Orochimaru, half-emerged inside one of the serpent mouths high in the air, finally noticed the pattern.
Kimimaro wasn't fleeing.
He was running straight toward the Uchiha girl, his clone had been fighting, for some reason.
A faint, irritated click echoed in Orochimaru's mind.
"Not good…" he muttered.
Something about this situation felt vaguely wrong to him, for some reason, and was giving him some dangerous deja vu, even.
Additionally, in this Eight Branches form, Orochimaru was overwhelmingly strong, but not faster than Kimimaro.
He couldn't allow this to continue.
He mentally urged the Tobirama and Hashirama Edo bodies to unleash the strongest techniques their imperfect forms could still produce, coordinating their assault with the movement of the serpent heads that followed.
Both Hokage surged forward, hands already weaving signs.
At the same time, Orochimaru elongated several serpent heads to their absolute limit, stretching their necks until they were like pale, titanic spears arcing across the battlefield.
He remained inside one of the extended mouths, riding it forward with predatory intent.
Kimimaro had to respond instantly.
He switched into a newly improvised adaptation of Willow and Larch.
A ranged variant.
A barrage variant.
From Willow, he launched long, aerodynamic bone spears, shaped for cutting arcs mid-air.
From Larch, he fired smaller, kunai-like spikes, but infinitely sharper than any metal tool.
Each one launched with violent precision.
This improvised technique, an airborne, pressure-ejected bone barrage, felt like a natural evolution of both dances.
He called it:
The Dance of the Falling Branches.
He used it while dodging, weaving between the elongated serpent necks with the new mobility patterns of his White Bastion Frame.
The barrage tore through Mokuton and water jets from the regenerated Hokage, including their not-so-durable bodies, buying precious seconds.
But not without cost.
Focusing on long-range bone volleys and evasion slowed him just enough for the cluster of giant serpent heads to converge again around him.
So he retaliated.
Another massive, multi-meter Flower erupted from his arm with a brutal, mechanical snap.
He swung it in one clean arc, severing two of the colossal heads outright, one after another.
Venom and flesh rained through the air.
But one more head cornered him from the flank, its maw opening to release a thick, dangerous mist of venom of some sort.
Even a small leak of that poisonous cloud slipping beneath his armor could be fatal, or at least deeply compromising, Kimimaro felt.
Then—another threat.
From a blind angle, Orochimaru emerged himself, bursting out from a serpent throat.
And from his mouth shot the Kusanagi sword, elongating in an instant as it lunged toward Kimimaro—not to pierce him, which the armor would resist, but to physically shove him into the drifting cloud of poison.
A perfect forcing vector.
For anyone else.
But as the blade connected with the armor, Kimimaro's mind snapped to a new idea.
Water pressure.
Directional rerouting.
He shifted a fraction of chakra through the micro-gaps of the Frame, diverting the sword's pushing force along a different vector.
Instead of being shoved into the poison cloud, he let the impact launch him farther, faster, and most importantly, higher as the main vector, where he would be far more visible.
And a little closer toward Akane's position again as well.
Exactly where he needed to be.
And not just that.
In that instant, Kimimaro's grin twisted into something almost feral.
Whether the Kusanagi was coated in poison or not no longer mattered.
He forced an artificial gap open in his torso, parting the bone armor with a split-second command to the Frame, and allowed the blade to punch straight through him.
The impact hurled him across the battlefield with brutal speed, exactly as he intended.
Orochimaru, still grotesquely spitting out the endlessly extending sword, froze for a moment in genuine shock.
He hadn't expected that.
He hadn't expected Kimimaro to use being impaled as propulsion.
He didn't even react in time.
The sword, with Kimimaro skewered on it, arced upward first, then dipped downward, angling perfectly toward the general area where Akane fought.
High in the air, locked in combat with one of Orochimaru's shadow clones, Akane finally saw it.
Kimimaro.
Impaled through the torso by a monstrous, elongated serpent neck and sword.
Cracks forming across his bone armor.
Blood scattering in red droplets through the air.
His body flung helplessly toward the devastated terrain near her.
It was unmistakable.
It was visible from anywhere in the vicinity.
And her eyes widened as he fell.
For a heartbeat, Akane didn't breathe.
