The Fall of a Kage-Level Shinobi! Orochimaru Cuts Off His Tail to Survive

"That old man, the Third, can't hold on much longer."

Yuan stood amid a ground covered in headless corpses, coldly watching the four violet pillars of flame rising into the sky from the distant rooftop.

Inside the barrier, the battle had already reached its unbearably brutal final moment.

The elderly Third Hokage, Hiruzen Sarutobi, was covered in blood. Orochimaru's Kusanagi Sword had run him clean through the chest, the tip protruding from his back as blood dripped down with a steady patter. But he had not taken even half a step back. Those withered hands of his clamped tightly onto Orochimaru's shoulders.

Behind him floated a terrifying phantom that only he could see—the God of Death. It was the forbidden technique cast at the cost of one's life: the Reaper Death Seal.

"Orochimaru, you stubborn fool. Wherever leaves dance, fire will burn..." Blood foam kept spilling from the Third's mouth, and in his aged eyes there was no fear of death, only deep regret.

Flashes passed through his mind: the teachings of the First and Second Hokage from when he was young, the sight of Orochimaru obediently learning ninjutsu before him in the past, and that night six years ago, when he had weakly allowed Danzo to raise the butcher's blade against the Uchiha.

Everything was over.

The God of Death's ghostly hand suddenly pierced out from the Third's abdomen and seized the soul of Orochimaru's hands.

"No! Give me back my hands! You damned old man!" Orochimaru felt the agony of his soul being forcibly torn away. His already sickly, pale face twisted into that of a demon as he struggled desperately.

"Seal!"

The Third used the last of his strength to let out a furious roar. The God of Death directly severed the soul of Orochimaru's hands and swallowed it into its belly. At that same moment, the Third's chakra was utterly exhausted, and his life force was cut off. His cloudy eyes took one last look at the sky, then his hands loosened powerlessly, and he crashed heavily onto the floor tiles.

The Shinobi Hero who had once awed the ninja world had fallen, returning to deathly silence.

"Lord Hokage!" Several Anbu guards outside the barrier let out heart-rending cries.

Yuan stood on a distant rooftop without so much as blinking. He sensed that chakra vanish completely, and the corner of his mouth curled into a mocking sneer.

"At least you died with some dignity. But your life isn't enough to offset the debt you owe the Uchiha. You deserved to die."

As the chakra of the Sound Four, the casters, ran dry, the Four Violet Flames Formation turned into points of light and scattered into the air.

"Go! Retreat immediately!"

Orochimaru's arms hung at his sides like two limp noodles. The agony of his soul being severed nearly made him faint on the spot. He bit the tip of his tongue, forcing himself to stay conscious, and gave the Sound Four the order to retreat. The four of them quickly supported Orochimaru and turned into several afterimages, fleeing wildly toward the forest outside the Hidden Leaf Village.

"You think you can just leave?"

The Mangekyo Sharingan in Yuan's eyes spun rapidly. To him, the five fleeing chakra trails were more glaring than searchlights in the night.

Bang! The roof tiles beneath his feet were crushed to pieces. Yuan ignored the Anbu on the ground who had begun grieving in despair and directly chased after Orochimaru along his escape route.

At the edge of the Forest of Death outside the village.

The Sound Four carried Orochimaru, who was weak to the extreme, and had just leaped down from a large tree to catch their breath.

The treetop above them suddenly exploded.

No hand seals. No probing. A heavy whip kick burning with raging flames descended from the sky like a battle-axe.

"Tayuya, watch out!"

Sakon and Ukon roared. But it was too late. Yuan's speed was simply beyond ordinary human limits. That kick struck Tayuya directly in the neck. A crisp sound of breaking bone rang out, and Tayuya's head twisted a full hundred and eighty degrees. She died on the spot.

"Bastard! Kill him!" Kidomaru's eyes went bloodshot, and he spat out a huge golden spiderweb covered in mucus.

Yuan neither dodged nor avoided it. Holding his short blade in a reverse grip, the Flame-Lightning Chidori coiled around the blade erupted with an ear-piercing roar, directly burning a large hole through that tough spiderweb. Yuan passed through the web and stabbed Kidomaru in the abdomen. With a turn of his wrist, he ground Kidomaru's internal organs to shreds.

He pulled out the blade and turned.

His right fist turned into an afterimage and smashed heavily into Jirobo's face just as he tried to form hand seals. That huge head burst open like a watermelon, scattering red and white matter all over the ground. The last one left, Sakon and Ukon, collapsed to the ground in terror. Before he could even crawl up, Yuan stomped down and crushed his spine.

In just three breaths, the Sound Four, whom Orochimaru regarded as trusted aides, were completely wiped out.

