Sorry everyone, I meant to have this chapter out sooner. I hope you've all been doing well.
Let's get this trainwreck moving.
The concept of time had left Orochimaru behind, and he felt the face of the full moon mocking him whenever he turned to face it. How many days had he been trapped in this night without end? He'd run his meridians to their limits, struggling for anything that could help him power through the nightmarish version of Konoha he walked through, but no chakra sprang forth from them anymore; all he had were the weapons he'd walked in with, and the supplies he'd managed to scrounge up. Shadowy figures stalked the streets of the place he'd once called home, and their blood littered the stones. Each of the village's many wards was its own special show of horrors, and the White Snake felt like he understood less as he continued exploring.
Horrific beasts had crossed his path as the hours wound on, creatures that defied his understanding of the world as he'd grown to understand it. They were twisted amalgamations of man and beast, and what Orochimaru could only comprehend as parasites. Their eyes glowed with unnerving light, and the Byahebi had learned that those with red eyes weren't to be feared. The blue eyes, on the other hand, were in an entirely different category. Their forms skulked up and down the back streets he was forced to wander, regardless of their eyes, claws making trails with the saliva that dripped from open maws; after Orochimaru slit the throats of two more, he made his way into the building they'd been guarding—a large building, the central chamber for one of Konoha's clans to handle their internal affairs. If his geography was right, then it was the Inuzuka clan's main building.
Advancing with caution, and no small amount of trepidation, the White Snake slunk forward with his sword in hand. Crossing the threshold into a greater hall, moonlight bathed two figures as if to announce that they were protected by a god. Even having been out of the village for a decade, Orochimaru recognized the woman at the back of the room—and the shaggy canine she knelt beside. In hollow, ragged, weary breaths, Inuzuka Tsume hugged her beloved pet's neck and shook with pain. This was a private moment, meant to go unseen by men and gods alike. As Orochimaru turned to leave, intent on finding some other place to go, he was interrupted; a massive dog with a human's face had crept behind him, and lunged for his arms.
Dark blood caught the edge of the Kusanagi's blade as it carved into the monster's head, and the commotion caused Tsume to look back at him. That movement drew Orochimaru's eye as his body twisted around, following the beast that had attacked him, and he saw the sweet marrow of violence with the kind of instant recognition that could never be denied. Animalistic fury overcame the Inuzuka matron in an instant, her face and muscles warping without regard to their previous torpor; the rage she flew into might have confused the ancients for riastrad, the deadly battle frenzy, but tears betrayed that her true cause was shame. The mighty Kuromaru quickly rolled himself over, covering his weaknesses to reveal a blood-matted coat. He loomed larger than Orochimaru remembered, and the Sannin knew full-well that the dog had been full-grown long before Tsume's daughter was born. If he were in the mood to joke, he might have asked what they were feeding the beast to keep him from shrinking in his old age.
Not wanting to turn the Kusanagi on another member of Konoha's former elite, the White Snake pulled the black mace he'd obtained outside of Konoha's gates from his belt. Practice may not have made him a master with the weapon, but it was simple in its form and function. Scraping it along the floor, brushes inside the mace's head spun against one another to give the weapon an electrical charge that would continue to build. Dodging Tsume's clawed strikes as the crazed woman continued to come after him, he brought his right hand across his body in a slashing motion. The mace connected with Tsume's jaw, and a burst of lightning seared her skin before sending her backwards. Kuromaru leaped into action to defend his beloved mistress, his yellow teeth and muzzle stained pink with human blood, but the mace's return swing caught him short below his eye socket.
Without further warning, as the master and servant were almost as near to one another as they'd been when Orochimaru arrived, the Byahebi smashed his mace into the floor. Lightning arced across the ground, and beams of electricity ripped across the air in an effort to cook the pair alive. No emotion showed on Orochimaru's face anymore, but his heart bled for the pain he was forced to inflict on his homeland to survive. More than anything, he prayed that his honored master could forgive him for the things he was doing.
A Kumo-nin's ribs were cracked open, revealing the precious organs within, and the expression on his face gave no doubts about the fact that he'd died in extreme agony. Yahiko remained unmoved at the sight, even as he unconsciously calculated how long ago the murder had occurred. The pitting and char marks in the surrounding hills were clearly unnatural, and this was the twelfth corpse they'd come across. Plenty of Iwa-nin were alive and moving through the territory, but this wasn't their work—if the redhead didn't know any better, he might even say that their aversion towards the sites of the murders was deliberate, but Nagato had explained one of the properties of demonic youki: it was foreign to the world they lived in, and unaware residents of the earth would subconsciously avoid its lingering traces. While that often meant the less intelligent flora and fauna that lived beyond civilization's grasp, unaware and unadjusted humans were just as prone to ignorance as anyone else.
Youki wasn't something that sensors could track or feel unless a demon was actively flaunting their power, and if Yahiko hadn't explicitly been told what to look for, he'd have been lost. Even without those minor, telltale clues, though? He still would have known exactly who killed the young man in front of him. Not even the women had been spared, though their bodies had been left untouched beyond stripping the life out of them.
