As the colossal wooden giant's lava-wreathed punch obliterated Manda, a shockwave far fiercer than any hurricane—fused with heat that felt hot enough to melt iron—smashed into Orochimaru like an invisible hammer.
He barely managed to cross his arms over his chest, chakra gathering by reflex.
But before that world-ending force, a human body might as well be paper.
It felt like being hit head-on by a mountainside of molten rock at full speed. Bones in his forearms cracked with a tooth-aching snap; pain flashed through every nerve.
Then he was a severed, tattered kite—blasted away by that overwhelming power.
Bang!
He slammed into a slick, icy rock wall like a fired shell. The impact dented the stone into a webbed crater; shards rattled down in sheets.
A sweet taste rose in his throat; he couldn't suppress it this time. Thick blood spilled from the corner of his mouth, dripping off his chalk-pale chin.
Clenching against the pain of a body coming apart, he forced his head up.
His golden, slit pupils locked on the churn of magma ahead.
And on—
Manda, now utterly still.
The foul-mouthed, untamed serpent had been reduced to half a charred carcass soaking in a dark-red lava lake, still stinking of burnt flesh. The rest of its head was simply gone from his field of view.
"Manda…"
"Dead?!"
Orochimaru's voice came out raw and hoarse, with a tremor he himself didn't notice.
The composure and chill of a Sannin shattered in an instant, leaving only shock and a sense of absurd disbelief.
His strongest summon couldn't last ten exchanges under Uchiha Chizumi?
Cold analysis kicked in through the chaos of his thoughts.
—For all its size, Manda was fragile as paper before Lava Release's all-consuming heat. The bigger the body, the bigger the target.
—Poison strong enough to eat rock was hard-countered by Wood Release.
—And Manda's movements were clumsy slow-mo under Mangekyō Sharingan's tracking; no matter the attack, it couldn't even brush Chizumi's sleeve.
—In short, Manda was hard-countered by Uchiha Chizumi.
There was another factor he didn't mention.
In the panic he'd failed to share key intel on Chizumi with Manda—he'd basically gotten it killed. With that knowledge, Manda might at least have lasted a bit longer.
Screee—!
Suddenly, a shriek of air ripped the smoky, sulfurous haze. A tighter, faster torrent of lava swelled in Orochimaru's vision without warning.
Even at a distance, the heat prickled his skin like needles.
"Damn!"
Alarm bells detonated in his mind; death's shadow loomed again.
Gritting his teeth, he threw himself sideways in a desperate, ungainly tumble, pain screaming like broken bones.
Szzz—
The lava stream skimmed his torn robe. The wall he'd just cratered sagged like wax the instant the flow touched it, slumping into a gaping, glowing hole.
But the lava didn't disperse after missing—like a living thing, it snapped around, whip-fast, and surged at him again.
It covered so much space he had nowhere to dodge.
"Can't get away!"
His golden pupils pinholed under the sheer threat.
He slammed both hands to the ground.
"Summoning: Single Rashōmon!"
Boom!
A gigantic demonic gate—scarred, blackened, half-melted—heaved up with a grinding roar. It was the last gate that had survived earlier blasts, a husk of its former power and barely holding together.
Wham—!!!
The lava torrent hammered the Rashōmon. The ruined gate shuddered and screamed with twisting metal; the stubborn char turned to rivulets of red-hot iron that ran down its face.
Orochimaru never expected it to hold.
He only needed a heartbeat.
In that instant of impact—before the shockwave fully blossomed—he launched upward like an arrow.
Fighting off vertigo, his left hand flashed to his waist and ripped free a scroll.
Poof!
A bloom of white smoke—and a bizarre jet-powered flyer popped into the air. Something he'd tinkered together between human experiments.
He slammed a foot onto the cold stirrup and slapped the control panel.
Vrrrr—
Fwoosh!!!
A snarl of blue flame stabbed from the tail. With a piercing whine, thrust hurled Orochimaru like an uncaged bird into Ryūchi Cave's dark depths.
Manda's death had snuffed his last will to fight.
As for grief? Hah. He and Manda merely used each other.
To him, Manda was a powerful but awkward tool.
He'd barely covered a few hundred meters—already tasting the relief of survival—when—
Thoom. Thoom.
Heavy footfalls boomed behind and below, the ground trembling. Like a rapid death drum, the rhythm pounded his chest.
Cold spread up his spine.
Stiffly, he turned his neck by degrees and looked down, dread thick in his gut.
The massive wooden giant was striding over Manda's still-smoldering remains, each step heavy, charging after him.
Atop that wooden head stood Uchiha Chizumi, arms raised at a slant, leveled at Orochimaru in the sky.
What made Orochimaru's soul lurch: both of Chizumi's arms had fully molten—two living volcanoes, swelling and pulsing.
Red magma raced within them, surging and compressing, radiating annihilation.
