Hinata Hyuga
The wind stopped.
One second it was threading through the branches above them, carrying the ordinary noise of the forest. Then it just quit, leaving a silence so complete that Hinata's ears rang with it.
The campfire went out the same instant. No gutter, no fade. One moment it was burning, and the next the clearing was black.
The temperature dropped. The air tasted like copper on the back of Hinata's throat, and somewhere deeper in the trees, something carried the stench of wet dirt and spoiled meat baking under summer heat.
She activated her Byakugan. The veins along her temples bulged as her vision tore through the darkness and swept the tree line.
A mass of chakra crouched in the canopy directly above them. It was enormous and dense, but it moved wrong. Human chakra had a rhythm to it, a pulse, the way blood moved through a body. This had no rhythm. It writhed. It contracted and expanded in grey, oily surges that seemed to eat the light around it.
"Scatter!" Hinata shouted.
Sasuke and Naruto didn't make it two steps.
The canopy split apart, and a figure dropped into the center of the dead campfire. He landed without sound. He wore a Grass Genin uniform, standard-issue, and his yellow eyes with their vertical black pupils swept across Team 7 with the patient attention of something deciding where to start.
The Killing Intent hit Hinata like a wall of cold water.
Her Kei Talent snapped on automatically, reading the source, and her stomach dropped. This was a genjutsu. A visual one, tuned specifically to the cranial nerves, built to do one thing: make the body believe it was already dying.
The illusion was immediate and total.
She watched her own head leave her shoulders. She felt the air on the exposed stump of her neck and saw the clearing tilt sideways as she fell. She saw Naruto open from hip to chest, his face slack with surprise while he looked down at himself. She saw a blade buried through Sasuke's skull, pinning him to an oak tree, and watched his fingers twitch once against the bark before going still.
Her legs stopped working.
The rational part of her brain was screaming that it wasn't real, but her body had already received the verdict. Muscles locked. Lungs seized.
Beside her, Sasuke crumpled to his knees and clawed at his own throat with both hands. Naruto stood rigid, eyes blown open, chest completely still.
Hinata's Byakugan cut through the nightmare and showed her the actual mechanics: threads of Yin chakra, thin as spider silk, plugged into the nerve clusters behind each of their eyes. She saw exactly where they entered and exactly what they were doing.
She spiked her own chakra.
The disruption was like snapping a tripwire. The illusion shattered, the clearing reformed around her, and she spun, slammed both palms between Sasuke's shoulder blades and then Naruto's, and drove a short, targeted pulse of her Light chakra straight into their spinal cords.
Sasuke gasped so hard it sounded like he'd been underwater. Naruto stumbled, coughed, and doubled over with both hands on his knees.
The Grass Genin tilted his head. His tongue came out, far too long, curling slowly at the tip.
"I must admit," Orochimaru said, and his voice was quiet the way a crack across thin ice was quiet, spreading without hurry. "I came here for the Uchiha. But you, little Hyuga... you did cost me a very expensive laboratory."
Hinata stepped in front of Naruto and kept her eyes on the rotting ruin of the chakra pathways inside the man's chest. "You should invest in better containment seals then."
Orochimaru laughed. "Fire, lightning, and yang chakra. A Kekkei Tota synthesized from thin air by a clan that only knows how to throw palms." He began pacing, his footsteps leaving no impression in the mud. "How did you manage it, girl? The Hyuga are one of the oldest clans in the world. You mean to tell me all of them possessed the power of a Kekkei Tota and never bothered to use it simply because they were too rigid to look?"
"I just paid attention," Hinata said. She shifted her weight to her back heel, loading her legs.
"You play the loyal soldier very well." He stopped pacing. "We are the same, you and I. We push past the boundaries we are handed. We create." His yellow eyes narrowed. "What do you think the village elders will do when they realize you will one day hold power equal to the First Hokage? Don't you hate this village, Hinata? I have heard about your difficulties with your cousin. You want to free your clansmen from their slavery. Your clan brands its own family like livestock."
He paused.
