Nagato escalated.
Deva Path rose into the air, gravity bending beneath it as it gained height, and this time the Shinra Tensei that followed wasn't a simple repulsion meant to clear space.
It was vast.
Yet compressed.
A crushing locality, pressure forced inward instead of thrown outward, pinning Reika in place as if the air itself had decided to fold her into the ground.
The weight hit like a closing vice.
Chains screamed.
Ice fractured.
The ground beneath her caved.
Nagato pushed harder.
End it.
And then the world stopped.
An overwhelming Absolute Zero bloomed as well.
It wasn't freezing in the conventional sense anymore.
Not cold spreading through matter.
This was something closer to negation.
Motion stalled.
Pressure locked in place.
Even gravity itself slowed, then seized, as if time had been caught mid-breath and held there by force.
The Shinra Tensei didn't rebound.
It froze.
Reika felt it in her bones, the Three-Tails' chakra roaring through her seals, vast and violent, converted and refined into something her bloodline had never known before.
Water's depth fused seamlessly with Yuki ice, scale, and density, amplifying each other instead of clashing.
"So it really works," she thought, breath crystallizing in the air. "Perfect fuel."
Chains erupted from her back while the forces deadlocked, snapping outward in killing arcs, not toward Deva Path, but toward the other bodies, exploiting the moment of suspension to end it decisively.
Nagato reacted instantly.
Animal Path moved again, summoning the other Paths out of danger in a flash of displacement, ripping them clear before the chains could close.
Deva Path disengaged at the same time, pulling back toward it as gravity loosened its grip.
The frozen pressure shattered.
Ice collapsed inward.
And suddenly, there was space again.
Both sides pulled away.
On the battlefield, Reika staggered back a step, chest heaving, frost cracking from her skin.
Across from her, the Paths reformed their formation, distance restored, momentum broken.
Kilometers away, Nagato's real body inhaled sharply.
His expression darkened.
"…Would Chibaku Tensei even hold?" the thought surfaced, unwelcome and sharp.
For the first time, he didn't know.
The realization sat heavy in his chest as he steadied his breathing, eyes narrowing.
This had gone far beyond expectations.
And that unsettled him more than the stalemate itself.
...
Kimimaro, meanwhile, was still holding the other side of the field alone.
Konan. Deidara. Sasori. Kisame. Hidan. Kakuzu.
Six at once.
And he deliberately didn't escalate.
The White Sovereign stayed dormant.
Not because he couldn't call it, but because he wouldn't waste the chakra.
He was already fighting this engagement at a handicap, and he knew it.
Roughly half his reserves were gone.
Twenty percent fed a shadow clone that gave the most chakra contribution to maintaining the massive barrier over Kirigakure, the only reason the village hadn't already been erased by the aftershocks tearing through the battlefield.
Another thirty percent was locked into the distant bone mass supporting Saya and Emi against Obito.
Thanks to his world-class sensory mode, he could precisely calibrate how much chakra each clone received, monitor it in real time, and then reclaim it almost instantly and with minimal loss the moment they dispersed alongside memory.
Reika could do the same, and the two of them extended it also to the remaining shadow clones of the other girls still stationed in the village, using them to stabilize the situation further.
Their chakra cost was minor; most of the expenditure, which went into maintaining the larger barriers, was paid by him.
Moreover, as their battles escalated, they just recalled their clones one by one, leaving only his and Reika's probably remaining.
So he was measured this time.
Five Gates opened.
White Bastion Frame slid into place, bone armor whispering as it locked over muscle and tendon.
The Yang Seal pulsed, fully released, feeding Shikotsumyaku with refined fuel rather than reckless output.
Then he moved.
To them, it didn't look like ninjutsu.
It looked like a disappearance.
Kimimaro crashed into them in a pure taijutsu onslaught, Dance of the Willow flowing seamlessly into Larch, bone blades flashing, bodies forced back under relentless pressure.
Flying Branches ripped through the air in cutting arcs.
Blooming Lance screamed past defenses.
Vine and Flower lashed out in lethal geometry.
They barely held.
Not because they were weak.
Because he was too fast.
Shock rippled through the group as they realized what they were dealing with.
This wasn't the slow, brittle Kimimaro of the original story.
This was something honed, restrained, and viciously precise.
Hidan was the first to fall apart.
He was the only one who insisted on close combat.
Bone blades carved him open again and again, limbs severed, torso split, head torn free in a clean, efficient motion.
He kept screaming through it, curses spilling from his mouth even as his body lay scattered.
"Jashin will—!"
Kimimaro didn't bother listening.
He already knew Hidan was still alive.
Immortal, yes, but nonfunctional.
A liability now.
One Kakuzu would have to stitch back together manually.
Unlike Saya.
Her immortality overwrote damage from within, reality correcting itself automatically.
Hidan's was crude by comparison.
Kimimaro sealed him anyway.
A specialized containment seal snapped shut around the severed head and remains, suppressing movement and chakra alike.
Kimimaro thought distantly, "You'll make an excellent offering."
Already saturated with the Yin–Yang essence he had accidentally acquired back then, in that valley, the foundation of his current, warped form of immortality.
Above him, the sky filled.
None of them even blinked at what happened to Hidan.
They probably thought that he'd brought it on himself with that brain-dead charge, rushing a white-haired monster while screaming accusations, curses, and religious nonsense.
Against an opponent like this, that kind of stupidity was just another way of asking to be removed.
Kimimaro understood it easily. He was probably the least liked member. After all, when you're the weakest yet insist on being the loudest, who is ever going to tolerate you in any place?
Konan was already airborne, Yang-infused paper wings spreading wide as she maneuvered for angles.
