Orochimaru chuckled as his arm moved to his lower eyelid and touched it with his fingernail. The light pinch of his eye, combined with the violent and sudden outburst of the Sannin's Killing Intent filled the stage. Even Sasuke and Kabuto tapped their heels against the ground as the influx of Killing Intent forced even them to stay rooted to the ground as a giant snake burst forth from underground and enveloped the trio.
"For someone to be able to paralyze even me with just their Killing Intent. This can only be the power of a former Akatsuki member and the rival of old master…" Konan observed in respectful fright of Orochimaru's abilities as while she did not undergo any of the more serious aftereffects of such a nauseating Killing Intent, it did restrain her in place from the irrational fear that resistance against such a lethal foe was futile and would only result in a quicker end for her.
"No." Pain decreed. "Killing Intent such as this one requires more than just mere power, it is a fruit of fruitful sadism or, in Orochimaru's case, curiosity unbridled by any sense of morality."
"Don't tell me, Pain that even the Deva Path is…" Konan looked to Pain with a horrified expression.
"Indeed…" the body Pain used as his main one before closed his eyes in acceptance of the impending doom in the shape of a slithering gigantic boa that headed straight for him with its fangs reared out. While fangs weren't the preferred method of execution for this particular reptilian, they certainly possessed the capacity to impale a normal-sized person such as the Deva Path with them.
Another, mechanical body of Pain appeared in front of the Deva Path and threw its arms out, its black cloak littered with red clouds floated away as the Asura Path exposed two more pairs of arms alongside the first one, arms that laid hidden underneath the cloak and added further to thickness and size of the mechanical body until exposed to restrain and wrestle the titanic boa down to the ground before it could hurt the already damaged Deva Path.
"Luckily for us, Preta Path and Asura Path have both avoided the effects of the Killing Intent by being outside its range." Deva Path declared while staring boldly at the exposed back of its puppet peer.
"Hold on…" Konan's face turned more sour after she noticed something shifting inside the mouth of the snake, a fleshy lump that revealed itself to be Orochimaru's body double, slithering from inside at Asura Path, intending to rush past it and get right to Deva Path and Konan, behind the six-armed mechanical marvel, while they were still paralyzed.
Orochimaru's clasping hand stopped just inches away from Deva Path's exalted Rinnegan, Deva Path observed the would-be eye thief with indifference while Orochimaru's serpentine, modified body stopped in place and struggled against the firm hold of two arms of Asura Path that had twisted behind and locked around the elongated waste of the snake master.
Orochimaru's jaw snapped open, unnaturally wide, unveiling a moist mass inside his own throat, which concealed a handful of silver hair. While Deva Path prepared for another body shedding of Orochimaru to take place, the silver-haired ball of wet clothes and saliva burst forth with chakra-colored flares on each hand and attacked Deva Path aiming for its joints. It wasn't Orochimaru but Kabuto instead.
A wet tendril of Pain's own creation locked around Deva Path and pulled him backward, away from Kabuto's intended harm and into the jaws of a demonic-looking statue depicting a humanoid demon's head baring sharp lines of teeth and a kingly helmet – an authoritative figure with the kanji of "King" on its forehead to cement the royal impression further. Surrounding this King of Hell blazed black flames that walled it off from a simple physical assault.
The jaws of this King of Hell snapped shut, swallowing Deva Path whole in one gulp. Kabuto straightened his body out and wiped a handful of snake saliva off of his eyes. The geeky looking apprentice took a couple of bounds backward and picked a pair of glasses off the ground, it must have been now that the breeze set in and made Kabuto feel a bit chilly without his top on. It was a choice he had made to make it easier to attack the enemy from inside the throat of his master.
"Well, well… What a waste, I don't think this fake-out will work twice. It would have been neat to take out the main body while it was still paralyzed in fear." Kabuto lamented in his trademarked fake tone.
