Oops, I’m Kimimaro? Guess I’ll Be the Final Villain!

Kimimaro stepped closer to the central table, stopping beside Reika rather than across from her. He didn't look at the scrolls first.

He looked at her. "You already know why I came now... Did you come to terms with it?"

Reika didn't answer immediately.

Her pale gold eyes stayed on the seal array she was refining, fingers adjusting a stroke by a fraction before she finally spoke.

"Kirigakure matter..." she said calmly.

Not a question.

He nodded. "You've been heavily thinking about it since I told you about it a few days ago."

"Yes."

She rolled the scroll closed and turned to face him fully.

Her expression was composed, as always, but there was a rare tension underneath it, something old and sharp that rarely surfaced anymore.

"I want them punished," she said. "I always have. For my clan. For my mother." Her voice didn't shake. "But living there is different. Calling it home."

Kimimaro studied her quietly.

He already knew the answer she was circling, but he let her say it.

"I don't want to stand on their streets and pretend nothing happened," Reika continued. "I don't want to breathe the same air as people who hunted us like animals."

"You wouldn't," Kimimaro said.

She looked at him.

"You would sit above them," he continued evenly.

"And they would learn what it means to kneel."

Silence stretched.

Reika's gaze sharpened, not with anger, but with understanding.

"Revenge isn't killing everyone there indiscriminately..." Kimimaro went on. "That's release. It fades. Domination doesn't. You don't answer isolation with blood. You answer it by becoming unavoidable."

Her lips pressed into a thin line.

"They feared bloodlines," he said. "So they tried to erase them. We'll do the opposite. We'll make bloodlines, the five of us, the axis they rotate around."

Reika exhaled slowly.

"When you first said it," she admitted, "I hated the idea. Not because I didn't want them to suffer, but because it felt… close. Too close to the past."

"And now?"

Her eyes lifted to his.

"Now I see what you mean," she said. "Sitting above the ones who once decided who was allowed to exist. Making them enforce our rule. Making them prosper only if we allow it."

Something cold settled in her gaze.

"That's better than a simple revenge."

Kimimaro watched the shift happen in real time.

Hatred refining, shedding heat, crystallizing into disdain.

"They aren't monsters," Reika said quietly. "They're worse. Weak. Envious. Afraid. Humanity always is. They destroy what reminds them of their limits."

"And they deserve to kneel because of it," Kimimaro replied.

"Yes."

She didn't hesitate.

"I don't want freedom anymore," Reika continued, voice steady. "I want a world where weakness can't touch me again. Where no one gets to decide my worth."

Her eyes softened just slightly as they met his again.

"With you, that world makes sense."

Kimimaro said nothing, but she knew she had his attention fully.

"You don't shout," she said. "You don't posture. You always build. Quietly. Patiently. You don't hate them emotionally. You simply place yourself above them from the start."

She paused.

"I understand that."

A rare thing.

Kimimaro nodded once. "After eradicating the previous regime and making them pay, Kirigakure will become our base."

"Not a village that hunts bloodlines, but one that reveres them. The five of us will rule it openly. Not as shadows. As a fact."

"Overlords," Reika said.

"Yes."

"With order," she added.

"With stability," he agreed.

"They'll be restored on the world stage because of us. Feared. Respected. Useful."

Reika considered that, then inclined her head slightly.

"My clan was erased by Kirigakure," she said. "Yours too. Different dates. Same brutality."

"Which makes this all the more fitting for both of us..." Kimimaro replied.

Retribution, not through complete slaughter, but through ownership.

Reika stepped closer, standing at his side rather than across from him, gaze forward, aligned.

"I'll make the seals," she said simply. "The barriers. The chains. The frameworks they'll never escape."

"I know," Kimimaro said.

She glanced at him then, just once.

"I don't question you," she added quietly. "Because you've never been wrong in terms of the direction."

A faint pause.

"And because I trust you."

Kimimaro met her gaze.

His closest shadow in this world.

Calm. Cold. Constant.

"Then Kirigakure will fall," he said. "And rise again under us as something tamed."

