them, Orochimaru was confident that not a single Hokage, fighting alone, stood any chance against a creature this unfamiliar and this terrifying.
Something this size could plausibly overpower a Tailed Beast outright.
Even dead, the lingering menace radiating off these corpses was enough to genuinely unsettle him — sweat beading on his forehead without his even noticing.
"Someone capable of killing one of these things solo... that's got to be Ryū-kun, from Konoha. Except this isn't just one. There must be hundreds — thousands — of them here."
Orochimaru couldn't quite keep the shock off his face, couldn't quite settle his racing thoughts.
He genuinely struggled to imagine what kind of power it would take to wipe out hundreds, thousands, of creatures on this scale.
Everything about this was starting to slip past the edges of what he understood. More and more, things felt like they were spinning outside his control, outside anything he could have predicted.
He even found himself wondering — if the Sage of Six Paths really existed, would even he stand a chance against something like this?
"Maybe I shouldn't have left Konoha so quickly. Or the Land of Fire, for that matter. If I'd still been in the village when this happened, I might know a great deal more by now."
He murmured to himself, "Then again, whatever's behind this, Konoha will absolutely bury the details. There's no such thing as a perfectly sealed wall, but getting firsthand information won't be easy either."
With that, he made straight for the Land of Fire's territory — he wanted a close look at the bodies. He might as well take one along, too; with a pile this massive, surely no one would notice a little flesh and blood going missing for research purposes.
He was standing right at the border between the Land of Fire and the Land of Rice Paddies — a few steps in either direction would put him across it, and there didn't seem to be anyone guarding the line nearby. Not that it would have mattered if there had been — Orochimaru had once been one of Konoha's Legendary Sannin, and if not for Minato, he'd have been Fourth Hokage himself.
With strength like his, did he really have any reason to worry about a few border guards or shinobi patrols?
Not remotely.
Once he'd made his way into the pile of Void Beast corpses, he looked up at the towering wall of flesh reaching into the sky above him and couldn't help but suck in a sharp breath.
What he drew in, though, was a thick, coppery reek — unlike the blood of any ordinary creature. There was something else laced into that smell too, something almost earthy, like raw soil.
He reached out and touched the wound on one of the corpses, coating his fingertip in its faint blue-tinted blood.
He hesitated for a few seconds, then finally touched his tongue to it — and immediately spat it back out.
"The smell alone isn't that bad, but the moment it actually hits the tongue... it's genuinely nauseating."
For Orochimaru, of all people, to call something "nauseating" said quite a lot about just how vile that taste really was.
And Orochimaru wasn't the only one who'd noticed the disturbance. Plenty of other well-known figures from the wider Naruto canon had spotted the corpse pile as well — some from Konoha, others from rival hidden villages entirely. A sudden mountain range appearing out of nowhere was never going to go unnoticed for long.
Orochimaru drew a sharp kunai, intending to cut a strip of flesh from one of the bodies to bring back for study.
But the moment the blade struck the wound, he froze — the kunai simply wouldn't go in.
The razor-sharp blade might as well have been striking a thick steel plate. Even putting his full strength behind it, he managed to sink it barely half a centimeter deep.
His brow furrowed slowly, and he muttered, "What kind of density is this? This flesh is absurdly tough."
In the end, after exhausting every method he could think of, Orochimaru managed to carve off a strip of meat roughly the size of a pinky finger.
Small as that strip looked, its density was staggering — its weight had to be some multiple of gold's, and then some.
An ordinary person trying to carry something that size would have felt like they were hauling around a solid chunk of iron.
Weighing the strip in his hand, Orochimaru shook his head ruefully — getting even this much out had taken considerable effort.
Even so, a spark of genuine interest lit up his eyes. "Perhaps a creature like this could give my research the breakthrough it's been needing."
As a scientist obsessed with his own experiments — and one chasing immortality above all else — there was simply no way Orochimaru would let a specimen this unique pass him by.
Meanwhile, back at Konoha, some unknown distance away —
Drawn by the earlier flash of green light spanning the sky, Minato stood frozen, staring in disbelief at a village that was, impossibly, completely intact.
His reaction was, more or less, a mirror of Orochimaru's own upon finding the corpse pile. The same shock. The same disbelief. The same look of utter bewilderment.
Minato was absolutely certain — Konoha had been destroyed. Nothing should have been left standing.
And yet here it was. A Konoha, whole and untouched.
Not even a single crack ran through the ground beneath his feet.
He reached out and touched the front gate — the texture beneath his fingers unmistakably real, solid.
"This can't be right... is this some kind of genjutsu? Because there's no way this should be happening. Why would Konoha — why would the village that just became a thousand-meter crater — be back to normal like this?"
He tried, again and again, to dispel whatever illusion this might be. Each time, he opened his eyes to find the same fully restored village staring back at him.
Swallowing hard, he took a tentative step through the gate and made his way into the village's main street.
The empty streets sat eerily silent, the wind rustling faintly through the trees. Even the snow blanketing the ground looked completely genuine.
Genuine enough that, Hokage or not, it left him with the disorienting sense of standing in the middle of a dream.
"...Could this be Ryū-kun's doing? It's not impossible — the man's mysterious enough that there's no telling what he's actually capable of."
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