Kimimaro kept staring at the empty space where Orochimaru had long disappeared, the silence still folding around him like dust settling after an earthquake.
Behind him, the four girls were already moving through the wreckage on his earlier orders, picking through the ruins for anything worth salvaging.
At least the main laboratory had survived intact.
Buried far beneath the earth, reinforced by heavy structure and wrapped in layers of their strongest, longest-inscribed fūinjutsu, it hadn't taken so much as a scratch.
Everything above it had been ripped to pieces, but the seals held, the chamber standing firm as if untouched by the chaos that devoured the base.
Kimimaro had sent him a sensory warning the moment the battle truly broke beyond control, and the man, just a jōnin, a small fish in a sea of sharks, followed their pre-planned protocol without hesitation, slipping into the protected laboratory and sealing himself inside.
That was why Akane had been able to fight without a single hesitation.
She knew exactly what was keeping her father alive.
And the fact that Kimimaro had safeguarded her father with the same priority he reserved for his most precious research… now that everything had finally settled, it stirred something warm and soft in Akane's chest again.
Meanwhile, Kimimaro's own thoughts drifted back through the fight, replaying every exchange from beginning to end.
And somewhere in that looping reconstruction, the answer surfaced.
The reason why he had underestimated Orochimaru this entire time.
Not consciously. Subconsciously.
And now he understood why.
His baseline image of Orochimaru's strength came almost entirely from Part 1.
And what had been the common denominator in every one of those appearances?
A dying vessel.
A body rotting from the inside out, nearing its three-year expiration limit.
A host already breaking apart under the strain of containing him.
Additionally, his arms were spiritually sealed in later appearances.
That wasn't just the loss of hand signs; it was also the loss of a significant portion of his chakra that should have come from the arm's essence.
His chakra dysfunctional, his reactions dulled, his physical form collapsing.
Kimimaro had clearly accounted for this before, but clearly not enough.
Because seeing Orochimaru fight now, in a fresh vessel at the very start of his three-year cycle, with no restrictions, no spiritual damage, and no failing body… it felt like an entirely different tier.
A reminder that no past-life meta-knowledge could fully cover the intimate mechanics of that reincarnation jutsu.
He let himself begrudge the oversight, just a little.
'So this is what a healthy Orochimaru looks like…'
If this man fought Jiraiya or even an optimal, 'awakened' Tsunade in this state?
He would maul them.
As for old Hiruzen?
Kimimaro felt it now with clarity—Orochimaru would smoke him.
After all, judging from what he'd just seen, Orochimaru had been at least halfway, if not more, toward even the "Peak Kage" tier in Kimimaro's mental model.
So, definitely, that laughable scene where he let his arms get sealed by a mid Hieruzen was less a defeat and more a display of madness.
'What a lunatic,' Kimimaro thought, finally understanding the full insanity behind Orochimaru invading Konoha while already nearly collapsing.
The man had gambled on a rotting vessel.
He was lucky Jiraiya wasn't back a few minutes earlier.
Lucky for Konoha, Hiruzen had finally abandoned his usual sanctimonious restraint and, for once, acted like a real leader willing to sacrifice himself.
He hadn't done it during the Nine-Tails attack. Back then, he pushed the burden onto Minato, the young prodigy whose future shone ten times brighter than his own, letting youth bleed in the old man's place.
But this time… maybe because he could already feel his one foot truly hanging over the grave, he wanted to stage one last shining, saintly moment, something noble-looking, righteous, and neatly packaged to prop up his legacy during his afterlife, exactly the kind of image he always loved polishing.
It was probably the only reason he allowed himself to stay "trapped" inside that laughable barrier the Sound Four fodded held up, instead of ordering his entire ANBU cadre to tear it open, summoning every barrier specialist in the village… or calling Gai, who was standing right there, the walking natural disaster in human form who would've shattered that cage like it was damp paper.
Therefore, Orochimaru was also lucky that Gai was never ordered to open the Inner Gates… especially the Eight Gate of Death.
Kimimaro highly doubted Gai had "learned" it only during the timeskip after all.
Far more likely, he already had it back then, and it simply wasn't allowed to be unleashed because Hiruzen insisted on choreographing his own grand farewell performance, drowning the moment in self-indulgent trees, leaves, branches, and whatever cheap symbolism he usually loved dressing his propaganda with.
A sensei sacrificing himself to "atone" for his rebellious disciple. What a perfectly scripted little tragedy. Orochimaru may have walked right into his performance.