Reika's lips curved, not into a smile, but into something colder. "Good," she said.

Silence settled again, heavy but calm.

Kimimaro turned to leave, then stopped.

"There's one more thing," he said, without facing her.

Reika looked up.

"I will keep my promise," he continued evenly. "Back then. When you followed me, on that boat, as a young girl with nothing but ice and hatred left. I told you I'd give you power enough to see your revenge through."

He finally glanced back at her. "You will have it now."

For a moment, Reika didn't speak.

Her pale gold eyes softened, just slightly, warmth breaking through the frost she wore for everyone else. Not pride. Not triumph. Relief.

"…You did," she said quietly.

The revenge mattered. It always had.

But it had become something secondary without her noticing, a justification layered over something deeper.

Her loyalty hadn't grown from hatred

It had grown from him.

From his consistency.

From the way he never promised what he couldn't deliver.

And now, with that promise about to be fulfilled, she felt something dangerous stir beneath her composure.

Heat, restrained only by discipline, by habit, by the fear that if she let it rise too fast, it might spill in a way she couldn't take back.

If this truly succeeded… she wasn't sure how long she could keep pretending that devotion was all she felt.

Kimimaro held her gaze for a heartbeat longer, reading more than she said, then turned away.

"Finish the seals," he said calmly. "We'll need them soon."

He left without another word.

Reika stood there for a moment longer, watching the empty doorway, one hand resting lightly over the scroll.

"…I will," she murmured. And for the first time in a long while, the cold felt optional.

...

As he walked back toward his own chamber, Kimimaro's thoughts returned to Kirigakure, circling it from every angle.

He knew it wouldn't be easy.

The more he examined it, the clearer one thing became.

He could not afford the illusion that Obito would ever simply hand Kirigakure over to some other major player like them.

Nor that Obito would leave it intact behind him.

Canon made that obvious in hindsight.

Obito hadn't moved on because Kirigakure finally "fought back," but because it was sufficiently hollowed out, and people who reclaimed it were no serious factor.

There had been no rival Jashinist cult, no powerful force capable of claiming it, and the village had been ravaged just enough to become unstable rather than valuable.

The total destruction and vacuum had always been the objective, not governance, not ownership, and certainly not reform.

At best, Obito would only abandon it after ensuring the damage ran deep enough to collapse inward on its own, with one final civil war tearing out whatever structure still clung to life.

That wasn't intuition.

It was the only conclusion that made sense.

After all, in what world could a ragtag faction led by Mei Terumī truly defeat Obito Uchiha himself, let alone everything in the Akatsuki, unless he had already withdrawn by choice?

So Obito had never planned to leave Kirigakure to anyone else.

And Kimimaro doubted he would accept it in the state Obito intended to leave behind anyway, a village ruined beyond usefulness, a final insult delivered as a spiteful parting gift.

Kirigakure was the village that had sealed the Three-Tails into Rin.

Releasing the Nine-Tails on Konoha hadn't been mainly due to logic.

In Obito's mind, where so much still revolved around Rin, Konoha's greatest sin was simple and unforgivable. They had moved on.

They had survived. They had treated her sacrifice as another tragic entry in history, something to mourn and then forget.

The attack had been Obito forcing them to feel what would have happened if Rin had not chosen to die. A kind of punishment for continuity. For normalcy. For daring to keep living.

If that was what he prepared for Konoha, then Kirigakure would be spared even less.

Of that, Kimimaro was certain.

So, perhaps, the only reason it still existed as a "Great Village" by the time the second part of the series began was that Sunagakure had been barely functional itself, and because Mei's rise and personal talent had held the structure together just enough to keep it breathing.

Yet, Kimimaro didn't want a corpse.

He wanted Kirigakure intact enough to be taken, still breathing, still useful, something that could be seized and reshaped rather than scraped off the ground.

Which meant one thing was inevitable.

Obito wouldn't simply step aside this time.

And if his influence within the Akatsuki had grown over the past year, then they wouldn't step aside either.

Kirigakure would have to be taken by force, contested openly, torn from Obito's hands on Kimimaro's terms.