"No matter…" Orochimaru's jaw shot back into place. The Sennin snapped it around to both sides to lock it in, it was not ideal for his newly shed body to go through strain as extreme as spitting up a fully grown man from inside right from the get-go but the opportunity was too grand to resist. "At least we got him to reveal another body… How many more there are, I wonder…" the ever-curious Sennin chuckled to himself.
"You think Deva Path is Pain's most important body?" Konan smirked in defiance of her own compromised situation. "Then why do you think it is the body he uses for combat as his default one?"
"The woman makes a fair point!" Sasuke's voice pierced the heavens while a black lightning bolt crackling in his hand followed not too long after, parting the clouds. The body of the young man had undergone a drastic transformation having become pale and dead-like while his eyes turned black in all but the iris that displayed his Sharingan while the Uchiha's hair became stale blue.
The mighty Flapping Chidori erupted into a violent lightning storm upon impact with the King of Hell and decimated the battlefield. It wasn't until the rampant violence had settled down some that Sasuke noticed his hand stuck right onto the core of the rounder of the Pain's paths, the one that had absorbed his techniques previously and done so now, greatly reducing the rampant might of his Flapping Chidori variant.
"Careful, Uchiha, do not outdo your welcome." The Preta Path muttered in a sharp and irritating, slightly squealy tone of voice. Following his trace in the clouds, plummeting downward, another one of Pain's paths emerged and drove its black rod down into the ground where Sasuke was meant to be with his right arm entrapped within Preta Path's grasp.
The descended Human Path found its black rod stuck to the ground as the Sharingan user had both the foresight, the speed and, while in the second stage of his Curse Seal of Heaven, the strength to power out of the entrapment and evade the deadly dive from above. Within a mere blink, Sasuke's body flickered by Orochimaru's side.
"I thought I told you to leave this to me until I got my answers…" Sasuke's darkened lips moved subtly. He let his finger-shaped wings stretch out while the membrane covering the in-between parts and enabling flight glistened in the emerging moonlight. It was because of his unorthodox transformation that Sasuke was capable of such sudden and efficient airborne assault.
"Excuse me, Sasuke-kun… I just thought that you'd be indisposed while my Killing Intent was in effect so I took initiative." Orochimaru expressed his glee at the arrogant caprice of his protégé.
"Oh well, it's not like you destroyed this protective statue and Pain's body either…" Kabuto shrugged.
"It's not just protective," Sasuke claimed. "I can see great traces of chakra pooling inside it, an amount that would be sufficient for either empowering it, which would be pointless in its current injured state, or healing it."
"I see… So this unsightly summoner of the statue is the one the woman meant as the most valued of Pain's bodies, the one capable of fixing the broken toys…" Orochimaru chuckled to himself.
"Now, now, Orochimaru. You are in the presence of just five of Six Paths of Pain and you are already at awe of God's power?" Naraka Path wondered.
"Of course there would be Six Paths…" Kabuto chortled while holding his glasses from slipping off of his face. "We should have gotten the clue sooner, ever since we realized they were called Paths, honestly…"
"Hmm?" Sasuke turned to Kabuto, having missed the hint that both Kabuto and Orochimaru appeared to be aware of.
"You wouldn't get it…" Kabuto smirked at Sasuke. "It's a secret Orochimaru-sama hasn't shared with you yet, it seems."
"It's not that I am at awe at the power of your Paths, Pain, it's more that I am excited to learn about the abilities I shall be inheriting when I take those eyes from you…" the serpentine man licked his lips with his unreasonably long tongue. "This battle spares me a lengthy process of experimentation, although, I must admit, trial and error has its own fun too…"
Konan's body dissolved into a shower of paper tags and scattered across the stage, rising back up in the form of a wide-encompassing twister. Effectively the woman had walled off most of the battlefield as well as potential escape of the opposition. Now that all of Pain's Paths had entered the fray, it was not at all detrimental to wall the place off as long as Konan herself remained in complete control of the battlefield conditions, given that she controlled these papers as long as her Dance of the Shikigami was still active.
