The corridor stopped being a corridor and became a fight.
Kagetsu felt it happen through the mark before his eyes caught up — the gold overlay pulsing once, hard, like something had just tested the weight of the decoy and found it convincing.
Six copies fanned out along the walls.
Three more unfolded behind them, wet-eyed, wrong-jointed, already moving.
The doorway itself had gone from flickering to steady, wide open now in a way it hadn’t been even at completion, maroon light pouring out around each new arrival like the space behind it had simply stopped bothering to hide how big it actually was.
---
There was no room to retreat and no time to plan one.
Kagetsu pressed his back against the nearest wall, watching four separate fights break out in the same twenty feet of corridor, all of them somehow slower and faster than they should have been at once — the copies moved with that same half-second lag, but they moved constantly, without the pauses a real body needed to breathe or reset its footing.
It made them exhausting to track and impossible to predict.
---
Orochimaru met the first one with a kunai instead of a hand.
The blade opened a line across its shoulder — no blood, just a soft give, like cutting into something half-set — and the copy folded around the wound instead of flinching from it, its shape swimming into a slightly different configuration of the same wrongness.
"Confirmed," Orochimaru said, stepping back into guard. "Cutting doesn’t stop them. It just gives them somewhere new to be wrong."
"Then don’t cut them," the figure said, driving an elbow through a second copy’s chest and shouldering past the mess it left behind. "Redirect. Push them back through the door if you can. Don’t let them linger near any of you."
Minato hadn’t moved from Kushina’s side, but his free hand had a kunai out now too, angled, waiting.
"Define linger," he said.
---
[Talent Card: Divergent Expression]
World: Naruto
Quality: Epic
Effect: Collective bio-processing intelligence, distributed across the colony
Status: Active — Combat Monitoring
Report:
— Doorway signatures: 34, holding — no new arrivals in the last twelve seconds
— Copies currently engaged: 4
— New observation: copies that make sustained contact (2+ seconds) with a target show a measurable shift toward that target’s own signature afterward
— Assessment: proximity is not the danger. Contact duration is.
"That’s it," Kagetsu said, reading it fast. "That’s what ’count you twice’ means. They’re not attacking us. They’re — copying us. Sampling."
The figure’s head turned, just slightly, mid-strike.
"Now you’re actually close to right," it said. "Small comfort."
---
A copy broke from the wall and came straight for Kagetsu.
Not fast. Not clumsy either — deliberate, the half-second-delay in its eyes the only warning he’d get before it closed the distance and did whatever "sampling" actually looked like up close.
He didn’t have a weapon out.
He hadn’t needed one all night, and some distant, still-functioning part of his brain flagged that as a mistake he was about to pay for.
Orochimaru was three steps away, mid-exchange with another copy, too far.
The figure was on the far side of the corridor, back turned, fighting for its own footing.
---
Kagetsu’s arm moved before he told it to.
The gold overlay flared along the mark, and his hand came up in a shape he’d never practiced, palm out, fingers spread — an interception, not a strike, more instinct borrowed than instinct earned.
The copy’s outstretched hand met his palm.
Contact.
One second.
---
The world tilted sideways into something that wasn’t quite sight.
Kagetsu saw himself from outside his own body for half a heartbeat — kneeling in Ch. 335, mark spreading up his jaw; standing at the seal in Ch. 336, watching Kushina’s palm meet the door; every version of the last two weeks compressed and running backward through something that was reading him the way the colony read a chakra sample, fast and total and utterly without permission.
It didn’t hurt, which was somehow the worst part.
It felt organized. Patient. Like a filing system finding the right drawer.
Two seconds.
"Kagetsu." The figure’s voice, distant, sharper than he’d heard it all night. "Break contact. Now."
He tried to pull his hand back and found, for one bad half-second, that the instruction and the ability to follow it weren’t the same thing — his arm answering a half-beat slow, exactly the way the copies’ eyes did, like whatever was reading him had started reading his reflexes too.
---
He wrenched his hand back.
The copy staggered, its face — for one instant — resolving into something almost coherent, almost him, the wrongness of its proportions correcting toward Kagetsu’s own features before sliding back into its usual mismatch.
[Talent Card: Divergent Expression]
Alert — Partial Signature Transfer Detected
Report:
— Contact duration: approximately 1.8 seconds
— Copy’s signature: shifted 12% toward Kagetsu’s own profile
— Kagetsu’s signature: no measurable loss detected
— Assessment: the shift is one-directional and cumulative. A second full contact would likely push the copy past 50% match.
"Fifty percent," Kagetsu said, breathing hard. "That’s — that’s not sampling. That’s becoming."
"Yes," the figure said, finally turning enough to look at him. "That’s exactly what it is."
---
"Then what happens at a hundred," Kushina said, voice tight.
The figure didn’t answer right away.
It drove the copy nearest it back through the doorway threshold with both hands, hard, and only then turned fully toward the group, breathing for the second time that night — not from exertion, Kagetsu was fairly sure, but from something closer to dread.
"At a hundred," it said, "it isn’t a copy anymore."
"Say the rest of it," Orochimaru said.
"At a hundred, it’s you. Fully. Standing in the doorway instead of you standing here." The figure’s ash-red half caught the corridor light at an ugly angle. "And there is no version of that where the original gets a vote."
No one said anything for a moment.
Kagetsu flexed the hand that had made contact, half expecting it to feel different, and found it didn’t — which somehow felt like its own kind of warning, the absence of any obvious damage more unsettling than pain would have been.
"How many contacts before something like that’s even possible," he asked. "Realistically."
"Depends on the length of each one," the figure said. "Yours was under two seconds and it still moved the needle twelve percent. Do the math you don’t want to do."
Orochimaru already had.
"Four, maybe five sustained contacts," he said. "Less if they get smarter about holding on."
"They will," the figure said. "They always get smarter. That’s the part nobody warns you about."
For a moment the corridor actually went quiet — not calm, just paused, the way a fight sometimes stalls itself out on the edge of its next escalation. The copies that had been pushed back near the doorway drifted rather than charged, circling at a distance, watching with those half-second-delayed eyes like they were waiting for something the group couldn’t see yet.
Kagetsu used the pause to look down at his own arm.
The gold overlay hadn’t faded. If anything it looked steadier now than it had right after the transfer, settled in the way a bruise settles into its final color instead of still spreading.
"Is it always going to look like this," he asked. "Or does it fade once we’re clear."
The figure didn’t answer that one either, and this time the silence felt less like reluctance and more like it genuinely didn’t know.
---
Nine more copies unfolded from the dark all at once, the doorway behind them flaring wide open, wider than it had been all Chapter.
Kagetsu’s mark burned gold down to the wrist.
Kushina’s grip found Minato’s hand this time, first time all night she’d reached for him instead of the other way around.
Orochimaru fell back half a step, recalculating, the kunai in his hand suddenly looking less like a weapon and more like the wrong tool for a problem that had just changed shape.
The figure didn’t retreat.
It planted itself squarely between the new wave and the rest of them, and for the first time all night it looked less like something ancient and patient and more like something that had done this exact math before and hated the answer every time.
"Nobody makes contact again," it said. "Not once. Not for any reason."
It didn’t look back at them when it said the rest.
Its eyes stayed forward, counting, the way Kagetsu imagined it had been counting things far larger and far worse long before tonight.
"Because I only just now noticed there are forty-one of them," it said, "and I count nine that already know exactly whose face they’re wearing."
---
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