Sasuke dashed onward, flapping his webbed wings once to increase his speed even further beyond his already ludicrous abilities. Konan had been educated in the simple arts of taijutsu and knew how to handle a swordfighter but Sasuke's sword-fighting style was rather eccentric, holding the blade with a reverse grip but slashing and thrusting with it in front, effectively losing very little range.
Konan's body twitched and stumbled backward with each successive strike, even when her eyes had lost all traces of life Sasuke continued to cut and slash. It was because he knew of the full extent of her Dance of Shikigami ability that he was so relentless and savage, cutting her body down to chunks smaller than his fist with a flurry of wild slashes delivered in a split-instant. The jolts of black lightning passing down Sasuke's blade ignited the severed sheets of paper that floated off of Konan's lifeless body.
"Hmph… You're still adamant to waste chakra on that technique, you won't be able to keep it up forever…" Sasuke taunted Konan after turning to where her body would reform before it actually reformed. It was meant as an intimidation move, a show of force and awareness from his part. Truth be told, even with the awareness of his Sharingan, he was not going to defeat the enemy before her Dance of the Shikigami concluded.
Konan's skill in that jutsu was simply too great. She formed weapons, limbs and separate clones of her body out of the chakra infused paper with far too much simplicity for Sasuke to consider challenging her outside of the elementary face value battlefield he was engaging her in. His best call would have still been to defeat her once her chakra was out and she was panting to be finished off, after all, techniques such as the Dance of Shikigami that extended their effects over a longer period of time grew in strain perpetually, making them dangerous to abuse.
"What about you, hatchling? This Curse Seal you are wearing also drains your chakra, are you ready to allow your chakra to be more Orochimaru's than your own? Are you truly ready to surrender your body to him, I wonder?" Konan replied without skipping a beat. She was a member of the Akatsuki, every little bit as skilled as his brother, for whatever reason, Sasuke kept forgetting that. Maybe it was because she was a woman, maybe because she employed mere paper in battle or perhaps it was because of how she acted like mere support for Pain and his ambition for the future of the ninja world.
"Hey, you…" Sasuke turned his Sharingan to Kabuto. "Isn't it about time you get up already?" he wondered, staring at the pair of impaled bodies writhing against one another. "You are keeping that Path pinned down but when it's two against five, you're inconveniencing us far more…"
Flares of chakra in the shape of sharp blades lit up around Kabuto's hands as he slashed over the Human Path and pushed him off of the shortened paper spear before struggling off himself. The moment that the geek's body left the object of his impalement it spilled blood by the handfuls but Kabuto's blades transitioned into a softer, more emerald-shaded glow to heal his wounds immediately.
"I'm sorry, Sasuke-kun, I was unaware you were in the need of help…" Kabuto croaked with a voice inconvenienced by a grievous injury. "That body is dangerous, you know, if it gets its hands on you…"
"It won't." Sasuke cut the teasing down. "Plus, isn't it the same case with any of them anyway?"
"I suppose so…" Kabuto chuckled to himself. "Anyway, I'd flee with my life if I were you." He looked at Konan.
"Yes, I don't doubt that you would…" she replied.
"Sharp… Nevertheless, Orochimaru-sama will be taking your master's body and his other bodies are affected by my disruption of their nervous systems. I bet Pain-san has a great deal of trouble controlling them right now, which is why you were his last hope to save him from Orochimaru-sama. You're a failure as an angel so you should just feel content fleeing with your life." Kabuto explained his stance to Konan while his gut injury decreased to a meaningless, wet stain.
"It is awfully presumptuous of you that Orochimaru could ever control the Rinnegan's power. No man other than Nagato has ever done so. His chakra would be gone before he even tried." Konan objected with a change of subject where she realized that confronting Kabuto's point would have been too painful.
"Perhaps in our universe…" Kabuto smirked. "This universe, however… So many new opportunities, so many ways to improve oneself… Going back home would feel so sad if we weren't going back to a weaker home, unprepared for the new and improved Orochimaru-sama."
"Enough talk!" Sasuke swiped his sword to the side. It was rather hasty of him, given how buying time for Orochimaru to find and reincarnate into the true body of Pain was their main goal here. "I will find out what you know about Itachi and I am certain that I won't get that intel from you. It's clear that you're only focused on one man and I can't stand useless women like that!"