And still, even in that suicidal state and that whirlwind of reckless madness, Orochimaru managed to slither out alive.
His invasion collapsed, yes, but he still technically killed the acting Hokage and carved a deep wound into the village.
The whole "Konoha Crush" ordeal revealed two things simultaneously:
Orochimaru's arrogance was his defining flaw.
And Konoha… had been far weaker in his eyes than the village ever dared to imagine.
To Kimimaro, it now felt almost surreal.
As if Orochimaru had marched into Konoha in his weakest possible state purely to make a point.
Revenge?
Fine. But then why not strike even earlier, if he was so eager, while he was still near his peak?
Sasuke?
Why assume the boy could only be reached inside the village, and not on any of his constant external missions?
No… it wasn't strategy.
It was arrogance.
A cold, festering contempt for Konoha that pushed someone as brilliant as Orochimaru into a chain of self-sabotaging choices, a catastrophe he'd practically engineered for himself.
And the fact he'd managed to slither out alive afterward was nothing short of miraculous.
Kimimaro felt, at last, that he understood the strange logic behind Orochimaru's decisions before the Konoha Crush.
The man must have genuinely believed he'd made the "necessary preparations" simply by securing a quiet consensus with Danzō beforehand, ensuring that neither he nor Root would interfere or turn against him.
In Orochimaru's mind, that alone might have felt like enough of a safeguard.
But it wasn't. Not even close.
It was only a single step in the 'right' direction. A sensible one, yes, but nowhere near the full depth required for something as audacious as toppling Konoha.
Because how could a village like Konoha ever truly be that weak as it seemed?
How could he not account for someone like Gai, a monster who had grown entirely organically inside that village, completely outside his awareness, possibly appearing at all?
How could he not remember that Konoha's "low point" after the Third War was the anomaly, not the norm?
That, historically, something the later parts of the series only reaffirmed, in the end, Konoha had always produced monsters of absurd caliber, each generation somehow eclipsing the last?
That it was, by every practical measure, the most consistently dominant shinobi village on the continent?
Orochimaru had looked at a momentary weakness and mistaken it for a permanent truth.
That was the error Kimimaro saw now.
Arrogance wearing the mask of logic.
Kimimaro could now see everything with painful clarity.
Orochimaru "convincing" Danzō to stay out of the invasion… that hadn't been some masterclass in manipulation either.
There was barely anything to convince.
To a man like Danzō, it must have looked like a divine blessing.
Orochimaru storms Konoha.
Hiruzen dies.
And who becomes the most "natural" successor?
Danzō, of course.
The throne he loved more than his own mother.
The dream that kept him breathing.
The chair he worshipped like a shrine.
After all, he likely knew that Jiraiya would refuse the hat for his usual, mysterious, self-indulgent reasons.
He knew Tsunade was half-deranged by trauma, wandering aimlessly, drowning her sanity in bottles and gambling debts, barely maintaining even a symbolic tie to the village, and mostly when she needed money.
The only reason she wasn't branded an S-rank missing-nin for de facto abandoning the village and living the way she did, nor forced into hiding, was because Konoha made an exception.
They even wiped her debts, bankrolled her wandering vices through the official budget, and pretended not to notice.
Her name still sold well, her lineage carried weight, she was the Third's prized disciple, and her old achievements still shone brightly enough that the village would bend over backwards rather than call her what she technically was.
Someone like her would never have accepted that job. Not even then.
In fact, the higher-ups were probably just relieved she wasn't causing them even more trouble and embarrassment everywhere.
So in Orochimaru's mind, the puzzle pieces must have felt perfectly aligned.
He gets his revenge.
He gets Sasuke.
Danzō gets his Hokage fantasy.
Konoha falls into the hands of its most manipulable, morally rotted candidate.
It gets automatically weaker, in the aftermath, and easier for him to bend to his will, letting him tap into the village's official channels, resources, and techniques through Danzō as if they were extensions of his own hand.
A seamless chain of logic.
Except reality… was not logical.
And even Danzō, in all his scheming paranoia, could never have predicted what came next.
The other two decrepit fossil-councilors, Homura and Koharu, pushed Jiraiya first as expected.
Rejected. Obvious.
Then Tsunade, purely as a ceremonial gesture.
And then the universe decided to collapse in on itself.
The Nine-Tails' loudest, least mentally put-together child managed—through some diabolical mutation of willpower, stupidity, and vocal cords—to "talk-no-jutsu" Tsunade into resolving decades of PTSD, nihilism, alcoholism, self-hatred, and trauma… in one afternoon.
