Starting from a few minutes ago, the clash between Kimimaro and Orochimaru had shifted into something monstrous.
Orochimaru finally stopped pretending.
He shed whatever restraints he'd been indulging himself with earlier and unleashed the kind of overwhelming, suffocating onslaught that only someone like him could call "fighting seriously."
Thousands of snakes promptly erupted around Kimimaro, layered in overlapping, crushing waves, gradually.
Hundreds of them were further armed, razor-edged blades extending from their jaws or tails, others engraved with jagged jutsu-shiki that pulsed with corrosive chakra the moment they touched air.
And above that living sea of coils and fangs, Orochimaru began summoning fresh batches of temporary shadow clones, each clone immediately weaving the highest rank elemental fusion techniques that came crashing down in warped, destructive combinations.
Fire that twisted with wind into vacuum-flares.
Lightning wrapped in earth to produce exploding pillars.
Water laced with wind to form slicing, rotating geysers.
It was as if he were firing off the entirety of his personal library at once.
It felt reminiscent of what Hiruzen Sarutobi, the so-called Professor, had once been capable of in his true prime.
Then the battlefield shook.
A massive, purple-scaled form tore out of the earth with an enraged hiss, massive enough to bend the tree line.
Manda.
Orochimaru's premier serpent of Ryūchi Cave, the apex summon he relied on when subtlety no longer mattered.
The monstrous serpent whipped its body across the field with lethal fury, wiping out Kimimaro's paths of escape in arcs that pulverized stone, cutting him from the other side.
But Orochimaru wasn't finished.
His main body—still hidden behind layers of misdirection, illusions, modified snake-shed decoys, and dozens of false Kusunagi strikes—prepared for the final blow.
And then came another true nightmare for Kimimaro.
Two coffins slammed into the ground with hollow thuds, sealing tags peeling open.
Hashirama.
Tobirama.
Imperfect, yes—but Orochimaru's refinement of Edo Tensei made them far from harmless.
These weren't Tobirama's early disposable concept of suicide constructs for his "Mutually Multiplying Explosive Tags" jutsu.
These ones carried vestiges of their actual legendary power, enough to make the air freeze in tension.
Forest erupted from the ground, swallowing half the battlefield.
Torrents of water crashed from impossible angles, splitting stone and tearing apart ice in long, violent arcs.
When Kimimaro saw all of this converge on him at once, for a moment, he felt as if the entire world had turned its killing intent toward him alone.
And, disturbingly…
He finally felt excited.
He had never underestimated Orochimaru's Edo Tensei, not even the imperfect forms.
Hashirama's legendary wood techniques and Tobirama's water mastery, arriving at the same time, were the kind of impossible threat that should flatten anyone below true Kage-tier.
Kimimaro, meanwhile, had no shadow clones.
No duplicates.
No extra bodies.
No decoys or backups.
It was him.
Only him.
The eye of the storm.
The deadliest moment of his life.
But he had never been a greenhouse flower.
He was a venomous bloom raised in poison and sharpened by abandonment.
He did not break.
Nine out of ten people would have.
He refused.
His Yang Seal flared to its full release, all the stored chakra gathered across two and a half years burning down rapidly, the markings crawling and branching across his skin like black roots.
At the same time, Orochimaru was clearly going all out, too.
Neither of them hid anything anymore.
Kimimaro's entire body was already perfectly encased in the external exoskeleton-like armor he'd been perfecting for months: dense, layered bone plating shaped over his muscles and joints, but not grotesque like the original Kimimaro's internal self-destroying armor.
This version was far superior in everything.
The White Bastion Frame
Hard not because it was not his densest, most durable, brute bone, but because he had also woven into it both earth-nature densification principles for structural integrity and water-nature refinement for elasticity and surface sharpness.
It wasn't merely durable.
It was engineered.
Cracks splintered across the plates as he tore through the combined assault, yet he moved without slowing, a relentless engine of motion, dodging, tanking, cutting, adapting with every breath inside this first-worn form that was far more than armor.
Orochimaru's strongest elemental barrages that managed to hit him broke uselessly against him, splintering across bone that regenerated as fast as it cracked.
Every blast of fire, every shredding gust, every crushing column of earth simply dispersed against the shifting plates of his armor, the damage knitting itself shut before the next strike even landed.
Hashirama's wooden tendrils hammered down from above.
He severed them mid-fall, shards of frozen sap scattering like dust.
A fresh tide of serpents surged toward him.
He blurred through them faster than before, the White Bastion Frame not hindering him but sharpening his momentum, each movement cleaner, more optimized, more inevitable.
However, just then, water dragons spiraled toward him from Tobirama's direction, several coiling together into a single crushing torrent.
There was no slipping between these, no clever angle to parry.
This wasn't a simple elemental blast, nor one of Orochimaru's volatile fusion tricks.
This was Tobirama Senju's water, the kind that pinned targets in place, drowned movement, and smothered regeneration by sheer unrelenting pressure.