Orochimaru's pupils shrank to pinpoints.
A heartbeat later—
BOOM-BOOM-BOOM-BOOM-BOOM—
Chizumi's arms snapped—and a storm of lava fists, each larger than a man and made of pure molten rock, tore the air like flak fire, screaming upward from the giant's crown.
In a blink, they wove a net of magma across most of the sky—nowhere to run.
Against that barrage, the flyer under Orochimaru's feet looked clumsy and ridiculous.
He gritted his teeth and threw the machine into extreme evasions, barely scraping past a few howling fists.
Hot gusts singed his hair; terror gripped his throat.
He'd just dodged three when a larger, denser punch hammered into the only path left.
Quantity became quality.
BOOM!!!
It didn't hit him square—just grazed the wing—but the heat burned through the alloy in an instant. Everything below his left ankle vanished like frost in the sun.
The stump carbonized on contact; not a drop of blood had time to fall.
"Argh—!"
Blinding pain almost blacked him out.
The giant was already there.
Its left arm—knotted from titanic timbers—opened like a swatting hand, force enough to smash mountains, air crumpling into a palpable wall ahead of it. It came down on the falling, helpless Orochimaru.
Shadow swallowed him whole.
No escape.
No blocking.
"Power of the White Snake!"
Eyes bloodshot, Orochimaru burned nearly all remaining chakra, fingers locking a seal.
The giant palm hit square.
Crack!
Splurt!
Crunch!
Bone snapping, meat crushing, organs bursting—a hellish chorus.
Skin and facial muscle sloughed like sludge; his skull dented and fractured in an instant. A dozen ribs broke to splinters; sharp bone spurs stabbed deep into soft organs. Limbs twisted at impossible angles; white shards punched through skin into the air.
Blood sprayed from mouth, nose, ears, and eyes like ruptured bags, flecked with tissue.
"Gah—!"
A foul gout of viscera, teeth, and clotted blood geysered from his ruined mouth.
He was swatted away by irresistible force, the speed dragging a chain of detonations through the air.
A flesh shell fired at full charge.
Whump—!!!
He hit like a meteor. The ground blew open into a crater more than ten meters across; dust and blood fog blasted skyward.
At the center, what barely resembled a human lay in rubble and gore, twitching in unnatural spasms—proof some sliver of life clung on.
Blood ran like rills from the wreck that was his body, turning the dirt red.
"Urh… khh…"
Breaths rasped like a torn bellows in his shattered chest.
A hand—bloody, fingers broken and twisted—scraped weakly in the pool. Each twitch drove bone shards deeper, wringing new agony.
But in his one remaining golden pupil, a near-fanatical will to live burned.
With the last sparks of will, he tried to complete a simple, impossibly difficult seal with those ruined fingers…
Once… failed…
Twice…
The third time—
Through pain at the edge of madness, the mangled fingers finally locked.
Rip.
With a sickening tear, a slick, blood-smeared, corpse-pale new arm thrust out from the split in the ruined face.
Then a new shoulder, a new neck—
A new Orochimaru crawled from the "old skin" like a snake breaking shell, inch by agonizing inch.
"Huff… huff… khh…"
A third of the way out, he was panting like a dying beast. Every breath reeked of blood and the pain of torn organs.
Overdrawn chakra and the strain of using this forbidden art again hollowed him out. Weakness drowned him like a tide.
He braced a new hand, trying to haul his waist free—
Thunk! Thunk!
Two cold flashes fell from the sky.
Shunk!
The first, a black kunai, screamed down and pinned his bracing palm to the rock, punching through flesh and stone.
"Hsss—!"
White-hot pain sucked air through his teeth.
He bit down to yank it free—another flash. A falling ninja blade smashed his other outstretched hand to the ground.
"Ghah!"
He couldn't hold back the grunt. His golden pupils shook with pain and despair.
He recognized the blade—the Kusanagi.
He must have lost it when he was swatted; Uchiha Chizumi had caught it.
Pinning his hands with his own sword—
The righteous lunatic did have a taste for cruelty.
Thoom. Thoom. Thoom. Thoom.
Heavy steps approached, each pounding his heart.
The towering wooden giant blotted out the cavern's dim light and stopped at the crater's edge. Its shadow fell over him like a death shroud.
Teeth clenched, Orochimaru tipped up his slime- and blood-smeared head inch by inch.
His gaze climbed the giant's mountain-thick legs.
And fixed on the figure atop the wooden head—cold as a judge from hell, looking down.
Their eyes met in midair.
Only then did Orochimaru realize how eerie the Uchiha's Mangekyō could be—so scarlet, so otherworldly.
The moment he saw them, color drained from the world. In his blurring sight those eyes stood out, burning red points.
It felt like his soul was being drawn into that blood-red abyss.
