Fugaku's Invitation

Obito's anticipated battle of the century with Kakashi was gone, and so was his chance to make an appearance before the Third Hokage.

But it was not as if he had gained nothing—Rin's medical treatment, for instance...

Obito's dejected mood vanished instantly. His only regret now was that Might Guy's kick had been too light.

If it had been a little harder, would Rin not have had to take care of him for much longer?

Might Guy had never seen such a shameless request in his life.

Most of the matches that followed had little worth watching.

After all, this was only the preliminaries. To preserve the excitement of the finals, the opponents faced by many powerful ninjas were not particularly strong.

Their true trump cards would be saved for the exhibition matches, where they could fight with everything they had.

The only especially exciting match was probably Kakashi versus Yashamaru.

Yashamaru was also among the unlucky ones; he had encountered one of the favorites of this Chunin Exams.

Still, any ninja who had made it this far would never believe himself inferior to anyone else.

Yashamaru was not entirely without surprises. He directly brought out three Puppets.

Unlike Karura, Yashamaru followed the path of a Puppet Master and used Crow, Kuroari, and Sanshouo.

Over the years, Sasori had left behind quite a few Puppets in the Hidden Sand Village. Though they were all his early works, they were exquisitely crafted and immensely powerful.

Things Sasori no longer used were treated as treasures by Sunagakure, which showed just how terrifying his talent for Puppet-making was.

But unfortunately, he had already become a Rogue Ninja.

Even so, to this day, the Hidden Sand Village had never launched a large-scale pursuit of Sasori.

Yashamaru was quite strong, and with the support of