The third eye snapped open, and the world fractured into glorious, hyper-focused geometry.
Through the vertical slit in his forehead, the freezing fog vanished. In its place, the forest burned with vivid, overlapping heat signatures and pulsing chakra currents. The Cursed Seal pumped a dark, blistering euphoria through his veins, gorging his blood vessels and pooling a heavy, boiling heat in his extremities that turned the damp chill of the montane air into a meaningless whisper against his bruised-red skin. His heart hammered against his ribs with a sickening rhythm. A fine, uncontrollable micro-tremor vibrated through his four lower hands, bleeding off the excess kinetic energy. Power tasted like iron and ozone on his elongated tongue. He stood upon the high branch, looking down at his prey.
Down on the moss-slicked stones, the girl with the twin buns breathed too fast. Her chest heaved, her chakra network sputtering with the erratic, jagged spikes of an exhausted, cornered animal. The Aburame patriarch had vanished into the trees. The Hyūga boy remained pinned down by Kyodaigumo's unending brood. She stood alone in the dark.
Kidōmaru leaned forward. Thrill burned in his chest, a roaring, addictive fire.
The girl slapped a massive scroll against the earth. She bit her thumb, smearing blood across the parchment in a desperate, frantic arc.
"Manipulated Tools: Heavenly Chain Disaster!"
Twin plumes of smoke erupted from the paper. Hundreds of weapons—kunai, shuriken, senbon, spiked chains, and heavy axes—blasted upward like a metallic geyser. They shrieked through the fog, a tidal wave of sharpened steel aimed directly at the canopy where he crouched.
Kidōmaru didn't dodge. He simply grinned, his elongated canines gleaming in the pale light, and clenched all six of his fists simultaneously.
The seemingly empty canopy above the girl instantly shimmered. A massive, intricately layered network of Spider Web Area threads, strung invisibly between the highest spruce branches long before the fight even began, snapped taut.
The ascending avalanche of steel hit the snare. The weapons did not pierce the threads. They adhered instantly. The thick, chakra-infused silk absorbed the kinetic force of the blast. The surrounding fir branches groaned and bowed violently under the sudden transfer of weight, a heavy shower of frost raining down from the canopy as the deadly storm froze in mid-air. Hundreds of weapons hung helplessly above her head like flies caught in amber.
Tenten stared upward, her dark eyes wide, the blood draining completely from her face.
"That's gonna cost you some points, Bun-chan," Kidōmaru laughed, the sound vibrating with a deep, demonic resonance from his widened jaw. He loved the look of absolute, crushing realization on a Konoha shinobi's face.
The adrenaline spike blurred his vision for a fraction of a second, the heat of the Cursed Seal overlapping with a phantom memory of woodsmoke.
He possessed only five years of age. He stood near a roaring campfire, tossing four stolen kunai in a rapid, blurring juggle. Around him, rough, scarred men hooted and cheered, slamming tankards of cheap alcohol together. Shutenmaro sat on a massive stump, entirely silent. The Bandit King watched his multi-limbed son with dark, calculating eyes.
A distraction from a drunken shout caused Kidōmaru's rhythm to falter. The sharpened edge of a kunai slashed directly across his small palm, laying the flesh open to the bone. Tears pricked his eyes, but he looked at his father. He clamped his jaw shut, spat a thick wad of golden fluid directly into the wound to seal it, and resumed the juggle, faster and more aggressively than before. He hungered only for the faint, singular twitch of his father's lips. Approval.
The vision snapped back to the frost-covered trail. An intense, localized ache flared behind Kidōmaru's third eye, forcing him to blink rapidly to correct a momentary misalignment in his depth perception. The tremor in his lower hands spiked, the Cursed Seal burning hotter to compensate for the jarring cognitive shift.
The girl below him hadn't broken. She inhaled sharply, her chakra flaring as she dropped her center of gravity, preparing to summon another scroll.
Kidōmaru didn't give her the time. He dropped from the canopy like a stone.
Before Tenten could even turn to run, Kidōmaru inhaled deeply and spat a thick, heavy rope of webbing. The Spider Bind hit her dead center. The force threw her violently backward until she slammed into the trunk of a spruce, the impact shaking the heavy branches above them. The adhesive threads wrapped around her torso and arms instantly, pinning her upper body to the rough bark.
The rigid, trapped weapons dangling above the girl triggered another phantom echo.
The grinding roar of shifting stone replaced the forest wind.
He possessed eight years of age now. Dust choked the air above the half-built structures of the Hidden Sound Village. Exposed wooden frames and massive steel girders littered the construction site.
Shutenmaro, the undisputed King of the border, stood with his head bowed slightly. He spoke in low, deferential tones to a pale man with serpent eyes and a sickeningly cold aura.
Kidōmaru sat on a crate nearby, his six hands gripping the rough wood. He watched the hierarchy of the world shift. His father bowed to no one, yet this snake commanded him effortlessly.
Across the site, an impossibly large seven-year-old boy with thick orange hair stepped beneath a massive steel girder. Jirōbō hoisted the crushing weight onto his shoulder without a single drop of sweat breaking on his brow. He carried the metal beam as easily as a twig.