For the first time, Kimimaro felt a technique that could hold him still long enough to matter.
And just as he feared, the deluge swallowed him whole in less than a heartbeat, cold force battering against bone, nerve, and chakra coil all at once.
For a moment, he felt the world narrowing, pressure closing around him like a vice.
And under that suffocating weight, something in him cracked.
Not in despair, but in release.
A pulse of discipline, danger, and sheer refusal surged through his core. His frame tightened, his chakra roared, and the familiar internal gate strained against its limit.
He didn't decide to open it.
He forced it.
The Third Gate tore open mid-battle, flooding through him in a violent rush of clarity and power as he exploded back out of the water dragon with a shockwave of bone and boiling chakra.
Normally impossible to use sophisticated ninjutsu while more than two of the Inner Gates rampaged through one's system, one created internal chaos that prevented external molding.
But Kimimaro wasn't molding external ninjutsu.
He was activating the deepest layer of his Shikotsumyaku birth bloodline instinctively.
The one tied directly to his Yang Seal as well.
The one meant to evolve.
His finger joint bones erupted in a machine-gun haze, no longer Ten-Finger Drilling Bullets but an evolved Yang barrage, Endless Finger Drilling Bullets, refined and accelerated, each shard layered with earth for tuned velocity and water for razor-clean penetration, hundreds launching in interlocking spirals that tore through the air like a skeletal storm.
They punched straight through the Edo bodies of Tobirama and Hashirama the instant the two finally slipped into striking range, the barrage tearing through them like a skeletal hailstorm. The impact staggered their forms, ripping numerous chunks out faster than their regeneration could immediately answer, forcing Orochimaru to yank both reanimated Hokage back several steps while their borrowed flesh scrambled to reassemble itself.
Then came even the larger new and old forms.
Dance of the Clematis: Vine tore out from the armored ridge along his spine externally in a sweeping arc, thicker, longer, and far more forceful than anything the original Kimimaro had ever manifested, even at the height of Orochimaru's Cursed Seal second form.
This time, there was nothing grotesque clinging to him at all, no parasitic beast-flesh twisting his form, no foreign brand scarring him as someone else's property, no warped mutation he once wore with that strange, empty pride.
Only power that was his, born of his will alone.
Refined. Claimed. Controlled.
Then finally came Dance of the Clematis: Flower, proudly blooming open in a burst of honed sharpness, wider and deadlier than its predecessor had ever been, every edge a declaration.
All of it was born from his own discipline and design, a result of years of refinement and the strength stored within his Yang Seal.
Not that revolting brand of servitude he once carried, not the cursed slave-mark that had puppeteered his body and stolen his fate.
A rejection of the fate Orochimaru once wrote for him.
A weapon pointed back at the man who had tried to turn him into a tool.
It was symbolic.
A break from his original fate.
The White Bastion Frame shifted over him like a pale, white exoskeleton, its plates locking and unfolding with the ease of living muscle.
The Vine erupted from the reinforced ridge along his spine first, and the Flower followed in a precise, engineered snap from a hardened shoulder socket, bone, and armor moving together as a single, seamless mechanism.
Water flowed through the micro-gaps of the Frame like a living coolant, guided by five years of elemental immersion, razor-sharp close-range sensory perception, and very meticulous chakra control. It kept the entire structure flexible, mobile, and shock-absorbent, letting the armor breathe and move as if it were another layer of muscle rather than hardened bone.
Earth Release, by contrast, operated like a silent engine beneath it all. It lightened the plates the instant he moved, then hardened them into brutal density the moment they struck or were struck. He didn't have Iwagakure's two famous secret methods, but five years of parallel Earth-nature conditioning and an unparalleled intimacy with his own bone, an extension of his body, and will, let him recreate similar principles for his own living armour.
Only when shoved into a genuine life-or-death corner, every nerve lit and every instinct sharpened, did the Frame finally lock into its true form.
Under the crushing feedback of the strongest enemy he had ever faced, it refined itself in real time, compressed by the same pressure that turns coal into diamond. Moments earlier, it hadn't even been half this coherent.
So, his spine-borne whip then snapped backward first, a living spear reacting faster than thought, just as Manda finally surged out of the torn earth behind him to join the hunt.
The timing was perfect, instinct and calculation fused.
Kimimaro felt, with a cold and sudden certainty, that if Orochimaru dared to close in with the same reckless confidence he'd shown at the start of the battle, he could carve him apart outright, enough to seriously endanger even that obscene body of his. And if not Orochimaru himself, then at the very least his prized serpent avatar would be the first to pay for it.
After all, it wasn't only the armor that had evolved just now. The Frame had leapt forward because it had to, its complexity demanding real stress-testing to lock into place. But beneath that, something deeper had shifted.
He could feel it in his marrow. His bloodline itself had also taken another surprising step altogether. That was why he'd been able to manifest twin bone weapons on that massive scale, unlike ever before, why they'd formed so cleanly, so decisively.