Yuan stepped over the corpses littering the ground and walked up to Orochimaru, who was leaning against a tree trunk and gasping for breath. Without any unnecessary words, he stretched out his right hand, grabbed Orochimaru by the throat, and lifted him up like a chick.

"Run. Why aren't you running anymore?" Yuan looked at that snake-like face streaming with cold sweat.

Orochimaru's hands were crippled, and he could not move, but those snake pupils of his still held an eerie calm. He struggled to pull at the corners of his mouth and let out a hoarse, leaking laugh. "Kill me... and you'll never know... how Danzo and the higher-ups conspired back then to wipe out your entire clan. That truth... I'm the only one with evidence..."

He was trying to trade intelligence for his life. This was his usual trick.

But after Yuan heard him, he looked at him as if he were an idiot.

"The truth?" Yuan's five fingers slowly tightened, choking Orochimaru until his eyeballs bulged. "You think I care about that useless, roundabout evidence? I told you long ago, I know far more clearly than you do. Anyone who got Uchiha blood on their hands, I'll flay their skin off. Rotten trash like you doesn't even qualify as a bargaining chip!"

The six-pointed Sharingan in Yuan's eyes instantly flared with dazzling blood-red light.

"Get a good taste of this!"

The Mangekyo Sharingan's unique ocular technique, a manifested spiritual attack—"Annihilation"!

An invisible, violently extreme spiritual storm rushed straight down Yuan's arm and into Orochimaru's body. It was not mere physical damage. It began madly breaking him down from the cellular and spiritual levels. The disguised skin on Orochimaru's surface cracked inch by inch, revealing the rotten flesh-like body beneath.

"Ah—!!"

Even a pervert like Orochimaru, who could be ruthless even to himself, let out an agonized scream at that moment. He felt as if his soul were being gnawed by tens of thousands of ants.

He knew that this time, he had truly run into a madman who made no sense at all and never played by common logic! This body could not be saved!

"Don't even think... you can kill me completely!"

At the instant Orochimaru's body was about to collapse completely, extreme madness flashed in his eyes. He made the exact same move as when, in the original story, he had cut off his tail to survive while facing Itachi's Totsuka Blade seal.

There was a muffled bang. Orochimaru voluntarily detonated all the chakra hidden inside this body.

His shriveled abdomen suddenly swelled up, and immediately after, that rotten flesh-like belly split straight open. Dozens of pure white snakes as thick as arms, carrying nauseating mucus, surged madly out of his body. They directly burst through the original shell of flesh.

Each white snake carried a small fragment of Orochimaru's consciousness and chakra. As long as even one escaped, he could condense again and revive a few months later.

The moment the swarm of white snakes landed, they immediately scattered like a nest of startled loaches, burrowing wildly into the grass and soil in every direction.

"Trying to run?"

Yuan's gaze turned cold. His hands rapidly formed seals, and an even more massive wave of Susanoo chakra burst out of his body. A gigantic red skeletal arm slammed fiercely into the ground, and a ring-shaped shockwave mixed with flames directly peeled away a layer of earth within a fifty-meter radius.

Most of the white snakes let out shrill hisses in the flames and were burned to ash. The Mangekyo Sharingan in Yuan's eyes locked hard onto the remaining few, using the ocular technique "Annihilation" to crush them one by one in midair.

Blood and shredded flesh splattered everywhere.

However, there were simply too many white snakes, and their escape routes were completely scattered. Just as Yuan had eliminated the eightieth white snake, the corner of his eye caught sight of the largest one, a white snake with a trace of purple on its head. Using the crater from the explosion just now, it plunged headfirst into an underground fault dozens of meters deep.

That was Orochimaru's core consciousness! Its speed was incredibly fast, and it instantly broke away from the Sharingan's line of sight.

[Ding! Orochimaru's body has been killed. System extracting chakra fragments...]

[Warning! Abnormality! Target consciousness not fully harvested! Fragment drop incomplete!]

[Obtained only Orochimaru orange fragments ×15 (30% of total).]

Yuan stood in the wrecked forest and shook off the snake mucus left on his hand. He did not waste his strength forcibly digging open the underground strata. After all, once that kind of soft-bodied creature drilled into an underground river, continuing the chase was no longer realistic.

Looking at the pitiful 30% drop notification on the system panel, Yuan sneered.

"You run pretty fast." Yuan raised his foot and directly crushed the half snake tail still twitching beside him. "One body destroyed, even the souls of both hands gone. I'd like to see how many years you can keep clinging to life in some hole in the ground, you damned long worm. Next time we meet, I'll chop up that snake skin of yours along with your soul and stew the whole thing into soup!"

The forest was filled with the pungent stench of blood and burning. Yuan turned around and looked toward the Hidden Leaf, where the firelight was gradually dying down. The Hidden Leaf's power vacuum had arrived.