Deidara circled higher on a massive C2, explosives primed.
Sasori hovered as well, balanced atop the levitating iron sand cloud generated by the Third Kazekage puppet, threads dancing as he adjusted position with surgical precision.
Only Kisame and Kakuzu remained grounded.
And they compensated with distance and output.
A tidal surge of water crashed toward Kimimaro as Kisame unleashed overwhelming Suiton, while Kakuzu's hearts tore free of his body, elemental masks bombarding the field with layered ninjutsu, Earth Grudge Fear stretching him into something barely human.
Kimimaro walked through it.
Water smashed against White Bastion Frame and broke apart.
Elemental blasts scorched, froze, and shattered against layered bone and reinforced flesh.
What landed simply didn't matter.
He was too durable.
Too fast.
As the last seal locked into place around Hidan, Kimimaro lifted his gaze calmly toward the air and the remaining five.
Breathing steady.
Posture relaxed.
He hadn't even started killing them yet.
And they could feel it.
His attention settled on Kisame.
Even without focusing, his sensory mode screamed it at him, obscene vitality, vast chakra reserves, a body that bordered on a pseudo–Sage physique.
However, still, the comparison to a tailed beast had always been an exaggeration anyway.
How could a random Kirigakure shinobi truly possess more chakra than entities that were literally created as condensed masses of it?
Saying that about Hashirama, or even that Kimimaro himself already could rival some of the weaker beasts, in that department, made sense.
Kisame, on the other hand, didn't.
Yet it was still not natural. Not accidental.
That kind of unnatural resilience and even appearance could only come from deliberate experimentation buried deep in the Hoshigaki clan's past, something aquatic and brutally vital, warped into flesh and preserved through generations.
Kimimaro recognized the pattern immediately.
But whatever legacy the Hoshigaki and Hōzuki clans once had was already gone, destroyed.
After all, when "Yagura" rose to power, they were no longer sheltered as they had been during the Third Mizukage's bloodline-only suppression era, when persecution was largely confined to clans outside the village rather than those within it.
Obito had hollowed them out as well, stripped them down just as thoroughly.
By the time Kimimaro stepped into Kirigakure today, he could barely locate a handful of remnants, diluted, broken, barely worth the name of those once decent hijutsu clans.
Kisame wasn't proof of survival.
He was proof, perhaps, of the highest state of what had been lost.
He moved toward him first.
In his mind, killing a single body was simply more efficient than dismantling Kakuzu's five separate hearts.
Economy of effort mattered.
And he knew that by targeting one of the grounded fighters, the ones still in the air would be forced to descend sooner or later, abandoning their safety and exposing themselves to him without the need for pursuit.
Efficiency always dictated the order of death.
Kisame grinned when the white-haired bastard chose him.
"So you picked me," he thought, teeth splitting wider. "Bad call."
Chakra flooded outward as he slammed his hands together.
"Water Release: Exploding Water Colliding Wave!"
The battlefield drowned.
A rising wall of water surged up in front of Kimimaro, swallowing the ground, lifting Kisame with it as the terrain became an ocean.
In the same breath, Kisame dove, body vanishing beneath the surface like a shark slipping into its element.
Perfect.
Then he struck again.
"Water Release: A Thousand Feeding Sharks!"
The water itself turned predatory.
A thousand sharks burst upward, not swimming but charging, their mass replicating a collapsing wave as they swarmed down toward Kimimaro from every angle.
From Kisame's perspective, the man looked small now. Drowned in blue. Buried under pressure.
"…Heh," Kisame thought. "Let's see you swim."
Kimimaro didn't slow.
He cut through the water.
Not by brute force, not by dispersal, but like a blade sliding through silk.
White Bastion Frame parted the pressure cleanly, bone edges carving channels through the wave as Kimimaro advanced through the ocean, ignoring depth, ignoring drag, ignoring resistance.
The sharks hit him.
And broke.
Armor didn't dent.
Momentum didn't shift.
The feeding frenzy looked less like an attack and more like puppies crashing into a moving wall of knives.
Kisame's grin faltered.
At that moment, a shadow fell behind Kimimaro.
Deidara hovered on his C2 bird, already smirking.
"Oi, oi," he called cheerfully. "You're real scary and all, but don't forget about art, hm?"
From his palms, miniature explosives peeled loose, C2 clay shedding into the air.
They didn't fall straight down.
They circled, corrected, and tracked, tightening into a ring directly above Kimimaro's position.
"Art is—"
Kimimaro's eyes flashed.
He didn't turn around.
Byakugan flared for a fraction of a second, vision snapping open behind him as clearly as in front.
Then the Tenseigan ignited, pressure condensing, vectors aligning.
"Dance of the Bone Rain."
The air screamed.
Tens of thousands of hardened shards of bone erupted upward in a sudden, violent burst, launched by Tenseigan pressure rather than muscle alone.
They arced high, spread wide, then inverted—
And rained down like a storm of white arrows.
Nearly instantaneous speed, driven with bullet-like force.
Front and back.
Water and sky.
Kisame was forced to dive, body twisting as bone shards punched through the wave around him, shredding sharks, piercing water like it wasn't there.
Above, Deidara's grin vanished.
"—is an EXP—"
Iron sand slammed up around him.
Sasori's Third Kazekage puppet interposed instantly, magnetism flaring as iron sand formed a layered shield, catching the bone rain mid-descent.
Shards embedded, screeched, and were deflected aside just before they could reach Deidara.
"Watch your positioning," Sasori said flatly, voice calm even now.
Deidara clicked his tongue, irritation flashing across his face.
"Tch. I had it."