Under cover of night, a huge wooded plain stretched out in all sorts of shades of gray and black. As far as one could see, trees stood close together, leaf bordered on leaf, branch on branch. If the top leaves of the treetops were also touched by the silvery sheen of stars, the deepest, darkest darkness reigned under the mighty branches. If you had tried to fight your way through the undergrowth of hedges, head-high bushes and tree trunks, the eye would not even have been able to make out the contours of your own hand.
There was never really any light in this forest anyway. Not even during the day, because even the rays of the strongest midday sun made it impossible to penetrate the thick canopy of leaves on the treetops. Not to mention the milky shimmer of the little stars!
Although the wooded area took up an inestimably long stretch that stretched far beyond the horizon, here and there there were isolated - albeit extremely small - clear spots.
Where the thicket of trees parted so that those clear spots could arise at all, hedges and bushes grew in such a density that you could only find the clearings when you were already on them.
This almost endless forest was a god and human-forsaken border area between two mountain ranges. Here wolf and bear ruled, deer and hare lived. Only lumberjacks or hunters found their way here in time. However, this was extremely rare. Even if they did, hardly anyone dared venture that far. The way was too difficult.
It was even more rare that a group of ninja got lost here. To do this, a conflict had to break out between the two neighboring empires and since they lived next to and with one another in peace, this had only happened in a dark, distant past.
If it wasn't about acts of war, hunting or the felling of trees, this area was of little use: trees, hedges and bushes were too dense to be able to establish settlements or develop fields here. Clearing for this purpose would have taken too much work that nobody would have to do, since there was enough space for the citizens to live and do business in both border states. So it would have been useless work that you could still do if you had to.
And yet the forest, no matter how difficult it was to penetrate, offered an incontrovertible advantage: it was wonderful to hide in if you wanted to avoid meeting anyone.

Orochimaru, a Nuke-Nin, murderer and criminal from the village of Konoha Gakure, whose name was known far beyond the borders of the five ninja great powers and feared in many places, had once discovered this piece of earth for himself. Who knows the majority of the entire world against himself, can use the local area, in which people still live in harmony, without discord and undisturbed by all evil in the world, wonderfully as a place of refuge without ever having to seriously fear from enemies to be discovered.Orochimaru could probably have set up his base in the middle of one of the clearings without ever being disturbed. As I said, hardly a human eye had ever seen the area.
But nevertheless the criminal had preferred caution and created his place of retreat, where he incidentally and largely also experiments and research of every imaginable kind with all imaginable creatures, or had carried out, underground.
Even if he had always been safe here, he had certainly not acted badly: all over the world he had been hunted and tried to chase him. But an Orochimaru who had set himself immortality as his goal a number of years ago had never let himself be rushed. Whenever anyone had known he was safe in his power, he had been able to break free again.
It was not for nothing that the snake was the animal with which he had always identified himself and as which he was described by so many. He had never stayed in one place for long and had always wandered from hiding place to hiding place. If one of its nests had been found and looted, it had just crawled into a different place and thus always wrested itself from the claws of the hunters like a snake without having suffered any particular damage. However, there are some exceptions to this rule as well. During the fight with the third-generation Hokage a few years ago, he had suffered considerable damage, but in the end it had not been able to stop him from his malicious machinations.

On this new moon night, however, which was only illuminated by the milky shimmer of the stars in the black sky, it was not Orochimaru who was on the way to the hiding place, which stretched in tangled corridors under the forest.
Strictly speaking, Orochimaru himself couldn't do it anymore because he was no longer alive. Not for a few weeks.
One could guess that it was the hand of an enemy that led the dreaded Nuke-Nin to death. It would be the most obvious guess, after Orochimaru had been considered a felon for countless years and was ranked high in the bingo books. But, far from it.
It was not an enemy, not a Hidden Villages Alliance, not a conspiracy that had brought down Orochimaru.
On the contrary. It was someone very close to him, from whom Orochimaru had believed nothing to fear: it was the hand of his own student, whom Orochimaru had under his wing for years, through which one of the greatest criminals and traitors of all time had died . The name of this student is Uchiha Sasuke.

