As he flickered through the forest with the girls separately, Kimimaro spared Kabuto no more than a passing thought.
Kabuto's potential, in his assessment, had always rested more in his mind than in raw shinobi talent.
A brilliant operator, yes, but one whose greatest leap in the original timeline had been born from a very specific catalyst.
Orochimaru's death.
Both metaphorical and literal.
Now that the catalyst was gone.
Orochimaru was alive, stronger than before, and by all indications would remain so.
Without that vacuum, without that violent severance, Kimimaro wasn't particularly bullish on Kabuto ever reaching the same heights as he once had.
Not the Fourth War version. Not that monster.
Not to mention something even greater.
Still.
He allowed for the possibility that he was wrong.
The world had already proven, more than once today, that it enjoyed defying expectations.
He then assessed the girls around him as they moved.
All of them were running low, deep into the bottom end of their chakra reserves.
Lower than his, even. That much was expected.
His own bloodline, refined further by the Byakugan's integration, had crossed into a new tier of efficiency.
Every cycle burned cleaner now, wasting less, yielding more.
Still, he was satisfied.
Very satisfied.
Their opponents hadn't fared any better.
If anything, this operation had accomplished what two and a half years of intense, but still ultimately controlled sparring, after that last genuine clash they'd shared with Orochimaru back then, never could.
It had locked them in fully inside of it. Not brushing the 'Peak Kage' tier anymore.
Pressure like this couldn't be manufactured. Couldn't be rehearsed. This was the kind that stripped pretense, crushed hesitation, and forced growth in real time.
Their mindset had never been the issue.
They had been shaped early. Pressurized.
Hardened long before most shinobi ever tasted real fear.
But experience was the missing piece.
They hadn't been raised inside a hidden village, after all.
They hadn't gone through that system of escalating missions, the steady grind of small failures, forced adaptations, and improvised survival that slowly hardens a shinobi over the years.
That gap was closing now. Fast.
Each of them had taken something from today.
A correction. A realization.
A sharper sense of timing, restraint, and positioning.
Not just more power, but better use of it.
And that, to Kimimaro, mattered far more.
They didn't stop moving, even once the village was far behind them.
Kimimaro set the pace without speaking, senses stretched outward, counting pulses that weren't there, listening for the wrong kind of silence.
Only when he was satisfied did his shoulders ease a fraction.
Not much. Just enough.
Akane broke first, as usual.
"So," she said, hopping down from a low branch and landing beside him, flames long gone, voice light but frayed at the edges. "That went… loud."
Saya laughed quietly, a thin, pleased sound. "You mean profitable."
Reika snorted. "You mean reckless."
Emi glanced back once, Byakugan flickering briefly before she shut it off again.
"We weren't chased. That alone says enough."
Kimimaro finally slowed, stopping beneath a thick canopy. He turned, looking at them properly now.
All four were exhausted.
Not visibly broken, not limping, but the kind of drained that sat deep in the eyes, in the way posture became economical. Low reserves. High stress.
"You did well," he said simply.
Akane blinked, then scoffed. "That's it?"
"Yes."
That earned a crooked smile from her anyway.
Saya tilted her head, eyes still bright despite the fatigue. "That Hyuga didn't kill you."
"He tried," Kimimaro replied. "That matters."
Reika crossed her arms. "You got what you came for."
"I did."
Emi hesitated, then asked quietly, "And what you saw?"
Kimimaro didn't answer immediately.
He scanned the forest again, slow and deliberate, before speaking.
"Konoha is no longer the structure it thinks it is," he said. "Too many hidden pillars."
Akane whistled softly. "That bad, huh?"
"Worse," Kimimaro said. "Because none of it was accounted for."
That sobered them.
Saya's smile thinned. "So we left."
"Yes."
Reika nodded at once. "Good. Another few minutes and I'd have started freezing the wrong people."
Emi exhaled, tension slipping just a little from her shoulders. "Jiraiya made the right call."
"He made the least destructive one," Kimimaro corrected. "That's not the same."
Akane stretched her arms, wincing faintly. "Still. We stood there. All of us. Against the so-called legends."
She glanced at Emi, then Reika, then Saya.
Something proud flickered through her fatigue.
Kimimaro watched them quietly.
This was what pressure did.
Not polish. Not elegance.
Alignment.
Saya's lips curved. "Told you this would be more fun than hiding."
Emi shot her a look. "Fun isn't the word I'd use."
Akane smirked. "You survived. That's close enough."
For a brief moment, something almost normal settled between them.
Not peace. But familiarity.
Kimimaro allowed himself to lean against a tree, just slightly, hand resting near his side instead of ready at all times.
It was the most relaxation he'd permitted himself since they entered the village.
Still, his senses never dimmed.
The forest felt calm.
Too calm.
"Don't drop your guard," he said quietly.
All four straightened instantly.
Today proved something to him again.
The canon is breaking.
Old certainties don't hold.
Anything can surface now, anywhere.
