Consciousness sank like a stone into a cold, lightless sea—only to be yanked up somewhere in that murky haze.
Orochimaru blinked open his eyes, dazed.
All he could see was a boundless, viscous gray. No sky, no ground, no sense of direction—only a suffocating void creeping along, utterly lifeless.
A light from nowhere, weak as a candle guttering in the wind, barely traced out a few blurred contours.
It tasted like the end of all things.
"Where…is this? Does Ryūchi Cave have a place this bizarre? Why don't I remember any of it—"
He tried to step forward out of habit, but felt nothing beneath his feet. The sensation set his nerves on edge.
Just then, a figure in the fog ahead began to sharpen.
A boy.
Short, wearing a Konoha genin's green vest, face lit by the bright, hopeful smile Orochimaru only dimly remembered.
He stood there, waving hard at Orochimaru.
The moment he saw that face, Orochimaru's pupils pinpricked.
A tide of shock, realization, and some long-buried, tangled feeling surged up and drowned him.
"Nawaki?"
The name scraped out of his dry throat, strangely faint in this dead space, tinged with an almost imperceptible tremor.
Nawaki—Tsunade's brother. One of the disciples Orochimaru had pinned his hopes on. The boy who always lay forever in a battlefield puddle of blood.
And the instant he saw Nawaki, all Orochimaru's confusion was blown apart like mist.
The memory of fire of judgement scouring flesh and soul came roaring back.
The fragments slammed together.
"So that's how it is." For the first time, the chalk-pale face that usually wore a cold, calculating mask went blank with bewilderment, then sank into a deep, hollow loneliness.
He lowered his head, stared at his spotless hands—no blood anywhere—and let out a thin sigh.
His voice was bone-tired, edged with a mocking sense of fate. "So this is the price of chasing immortality? There's always some self-righteous fool to get in my way—but every time, I slipped past. This time, I didn't."
"Orochimaru-sensei!" Nawaki's voice rang out—clear with youth, laced with urgency.
He seemed to want to run over, but something invisible blocked him. He could only stand at the edge of that grayness and wave harder. "Sensei! This way! Over here—"
But as Nawaki called to him, about to say more—
Nng—!
Orochimaru's raised foot froze midair. His insubstantial body juddered.
A pain he knew down to the marrow—soul-deep, as if it would tear his very being apart—struck without warning, like a billion red-hot needles driving into every inch of him.
"Hssss—aaAAAARGHHH!"
A scream savage enough to rip this dead space apart tore out of his throat.
He jackknifed, face contorting beyond recognition, hands clawing his chest as if he could gouge something out of his soul.
The despair and agony in that howl dwarfed what he'd felt at the bottom of Ryūchi Cave—tenfold, a hundredfold.
Not even this Pure Land could keep that curse at bay.
Nawaki blanched, stumbling back, terror scrawled across his young face.
"Orochimaru-sensei?! Wh—what's happening to you?!"
He dared not step closer. While Orochimaru writhed, a strange fire had bloomed out of nothing over his body.
It gave off no heat, yet its aura made Nawaki's soul quake.
It clung to Orochimaru's phantom form, burning without sound, wringing even harsher screams from him.
"No… impossible—this is the Pure Land, why—hsss AAAAHHH!"
Between the endless spikes of soul-rending pain, Uchiha Chizumi's icy voice echoed, clear, at the bottom of Orochimaru's awareness:
"This pain will cling to you like maggots to bone, for all eternity. Whether you cling to life or pass to the Pure Land, you won't escape. Every minute, every second, you will sink into a bottomless pit of torment."
Orochimaru understood. That wasn't a threat, wasn't a bluff. It was reality.
He would end exactly as Danzō had.
"Uchiha… Chizumi!!!"
With the last dregs of his soul, Orochimaru roared a name, raw with absolute despair and a hatred vast enough to burn the world.
"Hss—AAAAHHH!"
Not far away, Nawaki could only watch in horror, helpless, as the teacher he'd once revered writhed and howled—tortured beyond death, falling forever into the endless purgatory of Naraka.
…
"What's wrong, Jiraiya?" As Jiraiya stepped out of the Uchiha Police Force, he suddenly stopped short, making Fukasaku on his shoulder tilt a worried glance at him.
Jiraiya drew a long breath, then shook his head, a little lost.
"I'm not sure." His voice held rare confusion and weight. "It's just… a strange feeling. Not the usual pre-fight danger sense. 'Bad omen' doesn't quite fit either."
"More like…"
He lifted a hand, pressing it absently to his chest, frown deepening. "Like something important inside me was ripped out. I feel hollow. Uneasy."
He paused, face growing graver as he dug through memory. "Come to think of it, this might not be the first time."
Fukasaku and Shima traded a look over his shoulders, grave understanding in those wide frog eyes.
"The last time…" Jiraiya's voice dropped, with a sigh you could almost miss. "The last time I felt this hollow, panicked feeling—soon after, word came that Minato and Kushina were gone."
