A confident and twisted smirk colored Orochimaru's cheeks before his jaw snapped open to an unnatural degree, letting a giant boa slither out from his insides through his throat and take off toward Pain and his angel. Pain covered up his body before the tackling snake sent him flying back a fair distance, Sasuke wondered if this was the extent of Orochimaru's plan of attack, it seemed sort of too straightforward to attack an opponent of such caliber with something so direct and simple.
The slithering boa opened its mouth, a soft pillow of soaked flesh erupted from its mouth and the wet membrane covering it tore, revealing an identical smirk to that of the twisted snake master that spawned this boa, to begin with. The Orochimaru that hunched over with the giant boa slithering out of his mouth began crumbling and his body turned to a hollow husk and crumbled away into something resembling a dried out sack while the new Orochimaru, reborn from the mouth of the snake he had called for, stabbed at Pain with his Kusanagi.
Pain's wrists locked around Orochimaru's, then moved on to slam at Orochimaru's wrists, the Sennin hissed in pain when he realized that a black rod ended up lodged in both of his sword-wielding hands while his Kusanagi fell down and stayed behind, while the boa on which the two duked out continued to slither and thrash about, trying to shake Pain off its nostril and devour him whole.
"I can't even call my Kusanagi anymore…" Orochimaru smirked. "What a curious technique you have there, Pain…"
"Your attempt to lure out my gravitational technique early was as toothless as you, begone now… Universal Push!" Pain declared while extending his palm with a black rod still sticking out from his sleeve. Sasuke winced when a flare of chakra lit up around Pain where in the material world his technique manifested more as a mere disturbance of the air around him, a bubble of a transparent shockwave, more than powerful enough to throw Orochimaru off his feet and send him crashing through the Konoha streets down below.
Pain hopped gently atop of the giant boa and then thrust his wrist into the snake's forehead, a massive black rod pinned the snake to the ground and forced it to disappear in a puff of smoke while the self-proclaimed God himself walked out from what the snake left behind, his Rinnegan focused on Orochimaru's lifeless body.
"Orochimaru-sama!" Kabuto called out for his master as he approached Orochimaru and pulled the black rod out of his wrists. He had counted on Orochimaru to reincarnate through his mouth immediately via his experimental immortality technique and adopt a new body, as he had done earlier, but given how he did no such thing, the four-eyed rogue realized that Pain's technique was blocking that impulse from being realized.
"What a troublesome ability…" Orochimaru wiped something vile and swampy dripping from his lip as he sat and stood up.
"So you also dabble in disrupting the opponent's chakra flow?" Kabuto stood in front of his recovering master and lit up chakra scalpels over his hands in the shapes of intense, knife-shaped flares of chakra-shade light blue.
"Do not presume to be someone who might speak to God!" the blue-haired woman in an Akatsuki cloak pointed at Kabuto. The woman raised her hand as if uttering a command for hundreds of paper tags to swarm and ride a violet gale below to reach their target. Kabuto sliced and let out a piercing crescent projectile of chakra that cut through the oncoming swarm of paper tags but no matter how many more times he repeated the combo, the papers encased him into an origami prison nevertheless.
"Fire Style: Great Dragon Fire!" a chant came from Sasuke's direction, Konan turned for the source of immense heat, surging at her in the form of large, dragon-head-shaped fireballs. A cascade of blasts resonated through the area, Konan stumbled out from the blast zone, burning up to a crisp, one paper that comprised her origami clone at a time before too many of her tags burnt up for the duplicate to retain its cohesion, leaving the woman's image just as a pile of detached, smoldering paper tags.
Sasuke turned his Sharingan to Kabuto. He very much would have preferred to step into Orochimaru's aid in confronting the Akatsuki leader rather than playing around with his second-in-command. Who knew if she even had the information he needed and it always seemed like a job better suited for Kabuto anyway. Still, given how the woman encased Kabuto in her origami prison, it couldn't have been helped, he'd have to play nanny until the medical ninja got himself out of the predicament.
It was a deceitful technique, one's first instance would have been to attack those notes, light them up with fire that has already proven to be very effective against the paper-using kunoichi, however, one glance with Sasuke's Sharingan betrayed the fact that this was exactly what Konan waited for – those tags would have ignited the moment that Sasuke touched them, using his own chakra to reveal the concealed explosive seals on each tag and light them up with the smallest of contacts. Kabuto would need to figure something out on his own…
"I'll give you one chance, where's Itachi?" Sasuke spoke to thin air, it seemed, but his instincts, assisted by the chakra-scanning abilities of the Sharingan proved to be correct – Konan soon reformed from airborne and chaotic paper tags sticking together in a more cohesive formation.
"Itachi is a man of his own. The Akatsuki is not on any sort of mission here, we are merely participating in this competition for the power this universe offers. Each member goes and does as they please at the moment." Konan replied.
"I see, so you are useless to me." Sasuke sighed. "You can leave, I don't care about you."
"Oh? You'll let us leave just like that?" Konan spoke to Sasuke in a mocking tone, as if berating the young man's assumption that he's in any kind of control here.