"He made them fall," the redhead mumbled to himself, not referring to the dead bodies scattered around the area. He vividly remembered his clash with the Raikage's wayward niece, her supernatural speed and her immunity to flames; that could be explained away by her status as the Nibi Jinchuriki, but no natural human could break Nagato's holy defenses with the easy disdain she'd displayed. He had to assume Yugito had been turned into a true demon, and the winged girl who'd fought Konan in the sky would share that label.
"What makes you so sure?" Konan asked, as if she knew he'd been thinking about her a moment ago. "He's perfectly capable of killing this many people by himself."
"Their deaths are too different," Yahiko argued quietly. Several steps away, a woman looked like she didn't even realize she'd been in the process of dying. One slick cut at the jugular had killed her, and the edges of her skin were so clean that they nearly looked natural. Whatever had happened, she'd offered her life to her killer willingly. From Suna to Kiri and back again, that wasn't the way any witnesses described Yuurei's fighting style.
"Surely you're not insinuating a ninja, or at least a demon trained as a ninja, would be incapable of making it look like there were several unrelated causes of death," Konan said mockingly.
"If I'm insinuating anything, it's that the most likely cause for all the youki is the appearance of multiple demons." Yahiko retorted his partner's antagonism with logic. She always hated that. "The most probable cause for that is that he corrupted humans over a period of time. We know that two women have been traveling with him for roughly a year, and after a long enough time, he can force the process to finish. The real question is how far he's gotten since killing them all."
"Not far," Yuurei replied, as if out of nowhere, swinging his sandworm tooth and taking their heads off. The pair's features slowly began to morph, hair and bone structure quietly swimming through a spectrum of variance before landing on what must have been their original forms. Their hitai-ate marked them as ninja of Iwagakure, and the demon knew that it was time to move forward with his real plan.
He'd hoped that by killing enough Kumo-nin inside of the borders of Tetsu no Kuni, he'd be able to arouse some suspicion and draw Iwagakure into the mess, but that was more of an idle curiosity than anything. More than that, it was just an excuse to commit to slow killings without raising stakes; he had to be sure that all of Kumo's ninja were either dead or withdrawn to the village. Killing a few here and there wouldn't do anything to force an immediate retreat, but it helped to set a perimeter that he could continue shrinking. After Takigakure's destruction, Kumo and Iwa had seen an uptick in requests from smaller nations, but Yuurei had killed his way through the edge of Tetsu no Kuni and made sure that no ninja from Kumo was alive. In the months since he'd left Suna, he'd noticed a sharp decline in their numbers.
It told him that the plan was working. Yugito and Tayuya moved with him, and the ex-Jinchuriki held no love for her former comrades. They'd killed as they moved, from north to south and ever eastward. Perhaps he hadn't killed them all, but he'd killed enough to make the rest retreat; the country was unsafe for them to travel through, the killings too numerous and too spread out to be coincidence. The sooner they could reach home, the sooner they could regroup to launch a coordinated counterattack—but bottling themselves up in Rai no Kuni would only seal their fate.
It would be tempting to simply abandon the peninsular nation to destruction by the Hakai, to watch its mountains crumble into the sea and see its valleys make way for magma. Even though Yuurei had sworn off the technique before adopting his new name, and intended to stick to his self-imposed vow, he still felt Temari's desire for vengeance burn hot beneath his skin. To do it the slow way—with seals, with teeth, with his own two hands—was to choose what he enjoyed most about the act. Destruction? The art of the kill? Or was it the hunt itself? All that really mattered to the demon was that his loved ones were safe and happy. Everything else could be bargained for, or bargained away, and the Oathkeeper wouldn't blink.
Days and weeks continued to pass as the trio traveled together, and Yugito's growing anticipation went beyond the point that either of her companions could fail to notice. More than once, Yuurei mused on the idea that he wasn't just fulfilling Temari's vengeance for her—whatever it was that Yugito's father had done, or not done, the blonde had asked her master for the opportunity to kill him with her own hands. She'd left her ancestral homeland as a weapon of war, and she returned a free woman. No matter the servitude she endured, no matter her master's nature, she was far more free in the demon's grasp than she'd ever been as a kunoichi of Kumogakure.
With her mind finally released from the enslavement seal, she was able to think far more clearly about all the things she could say when she finally came face-to-face with her father or her uncle. She had dreamed of it, when she still dreamed of things that weren't the afterlife she'd been forced to leave behind, but that was a sacrifice she was all too glad to have made. In the year that she'd been gone, the faces of her family members had followed her in her thoughts. For nearly three decades, hatred had festered beside a fear of reprisal, because even the Nibi's unsealed strength wasn't enough to contend with the Sandaime Raikage and his younger brother. She wanted to leave them broken and battered, utterly crushed, writhing in agony; after all those years, the man she loved was on a slow march to deliver her their heads. Only through Yuurei, and the power he'd given her, did she finally have the capital to avenge her wounded heart.
