The "central brain" of the northeast front wasn't some shining fortress, but a concealed hub carved into the terrain of the Land of Hot Water's ridges.
Orochimaru had chosen an abandoned iron-mining site, long since hollowed out by laborers, its tunnels reinforced with sealing arrays and hidden under thick camouflage nets that matched the rocky slopes.
From the outside, it looked like just another forgotten cave mouth. Inside, it was a hive.
The main cavern held the war maps, enormous scrolls pinned across stone walls, covered in inked markings of troop positions and shifting frontlines.
Smaller chambers spread outward, housing communications units, medical stations, and the barracks for his "central detachment."
Half were flexible strike units, shinobi with diverse talents in scouting, assassination, sealing, and sabotage, the kind of operatives who could be sent into any gap along the front to plug holes or cause chaos.
The rest were defenders: hardened veterans, most of them special-jōnin or low-jōnin, capable of forming a last wall around the commander himself.
And then there were the Root operatives.
They didn't eat with the others, didn't rest in the same quarters.
Their eyes were colder, their voices absent.
Danzo had "loaned" them to Orochimaru, but everyone knew it was more than that.
They acted as his hands for the work too unsavory for the official record: bringing in captives alive, disposing of inconvenient allies, ferrying corpses to the back chambers where screams occasionally leaked.
Orochimaru's day-to-day life was deceptively methodical.
He spent mornings bent over the war maps.
Messengers and sensory relay officers brought in fresh reports every hour.
In the afternoons, he walked the tunnels, his presence as unnerving to allies as to enemies.
He'd pause to ask a medic-nin about casualty rates, or inquire about the chakra reserves of a particular squad.
Evenings were quieter. That was when the Root brought him "materials."
A captured Kumo shinobi was dragged half-conscious into the depths yesterday.
A body bag from one of Konoha's own, labeled "unsalvageable", the day before then.
Orochimaru studied them all, his hands delicate, precise, as though every corpse was a text to be read. He liked the most those "exotic pieces".
His assistants whispered that he sometimes didn't sleep for days, moving from War Council sensory meetings, to coordinate with the village and other fronts, to experiment without pause, driven by something far beyond duty to Konoha.
And all the while, his central post, this "nerve center", pulsed with life.
Officially, it was the Forward Operations Center of the Northeast Division.
To shinobi on the ground, it was simply "the Den."
Those who entered rarely spoke much of it afterward due to how eerie the place was, even though many shinobi from regular forces had no precise idea what exactly was going on.
On this particular day, Orochimaru was bent over his desk, a candle flickering low beside him, quill scratching notes across the margin of a battlefield report.
The map of the Land of Hot Water stretched out before him, lines of ink tracing rivers and infiltration routes.
He was correlating skirmish outcomes with the flow of supply convoys, muttering under his breath in a voice almost too soft to hear.
The "Den" was quiet, too quiet for a place that controlled an entire front.
That was how Orochimaru preferred it.
No clamor of ordinary soldiers, no nervous chatter.
Just the faint scratching of quills, the distant drip of water in the stone tunnels, and the soft hiss of candlefire eating wax.
His long pale fingers slid across the map spread before him, nails clicking faintly as he tapped points along the Land of Hot Water's valleys.
To any other commander, these were dots of ink.
To Orochimaru, they were pieces, pawns, and knights in a game that was more about pressure and misdirection than brute strength.
He didn't bark orders. He didn't need to.
His tone was always quiet, smooth, almost indulgent, like a teacher guiding slow students.
Yet everyone who served in the Den walked away with their spine damp in cold sweat.
"Shift the screening teams here," he murmured to a communication-nin kneeling beside him, his voice low and measured. "Mm… yes, just so. If Kumo presses on that valley, they will find themselves chasing shadows."
The messenger bowed and hurried away.
Orochimaru's golden eyes followed him lazily, then turned back to the map.
He was already elsewhere, mind crawling down into other layers.
He could see how squads bled, how supplies shifted, how information itself could be weaponized.
And then, when the duties of command eased, came what he privately called his other 'work'. Corpses, prisoners, the whispers of Danzo's Root echoing through the tunnels.
He moved through the deeper chambers with the same composed grace, pale skin glowing faintly in torchlight.
To the nervous young medic-nin who handed him a sealed cadaver pouch, he gave a soft smile, almost reassuring.
"You've done well. Don't look so pale. The dead still teach us… If you know how to listen."
His words sounded like praise, but the boy nearly stumbled running out of the chamber.
That was how Orochimaru was in his mid-thirties.
Outwardly, the brilliant general, commander of the northeast front, was polite and efficient.
Inwardly, always peeling back the skin of the world, hunting for the truth underneath.
Death wasn't an end to him, just a different kind of text to read.
And so the Den pulsed, a hundred and dozens more shinobi within its walls, if you included the Root too, on top of strike units and defenders, operatives trained to respond to his every gesture.
Root lingered separately, silent shadows at the edge of torchlight.
Some whispered about what happened in the deeper tunnels, but no one asked.
On this day, Orochimaru sat at his desk, quill scratching faintly, reviewing casualty reports with an almost academic detachment.
His expression was the same whether he read about victory or loss, gain or death. He didn't celebrate, he measured.
The door curtain shifted.
A Root operative entered without ceremony, mask gleaming white in the dim light.
It took him a few seconds, but he then knelt in silence, head bowed. "Report."