"Not good…"
The pattern in those pupils ballooned in his vision. An indescribable, irresistible force—like billions of red-hot needles—stabbed into every corner of his soul, mind, will, and consciousness.
"AAAAAAAHHH!"
Thought shredded; his brain was jammed into a boiling crucible. Faces of "materials" he'd put on operating tables—screaming as they died—flashed past like a carousel.
Twisted limbs, hollow eyes, shrieks without end… All the pain, fear, despair, and hatred borne by the "sacrifices" he'd written off returned in a tsunami, multiplied thousands of times, smashing the cold fortress he called a mind.
Not illusion—judgment by Absolute Justice.
"HSSSSAAAAAHHH!"
A scream not quite human tore from his throat, as if his soul were being ripped apart.
His new body convulsed like it was under a high-voltage jolt; tears, snot, and drool poured unchecked. A foul stench spread as he lost control below the waist.
The "Sannin" who toyed with life writhed like a skinned worm on a hot plate.
His howls echoed through Ryūchi Cave—thick with sulfur, scorch, and blood.
In the pit, he rolled and spasmed, yanking at the weapons pinning his arms and drawing new waves of agony.
Chizumi stood on the wooden giant's crown—an indifferent judge of hell—looking down.
His voice cut through the screams, each word like an ice pick hammered into Orochimaru's soul.
"For a source of the shinobi world's evils like you, an easy death would stain the word 'justice'—it would indulge your crimes through inaction."
"The pain you feel now will cling like maggots to bone, for all your days. Whether you cling to life or cross to the Pure Land; whether you wear one shell or a thousand, no matter how your soul contorts…"
"You will be as Shimura Danzō is—every minute, every second, to the end of time—sinking and wailing in an abyss of perfect pain. This is Absolute Justice's final verdict upon you."
As the last word fell, his other Mangekyō flared.
A stark blood-red line slid from the corner of his eye like a tear.
His ocular power spiked; the cold, intricate pattern whirled, as if opening a gate to purgatory.
Boom.
Without warning, a strange, condensed flame manifested from nothing and blossomed on Orochimaru's chest.
It had no heat—yet the agony it inflicted on body and soul was a billion times worse than fire.
It burned flesh, yes—but branded his soul's core as if with countless red-hot irons.
The scream pitched up beyond human range.
His back arched; it was as if invisible spikes had pinned him to the ground.
The flame behaved like a living thing, greedily sucking his life and spirit, as if to erase him at the root.
"—Stop!"
Just as that heaven-sent fire was about to swallow what remained of Orochimaru's awareness, a furious, ringing cry broke across the battlefield.
Three graceful figures, cold auras rolling off them, ghosted into view atop boulders at the edge.
The three serpent princesses of Ryūchi Cave—Tagorihime, Ichikishimahime, and Takitsuhime.
Even they—ancient and no strangers to slaughter—went wide-eyed and drew sharp breaths at the sight.
This wasn't the Ryūchi Cave they knew.
It was a purgatory.
The ground was cracked wide, lava oozing like the earth's blood through its veins. Destructive heat warped the air itself.
Charred pits, collapsed cliffs, rocks pitted by corrosion—
A wasteland of death.
Farther off, Manda's mountainous corpse soaked in magma, its once-arrogant head and a swath of neck long since vaporized.
At the center of that hellscape, the wooden giant loomed.
At its feet, in the crater, Orochimaru was nailed to the ground by a kunai and the Kusanagi itself.
On his chest burned that uncanny flame that made their souls quail. He writhed like a worm on a griddle, shrieking in a voice that unsettled even them—nothing left of any "Sannin" dignity.
And the author of it all, Uchiha Chizumi, stood atop the wooden crown. He turned toward their angry shout, face without a trace of feeling.
…
His gaze passed over the three—and he murmured, "Three Red Named Villains."
"Brat!"
Tagorihime forced down that flutter of dread; she didn't realize she'd already been marked.
The ruin around them and Manda's fate lit her fury. Sage chakra surged off her, invisible force lifting her into the air. Her ornate kimono fluttered without wind; a suffocating chill pressed outward.
Her voice was sharp as a serpent's hiss. "You trespass in Ryūchi Cave, despoil our holy ground, slay Manda, and even disturb the White Snake Sage's seclusion—"
Her pupils fixed on Chizumi atop the giant. "Since the shinobi world settled a thousand years ago, no one has dared treat Ryūchi Cave with such contempt!"
"You little—"
She didn't finish.
Whoom!
Without warning, the wooden giant's left arm—braided from titanic timbers—swung with crushing wind pressure and slapped down at the hovering Tagorihime.
Shadow swallowed her small form.
"What?!"
For the first time true fear tore across her perfect face.
She hadn't expected the human brat to be so unreasonable—attacking before she could finish a sentence.
The force in that blow could smash mountains.
For the first time, she felt death closing in.