Anko did not wait for ANBU.
She knew all too well that no more than three people in all of Konoha could keep track of Orochimaru's presence when he used his escape techniques and counter-tracking skills.
No matter how fast ANBU moved, they could not outrun one of the Sannin who was determined to do something in the Forest of Death.
"Seal off the scene. No one gets close." Anko tossed out the order and darted through the bushes.
She headed into the Forest of Death to find Orochimaru.
The deeper she went, the stranger her surroundings became.
At first, there were only broken branches and churned-up earth, as though left by the shockwaves of some Taijutsu attack.
But farther in, the way the trees had broken made less and less sense.
Ancient trees had been uprooted whole, dark soil still clinging to their roots, as though some immense force had thrust them up from below.
Anko's pupils contracted slightly.
No ordinary ninja could have left marks like these.
Whoever had done this was at least Kage Level.
She slowed a little, caught three Shuriken between the fingers of her left hand, and stretched her senses to their limit. Chakra burst beneath her feet with every step, yet she made no sound when she landed.
Then she stopped dead.
The smell on the wind had changed.
Blood. So much of it that she nearly retched.
Not just human blood. Snake blood, too.
Anko stared ahead.
What should have been dense woodland had been flattened completely.
Not one tree stood within a hundred-meter radius. Shattered trunks lay scattered across the ground like a heap of crushed twigs.
At the center of the clearing lay an enormous depression more than ten meters across. The earth had sunk nearly two feet, and a deep crater gaped at its heart, as though a meteor had struck.
"You've got to be kidding me..."
Anko's voice came out painfully dry.
She stepped lightly over a charred log and landed at the edge of the depression.
Then she sensed it.
Two traces of chakra still lingered in the air.
One belonged to Orochimaru.
The other...
Her brows drew tight, and she sucked in a sharp breath.
What was that?
For the first time since becoming a Special Jōnin, Anko encountered chakra whose nature she could not identify.
It felt like fire, then lightning.
Or rather, it kept shifting between the two.
On the back of Anko's neck, the Cursed Seal suddenly throbbed hard.
As though it were resonating.
She instinctively clapped a hand over her neck. Cold sweat sprang across her forehead.
How could this be...? That presence was triggering the Cursed Seal, and its power dwarfed the seal inside me.
Impossible.
Only Orochimaru himself knew how to wield the Cursed Seal of Heaven.
Yet this power clearly came from someone else.
Anko's knees felt weak, but her gaze grew sharper.
Slowly, she turned toward the place where the unfamiliar chakra lingered most strongly.
That way led deeper into the Forest of Death.
It also led to the area where the Chunin Ninja Exams candidates were active.
Her heart felt as though something had seized it in a crushing grip. A faint tremor ran through her pupils.
"Who was Orochimaru fighting?" she murmured, forcing the words from her throat. "Who could push him this far?"
Inside the crater lay half a shed white snakeskin, melted and then cooled solid. It was charred and twisted, with a few phosphorescent scales still clinging to its edges.
Savage gashes crisscrossed its surface, as though some sharp weapon had hacked it open—or something had burst out from within.
This was no ordinary summoned snake.
Anko recognized the pattern, broken in two, on one of the scales. Her pupils shrank to pinpoints.
Manda's scales.
Orochimaru had even summoned Manda?
She whipped her head toward the other side of the clearing.
Every tree along its western edge had burned to black charcoal.
Anko went over and lifted a scrap of cloth with her Kunai.
The cloth was unremarkable, but it carried a third, exceedingly faint trace—the exact same presence as the unfamiliar chakra she had sensed earlier.
"Two people..." Her voice was barely audible. "The center of the explosion held Orochimaru's presence and another... But this cloth means a third person was here..."
Or perhaps the first unfamiliar presence and the trace on the cloth came from the same person.
Perhaps that person had been so monstrously powerful that, even after death, their chakra lingered in two entirely different forms.
But...
Anko's face drained of all color.
She was no stranger to danger.
She had fought for her life more times than she could count.
Yet destruction on this scale still made her knuckles whiten around her Kunai.
Just then, a very faint but unmistakable pulse of chakra spread from deep within the Forest of Death.
It lasted less than half a second.
Her pupils contracted sharply. She almost stopped breathing.
"There's something else hidden in this exam—something even Orochimaru couldn't take down right away."
She hesitated no longer. Her figure blurred as she raced toward the source of the pulse.
Anko swept past fallen trees, her toes barely making a sound as they touched the leaves.
The deeper she went, the closer that chakra felt.
Just as she sensed she was nearing the battlefield, the wind died.
Every sound vanished from the deathly still forest.
No insects chirped. No birds called. Not even leaves rustled against one another.
Anko braked hard and landed on a fallen trunk.
She could sense it.
Something in the darkness a hundred meters ahead was watching her.
Amid the rank stench, the Cursed Seal on the back of her neck throbbed violently again. The pain nearly made her cry out.
Two pairs of dark golden slit-pupiled eyes lit up deep in the mist and silently met hers.
Snakes, or people?
Anko gritted her teeth and tightened her grip on her short blade, crouching into a fighting stance.
A faint, almost inaudible chuckle rose from the darkness.
"Heh heh... You like getting mixed up in things too, Anko?"
"Orochimaru! I knew you were here!"
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