Kimimaro looked at them, his knives, his orbiting constants in a world that was starting to shake itself apart.
"Together..." He muttered to himself.
And then, without another word, they vanished deeper into the forest, shadows folding around them as they had always belonged there.
...
They kept moving. Only once they had put enough distance between themselves and Konoha, a distance Kimimaro personally judged sufficient, did he finally allow his thoughts to unfold.
Leaving hadn't been just tactical. There had been a flicker of something else beneath it, unease.
Not fear in the simple sense, but the awareness that this hidden hand still had many cards it hadn't shown.
And if it was letting them go, if it couldn't fully move against him yet, for whatever reason, seemingly, then staying would have been foolish. So Kimimaro left.
The moment Shisui appeared, the conclusion had snapped into place with uncomfortable clarity.
Hagoromo had already moved. Not openly, not loudly, but decisively.
Most likely to shield Konoha, as always.
That village always carried too much strange 'narrative' weight, too much invisible protection, to ever be accidental.
Kimimaro remembered Shisui well.
Not this revived version, but the myth from his past life.
And the more he thought about it, the more absurd it became.
Kotoamatsukami.
The ability was so absurdly overpowered that it felt like it violated the rules the world itself was supposed to follow.
Perfect, subtle mind control, no awareness, no backlash, no trace.
Almost no cost.
A scalpel meant to reshape history.
And what did Shisui do with it?
He talked about it.
Not used it.
Not erased problems quietly in the dark.
He explained it.
Almost advertised it.
Spoke about it openly, in rooms that included Danzo and Hiruzen.
It was like inviting a starving wolf into your home and giving it a guided tour of your pantry.
Kimimaro almost scoffed out loud.
If Shisui had been even minimally sane, he would have done exactly what he was supposedly assigned to do.
Slip Fugaku and possibly even the other Uchiha leaders into illusions they never noticed.
Prevent the coup cleanly. No blood. No justification. No pretext for Konoha's four decaying elders to butcher an entire clan. Buy time. Force a different outcome.
Instead, he chose obedience over intelligence.
Thought like a tool, not an actor.
Always reporting and consulting on what his masters wanted, never what actually solved the problem.
And worse, the direction of his so-called corrections was obscene.
Why was his first instinct always his own clan?
Why was it never Danzo?
Never Hiruzen?
Never the elders who had spent decades isolating, policing, and cornering the Uchiha until rebellion became the only remaining shape of resistance?
What kind of self-hatred did it take to see your own people as the disease, and their oppressors as neutral caretakers?
It reeked of victim-blaming wrapped in loyalty.
Of Stockholm syndrome, polished into ideology.
Shisui had access. Frequent meetings. Trust. Proximity.
Instead of blabbering about it, he could have simply slipped Kotoamatsukami into Danzo alone and saved the clan overnight.
Even Hiruzen, with his power alone, would have shifted the balance irreversibly.
One of them would have been enough, even if realistically it would not have been that hard to put all of them under the same thing.
But he never even considered it.
Which told Kimimaro everything he needed to know about Shisui's so-called concern for "both the clan and the village".
It was hollow. Performative. His real loyalty had always been vertical, not lateral.
Upward, toward authority. Toward his masters.
Toward the system that was eating his people alive.
And then came the greatest sin a shinobi could commit.
He told Danzo.
He disclosed an ability capable of enslaving even the strongest veterans without their awareness and somehow expected the world to politely ignore that fact.
What outcome did he imagine?
That Danzo would smile, nod, and say, "How reassuring, carry on"?
Anyone with power would have reacted the same way.
Danzo moved first because he was decisive.
Hiruzen would have followed eventually, slower, weaker, buried under hesitation and old guilt, but the result would have been the same.
No leader could sleep knowing a subordinate held a button that could rewrite their will without consent.
Danzo's response was brutal, but rational.
Shisui's was catastrophic.
He lost his life, his eye, his clan, and achieved nothing with the most broken ability in existence.
Kimimaro understood Danzo perfectly.
Shisui, he couldn't understand at all.
Which only made his popularity in his past life's fandoms even more baffling.
A tragic hero? No. A walking cautionary tale.
Perhaps only surpassed in self-destructive loyalty by Itachi himself.
And yet.
Now that Kimimaro stood inside this world, watching Shisui move again, revived in a way that made no sense, doubt crept in.
What if things had never been that simple?
What if Shisui and Itachi hadn't been naturally this obedient, this collectivist, this willing to erase themselves?
What if someone else had shaped them?
Nudged. Weighted.
Pressed their psychology in very specific directions over the years.
Made sacrifice feel virtuous.
Made self-annihilation feel like peace.
And what if that same hand was the one that had pulled Shisui back now?
Not to save the Uchiha.
Not to save truth.
But to protect Konoha from him.
Kimimaro's eyes tracked the forest ahead, sharp and distant.
If Hagoromo was moving pieces personally now, then the game had already escalated past what canon ever accounted for.
And that meant this forest, this silence, this moment of calm, could break at any second.