Queen Administrator's Multiverse Adventures or; How Everyone Started Worrying and Taylor Took Over the Worlds
Alt Title: Taylor's Adventures in the Land of Oh God Why is it On Fire?
Part Five: Orochimaru's Ooopsie
He moved from one branch to another with the simple grace afforded to all those who had made an art of honing their skills. There were no extraneous motions, no flashy landings or wastes of momentum. Every jump brought him to just the right height, every push left the branch he was on intact and unmarred. Not a single leaf was russeled by his passing.
It had been some time since Orochimaru of the Sanin has stalked the forests of Konoha, but he still remembered the motions he needed to move through them.
Today, his objective--one of many in this operation--was to find the last of the Uchiha. The boy was supposed to be powerful and talented. Less so than his older sibling, but that was for the best. He was still pliable, still likely to bend to the offers the snake summoner laid at his feet.
But first, he had to find the boy. "Where?" he hissed.
The tiny snake wrapped coyly around his neck sniffed the air with a flick of its forked tongue. "North," it hissed. "The boy is near."
He grinned, the expression pulling at the fleshy mask he was wearing. It wouldn't matter, soon he would drop the disguise, its use through. But that wasn't until he found his query.
Taking to the air with a heave, he landed, standing tall on a branch and looked below. He could feel chakra stirring, three signatures that he had marked during the previous test.
Crossing his arms, he prepared to deliver a speech, but paused when he noticed the three people below staring up at him.
All three wore outlandish garb, unsuitable for the ninja life. The one wearing robes that might have been fit of the Akatsuki especially had him feeling a particular sense of dread. Then the girl in their midst raised a delicate hand and waved at him.
"I don't suppose you three saw a team from Konoha around here?" he asked, tone still jovial and light. He would have to kill them, of course, but no self-respecting ninja would fail to at least try the stealthy approach.
The girl nodded, eyes closing in a smile. She pointed off to the side.
Turning, Orochimaru found his target, and his target's teammates, piled up together. They were snoring, drool leaking from their mouths and limbs sprawled out every which way.
So, the Konoha team had run into this team from...
He looked at their forehead protectors. The Village Hidden in the Village. A joke, perhaps, or a team from somewhere sensitive. Either way, it did not matter. He had hoped to test the boy before marking him... perhaps he could be awakened.
The large one dressed in a samurai's garb lumbered over to the three Konoha genin, then crossed his arms over his chest, effectively blocking the path between Orochimaru and his Uchiha.
"Ah, I see how it is," he said, his grin growing feral as he allowed his killing intent to pour out around him.
The kunoichi rolled her eyes. Raising a finger, she wiggled it from side to side in a clear 'no' gesture.
"As you wish," he said.
He threw three kunai at the genin team, all of them tossed with the speed and precision of an S-ranked nin.
The boy in the robes swiped the one heading for his heart out of midair, the samurai's kunai bounced off his armour and a bird swept in from nowhere and smacked into the knife heading for the girl.
She snorted.
He didn't give in to his rising anger. Too many fights and too much experience told him that the proper response to being toyed with was never rage. Instead he took in the scene, the kunoichi and the robed genins in the middle of a clearing, the samurai off to the side, the team with his target in a nook between the roots of a large tree. This wasn't the grounds for an ambush, but it was, he felt, a trap.
But a trap for whom, and why?
As if in answer, the kunoichi pointed right at him, then flicked a thumb to her teammate in the black robes.
With a dismissive flick of the head, she sauntered over to the tree where the Uchiha was still sleeping, patted down a branch to clean it off and plopped herself down. Then, from the side of her outfit, she pulled out a Heaven scroll.
The robed genin fixed the large steel hat he wore on tighter and got into a loose stance.
"A duel, then," Orochimarou said. This was more in line with what he expected. These upstarts were talented, perhaps. In all likelihood they were already Chunen ranked for whatever small village they came from and were merely here to show off their village's might.
He would need to scour his spy networks once the debacle in Konoha was complete.
Landing with a clatter, the Sannin stood tall and proud across from his foe. It would only take a minute to kill the poor boy.
With a flick of his wrist, he sent a few kunai rushing towards the genin, then leapt forwards to catch up to them and deliver a strike across the boy's neck.
The genin shifted, arms and legs spinning out of the way of each kunai with liquid grace. The last was snatched out from midair, then brought around to Orochimaru's own neck.
He ducked out of the way, but just barely. He was still regaining his footing when the Genin moved after him.
He knew he was in some degree of trouble when he had a hard time keeping up with the genin's sweeping taijutsu. The first attack he blocked sent a shock running through his entire body, as if he were trying to stop a mountain from falling bare handed.
He ducked and weaved under the next attacks, hair billowing out around him as he moved quickly in order to just barely avoid hard strikes from the genin. This, he realized, was not going according to plan.
***
Taylor had mixed feelings about the viewing room. On one hand, being able to watch all the ninja at work on a bunch of big old televisions with just a bit of blur was kinda neat. It was like a spectator sport with actual stakes.
On the other hand, all the other Jounen in the room kept giving her weird looks. Some, especially those from Konoha, were looking at her as if she was awfully suspicious.
At least Anko had been nice until she ran out of the room swearing up a storm.
On the screen, Levi was playing with the snake guy, dowsing his increasingly erratic fire attacks with water and batting his freaky arm snakes aside. "They're doing pretty well," she said.
"You could say that, yes," the one who was wearing a mask wrong said. He didn't really look up from his book, which was fair. She loved reading too and could understand binging through a good book.
