When Yuna saw that her technique successfully sealed away all three of her opponents, an exhausted sigh escaped her lips as she started to clench and unclench her fists slowly.
“*Phew* as expected, clashing head-on with the Third Raikage was a terrible idea. That guy’s body is as tough as steel. I might have actually confused him for a body cultivator if it wasn’t for the total lack of Natural Energy in his body.”
Anko couldn’t help but chuckle when she heard Yuna’s words, and moments later, her hands landed on Yuna’s shoulders and started casually massaging them.
“If you knew that it was a bad idea, then why did you do it anyway?”
Yuna’s shoulders relaxed when she felt Anko’s touch before she started chuckling as well.
“Hehe, I think you know the answer to that question rather well, Anko. With someone in front of me who can clash head-on with the Hachibi, how could I possibly not confront him directly? Wouldn’t that be terrible rude?”
Instead of answering, Anko only rolled her eyes at Yuna’s weird sense of what was considered rude and what wasn’t. By now, she has gotten rather used to the occasional weirdness in Yuna’s behavior, after all.
A few minutes of comfortable silence later, Yuna resumed speaking.
“By the way, how did your little scuffle with Orochimaru go?”
“Meh, pretty annoying. As expected, he was ridiculously slippery, and without my breakthrough, he would have probably gotten away again. Well, in the end, I still burned him to a crisp, which felt rather lovely.”
Yuna glanced at Anko from the corner of her eyes before nodding her head in acknowledgment.
“I see; I noticed that something about you felt a little different, so that must be it, I guess. I wasn’t expecting that killing Orochimaru would still have such a positive effect on you.”
For a split-second…no, for less than a split second, Anko’s face became slightly awkward. An average person would have never noticed that, but Yuna was a completely different case.
She instantly noticed that something happened that Anko would rather hide from her, so how could she not get curious about it?
Yuna glanced at Anko and met her eyes resulting in Anko’s eyebrows twitching in irritation. The moment she met eyes with Yuna, she knew that it was her loss and the smirk that appeared on Yuna’s face moments later confirmed that notion.
“Come on, Anko, spit it out, what happened?”
“Nothing.”
Yuna couldn’t help but chuckle at Anko’s blunt denial and started pondering what kind of event Anko might want to hide from her.
Honestly, there wasn’t much that Yuna thought Anko wouldn’t want her to know, and after thinking about it some more, Yuna felt that she might have come up with a good theory.
‘Considering she was fighting Orochimaru, someone who she considered her worst enemy for quite a long time and that she made a breakthrough a short while ago, the chances are pretty high that she finished the whole fight with a flashy move. Additionally, she already said that she burned him to a crisp which supports my previous guess. In conclusion, she might have gotten carried away and said a few things she would usually have not said. Or, to be more precise, she finally realized the true power of giving a technique a proper, awe-inspiring name.’
A smirk appeared on Yuna’s face that immediately sent shivers down Anko’s spine.
“Hehe, it seems you have finally awakened to the truth of the world, Anko. Only by giving your techniques proper names can you reach the apex! How could you possibly defeat your enemies with attacks that don’t even have the intentions of piercing the heavens in their name!? That’s just ridiculous!”
A pained groan escaped Anko’s mouth when she heard Yuna’s declaration, but she decided to comment no further on it. However, she started making plans to bribe Yuna to not tell anyone about her using the Yuna-style naming sense for her attack.
Yet again, silence covered the room the duo was currently in before it was broken by one of Yuna’s clones that entered the cave with an excited smile on its face.
Anko couldn’t help but be interested in the clone’s sudden appearance as well since she had no clue why Yuna bothered sending out a clone to search Orochimaru’s base.
However, the clone didn’t say a single word and only approached the real Yuna’s with a smirk on its face, handed her a scroll, and then disappeared, while the real Yuna quickly stowed the scroll away in one of her seals, causing Anko to frown.
“What was in that scroll, Yuna? I don’t think Orochimaru would have anything that could actually get you interested.”
“Don’t worry about it, Anko. It’s just that I saw Orochimaru use a technique I got rather curious about, so I decided to grab it while I was here. As for which one it is, that is a surprise for later, hehe.”
Anko couldn’t help but raise her eyebrows when she heard Yuna’s answer. She thought back to all the techniques Yuna saw Orochimaru use so far, but no matter how hard she thought about it, nothing appeared in her mind that could interest Yuna.
After pondering about it some more, Anko simply shrugged her shoulders in disinterest. Since Yuna said that it would be a surprise, she decided just to wait and see.
“Anyway, how about we get out of here? Even though Orochimaru is dead, the atmosphere in his hideouts still gives me the creeps.”
Yuna nodded her head in acknowledgment at Anko’s question and was just about to teleport them back to Konoha when she remembered something else.
“By the way, do you want to get the credit for killing Orochimaru, Anko?”
Anko was slightly taken aback by Yuna’s sudden question, but she simply shook her head a short moment later.
“Nah, that would be a hassle. I bet Tsunade would keep nagging us for days if she heard about us sneaking out and killing Orochimaru, so let’s hide it instead. It seriously isn’t worth the trouble.”
Yuna nodded in agreement and gathered some chakra to make a total of ten ice clones appear in the vicinity. Nine of them transformed into random thugs and ran off, and the remaining one stayed behind to… modify the battlefield a little. Meanwhile, Yuna grabbed Anko’s shoulder and teleported away.
A few minutes later, shouts of joy echoed through Orochimaru’s hideout as hundreds of people that were trapped inside cages were freed. After they felt gigantic amounts of battle intent and chakra flooding over them, they thought their last day had come, but now all of them celebrated their freedom and the person responsible for killing Orochimaru, the one who tormented them for such a long time.
“SOMEONE FINALLY KILLED OROCHIMARU; WE ARE FINALLY FREE!!!”
“PRAISE OUR SAVIOR, SASUKE UCHIHA-SAMA!!!”
Meanwhile, Sasuke was still knocked out on his bed and was twisting and turning in an attempt to get away from the bizarre form of Orochimaru that was chasing after him in all its glory.
By now, its eyebrows became even bushier, its bowl-cut even shinier, its green suit even tighter, and to put a cherry on top of the whole picture, a ridiculously long tongue was extending out of its mouth and was wiggling around in a rather disgusting manner.
In conclusion, despite being praised as a hero by quite a few people right now, Sasuke wasn’t having a good time at all.