A gust of wind picked up, the tip of Sasuke's Kusanagi broke through Konan's chest and plunged from deeper within, emerging halfway through from behind her as Sasuke had made it all the way behind her using a technique that once caught him unaware just like it did Konan right now.
"Shadow of the Dancing Leaf… Quite deadly when used in combination with a sword and not the primitive art of taijutsu." Kabuto observed after blowing hot air into his glasses and wiping them with his fingers because his shirt was in tatters somewhere in the battlefield of ruined Konohagakure.
"Scatter again, keep struggling…" Sasuke muttered to Konan from behind her before pulling the blade out with a rude yank and swiping it aside, the blade shed no blood as the stabbed woman collapsed into a shower of paper.
Unlike what Sasuke had intended for the dancing vortex of the paper, it began growing in size and density, growing and expanding, covering an immense area while creating gusts of wind powerful enough to keep Sasuke rooted on the ground and struggling to stay that way. So much chakra floating all around, with all of those chakra infused paper pieces it was difficult perceiving the real Konan, especially when her chakra levels were beginning to dwindle to those approaching someone of her age and experience for a village ninja.
"She's fleeing to protect Pain!" Sasuke yelled out through the gust and the storm irritating paper cuts. His head lit up with pain as Sharingan began warning him of every incoming piece of paper in the storm, it made it almost unbearable to go through with, forcing Sasuke to shut down his eyes just for a moment.
"Chidori Current!" Sasuke grunted as he expanded his arms outward, sending Chidori in concentrated streams of lightning in all directions, greatly empowered and blackened by the Curse Seal chakra that he had imbued his technique with. The tiny notes of paper lit up and burnt up, beginning to pop from heat even in a premature reaction similar to when Konan imbued all of them with chakra and forced them to explode on their own.
"So it was a distraction…" Kabuto tilted his glasses and began scanning the area for signs as to where Konan might have fled to.
Detached fists flew right at the bare-chested medical ninja of Orochimaru's squad, evading them was almost too simple for a medical ninja, trained to flee with his life and serve another day, especially noting how awkward the mixed nervous signals in Asura Path made the trajectory of the rocket fists to be. Kabuto appeared to dance just by tapping his feet in an evasive dash as if mocking the enemy while avoiding the tongue of Naraka Path's King of Hell while strutting with his feet just far enough to outrun the tongue of the summoned entity. The Human Path, still stumbling over itself, fumbled at Kabuto with sloppy taijutsu strikes that Kabuto answered with kicks of his own until his recovery from the impalement previously seemed completed.
A booming noise came from behind as a colossal beast erupted from a nearby competitor to Ichiraku Ramen for the preferred fast food spot of the village. A black and white yak covered with bony plates over the more sensitive areas like joints and the shoulders, where the fur failed to keep up with the thickness of the more central areas of its body. The beast's horns weren't the size to impale a man but to squish one outright. The exalted Rinnegan appeared as the replacement for the beast's eyes.
"The sixth one, huh?" Kabuto smirked. The ability of this one to summon beasts would have seemed troublesome as summoned animals did not share a body with the summoner, meaning that they'd have eluded the weakness of the nervous fritz that Kabuto forced upon Pain's body but a black earring sticking out from the beast's nose alongside multiple rods sticking out from the snout of the cattle helped keep up the enthusiasm in Kabuto's smile – the beast was controlled the same way as the Paths, meaning it was sloppy and weakened by having the responses of its limbs all mixed up, just like the other Paths.
Kabuto drove his hands with a cross-shaped chop, connecting it to the tip of the nose of the giant yak and forcing spurts of goopy and thick, dulled out in color blood splash from it. At the same time, the recovered medical ninja vaulted over the giant beast and ran up its snout to the position of the horns as that was one place where the beast could not find it.
Konan grunted in mid-air, a blinding ray of light had penetrated her chest from behind again, this time from further back. Sasuke's eyes were lighting up with the crimson flare of the Sharingan again while the obsidian-colored Chidori Spear flowed freely from his blade. The youth then extended his other hand and formed another Chidori Spear out of the Chidori he had formed in his free hand, matching the two blades and splitting the sky in a mad slasher combination that split Konan's airborne body to pieces and incinerated the paper remains at the same time.