"Not your partner. His eyes are interesting, what are they?" Sasuke wondered.
"Are you sure you wish to know? It is important information for the Akatsuki and anyone from the outside who comes to learn that information is taken out." Konan wondered, she found the confidence of this young man almost a bit cute. She knew an energetic young man once who spoke to legendary ninja with almost the same amount of defiance to their authority and awesome power and while Sasuke looked nothing like that man, he embodied all that Yahiko wished the next generation of ninja to have.
"I asked you, I do not intend to ask again…" Sasuke drew his own Sword of Kusanagi and held it in a high hold, blade pressed to his forearm and extending past it downward.
"Struggle onward, young man, but know that you struggle against the will of God now." Konan swiped with her right hand to the side as a pair of wings comprised entirely out of paper notes spread from her back and fluttered a pair of times. Massive enough to cause considerable gusts of wind as they moved or let the woman sustain flight, comprised of so many notes imbued with chakra to be of some worry. "The Dance of Shikigami…" the woman chanted.
Orochimaru laughed out loud, straightening his flexible body in front of Pain. Pain stood and observed his opponent with an unamused expression. The snake master raised his hand up and flicked his wrist, a metallic howl of steel rushing through the air whistled up above as the Kusanagi swung through the air, Pain crossed his hands, planning to use his concealed black rods again to block the attack of Orochimaru's telekinetically controlled legendary sword.
The black rods shattered to chunks and crumbled out from Pain's sleeves in the shape of black shards while Kusanagi stabbed through Pain's forearms, spraying a decent chunk of darkened blood that acted goopier than Orochimaru was used seeing blood function. The Sennin signaled with his hands once more, pulling the Kusanagi out and letting more blood goop the ground while he commanded his sword to attack again and again. Pain leaped and danced around the sword, evading its extremely penetrative capabilities and eluding his own peril. His injured arms slumped down but not a couple of moments later appeared to move as if they had not just had a tip of a sword forced through them clean.
"Just what are you, Pain?" Orochimaru wondered aloud with a spark of excitement in his voice. He had seen enough from the Akatsuki's leader to intrigue him and far more than he had ever seen from the man.
"I am God, I am love, I am sacrifice, I am despair, I am hatred, I am death… Most importantly of all…" Pain raised his arm up, Orochimaru had seen this motion before but he couldn't understand why Pain would use his propulsion technique from so far away. "I am Pain… Universal Pull!" Pain declared as Orochimaru felt a tyrannical kick to his shins that forced even his inhuman legs to give way to Pain's power and will to pull him in.
Orochimaru opened his mouth and drove his head back with enough strength behind the notion and an awkward enough angle to outright snap the neck of any more conventional man outright. Another fleshy bud slipped out from Orochimaru's body and shot out into the air. While Orochimaru was not the slug-using Sennin, his reincarnated, body-shedding appearance each time he was reborn and still inside the fleshy membrane reminded very much of a slug and at no time was this more apparent than when the newly born body writhed on the ground for a quiet place to shed out of its membrane.
The body that Orochimaru slid out of ended up in Pain's hands and slammed to the ground with dozens of black chakra transmitting rods sticking out of its chest. This would have been Orochimaru had he not realized what was coming and didn't switch out bodies as fast as he could.
"Heh heh heh…" Orochimaru couldn't help but chuckle when confronted by the pair of silver eyes with pronounced black rings decorating their irises. "This pair of eyes is most intriguing. These abilities are a complete mystery to me, despite devoting my entire life to studying ninjutsu." The snake master licked his lips with an unnaturally long and pointy tongue for a man. "I must have them…"
"Killing God would a hollow victory." Pain observed while his heavy hands slumped to his sides. The gravitational techniques he used did appear to put up a decent strain and Orochimaru wondered how come there was such a delay behind each use of his techniques. He also appeared to be using his pushing and pulling jutsu interchangeably, as if he could not defend himself actively with just one of either of these jutsu.
"Killing? Who would do something as boring and wasteful as that?" Orochimaru pushed air through his small nose in amusement. "If I could, I would much rather feast on God's flesh and learn his secrets. It is selfish, after all, for God to keep all of his magnificence all to himself while his subjects die and suffer every day, spreading grief and torment like a plague to those that stay to succeed them."
"That is why you are a mere man, incapable of understanding God's plan. Suffering, pain, and loss are all necessary experiences. They are all vital parts of the circle, understanding suffering makes us whole, not even knowledge comes without hurt, growth cannot come without a slump, nothing is gained without losing something first. To wish to exterminate loss and pain, to live forever, is to strive to stay unchanged, static and frozen in the same state of being, learning nothing new." Pain replied, dismissing Orochimaru's ambitions and his goals at once. "It is because of that vanity that even if you stared at God's bare body laid out before you, you'd see nothing."
"A man calling himself God speaks to me about vanity…" Orochimaru hissed with a cruel smile before commanding his sword to attack Pain again. It has managed to draw blood from this God before, meaning it had a fair chance of striking a killing blow as well and from this long-distance, Orochimaru had a fair chance to attack Pain without falling victim to his gravitational techniques. If Orochimaru's theories and observations were true – Pain would be unable to use his pulling jutsu for a few moments longer.
