His expression hardened behind the mask.
Five of them.
Together.
Here.
Today.
He lifted his left eye beneath the mask and hood, activating long-range Kamui as space warped around Yagura, reality peeling open to rip him free and deliver him instantly to the Kamui dimension—
And it failed.
Akane's Mangekyō snapped open.
The air screamed.
A pinpoint of entropic collapse struck, precise and merciless.
Shōmetsu.
The Touch of Entropy.
Chakra destabilized.
Space itself buckled.
Kamui's distortion stuttered, frayed, then unraveled mid-pull, the technique dying before it could finish forming.
Reika didn't even look up, her focus steady as extraction continued, seals tightening, the Three-Tails' chakra bleeding out in controlled streams.
However, behind Obito, the rest were already moving.
Saya's red-black mist rolled in, intent saturating the space, pressure wrapping around him like a living curse.
Emi's translucent strikes followed, invisible vectors smashing into his chakra flow, disrupting balance and timing with surgical precision.
And Kimimaro—
Kimimaro was already behind him directly.
Cyan light burned in his eyes.
Pressure crushed inward.
Obito tried to phase, to slip—
And realized something was wrong.
He wasn't moving safely on any side.
He was being pinned from all sides.
Not by a single technique, but by overlapping systems that denied him the moment he needed to escape safely.
Kimimaro's hand rose, bone forming, energy condensing, coated in all-killing ash already, a finishing blow seconds away.
Obito assessed instantly.
He couldn't stay intangible forever.
For the first time since awakening Kamui, relying on it felt too dangerous.
After all, he realised that their pressure wasn't just physical.
It gnawed at definition itself, brushing against the same impossible territory Kamui occupied, where space, timing, and certainty stopped behaving altogether.
The Hyūga girl's strange natural energy coating was disrupting contact before it even formed.
The Uchiha's Mangekyō, entropy condensed into a single, surgical point that ate at technique and space alike.
The pale-blonde girl's unique but undoubtedly Yin–Yang art, reality rewritten rather than resisted.
And at the center of it all, the only man, moving too fast to track, bearing a dōjutsu Obito didn't recognize and couldn't read.
Against any one of them, he could maneuver.
Together, the margins vanished.
Against all of them together, here, now, he didn't need to test the outcome to know it.
Almost certainly dead eventually.
So, Obito made the decision instantly.
Not retreat.
Reposition.
Space twisted as he disengaged, abandoning the pull on Yagura.
He straightened as Kamui wrapped around himself again, not as a shield, but as an exit.
"Fine. Let's see how long you last when the board catches up."
Space folded.
Then he was gone.
The office fell silent except for Yagura's ragged breathing and the low hum of sealing arrays still at work.
Kimimaro lowered his hand slowly.
"…As expected," he said calmly.
Outside, Kirigakure burned.
And the real battle had just begun.
Kimimaro turned to them immediately.
"This isn't over," he said. "He'll be back. And next time, he won't come alone."
The weight of that settled fast.
During the past year, he'd already told them what mattered about Akatsuki.
Enough that they understood what that sentence really meant.
They'd always assumed it came from his sensory reach, from observation.
None of them questioned it now.
"Reika," he continued without pause. "Keep extracting. As much as you safely can."
She didn't answer. She was already doing it.
The chains tightened, adjusted, drank again.
Emi stepped closer to Yagura, Byakugan flaring, not the broad, obvious scan most Hyūga used, but that refined, almost microscopic focus unique to her.
She frowned.
"…There's something wrong with his brain," she said. "Not damage. Structure. There's Yin–Yang residue threaded through it. Deep."
Kimimaro's eyes narrowed slightly.
So that was it.
He finally understood why the control had held for so long.
Why a perfect jinchūriki, a man and beast in full harmony, had been reduced to this.
Why it didn't behave like ordinary Mangekyō genjutsu.
He looked back at Yagura.
The Mizukage convulsed as another surge of chakra rose, Three-Tails roaring inside him, only for the chains to clamp down again, sealing the outburst before it could go anywhere.
Over and over.
Automatic. Futile.
It wasn't conscious obedience.
It was a loop.
A system.
Obito would have never wanted this.
He wouldn't have risked Yagura mindlessly feeding his enemy tailed-beast chakra.
This wasn't Kotoamatsukami.
Not persuasion.
Not a gentle rewrite that let the target live a normal life while believing it was their own will.
This was deeper.
Algorithmic.
A genjutsu scaffold anchored directly into the brain, reinforced with Yin–Yang principles, operating on preset rules long after the caster withdrew.
Persistent enough to endure distance.
