The forest went quiet after Naruto stopped yelling.
Not normal quiet. Not bugs and leaves and distant screams quiet.
Dead quiet.
Orochimaru—still wearing that Grass-nin girl's borrowed face—stood across from them with his hands loose at his sides, head tilted, eyes half-lidded. Completely untouched. Not a scratch, not a singe mark from Naruto's wild charge or the way that red chakra had burst out of him like a broken dam.
Naruto was the one on his knees.
He swayed once, the last flickers of that boiling, red-streaked chakra peeling off him and dissolving into the heavy air. Then his arms gave out. He hit the ground hard, face-first, cheek grinding into the dirt.
"Naruto!" Sylvie was moving before Sasuke's frozen brain finished the thought.
She slid in beside him, skidding on the wet leaves, hands already on his shoulders. Her glasses were crooked, pink hair plastered to her forehead with sweat and forest humidity.
Sasuke couldn't move.
He watched from a few paces away, legs tight, lungs burning.
Naruto's outburst—charging the giant snake, tearing himself out of its stomach, screaming at Sasuke to stop being a coward—had burned across his nerves like lightning. For a few seconds, it had cracked Orochimaru's killing intent. Just enough for him to breathe. Just enough for him to move.
And he hadn't done anything with it.
He'd stood there, watching Naruto throw himself at an enemy who didn't even look impressed.
Sylvie's fingers shook as she rolled Naruto onto his side, then his back. She pressed two fingers to his neck.
"Breathing," she said, too fast. "Pulse. Just— drained. Idiot burned himself out."
Her palm glowed faint green as she pushed chakra into a basic diagnostic technique. It flickered unevenly, her control torn up by adrenaline and the oppressive weight of Orochimaru's presence. The light skimmed over Naruto's chest and head, then guttered.
Sylvie swore under her breath. "Stable," she said. "But he's not waking up."
"Mm," Orochimaru hummed.
They both looked up at him.
He hadn't moved, but something in the air had sunk a few degrees colder. The feeling rolling off him wasn't like normal killing intent, where a person's bloodlust flared outward.
This was worse. Deeper. It felt ancient, like the memory of a battlefield. Like standing in the street the night the Nine-Tails attacked and realizing the sky itself wanted you dead.
Sasuke's knees threatened to give way again.
No.
Not this time.
He ground his teeth and forced his legs to lock. The tremor climbing his spine kept going anyway.
Naruto had just risked everything on a hopeless charge because Sasuke had stood there shaking.
If he stayed still now, it was over. For real this time.
Orochimaru's borrowed lips curled. "How interesting," he said softly. "The jinchūriki's chakra is…messier than I expected. So quick to answer a childish declaration."
His gaze slid to Sasuke.
Sasuke felt it land like a hand around his throat.
"And you," Orochimaru continued. "Still so rigid. Are you going to hide behind children forever, little Uchiha?"
Sasuke's fingers twitched against his thigh.
Hide.
The word sank in like a hook.
Itachi's back, walking away in the blood-wet corridor. His own shaking legs, buckling under him as he crawled toward their parents' bodies. The way his brother's hand had tightened on his head, fingers digging in almost gently as he rewrote Sasuke's world with a single jutsu.
He'd been useless then.
He'd promised that would change.
"Get away from him," Sasuke heard himself say. His voice didn't sound right. Too tight. Not enough air. "Stay away from my team."
Sylvie's head snapped toward him. Her chakra flickered—sharp, startled green-gold at the edge of his senses.
Naruto lay between them, chest rising and falling shallowly.
Orochimaru's eyes half-lidded. "Teamwork," he mused. "How quaint."
He took one unhurried step forward.
That was enough.
Sasuke moved.
He didn't make a plan. There wasn't time. Muscle memory and rage took over.
His hand was already in his pouch, fingers closing around cold metal. In one smooth motion, he dragged three shuriken out and sent them spinning at Orochimaru's head and chest.
The angles were clean. The lines true.
Orochimaru tilted his head a fraction. The blades passed through where he'd been an eyeblink before, cutting nothing but air.
Of course.
Sasuke had never expected those to hit.
They whistled past and buried themselves in a trunk behind him with solid thunks. The thin lines of ninja wire trailing from Sasuke's fingers sang for a heartbeat, catching the light.
Orochimaru's eyes flicked down.
"Ah," he said. "Wires."
Sasuke yanked.
The shuriken reversed, arcing back in a sharp curve, the wires looping around Orochimaru's limbs and torso. They crossed and tightened, binding him in a crude lattice of steel.
