In truth, none of the girls were "young" by shinobi standards anymore.
Yes, they were not even halfway there and still very far from that ideal shinobi peak, that sweet spot in the mid-thirties to mid-forties when body and spirit balanced perfectly, a peak most shinobi never lived long enough to reach, but measured against when the greatest prodigies in history had attained comparable power?
They weren't early at all. If anything, they were exactly on pace.
And if Kimimaro were completely objective, he would admit one more thing:
Against crowds, platoons, most elite jōnin, or even those "quasi-kage," each of the girls already counted as a genuine low-Kage threat at least by this point.
Not because of raw polish or experience, but because their abilities were simply too anomalous, advanced, specialized beyond what the shinobi world had answers for.
Abilities close to no one in the world had decent counters or recorded data for.
Reika wielded a chakra pool and Ice Release density worthy of a natural disaster.
Saya possessed a one-of-a-kind dōjutsu whose applications literally no archive had ever documented.
Emi combined divergent chakra forms with Hyūga Gentle Fist in a way the clan would have called heretical and unprecedented.
Even Akane, the most "traditional" of them, held two affinities, including lightning, rare even among the Uchiha, and her Sharingan had evolved far past the usual tomoe's limits now.
Their problem wasn't talent. It wasn't even power.
Their opponent was simply wrong for their experience level.
They had run into him.
The walking archive.
The man with the widest technical arsenal on the continent.
The one shinobi alive who could read their strange, exotic abilities on sight and respond as if he'd trained against them for decades.
Against anyone else, their uniqueness would have been a trump card.
Against Orochimaru, it only meant their secrets were being dissected in real time.
This was their first true Kage-level trial, and fate had thrown them at perhaps the single trickiest High-Kage in existence, a creature who could nullify almost any niche advantage by virtue of sheer versatility and centuries of accumulated understanding he had acess to.
Kimimaro understood that more than anyone.
Yes, he could even call himself "mid-Kage" if he imagined some random elite jōnin or one of those paper-thin, "honorary" Kage like Rasa standing in front of him.
He had no doubt he could tear through several of that type at once by now.
So, yes, his bone techniques and Yang Seal let him contend with such 'monsters' most shinobi ever would flee from already.
But in front of Orochimaru?
He didn't dare pretend the gap between them was a single clean step like that.
It felt like a precipice — a dark plateau between what he was and what Orochimaru embodied.
Only if they survived this, this hell-difficulty baptism of fire at the very start of their ascent, sharpened by a kind of concentrated life-and-death struggle on every front that most shinobi never experienced in their entire lives, could they truthfully claim those levels in full.
Not only through the 'crash-course' of experience and battlefield instinct, but in raw skill as well, every technique they possessed being polished toward its sharpest possible edge.
Assuming, of course, they didn't break first and fail to reach that refinement once too late.
...
Eventually, Orochimaru shifted gears again once he realised they won't go down that easily.
His clones widened their jaws and disgorged a fresh, but more massive tide of serpents, the ground swelling and crawling as if the earth itself had turned hostile.
The battlefield drowned under coils and fangs.
Some snakes shot past Kimimaro's front line entirely, slithering straight for the nearby isolated cultists who held the ritual circle, slowly binding limbs, choking throats, and sinking venom wherever they could.
The moment he sensed the strange ritual, which he had never encountered before, beginning to tug at his clarity and tempo, Orochimaru responded with surgical cruelty.
But these snakes were also different.
Some of their jaws hinged open wider than bone should allow, and thin metal gleams flashed between fangs.
Blades.
Hundreds of such snakes, each one spitting a sharp projectile as naturally as venom.
The projectiles whistled through the air, ricocheting off frozen earth, blood constructs, and even Kimimaro's bone blade, turning the battlefield into a storm of steel threaded through scales.
It wasn't random.
It was a technique refined through years of anatomical modification.
Snakes that could bite, bind, poison… and now fire weapons from within their bodies.
The pressure doubled instantly.
And then, with that cold, amused decisiveness of someone who still hadn't needed to take things seriously, he also began layering ninjutsu into the chaos, earth splitting under them, wind blades slicing through ash and mist, fire tongues whipping between the clones' positions, water spears erupting from every unexpected angle.
The field shifted again, becoming the kind of nightmare only someone who had mastered all five natures could weave while smiling.
That all had subsequently allowed him to already maneuver the field into the shape he desired.
The five of them were no longer even remotely a formation, but scattered islands in a storm, exactly as Orochimaru intended.
Separation was the true goal, not the snakes, not the pressure.
Once fractured, the battlefield belonged to him.
His main body drifted toward Kimimaro with predatory ease, confident he could handle the Kaguya alone.
The four shadow clones angled themselves toward the girls, each clone judging its assigned target with that same surgical certainty.
For them, it would be enough.
In Orochimaru's mind, the equation was simple from the beginning.
Divide first. Then harvest them one by one.
And he knew that they knew it was not his arrogance.
Emi was already spinning through half the field, her Rotation widened far beyond anything a Hyūga in Konoha would have dared to attempt, a vortex tens of meters across.
