What was going on?
Why had it suddenly become so quiet?
It felt like... something huge was about to happen!
As heaven and earth suddenly fell silent, everyone instinctively halted, unconsciously raising their heads to look at the sky. All of them stopped what they had been doing. Even the retreating allied forces of Sound Village and Sunagakure came to a halt, their gazes passing through the canopy overhead toward the sky.
In the darkness, it seemed that everyone sensed it—something major was about to happen.
It was the purest kind of intuition.
An almost instinctive perception.
Although nothing had changed yet, they simply knew that something big was about to happen.
"What is this feeling?"
At that moment, Kabuto Yakushi, who had retreated alongside Baki but taken another direction, stopped beneath the dense forest canopy. As he instinctively looked up at the sky, he voiced his disbelief.
At the same time, perhaps because he had long worked in intelligence and served as a frontline spy, his instincts toward danger were sharper than those of other shinobi. Waves of ominous premonition surged madly through his heart.
Under normal circumstances, he would have paused only briefly, felt a little puzzled, and then left. But now, he found himself hesitating.
The feeling that he had to leave this place immediately swirled wildly through his heart, making his spine tingle again and again.
His conscious determination to keep moving forward clashed with his instinctive urge to flee. The resulting conflict had become a physical reaction that left him unable to advance or retreat, his back prickling incessantly.
As for why he had to keep moving forward—
Beyond the edge of that black wall ahead was precisely the place he had arranged to meet Lord Orochimaru. There was a secret passage there that could