"Everyone move back," Deidara barked, grin sharp and feral. "I'll show him true art!"
This time, no one argued.
Konan was the first to recognize it for what it was.
Against an opponent like this, speed and tricks weren't enough.
If they were going to win, it would have to be through overwhelming, fused firepower, crushing him from range before he could close again.
The others disengaged immediately, pulling back to create lanes.
Deidara rose higher.
"C3."
The clay unfolded into a massive statue midair, grotesque and solemn, its bulk blotting out the sky as it began to fall.
Once activated, it would detonate with a force great enough to erase an entire village.
Kirigakure-sized devastation, compressed into a single moment.
Kimimaro looked up at it.
Interested.
"So that's your ceiling," he thought calmly.
He could see the structure of it even without fully engaging his dōjutsu—a fusion.
Deidara's innate Explosive Release kekkei genkai, paired with some kind of Yang Release-based clay molding.
Without the bloodline, the technique would be meaningless.
Together, it was lethal.
Refined. Signature.
At that scale, Deidara truly did stand among Akatsuki's upper echelon.
And Kimimaro understood why they'd chosen this.
He lacked overwhelming long-range annihilation, at least on the surface.
At least without this.
'So you're next.'
Just because he hadn't flown yet didn't mean he couldn't.
As the C3 statue plummeted toward him and the rest of Akatsuki scrambled to reposition, Kimimaro's eyes ignited, arctic blue light flaring as the Tenseigan awakened.
The air bent.
Pressure inverted.
He didn't dodge the bomb.
He passed it.
Omnidirectional force seized the falling mass for a split second, containing its descent just long enough for Kimimaro to surge past it, accelerating upward in a straight, impossible line.
Gravity became suggestion.
Distance vanished.
One moment, Deidara was smirking.
The next, Kimimaro was in front of him.
"What—"
Shock ripped through Deidara's face as the white-haired figure appeared point-blank, riding nothing but warped pressure, moving faster than his eyes could track.
"C4!" Deidara snapped on instinct, clay already dispersing—
Bone ash cut through the air.
All-Killing Ash: Bone Ash Arrows.
Needle-thin projectiles tore through the forming clone of micro-explosives, unraveling them on contact.
The C4 construct didn't detonate.
It disintegrated mid-formation, cellular structure collapsing before those micro-explosives could become anything at all.
Deidara's breath hitched.
"You— you erased my art?!"
Kimimaro was already closer.
Too close.
Panic flashed, raw and ugly.
"Then die with it!" Deidara screamed.
C0.
Everything detonated at once.
His body had a suicidal core forming, power compressing beyond reason.
Even Kimimaro felt it, a sharp spike of danger, genuine for once.
"…That's potent," he admitted.
Especially that close.
But not unmanageable.
Cyan chakra mode briefly flashed around him.
Truth-Seeking Orbs, coated in Yin-Yang, materialized behind him in perfect formation, smooth, absolute, indifferent.
They surged forward as one, swallowing Deidara and the forming detonation alike, erasing matter, chakra, and intent in a single, silent collapse.
There was no explosion.
No sound.
Just absence.
The sky cleared.
Kimimaro hovered there for a moment, breath steady but reserves lighter.
"One down," he thought.
And for the first time in this fight, he acknowledged the cost.
Yet he needed him gone immediately. Deidara's entire body turned translucent, black lines racing across his skin as every last ounce of his being surged inward toward his heart and chest, building toward an ultimate detonation, the conceptual kind that only the Truth-Seeking Orbs could erase.
From a distance, the rest of Akatsuki froze.
They hadn't expected that.
Flight, yes, perhaps. But not like that. Not clean, not absolute.
Not gravity itself, bending as if it had been waiting for permission.
Konan felt it most sharply.
Her paper wings stalled for half a breath as she stared at the empty sky where Deidara had been.
The realization hit hard and cold. In the entire shinobi world, she had believed only Nagato possessed that kind of authority over gravity.
Rinnegan territory. Sacred territory.
And yet—
She remembered what the masked man had said.
That this white-haired teen carried an advanced dōjutsu.
Not Rinnegan. Something else. Something unknown.
For years, she had believed in Nagato not just as her closest companion, but as something more.
The reincarnation of the Sage of Six Paths.
The one meant to bring about Yahiko's dream, not through naïveté, but through grim, necessary resolve.
That belief was why she had accepted Akatsuki's transformation.
Why she had followed the masked Uchiha at all.
Now doubt crept in, sharp and unwelcome.
"If he can do that," she thought, watching the cyan light fade from the air, "then what does that make Nagato?"
Sasori didn't react outwardly.
He hovered in silence atop his iron sand, threads steady, posture unchanged.
But inside, something tightened.
Deidara's death wasn't just the loss of a partner.
It was the erasure of a variable.
Art, arguments, noise, all gone in an instant.
No struggle. No dramatic finish. Just… deletion.
"So that's the difference," he assessed calmly.
"Between something that explodes… and something that decides."
On the ground, Kakuzu stared upward, hearts beating harder than they had in decades.
That presence.
That pressure.
He had felt it once before, long ago, standing across from Hashirama Senju.
The same sensation of inevitability.
Of a predator so far above the food chain that resistance felt theoretical.
He had thought himself the ceiling of this world.
The apex of the underworld.
The one who survived everything.
He was wrong.
Kisame swallowed, grin gone, eyes wide with something dangerously close to excitement and fear.
"So there really are monsters bigger than us," he thought. "Hidden right under the surface."
They didn't hesitate.
Whatever shock lingered died instantly, replaced by instinct.
Experience. Survival.
