Deep down, a reluctant part of her admitted the truth: he had done more for her in these few days than anyone in her life ever had.
The Hyūga Main Branch had only ever chained her.
Kumo had only deceived her. But him?
Aside from captivity and his infuriating teasing, he had done nothing cruel.
No beatings, no torture, no commands laced with malice.
He treated her like a house pet, yes, but with a strange, mocking fondness that didn't bruise as much as it should have.
And he had risked something priceless to save her.
'Why? Why him of all people…?'
The thought made her uneasy, but also… less resistant. Less hateful. She hated herself for it, but the feeling stuck.
Her lips stayed curved in that soft smile as she straightened from the bow. "I'll remember this debt," she said aloud, steady.
But inside, her thoughts tangled like vines.
'He really might be the one person I can't escape from… not because of these seals… but because somewhere inside, I've already started to rely on him.'
Kimimaro let a faint smirk play at his lips.
"Strange, isn't it? You spat hatred at me from the start inside your little head, yet in the end, the one you despised most is the one who dragged you back from the edge. I suppose that makes me your savior. And the person you'll need from now on… If you still want to live long enough to take your revenge."
Emi's face stiffened, then betrayed her with the faintest flush across her cheeks.
"Tch…" She looked away, the faintest twitch at her lips. "Don't flatter yourself. You just happened to be standing in the right place at the right time."
But then her voice shook, sharper, carried by something deeper than embarrassment.
"The Main Branch… I'll never forgive them. Not for this. Not for any of it."
Her nails bit into her palms.
The words came like a vow, heavy with venom.
Kimimaro studied her in silence for a moment, then thought coldly to himself.
Hatred was good.
It meant she was still alive inside.
Anyone else might have shattered, yet she only emerged with this monstrous hate.
A testament to her will.
Too idealistic, too naive, yes.
But not incapable. Not stupid.
Kimimaro's eyes lingered on her, faint amusement tugging at his lips.
"So it only took a few honeyed words and a bit of shiny trickery to reel you in? For someone who calls herself ambitious, you fell for the oldest bait there is."
Emi flushed, fingers tangling restlessly in the blanket. "They weren't just words. They were persistent, convincing… they even hinted at precise tools that could free me. How was I supposed to know it was all a lie?"
She bit her lip, then lifted her chin slightly. "And tell me this, how would you feel if, first thing every morning, after waking up, you had to constantly bow, kneel, and follow other humiliating rituals just to exist? To be able to breathe under someone else's rules?"
She pushed a strand of hair back, trying to steady her voice. "If your worth was measured by only how well you pleased a few wastes every day? How many times would you swallow your pride before you tried to claw your way out and break that cage?"
Kimimaro's smirk didn't fade, but the edge of it softened slightly, and he even nodded honestly, as if acknowledging her point without saying it aloud.
Emi's hands clenched tighter. "I wasn't wrong to want a way out. I was only too eager, too ambitious, and too trusting. But even if it meant pain, even if it meant death, I'd rather chase a spark of hope than rot as one more shadow in a line of bowing heads. A single spark of light, even if it meant the risk of burning."
She looked at him then, defiant and raw. "So yes, I tried to be free. I paid the price. And I'll pay even more now to finish the job."
Kimimaro let her words hang in the air, then gave a low hum. "You talk as if you lost everything. But in a way, you already clawed free. As long as you keep those eyes closed, the Main Branch can't tug your strings anymore. And soon," his tone was calm, almost casual, "I'll craft a seal that lets you open them without risk. No more leash, no more puppet."
Her heart skipped at that, but the relief was immediately undercut when his smirk sharpened again. "Of course, don't mistake it for freedom. You just traded one cage for another. This one happens to be mine."
Emi stiffened, color rising in her cheeks.
She wanted to spit something back, to say she'd never call him freedom, but the memory of that pain still burned under her skin, the helpless screaming.
Compared to that, his words cut less sharply.
So she forced a small, almost playful scoff, hiding the twist in her stomach. "Some trade. From a gilded prison to a bone-and-blood cult. You're a generous captor, aren't you?"
Kimimaro tilted his head, unbothered, the faint smile still carved on his face.
Inside, Emi bit down hard on her thoughts.
'Mocking me, binding me, and somehow still the only one who saved me. Damn him… If I weren't trapped already, I'd strangle that look off his face.'
