Chapter 313 - 313: Hashirama Meets a Deadlier Scientist

Orochimaru's young vessel braced as Hashirama's regenerated fist tore through the clearing again, pulverizing stone and uprooting trees.

Even as an Edo, the First Hokage fought like a force of nature, perhaps even more so now.

But Orochimaru backed down less and less currently.

He had already received Ryusei's support hours earlier, the moment that massive wave of chakra spread across the area, and the majority went toward him.

That pulse had flooded his coils then, restoring his reserves, stabilizing his vessel, and sharpening his senses.

Every movement since had been riding on that renewed strength as he was slowly figuring Hashirama out completely.

Orochimaru's pupils narrowed, his aura pulsed in serpentine ripples, the scaled patterns across his young skin tightening and shifting like liquid ink.

Hashirama swung a forest-sized arm again.

Orochimaru calmly slipped beneath it, twisting with inhuman fluidity.

"You're regrowing slower," he said softly. "Even for an Edo."

Hashirama's wooden ribs cracked from the strain, his eyes widening as the regeneration faltered. Orochimaru's natural energy conceptual venom had been working on him for minutes, slowly corrupting the reconstruction pattern that the Edo Tensei depended on.

And Hashirama's current body wasn't pure Edo material anymore, trading that for better performance. Tobirama had grafted real cellular tissue into him before the war, making this incarnation a half-living hybrid.

So when the accumulated damage, exhaustion, and finally that venom hit him, the real flesh burned and peeled away like any normal body would, leaving the Edo framework suddenly exposed and collapsing twice as fast.

Venom of Rebirth sank in through the regrown wood-flesh.

Chakra pathways inside the body spasmed.

Regeneration corrupted.

Cells rebuilt incorrectly.

Senjutsu poison gnawed through the reanimation formula itself.

The forest-arm exploded into splinters.

Hashirama staggered, clutching at his chest as the venom crawled deeper.

"What… is this…?" he gasped.

"Evolution," Orochimaru answered.

He darted forward, spectral multi-headed serpents flaring behind him in a ghostly ourochi coil. His fist hit Hashirama's sternum, injecting another burst of venom-laced natural energy.

Devourer's Evolution activated.

Orochimaru felt it immediately, brief flashes of Hashirama's vitality, the structure of Wood Release, the sensation of vast, stable life-force.

Temporarily unstable, but intoxicating.

Hashirama choked, half his body collapsing into dead, rotted wood.

"It seems even your legendary body can't handle the corruption of this tier," Orochimaru said quietly, almost respectfully.

The final blow came when a serpent-head lunged from behind him, biting into Hashirama's spine. The Edo body convulsed.

Then it collapsed into ash.

The reanimation simply could not stabilize under the combined assault of venom, natural energy, and structural corruption.

The binding broke. The First Hokage was gone.

Orochimaru landed lightly, exhaling a slow breath as the serpentine aura around him settled and he consumed what was available.

The faint scales across his arms dimmed, but the dragon-like poise stayed.

He turned toward the horizon and saw Ryusei.

Hovering in the distance, wrapped in warped light and collapsing gravity, crushing Hagoromo piece by piece.

It was a sight even Orochimaru had no words for.

He watched silently, studying every twist of force, every pulse of chakra, every ripple where reality bent.

Then the air snapped.

A pressure unlike anything mortal cut through the battlefield.

A colossal shadow fell from above.

Gamamaru, the Great Toad Sage, emerged from nowhere, summoned by the Sage of Six Paths' final act of spite, the last desperate trick of a dying god.

Orochimaru's expression hardened, eyes narrowing.

"So even the old frog entered the board," he murmured. "How troublesome."

He straightened, scaled aura rising again.

Because now, everything Ryusei had been fighting for was about to erupt into a new battlefield entirely.

...

Meanwhile, on the other side of the battlefield, Hagoromo's Kazuki-puppet reached its end as well.

It didn't simply fall.

It self-destructed, in the same brutal bone style it had used the entire fight.

The timing was too perfect to be a coincidence.

Even while dying, Hagoromo had clearly directed it somehow remotely with whatever scraps of spiritual energy he still had left.

The puppet ruptured from the inside, detonating in a spiral of white bone spears and ash-bone dust.

Yet Ryusei's eight allies, who had been hammering it for hours in parallel with Ryusei and Hagoromo's duel, survived almost completely unscathed.

They had drained it together, covered one another, traded roles, and ground the monster down little by little until only the shell remained.

The backlash of its destruction washed over them harmlessly, swallowed by combined defenses and coordinated timing.

Tobirama, however, was not so lucky.

He had been fighting alongside Kazuki, helping it pressure the eight.

The moment he saw it erupt, he made the only logical move.

He flicked his fingers, Flying Raijin activation.

Escape.

But in that exact fraction of a second, before the jutsu fully triggered, he felt something slip into his back.

A thin wave of particles, almost like dust, but colder and wrong.

He reacted instantly, but it was already too late.

He finally understood only as his body began to unravel:

Ryusei had freed his hands for a moment, just enough to act, while dissolving what remained of Hagoromo.

And in that sliver of time, Ryusei had sent microscopic fragments of himself across the battlefield, riding the natural energy vibrations in the air.

Those fragments carried microscopic Truth-Seeking Orb shards, invisible even to Tobirama's sharpened senses when he was distracted.

They slipped inside his Edo body from behind, erased the seal matrix, and began devouring him from the core outward.

A familiar voice drifted across the field, calm, amused, merciless.

"Even you… The biggest cockroach in shinobi history… eventually run out of lives."

Tobirama gritted his teeth, trying to stabilize the Edo frame, but the truth-seeking fragments ate every binding formula they touched.

"You lasted longer than most," Ryusei's voice added, almost respectful in its cruelty. "But your persistence ends here."

The last thing Tobirama felt was his body collapsing into silent dust, his consciousness fading into a blank void.

In the end, even he couldn't outmaneuver a predator who fought on every invisible layer, physical, spiritual, and conceptual, all at once.

...

Meanwhile, just as the others converged on the shattered plains outside Konoha, which could even be described as a wasteland, where Gamamaru was dropped and now stood before Ryusei alone, the ancient toad finally moved. Its heavy eyelids lifted, seemingly revealing tired eyes that still carried a depth older than any village.