Kidōmaru stared. The realization hit him with the force of a physical blow. Monsters existed beyond the woods. If he wanted to survive in Orochimaru's new world, juggling kunai would never suffice.
His teeth clicked together as he decided—
Power at any cost.
Kidōmaru landed smoothly on the frost-covered stones right in front of her. His bruised-red skin steamed in the cold air, the thermal output of the seal aggressively combating the freezing mist. The constant, thrumming demand of the transformation was beginning to exact a toll; a sharp, arrhythmic hitch caught his breath, his pulse skipping a beat as his throat tightened.
He grinned, stepping into her personal space. He saw the Leaf insignia gleaming on her forehead protector, and the sight of it made the venom in his blood boil, dragging him violently back to the dirt.
He possessed ten years of age. The stench of ozone and scorched earth overpowered the scent of the pine needles. The deafening crackle of yellow lightning had just died away. Kidōmaru knelt in the dirt, staring at his father's undefeated, massive body. A single, uniquely forged three-pronged kunai protruded from the back of his father's neck, buried perfectly between the bone segments. The Yellow Flash of Konoha had simply appeared, struck down the King, and vanished.
A searing, blinding agony suddenly ignited at the base of Kidōmaru's own neck. A sudden wave of intense nausea doubled him over as Orochimaru's brand took root. The seal ripped into his nervous system, seizing his breath and violently disrupting his motor control as it burnt his nerves, and replacing it with a spiking heart rate and bloody nails digging into his palms.
Kidōmaru blinked, the phantom stench of ozone fading back into the sharp, metallic chill of the present. The girl pinned against the tree stared at him. She noticed the momentary glaze in his third eye. She saw the fractional delay in his jaw unclenching. Her pulse spiked. Her weight shifted forward against the bark, her muscles coiling as she seized on the involuntary stall.
Tenten gritted her teeth, straining her trapped muscles. She twisted her right arm inside the webbing, fighting the brutal elasticity of the silk. She forced a volatile surge of chakra into the limb until the skin flushed red, generating enough desperate, scalding heat to slightly soften the adhesive binding her gauntlet. The heat flared recklessly; a faint hiss echoed as the metal scorched her own skin beneath the plating, a sharp spike of agony bleeding into her frantic pulse, but she pushed through the self-inflicted burn. She brought her wrist upward, her fingers trembling violently toward a hidden seal.
Kidōmaru didn't stop her immediately. He let her struggle. Through his third eye, he watched her heat signature dim and the tremor in her shoulder worsen as the exertion drained her.
Then, he raised two of his massive, red-skinned hands and caught her arm mid-motion.
His thick fingers wrapped completely around her metal gauntlet and the delicate wrist trapped beneath it. The third eye on his forehead dilated. He didn't see metal and skin; he traced the weak seams where the steel plating had been riveted together. He mapped the tension lines of the radius and ulna bones beneath the flesh, finding where resistance funneled between the shifting bone and shining steel to snap both simultaneously.
"Let's lower the difficulty," he whispered, leaning in close enough for her to feel the unnatural, burning heat rolling off his chest.
Kidōmaru squeezed.
The reinforced metal plating of her gauntlet buckled inward with a shrieking groan. A sharp, searing pain shot up Kidōmaru's forearms, the sheer physical exertion of crushing steel sending a heavy resistance tremor through his fingers. A sickening wave of hyperesthesia washed over his skin, his nerve endings screaming from the exertion, but he pushed past his own body's burning pressure, forcing the strength of the Cursed Seal into his grip.
He crushed the steel until it pierced the fabric beneath. For an agonizing half-second, the bones resisted, a hairline fracture cracking beneath the pressure before it gave way entirely.
The radius and ulna splintered. They collapsed inward with a sickening, wet crunch that echoed loudly against the trees.
Tenten's defiance shattered.
A raw, piercing scream tore from her throat, her head throwing backward against the bark as agonizing pain flooded her system. A sudden, hot gush of blood soaked through the crushed metal of the gauntlet, the sudden warmth steaming against Kidōmaru's cold, red fingers.
The forest reacted to the violence. The heavy scream vibrated through the tension lines strung across the canopy, causing the massive webs to oscillate wildly. The sudden shift in resonance sent a terrifying, creeping groan through the upper branches. High above, a single silk filament snapped with a sharp ping, causing the entire suspended mass of steel to sag a dangerous inch lower. Frost shook loose from the disturbed firs, raining down onto the Sinking Trail.
Kidōmaru threw his head back and laughed, the sound booming through the dense, trembling forest. He released her broken arm, feeling a sharp recoil in his own wrist joints as he let go. Her arm hung uselessly in the webbing, her head slumped forward as shock began to take her.
He stood before his trapped, broken prey.
He listened to the woods.
The webs carried no other vibration.
He heard no other breath in the immediate fog.
The violent tremor in his lower hands finally quieted. His erratic pulse smoothed into a slow, heavy thud, and his third eye narrowed as his breathing leveled out.
The violence had stabilized him.