The stadium wasn't holding the music: it was reinforcing.
Shrill, oscillating notes from Tayuya's flute ricocheted off the vaulted stone ceiling, bleeding into echoes that vibrated against Sasuke's ribs.
The sound arrived from four directions at once—a distorted acoustic maze designed to defeat spatial awareness.
Sasuke stood his ground, the three tomoe of his Sharingan spinning in a frantic attempt to filter the noise.
He tried to time his breathing to the staccato of the flute, attempting to triangulate Tayuya's position by the minute pressure shifts in the air.
He committed to a leftward lunge, eyes locked on a chakra flare behind a pillar.
He was wrong.
The geometry of the room caught the note and threw it back a millisecond late—a false echo that pulled his guard wide. The shirtless Doki swung into the gap before he could recalibrate.
The claw raked across his ribs.
The fabric of his shirt tore with a sharp zip, and the skin beneath burned as the energy-draining parasites began to burrow.
I can't... the rhythm is—
The thought dissolved into a familiar, numbing chill that radiated from the back of his neck. It was a cold, parasitic tide that swallowed the frustration, the strategy, and the pride of the Uchiha name. The "I" that calculated the distance to the exit and the "I" that remembered the name of the girl beneath him stalled and died.
The override took the wheel.
Sasuke's world narrowed.
The acoustic noise—the rattling gables, the overlapping echoes—deprioritized, fading into a dull, underwater hum.
In its place, the vision of the room vanished.
The only thing left was the sensory flare of Tayuya's flute—a rhythmic, pulsing spike of chakra that dominated his darkened field of vision.
He didn't decide to move. His muscles simply fired, locked onto the high-amplitude glare.
His first step was a violent overfire of his quads.
He skidded, his sandal catching a patch of frost-rimed grit, and he nearly tipped.
His body over-corrected with a jagged, spastic lurch that sent a jolt of pain through his ankle, but the sensation was discarded before it reached his awareness.
The shirtless Doki lunged again. Sasuke's fingers blurred through signs as a low-output Chidori sparked.
Zzzz-tick.
The electrical surge was a neural jump-start, forcing his heart into a violent, irregular rhythm—ba-dum, thump-thump, ba-thump— to bypass his fatigue.
The smell of scorched air filled his nose, and a sharp, metallic tang of iron flooded his tongue. Nerve conduction pain sizzled down his arm, his hands vibrating with a fine, electrical tremor that made the seals nearly illegible.
The beat was wrong; his heart failed to sync with the flute's staccato, creating a jarring, arrhythmic interference in his nervous system.
His hand seals stuttered; the final sign was incomplete as his fingers misfired, and the lightning blade flickered with an unstable whine.
When he launched toward the wall, his strike was mis-angled by an inch.
The stone splintered under a clumsy, forced impact. He over-torqued his shoulder, a dry pop echoing in the room, but he didn't reassess. He only saw the flare. The air above and behind him did not exist.
Sasuke launched off the wall, a living projectile cutting through the grey mist.
Tayuya's yellow eyes widened as he bypassed her guard. She shifted the melody—a frantic, staccato burst—but the command hit a lag.
Sasuke hit the ground and erupted upward.
He twisted, his weight slamming her into a stone pillar.
His boots slid on a patch of grit, his center of gravity nearly failing as the echo of his own movement confused his inner ear, but he used the slip to drive his weight harder into her center.
He tore the instrument from her grip. In a single motion of ego-less violence, he drove the wood into her shoulder. The flute pierced her skin with a wet, sickening crunch.
Sasuke remained pinned to her, but the organism was redlining. His breath failed to reinflate his lungs fully against the pressure of his own bunched muscles. A rhythmic tremor, no longer just motor but structural, vibrated through his left arm where the torque trauma had shredded the fibers.
His heart skipped, a jagged thud in his chest that misfired against the dying staccato of the flute.
His peripheral vision narrowed until the world was just a pinprick of dying pink hair and wood.
A terrifying pressure built behind his scapulae. A white-hot heat spiked in the bone, the skin stretching to the point of translucence. His vascular system surged, blood thumping with a rhythmic, heavy pressure against his dermal layers. Fascial thresholds reached their limit, the internal tension becoming a structural inevitability.
