"DAMMIT, OROCHIMARU, STOP RUNNING AWAY AND FIGHT ME LIKE A MAN... ERR... snake?... Anyway, STOP RUNNING AWAY!!!"

"COULD YOU LEAVE ME ALONE!? I DON'T HAVE TIME TO HUMOR YOU; I NEED TO GET AWAY FROM THAT CRAZY WOMAN!!!"

"ALTHOUGH YOU ARE CORRECT ABOUT HER BEING CRAZY, HOW DARE YOU CALL MY GIRLFRIEND CRAZY!?"

Orochimaru's lower body was currently transformed into that of a snake's, and he was slithering away from Yuna's current position at high speed.

Closely following behind him was Anko, who used every moment she had to pile up more curses on Orochimaru while occasionally throwing a few projectiles at him, which he dodged relatively easily.

A few moments later, Orochimaru sighed in relief as he finally reached the place he was looking for. It was a wall that looked exactly like every other wall in his hideout but was somewhat special. Or, to be more precise, it was one of the only walls that were not special.

A skilled earth-style user can easily phase through normal earth, so Orochimaru naturally wouldn't allow there to be such a huge weakness in his hideout. So, every wall in his hideout was reinforced to make it pretty much impossible for someone to get through them except for a few chosen walls that could serve as emergency exits.

The wall right in front of him was one of those walls, and considering Anko's abysmal talent with earth-style, Orochimaru had no doubt that she wouldn't be able to follow him.

Without a moment of hesitation, Orochimaru gathered earth chakra and dove through the wall without distorting the earth in the slightest.

"WEREN'T YOUR SUPPOSED TO BE A SNAKE!? WHEN THE F* DID YOU TURN INTO A MOLE!?"

Although Orochimaru's face was twitching in irritation when he heard yet another curse from Anko, he decided to simply ignore it for now.

Anko sighed in annoyance when she saw Orochimaru dive into a wall and vanish. Since she came here to kill Orochimaru, she naturally predicted that he would try to run away like that, and her [Spirit Sense] was still firmly locked onto Orochimaru despite him burrowing into a wall. What annoyed her was that she couldn't follow Orochimaru without using her cultivation, something she wanted to do as little as possible to test out how far she had gotten since she met Yuna.

With another sigh of annoyance and a shrug of her shoulders, the red hue around her eyes returned, and her eyes turned crimson again. At the same time, the temperature around her body increased significantly, and her body was strengthened.

Just like Orochimaru before her, she jumped towards the wall, but unlike Orochimaru, she didn't simply disappear into it like it was liquid but pierced through it, leaving a smoldering hole of scorched earth behind.

A few moments later, Orochimaru reached the surface and sighed in relief. He wasn't sure what kind of tracking capabilities Yuna had, but he didn't believe that she could follow his tracks after he dove through the earth like he just did.

That was also why a rather ugly expression appeared on his face when the earth underneath him suddenly started rumbling. His first instinct was to continue running away, but when he felt that the air was getting hotter instead of colder, he discarded that thought for now. If there was one thing he learned about Yuna in his last few encountered with her, it was that her appearance would usually decrease the temperature, not increase it.

Moments later, a geyser exploded out of the ground a few meters away from Orochimaru, but instead of hot water, fire and molten rock shot out of it.

Anko landed a few meters away from Orochimaru with a slight smirk on her face, while she was seemingly not bothered by the molten rocks that were still dripping off of her. Meanwhile, Orochimaru could only look dumbfounded at Anko's current form. He had, of course, seen Anko use Natural Energy during the chunin exam, but when she did it, it only increased her strength by a few percent. Now, however, Anko was oozing pressure so intense that even he felt endangered by it.

Orochimaru's face twisted in anger as the combination of Anko's mocking grin, leisure posture, and all the mockery she had piled upon him up until now finally caused Orochimaru to snap.

"HOW!? HOW COULD YOU POSSIBLY REACH SUCH A HIGH LEVEL OF POWER!? WHEN I KICKED YOU OUT, YOU WERE A NOBODY!!! I THOROUGHLY TESTED YOUR POTENTIAL, AND YOU WERE SIMPLY NOT WORTH MY TIME!!! LET'S NOT EVEN TALK ABOUT SAGE MODE; THE AMOUNT OF CHAKRA YOU CURRENTLY POSSESS SHOULD HAVE BEEN IMPOSSIBLE FOR YOU TO REACH!!! HOW!? WHAT HAPPENED!? HOW IS THIS POSSIBLE!?"

Anko couldn't help but shudder in pleasure when she heard Orochimaru's crazed words. Like she previously mentioned, she barely cared about her revenge against Orochimaru anymore, but that didn't mean that she couldn't get a lot of joy from seeing him struggling like this.

While Orochimaru was ranting on and on, a benevolent expression appeared on Anko's face that caught him off guard.

"The Dao is infinite, but only by finding your own can you reach the apex."

"..."

"..."

An uncomfortable silence descended onto the battlefield, while Anko couldn't help but feel more and more awkward.

'I just wanted to mess with him a little, but it got really awkward somehow. How in the world does Yuna manage to spout nonsense like that so confidently?'

A few more seconds passed before Orochimaru started speaking again.

"Why did you suddenly start spouting nonse...*URGH*"

*BOOM*

"HAHAHA, TAKE THIS: DAO OF SUCKER PUNCH!!!"

When the still confused Orochimaru started speaking, Anko decided to take advantage of his confusion and punched him in the face.

When Anko saw him sliding over the ground face first, she couldn't help but nod in approval at her own actions.

'That worked out pretty well. In case somebody asks, I will just pretend that I was talking gibberish to distract Orochimaru so I could get a good punch in. I totally wasn't trying to copy Yuna's "I'm a wise expert" persona. Yup, totally wasn't.'

Rather than spending more thoughts on useless stuff, Anko decided to follow Orochimaru, who was still in the process of getting blasted away by her attack. It would be rather awkward to explain that Orochimaru got away because she punched him too hard, after all.