"Now look what you've made me do, the other Pains are the other way…" Sasuke taunted the collapsing and burning up body of the Akatsuki member.
"Hmph…" a feminine grunt of bemusement came from up above, Sasuke maneuvered in mid-air via his webbed-hand-shaped wings to avoid a downpour of rods of paper made out of tens of thousands of paper notes rolled one over the other.
"You're keeping up your Sharingan at the same time as your Curse Seal? Your chakra levels are far inferior to mine, you'll succumb to weakness first." Konan taunted Sasuke who'd have been a skewered pancake on the pavement had it not been to his Sharingan's improved perception just now. She did have a point though, his Curse Seal Mark 2 was not designed to work in prolonged engagements, definitely not together with his Sharingan…
"Your leader will be far dead by then. Maybe I'll just ask him where Itachi is when I meet him in alongside the other Orochimaru's vessels…" Sasuke grunted, swooping up ahead and blocking off the path to where Orochimaru had gone to confront Pain.
"Contrary to what that despicable turncoat said before, an angel that is threatened with the loss of its paradise does not wither away and die, they fight to the bitter end and if they survive to see it all burn down, they become angels of vengeance!" Konan spread out her wings, this was huge, Sasuke didn't need a Sharingan to see it.
The span of Konan's wings spread out at least five times larger than ever before, her body lit up with wild chakra it produced and molded into this technique. The chakra perception of the Sharingan was not like the chakra network perception of the Byakugan but the immense chakra usage that Konan underwent while using this jutsu nearly blinded Sasuke with its intensity alone. How did he keep underestimating her?
"Dance of the Shikigami!" Konan chanted while the makeshift feathers that comprised her origami wings all unleashed a downpour on Sasuke. Raining down and covering the streets, the buildings and all living or dead things in its path with thick layers upon layers of origami notes. "Burn down together with my paradise, Orochimaru's hatchling!"
The notes of paper that Konan laid one on top of the other lit up one by one. Not all at once but all at seemingly random intervals. Sasuke had managed to avoid getting pinned down by the downpour of origami notes, he did not become buried underground neither did he get pinned down to one of the walls of the surrounding buildings but he had more than a fair share of paper notes stuck to his body, looking for another one and another one still to connect to in order to form a complete chain, to form even the most simplistic of shapes before lighting up and exploding.
The pupil of Sasuke's Sharingan expanded, it appeared as if the patterns depicted on the eye itself have transcended the limits of the eye they were on, or so it appeared to Konan, who covered up her body when Sasuke reversed the positions of the two – revealing that it was indeed Konan and not Sasuke covered with a multitude of origami notes that were about to explode.
"A genjutsu?" Konan wondered to herself before the notes present on her body detonated, tearing bits and pieces of her Akatsuki cloak and leaving burns over the blown off areas but due to the augmentation of her own body and rather lacking explosive power of singular notes she managed to escape with minor injuries.
Sasuke's glare at the woman from Akatsuki sharpened as he realized that she was too engrossed into casting her ultimate hidden technique to use the Dance of the Shikigami to protect herself. It was her real body in the middle of that tempest of origami but while Sasuke's Sharingan allowed him to avoid most of the downpour of the origami notes that turned into explosive notes before long, he'd have been a madman to attempt and attack Konan where the intensity of her origami monsoon was the greatest – around her exposed true body.
Obsidian lightning crackles ran down Sasuke's body. He had never used that jutsu in Curse Seal Mark 2 form and his normal state would have been more than enough. He set it up just like he had to but… Konan had moved further ahead from where the storm clouds had formed from the intense heat of the Fire Release jutsu he had used earlier and missed. The range of that jutsu wasn't all that great and he couldn't miss – if he did, the storm would cover him up while he wallowed in the strain of using both the Curse Seal and that jutsu at the same time…
This universe… What Kabuto said was true, both Orochimaru and Kabuto were exploring the wildest things that this universe and the boundless chakra present in all living things and even lifeless objects provided. It was time that Sasuke broke through his own limits, otherwise, he will never find him, he'll never kill Itachi.
