"Ah! Aah..."
Orochimaru, transformed into the Eight-Headed Serpent, let out one agonized scream after another. The lightning had clearly hit him hard.
There was even a faint smell of scorched snake meat in the air.
Seeing that the lightning had left Orochimaru half dead, Shinichi stopped in time. He only wanted to teach him a lesson, after all, not actually kill him. Otherwise, Shinichi would be the first one crying.
"Shinichi, your power is enough to rival the entire Shinobi World..."
Back in his original form, Orochimaru was covered in wounds and looked utterly bedraggled. Yet his eyes still burned with fervor and excitement as he looked at Shinichi. "I simply cannot understand why someone as powerful as you would willingly stay in Konoha as a puppet hero controlled by others."
Konoha's Hero?
It was nothing more than a nice-sounding title.
Until someone truly held power over the village, being a hero was merely a title, one the people in charge could erase with a single word. Just look at the Fourth Hokage, Minato Namikaze. All he had left after his death was a good name, and he could not even protect Naruto, his only child.
Precisely because Orochimaru understood this, he was so puzzled.
He could tell that Shinichi was different from those shinobi brainwashed by the "Will of Fire." This fellow was certainly not one to blindly follow the rules.
"Why couldn't you have talked to me like this from the start?"
Shinichi rolled his eyes at Orochimaru. "You had to wait until I beat the crap out of you before you were willing to talk calmly. Isn't that the textbook definition of asking for it?"
Orochimaru smiled without replying.
In this world, only people of equal standing had the right to speak as equals.
If Shinichi had