"Your students are very youthful!" Mister Gai said. He gave her a thumbs up which she returned with one of her own.
The others in the room didn't seem so enthusiastic. "So, are all the genin in your village that strong?" the one called Asuma asked. He was smoking indoors, which she figured was rather rude of him, but she wasn't going to be the one to stop him.
"Hrm," she said as she thought about it. On screen, the snake guy cheered as one of his snakes bit Levi. Then it exploded. "Yeah, they're all that strong."
Kurenai, another one of the Konoha ninja took a small step towards her. "Why aren't the others helping him?" she asked. "Don't they know who Orochimarous is? It'll still be a few minutes before ANBU show up to help."
"Why would they help Levi?" she asked. "Do you think that Orochi... uh, that the snake guy could hurt my genin? Honestly, I'm more worried about snake guy accidentally hurting himself. He's moving all over the place. He could trip over something."
"Tripping is a hazard," mask-dude said.
"Yeah," Taylor agreed. She had tumbled a bunch of times already. It would be super embarrassing for snake guy to fall while on camera. "I'm just happy that Levi hasn't started with his whole genocide protocols."
"His what?" came about three voices at once.
She sighed. It would probably have been better if she didn't mention that. At the same time, it was best that they know, just in case. "He's really enthusiastic about fixing all of his problems by killing them."
"Killing your problems is always a solution," mask dude said.
"I... guess? But he's... well, his idea of enthusiasm is to kill everything similar to the thing causing trouble. There are no mosquitoes where I live."
"No... mosquitos?" Asuma asked.
"Not one. And it's a coastal city. We had a bunch, but then I made the mistake of telling him that they were annoying, and didn't tell him not to genocide them all. Now I sometimes worry about all the poor little bats. I mean, what will they eat?"
"We should all do our duty to protect small mammals," mask dude said and Taylor nodded. She was started to really like his attitude.
"Anywho, I'm pretty sure Simmie won't let the fight go on for that much longer." She gestured at the screen. "See?"
***
Orochimaru panted. He wasn't out of the fight yet, not by a long shot, but even he could feel the drain on his chakra reserves from three minutes of non-stop high speed Taijutsu, and that wasn't including the ninjutsu he had thrown in between bouts of fighting to catch his opponent off guard.
Across for the now flattened, burned and wet clearing, his opponent stood, robes unruffled and still perfectly clean and pressed. The only signs that he had been in a fight with Orochimaru was a tiny nick in the steel of his large circular hat.
"Who are you?" he asked the false genin. He would bet a month's worth of experimentation time that the genin was no genin at all.
The kunoichi off to the side shrugged and hopped to her feet. She made a gesture at her wrist, as if she was wearing one of the watches favoured by Daimyos and their courtesans.
"Leaving already?" he asked.
The truth was he would probably not fight their attempts to leave, as much as it might sting his pride. If the other two were half as skilled as the genin he had been fighting, then taking on all three at once would be unwise.
Still, he had to make a good showing of it.
Jumping back to the side of one of the training ground's trees, he lid the back of his thumb over a tooth and closed his fist over the bleeding finger. With a slap, he pressed a bloody hand to the side of the tree and pushed chakra into it.
With three great explosions of smoke, snakes that rivalled the forest's gigantic trees appeared. "Kill them," he hissed.
The three snakes, eager to obey, snapped out at their foes, one for each genin.
The one he had been fighting raised a hand, then swept it aside as if cutting through the air. Even as Orochimaru watched, one of the nearest trees dessicated, turning ashen as water was torn out from under its bark. Then, following the path of the genin's swipe, the water turned into a thousand needle-like spears and shot into one of the snake's sides.
Across from the clearing, the largest of the snakes hissed as it reared up, then shot forwards to the samurai genin.
Its charge stopped with all the grace of a bird running into a wall. The genin had a hand up, fingers digging into the nose of a snake that had to outmass it a hundred times over.
With casual ease, the genin raised his other fist in the most telegraphed attack Orochimaru had ever seen outside of children at play. The fist rocketed forward and hit the snake in the snout.
The birds across the forest went quiet, every insect stilled. The snake glowed from within, scales lighting up as if it had just swallowed an arsenal of flashbang tags.
Orochimaru brought at arm up to cover his eyes as a searing beam of reddish light shot out of the back of his summon, then through the forest.
When he lowered his arm it was to find the corpse of his summon thudding to the ground, a perfectly circular hole burned through the entire length of its body, and the trees behind it, and the trees behind those, and the distant clouds.
He began to suspect that perhaps they were all three a lot more than genin.
"Oh yesss," a sibilant voice brought him back to reality. "Yiss, right there, yess, sscritch my sscaless, yess."
His final summon was writhing on the ground, sinnous body wagging like a dog's tail and head raised up so that the third genin could rub at its neck while its eyes rolled into it head.
"Your sso good at thiss," the snake summon hissed. "Sso much better than our ssummoner."
The kunoichi locked eyes with him, then her face twisted, lips pouting out in a disgustingly smug smile that had her eyes sparkling with condescending mirth.
"Fuck this," Orochimaru said. He was the smartest of the Sannin, he knew when to cut his losses.
***
Taylor smiled as the snake guy ran off-screen. "Well, that's that," she said.
Hopping to her feet, she waved at all the ninja staring at her. "I'll be in my hotel room," she said.
"Enjoy yourself," Mask guy said.
"Thanks! This whole tournament thing is lots more fun than I expected."
***
Poor Orochimaru. All he wanted to do was bite some youngst-- you know what? Orochimaru deserves what he got.
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