The Eyes of the Predator

Approaching the sealed cavern, Kamui's eyes narrow as she feels traces of malevolent chakra emanating from the seal. Her instincts cried out for combat, to crush the being on the other side.

'What is this feeling? Why am I feeling like this?' she thought.

In front of the two Kunoichi was a large boulder blocking the only entrance to the cavern. Seal markings decorated it like an elaborate work of art showing the level of effort Orochimaru put in to keeping the girl in.

"Wow… this is an interesting sealing matrix. It's kind of like the revolving doors they have at the hospital, except with earth." Kamui mutters with awe, surprised that the snake would have such an interesting seal on his person.

"Is it safe to enter without destroying it?" Yugao asked, not too interested in the complexities of sealing.

"It is. Funny enough, I don't see any traps in place. I don't think he had enough time to create something more complex on the inside. This whole thing was an unexpected mistake after all. It would only be concerning if we didn't have the password the scientists so graciously gifted us." Kamui replied.

Even at this distance, they could hear the screams of the still living scientists. It seemed like Reina was running some experiments of her own, blowing off steam as it were.

"Then, let's get inside. We've been delayed long enough." Yugao ordered.

"Right." Kamui affirmed.

With that, Kamui ran through the hand signs she had seen in the scientists' memories. It was a set of fifty hand signs that served to mould the chakra properly for the seal and acted as an active password that would be nearly impossible to guess. While she had an idea of how to circumvent it without the hand signs, that would be unnecessarily risky and a waste of time.

Once the final seal was complete, she placed both hands on the boulder and channeled the chakra in the same manner she saw the scientists do in their memories. With that, a small space big enough for two people opened in the rock. It didn't go all the way through, just a few feet in.

Once they stepped inside, the rock closed behind them and they were pushed through the inside of a rock in a similar manner to a syringe. With that, they were on the other side and immediately noticed the difference.

The inside of the cavern was a mess. Craters littered the landscape, dried blood caked the walls, and bone fragments were like gravel on the ground. The air was a maelstrom of twisted blackish-red chakra that slowly stiffened their bodies. It almost felt like the chakra itself could petrify their bodies, even if not to the same level as how Orochimaru described the snake currently merged with Naga."

Quickly, Kamui's body was covered in a thin layer of chakra, shielding her from the petrifying energy. Yugao was not so lucky. To keep herself safe, she was constantly pushing copious amounts of chakra to different parts of her body, forcing out the malevolent energy.

Glancing toward her prodigious student, Yugao gave her a bitter look.

"I can see why you wanted us to stay out of this. This chakra is ridiculous, and she hasn't even started actively using it yet." Yugao softly stated.

"Yeah. It's something that requires a special skill set. Be careful back here. Her attacks will likely be long reaching. I'll leave a shadow clone to help you expel some of this chakra." Kamui explained.

A moment later, a shadow clone popped up next to her and walked to stand by her sensei.

"Right. Be careful out there." Yugao warmly reminded, receiving a nod from her.

Steadily, Kamui walked toward her target, examining the room's layout to get the best grasp of the interior possible before their clash. As she got closer, Naga's sleeping form could be seen behind the storm of chakra.

The sleeping girl looked to be about fifteen feet tall, completely eclipsing Kamui's own height by almost three times. Her arms were still covered in thin black scales, while her legs had fully become the lower body of a snake. Between her scales, a scarlet red energy could be seen. Of her upper body, her breasts were covered by a convenient strapless scale-like bra, leaving the rest exposed to show a human-like pale-white-skinned upper body and face. Her lavender-colored hair draped down her body like silky curtains, falling just below her waist.

Feeling the approaching presence, her eyes snapped open, revealing the same vertical rectangular-shaped pupils Kamui had seen, but with scarlet red irises glowing at an intensity far greater than before. Her hair also started bundling up into the same snakes she had seen during their last encounter. Layered hissing sounds could be heard from the nest of hair.

"From the hostile posturing, I'm assuming you're not yourself?" She asked, not having much hope of a peaceful resolution.

