33. The Snake and the Fox
Chapter 33: The Snake and the Fox
The snake's body blocked the light.
Not dimmed it. Blocked it. The massive coils rose on either side of the clearing and the head was above the canopy and the shadow it cast was complete, a darkness with scale and weight and the particular quality of shadows made by living things, which was that they moved. The yellow eyes were fixed on Team 7 with a hunger that required no urgency. The snake had nowhere else to be.
Orochimaru stood on its head and smiled.
Naruto brought his hands together. He tried to focus. The chakra came, but slowly, scraping the bottom of what was left. The Cyclone Devastation had taken most of it. What remained was thin and unsteady, the chakra of someone who had been running since morning and was still being asked to run.
He looked at Orochimaru.
The Sannin was watching him. Not moving. Not rushing. The yellow eyes held the patient expression of someone watching something small try to solve a problem it did not have the tools to solve, interested in how it would proceed.
Toying.
Naruto smiled.
It was not a happy smile. It was the smile that appeared when he had looked at a situation from every available angle and concluded that the only option left was the kind of option that reasonable people did not select.
His fingers crossed.
"Shadow Clone Jutsu."
The smoke cleared. Four clones. Solid. Each one carrying his face, his posture, his exhaustion in the set of the shoulders and the slight forward lean of someone whose reserves were nearly empty. They looked exactly like him because they were him, distributed across four additional bodies, each one as tired as the original.
He turned to Sasuke.
He nodded.
Sasuke nodded back.
No words. They had fought together before. The bell test, where the geometry of the problem had required both of them or neither of them. The Land of Waves, where they had moved without discussion because the situation had not offered time for discussion. They knew the shape of it. Attack and distraction. Pressure and opening. The vocabulary existed between them without having been spoken.
Naruto turned back.
The five of them moved at once.
Shuriken and kunai left their hands in the same breath, the weapons arcing upward toward the snake and the man on its head. The throws were precise. The trajectories were thought through. Each weapon aimed for a specific point, a specific angle, a specific outcome.
The snake's tail moved.
The wind from the movement alone was enough. The weapons scattered like they had been batted by something enormous, which they had, and they clattered down into the torn ground below and did not matter anymore.
Sasuke came through the canopy.
He had been climbing while Naruto attacked. Silent. His hands already moving through the signs, his chakra already shaped and ready, the timing worked out in the space between Naruto's nod and his own. He dropped fast and he was already exhaling when he cleared the last branch.
"Fire Style: Phoenix Flower Jutsu."
They came out in a scattered burst, small fireballs that spread through the air in every direction, not a single mass of flame but a flock of burning points that covered the space between Sasuke and his targets the way a net covered water. Some toward the snake. Some toward the man standing on its head.
Orochimaru stepped off.
He moved from the snake's head to a branch with the ease of a decision, his body going where he put it without argument, and the fireballs that had been aimed at him passed through the space he had occupied and continued into the canopy.
The snake hissed. Its head turned. The yellow eyes found Sasuke and stayed there.
Naruto and the clones were already moving.
Five against one. They swarmed Orochimaru from angles that required him to face multiple directions simultaneously, fists and kunai and kicks arriving in sequence tight enough that blocking one meant accepting another. The Sannin moved through it. He blocked. He dodged. He stepped between the attacks with the minimal motion of someone who was not trying but was nonetheless not being touched.
But he was moving. The clones were pressing him and he was moving to accommodate them and for a moment, a window of real seconds, Naruto held him in place. Not by force. By volume. By the simple arithmetic of five bodies requiring more responses than one body could provide without effort.
The yellow eyes were still analyzing.
Still watching. Still filing. But he was being pressed and that was something.
The snake charged.
It did not lunge the way small things lunged. It moved the way geography moved, the massive body shifting its weight through the destroyed clearing, crashing through what was left of the trees at the edge, the impact of each coil against the ground transmitting through the soil and up through the feet of everyone standing on it. The sound was not a sound. It was a condition.
One of the clones was in its path.
The snake's jaws opened. The inside of its mouth was pale and enormous and final. The clone did not run. It stood where it was and the jaws closed around it and it was swallowed whole and the throat moved and the clone was gone.
Then it dispersed.
