Before the battle ever began, Kimimaro had already done his part.
He had briefed the girls on Akatsuki.
Not vaguely. Not cautiously. Precisely.
Abilities, tendencies, known techniques, and behavioral patterns.
Enough to turn first contact into execution instead of improvisation.
They assumed it came from his sensory network.
As for the allocation of targets, it was the result of deliberate, calculated planning on his part.
His Tenseigan had pushed his Byakugan-like standard perception to its absolute limit when it was on.
Hundreds of kilometers of range, omnidirectional sight, layered X-ray vision, all three baseline modes amplified to the maximum whenever he allowed it.
Distance, penetration, and breadth, all refined beyond any Hyūga in history, surpassed perhaps only by true Ōtsutsuki eyes.
But that didn't make his vision the same as Emi's.
Emi's Byakugan had been broken in a different direction.
Where Kimimaro's now overwhelmingly powerful dōjutsu ruled scale and scope, Emi had spent her entire childhood abusing hers for detail and specialization.
Straining it. Forcing it. Refining it relentlessly.
Even after coming under Kimimaro's wing, she trained and used it daily in her role as his main scientist, pushing it ever deeper toward microscopic precision.
And now, it let her perceive something no one else could see with clarity at all, the faint, translucent distortions of natural energy itself.
She didn't see farther.
Compared to ordinary Hyūga, she was actually weak in range.
But she saw deeper.
That was why Kimimaro couldn't replicate the quality of her close-range perception, no matter how superior his eye was overall.
And that was why, when the fight finally fractured, he sent Emi and Saya after Obito.
In theory, Kimimaro's own Tenseigan Sage Mode could also be a hard counter against Obito's Kamui because of the sheer level of speed he achieves at that time.
In practice, it was too expensive to deploy too freely at this stage from the beginning.
Emi, however, could intuit Obito's intangibility windows through natural energy distortion alone.
She didn't need to "see" Kamui.
She felt where reality failed to line up.
And her externally enhanced Eighty Gods Vacuum Attacks, also reinforced by Polarity Release, could interfere with him at minimal cost.
Saya complemented that perfectly.
Her immortal physique let her survive even the most hostile terrain, and her Yin–Yang curse arts didn't just strike bodies; they imposed reality.
Kamui didn't negate that cleanly.
Together, they were cheap pressure.
And Kimimaro loved cheap pressure.
"The space around him doesn't align cleanly, from time to time," she said calmly. "I can work with that."
Saya smiled as bone rose beneath her feet.
"So I just keep walking forward until he runs out of reality?"
Kimimaro answered dryly without turning his head.
"Until he breaks. Or you do. Preferably him."
So when Akane and Itachi's clash detonated in the distance, black and orange Susanoo tearing the sky apart and forcing the battlefield to spread and scatter, Kimimaro moved immediately.
Chains lashed outward as Reika targeted the rest of Akatsuki, in an instant, forcing spacing and disrupting formation.
At the same time, Kimimaro formed a shadow clone.
Not to fight.
To pilot.
He knew better than to throw clones into close combat at this level.
No matter how much chakra you fed them, they were never as durable as a real body. One mistake and they vanished.
They couldn't even use the Eight Gates properly, lacking a true human physique to withstand them.
But they were perfect conduits.
The clone slammed its hands to the ground.
The Seedling Fern Forest erupted.
Bone spears tore upward in waves, impaling earth, stone, and mist alike, transforming the terrain into a lethal white forest. From within it, the clone didn't move forward.
It grew.
The Dance of the White Sovereign awakened.
A colossal skeletal avatar rose as the forest itself fused together, spiked, layered, reinforced, a towering bone construct that eclipsed buildings, its form sharp, moldable, and brutally solid.
Kimimaro didn't inhabit it physically.
The clone controlled it from within like a nervous system wrapped in armor.
A third of Kimimaro's chakra already flowed into it.
The battlefield froze for a fraction of a second.