She made sure not to look Naga in the eyes. If Naga's petrification was tied to her dojutsu as the intel described, then making visual contact with her eyes would be foolish. Even if it only stunned her for a moment, that might be enough for the beast to kill her. Luckily, she had enough experience fighting her mother to pull something like this off.

As if to answer her earlier question, the hair snakes rose to stare at her and opened their mouths. Reddish-black chakra gathered, warning Kamui that standing still wouldn't be the best idea. A moment later, the chakra beam fired.

Before they could reach, Kamui glanced to a point behind Naga and teleported. Where she once stood, the beam collided and washed over the rock like a torrent of black blood. The sound of the impact was like the crashing of a wave. It left little traces of its presence in this rocky cavern.

Regaining her bearing, Kamui noticed a lack of the explosion she'd normally expect with an emanation of that much chakra. Quickly glancing at her previous locations, she didn't notice anything significantly different, but she knew better.

'If I let that hit me, I'll be getting a place in Konoha's art museum…' She thought, flashing to the next location to dodge another wave of petrifying chakra.

Seeing how ineffective her attacks were, the monster lunged forward at a speed putting Yugao to shame.

Kamui barely had time to react, much less teleport. It was one of the lessons she learned while sparring with her sensei. Teleport dodging isn't too effective if she had to do it constantly. It's too easy to lose her spatial orientation. Instead, she teleported to far points of the cavern, dropping marked kunais in the process, while measuring the beast's approaching speed.

This happened for about three minutes until Kamui had enough Kunai in the room, so she didn't have to rely so much on her eyes.

With that phase done, she created five reinforced shadow clones and ordered them to different parts of the room.

Looking around through her snakes, the beast let out a wicked smile and let out a piercing scream, causing the structure around them to shake and the group of Kamuis to hold their ears in pain. Her ears were more sensitive than average, so this hurt even more than it would for most. If it weren't for Orochimaru's seal, the whole cavern would be in ruins, though it seemed the beast accounted for that.

Capitalizing on her distraction, the beast appeared in front of the real Kamui in a heartbeat and swatted her into a wall. Before it could give chase however, it felt a wave of searing heat as four searing stakes of metal pinned her to the ground.

Behind it, two of the clones Kamui previously created stood with focused expressions. They had capitalized on the beast's distraction and successfully used a combination jutsu between steel release and scorch release. The challenge was reinforcing the metal to be resilient enough to retain its structure for just long enough to stab into the target. Beyond that….

A piercing scream echoed in the cavern as the molten stakes melted into the beast's body.

"Yes!" The two Kamui clones cheered. Although this looked brutal, the beast would regenerate. The scientists' memories testified to that fact. The joy was short lived however, as they suddenly dispelled without warning. Purple fumes could be seen pouring out of the beast's convulsing body.

Back to where the original Kamui had landed, she was just starting to get out of the rock.

'Man, that was brutal. I knew she could hit hard, but that was ridiculous.' She thought, spitting out a few rocks that had found themselves in her mouth from the impact.

["It's to be expected. You should probably focus on why your clones dispelled though."] Yume commented, glad that her presence boosted her host's regeneration. Otherwise, she might have to carry two broken arms for the rest of the mission, which wasn't ideal. In this case, they wouldn't be functional for the rest of this fight but would only take a few days to heal with the injuries sustained. The problem they would deal with later was that Kamui would probably need to fight without her arms due to the quick pace of this mission, which was extremely dangerous. Still, it was extremely lucky that Kamui managed to block that strike with her bracers as fast as she did or that blow would have been a whole lot worse. If it weren't for her frequent spars with fast opponents, she wouldn't have been able to react in time and might have even sustained fatal damage.

'I'm going to take a guess and assume it has something to do with the stakes we shoved in her hide.' Kamui thought, feeling as if she was fighting back in the poisonous forest.

["That's a good point. Reina did say that Kocho blood is toxic. Those molten stakes must have released some into the atmosphere. That poses a problem though. How will you get close?"]

'Honestly, I don't think getting close is an option. Yume, can you have one of my clones keep up a constant air current to push the toxins into a corner of the room? If I play this next part right, the fight should be just about settled.' Kamui asked.

["Of course."] Yume affirmed, following her instructions.