Her Sharingan froze on the image of him, Kimimaro, the one person who had refused to discard her, the one who never flinched at her pride or temper, the one who had pulled her out of Root's pursuit, saved her dad, and shaped her into something more than a survivor.
Impaled.
Falling.
Blood scattering like red dust.
Something inside her cracked with an audible snap.
Her chest tightened, breath caught, and a violent surge of emotion flooded through her, fear, rage, grief, all twisted into a single, unbearable spike that felt like it tore straight through her eyes.
Her pupils warped.
Her tomoe spun.
And then they shattered.
Pain lanced through her skull, so sharp it nearly tore her vision apart, the world tilting, sharpening, darkening all at once as the more inky Mangekyō Sharingan bloomed open.
The pattern was peculiar. Each eye twisted into a split, inward-curling design, like opposing blades folding toward the center, or petals tearing themselves apart as they closed.
The symmetry was broken; it was as if the symbol itself were collapsing inward, consuming its own shape.
Chakra howled through her coils, raw and unrestrained, surging into patterns her body had never used before.
A pitch-black skeletal frame erupted around her in the same instant, ribs snapping into existence like a guardian made of wrath.
Her Susanoo.
Untamed.
Instinctual.
Half-formed.
The Orochimaru clone fighting her didn't even process it before she crushed him.
The skeletal arm snapped forward, grabbed him mid-charge, and pulverized his upper body against a shattered boulder.
Akane didn't care.
She didn't even look.
Her gaze was locked entirely on Kimimaro's falling form.
Her chakra surged again, the Susanoo's bones thickening around her as she bulldozed across the broken terrain, each step a quake, her aura wild and cracked at the edges.
"Kimimaro!"
Her voice trembled between fury and desperation.
She didn't think.
She didn't plan.
She just moved.
The Susanoo charged straight toward him, skeletal arms tearing through debris, and propelling her as she raced to reach him before the ground or Orochimaru could.
She reached Kimimaro just in time.
One massive skeletal arm scooped his falling body out of the air.
The other smashed the elongated Kusanagi sword aside with a thunderous backhand, sending the blade recoiling all the way to its source.
Inside the ribcage, Akane held him tightly.
His bone armor had fully dissolved.
His torso was torn open where the sword had passed through.
Blood soaked her hands.
"Hold on!" she screamed, voice cracking inside the Susanoo's skull chamber.
Across the field, Orochimaru finally retracted the sword back into his mouth.
Faint traces of Kimimaro's blood still clung to the tip before he swallowed it down.
He stared at the scene in genuine shock.
"Mangekyō Sharingan…" he muttered.
A cold ripple of recognition slid through him, a deja vu he had hoped never to feel again.
Itachi.
That painful humiliation.
And suddenly, everything fit.
His movements.
His direction.
His willingness to be impaled.
The perfect visibility of the moment.
The boy had been using himself as bait.
A sacrifice to force the girl's Mangekyō awake.
To instantly produce a new top-tier fighter on their side.
Orochimaru clicked his tongue softly.
Infuriatingly clever.
But then another thought crept in.
Was it really worth it?
The wound Kimimaro took was severe, even catastrophic.
Worse, Orochimaru always kept a layer of poison on the Kusanagi blade by default.
So, although he hadn't aimed to poison the boy a moment ago with it, only to shove him into the venom cloud mechanically, instead, trace amounts from the sword would still have entered Kimimaro's system by now.
Combined with the puncture wound, it was almost certainly lethal.
A near-guarantee of death.
The girl's Mangekyō was frightening, yes.
But she was not Itachi.
And she had only just awakened it.
Orochimaru's shock faded into cold calculation.
"I am still stronger than her as well," he whispered to himself.
New plan.
He simply needed to defeat her instead of the boy as his primary target now.
He didn't even need Kaguya alive anymore as the main vessel, either.
He needed the Uchiha, her eyes, her potential.
Capture her.
Then harvest the rest.
But he was running low on chakra.
The Eight Branches form demanded a constant trickle merely to stay coherent.
He needed to reclaim what he could.
With a sharp command, he dispelled the three remaining shadow clones still fighting the other girls elsewhere.
Their chakra and memories snapped back into him in a rush, stabilizing his body and feeding the monstrous serpent form just enough to keep it intact.
Orochimaru exhaled slowly.
"Now… let us begin again."
Eight regenerated serpent heads gradually shifted toward Akane's Susanoo.