However, Kimimaro's tone soon shifted, quieter now, almost coaxing.
"I won't suppress you anymore, seeing how pitiful you are. You'll need my seals anyway if you want to keep those eyes from frying you alive. But listen well… one day, maybe you won't need them at all. One day, you might break free of the Hyūga's cage completely and hence even from mine at that time too."
His eyes lingered on her, sharp but not unkind. "Until then, you'll work. My assistant, for years if necessary. We'll uncover what lies in the Byakugan, its secrets, its strengths, together. And until that day, you'll obey me and help with other matters, too. A fair trade between us, yes?"
For a moment, Emi just stared at him, stunned.
The words should have felt like another shackle, yet they didn't.
Instead, something in her chest twisted strangely.
She thought of all those nights imagining escape, imagining some light outside the suffocating curse… and now, against all odds, this bone-demon boy was the only one who had cracked the lock, even a little.
Her lips parted before she realized it.
"So… you're saying… you'll be the one to give me that chance?"
Kimimaro didn't answer directly.
His gaze softened, his sharp features taking on a calm, almost noble cast in her eyes.
Her heart thumped, harder than it should have. She cursed herself silently.
'Why… why does he look like that now? Damn him, I should hate this…'
A blush crept into her cheeks, and she dropped her eyes quickly, trying to hide it. "…Fine," she muttered, fingers fiddling nervously. "I'll obey. I'll… help. If that's the price to really break free one day."
Her voice firmed at the end, but inside she couldn't deny it - the thought of him as that "light" she'd always longed for had taken root, no matter how much she wanted to deny it.
Kimimaro's gaze lingered on her a moment longer, unblinking.
Then he spoke, voice flat as carved stone. "Not just obey. Go even further than me. For your own sake, for the self you want to become. That's the only way forward."
His eyes narrowed slightly, measuring. "You might be safe from distance now… but I'm not convinced about close range. If several Main Branch members gather near you all at once, for example, they might still tighten your veins into shackles again, and all of my seals would become useless if you can't fight them off on time, or if we are not around. And you know as well as I do, they won't leave this historic 'precedent', more like a negative 'stain' for them, unresolved. The Main Branch doesn't tolerate such cracks in their bloodline and tradition."
The weight of it hung between them, sharp and suffocating.
"That's why you're still free," he continued calmly, as if discussing the weather.
"Who knows what the future holds? That's why you need to work hard."
Emi raised her head, eyes searching his.
She understood exactly what he was implying, and yet she let out a breath that was half laugh, half sigh. "Work hard, huh? You make it sound like I've been slacking all this time."
Kimimaro's eyes stayed on her, unreadable.
Her lips curved, faint and cheeky despite the heaviness of the warning. "Fine. I'll work hard. But if I collapse from all this training, I expect you to carry me around like the good captor you are."
Kimimaro didn't so much as twitch, but the corner of his mouth curved in the barest flicker of a smile. "If you collapse, I'll bury you where you fall. Saves time."
Emi's smile wavered, then returned sharper. "You're terrible. No wonder I'm starting to get used to you."
Her words were light, but her eyes said something else entirely: a reluctant acceptance, and a quiet resolve not to be left behind.
Soon their talk wandered through many other topics, light and heavy both, until Kimimaro finally left her alone to rest.
On the way back down the dim corridors, his mind stayed on her.
She was already nearly conquered, he realized.
The only thing left was time, the slow cementing of habit and reliance, and then she would be bound to him as surely as her cursed seal had bound her to the Hyūga.
Forever inseparable in this life.
And the irony was that he had only just begun to understand her full worth.
She had told him, almost offhandedly, about her childhood, how one day she'd realized her dojutsu was strangely limited, as though some invisible wall capped her potential.
But instead of giving up, curiosity had driven her deeper.
Patient, scientific observation of her own seal, trying to peer into it from within, had refined her Byakugan into a strange, almost 'microscopic' lens.
For Kimimaro, it was like hearing destiny itself.
That gift was the perfect fit for the kind of research he intended to pursue.
And there was more.
She wasn't just a side-branch girl with a caged eye.
She had trained in the Hyūga medical institute from a young age and excelled at Yang Release.
So much so that, at twelve, she had already secretly pioneered a technique her clan had long dismissed as impossible: a fusion of medical healing chakra and Gentle Fist.
She could heal herself mid-battle, knitting tissue while fighting.