Near the center of the cavern, the beast was still roaring in pain from the molten liquid it could feel searing its insides. Before it could gain its clarity, large roots of silvery-white wood extended out of the ground, binding it in place, one of which pinned its head to stare straight in front of it.

A silvery-white flash later and Kamui stood a safe distance in front of the beast, glaring at its eyes with her sharingan. A wooden tendril raised to sit upon her hand, connecting her with the binding that held the beast in place.

With the wooden tendrils in place, the beast felt its chakra being drained into them, preventing it from directing enough to form the beams. If Naga was in control, this whole fight would have been a lot harder. In fact, she'd probably have made better use of her Kocho bloodline.

This beast was just running on instinct though, functioning in a similar manner to a jinchuriki's second stage. If Kamui's guess was right, the beast's original form likely didn't contain any venom and hunted primarily using its strength and natural ability to petrify its prey. That's likely why it never actively used the Kocho bloodline in the encounter or any real strategy for that matter; the toxins only came into play when it was injured in a way that would release them into the atmosphere. This was much easier for Kamui to beat once she gained her bearings. She shuddered to think what a trained Kunoichi like Naga could do with full command of the power her body now wielded.

Just when Kamui was about to enter Naga's mindscape, she froze. Her body stiffened as her nerves worked against her. Every fiber of her being commanded her to be still. Her joints locked up, her muscles tensed, etc. Even her heart started slowing to a halt. She wasn't physically turning to stone, but her body was doing something similar. The beast's dojutsu petrification clearly worked differently than those beams.

In this moment, Kamui felt her first taste of something she'd yet to feel outside of the village, fear. As she felt her heart slow to a near standstill, she started to panic. She wanted to do something, anything, but the feeling of stillness consumed every nerve in her body. Still, above all else, her heartbeat rang prominently in her ears. If she couldn't figure out a solution, then it was over. The worst part, her sensei wouldn't even be able to tell that anything's wrong. She was literally standing in the position every Uchiha would be in if she had Naga in a genjutsu. The only indication was that distorted smile on the beast's face as its eyes quickly petrified her.

'No! No! No! I got careless!' She mentally screamed, unable to do so physically.

["Kamui!"] Yume shouted her name, immediately getting her attention.

'Do you have a way out of this?' She quickly asked, trying to remain as calm as she could, still hearing her heartbeat slow to a crawl.

["Push your consciousness into Naga. Force your way in there if you must. It shouldn't be able to keep petrifying you if it's unconscious. In this case, if you focus on the problem, you won't survive. I'll try using your chakra to help patch you up while you're in there. Just hurry!"] Yume quickly ordered, giving Kamui the best strategy she could come up with, which was a gamble.

There was no guaranteeing that doing this would stop the effects. There was no guaranteeing that Kamui leaving her body wouldn't make the progression quicker. It was just Yume's best guess at a solution. Still, Kamui didn't need to know that; that would only confuse her, which would slow her down, possibly to her death.

'Right!' Kamui readily agreed, glad that Yume still had the presence of mind to figure out a solution.

Focusing back on Naga's eyes, Kamui forced as much chakra as she could into her eyes and forced her spirit into the beast with every fiber of her being. If Itachi were here to witness it, he'd scold her on principle for using such a reckless spiritual charge. Not only was it dangerous to the user's optical nerves, but it also carried the risk of frying Naga's brain. The only consolation was that both Kamui and Naga were abnormal, so they'd probably be safe, especially if the contract piece works as intended.

Slowly, any form of resistance from the beast ceased as its muscles relaxed into the bindings, which tightened to further restrain any potential future movements. The clones worked to pull out the molten beams from the beast's body and created fresh steel ones to bind its joints.

While Yume could have asked the clones to help Kamui, she decided against it. Regardless, Kamui needed to make eye contact with the beast to enter Naga's mindscape and it needed to be the original if the contract was going to work. Therefore, they simply needed to take this gamble unless they were willing to end Naga's life, which they weren't. Although it was foolish from a risk perspective, Yume knew her host and understood what she'd want to do if presented with the options. She just hoped this risk taking wouldn't get them into trouble in the future.

As for the original's and the beast's consciousnesses, they had moved to the inside of Naga's mindscape.