Fukasaku's small body went taut, his frog face more serious than ever. "Jiraiya-boy! That's no ordinary feeling. Your intuition's sharp—especially when it concerns those who matter. This could be tied to the Child of Prophecy—or to someone bound to your fate. We can't take it lightly!"
The air tightened.
"Gwah! Gugu gwah-gwah!"
A small, emerald-green toad sprang from the shadow of a planter and landed on the flagstones at Jiraiya's feet, croaking in a rapid, distinctive rhythm.
"That's one of Mount Myōboku's messenger toads," Shima said at once, recognizing it.
Fukasaku hopped down and listened closely to the urgent croaks, Shima leaning in as well. As the messages went on, both sages grew more and more solemn, brows knitting.
Watching them, the strange feeling inside Jiraiya swelled. He couldn't help blurting, "What's it saying?"
Fukasaku looked up. His eyes were complicated, worried. He spoke slowly, voice heavy as never before. "Jiraiya-boy, the Great Toad Sage sent this messenger specifically. It brings what he saw in a 'prophetic dream.'"
Fukasaku drew a breath. "He said—he dreamed of a huge purple snake rolling and thrashing… then being completely melted by blazing, red-hot lava."
"At the end of the dream, he suddenly felt that the snake being melted… wasn't entirely a snake. Its aura carried a strong scent of a human."
"When he woke, a powerful hunch struck him—that this dream is deeply connected to you, Jiraiya-boy."
By now Jiraiya's face was set like stone. "Lava. A purple snake. A snake with a living human's presence. And tied to me…"
Three clues were enough for him to see where this pointed.
"Uchiha Chizumi."
"Orochimaru."
…
"P—!" Among the three Snake Hime, Tagorihime was no stronger than Orochimaru. If even he couldn't survive a slap from the colossal wooden giant, Tagorihime stood no chance.
Bones shattered with a nauseating crackle, like dry beans popping in a pan.
Her slender waist, fragile ribs, delicate arm bones—none of it lasted even a second under that absolute force. They snapped, splintered—pulverized.
Her body, trailed by a spray of blood and a chorus of breaking bones, was swatted away at terrifying speed.
The other two—Ichikishimahime and Tagitsuhime—flashed out the instant Tagorihime went flying, streaks of light racing to catch their grievously wounded sister.
"Tagori!"
They cried out and reached for her.
But they had gravely underestimated the force packed into that one blow.
Just as their fingertips were about to brush Tagorihime's broken body, an irresistible power slammed into both of them.
It felt like being rammed head-on by a charging tailed beast. Color drained from their lovely faces as they grunted in pain.
They couldn't stop their bodies from being dragged back by Tagorihime's "projectile corpse."
Boom! Boom! Boom!
All three smashed into a massive cliff hundreds of meters away. The impacts thudded and rolled; rock rained down.
"Cough—cough—"
Ichikishimahime spat blood threaded with bits of viscera; it felt like her whole skeleton had come apart.
Gritting through the agony, she forced her head around to find Tagorihime—only for a chill to spear from the base of her skull.
Tagorihime was embedded deep in a crater in the cliff, twisted into a pose that defied human anatomy.
Limbs bent at grotesque angles; her spine looked snapped in several places. Her ornate ancient kimono was fouled by blood and dust.
Her once-cool, fine-boned face was a mangled blur, half the cheekbone caved in, breath flickering like a candle in a gale.
Only her body still twitched faintly.
A flicker of senjutsu energy leaked from her shattered form, firefly-weak, trying to mend those ghastly wounds.
"Hh—"
Ichikishima drew a sharp breath, scalp prickling.
Never had she imagined that a high elder of Ryūchi Cave, a Snake Hime wreathed in powerful senjutsu, could be mauled to this degree by a human.
Thump.
Thump.
Thump.
Footfalls like a war drum of doom rolled nearer, making the earth tremble.
The towering wooden colossus was charging toward the cliff where they'd fallen, each step leaving a scorched footprint filled with bubbling lava.
Atop the giant, Uchiha Chizumi stood like a statue of ice.
His crimson Sharingan cut through the smoke and locked onto them.
They were still hundreds of meters apart when Chizumi moved.
He drew back his right arm. Lava surged along it in a furious boil, roiling like a volcano about to burst, swelling and rolling until, in a blink, it packed into a molten fist nearly ten meters across, radiating annihilating heat.
His arm fully elementized, a red bridge rooting the giant fist.
KRAKOOM—!
He drove the punch forward, and the magma fist tore free like an unleashed dragon, screaming through the air, heat scouring everything, a falling meteor of molten rock aimed straight at the three Snake Hime crushed into the cliff.
Its shadow swallowed all three.
Ichikishimahime and Tagitsuhime's pupils shrank.
The stench of death forced a split-second choice.
With two shrill hisses, the pair could no longer maintain human form. The senjutsu chakra pent in their bodies detonated outward; their frames ballooned, warped, transformed.