Crude compared to true autonomy of control, but terrifying in its efficiency, and far beyond what even standard Mangekyō genjutsu could achieve.
"So that's how you did it," he muttered.
Kimimaro kept his eyes on Yagura.
In the original timeline, this man had died during the uprising.
The resistance most likely killed him, the Three-Tails dispersed, and the beast respawned somewhere else later, far from anyone's control.
But that had never really made sense.
If Obito wanted efficiency, he could have taken Yagura at any point.
Kamui him away. Extract the Three-Tails directly into the Gedō Statue. Clean. Immediate.
So why didn't he?
The only answer that held was intent.
Obito wanted the process of the tailed-beast collection itself to be dragged out as long as possible, for some reason.
Delay wasn't an accident; it was a design.
And the idea that Obito had been unaware of the coup, so he didn't know it when Yagura died, was also laughable.
He'd just proven the opposite. Perfect timing.
Immediate response. Calm observation until the exact moment intervention was required.
With the White Zetsu network, the most pervasive intelligence web in the world, especially concentrated around his own long-term base, Kirigakure, ignorance wasn't possible.
He'd known.
He'd allowed it.
Kimimaro's gaze sharpened.
If they could strip the Three-Tails dry before Obito returned with reinforcements, that would be ideal.
Not just tactically.
Strategically.
No Three-Tails meant the Eye of the Moon Plan lost another pillar.
One less step toward the Ten-Tails.
One less future where Obito or Madara stood as its jinchūriki.
Fewer rivals.
A clearer path upward.
Kimimaro didn't need tailed beasts for his own growth.
His trajectory had never depended on them.
He had other methods, cleaner ones.
All that mattered was execution.
Even partial extraction mattered.
Draining enough chakra would delay the Three-Tails' rebirth.
Maybe not stop it outright, but slow it. Buy time.
Because tailed beasts were not simple creatures.
They were constructs of Six Paths–level Yin–Yang Release, fragments carved from the Ten-Tails' endless chakra by Hagoromo himself. Not born. Manufactured. Designed to persist.
Which raised an uncomfortable question.
If Hagoromo truly wanted to prevent the Ten-Tails from ever returning, why leave nine regenerating pieces behind at all?
Why create entities that inevitably reformed, lingered, and could be reassembled?
Why not disperse that chakra beyond recovery, split it into countless fragments, or erase it entirely with another god-tier Yin–Yang?
The answer was obvious.
He hadn't wanted permanence.
He'd wanted recurrence.
A system that guaranteed future conflict.
Another red flag against the Sage of Six Paths' supposed benevolence.
Back to reality.
Maybe even if every drop of the Three-Tails' chakra was stripped now, it would still reform eventually.
That much was certain.
Hagoromo's design ensured it.
But regeneration took time, and delaying it was enough.
And if Obito interfered before the process finished, then delaying that future rebirth was still a win. After all, who knew when it would happen?
It could take decades, barring yet another of Hagoromo's unpredictable, conveniently timed interventions to restore the "plot", or a similar logic.
Also, the Three-Tails was a smaller fraction of the Ten-Tails' whole.
Akatsuki didn't need perfection.
They'd already proven fragments were enough, even of the strongest two beasts, literally.
White Zetsu would eventually find the beast wherever it reformed, even if it was imperfect, still at the time.
Kimimaro wouldn't.
His sensory reach was vast, but not infinite.
And sensing at that scale burned chakra fast.
Obito, meanwhile, could drown the world in White Zetsu without cost.
Which meant this was the window. Now.
Every second Reika held the chains mattered.
And even if it failed, it was still worth doing.
Kimimaro's awareness stretched outward.
The village was already shifting.
Outside the tower, the shadow clones they'd prepared in advance had merged into the chaos, striking Yagura's loyalists at pressure points, breaking formations, disrupting command.
At the same time, the hundred elite Jashinists surged in disciplined waves, moving in ritual formations, their collective output amplified by fūinjutsu lattices and shared timing.
Where Mei's forces stalled, they punched through.
Where resistance stiffened, it collapsed.
Key districts fell in sequence.
Kimimaro sent a tight sensory pulse to Emi's shadow clones.
Now.
They moved immediately, spreading the truth they'd confirmed.
Captured officials. High-ranking shinobi.
The same Yin–Yang residue threaded through their brains.
Proof, not rumors.
As the information spread, something cracked.
Units hesitated.
Orders faltered.
Shinobi began turning on commanders.
Switching sides.
Laying down arms.
Momentum flipped.
Mei had already framed it cleanly.
Publicly, this was outside support she'd secured on her own terms.