Even Akatsuki felt it.
Obito did too.
Emi was already airborne, Polarity Step and natural energy control chaining silently through the air, her movement erratic, untrackable.
From above, her charged vacuum strikes collapsed space around Obito's movement paths, disrupting exits before they could fully form.
Below, Saya advanced through the bone forest itself, spikes tearing through her body only to be overwritten instantly by her immortal Yin–Yang loop.
However, that rarely happened.
Kimimaro's control over the bone forest had grown immense, regardless of distance.
He guided it in surging waves, deciding precisely whom to crush and for whom to open a path.
Obito warped, slipped, phased—
And found nowhere clean to go.
From above, pressure.
From below, imposition.
From all sides, bone.
Kimimaro adjusted the forest in real time, redirecting spikes, opening paths while sealing Obito's, every movement deliberate, predatory.
Obito's head tilted slightly beneath the mask.
"So this is the setup," he said quietly.
'He built those two properly...' Obito realized, irritation tightening the thought.
That was when he finally stopped trying to dodge.
Obito knew his intangibility wasn't absolute. When Kamui was active, he couldn't teleport away. If he let the duration reach its limit, he would be crushed the moment it failed. And the white-haired opponent controlling the battlefield looked fully capable of layering an endless sea of bone to force exactly that outcome. Worse, as the two girls closed in, who knew whether they might find a way to pierce his intangibility altogether, creating an opening he couldn't afford.
"Back," he ordered calmly.
Akatsuki obeyed without question.
Space shook.
Nagato muttered calmly across the battlefield.
"So he's finally committing. Madara Uchiha..."
A mountain of chakra erupted as Obito's gray Perfect Susanoo manifested, vast enough to eclipse both Itachi's and Akane's constructs even from a distance.
Its presence crushed the bone forest beneath it, shockwaves tearing outward as the ground failed under its weight.
The White Sovereign answered.
The skeletal titan straightened, spikes extending, bone fists locking into place as it faced the Susanoo head-on, dwarfing everything below into irrelevance.
What unfolded just now happened in clear stages.
First, Akane and Itachi exploded into each other, their clash tearing the battlefield's center apart and forcing every other engagement to spread outward.
Immediately after, Reika lashed out with her chains on his signal while Kimimaro himself drowned the ground in bone, denying space and shattering Akatsuki's formation.
At the same time, Kimimaro's clone, Saya, and Emi isolated Obito as their sole target first.
That was the opening.
Now came the adjustment.
The Akatsuki reacted fast.
"Tch," Deidara muttered as he pulled higher. "This battlefield's trying to eat us."
Kisame laughed while smashing through a narrowing gap. "Heh. I like it when the ground fights back."
"Don't get sloppy," Kakuzu said flatly. "This isn't pressure. It's a net."
Too fast to be caught cleanly.
They scattered through experience alone, slipping through narrow gaps between bone spikes just before they closed.
Zetsu was nowhere to be seen. Kisame brute-forced his way through openings, with massive water release output, Kakuzu detached and reattached limbs mid-movement, Sasori abandoned ground entirely, and Deidara rose higher as well.
Konan was flying with her paper Yang release, and even Nagato's Six Paths of Pain repositioned without hesitation through a flying Animal Path creature.
Then Obito escalated.
His Perfect Susanoo finished forming, mountain-sized, its sheer mass crushing swathes of the bone forest beneath it.
Gray chakra condensed into armor thick enough to silence the terrain simply by existing.
From within it, giant Kamui shuriken tore free.
They didn't explode on impact. They erased.
Each one struck the ground and vanished, sections of forest outright, carving clean corridors through bone and earth alike.
Pathways opened deliberately behind him, safe lanes for the rest of Akatsuki to retreat through and regroup under his cover.
Obito stepped forward.
The White Sovereign met him head-on, makeshift bone fists colliding with chakra armor in thunderous impacts that rippled across the battlefield.