Orochimaru, half-emerged from one of the eight heads, stared down at the scene below with an expression he rarely wore.
Genuine confusion.
"That wound… should have killed you," he murmured.
His eyes narrowed at the faint, reddish-orange aura flickering around Kimimaro's chest.
A chakra he did not recognize.
Not medical ninjutsu.
Not regeneration.
Not any Kaguya trait he'd researched about.
It held the wound still.
Contained it.
Orochimaru's brows twitched with irritation.
"Interesting. Very interesting. A Kaguya boy impaled by my own blade, poisoned, practically bisected… and yet he remains standing. How troublesome."
His gaze drifted to Akane's black skeletal Susanoo taking form around her, the raw Mangekyō glow burning in her eyes.
Then, to Reika, cold fury radiated off her in waves.
Saya's trembling excitement, blood-soaked and feral.
Emi's Byakugan active and sharpened.
Five of them.
Still five.
All battered, drained, wounded, but very much alive.
The realization drew a slow, thin smile across Orochimaru's face, the kind of smile that belonged on something hungry.
"So this is the power you possess when cornered," he said softly. "A boy who refuses to die… a girl who awakens despair into flame… and three more who keep rising back to their feet."
The serpent heads circled him like planets around a dark star.
"I expected an easy massacre. Instead, I find myself facing… this."
His amusement darkened into something colder.
"I miscalculated. I allowed you to gather, to breathe, to awaken what should have been dormant previously. But no matter."
The Eight Branches tightened, preparing to strike.
"Because now," Orochimaru whispered, voice slithering across the battlefield, "you face me all at once… while my patience runs out."
A low rumble shook the ground.
The serpent bodies tensed.
Eight jaws opened.
With a deafening roar, the Eight Branches surged forward.
Meanwhile, Kimimaro had already coordinated a plan with all four girls, linking to them telepathically through his sensory reach in the few precious seconds before the Eight Branches struck.
The moment the colossal serpent heads descended in a violent, synchronized crash, all five of them moved at once.
Reika reacted first.
She froze entire segments of the serpents' bodies outright, locking massive lengths of scaled flesh in ice to slow them down at least.
Her Ice Dragon slammed into another head, jaws of frost closing around its neck.
From the ground, she drove up jagged ice spikes that pierced through the underside of several branches, and with a flick of her wrist, sent spear-like shards whistling through the air, pinning others in place.
Saya blurred between the massive bodies, a streak of red and motion.
Her scyche cuts were quick and vicious, slicing through joints and soft spots with surgical precision.
She hurled blood-spears thickened to maximum coagulation, each one hardened enough to crack bone.
Her blood dragons surged in fluid arcs, sometimes liquid, sometimes brittle and sharp, shifting between states without even naming techniques anymore.
She had simply reached this level of mastery during her earlier clash with Orochimaru's clone.
Emi slammed her palms forward, unleashing vacuum palm blasts larger than anything seen from the Hyūga Main Branch.
Some heads convulsed into misshapen swells where her Yang overgrowth pulses struck them.
Others shuddered in confusion as her Yin pulses scrambled whatever passed for coordinated movement inside them.
Every hit left visible distortion, as if her strikes were deforming the very structure of the Eight Branches.
And Akane—
Her black Susanoo grew with every breath, skeletal limbs thickening and extending as she fed refined chakra into it instead of raw force.
She caught one serpent head by the jaw and punched another aside, the black ribcage flaring around her with gathering strength as she was quietly closing the distance from the start, as Kimimaro previously directed her to do.
All eight branches were forced back under the combined assault.
And in that staggered moment, Kimimaro moved.
He launched himself forward with another burst of water pressure, closing the distance while the serpents recoiled.
This time, he shaped Dance of the Clematis: Flower in his hand, but not the usual melee version.
A throwable variant this time.
Dance of the Clematis: Blooming Lance
A lance of bone engineered for high-velocity flight.
He hurled it.
The explosion of coordinated chaos around the battlefield left the main serpent head, the one carrying Orochimaru, momentarily exposed.
The projectile struck, cutting deep, forcing Orochimaru to jerk violently aside.
But Kimimaro wasn't finished.
A colossal Clematis: Vine had already wrapped around that same serpent neck, tightening with brutal leverage.
Using it as a pivot, Kimimaro swung himself closer, already forming a second Flower in mid-motion.
This one, he did not throw blindly as a decoy.