Wind-laced arcs shrieked from her palms, lightning threaded through them in sharp blue needles, vacuum bursts collapsing the air with each strike.
Yang overgrowth techniques lashed out in snapping tendrils whenever she caught a snake or a clone's limb within reach, while her Yin-based gen-taijutsu flickered through her movements in tight, precise pulses.
Her unique, razor-fine internal vision let her see every chakra coil, every filament, every microscopic shift in real time, and that alone made the impossible possible, allowing her to shape and master all four of those releases with unnerving precision ever since Kimimaro first recommended and explained all of that to her, not too long after their initial meeting.
But even with all of that layered together, she was being pushed back step after step.
Orochimaru's gaze slid toward Emi in the middle of a clash.
A thin, serpentine smile curled across his face.
"So the Hyūga have not gone extinct in spirit after all..." he mused.
"Two elemental, and two conceptual chakra releases... All not only mastered but also braided into the Gentle Fist perfectly. A delightful desecration of tradition, I must say. And far more fitting of a 'Main Branch' than the useless wastes sitting in that compound."
His amusement sharpened, eyes narrowing with predatory curiosity.
"Though I do wonder… how much longer that little seal of yours will stay so calm."
From then on, the battle quickly resumed, and his clone met her every technique with an ease that felt malicious.
Its defenses were seamless, its offense relentless, sliding between long-range pressure and sudden fangs of close-quarters speed.
No matter how wide her Rotation grew, no matter how fast her vacuum palms fired… his barrage never slowed.
Only her super-vision and swiftly dwindling chakra reserves were keeping her in the game.
Saya's battlefield was carnage in motion.
Red arcs slashed the air, bright enough to stain the trees, while snakes lunged from every direction like a nest exploding all at once.
Her Ketsuryūgan gleamed crimson, rippling like liquid glass.
Right away, she aimed to lock a clone in genjutsu, but Orochimaru's shifting form broke the technique before it even began.
One moment, he had a face, the next a neck stretching like a rope, then a torso twisting around itself, limbs lengthening, splitting, retracting.
Before the clone tore itself apart with its own contortions and finally dispersed, it flicked through a seal mid-twist and spat out a fresh replacement beside it, or another one was simply carried inside some medium snake from the underground, made by the real body from a distance.
Kimimaro's previous plan crumbled almost immediately.
Because as long as Orochimaru's true body held even a modest reservoir of chakra, he could replace every defeated clone without pause.
The only thing limiting him wasn't effort or technique, but the simple mathematics of divided chakra; he couldn't rationally create more, yet he could maintain the ones he had endlessly.
And so there was no stable point for her dojutsu to anchor onto, no fixed expression, no continuous line of sight.
She could target a mind through presence alone now, after evolving her Ketsuryūgan with Kimimaro's help, but only if the opponent was 'weaker'.
Orochimaru was not.
Not even close.
And worse:
She couldn't even reach his blood to further use as a medium.
Whatever body modifications he'd done, his internal flow was so distorted she couldn't catch a single stable signature to manipulate.
Infuriating.
So Saya adapted.
For the first time in her life, she fought almost entirely at mid-range.
She vaulted, spun, flipped, narrowly avoiding snapping jaws and lashing serpents, her scythe carving wide arcs to clear space while her eyes bled power.
Her best physical strength, among the four girls, kept her alive.
Her similar chakra enhancements kept her fast.
Her instincts kept her unpredictable enough, too.
However, it was her newly expanded mid-range, wide-area arsenal that was the only thing keeping her in the fight at all, truly.
It worked only because she could now masterfully flood her own blood fragments with pre-shaped Yang Release, the same principle Kimimaro used to supercharge his bone growth.
The two applications were cousins, born from the same logic of shaping living matter with a catalyst instead of self-destruction.
It wasn't just her steadily growing mastery of Yang Release, the one Kimimaro had drilled into her with relentless insistence, telling her to train it day after day.
In truth, she had also eventually gained a Yang Seal of her own from him.
Kimimaro and Reika had spent months preparing it, and transcribed the seal into her body, carefully, layer by layer, until it harmonized with her bloodline rather than ripping it apart.
What he used for bones, she now used for blood.
Kimimaro, in his own words, refused to waste a concept he'd created by leaving it exclusive to himself.
And, after all, out of all four Blessed, only Saya manipulated living matter directly through kekkei genkai the way he did.
Their mediums differed, bone and blood, yet the underlying principle was the same.
Both were living tissues.
Both could be catalyzed instead of consumed.
Instead of Kimimaro burning through his own skeleton, or Saya literally draining herself dry every time she summoned a technique, the stored Yang acted as pure fuel.
The seal provided the mass, the chakra, the spark of life. No loss of vitality.
No shortening of lifespan or hemorrhagic shock.
Only growth, refinement, and output.
Saya's seal also manifested as two dark red dot-marks near her upper chest, close to her heart, still shaped in deliberate mimicry of Kimimaro's, exactly as she'd wanted.