"What if I told you I held the secrets to the Caged Bird Seal? Become my follower. I would personally remove every brand from every forehead in your clan. And even beyond that, your village fears what it cannot control. They will put you in a dark room. They will take you apart. They will turn you into a weapon, exactly as they did to the boy hiding in those trees." His voice flattened. "My own sensei feared me. He couldn't control me either, so he discarded me the way a child discards a toy it has grown bored of. This village is rotten to its foundation. It buried its humanity with the death of anyone who actually had vision."
"You are a funny person to lecture anyone about lost humanity," Hinata said.
Orochimaru stopped moving.
"Look at your coils." She pointed at the center of his chest. "Your host body is rejecting you. Your chakra is grinding through those borrowed pathways and turning them to sludge. You call yourself a scientist, but your immortality is a bad joke. You are just a parasite hopping between corpses."
The amusement left his face so completely it was as though it had never been there.
"How bold," Orochimaru hissed.
He bit his thumb. Slammed his palm into the dirt. Black script cracked outward from his hand like broken glass across the ground, and a detonation of white smoke swallowed the clearing whole. The earth lurched. A thirty-foot brown serpent erupted from the smoke with enough force to flatten the nearest trees, its yellow eyes finding Hinata before the sound of its summoning had finished rolling through the forest.
"Keep the girl busy," Orochimaru told the beast.
Sasuke Uchiha
The snake's jaws snapped through the branch Hinata had just vacated. She hit the canopy running, drawing the serpent after her across the treetops, and then Orochimaru turned and looked directly up at Sasuke as though he had known exactly where Sasuke was hiding the entire time.
"Let us see those eyes work, Sasuke."
Sasuke forced chakra into his optic nerves. His Sharingan flared, the two red tomoe spinning, and the last of the genjutsu's grip on his chest loosened enough to let him move. He reached for a kunai.
Naruto went past him like he had been launched from a cannon.
"Multi-Shadow Clone Jutsu!"
Twenty copies of Naruto dropped from the surrounding branches. Five threw a barrage of shuriken. Ten drew kunai and angled for Orochimaru's flanks. The remaining five grabbed the original and flung him forward.
"Gale Palm!"
Compressed air caught Naruto and turned him into a projectile. Sasuke moved without thinking, throwing shuriken trailing ninja wire to box the Sannin into Naruto's path and cut off the exit.
Orochimaru didn't form a single seal. He opened his mouth.
Thousands of small brown snakes poured out. They hit the ground and spread into a living wall. The shuriken sank into the mass and disappeared. The clones crashed through it and vanished in small pops of displaced air. Orochimaru stepped backward and sank into the mud like it was water.
"Below you!" Sasuke yelled.
The ground burst open. Orochimaru's hands shot up from the dirt, grabbed Naruto by both ankles, and whipped him sideways. Naruto hit the ground on his back with a sound that made Sasuke's teeth clench.
"You rely too much on the fox," Orochimaru said quietly.
He pressed a burning hand directly into Naruto's stomach.
Naruto's scream cut through the entire forest. His eyes rolled back, and his body went completely slack in the mud.
Orochimaru stepped over him without looking down and turned his face toward the canopy.
"Now. Let us see what you can really do without distractions."
Sasuke's Sharingan caught the micro-shift in Orochimaru's shoulders. The blood was pounding so hard in his ears he could feel it in his back teeth. He wanted to fight. He wanted to test himself against a legend and find out exactly how far he still had to climb before he could reach Itachi.
Trust your team when you can't see the whole board.
He heard Kakashi's voice as clearly as if the man were standing beside him.
Naruto was face-down and exposed in the mud. Across the clearing, Hinata was fighting a building-sized snake. If Sasuke engaged Orochimaru one-on-one, he would die, and if he died, Naruto would die, and probably Hinata too.
He threw a smoke bomb at Orochimaru's feet, shunshin'd through the clearing before it detonated, grabbed Naruto by the collar, and hauled him over one shoulder.
He was in the canopy before the smoke had finished spreading, crouched on a heavy oak branch with Naruto propped against the trunk and his short sword in his hand.
Below, the smoke cleared. Orochimaru looked up at him. He looked like he was just getting started.
Anko Mitarashi
The blood reached her first.
Anko dropped from the canopy into the high grass at the edge of the clearing and crouched with one hand already on her kunai. Three ANBU materialized behind her without sound, waiting.
