Chapter 27: The Serpent's Kiss
At the end of the tunnel was a heavy wooden door, a starkly artificial feature in the rough-hewn cave. A sickly, greenish light seeped from the crack beneath it. Naruto's heart hammered against his ribs. The source.
He approached silently, pressing his ear to the cold wood, then risked a glance through the narrow gap.
Within the stone chamber, Orochimaru's slit-pupiled eyes flicked toward the door. A faint, knowing smile touched his lips. "It seems our guest has arrived."
The door exploded inward as Naruto, in his perfect Sasuke-guise, launched a preemptive strike. He didn't enter; he kicked the door and hurled a volley of kunai and shuriken through the opening in a lethal fan.
Ting! Ting! Ting!
The projectiles were deflected mid-air by unseen forces, clattering harmlessly to the stone floor.
A dry, amused chuckle echoed in the room. "How cautious. Uchiha Sasuke."
Naruto stepped through the doorway, his transformed face a mask of cold defiance. His eyes swept the room, taking in the cluttered shelves, the strange instruments, and the two figures. His blood ran cold. Orochimaru. The Legendary Sannin. A being of Kage-level power and boundless, twisted ambition. For a heartbeat, primal terror threatened to freeze him. This is it. We're dead.
But the mind that had planned a hundred clone-training regimens fought back. Calm. Analyze. Why was Orochimaru here, in this fake-mission labyrinth? The answer was obvious, and it confirmed his worst suspicion. This was all for Sasuke. Orochimaru coveted the Sharingan, and he'd laid an elaborate, psychological trap.
The realization brought a sliver of grim hope. Orochimaru wouldn't kill his prize specimen. Not yet. He'd want to corrupt, to possess. Naruto's disguise might buy a few critical seconds.
Adopting Sasuke's coldest tone, he glared. "Who are you? What is this conspiracy?"
"Hehehe… No need for hostility," Orochimaru purred, his voice a silken, hypnotic ribbon. "I mean you no harm. In fact, I wish to give you the very power you crave." His long, forked tongue flicked out, wetting his lips with a grotesque, eager gesture.
Naruto ignored the offer, his mind screaming warnings. This was a predator playing with its food.
"Don't you hunger for vengeance?" Orochimaru continued, his voice dropping, weaving subtle threads of suggestion into the very air. "To see that man pay? With your current pace… it will take a lifetime. I can shorten the path. I can give you the means." The words were laced with a subtle genjutsu, a psychic lure meant to tap into deep-seated desire and despair.
For a fraction of a second, Naruto felt the pull. A whisper in his mind agreed. Power. Revenge. Yes. He gritted his teeth, and with a focused surge of chakra, he shattered the insidious influence. He'd studied anti-genjutsu techniques for this very reason—knowing his greatest future enemies wielded such arts.
But his moment of internal struggle was a distraction. In the blur of motion that followed, Orochimaru's head seemed to detach, elongating on a serpentine neck, shooting across the room faster than thought.
Naruto ducked on instinct. The elongated neck whipped past where his head had been, then coiled back with impossible flexibility, wrapping around his torso in a vise-like grip.
He reacted, chakra flaring. His free hand came up, a Rasengan roaring to life in his palm. But Orochimaru was decades faster, a master of a thousand battles. Before the sphere could connect, the Sannin's real head darted forward, jaws unhinging.
There was a wet, piercing stab of pain at the junction of Naruto's neck and shoulder.
"Gh—!" Naruto grunted, the Rasengan sputtering out. Agony, sharp and invasive, lanced down his spine, carrying with it a cold, foreign corruption. It was the Curse Mark, a vile seed of Orochimaru's own chakra being forcibly implanted. The world grayed at the edges.
Minutes earlier, in a different branch of the maze, the real Sasuke had frozen, her Sharingan capturing the fleeting image of… herself? Rounding a corner, she came face-to-face with her own double.
"Halt!" she commanded, kunai raised.
The double turned. Its face shifted, features melting and reforming until Naruto Uzumaki stood before her, his expression urgent.
"Sasuke! Thank god I found you!"
"Naruto? What are you doing here? And why were you disguised as me?" Her voice was sharp with suspicion and affront.
"Sakura told me you took off on a solo B-rank! This place is a trap, Sasuke! We have to leave, now! Sakura's waiting outside!"
Sasuke's eyes flashed with defiant pride. "My decisions are my own. This mission is within my capabilities. If I shy away from every shadow, I'll never surpass my limits—or certain people." Her gaze held a clear challenge. "I'm not leaving until I've completed the objective."
Naruto's clone opened his mouth to argue, then his eyes went wide. A flood of searing pain and disjointed images—a stone room, snake eyes, teeth—crashed into its shared consciousness. "The main body… he's in trouble!"
Poof! The clone vanished into a swirl of white smoke.
Sasuke stared at the empty space, her arrogance shattering. A shadow clone… His real body… The look of shock on the clone's face before it dispelled was genuine. Naruto was here, searching for her, and now he was caught in the trap meant for her.
A cold wave of responsibility, sharp and unwelcome, washed over her. Without another thought, she turned and sprinted deeper into the labyrinth, toward the source of the dread she now felt pulsing in the stale air.
Back in the stone chamber, Orochimaru recoiled, his elongated neck snapping back to his shoulders. He stared at the boy before him, whose transformation had dissolved under the strain of the Curse Mark's implantation. The blond hair, the blue eyes wide with pain… This wasn't the Uchiha heir.
"You're not Sasuke…" Orochimaru hissed, recognition and furious disappointment warring in his eyes. The whisker marks, the hair… a ghost of the Fourth Hokage. "Uzumaki Naruto."
The Sannin's placid mask vanished, replaced by icy, murderous rage. His carefully laid snare, his chosen vessel, had been swapped for the village's jinchuriki. "You dare interfere? You ruin my design?!" The Kage-level killing intent he unleashed was a physical weight, crushing the air from the room, making the very stone seem to groan.
Naruto gasped, the pain from the fresh Curse Mark a fire in his veins, competing with the suffocating pressure of Orochimaru's aura. His chakra felt sluggish, tainted. Run. Can't fight. It was the only coherent thought.
He shoved off the wall, bolting for the shattered doorway.
"Fool." Orochimaru's mouth gaped open, inhumanly wide. His tongue, long and prehensile, shot out like a pink whip, crossing the distance in an instant. It wrapped around Naruto's ankle just as he reached the threshold, yanking him off his feet. He hit the ground hard, the world spinning.
Orochimaru loomed over him, all pretence of mentorship gone, replaced by the cold glare of a scientist whose experiment had been contaminated. "A interesting substitution. The Nine-Tails' container for the Uchiha's heir. Perhaps… you will serve as adequate compensation." He raised a hand, pale fingers curling, ready to deliver a final, sealing stroke or drag him into a far darker fate.
Naruto struggled against the sticky, powerful grip on his leg, his mind racing against the pain and the overwhelming power above him. The exit was right there, yet impossibly far.