And the armor, paradoxically, didn't slow him in the slightest. If anything, it had made him faster. Sharper. More lethal in close range than he had ever been.
This was perhaps what he had at the back of his mind all along, as this battle was going on.
Unlocking new levels wasn't a clean threshold or a ritual moment.
It very often happened mid-battle, when willpower crashed against something monstrous and refused to break. They hadn't gained anything new.
They had simply reached what had already been halfway present inside of them recently… just under pressure fierce enough to force it into the light.
As he thought this, the colossal serpent lunged, jaws wide enough to swallow him whole.
However, the Vine swiftly coiled around Manda's neck in a single violent twist, arresting that monstrous momentum with a crack of bone and muscle, now large enough to do that.
The ground split under the force of the grapple.
And then came the Flower almost instantaneously.
Also larger.
Heavier.
Sharper than anything that should logically exist.
A multi-meter lance of perfected bone, honed to a point so fine it provoked a physical chill just to look at it, drove forward in the same breath.
It struck the restrained serpent's skull cleanly, exploding through scale, bone, and brain in a single, execution-like thrust.
The impact detonated inside Manda's head.
The serpent shrieked, a deep, world-shaking bellow that ruptured into silence as Kimimaro's strike obliterated what little remained of its mind.
A rain of pulverized tissue and bone fragments burst outward across the clearing.
His bone armor propelled him through the shower of gore, advancing without hesitation, expression as calm as if he had simply taken another step in training.
From across the battlefield, Orochimaru's eyes widened, just a fraction, but enough to betray the shock snapping through him.
For a moment, he did not even process it.
His strongest summon for decades.
The "boss summon" of Ryūchi Cave.
Dead. Just like that.
And not only dead— killed cleanly, in one exchange, by someone who should have been overwhelmed, buried, and broken just moments ago.
Yet, instead, he had survived every layered assault.
He had endured the clones, the snakes, the elemental fusions, and the Edo Hokage assault.
And then he had killed Manda as if tearing down an inconvenient obstacle.
Orochimaru actually froze for a heartbeat, the reality sinking in.
However, it was not ever yet.
Finally—
Kimimaro planted his hand on the shuddering earth.
"Dance of the Seedling Fern."
Bone forests erupted like a tidal wave, devouring most of the remaining invading snakes, smashing through Mokuton branches, and tearing apart the battlefield.
He stood in the center of a battlefield that looked nothing like what had existed minutes ago.
What had once been forest was now nothing but ghostly, ethereal bone, an entire landscape bleached into a pale, unnatural world.
What once was soil became white fang.
Kimimaro had unleashed a version far beyond the original's—and did it without dying.
However, the triumph lasted less than a heartbeat.
Before Kimimaro could draw even a single breath of relief, the earth shuddered, a deep, bestial rumble rolling up from beneath the splintered roots and the forest of bone-spikes scattered across the clearing.
He felt it before he saw it.
A pressure.
A swelling.
A hideous, coiling surge of chakra thick with rage and dark excitement.
Orochimaru wasn't defeated.
He was provoked.
And he was changing again.
Kimimaro's eyes narrowed, breath steady.
'…So he's finally choosing his absolute limit.'
The temperature around him warped.
A wrongness that made instincts sharpen like knives.
Beneath the cracked soil, something vast squirmed.
Bodies separating, merging, multiplying.
As if a thousand serpents were trying to decide on a single monstrous form.
Flesh thickened, chakra ballooned, in a blink of an eye, each pulse twice as heavy as the last.
Branches.
Limbs.
Segments.
Kimimaro recognized the pattern immediately.
The forbidden transformation.
The colossal serpent aberration only Orochimaru would dare manifest.
His armor tightened over his ribs as he inhaled once, steam leaking from his teeth.
He was strong.
Stronger than ever.
His White Bastion Frame still held.
The Gates strained but didn't tear.
But even he knew it.
This body, compact, lethal, and refined, wasn't built to grapple a monster that size and chakra potency in a direct clash.
'So the real gamble starts here… with my life on the line.'
The biggest contingency he had prepared months ago, just in case this battle happened around this time and reached this point.
The plan that required putting his life on the line beyond any level he found acceptable… yet circumstances left him no alternative now.
He glanced, just subtly, past the storm of dust and shredded roots, toward another section of forest.
The foundation was laid.
His death was the final ingredient.
The catastrophe she needed.
The bloom that only opened when pushed to the edge of loss.
The earth split.
A colossal, twisting silhouette pushed its way free, Orochimaru's chakra turning so dense it vibrated in the marrow of Kimimaro's bones.
He tightened his grip.
'Come, then.'
A monstrous form formed in the dust and shadow, its many mouths opening at once.
Kimimaro spoke only to himself.
'Only another giant chakra monster on your scale could answer this… and give any of us a chance to see another day.'
His pulse steadied.
'…And I'll give everything I have to buy the moment she needs to awaken it, no matter the risk, no matter how much I have to leave to chance.'