Pain moved from the blade's path but avoiding a telekinetic sword was different from defending against a swordsman, despite a seemingly unnatural awareness of the sword's trajectory, its slashes and thrusts even when the sword was moving at the self-proclaimed God from behind him, Pain leaned under and vaulted over the sword. All that Orochimaru managed to land was a graze on Pain's shoulder, tearing some of his cloak off and spilling some more darkened goop onto the Konohagakure streets.
"Those rods… They're all over his own body, how is that possible? How can he cast techniques with those in his body? Unless… That's it…" Orochimaru's eyes widened as a mere observation of the rods sticking out through the exposed half of Pain's upper body tipped him off to the true ability of the so-called God. The Sennin's reptilian eyes began racing across the battlefield as all of a sudden he began fearing being cornered. All around him he saw and heard enemies now that the true nature of Pain's ability became clearer to him.
Pain was transmitting his own chakra through those rods. That was why Orochimaru could not use his body-shedding technique when those rods were sticking out from his hands. The unnatural biology, resistance to pain and supernatural awareness of the battlefield, almost as if Pain was truly observing the battle from heavens themselves, no… What was the pain of sticking one's own body with rods that transmit your own chakra? None. He was operating bodies of other people, channeling his own will through them, that was Pain. The real Pain.
And the question of the day burning hot in Orochimaru's mind was if the avatar of Pain in front of him was the only one there was. There was nothing to limit Pain's ability to just one body, after all, part of his fighting style involved stabbing the enemy with those rods so, at that point, Pain's chakra was coursing through at least two people, meaning that controlling multiple bodies was very much possible for him. And, if it was possible, why would he not be doing it? He must have been…
It wasn't like war and conflict did not produce enough bodies for Pain to take over. The question now remained how many bodies could Pain have used at the most and how did his control begin? What if Pain could take over Orochimaru's own body somehow, make him into one of his avatars? It truly would be a cruel stroke of irony to see one adopting other people's bodies as vessels become an avatar to Pain himself…
"What's the matter? It is not like you to hesitate to wrap your body around that which you consider prey and snuffing it out…" Pain inquired while he didn't even attempt to conceal the chakra rods sticking out of his body.
"Oh, I believe I've just received a peek into the "God's plan", and my frown is a distaste of how troublesome it is. It is my responsibility as a scientist to correct it to a more favorable direction, I am afraid." Orochimaru smirked and placed his head onto the ground, writhing with his entire body as if he meant to bow before his God but Pain knew better and so he stayed on his guard.
"Sword Snake Horde!" Orochimaru spoke with a hint of something heavy pressing against his airways, something that burst forth in the shape of a horde of reptilian slitherers, that spread out far and wide in a triangular, rising wave shape while producing swords from their own mouths.
Pain kept his eyes fixed onto Orochimaru even as the horde of snakes around him surrounded him in a wild whirlpool of reptiles and threatened to not leave anything unskewered as they prepared to crash like a tsunami wave teeming with creepy-slithery life. Pain's body took off the ground, rising in a controlled pace of flight while the sea of snakes devoured the ground underneath his feet. A shining bubble of air surrounded pain, powerful enough for the snakes coming at him to crash plant their fronts with nothing gained.
"You live because of pain, you keep swimming, floating on the surface of your pain, afraid to dive under and truly know it, that is why your pain rises and threatens to spill over to where you can no longer remain afloat. To where your pain will drown you out. To save yourself, you must know pain. I am a merciful God that is why I am willing to save you myself. Know pain, Universal Push!" Pain said as the transparent bubble of repulsive air around him began expanding rapidly, crushing and tearing every single one of the snakes apart into shreds and strings of dead flesh.
Orochimaru tried to rise on his feet fast enough to escape the expanding range of Pain's technique. A dominating pressure from up above slamming him ever stronger into the ground demanded that he stayed down, however. Soon enough everything went white, complete silence robbed Orochimaru of all the exciting things in life and even if just for a moment, the blades of the windmill weren't turning. It didn't take long for the pain, the gentle fall of rubble and settlement of all that Pain had destroyed in his attempt to teach Orochimaru pain and "save him" to return.
"Not rushing to reincarnate? It is truly ironic that one time you are born anew you do not choose to leave your old body behind and take a new one, then again, perhaps you wish to savor the pain I offered you and remain in your hurt body? If that is the case, I am glad you've chosen to learn your lesson." Pain spoke to Orochimaru's sprawled out and broken body that laid in the ground and broken street, surrounded by totaled building block of rubble. If Pain wanted to, he could have expanded his push much further than just a block, but, for one reason, or another, he chose to issue a very specific amount of pain just now.
Orochimaru's legs stood up before his entire body, up to their knees they took an upright position before his entire body swung back into action and rose after his legs, completing his return to form. It was now that Pain had overextended himself and his will of God that Orochimaru had a couple of brief moments to deal with him, then, with however many more the leader of Akatsuki still had in reserve.
A man's measly resistance against God went on…