Only then did the shadow of the green Doki's club form above him.
Skin on his back split with a wet, ripping sound. Two massive, grey-brown appendages erupted—asymmetrical, fleshy webbed hands wet with blood. They snapped open with a leathery thud, intercepting the Doki's club mid-swing.
The impact sent a rebound shock through his spine, a brutal compression in his thoracic cavity that punched the air from his lungs. Even as the appendages held, the attachment sites at his scapulae shrieked, micro-tearing blooming in the muscle as the mass of the club dragged against his skeletal frame.
The stadium didn't go quiet all at once. For a long, airless minute, the only sound was a new, wet tempo.
Drip...drop...drip.
The blood hitting the stone became the only clock in the room.
Sasuke stood bent at an unnatural angle, his heart hammering a frantic, muffled rhythm that he couldn't feel. The wings gave a slow, autonomous twitch, sending a wave of dull vibration through his ribs. Tayuya choked on a mouthful of blood, her breath coming in ragged hitches.
The shirtless Doki overswung, its claws grinding into the floor with a rhythmic scree-clack, while the bandaged one dropped to a knee, its limbs twitching in mechanical decay.
Sasuke didn't blink. He stared at the stone, his eyes vacant and wide. The scent of ruptured muscle and cold stone grit filled the space, the flute's broken rhythm finally dead.
The grey wings shuddered and began to fold inward.
The pull came first—a deep, internal drag beneath his shoulder blades, as if something hooked behind his ribs was being wrenched free. Muscle bunched and seized around the retreating mass, fibers tightening too fast, too hard. The torn channels along his back constricted around the withdrawal, forcing the tissue inward through raw openings that had not finished bleeding.
His breath hitched.
The right side collapsed faster than the left. His balance shifted abruptly as the weight distribution changed mid-stance. A violent spasm rippled across his upper back, and for a fraction of a second his arms lost strength, elbows dipping as the supporting musculature misfired.
Then the pressure was gone.
The black markings dulled and withdrew in segments, the vascular surge draining away as capillaries constricted. The skin did not close cleanly; it puckered and stuck, wet against itself.
A sudden, crushing lactate crash hit him.
He attempted to step forward, but his right foot did not lift; it remained rooted to the grit as if he had forgotten how to signal the muscle. He stared at his own leg for a jagged, terrifying second, unsure of why it wouldn't move.
Then his knees buckled in a staggered, uncoordinated collapse that sent him crashing into the stone.
Temporal distortion hit him like a physical weight.
He didn't know if he had been standing there for ten seconds or ten hours. He looked at the blood on his hands, watching the tremor in his fingers.
For a moment, he thought the blood was from his own training years ago. He looked at the girl pinned to the pillar, his mind struggling to recall why her shoulder was pierced.
Then the localized trauma arrived.
A warm, sticky trickle of blood ran down his spine where the skin had been forced apart. His shirt clung to the raw, jagged tissue of his shoulder blades. The cold air hit the exposed muscle, a biting sting that made his vision flicker with black spots.
Every shallow breath felt like a needle pulling through a fresh wound. Stone grit stuck to the blood on his palms, the texture feeling alien and sharp.
The auditory distortion lingered, a ringing tinnitus that made the world sound muffled and distant as if his head were wrapped in gauze.
"Enough."
The voice arrived as a vibration in his jaw rather than a sound in the air. Orochimaru's syllables arrived with a jagged tape-delay, the tone harder to process than the cold air hitting his back.
He couldn't localize the direction; the stadium echoed with a hollow resonance that turned the command into a Choir of ghosts.
Sasuke stood—then fell back to his knees. He didn't remember the wall. He didn't remember the wings. He didn't even remember the girl beneath him.
On the balcony, Kabuto's pen pressed hard enough against his clipboard to leave a permanent indent. He scribbled a rapid line, his own breath coming slightly unevenly. "Fascinating," he whispered, the sound arriving to Sasuke as if from across a great canyon. "He didn't adapt. He surrendered. The executive function is entirely offline."
Orochimaru smiled, his pale skin appearing translucent in the shifting torchlight.
"He is merely becoming... compliant. The ego is such a clumsy weight. Don't you agree?"
Sasuke looked at the blood on his hands again. He didn't know whose it was.