(Canon?) Interlude: Immortal
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(Canon?) Interlude: Immortal
"Come now, little snake," rumbled Kakuzu's voice, words slow and methodical. "Slither out of your hole. Let me taste your venom."
Orochimaru checked behind him in the hallway, but the demon wasn't yet upon him. He spun around a corner to find a hallway with doors on either side. He kicked open the door to his left, then warp-stepped into the room to his right. The slow, short-range dimensional jump wasn't anywhere that damned Minato's Flying Thunder God, but it was still a completely undetectable means of travel. Unless Itachi was around, he'd have bought himself half a minute.
How did Akatsuki know of this facility? He'd abandoned it years before he even joined Akatsuki, and there should have been no survivors to know of its existence.
Orochimaru descended deeper, periodically letting snakes slip from his sleeve to hide in the darkened corners of the long-abandoned experiment rooms. They would dispel themselves as Kakuzu passed, giving Orochimaru a countdown to his hunter's arrival. Konan wasn't present, evidenced by the fact that all the paper he'd left within the walls hadn't yet turned on him, but he was facing Kakuzu, Sasori, and Nagato at a bare minimum, and at least one other. Kisame, he suspected, though he hadn't seen his fellow summoner yet.
Orochimaru counted only one silver lining: that Nagato needed to focus his full attention on maintaining the injunction against reverse summoning. If Nagato had been able to maintain that and fight, he would no doubt have been truly killed by now.
Finally, he reached the armory, where he'd left the various seals, weapons, and ninjutsu scrolls he'd looted from the enemies he'd crushed in his first few years as an exile. The latter two categories were irrelevant; he needed the seals, and he needed them to contain some novel effect that could scare Akatsuki away for long enough to let him escape.
And after his last exit from Akatsuki, he did need them. Somehow, every single one of his contingency measures had failed. His poisons hadn't incapacitated Hidan, his disruptor field hadn't prevented Sasori from forming threads, and his defense against Amaterasu had proven… painfully inadequate. Orochimaru knew he could make mistakes, but he did not think he could intentionally prepare a half-dozen measures meant to foil potentially-hostile S-rankers and have every single one of them fail in their time of need, without a single indication that they would not have worked prior.
Akatsuki knew he was preparing contingencies against them. No doubt Sasori or Konan or Itachi would have made their own preparations against him, when he joined. Yet, how could they have known exactly what his contingencies would be, to prepare counters to every single one of his prepared methods?
Of course! Sasori had claimed that one of Orochimaru's shadow clones had gotten caught in the chakra-nullifying field, destroying its link to its creator. Orochimaru had never received memories from that clone. He'd thought the connection between master and clone had been severed by Sasori's seal. Except… What if that hadn't been why his clone never rejoined his mind? What if instead, Nagato had absorbed his clone's memories, seeing both his true intentions as well as all the steps he'd made in his plan to escape from Akatsuki's grasp?
Though… If the link between himself and his shadow clones wasn't sacred, then could he really rely on the link between summon and summoner?
THUD
The steel bunker door of the armory shuddered as a massive force impacted it. Orochimaru quickly gathered his seals. He hadn't felt the connections snapping. Somehow Kakuzu had descended without his summons warning him.
THUD
The door's hinges held, but its body bent. Black threads streamed through the newly made gaps between twisted steel and doorframe.
"Are you a snake or a hatchling, hiding in your egg like this?" Kakuzu's voice called out, muffled by the doorway. "I thought you were a predator, not prey."
Orochimaru didn't respond. He ran to the armory's escape shaft, then paused. Sasori's seals were in use, but Kakuzu had come down alone. The others would be on the surface, and they would have prepared the battlefield. Would he win a direct confrontation with them?
He turned back to face the door, which was now fully obscured by writhing black threads pulling more mass into the room. Orochimaru saw a foot and a stretch of skin moving amongst the threads, but they did not return to human form. Orochimaru had made a mistake in decapitating Kakuzu through his armor in their opening exchange. It had won him time and a heart, but knowing that the armor hadn't worked, Kakuzu had finally decided to use his far more flexible innards to fight directly.
The threads shot out towards him. He threw the seals. The black spear split around the seals, letting them pass through to Kakuzu's larger mass. The first shredded the defending appendages before they could tear the seals apart, then the second turned all matter within its radius to crystal.
Then the black spear reached Orochimaru, grasping him by the arm. With a thought, he severed his limb from his torso, but the instant had slowed him enough for the reaching threads to grab him around the waist. The threads crushed his spine and slammed him headfirst into the wall. His skull caved in.