The smoke of the clone's destruction did not vanish outward. It had nowhere to vanish to. It was inside the snake, in the closed dark of the snake's throat, and the smoke did what it had been designed to do. It became wind. Sharp and concentrated, invisible blades packed into a space that could not contain them, tearing outward in every direction at once.
The snake shrieked.
The sound was the sound of something very large being hurt from the inside. It went through the clearing and through the forest and through everything in the forest and did not stop at the edge of the forest. It was a sound that carried information about what had caused it and the information was specific and ugly.
The other clones were caught.
The snake's body came down on them, coil after coil, crushing them in sequence. Each time the smoke came and each time the wind blades came with it. Cutting from inside the scales. Inside the muscle. The snake thrashed. Its body whipped across the clearing and took the remaining stumps with it. Blood sprayed from its mouth and hit the ground in dark sheets and the beast's eyes were no longer ancient and patient. They were wild.
Orochimaru looked at it.
His expression did not change.
"An interesting technique," he said. "The clones were bait. You designed them to weaponize their own destruction."
His voice was the same. Conversational. The snake dying beside him was a data point. A notation in a margin.
Sasuke did not stop.
His hands were working before Orochimaru finished speaking. The wires were thin, nearly invisible against the grey light of the shadowed clearing, and he threw them with the precision of someone who had drilled the technique past the point of thinking about it. They spread through the air in arcs that converged on the branch where the Sannin stood.
The wires found him. They wrapped. Arms first. Then the torso. Then the legs. The coils tightened as Sasuke pulled and the Sannin's body was bound at every major joint, held against the branch, his hands pressed to his sides.
Sasuke pulled harder.
"Fire Style: Fireball Jutsu."
The flame left his mouth and followed the wires. It traveled them the way fire traveled anything that conducted it, fast and without interruption, the lines of it branching where the wires branched and converging where they converged. The wires became lines of fire. They became a lattice of burning that closed from every direction toward the center, toward the single point where all lines met, where Orochimaru stood bound and surrounded.
The fireball reached him. The fire reached him from every direction at once.
He was engulfed. The flames took his shape and then took it away. The skin blackened. Cracked. Peeled back in sheets. The shape inside the fire bent and sagged and came apart.
Then the burning skin peeled away from something underneath it.
Orochimaru stepped out of the fire. The old face, the face he had worn in the clearing, was gone completely now. What was beneath it was pale and yellow-eyed and calm, the face of something that had shed the previous face with no more significance than shedding clothing. He was unharmed. He was smiling.
From his sleeves they came. Dozens of them. Small snakes, dark-bodied and fast, pouring from the fabric and spreading across the branch and dropping toward the ground below in a continuous stream. They fanned out. They moved with the coordinated certainty of things that had been told where to go.
Sasuke moved. He kicked at the ones nearest to him. Stomped. His kunai came out and he cut at the ones on his legs. But the ones he killed were replaced immediately, more coming from the branch above, more dropping from every angle, and the ones he did not catch in time found his ankles and his calves and they wound upward.
They reached his arms. His shoulders. His neck.
He stopped moving.
His body was held in place by a hundred small constrictions. He could not breathe fully. He could not form hand signs. His Sharingan was still active, still spinning, still watching everything, and none of what it was seeing was actionable.
Naruto was on his knees.
The clones were gone. The snake was still moving, still thrashing at the edges of the clearing, but the movements had become irregular. Uncoordinated. The thrashing of something whose body was no longer receiving consistent instructions. It was dying. It was taking its time dying because it was very large, but it was dying.
He watched Sasuke.
He watched the snakes.
He closed his eyes.
The void was dark. He stood in it. The Fox was in its cage, watching him with the red eyes, the nine tails moving slowly in the dark behind it.
"I need it," Naruto said.
"You have nothing left," the Fox said. "You are scraping stone."
"I know. Give me what you have."
The Fox looked at him. The ancient eyes held the calculation of something that was always calculating, weighing the request against the cost, against the benefit, against the arithmetic of its own circumstances.
The chakra came. Thin. Not the flood he had felt before, not the red tide that had come without asking in the Land of Waves. A thread. But a thread with weight to it, Fox-chakra even at its minimum carrying more density than the same volume of his own.
He opened his eyes.