The crackles burnt down the notes that rained upon Sasuke, the bubble of an intense lightning storm that it had formed around Sasuke was just an effect of the increasing static around him while he prepared to use his ace in the hole.
"What is that?" Konan's eyes widened as she did not expect Sasuke's body to light up with an expanding static field of Lightning Release chakra that intensified the most in his hand. "Surely you don't intend to rush at me with a Chidori, you will be blown to bits before you reach me halfway, you might be fast but it will only lead you to gather more paper on your way to me."
"This is my Ultimate Secret Jutsu…" Sasuke declared as the powerful crackles of lightning in the night's sky revealed the stormy clouds that still lingered from the heat that Sasuke discharged after using his Fire Release jutsu from earlier. The intensifying storm summoned drops of rain that began to shower the area, effectively muzzling Konan's jutsu as while the chakra cloaking her paper would have protected her from natural rain, she lacked the necessary chakra to coat them all after using her Dance of the Shikigami so prominently earlier.
"Tsk… My paradise…" Konan lamented with a disgruntled expression, seeing her origami collapse to the floor wet instead of floating where the gusts carried it.
"This jutsu brings down very thunder from the heavens. I merely direct this power to you. Come!" Sasuke roared out, expanding the wild field of static, obsidian lightning all over the place, branching out in concentrated flowing jolts toward the gloomy skies. "The name of this jutsu is Kirin, disappear with the roar of thunder!"
Even Sasuke became overwhelmed by the descending obsidian shape from above. It didn't look like a mere quadrupedal mammal to match the namesake of Sasuke's jutsu but instead took the appearance of something far more majestic. Controlling the immense power of his jutsu was outside Sasuke's abilities, the precision of shape manipulation was a dream from his current level as it appeared as if the entire world would be split into two by the rampaging lightning. The descending storm was greater than mere lightning, it was a rebellion of sheer energy itself. A true, mightiest cosmic storm brought to Earth.
When Sasuke's eyes next opened, his vision returned to him slowly. It all started with a blur that barely let him tell light from dark, he was spared great agony due to the fact that it was well into the nighttime when his eyes opened and the drizzle still going down from above helped wash down the dryness of his lips and cool off his fatigued body. How did the ninja of this universe cope? He had to devote every last signet of his will to concentrate and control his technique… He could have easily blinked everything away in a thunderclap just as easily as his opponent.
"Sasuke-kun, may I imply your impressive showing was responsible for the combined collapse of all of Pain's Paths?" Kabuto's irksome voice was the last thing that Sasuke wanted in this moment of tranquil self-reflection.
"No…" Sasuke set up and dragged his cold hand across his sweaty forehead, wiping his wet hair out of the way from obstructing his eyesight. "I decimated that woman, I… Didn't want to but… The power of my jutsu, I lost control, it was either her or…"
"Ah, I see…" Kabuto smirked with that above it all expression. "Orochimaru-sama in that case, he got to Pain, the real Pain…"
Like called forth, a gigantic boa burst forth from underground and opened its mouth, letting Orochimaru slip out from inside the snake that tunneled from the location he had confronted the true face of Pain from. Upon his emergence, Orochimaru just snickered to himself, licking his lips in observation of the success that his precious subordinates had wrought and extended his hand toward Kabuto.
A weighty, white snake emerged from Orochimaru's sleeve and slithered down the much larger tunneling boa before landing before Kabuto and snapping its own jaw open. From inside its throat, came the feeble head of a red-haired man whose eyes remained closed, knowing Orochimaru – permanently so. The man looked like a ghoul, a far cry from the godly presence of the Six Paths, dried out and starved, without a doubt. None of this could have been Orochimaru's doing. He did so to himself…
"Can you prepare him for the ritual? It would be a tremendous waste to only be able to wear Pain-san for three years…" Orochimaru blew breath from his nose in something resembling a self-congratulating enjoyment of his triumph.
"I suppose it might be a good idea to rest for the night after this intense battle, I'll prepare the body after we find a safe place. The violence of Sasuke's technique might have killed a whole bunch of spectating hunters, meaning to assault us the moment the battle ended, but we would be wise to conceal from the rest." Kabuto nodded and voiced his thoughts.
"Oh? Sasuke-kun's technique? Do tell…" Orochimaru smiled.