"-fucking irritating," Orochimaru heard, as his brain regenerated enough to let him think. One part of his mind noted that his arm had regenerated, reopening ninjutsu as a possibility. Another part of his mind noted another potential flaw in his system, that the moments of incapacitation after severe damage to his brain tissue could be exploited. He'd need to find a way to retain cognition even against such damage.
In fact, Kakuzu had not been fool enough to let him regenerate in peace. Kakuzu's threads had penetrated Orochimaru, entering through every orifice and then punching through soft tissue to thread their way through his body. He could feel them work, severing his muscles from bone and shredding through his chakra coils.
"You have the five elements, don't you, Sannin? Perhaps your heart will replace the one you just cost me."
The crystallization seal had worked against Kakuzu, but Orochimaru couldn't give thought to exploiting the weakness. His chakra reserves had remained stable through his momentary incapacitation, but Kakuzu's active destruction of his chakra system wasn't something his regeneration would easily undo. Kakuzu's threads had cut the muscles controlling his fingers, but Orochimaru could still move them with his telekinesis and there was still chakra enough in them to form hand seals.
"Dimensional Cut."
Space warped and the sphere around Orochimaru rotated, severing Kakuzu's threads from their master. One part of Orochimaru's mind noted that Kakuzu would likely have killed him had he only thought to push one of his hearts into Orochimaru's body – then, nothing Orochimaru could have done would have killed the threads within him. Instead, the threads went limp.
Every minute of time he'd spent hunting the Toguchi Clan had been worthwhile. Exterminating a clan of spacetime ninjutsu specialists had been quite the challenge, but without their simple yet effective techniques, he would have died three times over in his escape from Akatsuki.
"You Sage-damned cockroach!"
His much-abused regeneration finally repaired his eyes, which regrettably still faced into the wall that had brained him. He didn't have time to look around and assess the situation, Kakuzu would already be counterattacking. He brought his barely functional hands together to summon a gust of wind to carry him to safety. With luck, the destroyed heart would have cost Kakuzu the Fire Element, and-
The wind carrying his still-recovering body ignited, and Orochimaru burned. He'd removed his pain senses long ago, but he could still tell that the damage was bad. There was only so much trauma that the regeneration would mend, and it wouldn't keep up with both his mangled innards and his melted flesh. He'd mended his upper body, but within the skin, his legs were still a slurry of muscle and flesh.
No direction but forward. Twin chakra pulses to storage seals on his upper vertebrae unsealed their contents – spraying aerosolized oil and pure air into the flames, turning the conflagration into an explosion that hurled Orochimaru bodily into the escape shaft. One final contingency activated, one of Jiraiya's old seals locked within the hollow of a rib bone to protect it against damage, lessening the rush of flames around him for just another second.
A rising stone pillar shot him into the air, and another dimensional cut rotated thick steel into the base of the shaft, blocking the entrance. It would take Kakuzu minutes to carve through – longer, at least, than if Orochimaru had just collapsed the shaft and left space for the threads to crawl through.
Orochimaru's body hit the steel with a crack and slid. Orochimaru could have arrested his slide with chakra adhesion, but focused his attention elsewhere.
Everything from his waist up was fine. Well, horribly damaged, but it would be back to normal within the minute. He could not sense his chakra in one leg below the knee, and in the other below the hip. Orochimaru severed them, but his regeneration didn't take hold in the limbs. He would need to secure replacements, and that was the work of days, not minutes.
He would die, then. Kakuzu would carve through the steel soon enough. Orochimaru could run with his various ninjutsu, but if he even made it to the surface, there was no way he'd fight his way out of the ambush ready for him. What a miserable repayment for the work he'd done for them inverting the jinchūriki seals.
Except… he had another option, didn't he? He could try to intentionally cause a sealing failure. His chakra twitched towards the bioseals still imprinted on his muscles. It would likely not end well for him, but… it could cause chaos. It could give him an opportunity.
Was it worth it? Violate the ultimate taboo, and roll divine dice to determine whether he lived or died? He would probably die anyway, and this way, he would at least…
No. He was Orochimaru of the Sannin, and he would only die on his own terms, once he'd exhausted every last option available on any Path. And he still had options. He just needed to find one that would work.
For some reason, Kakuzu wasn't coming after him. He'd been ready, finger on the metaphysical trigger that would spell both their dooms, but he still felt no sign of Kakuzu's approach. He relaxed it, then dove back into his mind.
Victory was impossible against the forces arrayed against him. Escape wasn't enough when they would hunt him down at any cost to prevent him from divulging their plans. They needed to think he was dead.