Sasuke gripped the wire in both hands and leapt to the side, planting his feet against a nearby trunk. The cords went taut, suspending Orochimaru slightly off-balance.
The fake Grass-nin body strained against the bindings. Steel creaked, but held. For the moment.
"Fire Style!" Sasuke spat, filling his lungs with the wet forest air that tasted like rot. Chakra surged through his coils, hot and sharp. "Dragon Fire Jutsu!"
Flame roared along the wires.
It raced toward Orochimaru in a blazing line, eating up the distance with hungry orange teeth. The heat whipped at Sasuke's face, stung his eyes. The bark beneath his sandals blackened and cracked.
The blast hit.
Flame surged upward, swallowing Orochimaru whole. For a moment, his world was noise: crackling, roaring, the hiss of sap boiling and bursting inside the burning branches.
Sasuke held the jutsu, teeth bared, forcing more chakra into the blaze.
This had to work.
It wouldn't be enough to kill someone like this—he knew that, somewhere deep down—but it might buy them time. Might hurt him. Might knock him out of that calm, mocking balance.
Heat licked at his skin. His arms shook. His chakra flared and dipped, the strain scraping the inside of his coils raw.
Then, slowly, the tide of flame ebbed.
Smoke poured upward, thick and choking. The wires sagged.
Something dropped out of the smoke and hit the branch in front of Sasuke with a wet thud.
He blinked through the heat shimmer.
There was a body at his feet.
Charred, twisted. The fake Grass-nin's flesh blackened and cracking, hair burned away, hitai-ate half-melted against the skull. The smell clawed down his throat.
Sylvie gagged behind him.
The ropes of wire still wrapped the corpse, metal glowing dull red in spots. Little flames licked at the remaining fabric and then died, leaving only blackened ruin.
For a second—one stupid, hopeful second—Sasuke let himself believe that maybe, somehow—
The corpse's mouth split open.
Not in a scream. Not in a normal way at all.
The jaw unhinged with a crack, stretching too far. Something pale and slick pushed up from inside the burnt ruin of the throat like a snake emerging from a dead animal.
Sasuke's breath caught.
A second Orochimaru slithered out of the burnt body, shedding it like an oversized skin. He unfolded to his full height with lazy grace, long dark hair untouched, clothes pristine.
He stepped neatly out of the smoking mess and smiled.
"Impressive reflexes," he said. "But you'll need more than that."
Sasuke's fingers dug into the bark behind him hard enough to splinter it.
The killing intent rolled out again, thicker this time. It oozed, slow and suffocating, filling the spaces between heartbeats. The forest seemed to lean in, branches curving closer.
Sylvie made a tiny noise—more exhale than word.
She was staring at Orochimaru with her eyes unfocused, pupils pinpricks. Her hand drifted toward her temple, fingers splayed, like she was trying to claw something invisible away from her face.
Sasuke could feel it too, now that he was looking.
Not just the pressure. The chakra underneath it.
Most chakra felt like heat, or weight, or wind. Strong or weak, heavy or light. Orochimaru's didn't fit any of that.
It was wrong.
Layered, dense, cold at the edges and weirdly empty at the center. Power coiled around a hollow space, like someone had carved out the middle of him and poured poison in to keep the shape.
Sylvie's lips moved soundlessly. Her chakra spiked painfully sharp, then rerouted, like she'd grabbed a live wire.
Her shoulders hunched.
Sasuke's own gut twisted.
He knew what it was to be treated like a thing. A container. A weapon you put away until you needed it.
Orochimaru looked at him the way Itachi had looked at him that night—like a puzzle piece. Not a person.
Anger surged up, hot enough to choke on.
"I'm not—" Sasuke forced the words out. "I'm not your tool."
Orochimaru's head cocked. "Not yet," he agreed. "But you could be so much more, if you survive."
He moved.
One instant he was standing in front of the charred husk. The next, he was inches from Sasuke's face.
Sasuke's eyes barely tracked the blur.
Then something clicked behind his eyelids.
The world sharpened.
The edges of Orochimaru's hair came into focus individually, each strand ridiculously clear. The play of his muscles under his borrowed skin, the twitch of tendons in his hand, the subtle shift of weight before each movement—
All of it snapped into place.
Sasuke's breath went shallow. His heart slammed against his ribs hard enough to hurt.
The Sharingan spun.
A second tomoe bled into existence in each eye, tearing his vision wider.
Everything slowed.
Orochimaru's arm came up, fingers knife-straight. Instead of a blur, Sasuke saw the exact line it would take, the trajectory aimed to shut down his shoulder joint.
He moved before he could think about it.
