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March 22, noon.
In an unnoticed corner, Hyuga Yu used Root's channels to slip out of Konoha without triggering its barrier.
Once outside the village, he raced twenty kilometers in the opposite direction from Sarutobi Hiruzen's departing force. Then he activated Wind Release: Shinra Tensei. Launched by a gravitational slingshot, he became a pale cyan beam that pierced the troposphere at supersonic speed. In the stratosphere, he slowed to Mach 0.9. By converting natural energy within the twenty-kilometer range of Sage Mode, he kept his own expenditure at half its usual level and flew swiftly toward Kirigakure.
Konoha was roughly eight hundred kilometers from Grass Wave Coast, a three-day journey on foot for a ninja. The straight-line distance from Konoha to Kirigakure in the Land of Water, including the sea between them, was about twenty-two hundred kilometers. With Sage Mode further enhancing his flight, Hyuga Yu could now sustain a journey much like a passenger jet.
Even with a detour around the Land of Fields and the Land of Hot Water, he reached the outskirts of Kirigakure in less than three hours.
Nearly three thousand kilometers on the fuel of a single lunch.
It also meant that, if Hyuga Yu wished, he could leave Konoha and strike the ninja village or capital of any major nation within five hours with Wind Release: Super Shinra Tensei, destroying an entire economic and military complex.
That afternoon, at 3:20.
Hyuga Yu landed on an abandoned stretch of rocky shore about twenty kilometers from Kirigakure's main island. Before descending, he used Wind Release: Chakra Scalpel to erase the tremendous disturbance caused by his passage through the troposphere. Even so, he tore a visible white line across the sky.
Fortunately, the sky was cloudy that day, and the strange sight was soon hidden by