He didn't have a body double prepared to take the blow while he reverse summoned, if he could even leave the range of the injunction and reverse summon. Even if he had prepared a body, they would know what to look for now, and they would know to set up the area so that he could never return to the Human Path.
Except, in a way, he did have a body that they would think was his. Orochimaru looked down at his own body – torso still pale and pristine, shining through his burnt and abused clothing.
He reattached his legs and tested them. He could stumble around, perhaps, but any jōnin could put a kunai through his torso if they wanted to.
He thought back to his brush with death earlier, when Kakuzu had caved in his brain. Just how much of himself did he need to stay himself?
Ditch the body in battle. Take the brain and the chakra coils with pure chakra control. No, he needed to assume that Sasori would analyze his body and his bioseals. He needed to leave the coils so the body looked complete. He could maybe take a tenth chunk of them – he only had a tenth of his reserves left, after all.
He didn't have the chakra he needed to make this plan likely to succeed, but he could at least make it a mile, perhaps two. If he could find a civilian to attach onto before he destabilized, he would have a chance. Even if Akatsuki was fooled, he would most likely die before finding anyone. If he did, it would take months if not years to rebuild his body, forget his seals. It was a fool's plan.
It was a plan he'd never had before this minute. Nagato wouldn't know of it.
He had sworn to himself that he would be immortal, not that he would be human. Orochimaru turned his mental gaze into his body. He suppressed his regeneration and started to carve.
o-o-o
Orochimaru-sensei was laughing.
Orochimaru-sensei had a dry chuckle he used sometimes to indicate that something mildly amused him, more often to indicate that something was particularly foolish.
His laugh was different. It was oddly spontaneous for a man that prided himself on exacting precision, and it had a full sound to it. His laugh was rich with a life and vibrancy that, for all his virtues, Orochimaru-sensei often lacked. For a moment, Kabuto thought that it would be better if Orochimaru-sensei laughed like this more often.
He quickly suppressed the thought.
After a few more seconds, the laughing subsided, leaving Orochimaru-sensei with a faint smile on his face. He didn't say anything about his uncharacteristic fit or give any indication that his apprentice should comment on it, so Kabuto didn't.
"...anyway, sir, after the skyslicer caught Kakuzu off-guard, Hidan used some as-yet unknown technique and exploded-"
Orochimaru-sensei raised a finger to interrupt Kabuto, but raised an eyebrow at Kabuto's final remark.
After a moment, he lowered it again. "Ah, I see. Of course, who better to make use of a suicide technique than the man for whom suicide would be little more than an inconvenience. Was he captured? I would like to determine his mechanism of operation."
Kabuto shook his head. "I am afraid not, sir. He escaped after an aerial chase, dropping to the ground at lethal speeds to prevent pursuit."
"Disappointing," Orochimaru said. "Regardless, I suppose I now have higher priorities. However, I want to clarify a misconception you may have had. Kakuzu certainly must have been aware that the so-called 'skyslicer' was in the window."
Now it was Kabuto's turn to raise an eyebrow. "Is that so, Orochimaru-sensei? How could that be possible? The silk that composes a skyslicer is so fine, it is invisible to the naked eye."
"While I cannot know exactly how he reconstructed his sensoria after Nagato's resurrection," Orochimaru-sensei said, "detection of seal and jutsu effects is so basic I cannot believe that even one as foolish as he would skip it. No, I am confident that he was aware of it. In a way, he was foiled by Sasori, who uses infinitesimal threads of chakra for detection purposes. Irrelevant as it is to optimize for chakra efficiency in seal effects at this scale, Sasori's aesthetic sense prefers thread-lattices for detection webs. Kakuzu must have seen the webs with their relatively low chakra density – for the Five Seal Barrier is not particularly chakra-intense for all that it abuses spacetime – and assumed it was a detection field around the Hokage's office. In his defense, it is an entirely reasonable countermeasure to take. He is well aware that severing fields are a mainstay among a sealmaster's defensive tools, and had he known that this was such an effect, he may have even elected to take another course of action. Instead, he was caught off-guard, then struck down in his moment of surprise. In a way, it's a fitting end."
"I see," Kabuto said, trying to process all that Orochimaru-sensei had said. "And why is it a fitting end for him, sir?"
"Because he called himself an immortal," Orochimaru-sensei said, smiling again in that odd way that indicated that he found something genuinely humorous.
Kabuto turned the words around in his head, but couldn't quite understand why this ending in particular was fitting. "Could you explain, sir?"