Legitimacy. Institutions. A name that still carried weight.

A coastal stronghold with infrastructure, shinobi potential, archives, logistics, potential resources, and isolation built into its geography.

Broken or not, it had hidden the Akatsuki successfully for years.

That alone made it valuable.

It could shield him just as well.

In the end, everything came down to a single question.

What you intended to do, and whether you had the means to enforce it.

Only that determined how much stability you could impose, and stability was the difference between extracting value and watching it burn away.

With it, institutions could be bent instead of shattered.

Systems could be exploited rather than erased.

You built shinobi instead of graves.

You accumulated gold instead of leaving scorched ground.

You turned a broken village into a machine that produced power, again and again, as long as the one standing at the top was strong enough to keep order absolute.

Which meant he would have to fight for it all first.

That would not be peaceful, but it would be worth it.

Kimimaro also understood that there was likely another, more practical factor behind Obito's withdrawal after Yagura's death.

It was possible that Mei's faction had indeed proven a bit more competent than Obito initially calculated. Better organized. Better timed.

Just strong enough to make a clean, silent defense inconvenient rather than impossible.

So, once the Three-Tails dispersed and began its natural respawn, holding the Kirigakure itself, same as before, would have required Obito to intervene openly, expose himself, and commit resources for diminishing returns.

So Mei's faction took the village not because Obito was beaten, but because he judged the cost of continuing to control it to outweigh the benefit, and chose to step away instead.

At that time, exposing himself fully to the village, to its population, its sensors, and hence the wider world, possibly, was not worth it. Kirigakure had already long served its purpose.

With his revenge largely satisfied, it was simply more rational to withdraw and leave behind the scraps, rather than go for total annihilation.

There was also the matter of Akatsuki itself.

Back then, Obito's grip over Nagato and the organization had been looser.

Nagato's faction didn't move on Obito's personal priorities and helped him to preserve Kirigakure as a secondary base. Akatsuki already had Amegakure. One base was sufficient.

But this timeline was different.

Now, Obito had reclaimed his second eye.

His leverage over Nagato and Akatsuki was far stronger than before.

His position was no longer ambiguous, even if it remained hidden.

And Kirigakure was no longer just a spent asset.

It was contested.

If removing Kimimaro and his group required Akatsuki to show its hand, even briefly, then Obito would likely decide the exchange was finally worth it.

Even more so because—

His eyes narrowed.

"The Three-Tails."

Would Obito really walk away this time, knowing that even before Yagura's puppet rule collapsed, Kimimaro had already intended to carve the Three-Tails out for himself, using Uzumaki sealing, long before the corpse ever hit the floor?

He would pursue it regardless. Even without taking the Three-Tails whole in the end, stripping away a fragment of its chakra would be more than sufficient.

For Reika. His first subordinate, and the best kind to have.

But then again, what was Akatsuki built around if not tailed beasts?

That alone made any hope of a peaceful transfer laughable.

Expecting this to end without blood was foolish.

This was never going to be a quiet takeover.

It was inevitable.

A collision.

The Jashinist cult versus the Akatsuki.

Right away, Reika's Ice Release would benefit immensely from a stable, deep chakra source, especially one already aligned with water.

Her body was already compatible with complex fūinjutsu frameworks.

The integration would be clean.

If she carried a portion of it, her ceiling would rise sharply once again.

Flying Raijin. Adamantine chains.

Even Snake Sage Mode in the future, if his suspicions proved correct.

That path could place her firmly in the same tier as even Akane Uchiha.

Low Six Paths potential, properly cultivated.

A fitting reward.

She had followed him first.

Trusted him almost immediately.

Leaned on him without hesitation, back when he was still little more than a dangerous promise on an uncomfortably small boat fleeing from Uzushiogakure into uncertainty.

He remembered that clearly.

Kimimaro's expression didn't change as he reached his chamber.

But the decision had already been made.

...

Later that day, Kimimaro "happened" to cross paths with Akane again.