One adolescent tantrum of a speech.
From a boy whose IQ was often indistinguishable from ambient room temperature.
Kimimaro felt his brain genuinely ache remembering it.
Even with all his cynicism, he could not comprehend how that scene existed in the same world he now occupied.
So yes.
Danzō was utterly annihilated.
His ascension evaporated on the spot.
Kimimaro could almost picture the man quietly dropping to his knees somewhere in the shadows, thanking Orochimaru in advance… before being blindsided by fate's most idiotic plot twist imaginable.
And the more Kimimaro replayed that chain of events, the more he realized just how catastrophically Orochimaru had misread the board back then.
Even he, standing here now, felt his intelligence decline slightly just thinking about it.
However, as Kimimaro's thoughts looped through that 'Konoha Crush' ordeal again, a quiet seriousness settled over him.
Because this time… Orochimaru would not walk into Konoha in that same half-rotted state as in canon.
This time, he would have real means to back that dazzling arrogance of his.
And the irony was almost funny.
Those means would come from Kimimaro himself.
The two things he planned to trade away were perfect fuel for strengthening a vessel, stabilizing it, and letting Orochimaru push even above his previous theoretical peak when the time for the Konoha Crush arrived.
By how much?
That depended on Orochimaru's own means and fate.
Kimimaro knew the difference between theory and application better than anyone.
Writing foundational insight was one thing.
Turning it into functional practice for Orochimaru's messy, complex, soul-hopping biology was entirely another.
He was giving him materials… not a manual.
But with Orochimaru's brain, that distinction barely mattered.
It was almost impossible to imagine him appearing in the same degraded form again two years from now.
He would be stronger.
Considerably so.
Perfect.
Because Kimimaro had every intention of "crushing" Konoha as well at that exact time.
Not out of boredom.
Not because he harbored a true disdain of sorts for the so-called "main cast".
But simply because Konoha had the assets he wanted.
And if Orochimaru was going to punch a hole in the village anyway, with his newly enhanced vessel, Kimimaro himself had empowered, then the opportunity was too perfect to ignore.
Konoha would be ripe.
Split open.
Bleeding resources.
And at the top of that list…
A grove of Byakugan ripe for picking.
Main Branch skulls, unguarded by any cursed seal, all of them underestimated by the world because no one else understood how valuable they could be.
Kimimaro did.
He already had immediate applications of them in his mind.
And even more distant plans, he barely allowed himself to picture yet.
At this rate, it wasn't even unreasonable to imagine a scenario where he and Orochimaru ended up dismantling Konoha's old leadership entirely, maybe even dividing the village between them as territory won in war.
Especially if his Blessed continued progressing as he projected they would.
After all, he didn't factor only himself ever at this point.
Two years from now… they would be monsters of their own.
And monsters reshape the map.
However, after today, Kimimaro no longer underestimated anything tied to canon.
Especially not Konoha, and especially not its endless parade of flashy "chosen ones," old and young, big and small.
That village was a kind of gravitational hotspot in this world, a birthplace and breeding ground for the so-called "main characters", a place where fate seemed to twist itself into knots for dramatic effect.
And where fate gathered, aberrations followed.
Who knew what variables could still crawl out of that village at the worst possible moment, ready to slap both him and Orochimaru if he wasn't careful.
The thought made him shudder once.
A ridiculous idea surfaced… then refused to leave.
'What if the Sage of Six Paths himself showed up to meddle?'
Absurd.
But the longer he considered it, the less absurd it became.
After all, this was the real world.
Not a fictional universe running on plot convenience.
All those stupid inconsistencies in his past life's version of the story had to come from somewhere.
Something real had to be underneath them.
And the biggest inconsistencies of all… all of them orbited around Hagoromo Ōtsutsuki.
If the world "patched" those inconsistencies in the most natural way, then the Sage of Six Paths wouldn't be some benevolent ghost giving moral sermons to teenagers.
He'd be something far more intrusive.
A lingering ancient force with his own unknown agendas.
A suspicious, overreaching demigod, closer to a cosmic version of Hiruzen with a superiority complex than any kindly grandfather figure, too.
Maybe even a presence that overshadowed Black Zetsu in manipulation and long-term interference.
The idea wasn't comforting.
But it was honest.
And Kimimaro preferred the painful truth to the pleasant lie every single time.
Not to mention… Akatsuki still looming in the background, a known kind of storm on the horizon, and one that overall still remained well above his current reach.
He wasn't foolish enough to underestimate anyone, not for even a heartbeat.