Rudimentary, incomplete, but revolutionary.
Kimimaro had listened without blinking, but inside he had laughed in satisfaction.
At twelve years old, with her bloodline suppressed and clan inheritance incomplete, she was already a solid mid-chūnin talent.
Outwardly, she looked only like a low one, but her actual growth, will, and insight far surpassed what her cursed fate allowed.
She couldn't yet compare to Saya or Reika, but in raw potential?
One of the brightest prodigies in Hyūga side-branch history. Possibly the brightest.
Kimimaro smirked faintly to himself in the shadows of the hall.
He had struck gold, gold bound in chains, delivered straight into his hands.
And he was the only one willing to dig it free.
As for the Hyūga, Kimimaro was only now beginning to realize how deep their mysteries ran.
The fragments of strange energy they had sealed away during Emi's ordeal were still there, pulsing faintly in the storage seals.
Neither he nor Ashina could identify its full nature, but one thing was certain to both of them: it was not ordinary chakra.
It was ethereal, alien, and powerful enough to travel across nations, enough to fry a girl's brain from half a continent away.
No single living known shinobi could project chakra like that.
Which meant only one possibility: the Hyūga had some kind of hidden power source, a vessel or reservoir, that they secretly tapped into.
A well of energy, buried away, fueling their cursed system, amongst some other things perhaps.
Possibly even powered through it indirectly in an even crazier assumption.
Kimimaro's lips curved faintly as the thought settled.
In his past life, the fans of Naruto had argued endlessly about the Hyūga clan.
Some dismissed them as wasted potential, some treated them as tragic footnotes to the Uchiha.
But here, faced with this power, Kimimaro felt that all those takes were upside down.
The Hyūga weren't weak at all.
They were hiding something enormous, and masking it behind obedience and restraint.
For now, he didn't know what he would do with the energy he had captured. But he already began planning.
Perhaps he could bait more of it out in the future, drawing it slowly, testing how much the Hyūga would give before they noticed.
And one day, if the chance came, he would go further, find this hidden vessel itself, and rob it clean for himself.
Another thought crept in, heavier and stranger.
The way this "caged bird energy" worked, vast range, independent source, almost alive in itself, reminded him of something else.
The Giant Tenseigan on the moon, the great eye of Toneri's clan. Its scale, its reach, its power… too many similarities to ignore.
"Hyūga clan," Kimimaro thought, his gaze sharpening,
"No matter what you hide, I won't be intimidated. From the start, my goal was far higher than you could ever imagine. Even if your roots stretch to the moon itself, I'll carve past them."
In fact, the entire last few days, Kimimaro had lived with that edge in his veins, always assuming Konoha might come marching down on them.
Sensory clones were spread like nets around the hideout, in the greatest numbers possible, silent watchers hidden under stone and earth.
Escape paths were marked by sea and by land.
Every hour, every breath, calculated.
But after the Hyūga Main Branch tried their little stunt from afar and nothing followed, he started putting the pieces together.
Either their hidden vessel couldn't pinpoint him with accuracy… or more amusing, they couldn't use it without exposing themselves.
"Think about it," he muttered to Ashina, once seated alone in the damp ritual hall, bone blade resting across his knees.
"How would they even relay something like this to the Hokage? 'By the way, we've had a secret chakra telescope hidden in a vault for generations, and we used it to spy across half the continent.' That's not a report, that's a confession and an invitation for it to be taken."
Ashina's chuckle had been dry, almost approving.
Kimimaro smirked at the thought. "Destroying a cursed seal remotely, I'll give them that. You can excuse that as some in-clan safeguard, an old design. But halfway pinpointing a shinobi on the globe? That's not something any great village could do. If they could, then why not track every single squad in real time? Why not map the entire world?"
No. They hid their hand, always.
And in hiding, they had tied themselves down.
That left the beauty of misdirection.
Let them assume the obvious.
Let Konoha whisper, 'Kumo must have been behind this, enticing another Hyūga.'
And let Kumo spit back, 'Konoha set us up, our elite jōnin fell into their trap.'
It was perfect.
They would gnash their teeth at each other, all while ignoring the one pulling the strings in the shadows.
Kimimaro's smile was faint, sharp, and almost mocking.
"The great villages, blind and deaf in their arrogance. Blame each other, bury the truth, and call it the greater good. All while I build the greatest cult in existence, under their noses."