He dropped off the branch entirely, twisting as he fell. His hands caught another limb below, fingers locking, momentum swinging his body around. He kicked up, launching himself back at Orochimaru from underneath.
Kunai flashed.
Steel met pale skin, biting deep into Orochimaru's forearm.
Blood welled. Dark, almost black in the dim light.
Orochimaru's eyes widened a fraction.
"Ah," he said. "There it is."
Pain lanced through Sasuke's temples. The Sharingan throbbed. Every detail pressed in at once—too much information, too quickly, his brain trying to drink from a waterfall.
He gritted his teeth and forced it to focus.
If he let the dizziness win, they all died.
He pivoted on the branch, drawing a second kunai in his left hand. A quick pair of throws—high and low—tested Orochimaru's guard. The man dodged both with obscene ease, bending in ways joints weren't supposed to.
Sasuke was already forming seals.
"Fire Style! Fireball Jutsu!"
He spat a sphere of flame bigger than his own torso.
This time he aimed not at the man himself, but at the branch he stood on. Bark and wood exploded, molten ash raining down. Orochimaru leapt, weightless, body arching.
Sasuke was there to meet him.
Kunai clashed. Branches whipped past. For a few heartbeats, the forest dissolved around them; there was only movement and flame and the taste of metal at the back of his tongue.
Every time Orochimaru struck, the Sharingan showed him where it would land.
Every time, Sasuke was just barely fast enough.
His lungs burned. Fire chakra tore through his coils again, hot and vicious. He couldn't afford a long fight. He couldn't afford any of this.
Behind him, Naruto lay unconscious. Sylvie hovered near his head, hands pressed flat to the ground, ready to drag him the instant there was an opening.
He had to make one.
Orochimaru's grin widened. "Yes," he murmured, voice almost affectionate. "You're adapting beautifully."
He whipped a leg out, faster than a normal eye could have tracked. Sasuke saw it a heartbeat before it connected and tried to twist away.
He wasn't fast enough this time.
The kick slammed into his ribs. Pain flared white-hot. He went flying, smashing through a curtain of branches and skidding along a thick limb before slamming into a trunk hard enough to rattle his teeth.
His back screamed. His breath left in a rush.
He sucked air in through his nose, forcing his lungs to work.
Move.
He got one knee under him.
Orochimaru appeared in front of him, vertical pupils gleaming.
"The eyes of your clan are such beautiful things," he said. "Wasted on children who don't understand them."
Sasuke's hand jerked up with a kunai, but Orochimaru caught his wrist between two fingers, grip like iron.
"You want to kill your brother, don't you?" he asked conversationally.
Sasuke's blood froze.
He didn't answer.
He didn't have to.
The smile Orochimaru gave him said he'd already read all the answers in the set of his jaw, the tremor in his spine.
"Power," Orochimaru whispered. "That's what you need. More than this. More than what they'll give you in this village of cowards and fools."
He leaned in.
Sasuke tried to wrench away. His muscles refused. The Sharingan whirled frantically, trying to track every tiny movement, but the effort just made his head pound harder.
He saw Orochimaru's face getting closer, saw his mouth open wide, wider than a human mouth should. Saw his jaw unhinge.
Fangs slid down.
"Sasuke!" Sylvie's voice, high and cracked. "Move!"
He couldn't.
The teeth sank into his neck.
They punched through skin and muscle like nothing, scraping bone with obscene delicacy. Then they pressed chakra into him.
It wasn't like when a healer sent chakra through your coils—warm, clean, structured. It wasn't like Naruto's wild, boiling flux.
It was cold and burning at the same time, slick and heavy, oozing into his tenketsu, forcing his pathways open, carving new ones.
Sasuke screamed.
The sound tore out of him raw. It felt like his own chakra was trying to claw its way out of his body in every direction at once.
Something slapped against his shoulder—the sharp sting of paper, the flare of unfamiliar inked chakra. For an instant, a different seal pattern tried to impose itself over the one searing into his skin.
There was a flare of light.
Then backlash.
It ripped through him, an echoing jolt as the foreign tag's structure shattered under Orochimaru's jutsu. Sylvie's chakra signature shrieked at the edge of his awareness and then recoiled, burning out of contact.
The bite deepened.
Heat shot down his spine, then outward, branching like lightning over water. A mark bloomed across his shoulder and collarbone, black lines licking out and then sinking under the skin.
His vision blurred.
The forest fell away.
For a heartbeat, he was standing in the Uchiha compound again.
The path stones were slick under his sandals. Blood soaked the cracks between them, thick and dark. Bodies lay in unnatural angles, faces he knew emptied out.
