Chapter 417: Orochimaru's Fury
The child he had once discarded as a worthless failure had grown into a towering figure—a shinobi standing at a summit Rasa could no longer fathom, let alone reach.
As the crushing weight of the golden sand closed in around him, plunging his consciousness into absolute darkness, the Fourth Kazekage peered through the narrowing gaps. Through the swirling grains, he caught one final glimpse of Gaara standing outside the tomb.
'So that is how it is...'The thought echoed in the hollow space of his mind. The corners of Rasa's cracked, reanimated lips twitched upward, forming a smile that carried equal parts bitter regret and deep relief.'Is this what they call... a bond?'The darkness swallowed the last sliver of light.'Karura...'He closed his eyes, surrendering to the inevitable.'It seems I was entirely wrong.'
Outside, Gaara slammed both palms flat against the coarse surface of the massive sand pyramid. The impact sent a shockwave of chakra rippling outward. Pitch-black sealing runes erupted from beneath his fingertips, snaking across the golden dune like a web of ink until they locked together in a flawless geometric cage.
A sharp pulse of light flared from the apex of the pyramid. In its wake, the oppressive chakra signature of the Fourth Kazekage vanished entirely, wiped from the battlefield.
The howling winds died down, leaving behind a heavy, ringing silence. Gaara slowly drew his hands back, his chest rising and falling in a steady rhythm. He exhaled a long, quiet breath, the tension bleeding from his shoulders. Turning away from the tomb of his father, the young shinobi lifted his gaze to the man observing from a short distance away.
"Teacher," Gaara said, his voice steady but carrying a faint tremor of suppressed emotion. "I did it."
Uchiha Akira stood with his hands resting casually at his sides, his dark eyes sweeping over the sealed pyramid before settling on his disciple. He gave a single, slow nod.
"Well done."
Those two simple words carried more weight than any grand declaration. The perpetual frost that usually hardened Gaara's features melted away, replaced by a rare, genuine smile that reached his eyes.
"Master!" Naruto's loud voice shattered the quiet moment. The blonde genin had been watching the fight with bated breath, his fists clenched tight. Seeing Gaara secure the victory, he let out a massive sigh of relief, wiping sweat from his brow. But as his blue eyes scanned the devastated terrain, he suddenly pointed toward the empty horizon. "That bandage freak! He's gone! He must have run away while we were distracted!"
Akira shifted his gaze toward the distant sky, tracking a trajectory completely invisible to the naked eye. A cold, playful smirk tugged at the corner of his mouth.
"Escape?" he murmured, his tone dripping with absolute certainty. "In front of me, there is no such thing."
He slowly raised his right hand, his fingers curling slightly upward. Hovering just above his palm was a condensed orb of deep blue light, no larger than a small stone. For a second, it sat dormant. Then, it began to vibrate with terrifying violence.
A high-pitched, keening hum tore through the air, emitting a fluctuation of chakra so dense it made the very atmosphere groan under its weight. The ambient light around Akira's hand warped and bent, struggling to break free from the gravitational pull of the miniature celestial body.
"Imperial Heaven: Star Fall," Akira stated, his voice devoid of any inflection.
He casually flicked his wrist. The blue orb vanished from his palm, leaving behind nothing but a sonic boom and a scorched trail in the air.
Tens of kilometers away, slicing through the upper atmosphere, the Second Tsuchikage Mū propelled himself forward at breakneck speed. He was fully submerged in his Dustless Bewilderment technique, rendering his physical form, his chakra, and even his scent completely undetectable.
Below him, the jagged mountain ranges and winding rivers blurred into a continuous streak of green and brown. Mū allowed the tight coil of tension in his chest to loosen slightly. He had put a massive distance between himself and the monster in the Uchiha crest. Combined with his absolute invisibility and total aura suppression, there was simply no logical way anyone could track him. Even a monster like Uchiha Akira could not lock onto a target from tens of kilometers away. It defied the fundamental laws of sensory ninjutsu.
The very instant that rational thought formed in his mind, every instinct honed over decades of warfare screamed in absolute terror. An unmatched wave of dread erupted from the deepest recesses of his soul, freezing the phantom blood in his reanimated veins. It was the primal stench of approaching death.
Mū snapped his head back, twisting his body mid-flight.
At the absolute edge of his vision, a single point of deep azure light pierced the clouds. In the span of a heartbeat, that speck magnified, consuming his entire field of view at a velocity that shattered all physical common sense.
It was too fast.
Before he could even form a hand seal, the suffocating pressure radiating from the blue star slammed into him, locking his coordinates in space like a physical chain around his throat.
'I cannot dodge this!' Mū's combat-hardened mind processed the grim reality in a fraction of a second. The trajectory was absolute. The lock-on was flawless. Since evasion was impossible, his only option was total annihilation.
"Dust Release: Detachment of the Primitive World Technique!" Mū roared, his voice tearing through the rushing wind.
He slammed his palms together. A blinding, pure white geometric cube expanded rapidly between his hands, humming with the destructive power of three combined chakra natures. This was his absolute pinnacle—a kekkei tōta capable of dismantling any physical matter in existence down to its base molecular state.
"I do not care what you are!" Mū bellowed, his eyes wide with desperate defiance. "Decompose!"
He thrust both hands forward, unleashing the blinding white beam of Dust Release directly into the path of the incoming azure star.
The pillar of white annihilation collided head-on with the deep blue orb. The impact should have vaporized the sky. Instead, the scene that unfolded completely shattered the Second Tsuchikage's understanding of reality.
There was no grand explosion. Only a soft, sickening crack.
The absolute destruction of the Dust Release—a technique feared across generations for its ability to erase anything it touched—fractured like fragile glass the instant it grazed the blue light. The white beam splintered, dissolving into harmless sparks that failed to slow the orb's momentum by even a fraction of a millimeter.
