Kimimaro's fevered skin had beads of sweat gathered at his temples. Every instinct screamed at him, warning him of the invisible death lingering just inches away. In this sealed subterranean expanse, Sasori's insidious poisonous smoke is a death sentence. A whiff of the purple poison, meant agonizing paralysis followed by a slow death.
To counter this, Kimimaro had encased his entire frame in dense reinforced full-body bone armor designed to lock out the poison smoke. But this defensive maneuver had a devastating catch: sealed tight inside his own calcified shell, he was completely cut off from oxygen.
The more he exerted himself, the faster his muscles burned through stamina, which in turn accelerated his chakra consumption. He was running a desperate race against his own failing defense.
Sasori let out a mechanical chuckle. "Looks like you are in a deadlock," the puppet master droned, his voice sounding like shifting gears. "I guess this is the end of you. I will leave you to your slow death."
Without sparing another glance, Sasori began to turn away, resuming his hunt for Orochimaru. He knew from experience that his target's underlings were stubbornly tight-lipped... warped by devotion, much like Kabuto, who never uttered a word about his master until when the memory cursed seal was forcefully used. Sasori assumed the boy before him was merely another disposable pawn waiting for his final moments.
Kimimaro was at a massive disadvantage. Or was he?
He slammed both hands flat against the ground. A full-scale Dance of the Seedling Fern: Bloom was entirely out of the question; summoning tens of thousands of bone spires across the entire underground expanse would require an ocean of chakra. He couldn't afford that luxury.
"Dance of the Seedling Fern: Mini!" Kimimaro muttered under his breath.
Instantly, a single towering pillar of dense white bone erupted from beneath Sasori's feet. However, the puppet master sensed the subtle shift in tectonic pressure below and gracefully leaped backward, dodging the unannounced attack.
"You are really quick on your feet," Kimimaro remarked, as he pointed his finger upward toward the apex of the massive bone pillar, which was tearing relentlessly through the stone ceiling of the underground cave, punching straight through to the surface world above.
A shift in air pressure created a powerful updraft. Like a gigantic vacuum, the funneling air swept up the purple smoke, sucking the lethal poison out through the newly formed breach and venting it outside.
"Am I still at a disadvantage?" Kimimaro challenged, lowering his finger pointing at the bone pillar.
Sasori paused... his expression hidden behind the facade of his puppet, though his mechanical joints creaked in visible surprise. "I take back my words... you are no ordinary lackey. Are you the next vessel of Orochimaru? You certainly deserve to be sent to the pure world with own my hands."
Kimimaro felt a fleeting warmth in his heart at the mention of being Orochimaru's vessel... an honor he would have gladly died for. But deep down, he knew he was the second option.
As the last wisp of purple poison vanished through the hole overhead, Kimimaro dissolved the bone casing around his head. He inhaled a deep lung-bursting gasp of fresh air, feeling his oxygen-starved muscles and protesting internal organs flood with renewed vitality. There was no time to savor the relief.
Moving with blinding speed, Kimimaro extended his arm straight toward his opponent, thrusting his palm forward as a barrage of sharp bone tips sprouted rapidly from his fingertips.
"Wind Style: Great Homing Finger Bullets!"
The projectile bones launched forward at hypersonic speeds, tearing through. Sasori reacted instantly as he swung his iron-studded tail of his Hiruko puppet upward to form an impenetrable shield.
But Kimimaro wasn't relying solely on momentum as he threaded invisible strands of his own wire-like osseous tissue as he manipulated the trajectory of the bone bullets mid-flight, curving them around the tail. The projectiles struck shattering Hiruko into a worthless pieces of splinter.
With a fluid motion, Sasori leaped out of the collapsing shell of his ruined puppet as a dark hooded cloak now draped over his shoulders, casting a shadow across his face.
Kimimaro stared, genuinely surprised to realize that the fearsome massive entity he had been trading blows with was nothing more than an other puppet.
"There is no one alive who got to see my true face and was left alive," Sasori whispered dragging the hood down, revealing the eternally youthful and porcelain face.
His fingers twitched against his chakra strings. The arm of the Third Kazekage puppet... his most prized masterpiece... suddenly unlatched, snapping open into several compartments packed with intricate summoning seals.
In a flash, a terrifying swarm of long flexible puppet arms erupted forward. They bent and twisted like a nest of serpents, pursuing Kimimaro with relentless devastating force until they slammed into him, crushing his White Knight defense and sending debris flying everywhere.
"Bone Clone Technique," Kimimaro grunted, reforming his stance as his clone dissolved into calcium dust from the force of thousands of mechanical hands.
He was visibly struggling now, the intensity of the battle was taxing every ounce of his stamina. He not only had to dance around without a single scratch from Sasori's countless hidden blades, but he also had to contend with overwhelming area-of-effect nightmare techniques.
Sasori detached the entire multi-armed assembly from the Kazekage puppet to restore its mobility, allowing a whirring buzzsaw to take the place in its stead. The mechanical saw spun with a shrieking whine, lunging forward to cut Kimimaro clean in half.
Kimimaro concentrated his chakra, rapidly condensing his bone tissue beneath his skin to forge a dense heavy warhammer. He swung it with all his might to parry the oncoming blade, sending a shower of sparks flying.
The buzzsaw tore away from the Kazekage's arm, returning to a neutral position as Sasori's eyes narrowed. The puppet master was beginning to realize: he could no longer hope to crush this resilient adversary with standard mechanical tricks. Up until now, he had deliberately held back his ultimate trump card... his signature Iron Sand... saving its full destructive for his target, Orochimaru. But looking at the fierce determination burning in Kimimaro's eyes, Sasori knew he had no other choice.
"Iron Sand Gathering Assault," Sasori muttered with confidence.
Dark swirling clouds of magnetic sand erupted from the puppet's seals. The technique instantly supercharged the density and hardness of the iron sand, fusing it together into a gigantic, steel-like weapon that hovered ominously in the air... it's immense weight and crushing size were staggering; it possessed enough destructive force to effortlessly shatter anything and smash through virtually any defense known to the shinobi world.
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