Pre-Chapter A/N: Here we go with another chapter. Here on time! Next four chapters on my patreon(https://www.patreon.com/c/Oghenevwogaga)— same username as here and link in bio. Also started a new story (SI into Bill Weasley in the HP Universe) so go check that out. As we do when we have new stories, there's a cheeky little discount for the week. Code: THEFIRSTSON
Kageru Fumikage used a type of magnet release that allowed her to control any metal within a specific distance of her body. She slapped her hands together, and all the knives and other assorted blades on her person left their sheaths and began to float around her. To my byakugan, it looked like she was surrounded by a dome of chakra that connected to all the metal objects within it. That wasn't just the blades even.
It included certain parts of her Jounin uniform, some hidden equipment in her boots, and even something within her body, but that was much harder to make out. She sprinted at Uzume, who levied her gunbai at her before running at her in turn. The gunbai was made of wood, so Uzume had little to fear on that end.
When they were inches away from each other, the blades floating behind Fumikage suddenly accelerated with the aim of burying themselves in Uzume's body. She swiped the gunbai, creating a blast of wind release that knocked them off course, but only for a few seconds before they returned to their goal, and then, at the same time, Fumikage attempted a kick. Uzume blocked with the back of the gunbai, and once they were in contact, my byakugan allowed me to see Fumikage's dome extend to Uzume and everything she was in range of.
The shuriken and kunai from her holsters rose seemingly of their own volition before stabbing themselves into their owner. Or trying to, at least. The blades stopped short against Uzume's skin, failing to penetrate as she activated her Mangekyou sharingan ability. Any slower, and she'd have been a goner there.
She tried to press the attack now that her opponent's gambit had failed, only for her body to lock up. The armour. Uzume's armour was made out of overlapping metal plates, and those plates were now under Fumikage's control.
Well, I'm sure she wished she'd gone to watch the preliminaries right about now. Unfortunately for Fumikage, though, a winning move against anyone else was just an inconvenience against Uzume. Her chakra flared, and Fumikage was forced to jump backwards as the Sussano'o rib cage formed around her. The chakra that had connected Uzume to her opponent now retreated to the dome around Fumikage's body.
"I see it now. Close combat against you is normally a death sentence," Uzume said with a chuckle. And then she began to strip. Well, not strip strip, but you get the point. First she unlatched the metal plates that made up her armour, and then next came all her weapon holsters, before finally she dropped her headband to the ground as well. Her gunbai was now the only weapon in her grasp as the sussano'o's spectral ribcage began to fade. All that while, Fumikage had peppered it with various weapons to no success.
"Let us dance, Kageru Fumikage. Come at me with everything you have," she said before shooting for her.
Fumikage, to her credit, did not back down. She sprinted for her in turn. The weapons at her back rose once again under her control. They went for Uzume, but she just barrelled through them with a swipe of her gunbai, and then they were in range for hand to hand. Fumikage attempted a kick. Uzume twisted around it, fingers stretching to slam into the outstretched knee.
Fumikage's other foot came up then, aiming for Uzume's reaching hand. She turned, turning the reach into a catch, grabbing hold of the foot and forcing Fumikage to maintain what could not be a comfortable position. Her hands were on the ground and her body was bent out with both feet fully extended. She twisted, other foot coming around even as the first tried to leave Uzume's grip. Uzume's grip strength would not be so easily denied, though.
Her other hand rose, blocking the kick that tried to make her head ring and force her to abandon her grip. Uzume's smile was manic in its glee. The ground exploded, two clones of Fumikage rising. Each one weaving seals.
"Lightning release: Thundershock," they both said in unison, hands pointed at Uzume at the end of the combination. The pattern in her eyes shifted, becoming the spinning wheel of her mangekyou. Both bolts hit and did a grand total of nothing. They should have spread from Uzume to Fumikage, but the other woman's grip on the earth allowed her to send the electricity that coursed through her body into the ground with no ill effects.
Once that gambit failed, Fumikage went for the nuclear option. Her flak jacket ripped itself to pieces as thin strips of metal from within it shot out and right at Uzume.
With her mangekyou ability, there was no chance of them harming her, so she just remained there as they wrapped themselves around her limbs.
"You can't hope to harm me," Uzume said, but her opponent just grinned.
"Kai." The bits of metal wrapped around Uzume's limbs began to glow before they suddenly lifted her up, sending her shooting backwards. Of course, she maintained her grip around Fumikage's foot all the while, even as she was dragged towards the far end of the field.
Fumikage twisted, taking advantage of the situation to slip her foot out from her sandals, leaving the bit of footwear in Uzume's grip as my fiancée was sent flying to the far end of the arena. The bits of metal around her limbs were magnetized and pulled themselves towards an area of the ground. Squinting at it, I could see the mass of metal underneath it. She must have had the clones plant that before they attacked. How interesting.