"So, the woman has already snapped herself out of the paralysis of my Killing Intent, even with all the power-ups that this universe has so graciously provided… Not bad…" Orochimaru noted.
"She's not to be underestimated as a mere lackey, she is, after all, a member of the Akatsuki and she's more than a diversity hire, it seems," Kabuto added onto the point he had already made previously.
"Regardless, our battle plan remains the same, Kabuto. Land that on either of the Paths and we win." Orochimaru looked at his right-hand man with a confident gleam of his reptilian eyes.
Sasuke drew his sword while forming another Flapping Chidori in his free hand, the black jolts of Lightning Release chakra trickled up his body from his left hand and then back down again, channeling through the blade with sufficient intensity to drown the sword out completely and leave Sasuke with a pair of elongated Chidori Spears in each hand.
"If there will be any Paths left after I am done with them…" he declared proudly before flickering away.
Slashes of obsidian rend through reality itself, slicing up the entire space inside Konan's whirlwind of origami as well as the tornado itself and canceling it out, effectively. However, Sasuke's impressive streak of rampage with his twin Flapping Chidori Spears stopped prematurely, just before it could injure any of the Paths of Pain when the long-haired Path of Pain intercepted Sasuke with a firm lock around the Uchiha's wrist and a knee to the chest as well as another knee to the other wrist of Sasuke, an impressive taijutsu move that blocked the attack entirely as it was too fast, too widespread to be contained and absorbed by just the Preta Path.
"Don't you think you're feeding the enemy too much of your wicked chakra, Sasuke-kun?" Kabuto smiled at Sasuke in a deceitful manner which his eyes did not reciprocate with. "Given that the enemy is managing six bodies with a single pool of chakra, exhausting him would have been a viable strategy before…"
Orochimaru chuckled to himself. Kabuto looked at the Sennin in confusion before the Preta Path began expanding and his flesh became bubbled with blowing out lumps. It just looked like a fitting end for such a slothful-looking Path when Orochimaru's body burst forth from within of the Preta Path while the other lumps of flesh burst into showers of white snakes that slithered and withered away after leaving their host body. The clone of Orochimaru that appeared from inside Preta Path soon turned into a den of snakes and fell apart.
"I see, so you let your ninjutsu get absorbed on purpose to transfer some of Orochimaru-sama's Curse Seal chakra within the Preta Path, something that Orochimaru-sama could then exploit to destroy the body," Kabuto noted with a flick of his glasses, an attempt to cover up the bitterness in his eyes that he was not able to pick up on this move earlier when both Orochimaru and Sasuke were in sync with each other on this one.
Kabuto's hands flared up with chakra. "Well then, I suppose I'll play my part in this as well…" he shrugged before darting off into the fray against the three active Paths of Pain all at once. The Human Path which proved to be exceptionally skilled at ninjutsu earlier, enough so to contend with Sasuke's own mastery of close-range combat, even when enhanced by his Sharingan and the Curse Seal of Heaven, moved in to oppose Orochimaru's confidant.
The two clashed hands against one another, the Asura Path moved in from the side but, with a clap of his hands, Kabuto forced a pair of mud-covered corpses to burst from underground and move into the way of the charging mechanical marvel with kunai in their hands. While the Asura Path smashed the emerging corpses to pieces and disposed of them sooner than they adopted Kabuto's form through the completion of Kabuto's jutsu, the dead body distraction served Kabuto as sufficient diversion to connect a strike to the Human Path.
It came at the price of an equal exchange, the Human Path grabbed hold of Kabuto's collar and struck him once while Kabuto slammed his palm, still overflowing with chakra at the chest of the Human Path. Both combatants stopped moving for a moment but then resumed their activity, Kabuto slammed his flaring with chakra palm against the joints of the Human Path all the while the long-haired Path of Pain reached out to some space over Kabuto's head but his hand froze before he could complete what it had intended to.
