Meanwhile, deep within Ryūchi Cave, in a shadowed cavern ringed by massive stalactites, the air grew thicker than outside—senjutsu energy so dense it was nearly tangible, drifting like a pale mist.
On a colossal stone throne a pure-white giant serpent lay coiled—the White Snake Sage of Ryūchi Cave, one of the Three Great Sacred Lands.
A pipe taller than a man hung from the sage's jaws. Wisps of bluish smoke rose slowly and melted into the darkness near the ceiling.
Its amber, slit pupils—eyes that seemed to hold endless wisdom and years—slit open a fraction. The sage's massive head tilted slightly, as if listening.
"Heh… an uninvited guest has come…" The White Snake Sage's voice was ancient and low, like an echo from the depths of the earth.
It tapped the pipe lightly between its teeth.
At the very moment its words fell, the mist filling the cavern swirled as though stirred by an unseen hand. Three lithe, bewitching figures appeared without a sound before the throne.
They wore gauzy, ornate robes of an ancient style; their faces were stunning—one cool and aloof, one sultry, one innocently sweet. Yet the vertical snake pupils in their eyes and the chill aura coiling around them were in no way inferior to Manda's.
That alone marked them as non-human—the three serpent princesses of Ryūchi Cave, high elders who could take human form: Tagorihime, Ichikishimahime, and Ichikishimahime.
"White Snake Sage."
The one in the center, the most ethereal and aloof—Tagorihime—bowed slightly, her voice airy and distant. "You summoned us, sisters and I. What would you have us do?"
The White Snake Sage exhaled a dense plume of smoke; in midair it thickened without dispersing—vaguely resolving into the blurred image of a far-off battlefield.
"Manda is fighting with Orochimaru… against an 'outside enemy.'"
Its tone carried the calm of one who sees through all things.
"Go and take a look."
The three serpent princesses focused on the smoky image at once.
But the picture was hazed like a lone cloud; only Manda's heaving bulk could be made out.
A flicker of surprise passed through their beautiful eyes.
"If the pair—man and serpent—begin to lose…" The sage's pipe-tip tapped the image where Orochimaru looked battered and Manda raged, then it paused. Those amber slitted eyes swept the three. "The three of you may lend them a hand."
For the first time, visible astonishment touched the princesses' perfect faces.
They had served the White Snake Sage for ages and knew well this ancient being's detachment. Ryūchi Cave followed nature's law of the strong over the weak; even internal disputes were usually ignored so long as the foundation remained unshaken.
Yet now the sage was proactively ordering them to aid a contract holder and an ill-tempered summon against an "outside enemy"…
Unprecedented.
What kind of enemy could move the White Snake Sage to break precedent and intervene?
"Is it those toads of Mount Myōboku? Or the slug of Shikkotsu Forest?" asked Ichikishimahime on the left, smile sweet but eyes sly.
They were the only ones she could imagine as qualified and capable of being Ryūchi Cave's "outside enemy." The Three Sanctuaries kept up appearances of non-interference, but the quiet rivalry and vigilance had never ceased.
"Neither."
The White Snake Sage slowly shook its head. Embers in the pipe pulsed with the motion. In the smoke, a figure sheathed in crimson magma with a frozen stare grew clearer.
"A human brat named Uchiha Chizumi."
A hard-to-name note crept into the sage's voice. "He has broken in to carry out what he calls [Absolute Justice]. Heh. In those fanatical eyes of his, most of the creatures in Ryūchi Cave… are 'steeped in sin' merely for breathing. If he were to see me, he might even entertain killing me."
"What?!"
All three princesses gasped, disbelief scrawled across their enchanting faces.
In the shinobi world, someone so blind to heaven and earth—mad enough to slaughter his way into Ryūchi Cave in the name of "justice"?!
And to contemplate killing the White Snake Sage?!
…
BOOM!!!
A blood-red torrent of lava, like a tongue thrust out from hell, scythed past the base of Manda's massive tail, skimming the hard purple scales.
Szzzzla!!!
An awful searing filled the air alongside the reek of char. Manda felt a pain at the tail that words could not hold—pain that stabbed at the very soul.
The scales it prided itself on, tough enough to take an A-rank jutsu head-on, melted and flashed to vapor under that ultimate heat like butter beneath a hot knife.
More than ten meters of tail vanished the instant the lava passed, erased like a pencil line rubbed away by an eraser.
The stump was black and charred; blood had no time to flow before the heat carbonized and sealed it.