The placement also clearly wasn't random.
It suited her nature, symbolic in its own way.
It tied her power to the person she followed, right over the place where her devotion beat the loudest.
Hidden under her upper visible mesh armor, rarely visible, yet now humming under the skin with quiet, dangerous strength.
It let her fight like this.
It let her endure.
Blood Art: Sanguine Shuriken.
Razor-thin crimson discs burst into the air, hundreds of them, swirling like a storm of ruby glass. Some tracked, some detonated, some veered unpredictably.
Blood Art: Crimson Spears.
Three massive spears erupted from her hand and forearm, spinning forward with terrifying force, each threaded with chakra that would rot an enemy's movement if it struck.
However, Orochimaru simply shaped a tight, shimmering barrier around himself and slid through the chaos as if it weren't even there, cutting straight toward her with that effortless predator's glide.
'How in the hell does he even know barrier techniques at that level…' Saya swallowed, mind racing.
Reika and Ashina had drilled enough theory into her that she knew exactly what she was looking at.
Barriers weren't simple.
They were a hybrid field made from sealing theory, jutsu-shiki formulae, and high-grade chakra shaping.
Even most Uzumaki specialists struggled with the finer points.
The idea that Orochimaru could just pull one out mid-charge, with that kind of precision, felt like an insult to the entire concept.
Hemocraft Barrier: Blood Dome.
A crimson shell snapped into place around her, sizzling with chakra. Snake fangs clanged uselessly against its surface, breaking teeth.
She hissed through her teeth and broke the dome deliberately, this time, knowing that it would be even worse to constantly be on the back foot, so she ended up launching herself outward with explosive force.
And she didn't stop.
She gradually began unleashing everything she'd mastered over the last two and a half years, every technique sharpened by training and, in no small part, by the power her Yang Seal now let her wield.
Blood Web — sheets of adhesive crimson threads trying to snare the popping ordinary snake-like clones by the limbs.
Sanguine Maw — a beast-shaped mass of blood that lunged like a wolf.
Crimson Tendril Net — spiked ropes snapping toward Orochimaru in layered patterns.
Scarlet Slime — viscous traps that corroded chakra on contact.
Blood Dragon — her largest, serpentine construct of her own, roaring as it barreled forward with pulverizing force.
All of them beautiful.
All of them lethal.
All of them blocked.
Orochimaru and his small and medium snakes slipped through her nets like water, dodged her beasts with impossible contortions, burrowed under her dragon, or erased her work with bursts of jutsu.
Mud clones surged from the ground to absorb her blood dragons and sludge-born constructs, their forms collapsing into muck that neutralized her chakra before she could reshape it.
Serpents erupted from every blind angle to bind and disrupt her momentum, their bodies twisting with impossible flexibility, snapping at her ankles and wrists, forcing constant evasions.
A sudden whip of razor wind shredded her Sanguine Shuriken and scattered her Crimson Spears into harmless droplets, while a pressure burst of air nearly toppled her stance.
Then came the earth, subtle and cruel — volleys of stone needles erupting in tight, punishing angles meant to herd her back, slow her steps, and choke her positioning until she had no good footing left.
And all of that was only the prelude.
Orochimaru wove seamlessly through every nature, shifting from one to the next as if switching masks on a stage.
Lightning lanced through the blood mist, fire scattered her slimes, water serpents surged to devour her wolf-like and other creations.
He could draw from a library of techniques that would take lesser shinobi lifetimes to master.
He could unleash A-rank jutsu across all five elemental natures without pause if needed.
And he did so with the detached boredom of someone paging through a worn-out book.
Substitution techniques so clean they barely disturbed the grass.
He countered her in every direction with layered, perfectly sequenced mastery.
When Saya's Blood Dragon crashed through a ridge of earth and shattered in red mist, Orochimaru finally spared her a longer look.
"A Chinoike… how unexpected," he purred.
"And improved. Blood shaped with Yang, and not dying from it. A rarity."
Another twist of his neck, another amused hum.
"Your clan rotted in obscurity in that valley… a waste so profound it borders on insult to the shinobi world."
"But your power won't be squandered ever again. I'll personally put it to very proper use."
Saya growled in frustration, teeth bared, as her blood arts swallowed half the clearing in red haze but still failed to land a killing blow.
And yet she endured.
She kept up.
But it was costing her.
She was burning chakra at a terrifying rate.
Keeping pace with Orochimaru, even just his clones, was draining her dry.
She could hold for now.
But she would not last long.
She could only hope Kimimaro would force Orochimaru to burn through enough chakra to slow him down first.
But even that hope felt thin.
Because Orochimaru likely didn't rely on raw chakra the way other Kage-levels did.
His body was the weapon, the engine, the abomination.
The snakes alone did half the work for him — endless, cheap, fast, and layered with tricks she couldn't even name.
And she had no idea what else he was holding back in that distant clash.
What other horrors he hadn't shown yet.
For someone like Saya, whose bloodthirst ran deeper than her fear, that flicker of dread meant something.
Despite her nature, even she was worried now.