Chapter 237 - Ritsu-kun, Are You Still Human?
The reanimated Senju Tobirama was shattered by Ritsu's punch, ash and fragments scattering through the air.
But a reanimated body could not be permanently destroyed - not by ordinary attacks. Normal-level force could disrupt the form temporarily, but not prevent it from reassembling. That was the fundamental problem with reanimated opponents, and the reason Onoki had ordered Kitsuchi to summon the Sealing Unit before leaving. As someone who had once dealt with the Second Hokage Senju Tobirama directly, Onoki knew precisely how troublesome the Reanimation Jutsu was.
Even his own Kekkei Tota - Dust Release - could not eliminate a reanimated body permanently. His teacher, the Second Tsuchikage Mu, who had invented Dust Release, had once fought Senju Tobirama in battle. Dust Release could scatter the reanimated form into ash and substantially delay the time it took to reform - but it could not permanently end it.
The only way to deal with a reanimated fighter was sealing.
Ritsu knew this as well. He hadn't expected his punch to accomplish anything lasting. The moment the reanimated Tobirama was temporarily dispersed, he activated Wind Release Chakra Mode, wrapping himself in a shrieking coat of wind.
His speed spiked to its maximum in an instant.
Moving faster than the eye could track, he reached the Rinnegan's jar before Orochimaru could.
Orochimaru's intentions were obvious enough. He had come for the Rinnegan. So the key to this fight was keeping the Rinnegan protected. As for actually killing Orochimaru - frankly, that was going to be difficult. Defeating him was one thing. Killing him was a genuinely different matter.
In terms of sheer survival capability, Orochimaru could credibly claim second place in the entire shinobi world. No one would contest first.
But as Ritsu reached out to grab the jar, a glint of cold light flashed. A sword extended from Orochimaru's mouth - summoned through a snake, then produced through the snake's jaws - and the legendary Sword of Kusanagi struck the jar from the side, sending it skidding and bouncing off the far wall before rebounding back.
The jar's material was exceptional. It survived the impact without a crack.
"Ritsu-kun, that's quite the treasure. Won't you let me have a closer look?"
Orochimaru retracted the Kusanagi back down his throat and fixed his crimson eyes on Ritsu, his smile an obvious fabrication.
Byakugan and Sharingan met.
Two waves of killing intent collided.
Hidden Shadow Snake Hands.
Whirlwind Iron-Cutting Fist.
Serpents were sliced apart in every direction, blood spraying freely.
Eight Trigrams Vacuum Palm.
Soft Physique Modification.
Orochimaru's body had been reconstructed to move like a snake's - boneless and fluid. Reading Ritsu's attack trajectories through the Sharingan, he twisted smoothly through the strikes that would have connected against any normal opponent.
Gentle Fist Style: Vacuum Serial Palms.
Ritsu unleashed eleven consecutive palm strikes, each at a different angle, sending wind blades out in a pattern that sealed off every possible evasion path.
But -
Sword of Kusanagi.
Orochimaru produced the legendary blade again, summoned the same way as before. The sharpest sword in existence cut through every one of the eleven wind blades cleanly, dissolving them.
Several exchanges passed, and neither side had gained any clear advantage.
Meanwhile, the research institute rapidly emptied of people.
The researchers who had qualified to work on the Rinnegan were almost all jonin, but jonin varied enormously in actual capability - sometimes the gap between one jonin and another was wider than the gap between a person and a ninja hound. Orochimaru was exactly the kind of monster capable of making that gap absolute.
Kitsuchi, while organizing contact with the Sealing Unit, also ordered the evacuation of the research staff. Only the few researchers whose strength he actually trusted were permitted to stay. The Sand, Cloud, and Mist ninja did the same - Yashamaru, Yatsuki Hikari, and Mangetsu Hoshigaki sent their subordinates back well clear of the fighting, to prevent them from being caught in a high-level battle and dying for nothing.
None of the three moved to intervene themselves, however.
Orochimaru's reputation was dangerous enough on its own. The addition of a Uchiha Sharingan made him even harder to read. Genuinely engaging him would be reckless, and none of them were willing to risk it - especially when Ritsu was there to serve as the front. Besides, Kitsuchi had already retrieved the Rinnegan jar.