"This is impossible!" Mū's voice cracked into a hoarse, desperate scream.
His Dust Release had been effortlessly swatted away? How could such a thing exist? His mind raced, grasping at horrifying conclusions. The only explanation was that the enemy's attack had completely transcended the physical concept of matter, operating on a dimensional plane he could not even begin to fathom.
He had no time to process the despair. The blue orb pierced through the fading remnants of his strongest jutsu without the slightest hindrance and slammed directly into his chest.
The moment the azure light made contact, Mū's reanimated body simply ceased to hold its shape. The kinetic force and gravitational crush instantly pulverized his physical vessel, grinding the Impure World Reincarnation sacrifice down into the finest microscopic particles.
The paper-like debris immediately began to swirl, attempting to stitch the immortal vessel back together according to the jutsu's absolute law. But the blue orb was not finished. It flared with a blinding, violent intensity. A domineering, inescapable suction force erupted from its core.
"Ahhhhh!"
Mū's shrill, agonizing scream echoed through the empty void of the sky. A translucent, spectral phantom—the raw, unshielded soul of the Second Tsuchikage—was violently ripped straight out of the swirling vortex of reanimation dust.
The spectral figure thrashed wildly, clawing at the empty air in a futile bid for freedom. But against the devouring gravity of Akira's technique, a mere soul offered no resistance. With one final, echoing roar of absolute unwillingness, Mū's spirit was dragged into the depths of the blue star, vanishing completely from the mortal plane.
Stripped of the soul that anchored the jutsu, the swirling storm of Impure World Reincarnation debris instantly lost its supernatural vitality. The paper-like fragments turned dull and lifeless, scattering in the high-altitude winds and drifting down toward the distant forest canopy like ordinary ash.
Its target eradicated, the blue orb dimmed slightly, its violent hum settling into a low thrum. It smoothly altered its trajectory, tearing back through the clouds toward its master.
Back on the devastated battlefield, Naruto and Gaara remained frozen, their eyes locked on the horizon. Neither of them possessed the visual prowess to see the slaughter that had just occurred tens of kilometers away. All they had witnessed was a singular streak of blue light carving a scar across the heavens, followed by an eerie, absolute silence.
A sharp whistle of displaced air snapped their attention back. The blue orb materialized from the sky, decelerating instantly to land with feather-light precision in the center of Akira's waiting palm.
"Not bad, Second Tsuchikage," Akira murmured, his tone carrying a trace of dry amusement.
He slowly closed his fingers. The azure star melted into his skin, its terrifying chakra signature vanishing without a trace, as if it had never existed at all.
Naruto stood paralyzed, his jaw hanging slightly open as he stared at Akira's empty hand. "Tea... Teacher..." he stammered, pointing a trembling finger at the sky. "What about the bandage man? Is he... is he taken care of?"
Akira casually brushed his hands together, dusting off non-existent dirt.
"Of course," he replied, his voice calm and utterly matter-of-fact. "I told you. He could not escape."
Naruto slowly turned his head to look at Gaara. The young Kazekage met his gaze, and in the silence that followed, both boys saw the exact same deep, terrifying shock mirrored in each other's eyes.
Far away, hidden deep beneath the borders of the Land of Rice Fields, the atmosphere inside a dimly lit underground laboratory was suffocatingly heavy. Rows of glass containers bubbled with strange fluids, casting sickly green shadows against the stone walls.
Resting on the highest shelf of a wooden rack, a specialized talisman bearing the name of the Second Tsuchikage suddenly ignited. The paper burned with a flash of cold fire, crumbling into a pile of dead gray ash the exact moment Mū's soul was devoured.
Orochimaru stood rigidly before his steel workbench, his pale fingers wrapped around a thick glass test tube. His golden, serpentine eyes were locked unblinkingly onto the pile of ash.
Crack.
The reinforced glass could not withstand the sudden, vice-like pressure of his grip. It shattered instantly, driving jagged shards into his pale skin. Bright red blood mixed with the chemical fluid, dripping steadily through the gaps in his fingers to stain the pristine metal table below. He didn't even flinch.
Mū was not some disposable pawn. He was a legendary powerhouse, a kage who had stood at the absolute pinnacle of the shinobi world. Even if the man found himself outmatched in raw destructive power, his mastery of flight and absolute invisibility meant that retreating should have been effortless. How could a monster of that caliber be completely eradicated, his soul severed from the tether in a single instant?
And more terrifyingly... what was that deep blue light?
Through the mental link of the reanimation jutsu, Orochimaru had caught one final, fragmented glimpse through Mū's eyes. He had seen the absolute destruction of the legendary Dust Release—shattered like cheap glass by a single, condensed star.
"Uchiha Akira..." Orochimaru hissed, his voice trembling with a sickening mixture of awe and raw terror. "What kind of monster are you... exactly?"
The sheer, paralyzing fear of an entity he could not comprehend, violently clashing with the bitter reality of his grand schemes crumbling to dust, ignited a spark of pure, unadulterated madness within the Sannin's chest. The calm, calculating facade he had maintained for decades shattered.
"Bastard!" Orochimaru shrieked, his voice tearing into a guttural roar.
He swung his bleeding arm in a wide, vicious arc.
Hidden Shadow Snake Hands!
Dozens of thick, venomous pythons erupted crazily from his sleeves in a writhing mass of scales and fangs. The massive serpents crashed into the laboratory tables, smashing expensive equipment, shattering containment tanks, and obliterating everything in their path.
"Damn it! Damn it! Damn it!" Orochimaru cursed, his golden eyes wide and bloodshot. Like a cornered beast driven to absolute madness, he tore through his own sanctuary, the sounds of his furious destruction echoing endlessly through the dark, subterranean halls.
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