Orochimaru turned his head slowly, the candlelight catching in his snake-gold eyes.
His lips curved into a thin, deliberate smile as he accepted the scroll, without saying anything or letting him rise.
The cipher markings were familiar.
A report not from the field, not about Kumo movements, but from Konoha, probably about "Ryusei Nishida" again, he guessed.
Orochimaru's fingers lingered on the seal, stroking it once as though savoring the taste of what was inside.
"Mm… how curious," he murmured, voice low, almost a purr. "This boy again."
The Root soldier said nothing.
Orochimaru's smile widened, quiet and serpentine, before he began to break the seal.
He soon finished reading the report, in under a minute, lips curling faintly as he exhaled a dry chuckle.
"It seems that Danzo and the teacher are getting more and more desperate."
The words weren't loud, but they carried, and the Root operative's posture stiffened instantly.
Even through the mask, the flicker of offense was clear.
Orochimaru's golden eyes slid toward him, the grin widening ever so slightly, savoring the reaction.
'How charming,' He thought, 'The only thing left in these creatures is indignation when their master's name is brushed the wrong way.'
"Tatsuma Aburame…" Orochimaru said idly, the syllables rolling off his tongue with deliberate weight.
The man flinched. Even behind the mask, his jaw tightened.
Code names, numbers, anonymity - Danzo's creed.
To speak his true clan name was to peel away the mask itself. An intrusion. A desecration.
The silence thickened. Tatsuma's fists clenched once before easing, his body trembling almost imperceptibly with the effort to stay composed.
Orochimaru leaned back slightly, amused.
His voice was smooth, soft, like a knife stroking across silk.
"Mm. Yes. One of Danzo's… more personal dogs. You've been with him since you were what? Five? Six?"
His smile sharpened. "Raised to bare your teeth only when your master commands. How loyal. How predictable."
Tatsuma's breath hitched, but he said nothing.
The rivalry between them was old now, a constant simmer under every exchange.
Danzo's originals despised the way Orochimaru carved his own section of Root, shinobi plucked from the same molds, yet repurposed into something more pliable, more useful.
His faction didn't pray to Danzo. They belonged to him.
The two sides tolerated each other because Danzo willed it so, but there was no trust.
No warmth. Only knives hidden under every sleeve.
This was why Orochimaru didn't like him, because they always made it difficult for him there, using all kinds of "rules" of the Root as pretexes to stop him from acquiring more influence.
Orochimaru's grin thinned into something closer to boredom. He waved a pale hand dismissively.
"Ah… but don't worry. I won't waste another thought on you." His tone was lazy now, dripping with disdain. "I find it terribly tiring to count the cracks in tools that can't even see themselves breaking."
Tatsuma stiffened, but lowered his head, the mask bowing once in acknowledgment. He had no choice.
Danzo's personal bodyguard. Vice Commander of Root. Elite Jōnin.
One of the few trusted to stand beside Danzo at all times.
And yet, here he was, forced to address Orochimaru with careful respect.
Strength demanded it, position demanded it, but most of all, Danzo's own valuation demanded it.
As long as Danzo saw Orochimaru as indispensable due to those experiments or something else, even Tatsuma had no choice but to bite back any offense, no matter how brazen the Sannin's mockery.
In another world, men of Tatsuma's pedigree would be the ones holding the leash.
But now he was the one being tolerated, standing in a room where Orochimaru's shadow loomed larger than Danzo's command seal.
Perhaps that was why, beneath the blank Root mask, there lingered something like jealousy.
Jealousy of Orochimaru's autonomy, his freedom to act without the same suffocating chains.
Orochimaru turned back to the scroll, his attention already elsewhere, his smile lingering like a shadow across his lips.
Orochimaru's voice slithered through the chamber, smooth but laced with a cold amusement.
"To think… Danzo would spare a group of his closest hounds, even you personally, for this little game. This Ryusei Nishida boy must be quite the thorn, hm? The more I consider him, the more I can't help but feel—"
Orochimaru's golden eyes narrowed, the faintest grin tugging at his pale lips, "—he might be the most interesting variable I've encountered on this entire front."
The words carried weight, but even more unsettling was the tone, as though Ryusei was less a threat and more a fascinating specimen to dissect.
Tatsuma's jaw tightened beneath the mask, though his posture didn't waver.
He couldn't read exactly how much Orochimaru already knew, nor how much Danzo had shared, but it hardly mattered.
The man's reach, his informants, his intellect…
There was no way he hadn't pieced together most of it already.
And against someone like Orochimaru, hiding details was suicide.
Danzo's orders were clear. On this matter, failure meant punishment even for him. Even for a vice commander of Root.
So Tatsuma remained perfectly still, voice flat but deferential. "Your assessment… may not be wrong. Danzo-sama considers the boy a danger that cannot be allowed to grow further. For that, he has sanctioned our full cooperation with you as the leader and your… division."
Inwardly, Tatsuma felt the sting.
Here he was, Danzo's personal shadow, forced to lower himself and beg for the help of a man who technically stood under Hiruzen's authority, but whose words, here at the front, carried more weight than the Hokage's own.
That was Orochimaru's reality.
Even though this front was very young.
The war had given him a throne of his own.
And Tatsuma knew well: if they were to eliminate this variable named Ryusei Nishida Senju, in silence, exactly like their leader and the Third Hokage wanted, they would need not just Root precision, but Orochimaru's cunning hand to cloak it all in silence. It was paramount.