Uzume hit the ground, and despite that, she still kept being pulled against the earth. The bits of metal strongly wanted to be connected to each other.
"Lightning release," Uzume whispered; the seals on the arena still caught it and broadcast it to the rest of us, though. A basic version of the lightning release armour we had fought against all those years ago came to life around her body with a sizzle. The lightning flowed to the metal, killing the attraction that drew it to the mass underground.
Uzume rose once again, looking amused if anything. The screens displayed her face in full clarity, showing a regular pair of sharingan in them. She'd deactivated the mangekyou, then. Because of what her ability was, she could activate the mangekyou for a second or two before tanking an attack and then deactivating it right after to manage the chakra drain. She had the chakra to maintain it for a good amount of time, but that was no excuse to learn bad habits, and with her ability, one of the only ways to beat her was to turn it into a battle of attrition.
In that case, it was best for her to be able to make sure that she came out the winner if that was ever the situation she faced.
"A good showing so far, but now I think we can end this here," she said, and then her chakra began to flare. The perspective on the screens changed once she was done speaking to show the two of them standing facing each other. Uzume's eyes had changed again, then. A purple aura began to form around her. First was the ribcage, and then the arms in their skeletal forms before a skull appeared above the ribcage. And then nerves and muscles began to grow around the bones before feet formed. She was now in a sussano'o so tall that she was level with the middle of the stands. But that was not the end of it.
The sussano'o grew more and more as clothes began to appear around it. It was reminiscent of the armour she wore at the beginning of the fight. The crowd was silent, held in a state of awed paralysis as she towered over the stadium itself. A second pair of arms grew under the first. In each of the upper arms a crossbow appeared, and the other two came together across the construct's chest with a drumstick in either one, with a drum appearing tethered to the sussano'o's chest.
A samurai helmet grew around the head of the construct, showing only eyes that glowed with a fire.
The perfect sussano'o.
"Behold the perfect sussano'o," Uzume's voice rang across the stadium. The screens gave up on trying to depict the construct. Everyone could see it, after all. They pivoted to showing Kageru Fumikage in her awestruck state. Her full height did not even come up to the sussano'o's ankle.
She lifted one hand.
"I yield. Can't see myself doing anything against that thing," she said. And so the match ended.
"I did not know such a thing was possible, Hokage-dono," the Daimyo said by my side after taking a few minutes to collect himself. The fight was over, but the crowd was clearly still contemplating the aftermath. Shika was giving them time rather than moving straight on. Probably for the best.
"Many things are possible. Not all things, but more than most would think for sure," I said with a shrug.
"Such a jutsu. Wow. And yet she is not Hokage?"
"Uzume is strong, Daimyo-dono. But I am stronger," I said, and the awe on his face had been why I had told her to use the technique in the first place. The purpose of this was to show off, after all. Make our nobles and merchants certain of the strength of Konoha shinobi and far more likely to bring their missions our way rather than trusting another village or roaming nin.
And stories of what happened today would spread to the other nations. To their people, nobility, and merchant class. They would look at their own shinobi and wonder how they compared. If they even compared.
"I see," he said, giving me another look that was somewhere between impressed and evaluative. People had heard tales of what Madara and Hashirama could do. Some had even witnessed them. The Valley of the End was a still-existing memento to the kind of power they had had. There was a reason Grand-uncle Tobirama had the statues made. He wanted no one to forget. Because no matter what else you took away from it, you would never leave without a positive estimation of the power of the Hidden Leaf. Whether you acknowledged it or not. And things like that were what kept the clients (and money) flowing.
There were only two people left, so before the wheel had even finished spinning after things had settled down, Minato was already walking out the tunnel. If Kushina had the crowd excited, Minato had them riotous. It must have been some combination of what they had just seen and how popular he was, because it felt like the stands were shaking with just how much screaming, hooting, and hollering they were doing.
And just like Kushina before him, he soaked it all up. Part of me wondered if this had been how it was in canon. Surely not. Because if the people could love them so much, turning against their son the way they did would have just been monstrous (and I refused to believe that nobody knew. The resemblance between Naruto and Minato was there, everyone knew Kushina's last name was Uzumaki. Surely someone could put two and two together and start the gossip).
His opponent waited for his name to be selected before walking out as well. There was some smattering of cheers, but the last surviving Sannin had never cared much about ingratiating himself with the civilians. I knew he had a more positive relationship with the shinobi forces than his demeanour would imply, but with this lot, it was a different story.
The two men who in another world would have fiercely contested for the position of Fourth Hokage stood before each other. Minato, right in the later stages of his teenage years, gangly in the way only teenagers could be. Orochimaru, entering the peak of his powers, a man grown in all ramifications.