His hands came together. His fingers interlaced. It looked like something a person did when they were asking for something. It was not that.
Tiger. Ram. Monkey. Bird.
Four signs. The same four from before. And then a fifth. The keystone of the advanced version, the level he had never reached. He had drilled it alone in the eastern clearing until the movement was automatic. Until his hands found it in the dark.
[He had called it Great Cyclone Devastation because the name had to be accurate. He had never used it. He had trained it to the edge of where training ended and using began, and then he had stopped, because the things he was not sure he could control were the things he saved.]
He was not saving it anymore.
"Wind Style: Great Cyclone Devastation."
The chakra erupted.
The tornado formed and it was not the same as before. It was larger by an order the word larger did not adequately describe. It reached past the canopy. It touched the base of the clouds. The suction at its center was not the suction of spinning air. It was the suction of a place where air had decided it no longer wanted to be still.
The trees at the edges of the clearing came out of the ground.
Not bent. Not stripped. Out of the ground. Roots and all. They were lifted whole and taken into the column and spun with the soil and the debris and the remaining pieces of the clearing's former shape. The wind blades inside the vortex were larger now, longer, capable of reaching further, and they found the snake. They found the scales. They cut through them with the patience of something that had all the time in the world and all the power necessary.
The snake was lifted.
Its massive body rose from the ground in segments, the coils coming apart as the vortex took each section and spun it separately. The wind blades reached deeper. Through scale. Through muscle. Through the architecture beneath the muscle.
The snake died inside the tornado.
Its body fell back in pieces when the chakra ran out, which it did all at once, the tornado collapsing the way tornados collapsed, from the top down, the debris dropping with the indiscriminate weight of things that had been very high and were now not. The crash of the snake's body hitting the ground shook the forest in a radius that extended past any sight line. The sound moved through the roots of every tree in the Forest of Death and continued outward.
The clearing was gone. Where it had been was a bowl, the ground gouged in a rough circle, the walls of it made from the compressed and torn earth of what had been the clearing's edge. The trees that had ringed it were absent. Their stumps were gone. The ground where they had stood was bare.
The tornado dissipated. The last of the debris settled.
Naruto was on his knees. His arms were shaking. His breathing was wrong, too fast and too shallow, the breathing of someone whose body was running a deficit it did not know how to close. He could not move. He tried to stand and his legs did not respond and he stopped trying.
The chakra was gone. All of it. His own and the thread the Fox had given him.
He was empty.
From above, Orochimaru stepped forward.
He had not been in the tornado. Of course he had not been in the tornado. He had watched it from wherever watching it from outside had required him to be, and now he descended from that position to a branch at the rim of the bowl and looked down at what was left of the clearing and what was left of Team 7.
"You really are just like your father," he said. His voice was conversational. Unhurried. The observation of someone who had known the father and was now updating the file. "So damn troublesome."
Naruto looked up. He could not move. His arms held him off the ground and his legs were useless beneath him and that was the sum of what his body was currently able to offer.
Orochimaru descended from the branch. He crossed the bowl without hurrying.
"The Akatsuki have their own plans for you," he said. "I cannot interfere with that. Not directly. It is not worth the complication." He tilted his head. The yellow eyes were level and specific. "But I cannot have you meddling in my plans in the meantime. You are too much of a variable."
He brought his hands together. Two signs. Naruto did not recognize them. They were not from any archive he had read, not from any scroll, not from any technique documented anywhere that he had found. The Sannin's hands moved through them with the ease of something practiced past the point of being a technique and into the point of being a reflex.
"Five Elements Seal."
His hand struck Naruto's stomach.
Not a punch. A claw. The fingers drove into the fabric and past it, not through flesh but through something that did not have a physical location, something in the architecture of the seal beneath. The impact sent Naruto backward. The ground at the rim of the bowl stopped him. The tree that had somehow survived stopped him. The trunk cracked at the point of contact and Naruto dropped forward from it.
Sakura was there.
Her arms caught him before his head found the ground. She pulled him against her and held him. Her hands were shaking. She was holding them still through decision rather than steadiness, which was the harder way to hold something still, and she was managing it.