In this moment, Kitsuchi found himself once again grateful for Konoha's insistence on sending someone to protect the Rinnegan. Without Ritsu here to absorb this, the prospect of Iwagakure facing Orochimaru alone to defend the Rinnegan was deeply uncertain at best - and the casualties to the village would have been severe regardless of outcome.
The explosions from the southwest were growing more frequent and more violent.
The intensity of that battle was evident from a distance.
The dizzying variety of techniques Orochimaru was demonstrating in front of them was enough to make the onlookers break into cold sweats just watching. If they had to face him directly in place of Ritsu, they doubted they would last more than a handful of exchanges.
One thing above all else made facing Orochimaru terrifying.
None of them could risk making eye contact with him. That was simply what a Sharingan genjutsu user did to a person's willingness to fight.
"Kitsuchi! What are all of you standing there for? The Rinnegan is about to be taken."
Ritsu's shout cut through the room. In the brief moments of their exchange, the reanimated Tobirama had already partially reformed and was lunging toward the Rinnegan jar.
That ended the watching.
They could allow Orochimaru and Ritsu to fight. They could not allow the Rinnegan to be taken.
Sand Hand.
Yashamaru moved. The gourd on his back opened, and yellow sand poured out in a rush, shaping itself into a large grasping hand that swept toward the jar.
Water Style: Water Bullet Jutsu.
Mangetsu Hoshigaki raised his right hand, extended his thumb and index finger in a gun shape, and fired a water droplet from his fingertip with enough force to punch through a human body.
The droplet hit the reanimated Tobirama's torso and passed straight through. The penetrating force was genuine - but penetrating a reanimated body didn't matter. It kept moving. Both hands formed seals.
Water Style: Water Barrage.
From his left hand came a volley of enormous water spheres - more than ten launched in rapid succession, precisely aimed at Yashamaru's Sand Hand.
The Water Barrage wasn't powerful enough to overwhelm the Sand Hand directly. But the sand, soaked through and heavy with absorbed water, slowed dramatically. The reanimated Tobirama moved past it.
A crack of lightning.
Yatsuki Hikari, wrapped in blinding electrical discharge, seized the gap - the reanimated Tobirama had just finished his Water Style technique, and his chakra hadn't fully reoriented. Hikari drove forward with Lightning Brutality: Horizontal Strike, a hand-blade hit to the neck executed with razor precision. The strike was sharp enough to live up to its name. The reanimated Tobirama's head separated from his body.
At the same moment -
Earth Style: Stone Iron Cannonball.
Kitsuchi spat out a pebble-sized lump of rock from his mouth. It expanded rapidly in the open air and struck the reanimated Tobirama's torso like a boulder, shattering the body entirely.
Orochimaru clicked his tongue in clear disappointment.
A reanimated Second Hokage with his will suppressed, reduced to basic instinct and command execution - and those three had managed to stop him. That was a more significant result than Orochimaru had expected from people he didn't recognize.
"Orochimaru-senpai. Underestimating me a little, aren't you?"
Ritsu's voice reached him from the side.
And at the same moment, Ritsu hit him like a charging bull, the razor-edged wind wrapped around his fists shredding through fabric, skin, muscle, tendons, and bone. Blood erupted like a fountain.
At the last moment before it connected, Orochimaru opened his mouth wide and used his signature technique - the Orochimaru Style Substitution - expelling a fresh version of himself from the wound like shedding a skin. And simultaneously, he found an opening to use Wood Style: Cutting Sprig Technique, driving a sharp wooden spike into Ritsu's body, intending it to take root and grow madly inside.
The spike entered along Ritsu's spine.
But the moment it was inside, it couldn't grow. The crushing regenerative force of Ritsu's body ground it into splinters and expelled the fragments back out through the wound as it sealed shut.
"Ritsu-kun. Are you... still human?"
Orochimaru was genuinely startled.
The hyper-speed wound closure earlier had still been within his range of conceptual acceptance - the First Hokage was said to have had extraordinary physical constitution and fast recovery. Even Ritsu regenerating internal organs had been somewhat extreme, but possible to accept, more or less.
But regeneration so powerful it actively fought back against an implanted jutsu - that was beyond the boundary of what a human body should be able to do.