A deal. Reinforcements. Nothing more.
She buried the uglier truths.
The dozens he'd erased before.
The reality of who was actually shaping the outcome.
That was fine.
Kimimaro had no intention of stepping into the light yet.
A proper villain didn't announce himself before the foundation set.
You embedded first.
You let the system grow dependent.
You let order stabilize around you.
Only then did you decide how much of yourself to reveal.
Mei's approval was enough for now.
From his perspective, it was simple.
Titles and authority were noise.
When something vast and undeniable entered a woman's life, she didn't crave control over it.
She leaned into it. Relied on it.
Let it shoulder the weight she'd been carrying alone.
Not to mention, as a leader, she should be intelligent enough to understand the futility of opposing someone like him, even if others did not.
The rest? Those who couldn't accept the new order?
Kirigakure didn't need them.
Neither did the world.
His Jashinist internal order would handle what remained.
Quietly. Efficiently.
And if that wasn't enough, one look from Akane's eyes, or a seal from Reika keyed to detonate without an antidote, would settle the matter.
The village was falling into alignment.
Exactly as planned.
The only problem left was Akatsuki.
Kimimaro turned back to the girls, expression already settled.
"We don't fight them here," he said. "Not in the center of the village."
They understood immediately.
"Start layering the Yin–Yang seal," he continued. "The prepared one. This entire office."
Reika moved first, hands already weaving. Emi followed, precise and silent. Saya adjusted the formation, feeding intent into the structure. Akane watched the perimeter, eyes sharp.
The seal spread through the walls, the floor, the air itself, not aggressive, not loud, just wrong in a way that made space unstable.
Teleporting into it would be a mistake. Anyone who tried would arrive compromised, distorted, already carrying a liability they couldn't shake.
Exactly what Kimimaro wanted.
If Akatsuki came here anyway, that was their problem.
But he had no intention of letting a clash of monsters tear apart what was already his.
The real fight would need to happen outside.
Kimimaro judged that they had more than enough time.
After all, he knew Obito couldn't simply make the Akatsuki appear here instantly.
He would first have to locate them across their scattered positions worldwide, relying on White Zetsu reports that were never truly instantaneous.
And even then, there was no guarantee that his Kamui gaze had a sufficiently close spatial anchor prepared to retrieve every one of them immediately.
After that came the harder part. One by one, he would have to approach them, deal with them directly, 'convince' them to move, and pull them through Kamui, essentially forcing a group of volatile S-rank criminals to act in unison, on his timetable, toward an unknown battlefield. Many of them would be meeting him face-to-face for the first time, not just within Akatsuki, but in their entire lives, and none of them were the kind to accept orders lightly.
That alone guaranteed a delay.
People with egos like theirs didn't respond quickly, quietly, or cleanly to being summoned on short notice in any universe without some friction.
Kimimaro didn't need to imagine it in detail.
He already knew.
Even if Obito leaned on Nagato as a figurehead to accelerate the process at the outset.
Even if Kimimaro knew that not all of Akatsuki had joined by choice, it also meant they likely wouldn't have much of a choice in coming here either.
That was obvious enough.
Being labeled S-rank criminal sounded grand, but the moment you actually became a missing-nin, you lost your village's protection while staying on its kill list.
Hunted, isolated, and stripped of support, you were suddenly easy to corner.
At that point, Akatsuki didn't need to 'convince' you much to join their cause.
It just had to offer you a "protection" in a way that made refusal pointless.
Yet again, Kimimaro also knew that this process would still take some time.
Which meant there was a window.
So the order was simple.
First, lay the trap here, just in case.
Second, move Yagura out of the village and use him as bait to draw the fight out there.
And after securing the last pockets of Kirigakure's resistance, raise the prepared barriers across the village itself, sealing it off and protecting it from whatever fight would unfold outside.
Kimimaro was already moving ahead.
He sent precise sensory directives through the network to his shadow clones outside as the last pockets of Kirigakure's resistance collapsed.
Everything shifted into the next phase.
Jashinist formations were rerouted.
Their clones fanned out in disciplined patterns.
Reika's shadow clones took priority control, synchronizing seals and relays.
Mei's forces were redirected without hesitation, joined by loyalists who had already surrendered and been folded into the chain of command.
All of them began laying barriers.
Not hastily. Not reactively.
Layered, overlapping, massive formations spread across the village, designed to absorb shock, disperse residual chakra, and seal off collateral damage.
This fight would not happen here. Kirigakure would not be turned into a battlefield for monsters.
Whatever was coming would be forced outside.
And when it arrived, the village would already be braced for it.