She was coming down one of the outer corridors from her advanced elemental sessions with Emi, the atmosphere around her noticeably lighter than before, if only by a margin, as if she'd learned a very specific lesson earlier, one that had nothing to do with elements at all, and had been pinned and subdued in a far more… memorable way.

That was probably why she didn't bring it up. Instead, she was quieter, more reserved than usual, the sharp edges of her attitude filed down just a little. Still, she wore that same deliberate disregard for temperature and context, especially around him for some reason, as if defiance had simply shifted from words to wardrobe like usual.

The moment she noticed him, she clicked her tongue in that familiar, irritated way, plump lips pursing before curling into an exaggerated, half-defiant expression she made no effort to hide. "She's unbearable," Akane said flatly. "Absolutely unbearable."

Kimimaro glanced at her once. "Emi?"

"Who else?" Akane shot back. "She keeps talking about control like it's some sacred art. 'Don't force it.' 'Feel the transition.'" She mimicked the tone poorly. "As if fire and lightning are supposed to politely cooperate that easily."

Kimimaro stopped walking. "If you're complaining, that means she's doing something right."

Akane scowled. "You're siding with her now?"

"I'm stating facts," he replied. "If you weren't fighting her at every step and actually listened to experience that's directly useful to you, you'd probably already have a stable fusion."

"Tch." She looked away. "I acknowledged her method. Doesn't mean I have to like it."

He studied her for a moment, already aware of the real issue. Emi wasn't the problem.

Impatience. That familiar Uchiha tendency to rely on intensity instead of discipline.

"If you don't behave," Kimimaro said calmly, "I'll pull you out of those sessions entirely."

Her head snapped back toward him. "You wouldn't."

"You know I would," he replied evenly. "And Emi would be relieved to stop wasting her time wrestling with someone this difficult."

That earned him a sharp glare. "…You're enjoying this."

"A little," he admitted.

She huffed. "Anyway… she still said she thinks I can pull it off. Fire and lightning. Properly fused." Her eyes sharpened with interest despite herself. "I want to see what's on the other side of that. Her Polarity Release was… annoyingly impressive. More useful than I expected."

"You can definitely do it," Kimimaro said calmly. "But only if you listen, stay disciplined, and stop trying to overpower every step. The result won't be any less destructive for it after all."

She glanced at him.

"And once you manage it," he continued, "layered into your Susanoo hammer constructs, it'll be dangerous in the right way."

That did it. Her posture shifted, attention snapping fully back to him, irritation giving way to something sharper and more focused.

Internally, Kimimaro had also already placed that trajectory clearly.

If she succeeded, it would push her even more beyond the limits of a conventional Mangekyō user. Combined with the possible Hashirama cells, it would place her decisively on a different trajectory altogether, anchoring her even more firmly in the Low Six Paths' potential territory.

Not through raw escalation, but through useful synthesis, an advanced fused release layered into her Perfect Susanoo.

Her Sharingan would also help with the mechanics. With observation. Not like Byakugan, but it was still better than nothing.

For copying some of the control Emi demonstrated and recalling it with near-perfect clarity.

In a way, it was almost ironic. Right now, Reika and Akane stood below Saya and Emi in raw current standing and near-term potential, yet their final ceilings were higher. If his plans unfolded the way he intended, they wouldn't just catch up over the next few years; they would leapfrog them entirely by the finish line.

Temperament, however, was the real variable.

Power like that demanded restraint.

And restraint had never come naturally to an Uchiha.

"Just don't get lazy," he added. "Or reckless."

She rolled her eyes. "I'm neither."

He raised an eyebrow.

"…Fine," she muttered. "Maybe a little reckless."

They parted soon after, irritation replaced by the usual sharp banter, tension diffused for now.

Kimimaro stepped outside into the open evening air, pausing as his sensory clones fed him a steady stream of updates from all over the Land of Water's interesting places to observe.

Movements. Shifts.

Mei's little faction,

He looked toward the distant horizon and allowed himself a faint smirk.

It was almost time.

Perhaps it was right to appear before them in a few weeks.

And before her.

Let another conquest begin.