At mid-range, Orochimaru still didn't panic completely as he tried to retreat, to submerge back into the serpent's throat and let the Eight Branches absorb the impact for him.
Normally, he would have succeeded in an instant.
But this time he couldn't.
Because Akane had closed the distance, as necessary for her new abilities, exactly on cue.
From inside her black Susanoo, both of her Mangekyō abilities surged at once.
Enmetsu spread out first, an expanding, dozens of meters wide, 'chaos field' of entropy that warped the air around the serpent's neck.
The tissue and chakra inside the throat began to destabilize and erode, making the retreating pathway brittle and unreliable.
Orochimaru's escape route literally deteriorated while he tried to slip back into it.
And Shometsu, her 'entropic touch' followed a heartbeat later—
A more concentrated line of dissolution aimed directly at the serpent's inner musculature, creating strange black void-like 'spider-webs'.
It didn't destroy the entire head, but it cracked and decayed the exact segment Orochimaru needed to retreat through.
The inside of the throat partially collapsed, folding in on itself, making the passage too unstable to dive into.
The Eight Branches hesitated.
Orochimaru's body froze for half a second.
And that half second was all Kimimaro needed.
With the serpent head's inner structure warped by Enmetsu and partially decayed by Shometsu, Orochimaru had no viable space to escape.
He was trapped half-emerged, his movement delayed by entropy eating away at the very tunnel he intended to use.
Kimimaro released the second lance.
It flew perfectly into the one moment Akane had carved open for him.
It flew straight and mercilessly, piercing Orochimaru's wet, pale torso before he could dive back into the cavity of the Eight Branches.
Blood and serpentine fluid burst into the air.
The strike landed perfectly.
Orochimaru's eyes widened a split second before the lance struck.
For an instant, his entire upper body convulsed, pinned in place by the enormous bone spear.
Then the pale flesh below his ribs began to slough off.
He shed.
Orochimaru discarded the upper half of his body like a snake ripping free of ruined skin, collapsing the pierced torso and spilling it out of the serpent's mouth.
A new one pushed out from the torn membrane behind it, reforming in a grotesque bloom of white meat and serpentine fluid.
He survived.
But not without a cost.
That lance had been too sharp, too large, too perfectly placed.
Regrowing from it drained him brutally.
By the time his new upper body stabilized, Orochimaru was panting, shoulders rising and falling with visible chakra loss and strain.
"Tch…"
He leapt from the damaged Eight Branches head, abandoning the technique entirely.
The enormous serpent construct cracked and sagged behind him, its body too eroded, too pierced, too destabilized by Akane's entropy field to regenerate in time.
And the other serpent bodies were also being completely torn apart and immobilized by the girls at nearly the same moment.
Remaining inside it would have been suicide.
But Kimimaro didn't let him breathe.
The moment Orochimaru landed, a storm of bone spears erupted toward him, Kimimaro's Doing of the Falling Branches, fired in a killing wave from a distance.
Orochimaru's jaw clenched.
"Rashōmon!"
A massive demonic gate tore to the ground mid-air, an impossible structure forming in front of him just in time to intercept the barrage.
The spears slammed into the gate's face with explosive cracks, gouging deep holes into the demonic visage, passing through in the end, yet too late and with all of their momentum lost.
Orochimaru fell down to the other side of the Rashōmon, gasping, his hair plastered to his face.
This was not the easy dominance he had expected.
He had survived far worse in his lifetime, but this time….
This time, he felt far too cornered in an instant.
He spat blood, wiped his mouth, and felt the five figures now regrouping again on the other side and ready to corner him again.
"Damn it…" he hissed under his breath.
"Mangekyō Sharingan…"
"It's all its fault!"
He hadn't expected the girl's newly awakened abilities to be this broken.
This conceptual.
This reality-bending.
In some terrifying ways, it even surpassed Itachi's Mangekyō.
This was Yin Release pushed into a domain that eroded matter, destabilized chakra, and cracked the very throat of his Eight Branches from the inside.
Not to mention, it was just awakened, yet it was already so powerful.
He staggered once, caught himself, breathing hard.
"What a wretched, troublesome evolution you all have shown me today…"
And for the first time in the fight, Orochimaru looked genuinely unsettled.
He immediately began directing the remaining snakes spilling out of the collapsing Eight Branches, steering them toward the ground and regrouping them around himself.