The seal was on his stomach. He could feel it the way he could feel the Eight Trigrams Seal beneath it, not with his hands or his skin but with the part of him that knew what his chakra was doing. The Eight Trigrams Seal was still there. His father's work. It had not been touched. But the new seal sat over it like a hand over a door, and the Fox's chakra was gone. He reached for it and found nothing. The connection was not severed. It was blocked. A wall where there had been a passage.
He could not reach it.
Sasuke was still held.
The snakes had not released him. They held him in their collective grip with the patience of things that had been instructed to hold on and had no reason to stop. His arms were pinned. His legs were pinned. The ones at his neck had not tightened past the point of breathing, but they were there, and he was aware of them continuously.
Orochimaru appeared at his feet.
He did not approach from a direction. He rose from the ground the way the ground permitted things to rise from it only when those things had decided to, his body unfolding from below Sasuke's sightline with a movement that was wrong in the specific way that snakes were wrong, which was that the joints were suggestions rather than limits. His neck extended. His head rose. He looked at Sasuke from a distance that was too close.
He wrapped himself around the boy.
The snakes released as he took their place. His body replaced their coils with something that had the same function and no gaps. Sasuke could not move. He could not expand his chest fully. He could not form hand signs. The Sharingan was still active and it was recording everything with perfect fidelity and there was nothing that information could be used for.
Orochimaru's mouth opened.
He bit Sasuke's neck. Long. Hard. The teeth went in and stayed in and the bite carried something with it, not venom in the way snakes carried venom but something that moved differently, that spread differently, that had a specific destination and went to it directly.
Sasuke screamed.
The sound of it was not pain the way pain sounded. It was the sound of something happening to the body that the body had no framework for, an intrusion past the level where the body kept its records of itself. It came out of him and the forest held it and gave it back and he could not stop it.
The Curse Mark spread from the bite.
Black lines moved outward from the two points of puncture. They did not spread randomly. They followed a pattern, a specific geometry, the same geometry on every neck they had ever touched. The lines reached his jaw. His cheek. The edge of his eye. His skin between them was pale from the blood leaving it and dark from the marks crossing it and his eyes rolled back and he stopped screaming because there was nothing left to scream with.
He collapsed.
Orochimaru released him. The snakes retreated into the fabric they had come from. The Sannin straightened. He reached down, not to Sasuke, but past him, to the ground beside him, where the Heaven scroll lay. The one Naruto had taken from Sasuke. The one he had given to Sakura. The one Sakura had dropped when she caught Naruto.
He picked it up. He swallowed it whole. The motion of his throat was visible from outside.
He looked at the three of them. Naruto in Sakura's arms. Sasuke on the ground. Sakura holding both, her arms occupied and her face the face of someone who had understood for the last several minutes that the situation was beyond her and had not stopped moving anyway.
“You will come to me when you seek power,” Orochimaru said. “Both of you.” His yellow eyes moved to Sasuke’s still form. “Itachi is waiting for you.”
He vanished. Not into the trees. Into the mist that had come with him and had waited for him and took him back without ceremony.
The forest was quiet.
Sakura stood in the bowl where the clearing used to be.
Naruto was in her arms. Unconscious. His breathing was present and regular and told her nothing except that he was not dead. Sasuke was on the ground beside her. The marks on his neck were still there, black lines on pale skin, the pattern of them like something drawn by someone who had done it many times. His breathing was also present. Also regular. Also telling her nothing except that he was not dead.
The snake's body was at the rim of the bowl. Parts of it. The tornado had been thorough.
The trees were gone. The screams that had been ambient through the forest since the gate had stopped. The animals were gone. The insects were gone. The Forest of Death had been making noise continuously since they entered it and now it was not making noise.
Sakura looked around.
"This is not good," she said.
They had no scroll. They needed two. One was somewhere past the Sannin's throat.
She had to get them to the tower. Both of them. Alive. Five days had been the window. She did not know how many days were left. She did not know how far the tower was. She did not know what else was in the forest between here and there.
She looked at Naruto. At Sasuke.
She tore a length of cloth from the hem of her shirt. She bound Naruto to her back. She checked the knots. She pulled Sasuke onto her shoulder, one of his arms across her neck, her arm around his waist. She adjusted the weight. She stood up under both of them, which was not easy, and she did not put them down.
She started walking.
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Next time: I Am Doing It All For You - Sakura's Growth.