Ritsu was briefly at a loss for a response.
Being asked by Orochimaru whether he was still human. The whole situation felt somewhat absurd. Orochimaru was genuinely one of the last people in the world with standing to ask that question.
He didn't even know whether Orochimaru had completed that white-serpent transformation by now.
He looked at Orochimaru backing away to put distance between them and let himself smile.
"Whether I'm human or not isn't the point, Orochimaru-senpai. The point is that as long as I'm standing here, you're not taking the Rinnegan."
Orochimaru's brow creased.
The reanimated Tobirama wasn't cooperating. Yashamaru, Mangetsu Hoshigaki, and Yatsuki Hikari had shown genuine capability - the three of them working together had stopped the heavily weakened reanimated Second Hokage cold. And on his own end, Ritsu was blocking him completely.
And from what he had gathered, the situation with the reanimated First Hokage, Third Kazekage, and Fourth Kazekage in the southwest wasn't going smoothly either. The old man Onoki had intercepted them.
He exhaled quietly.
The Rinnegan was not going to be taken tonight. With Ritsu's Byakugan on watch, there was no way to get it by cunning alone. His gaze drifted to where Kitsuchi had picked up the jar and secured it, and he let go of any remaining expectation of taking the Rinnegan in this engagement.
He wasn't done, however.
He still had his arrangement with Tatsuhata, and while taking the Rinnegan tonight was off the table, he could still lay groundwork for taking it in the future. He didn't know exactly what Tatsuhata was plotting, but it was clear enough that the real purpose of allowing him to attack Iwagakure had been to keep Ritsu pinned here.
So he would cooperate with that plan. Not for the Moon's Eye Plan - he didn't care about that. But for his own future access to the Rinnegan.
And beyond the tactical calculation, there was something else. Ever since acquiring both the Sharingan and Wood Release, he had never had the opportunity to fight at his full capacity. Against Jiraiya in their repeated encounters since his defection, he had always been watching for Minato to appear behind him, and he had never wanted to fight Jiraiya to the death. So he had run, every time.
Against Ritsu, he had no such concerns. No psychological weight. And Minato, by all likelihood, was occupied with whatever Tatsuhata was doing inside Konoha.
So -
He drove both palms into the ground. Chakra flowed through his body along pathways that Ritsu recognized with instant familiarity.
Oh. You cannot be serious.
Ritsu's eye twitched.
Wood Style: Wood Human Technique.
Orochimaru brought out Wood Release, and he didn't start small. The Wood Human was a first move - a thirty-meter-tall colossus of living wood that crushed the research institute flat as it rose. The researchers had evacuated ahead of time and there were no residents nearby, so the immediate casualties were limited.
"Wood Human Technique... I'm starting to feel like this is becoming a common move," Ritsu sighed, looking up at the towering construct.
He knew it wasn't really. It was just that he kept facing opponents who had mastered it, and he had mastered it himself. The repetition was an illusion created by proximity.
He drew his chakra together and drove both palms down.
Wood Style: Wood Human Technique.
The only things capable of countering a Wood Human were a Uchiha clan's Susanoo - or another Wood Human.
Two colossal wooden giants now stood in the center of Iwagakure, trading blows with the full weight of their bodies behind every strike. The reanimated First Hokage's strength had been so heavily reduced that even his Flowering Tree Technique came out as a stunted version, and the Wood Human was entirely beyond him. Otherwise it would have been three giants fighting.
Even with only two, the battle had escalated to a level where intervention from the onlookers was neither possible nor particularly tempting - and with the Rinnegan already secured by Kitsuchi, they made the rational choice and moved well back.
It was at that point -
Minato appeared beside Kakashi, who had likewise retreated to a safe distance. His clothes were torn in several places.
"Kakashi. Where is Clan Head Hyuga?"
He asked it the moment he materialized.
Kakashi needed only a half-second to answer: "Fighting Orochimaru."
But the answer was already unnecessary. Minato had already seen the two Wood Humans locked in combat, and the chakra signatures of both Orochimaru and Ritsu were intense and unmistakable.
"Orochimaru has joined up with Uchiha Tatsuhata."
Minato's expression was grim.
He didn't wait for Kakashi to respond. He was already gone.