Boom!
Boom!
Two enormous serpents, no smaller than Manda had been, coiled before the cliff, wrapping themselves in front of the broken Tagorihime.
Their scales, lit by the fist's red glare, threw off a hard, metallic sheen. Two mountain-sized bodies braced to shield their sister.
But years of relative "ease" in Ryūchi Cave had made them forget how to fight a truly fearsome foe.
And they had learned nothing from Manda's ruined carcass.
"Fools."
Chizumi's verdict fell cold from atop the giant.
Even Orochimaru had never dared take his lava head-on—yet these two serpent hime meant to block it with flesh and blood.
WHAM—!
The magma fist, irresistible, smashed into Ichikishimahime first, right where her metal-bright scales were thickest.
Szzzzz!
Splat!
A scalp-crawling sound split the air. Those scales, tough enough to shrug off direct ninjutsu blasts, met the fist—and melted with a squeal like a hot knife sinking into congealed fat.
There was no resistance.
The fist, carrying searing heat and brutal force, punched clean through her body.
A vast, charred hole edged with oozing red lava blew open in her torso.
Organs, bone, and flesh in the path were carbonized in an instant.
The stink of burnt meat and scorched protein flooded the air.
Only the fist's diameter being smaller than her thickness kept her from being ripped in half on the spot.
"HssAAAUUUGHHH—!"
Pain beyond words wrung a shriek from Ichikishimahime, like a soul being torn in two.
Her massive body thrashed, slapping the rock. Blood and blackened meat fountained from the ruin.
Her slit pupils burst with spiderwebs of red.
Even after plowing through that mountain of meat, the fist had lost barely thirty percent of its force. Dragging Ichikishimahime's scream and a rain of gore with it, it slammed into Tagitsuhime behind her.
THUD—SZZZT!
This time it didn't bore through, but the power and terrible heat still dented a crater meters deep into Tagitsuhime's body.
Her hard scales shattered like fragile glass.
Searing burn and the shock to her organs wrung a ragged hiss from her too.
"Hsss—aaah—!"
The two giant serpents writhed and convulsed in agony at the cliff's base. Blood and lava slicked the charred ground crimson.
Their keening echoed through the cave, long and unending.
After a moment, Tagitsuhime forced her head up despite the burning and the storm inside her. Those bloodshot slits locked on Chizumi atop the towering giant.
Her voice rasped, flayed by pain and rage. "Human! As far as I recall, Ryūchi Cave has never had any grievance with you—or your Uchiha clan!"
"Yet you barged into our sacred ground unbidden! You slaughtered Manda, killed Orochimaru, crippled Tagorihime!"
"And now you strike us down as well—why?!"
"What is it you want?!"
Chizumi stood quietly on the wooden titan's crown, tall enough to meet the eyes of the writhing serpents.
He didn't answer.
He simply, slowly, shifted the gaze of those eerie, crimson Mangekyō eyes to meet Tagitsuhime's enormous serpent eyes.
The instant their gazes crossed—
Tagitsuhime's huge body went rigid. Space twisted around her.
"This—?!"
A flicker of shock flashed in her pupil.
The battlefield of scorched earth and rolling lava was gone. In its place: a bleak moonlit night.
A familiar figure slipped into a human village under cover of dark.
She looked closer.
It was herself.
Wait—
Ancient memory surged up; realization hit. "Sharingan genjutsu!"
In the illusion—
She watched herself prowl from house to house. Then came the screams—razor-sharp with terror—children's helpless sobs, men's roars of despair, women's dying wails—breaking out across the village like a tide.
The heavy reek of blood blanketed the dream.
Cold sweat beaded along Tagitsuhime's coils. Why was she seeing this? Was the genjutsu merely dragging up faded memories? Or had the Uchiha pried them open?
The scene snapped again.
Now she saw a hidden cavern deep within Ryūchi Cave, strewn with giant shed skins.
She watched herself—out of boredom—savagely kill a challenger who was about to pass Ryūchi Cave's trial, just to see how far a human could fall into despair, and what they'd do at the very end.
The images kept turning.
Endless memories strobed by like a lantern reel.
Only one pattern held: every scene showed her killing.
But she couldn't see the point—was this genjutsu only to make her remember what she'd half-forgotten? That wouldn't break her spirit or drop her in an instant.
So what was his purpose?
Suddenly—
The illusion ebbed like a tide. Sulfur stung her tongue again; wounds burned; her sisters' screams crashed back.
Dazed and off-balance, Tagitsuhime blinked up.
The sky-filling wooden giant loomed.
The lone figure atop it.
And then Uchiha Chizumi's cool voice drifted down: "These are the crimes you've sown in the shinobi world. There is no personal grudge between us. I act because you are evil. If you live, countless innocents will suffer. I'm here to reclaim the justice that's a thousand years overdue—for them."
Tagitsuhime stared, dumbfounded.
Was he insane?
With a reason that absurd—
Was he actually serious?