Agony shredded Manda's reason.
"HSSSRAAOO!!! Bastard!!!"
Its thunderous scream shook the caverns, rage and disbelief boiling in the sound. The pain and the shame of a severed tail pitched it into berserk fury.
Its bulk thrashed and slammed; each roll was an avalanche. Rock walls cracked and collapsed under that wild force like tofu, boulders hammering down in sheets.
The entire underground space shuddered violently, as if about to come down for good.
"Orochimaru!!!"
Manda's slitted eyes were shot with veins of blood. It roared at the tiny figure above its head, the roar so solid it sent Orochimaru's hair flying.
"Kill him for me!!!"
Swaying atop Manda's head, Orochimaru could barely keep his feet; his face was like water gone black.
Uchiha Chizumi's control over Lava Release—and its destructive power—rewrote his expectations every time.
His golden slit pupils locked on the form wading through magma below. His hands blurred before his chest, so fast they hissed.
"Water Release: Water Colliding Wave!!!"
With the last seal, Orochimaru hauled in a great breath; his chest swelled visibly. He wrung every drop of chakra from within.
The flood spewed from his mouth like the breaching of a dam, bearing a crushing weight as it tore toward the place where Chizumi stood.
Where the surge passed, even the air detonated.
At the same time, Manda—lost to rage—gritted through the agony of its severed tail. Leveraging the momentum of its rolling bulk, it hurled itself like a collapsing mountain with a force that could pulverize all things, angling to converge on the very point the water torrent assaulted!
Yet just as the chakra-charged deluge was about to swallow Uchiha Chizumi—and Manda's world-darkening shadow was about to blanket his head—
Chizumi's body ghosted; a lingering afterimage remained where he had been. His true form was gone.
BOOM!!!
The crash and the water's blast blended into a destructive symphony. Manda's bulk hit dead-center where the Water Colliding Wave broke.
The raging flood was squeezed outward by sheer mass and blew in all directions, rising into curtains of spray tens of meters high. The shock finally exceeded what the tortured cavern could bear.
Kraaaack—
RUMBLE—!!!
Pillars holding up the vault groaned past endurance, then snapped. Thousands of tons of stone poured down like divine punishment, burying everything below in an instant.
"Huff… huff…"
Standing on a relatively safe slab in the distance, Orochimaru panted. The through-wound in his left shoulder had started bleeding again from the seals' strain.
But his golden slit pupils stayed fixed on the area drowned in boulders and water, trying to sense any movement within.
"Did it work…"
Manda's vast bulk burst from the landslide with a roar, throwing up a storm of dust. Mud and gravel smeared half its head and the severed stump; it was a picture of humiliation.
Its vicious eyes likewise scoured the smoky ruins, hunting the figure it hated to the bone.
"Manda!"
Orochimaru's harsh shout cracked out then, urgent and warning in a way he had never used before. "Below you!"
A killing chill sluiced over Manda. Its massive head dropped; the pupils tightened to pinpoints.
Deep beneath the seemingly quiet rubble at its coils, a heat so fierce it made scales bristle erupted without warning.
Stones melted at once like tossed into a furnace, running red as liquid.
Then—
WHOOM—!!!
A blazing torrent of lava, more than five meters across—pure destruction—erupted from beneath Manda like a volcano venting centuries of rage, ripping the earth open as it speared upward.
"Hsss!!!"
With a hiss of shock and fury, Manda's survival instinct lent it impossible agility; it writhed like a panicked titan python and barely avoided the core of the blast.
But even the edge of that lava flood, hot enough to melt steel, lashed its belly like an invisible whip.
Szzzzzz—
The nauseating sizzle rose; the belly scales that touched the heat blackened and warped, skin splitting to raw meat.
The stench of burned flesh swelled.
It hadn't taken the full hit, but the pain of that ultimate heat was every bit the equal of losing its tail.
Blood-shot lines crazed Manda's pupils, madness boiling up.
The agony dragged its savagery to the surface. Its jaw gaped wide enough to swallow a house, and from special ducts at the roots of its two massive fangs, a thick, inky green gas jetted out.
The vapor congealed as if alive into a surging cloud of poison that smothered everything for hundreds of meters below.
Where the miasma rolled, the hardy Ryūchi Cave mosses and fungi that thrived even in blight shriveled at a speed visible to the eye.
Worse, the rock itself gave off a sinister "szz szz" when the gas touched it, pitting instantly with countless holes—as if bathed in the strongest acid.