Three Genin were dead in the dirt.
She approached the closest body and turned it over.
She stopped breathing.
The boy had no face. The skin had been dissolved from the front of his skull, leaving raw muscle and pale bone exposed. Clean work, no hesitation. She checked the other two and found the same thing. All three had been stripped of any identifying feature with a corrosive compound applied precisely enough to suggest someone who had done this many times before.
The air above the bodies held a smell she had spent years trying to forget. Ammonia. Burnt sugar. The thick chemical sourness that clung to the inside of the nostrils for hours and came back in dreams. She had breathed that same smell every day for two years while strapped to a metal table in an underground room.
The curse mark on the back of her neck ignited with a heat so sudden and vicious her vision whited out at the edges. She pressed two fingers against the back of her neck and breathed through her nose until it passed.
He was here.
Orochimaru had entered her exam. He had walked into her forest, killed three children for their clothes, and left the bodies where she would find them. He wanted her to know he was here.
He was hunting. He would never risk Konoha just for ordinary Genin. He was looking for a vessel. He was looking for the Uchiha.
"Grass Genin," one of the ANBU said, crouching over the discarded headbands scattered in the dirt. "Registered yesterday."
Anko stood up straight and pushed her breathing back under control. She shoved the memories into the back of her skull and locked the door on them.
"Send a bird to the Hokage. Tell him the Sannin is in the Forest of Death." Her voice came out sharper than she intended. "Mobilize the reserve tracking squads. I want a perimeter around the entire training ground."
"Understood. Your orders, Captain?"
Anko drew a poisoned kunai and looked into the dark trees of Sector 44.
"I am going hunting."
Hinata Hyuga
The snake lunged again.
Hinata burned chakra to the soles of her boots and threw herself backward. The serpent's head plowed into the ground where she had been standing, sending a curtain of mud up through the ferns.
"Fleeting Shield!"
A wide panel of hard golden light appeared in the air between them. The snake recovered and drove its snout into the construct. The shield cracked from center to edge under the impact, spider-webbing and screaming, but it held long enough. She drew a kunai, stepped into the gap, and drove the blade into the snake's eye up to the hilt.
The shriek it produced rattled every branch in a hundred feet. Then it vanished in a cloud of white summoning smoke.
She landed on a branch, turned, and took in the clearing. Sasuke was already in the canopy with Naruto over his shoulder. Orochimaru was preparing to go up after them. She dropped from the branch, hit the ground running, and planted herself between the Sannin and the oak tree where her teammates were.
Orochimaru paused. He studied her the way someone studies an insect they are deciding whether to step on.
"You survived Manda's initial assault. Impressive." He rolled his shoulders. "But you are still out of your depths, little girl."
He came forward.
Hinata brought her hands up and settled into the Gentle Fist stance. Her Kei Talent opened automatically, reading him, mapping his center of gravity, calculating the line of his hips and shoulders.
It couldn't get a read.
Orochimaru's joints bent the wrong direction. His spine curled and flexed in a way that no spine should be able to flex, and his momentum had no origin point, no mechanical center that the Kei Talent could locate. He moved like liquid poured into a human shape.
She ducked under a kick that would have caved her chest in. She caught a hand strike on her forearm and parried it, and then his arm wrapped around hers like a rope pulling taut, dragging her in toward him while his jaw unhinged and his neck stretched toward her throat.
Her Raindrop Iron Body activated through reflex rather than thought. A fraction of a second faster than her own conscious processing, she twisted out of his grip. Her jacket sleeve tore free in his hands. She drove a palm strike toward the center of his chest, flared her Byakugan, and locked her aim onto the primary tenketsu above his heart.
Her hand stopped in the air.
The human chakra network ran through three hundred and sixty-one nodes, branching symmetrically outward from the heart. Orochimaru didn't have one. Her Byakugan showed her what was actually inside the skin: thousands of white serpentine coils twisted together so tightly they mimicked the gross shape of a man's organs. A hive. No central node. No single point of failure. Striking one tenketsu here would disable one snake out of ten thousand.
Her Gentle Fist was useless.
Orochimaru saw her eyes go wide. The cruel smile stretched back across his face.
