"Then let me add something," Kitahara Kaede said. "Those young adults who were taken away should still be somewhere in this city."
"How so?"
Minato looked over.
Minato's ability to gather information was already maxed out.
So he had considered everything he could think of as well.
But according to their families, those young adults had all been taken away at once on the same day.
They had never been seen again after that.
"Because of the puppets on the streets," Kitahara Kaede said.
"What do you think those puppets are for?"
"To confuse people? To hide something?"
"Doesn't that mean the people who were taken away are still in the city?"
"First, producing so many puppets isn't something that can be done casually. It requires a tremendous amount of manpower and resources."
"So those young adults may have been involved in making the puppet figures on the streets."
"Then..."
"There were also those combat puppets Minato and I encountered today."
"If I'm not mistaken, those are the kinds of puppets Mukade wants to make," Kitahara Kaede said.
"So, those young adults were probably being kept somewhere in the Country of Roran, making puppets day and night."
"I see."
After thinking it over, Minato agreed with Kitahara Kaede's assessment.
"Then why make so many combat puppets..."
"What is Mukade planning?"
"He probably wants to control them and crush the Five Great Ninja Villages or something," Kitahara Kaede said.
"Uh..." Minato froze for a moment. "That ambitious?"
Yes.
The villains in these movies were all this outrageously ambitious, and their goals were all equally simple.
Moryo had been like that, and Mukade was the same.
"But our top priority now is rescuing Naruto," Kitahara Kaede said.
"And those elderly people, women, and children can be put to use too."
"Yes!"