Even Orochimaru, far off on a slab, blanched. His skin prickled and burned like a thousand needles; his breath caught.
"Damn it! Manda! You idiot!"
Shocked and furious, he snatched a special purple pill from his pouch, shoved it into his mouth, and snarled at Manda, "How many times have I told you—warn me before you use that? Trying to take me with him?"
As the medicine dissolved, the numbing corrosion ebbed a little, but his skin still stung.
"Hmph! I'm risking my life to kill your enemy and you're whining?"
Manda's huge head swung, eyes full of impatience and violence. "Spout one more word and I'll dump you here and let you deal with that lava freak alone!"
Its patience for Orochimaru was at its limit.
But as the words fell, the battlefield changed again.
From the poison-choked, lava-scored ground, trees the thickness of towers heaved up at an impossible speed. They ignored the toxic blight and the searing heat, roots plunging deep into Ryūchi Cave's ancient veins; trunks surged upward, swelling.
In the blink of an eye, a dense, primal forest pulsing with life ripped itself out of the death-scape. Each giant tree soared a hundred meters, foliage spilling, higher even than Manda's raised head.
"W-what?!" For the first time, raw disbelief flashed in Manda's blood-shot eyes.
More shocking: the thick branches burst into a riot of gigantic blossoms, phosphorescent and strange. Petals unfurled, dumping a flood of visible pollen.
The pollen rolled to meet Manda's green poison fog.
Hiss hiss hiss—
Gas and pollen ate each other in midair, squealing like cold water thrown into boiling oil.
"Wood Release…?!"
Manda's coarse serpentine features twisted with humanlike shock and dread. "Orochimaru! Why didn't you tell me he had this intel!"
It roared.
Next, the forest of titans groaned with tooth-aching creaks, as if gripped by unseen hands. Thick trunks and knotted limbs writhed and braided like living pythons, weaving together until a wooden giant larger than Manda by several orders stood before serpent and summoner.
The wooden colossus lowered its head; two great wooden orbs set in its sockets snapped open.
There was no feeling in that gaze. It fixed instantly on Manda below—and on Orochimaru on the stone.
Manda didn't even have time to react. The wooden giant raised a fist wrought from dozens of entwined trees.
No flourish—only pure, unbridled force.
The punch tore the air, keening like a falling meteor, faster than eyes could track, and hammered down on Manda's massive head.
THUD!!!
A dead, heart-stopping boom like the sky caving in. The instant the fist met Manda's scale-plated face, it crumpled visibly, denting like a fortress gate rammed by a siege hammer.
Scales shattered to splinters; blood and flesh flew. A fang taller than a man snapped and spun away, burying itself deep in a far wall.
"HSSSRAAOO—!!!"
Indescribable pain ripped a wail from Manda so shrill it pierced the bones—full of agony, fear, and disbelief. Under that world-breaking force, its huge head punched into the already shattered ground, and its bulk tumbled backward, plowing a trench meters deep.
Dust rose like a tidal wave to the sky.
On his rocky perch, Orochimaru was blown away like a leaf in a gale by the shockwave of that apocalyptic blow. He twisted in midair, barely managed to land on another collapsing slab, and blood traced from the corner of his mouth.
The wooden giant's assault was far from done.
As Manda's head struggled to lift from the crater—
From near the shoulder of the giant's right arm, thick, viscous crimson lava welled out in gouts. Like a living thing it streamed down the braid of timber that made the limb, coiling and racing along it.
Where the heat met living wood, savage burning cracked and hissed; the giant timbers blackened and carbonized before the eye.
And just before the whole arm could be consumed—
That right arm, now wholly wreathed in molten red and roaring flame, crashed down on Manda, who was still stunned and wracked by pain.
In the corner of Manda's blood-shot vision, the lava fist swelled to fill everything, blotting out the world.
Its eyes at last brimmed with terror and despair.
"No—!!!"
RUMBLE RUMBLE RUMBLE—!!!
A detonation ten times worse than all before shook Ryūchi Cave to its roots. Blinding red light flooded every shadowed corner; a brutal shockwave swept out in an instant.
What rock walls, what trees, what billowing dust—everything remaining was crushed and blown away.
At ground zero beneath the lava fist, Manda's colossal head simply vaporized under the union of ultimate force and stupefying heat. A long length of the neck with it was erased as well, leaving only a bottomless crater whose edges ran with dark red magma and fire still howled.
The air reeked of char and sulfur.
Manda…
was dead.