Time passed, land was traveled through, and Yuurei's seventeenth birthday would have gone entirely unnoticed if the women he'd spent so long with hadn't done anything for him. It wasn't much, just a small cake that the three of them shared at a cafe in the civilian-laden Yugakure, but it was more than he'd gotten since graduating from the academy. And in that foreign city, filled with people so pacifistic that they'd disbanded their hidden village, a black cloak with red clouds put all three of them on high alert. When he walked into the restaurant, everyone froze; they knew this man for the butcher he was, and would have known him even without the weapon on his back. Walking over to Yuurei's booth, he seemed amused at the way the three demons all assumed aggressive postures.
"Relax, heretic. I'm not here to kill you. Yet." The silver-haired man chuckled a little bit to himself as he sat down next to Yuurei, as if there was some private joke that Yuurei wasn't in on. "Welcome to my hometown. After the clans disbanded, I killed them all and left."
"And you think this means you're safe here?" Yuurei asked, not quite threatening.
"I'm safe anywhere I go, demon. My faith in my god sustains me, and the support I get from someone else's god doesn't exactly hurt. Your kind might live forever, as long as they survive, but what do you know about real immortality?" The priest's pendant hung from his neck, an encircled downward-facing triangle the symbol of his religion.
"So if you're not here to fight, why bother showing up?" Tayuya asked, hard lines dominating her face. The Akatsuki member gave off the impression of barely-controlled instability, as though he was waiting for any excuse to snap and start killing. It was the kind of aura that had followed Orochimaru for the overwhelming majority of the time Tayuya had known the White Snake. He was as dangerous to himself as he was to everyone else, and that meant nothing good could come from him.
"Because gods and demons are drawn to one another, just like their followers, and knowing your enemy is the first step to killing them," the priest laughed again, and the smell of blood flooded Yuurei's nose. "Kidding, maybe! The real reason is because our leader wanted to keep tabs on you, and he picked me because I'm immortal. You can't kill me no matter how hard you try."
"I can kill lots of people without trying very hard at all," Yuurei countered. "Leave, before you get hurt."
"Oh, you're so kind to worry about me," Hidan replied sarcastically, a genuine angry edge in his voice. Being next to three demons was bad enough, but their irreverence grated on him worse than he realized it would. It would be a struggle not to hunt them down in their sleep and kill them. Perhaps then, Jashin would forgive him for being forced to spare their lives for as long as he already had.
"I told you to leave," Yuurei said darkly, his corrosive youki reaching out to erode the priest's body.
Hidan was unaffected, outwardly even looking amused, but all three of the booth's other occupants could feel the hate rolling off of the silver-haired man. As he stood, exposing his back to the trio, Yuurei quickly unsealed the Shinigami's tanto from his left wrist. Hidan felt the blade enter his chest, between his ribs, and wanted to laugh at the young Kyuubi for not believing in Jashin's blessing of immortality; as an unfamiliar, creeping chill began to take hold of him, though, he quickly reconsidered.
"What the hell? How..." Hidan struggled to find words, strength beginning to leave the proud priest's body as he dropped to his knees. Unknown to the Jashinist faith, and their concept of immortality, a Grim Reaper's blade could end any life it pierced—no god, or their powers, could save someone who'd been claimed by Death itself.
"Knowing your enemy is the first step to killing them," Tayuya said, mocking his earlier words. "Say hi to the Speargod for us."
Yuurei ripped the scythe from Hidan's back, the only trophy he'd take from his kill, and returned the Shinigami's tanto to its seal in his wrist. The demon didn't mourn the strength he might've gained by killing his enemy with his own two hands.
The fallen man died slowly, fading as the blood in his head blocked out the instant uproar over his murder. The god of blood and destruction raved within, doing his best to coax his last follower into staying alive, but the effort was as pointless as it was wasted. As soon as the tanto had cut into Hidan's flesh, the priest's fate was sealed; the final reward for all his efforts was an eternity in the Blessed Lands, where the tranquil peace that he'd despised in life would be inescapable. If he was lucky, he would lose enough of himself to avoid feeling like that was a punishment.
Outside the cafe, Kakuzu shuddered and left. Performing one shunhin after another, he made his way out of Yugakure and began traveling southwest. He would send a message to their organization's headquarters, but Yahiko would want to hear the eyewitness account from him personally. All the same, the former Taki-nin was quite glad to see his "partner" killed—he'd never liked Hidan, or the milder persona the man put on that had never fooled anybody. While neither of them were keen on using the technique that turned corpses into body doubles, Kakuzu had always held fast to the idea that he was far more cautious than the Jashinist he'd been forced to work with. Now, for the last time, Hidan had proven him right.
As the moon began to rise in the eastern sky, a new age dawned in Yugakure. After settling on its desire for peace, after the massacre that had scarred so many memories, they could finally start to move on—the butcher was dead, and he'd never be back to haunt them again. Even if it was entirely coincidental, Yuurei couldn't have given a better gift to the city or the nation.