"Do you see it now?" His neck extended, bridging the three feet between them in a single slow reach. "Your clan's neat little tricks mean nothing to a body built like mine. I have outgrown the human design. And you dared to call me a parasite."
Hinata stared at the thing behind the stolen face. Time did something strange, pulling long and slow while the decision hung in the air in front of her, fully formed and unavoidable.
Someday you are going to have to kill someone. Kakashi's voice, exact and clear, from a conversation months ago. Because it will be the only option left.
She knew what would happen if she stepped back right now. She had been carrying the knowledge for months, turning it over in her head at night, trying to find the angle where it stopped being true. There wasn't one.
Orochimaru would bypass her and sink his fangs into Sasuke's neck. The curse mark would root itself into Sasuke's chakra network and start feeding on everything dark in him. The Sound Four would come for him at the end of summer exams. Neji would end up with arrows through his chest in a forest clearing, bleeding into the leaves alone. Choji would lie in a hospital bed for three weeks while military pills finished dissolving his body from the inside.
She thought about Anko, who flinched every time she touched the back of her neck. Kimimaro, who had been handed a mission to die on and called it devotion. Sixty infants injected with Hashirama's cells in an underground lab, each one documented and filed as a failure while Orochimaru moved on to the next batch. The prisoners in the holding tanks she had seen through the walls of the lab she had burned down.
She could let him go. She could tell herself the decision belonged to someone older and more qualified. There were no adults here. Kakashi was miles away. The Hokage was blind to all of this. Would he even die if she killed him?
She had thought about this moment since Zabuza told her to let the adults handle the ugly work. She had turned it over and examined every face of it. Who deserved to die? Where did she draw the line? Old Hinata's answer had been to stay a Chunin forever, to stop climbing so she never had to make this decision.
She had watched what that choice cost the people around her. Standing still while something like this walked through the world was choosing a side. It was just choosing quietly.
She broke her stance.
She gripped her right wrist with her left hand, planted her feet in the mud, and pushed the Endless Revolving Cycle past its ceiling. Past the point her body could absorb. The safety limits dissolved, and her chakra system answered by grinding her physical and spiritual energy together at full friction.
The pain was immediate. It started in the center of her arm and spread outward through every coil, a deep tearing sensation that pushed past anything she had a category for. Her vision pulsed white at the edges. She forced the raw energy down her arm and converted it entirely into Lightning Release.
Blue-white electricity erupted from her palm. The sound it produced was enormous, thousands of screaming voices compressed into a single pitch that shook the leaves overhead. The sharp, bitten smell of ozone flooded the clearing.
Orochimaru's smile disappeared.
She went forward.
He began forming seals for a mud wall. Her speed was already past his hands. The Chidori pulled her vision into a narrow corridor, but her Byakugan filled in the space around the tunnel and she drove her lightning-coated hand straight into his chest.
It went through.
High-voltage electricity discharged through the cavity. The current tore through the thousands of snakes forming his organs and cooked them apart, and the man in front of her made a sound that was wet and choked and very small.
Blood ran over her forearm. The skin of his face began to sag. His free hand found her wrist, grip loosening even as he tried to hold on.
He looked down at her arm in his chest. The electrical arc was still jumping across what remained of his jacket. A dark, manic light filled his ruined yellow eyes.
"Magnificent! Kakashi taught you well!"
His jaw unhinged.
His head launched off his neck like a thrown spear. His neck stretched upward thirty feet in a single motion, fangs extended and aimed directly at Sasuke's throat, still trying to plant the curse mark before the vessel finished dying under her hand.
"Phantom Mirage!"
She channeled her remaining Light chakra, bent the photons in a six-foot stretch of air directly ahead of Orochimaru's extending face, and created a clean hole where the tree was.
His fangs clamped down on a thick oak branch two feet left of Sasuke's shoulder. Sasuke drove his short sword through the snake's elongated snout and pinned it to the wood.
Below, the host body began to liquefy. The flesh turned grey, then brown, then slid apart like wet clay until Hinata's hand came free and there was nothing holding its shape anymore. Above, the snake head dissolved the same way, slipping off Sasuke's blade in a sheet of acid mud.