The remaining Akatsuki unleashed everything at once.
Konan dissolved.
Her body unraveled into endless paper, layers upon layers separating, masking her true position as countless paper clones burst outward.
Substitutions folded and unfolded midair.
Paper shuriken, spears, blades, restraints.
Explosive tags embedded into flowing constructs.
A suffocating storm formed overhead, sheets layering upon sheets, a white sea meant to drown, bind, and crush.
Paper rain fell like a judgment.
Kimimaro descended back toward the ground through it, unhurried.
The blue light in his eyes flickered once.
"Dance of the Crumbling Bloom."
Bone flowers erupted from the earth beneath him, opening like pale blossoms before collapsing inward, their petals disintegrating into clouds of ashen fragments.
The paper storm met them and began to rot, layers decaying on contact, constructs unraveling as the ash spread and ate through binding, structure, and chakra alike.
The sea parted.
Kimimaro previously tested and knew that it had always been a misunderstanding, one born from shallow fandom takes, that All-Killing Ash Bones only disintegrated physical bodies.
If that were true, the technique wouldn't be godlike.
It wouldn't be worthy of Kaguya at all.
After all, what would stop any competent shinobi from simply fighting at range, with chakra blast in the form of ninjutsu, never exposing a physical body for the ash to touch?
A power that was supposed to be so absolute wouldn't have such an obvious loophole.
Canon itself already disproved that idea.
In the original series, the bone reduced Naruto's shadow clone to literal ash as well, a construct made entirely of chakra, not real flesh.
Shadow clones are not real bodies.
If they were, they wouldn't disperse so easily.
They are physicalized chakra given temporary form, far more substantial than ordinary illusionary E-rank clones, without any real substance at all, but still chakra nonetheless.
And yet, the ash erased them all the same.
Which meant the truth was obvious.
All-Killing Ash Bones did not merely destroy matter.
They degraded existence at a deeper level, unraveling chakra constructs just as surely as flesh, though physical bodies succumbed faster and more violently.
That was why Kimimaro could reduce Konan's paper to ash.
Her paper wasn't mundane.
It was animated, sustained, and weaponized through Yang Release, chakra given structure and function.
Without that chakra, it was nothing more than dead pulp.
And ash didn't care what form the target took.
Flesh or construct.
If chakra was there, the decay would find it.
Kimimaro, meanwhile, moved through the opening immediately, redirecting toward Kisame, who was still on the ground, again.
Kisame roared as he formed seals. "Water Release: Great Shark Bullet Technique!"
A colossal shark of compressed water and Yang-charged force surged forward, homing instinctively on Kimimaro's leftover chakra, in the atmosphere, growing denser, heavier, more violent by the second.
Kimimaro's eyes flashed again. The pressure inverted instead of colliding with it.
The shark twisted mid-charge, its momentum ripped away and hurled back along its own vector.
Kisame's grin vanished.
"Not good—"
But before the reversed technique could finish its course fully, four shapes lunged in from behind.
Kakuzu's hearts.
Detached bodies streaked forward, elemental masks screaming as they converged, his real body still hidden far away, safely distant.
Kimimaro answered without breaking stride.
"Dance of the Piercing Forest."
The ground beneath the battlefield came alive in sections.
Not a single eruption, but controlled waves of bone spikes rising in patterned zones, herding, separating, denying angles.
The hearts were forced apart, their trajectories and elemental jutsu barrages of Fire, Wind, Water, or Lightning, majorly disrupted as the terrain itself became a weapon.
"Dance of the Rising Grave."
From beneath the hearts, skeletal arms erupted upward, grasping, skewering, and dragging them down into surging white growth meant to finish them off quickly.
Bone wrapped, pierced, and pinned, collapsing the assault into nothing but spasms of motion and shrieking chakra. The two techniques worked in lethal tandem.
All four hearts were destroyed.
Kakuzu's real body, still lurking at a safe distance, froze in shock and immediately retreated even farther.
Above—
Iron sand screamed.
Sasori descended, the Third Kazekage puppet unleashing its full arsenal.
Iron Sand Drizzle poured down in lethal sheets, grains laced with poison cutting through the air like a black rain.
Then the battlefield itself darkened as Iron Sand World Method spread outward from the other side, magnetism saturating the air, sealing off space, and closing every apparent route of escape.
Kimimaro, however, just stepped into it.
Pressure surged.
"Tenseigan: Celestial Divide."
Iron sand buckled, paths opening through the storm as if parted by an invisible blade.
Kimimaro elevated, using his control to carve a straight ascent toward Sasori, who had suddenly become the most exposed target.
Sasori reacted instantly.
The Kazekage puppet flared with power, magnetism intensifying as it launched itself upward, iron arrows screaming toward Kimimaro in dense formations.
Too late.
"Ashen Cocoon."
Bone surged outward around Kimimaro, then crumbled instantly into a swirling shell of corrosive ash.
The iron sand met it and died.
Weapons disintegrated mid-flight.
Arrows vanished into nothing before they could reach him.
The cocoon collapsed outward.
"Dance of the All-Killing Bloom."
Bone projectiles launched forward, turning to ash mid-flight, scattering into a fine, invisible mist.
It washed over the Third Kazekage puppet in silence.
Metal screamed.
Then failed.
The puppet collapsed, iron sand losing cohesion as its structure unraveled from within, reduced to drifting residue.
Sasori's eyes widened.
He barely managed to retrieve the puppet's core, snaring it at the last moment with his longest thread and pulling it back to himself remotely.
And just as Kimimaro leaned forward to pursue—
Space twisted.
A warp formed around him.
And everything froze at once.