"Heh, I've done it, Orochimaru-sama…" Kabuto declared. "His nervous system is in fritz, as you've predicted, messing with the nervous transmissions in one body messes with all of them…"
"I… Cannot move…" the Human Path muttered. "What is this method of paralysis now?"
"This is quite different from what Orochimaru-sama did before." Kabuto pulled up his glasses with a smug expression on his face. "You're also not quite right – you can move, you just don't know how to yet. Until I release your body from this technique, the nerve signals in your body are in a fritz and the commands you give to your body for movement are all mixed up… Have fun figuring out which part moves what before we destroy…"
Before Kabuto could finish his sentence, a white rod twice his size and thick enough to penetrate the entire abdomen of both the Human Path and Kabuto slammed into the Human Path from behind and penetrated both Kabuto and the Human Path, pinning both combatants to the ground. Konan had formed the spear entirely out of paper tags wrapped around one another and stuck to one another with chakra.
Kabuto coughed up with blood, for once his expression expressed the seriousness of the situation and removed that expression that Sasuke hated, that the four-eyed spy of Orochimaru's was above everything around him, like he was just an untouchable observer who would escape every situation unharmed.
"I'm… Guessing this Path… Isn't the most valuable…" Kabuto taunted Konan with a bloody mouth, the red trickled from his mouth even when the rogue medical ninja smiled at the Akatsuki member.
"This is just one of many Paths of Pain, it can be sacrificed if the outcome is to crush an irritating worm hiding underneath it. A mere human couldn't understand it…" Konan answered with some defensiveness to her tone. She wasn't entirely without feeling when striking down a Path of Pain but she did it nevertheless. Likely she had a talk with Pain once about situations just like this one.
"I am going to leave you with the matters here, Sasuke-kun." Orochimaru turned to Sasuke, entrusting to finish off the compromised Paths of Pain to his trusted vessel. "You lucked out, you will have to wait your turn as my vessel a few years longer, it seems…" the serpentine man chuckled.
"Fine…" Sasuke nodded with indifference. "Just make sure to take your time. It might take a few moments for me to get the answers I want."
Orochimaru's lower body became like a snake tail, launching the Sennin across the battlefield in previously unheard of speed as he raced across to where he had thought he had picked up the true Pain to be. Now that all of the Pain's Paths were compromised and unable to move effectively, Orochimaru felt confident that he could get to the real prize and obtain him as his vessel.
A hurricane of paper tags picked up around an area where Orochimaru was meant to slither across, all of them carrying explosive seals on them but, using his newfound agility, Orochimaru outraced Konan's attempts at stopping him and darted off beneath and over the rubble littering the area. Konan took steps forward in an attempt to chase after Orochimaru further but an instinct forced her to stop which proved to be the right move – a massive fireball shaped like the head of a dragon whizzed past the woman's face and would have blown her to bits and incinerated what remained had she allowed it to as much as scrape her. The fireball moved up and detonated high up in the sky.
"I guess you won't let me just interrogate Pain like that. Which means I have to take you out." Sasuke declared. "However, I'm not sure for how long someone like Pain will remain inconvenienced by Kabuto's ability before learning the new methods to move his body. That means I'll have to do it quickly and not bother with being gentle about it."
"Impudent chick, just what do you think Orochimaru will do if he gets his hands on the Rinnegan? Right now he only lived off of one vessel for his reptilian body, with the Rinnegan, he might just be tempted to live off of six of his own. Just how long do you think it will be until Orochimaru takes your body as one of his own Paths?" Konan bit her lip, she felt confident that as long as her Dance of the Shikigami continued, that was to say as long as she had chakra to spare for it, she would remain invincible to anything Sasuke had to show, however, while she might have had time, Pain did not.
And what was the point of an angel that outlived her God?