He ran down the corridor he'd run down a thousand times in nightmares, lungs burning, Sharingan spinning uselessly at the corners of his sight.
"Mother! Father!"
Their room. Their bodies. The position of their hands. The smell—
He couldn't breathe.
A figure stood at the end of the hall.
"Itachi," he rasped.
His brother's silhouette was backlit, haloed in red.
"Why?" Sasuke choked. "Why did you—"
The figure blurred.
It wasn't Itachi's face any more. It was Orochimaru's, stretched and wrong, the same lazy smile carved into foreign features.
"If you want to kill him," Orochimaru's voice purred, somehow inside his skull and in his ears at the same time, "you'll need power that this village will never give you."
The mark on his shoulder throbbed. Each pulse sent another wave of searing heat through him, boiling his blood, shaking his bones.
He dropped to his knees in the vision, fingers digging into the blood-slick stone.
Power, Orochimaru whispered. Power to tear him down. Power to make him feel what you felt.
Sasuke's breath hitched.
He saw Itachi's calm, distant eyes. The lazy curve of his mouth when he'd patted Sasuke's head and called him "weak."
Weak.
Hate surged up, volcanic, swallowing everything else.
The burning pattern on his skin answered.
"I can give it to you," Orochimaru murmured. "Seek me, when you are ready."
The world shattered.
Sasuke's body convulsed on the tree branch, muscles seizing. The mark crawled over his skin in writhing black flames, then settled again, three comma-like brands circling the bite.
His vision finally went white.
He hit the branch and slid, barely catching on a jutting root before gravity pulled him entirely into the empty air beneath.
He didn't feel Sylvie's hands catching his vest and slamming his weight back onto the wood.
He didn't feel anything.
The last thing that registered, dim and far away, was Orochimaru's voice, amused and satisfied.
"Yes," the man said. "That should do nicely."
Then darkness closed in.
I didn't remember deciding to move.
One second Orochimaru had his teeth buried in Sasuke's neck and the world was falling apart in shades of sick purple and rust-black.
The next, there was a tag burning in my hand and I was already throwing.
"Stop," I heard myself scream, like yelling at a landslide.
The emergency seal smacked onto Sasuke's shoulder right next to the bite. The paper stuck, ink flaring bright white-blue as my chakra discharged in a single, desperate pulse.
For a heartbeat, the curse pattern stuttered.
Then it hit back.
I felt it as a physical blow through the seal array—a wave of crawling, oily chakra that didn't just reject my tag; it chewed through it. My design melted, lines dissolving like cheap ink in a flood. Power slammed into my hand along the same path I'd just used, vicious and gleeful.
Pain tore up my fingers and into my wrist, white-hot.
I ripped my hand away on reflex. The tag blackened and crumbled to ash, taking most of the skin of my palm with it.
I choked on a sound that wasn't quite a scream.
My left hand was just—gone, in the sensory map in my head. A numb, screaming absence. When I looked, the fingers were still there, but the skin over the chakra channels was scorched, black and cracked as if someone had drawn the bones in charcoal and then forgotten to add flesh.
Sasuke spasmed.
The mark she'd tried to block finished etching itself over his skin, not caring that I'd gotten in the way. Black sigils crawled over his shoulder and neck, pulsing once, twice, sinking in.
He screamed, a raw, awful sound.
Then he went limp.
I grabbed his vest with my good hand and the burned one without thinking, pulling him back from the edge of the branch. Pain flared up my arm so sharp it made my vision stutter, but I held on until his weight settled.
Orochimaru watched me, head tilted, eyes bright with something hungry and fascinated.
"Interesting," he said. "You bite back."
I couldn't answer. My throat refused to work.
Behind me, Naruto lay unconscious, breathing shallow but steady. Beside me, Sasuke's new mark still glowed faintly through his shirt like embers under cloth.
My hand throbbed in time with it.
Orochimaru's lips curved. "Take care of my little gift," he said. "And tell Sasuke-kun… I'll be waiting."
The killing intent pulled back as suddenly as it had slammed down. For a second my knees almost gave out at the absence of pressure.
By the time I blinked the black spots out of my vision, he was gone.
Just…gone. No rustle, no chakra trail I could follow. The forest closed around the empty space he'd left like a mouth swallowing.
The only sounds were my own ragged breathing and Naruto's and Sasuke's, uneven and overlapping.
I looked at them—orange idiot and avenging prodigy, both unconscious and heavier than they had any right to be.
My burned hand trembled in the humid air, nerves screaming.
"Okay," I whispered, voice shaking. "Okay. Fine. It's cool. I've got you."
The forest of death loomed around us, waiting to see if I was lying.