Orochimaru-sensei's smile widened. "Tell me, Kabuto. After the Battle of Nagi Island, where Kakuzu suffocated to death under a mountain of rubble, what changes do you think he made to his defenses?"
Kabuto thought for a minute. "I suppose he would want to secure his biology further. Perhaps he would make a catalog of whatever biological requirements he still had, then have tried to secure countermeasures such that his bodily functioning would not be compromised by lack of air, extreme temperature, and so on."
Orochimaru-sensei shook his head. "Wrong, Kabuto. I say this with great confidence: the only new countermeasure Kakuzu took was to safeguard himself against suffocation."
Kabuto raised both eyebrows in surprise. "Really, sir? Only suffocation? While true that it's what killed him, wouldn't that be a bit… narrow-minded?"
Orochimaru-sensei laughed again, that imprecise, lively laugh. "Yes, Kabuto," he said once the laugh had died away. "Yes, he is, was, that uncreative. If I were to ask him what mistakes he had made that led to his death, he would grant that failing to safeguard against suffocation was one. Then, however, he would have said that his taijutsu style was inadequate to take down the Demon Swordsman, or that he needed more agility to dodge away when enemies moved him before he could be trapped. He simply did not possess the requisite ability to think creatively, that would have allowed him to realize that his 'immortality' was no more than physical resilience and immunity to senescence."
"I see," said Kabuto. "But why is the skyslicer and the ninjutsu barrage in particular a fitting end for him?"
Orochimaru-sensei was still smiling. "I always knew that Kakuzu would not join me in eternity. He had considerable powers of shapeshifting, yet he did not bother to use it in combat, instead preferring a dead taijutsu style that was outdated when he learned it a century ago. He was the last of the demon-stitchers, yet used their masks primarily to improve his ninjutsu arsenal. He was fundamentally close-minded, and it was only a matter of time until something drained his chakra, broke his mind, sealed him away, or ended his continued existence in some way or another.
"He trained his armor to ignore hits, his agility to evade what he could not ignore, and his regeneration to survive what he could not evade. So, with the expectation that he would die within the millennium to some esoteric means he was too foolish to ward against, imagine my surprise when he died within the decade to a trap that was exactly what he feared! The skyslicer was too sharp for his armor; if only he'd trained it more! The ninjutsu came too fast once he'd lost his arms and legs; if only he'd trained without them more! He tried to recover, but the damage coming at his weak points overwhelmed his regeneration, if only he'd trained it all just a little bit more! Maybe then he would have survived!"
"I see," said Kabuto. "He called himself an immortal while foolishly developing defenses against only a narrow set of attack vectors – and then when those attacks came to collect in quantities just too high for him to handle, he died in an instant."
"Immortality is always an aspiration, never a fact," Orochimaru said. "I expect his death will be a source of amusement for me for the next, say, twenty years. Whenever I have the chance to reflect on it, I suppose. If there is one regret here, it is that his demon-stitching technique likely died with him."
"In as much as Akatsuki are our enemies," Kabuto said, putting on a musing tone, "It may be a blessing that he was not more creative. Though, I suppose any aspiring immortal should learn from his lesson…"
Orochimaru-sensei waved a hand. "You are making adequate progress in biosealing, Kabuto, and I will continue to supervise your growth. However, I will do no more than show you the beginnings of the path to true immortality. If you wish to walk alongside me in eternity, you must earn your path.
"However, I will not dedicate much time to biosealing in the near future. While I will examine Kakuzu's remains, I will leave the rest of Leaf's corporal tributes for your pedagogical use. I must prioritize the study of the Great Seal. Were I one more prone to dramatization, I might say that this is the destiny that I searched for in my youth. Now, I will instead say that there is nothing more important to me than to ensure that the Great Seal's function does not lapse. At long last, I have acquired the materials needed to commence that work."
"Of course, Orochimaru-sensei," Kabuto said. Excellence in biosealing would come first, and once Orochimaru-sensei saw him as a peer, perhaps his master would then share what about the Great Seal had excited him so much. "And as for your recent acquisitions…"
"The bloodline holders are yours," Orochimaru said, waving the concern away. "Except for my lab assistants and the special guest. Of course, you may use my lab assistants when they have extra stamina and I am not making use of them."
"Of course, Orochimaru-sensei," Kabuto said, bowing his head. "Now, you wished to see Kakuzu's remains? I'm afraid that Leaf's ninja made quite a mess of them."
Orochimaru sighed. "They are eternally careless, aren't they? You said they were on level four? Let's go."
Voting remains closed.
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