And it was exactly this who camped on that full moon night, accompanied by his three companions, with whom he formed the Hebi team, in one of the rare, small clearings. The following morning he in turn would set out with them for Orochimaru's hiding place in order to replenish his own supply of weapons and food from the camps at the base.It was not to be expected to find anyone else there. Now that the Orochimaru snake had been wiped out, most of the bases had almost disintegrated on their own anyway. The news that whoever was entertaining them had been killed had spread extremely quickly. Like wildfire.
The prisoners, on whom the cruelest experiments had often been carried out, had stopped rotting in their cells. Any overseers who had dared to stand up to the angry pack of mutants and other socks had probably never seen a sunrise again ...
Uchiha Sasuke, founder and leader of Team Hebi, was currently keeping watch over himself and his companions. While the other three slept, Sasuke had a strict view of the surroundings through half-closed eyelids and his keen eyes could see no colors but detailed contours even in the gloomy semi-darkness created by the pitiful glow of the burned campfire. Not the slightest emotion, and if it was only triggered by a mouse, could escape him. His senses were sharper than any sword.
He sat with his back to the trunk of a mighty oak tree, so he could be sure of the matter that no one could stab him in the back. That wasn't to be expected anyway, but to be safe was to be safe. Like his former master, Sasuke also made it a point not to be discovered by anyone.
The eyes of the young ninja examined the surroundings in a regular circle and when it came time to inspect the points right next to him, he turned his head only a few millimeters in the appropriate direction. The movement was so small that it could not be noticed, and yet the area of ​​influence of his eyes expanded so much that he could be sure that there was no enemy immediately next to him.
In addition, the ears of the Uchiha were pricked up like those of a lynx trying to find its prey in the dampening snow, and were capable of every secret breeze in the tops of the trees as well as the smallest crackle in the bushes that made him and his three companions - a girl and two boys, incidentally - surrounded and heard. Thanks to his first-class trained senses and his unyielding attention, he had his surroundings perfectly under observation and made any sneaking up almost impossible.
All security in honor, but as expected, Sasuke's guard shift, like the previous one of the other three, in which he himself had rested, remained uneventful, downright boring. But Sasuke had made good use of every moment. He had occupied every single moment with forging plans that might be useful to him later ...
Not much time could pass before sunrise. An hour or two. It couldn't be longer before the sun had regained the sky. The first messengers of the morning were already coloring the sky a strong violet, which gradually lost its bluish tint and became redder.Now the clouds of mist rose slowly from the lush green grass. Fresh dew glittered in the young morning sun and a fresh and spicy scent filled the air.
Sasuke closed his eyes, dropping his attention for the first time since he started his shift, and took a few deep breaths.
It was only a question of half an hour to an hour before the morning was fully here. A morning at the end of the day he came one step closer to his goal, which he had been pursuing feverishly for years. Gradually his hunt was drawing to a close - he felt it and could hardly wait.
When the sun had finally conquered the sky, Sasuke got up and called the others with a few short, sobriety-spoken words to continue on the way to the hiding place. It wasn’t far and the distance covered in less than a couple of hours.
Sasuke didn’t push openly, but still tried to be in a hurry. The stopover shouldn't take too much time, because what the young Uchiha actually wanted would only be postponed. And yet he had been tired of waiting for so long.
His companions, however, even if their presence by their ability gave him many advantages in carrying out his aim, were as often a time-consuming obstacle. One of them, Juugo, was quite bearable because it was mostly of a calm nature; the other two however - Karin and Suigetsu - robbed the silent Sasuke of the last nerve practically every second of their being together.
Both Karin and Suigetsu were of a much more spirited nature than Juugo and the Uchiha scion itself, whereby Karin could even be described as extremely