"You are, without a doubt, the strongest I have faced in quite some time," Konan declared, her voice with calm tone. "Yet, I don't recall Leaf Village ever harboring a bone Kekkei Genkai user."
Her gaze on the skeletal protrusions breaking through his skin. Her mind drifted back, pulling up a specific memory from six years ago... the day the traitor Orochimaru had defected from the Akatsuki.
"Your form brings back memories," Konan mused to herself. "Back then, Orochimaru spoke about a specialized Cursed Mark seal he was developing. Ultimately, he fled like a coward after his pathetic attempt to seize Itachi Uchiha's body failed."
"So, you must be a product of his experiments. What escapes me, however, is why a creation of his would ever align with Konoha."
Kimimaro's posture shifted as he heard the insults from Konan, his eyes darkening into a feral glare.
"You have misjudged me," Kimimaro hissed, the malice in his voice apparent. "I have no loyalty to the Leaf though few of them are to my liking, and your understanding is entirely irrelevant. More importantly... I will not tolerate anyone insulting Lord Orochimaru."
Without wasting another breath, Kimimaro unleashed his terrifying power. He slammed his hands on to the earth, channeling every ounce of his remaining chakra into his devastating technique.
"Dance of the Seedling Fern: Wild Bloom!"
The ground groaned and violently ruptured. For nearly two hundred meters in every direction, a colossal forest of pristine bone spears erupted from the bedrock, ascending rapidly toward the sky. These massive spires branched out randomly, splintering into thousands of smaller, lethal barb branches.
Konan's eyes widened. She deployed everything in her arsenal to outmaneuver the rising tide of bones. She made a flurry of explosive paper clones to intercept the expanding mass, but the sheer amount of the branching bones pierced and detonated them prematurely, filling the sky with smoke.
Suddenly, Kimimaro's form dissolved directly into the bone spear. Merging seamlessly with his creation, he swam through the dense bones forest, rapidly closing the distance to the real Konan. He burst forth from a nearby spire with terrifying speed, his hand reaching back to pull a gruesome weapon from his body.
"Dance of the Clematis: Vine!"
With a sickening tear, he ripped out his own spine, wielding it as a flexible whip. With a snap of his wrist, the bone vine coiled tightly around Konan's waist, pinning her arms and immobilizing her completely. Jerking the spine back with immense physical force, he dragged her toward him. As she fell, Kimimaro readied his thickest bone spear to deliver the killing blow.
But Konan did not panic. As the dense bone pierced her chest, her body burst apart into thousands of scattered sheets of paper. Simultaneously, half a dozen of Shino's giant parasitic insects... which had been secretly lying in wait... surged forward, blanketing the lower half of her reforming silhouette.
In an instant, the bugs devoured the lower torso. The heavily mutilated corpse of the clerk from the Bounty Association.
"Shapeshifting Technique."
~~
On the other side, Neji Hyuga stood in front of Kakuzu, his breathing heavy and uneven as he had been racking his brain, wondering what Naruto would do to overcome a monster like Kakuzu, when the impossible occurred.
Neji was certain that Kakuzu was about to finish him off, suddenly collapsed after his failed vacuum palm attack. As the dust cleared, the man's facial features began to melt away, shifting into an entirely unfamiliar countenance.
"Is this another one of his technique?" Neji thought.
He forced a surge of remaining chakra into his temples, activating his Byakugan to scan the body. The chakra signature in the corpse was completely different from the immense power Kakuzu had wielded just moments prior when Neji had struck him with his Mountain Crusher in the 2nd stage of Cursed Mark.
"Did he substitute himself when my chakra bottomed out and my Byakugan deactivated?" Neji reasoned. "If so, they couldn't have gone very far. But I can't pursue blindly. First, I need to regroup with the others." Using the last reserves of his chakra to maintain his Byakugan, Neji carefully scanned the perimeter before turning on his heel to sprint back toward Shikamaru's location.
~~
A short while later, the four-man squad successfully reunited, their eyes drawn to the terrifying, towering forest of white bones that now dominated the landscape.
Kimimaro turned his gaze toward his partner. "What happened to your opponent?"
Neji wiped a trail of sweat from his brow, his expression grim. "After I successfully crushed his Earth heart by entering the second stage of the Cursed Seal, I was completely exhausted. I thought for sure he was going to kill me. But I threw out a final Vacuum Palm in desperation, and it killed him instantly—almost as if he intentionally let it hit him. My Byakugan wasn't active during that exact window."
He pointed back toward the woods. "Once the body died, the transformation broke. It turned into someone else entirely... a face I recognize from the Bounty Association."
Kimimaro's eyes narrowed slightly. "The exact same thing happened on my end. Konan lowered my guard, using that brief moment of distraction should have been when she swapped her place with a proxy."
Shikamaru stepped forward, rubbing the back of his neck as he analyzed the data. "I was tied up dealing with three of Kakuzu's masks. I managed to force them into creating a massive smoke screen to use as a distraction, but I couldn't locate any of them. They likely used the chaos to slip away."
"Don't lose heart just yet," Shino interjected, as kikaichu insects hummed around his coat sleeves. "My insects are actively monitoring her and Kakuzu as we speak. They are currently moving rapidly toward the far west. It has only been ten minutes since they initiated their escape, and they are traveling at full speed. We can still catch them, but everyone is exhausted."
~~
A/N: Shapeshifting Technique allocates a portion of an individual's chakra to a living human sacrifice. This causes the sacrifice to become the individual's identical copy, complete with perfect imitations of the original's kekkei genkai.
The original controls their copy remotely, thus making the copy's movements and knowledge indistinguishable as well. However, the copy is limited by how much of the original's chakra they are given. Once the chakra from the original runs out, the sacrifice reverts to their own appearance and they die.
In canon, Shapeshifting technique is used by pain on Itachi and Kisame.
Now Konan and Kakuzu used it to escape. Kakuzu replaced himself after his 2nd heart (earth) was destroyed using smoke as a cover. Konan, while she was rage baiting Kimimaro.
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