The puddle on the ground shifted. Pulled itself into a partial shape. Orochimaru crouched in the ruins of the host body, holding what remained of his chest together with one hand, breathing in short pulls.
He looked at her. The yellow eyes were still bright.
"Fascinating," Orochimaru rasped. He was already sinking into the dirt. "You carry such beautiful jutsu, Hinata Hyuga. We will finish this conversation soon."
The mud closed over him. The shriek of the Chidori faded one frequency at a time until the clearing was quiet, and the only sound left was the Hinata's own breathing and the distant drip of water from the leaves overhead.
Sasuke Uchiha
Nothing moved in the mud below.
Sasuke held his sword out and scanned every inch of the clearing floor with his Sharingan, looking for residual chakra, for a heat signature, for any sign that Orochimaru was still underneath the surface and waiting. He found nothing. The man had retreated.
He looked at Naruto. The unconscious boy was burning against Sasuke's arm, his skin fever-bright, and the black seal on his stomach pulsed with its own slow rhythm where the Five Elements Seal had buried itself.
Sasuke sheathed his sword, jumped down to the forest floor, and walked to the clearing.
Hinata was on her knees in the mud. Her right sleeve was gone from the shoulder down, and the skin of her forearm was charred black and split open across the top, with blood seeping steadily from the cracks where her chakra coils had torn through the surface tissue. She had both arms wrapped around herself and was breathing in short, shallow pulls, her whole body shaking from the adrenaline working its way out of her system.
Kaguya crawled out of Hinata's carrier pouch and bumped her head once against Hinata's knee.
"Are you dying?" Sasuke asked. He kept his voice level.
"No." Hinata looked up at him. The smile she attempted was strained and thin. "The Chidori tears the muscle structure apart if you don't have the conditioning for it. I pushed too much chakra through the cycle."
A faint golden light began moving across the charred skin, pulling the edges of the wound back toward each other with visible, steady progress.
Sasuke crouched beside her, checked the perimeter one final time, and filed away his questions about the Chidori for later.
"He blocked Naruto's chakra," Sasuke said. "He has a high fever. We can't stay here. If another team finds us like this, we are finished."
"I know." She used her good arm to push herself up from the mud. Her legs shook under her weight. They held. "There is a root hollow about two miles north. I clocked it with the Byakugan before we entered the forest. We can hold there until I heal."
Sasuke nodded and went back to the tree. He pulled Naruto over both shoulders in a fireman's carry, adjusted the weight, and turned.
"Can you run?"
"I can run," Hinata said.
They moved out of the clearing and into the thickest part of the forest. Sasuke led with his Sharingan open, reading the terrain ahead of them, watching for wire traps and predator territories.
The root hollow took just over an hour to reach. It was a wide cavity beneath the upturned root system of a dead cedar, covered on all sides by hanging moss and thick fern growth. He laid Naruto down in the back of the cave, draped a blanket over him from the supply scroll, and spent the next twenty minutes on the perimeter: ninja wire across every approach vector, explosive tags pressed under the moss, a false trail leading north to misdirect any tracking hounds.
When he came back, Hinata was sitting cross-legged in the dirt against the far wall with her eyes closed. The burn was mostly healed. The new skin was raw and pink and clearly tender, and she looked like someone who had stopped moving and was finding out for the first time how tired she was.
Sasuke sat down across from her. Pulled his knees to his chest.
The fight was settling into him now that the adrenaline was draining out. He sat with it. They had just engaged one of the legendary Sannin, and Orochimaru had disassembled Naruto in under a minute. He had treated Sasuke like a secondary concern, something to collect after the real problem was handled. If Hinata hadn't had a used Chidori, all three of them would be dead.
Sasuke looked at his hands in the dark and said nothing for a while.
The man had offered power. Had dangled it in front of Hinata while Sasuke watched from forty feet up in a tree. He pushed the thought away.
"He wanted my eyes," Sasuke said.
Hinata opened hers and looked at him. "He wanted to give you a curse mark. It is a parasitic seal. It grants power in the short term and spends the next several years dismantling the host's ability to make independent decisions. He uses it to manufacture vessels for himself."
Sasuke looked at the healed skin on her forearm.