His jounin vest was filled out with surprising bulk. His skin, while still pale, had more colour to it than it ever had in all the time I'd seen him in the anime. He had been denied the position of Hokage in this world, he had lost his teammates as well, and yet I was beginning to feel that he had come out healthier for it. Having me as a goal to chase and Hiruzen there to spur him onwards had made for a better man than what Kishimoto's world had yielded.
At least, that is what I hoped. Because while Kageru Fumikage had certainly shown more during the preliminaries and shown herself to be dangerous against most opponents, Orochimaru had come out of all his fights never having needed to show more than the bare minimum. The man I had sparred with all those months ago would lose to Fumikage going all out. But part of me was beginning to suspect that this was not that man.
Minato offered the seal of confrontation, and Orochimaru chuckled before returning it. He looked healthier, but that had still been as creepy a chuckle as I had ever heard. You can take the man out of the creep, but not the creep out of the man, it seemed.
Shika's hand swept down, beginning the fight, and from that second, it was nonstop action.
Orochimaru's knife hand threatened to collapse Minato's throat. He leaned to the side, and came around with a punch aimed for his head. Said head twisted to the side, and kept twisting as it elongated to wrap around Minato's arm. Shocked, he could do nothing as the rest of the body came around to collect its debt. Two kunai in the chest in a matter of seconds. The clone exploded. Bunshin Daibakuha.
Orochimaru's own body collapsed into a loose collection of rocks that were tossed in every which way. Both men rose from the ground in unison, already weaving seals.
"Wind release," Minato began, and Orochimaru's seals changed at the last second.
"Great breakthrough." "Fire release: Dragon flame Caterwaul."
Orochimaru spat out several small fireballs that morphed into miniature dragon heads midflight, only for them to be consumed by the massive tidal wave of water that Minato had called forth. I chuckled. They'd both tried to play each other there.
Orochimaru, by weaving dummy seals until he could tell what Minato was going to use so he could use a technique that trumped it—the dragon flame caterwaul would have been amplified by the great breakthrough and, because of its erratic flight path, would have been difficult for Minato to dodge afterwards. Minato, on the other hand, had somehow seen this coming and had weaved the seals for the great breakthrough but never actually put any chakra into the technique, instead using a sealless water formation pillar to take the attack that he had anticipated and then continue on towards his opponent.
The water formation pillar continued onwards, Orochimaru's eyes narrowing as it did so. The arc of rushing water lengthening at the side with shape transformation to make it harder to avoid. Both of them had had the same idea when it came to preventing their opponent from avoiding their attack. He squatted down, hands slamming into the earth. An earth wall?
Not that. The ground shook as the earth beneath his feet rose from the rest of the ground, taking him beyond the reach of the attack. Moving earth core. Not bad. The water hit the pillar and broke against it like a wave breaking against the shore. Orochimaru gazed down at his opponent from above. It looked like there was finally going to be a lull between both men, only for two massive snakes to erupt from the ground beneath Minato's feet.
The first wrapped around him and the second went for the bite. Said Minato dissolved into sparks, paralysing the snakes. Orochimaru lurched backwards just in time as Minato himself shot out from the ground beneath his feet with a rasengan.
The technique I had brought into this world missed by the barest of margins, and just as Orochimaru's feet were touching the ground again, Minato's other hand pushed out with another rasengan built within. Orochimaru met the attack with a spread palm. To those without a doujutsu, it looked like a panic attempt to avoid grievous bodily harm by sacrificing a limb.
I, however, could see the chakra gathered within. He was spinning it in the exact opposite direction to Minato's rasengan. He met Minato's charge, and the rasengan just popped. He'd dispelled the violently rotating chakra orb by matching it with equal power and rotation, just aimed in the reverse direction.
That. That was a statement of intent. You didn't do something like that without practicing it relentlessly. And there was only one reason a Konoha shinobi would practice so much against the rasengan. Message received, Hiruzen.
Minato swept out with a kick. Orochimaru leaned out of the way. It missed by some margin, and the Snake Sannin danced back into range with a palm aimed for Minato's face. He managed to get the back of his wrist up in time to slap it out of the way but could do little to avoid the knee that followed.
It hit him straight in the stomach, and he bent over, seeming to vomit.
From Minato's mouth came an extended tongue that wrapped around Orochimaru's ankle. He rose, twisting his head, and hurled the man straight into the pond in the middle of the battlefield.
Orochimaru hit the water and sunk like a stone.
A/N: Having a lot of fun with this one. Orochimaru in this story, with all his Sensei's attention, is a far different man from what he would have become in canon. In a lot of ways, for the better. For him, at least. Next four chapters up on patreon(https://www.patreon.com/c/Oghenevwogaga) (same username as here and link in bio), support me there and read them early. Don't forget to check out the new story or redeem the discount.