She had torn her own body open to keep the seal off his neck, and she had made the decision to kill without flinching, and she had carried the knowledge that this was coming for long enough to have a plan for it.
"You knew he was coming."
"I suspected it," she said, carefully. "I didn't know he would move this fast."
He leaned his head back against the dirt wall. He wasn't angry at her for keeping the information to herself. He was just tired.
"How do you know these things, Hinata?" He looked at the ceiling of the hollow. "You told me to trust you. I trusted you. You kept us alive." He paused. "But I need to know what you know before it's already happening. If you see something coming, tell me."
Hinata opened her mouth.
"Rest," Sasuke said. "Heal. I have the first watch."
He turned to face the entrance of the hollow and settled in.
Orochimaru
The stone floor was cold under his feet.
A pool of grey mud spread across the tiles and then thinned and collapsed inward, and a white snake the color of old bone pulled itself free of the residue. It rose. The flesh expanded. Bones shifted and locked into place. Orochimaru stood naked and shivering on the laboratory floor with the overhead lights cutting hard shadows across his face.
Kabuto stepped out from the edge of the room and draped a cloak over his master's shoulders.
"The Grass Genin host failed." Kabuto adjusted his glasses and studied the residue on the floor with clinical attention. "I didn't expect you to discard it so soon. Did the Uchiha prove problematic?"
"The Uchiha was a frightened child," Orochimaru said. He pressed two fingers against his chest where the hole had been. "The Hyuga girl destroyed the vessel."
Kabuto's hand stopped over his clipboard. "Hinata Hyuga? The subject with the luminescent chakra?"
"She drove a lightning blade straight through my heart." The dark thrill was working its way into his voice and he let it. "Oh, how magnificent it was to watch her decide to do it."
He walked past the surgical tables, feet leaving prints on the sterile tile.
"Her Kekkei Tota is highly volatile. The host could not withstand the ambient heat of her chakra before she even struck it directly. Standard cellular structure cannot adapt to that kind of output." He stopped in the center of the room. "She has also built a chakra regeneration technique that outperforms nearly anything documented. She possesses a sensor bloodline limit, a healing modality, advanced Light Release constructs, and now a functional Chidori. She synthesized a Kekkei Tota from a clan that has never produced one in recorded history." He paused. "I want to know what is happening inside that skull."
Kabuto looked up. "How do you wish to proceed?"
"I need eyes capable of tracking her abilities in real time," Orochimaru said. "I need a physical structure that can accept genetic material without rejection."
He crossed to the far wall where a row of reinforced stasis pods lined the stone from floor to ceiling. He stopped in front of the largest. Inside, a pale figure floated in green fluid. Stark white hair. Heavily scarred. A fully matured Sharingan embedded into the right arm, another in the chest, several across the face. The genetic anomaly called Shin, designed from the start around a single trait: the ability to accept any tissue transplant without rejection.
"You want to use the Shin prototype." Kabuto's voice took on a careful edge. "That vessel was designed for long-term observation only. The genetic structure destabilizes under maximum combat output. If you push it to its limits, the body will fail within days."
"Then I will burn it to ash," Orochimaru said.
He pressed his palm flat against the glass. The twelve red eyes in the unconscious figure's face stared into the dark.
"The Uchiha is still the primary target. I will have his body." Orochimaru watched the slow drift of Shin's hair in the fluid. "But the Hyuga girl is a variable that needs to be either yield or be removed. I want to see how far she can be pushed before she breaks. Beyond that, I believe her Light Release healing capabilities may solve the inhabitation problem permanently."
He turned from the glass and pulled the cloak tighter around his shoulders.
"Prepare the transfer ritual, Kabuto." He walked toward the back of the laboratory without looking back. "I will return. I will take the Uchiha. And I will pull Konoha apart until there is nothing left to call a village."
Author's Note:-
So this is my plan regarding Orochimaru, to use a throwaway character from the plot of Boruto and use him as the basis for Orochimaru's sorta powerup. Shin Uchiha for those who don't know is the guy who is attributed for the arm that Danzo uses in Naruto. He is apparently like a perfect recipient for all genetic implantation and his body quite literally just becomes better with each injection of new genetic material lol.