The Deliberation

It was hard to know just how much energy a person could unleash when pushed to their limits—unless they had truly experienced those limits.

Unlike the Konoha Ninja in the Land of Rivers, who outnumbered their opponents, Hatake Sakumo had played the opposite role in the Land of Rain. His lone stand against the enemy was what truly pushed the limits.

As the saying went, each new generation surpassed the old.

Hatake Sakumo certainly couldn't take on Sunagakure's entire force by himself, nor did he need to. All he had to do was buy the Konoha forward camp enough time to respond.

When word that Sunagakure was preparing a surprise attack reached the camp, the Konoha Ninja still stationed there immediately prepared for battle. At the same time, the urgent report was relayed to Shimura Danzō as quickly as possible.

Danzō's conduct during this incident couldn't exactly be called foolish. He was simply so cautious that he ended up being careless... It was only a retired Kazekage. Why bring so many troops to hunt him down?

Danzō was indeed an extremely self-serving man. Often, it wasn't that his self-interest outweighed his sense of duty; rather, he brazenly treated his self-interest as his duty.

In a word, any event or situation that helped Danzō get closer to the Hokage Position was, in his mind, something all Konoha Ninja ought to prioritize.

In any case, Danzō might not have understood what was happening at first, but once he had enough information, he quickly realized that Sunagakure had played him... Only then did he finally understand what he had to do.

He was quite rational—rational enough to immediately see which mattered more: the credit for killing a retired Kazekage or the destruction of Konoha's camp.

So Danzō abandoned the Second Kazekage at once and led Konoha's elite forces into the Land of Rain as fast as he could... By then, he had prepared for the worst. Even if Konoha's camp was defeated, he would cut off Sunagakure's retreat and make them pay for it.

That was right: Danzō's strategy was what people called "damage control."

Just as Danzō began to move, the first wave of Konoha reinforcements arrived at the battlefield in the Land of Rain.

Three enormous Summoning Beasts suddenly appeared on the battlefield, their exaggerated size blocking the Sunagakure Ninja's advance.

"Is he still alive?" Orochimaru asked, his calm, almost indifferent eyes fixed on the battlefield.

But even he, a man of reason, couldn't help narrowing his pupils when he saw the blood-soaked figure.

"Clearly, he's doing just fine... Can a ninja really achieve such an absurd feat of holding off the enemy through such simple means?"

Jiraiya had also spotted Hatake Sakumo, and admiration crept into his voice as he spoke.

Although Jiraiya and Hatake Sakumo had the same hair color and were roughly the same age, their fighting styles were worlds apart.

Hatake Sakumo had held back a large force of Sunagakure Ninja with nothing but a Chakra blade. That proved one thing beyond a doubt... He was a professional when it came to cutting people down.

"He looks close to his limit," Tsunade said.

To her surprise, neither Jiraiya nor Orochimaru agreed with her assessment.

"Tsunade, that's just a medical judgment based on your training as a Medical Ninja... The man standing up there clearly isn't someone you can measure by ordinary standards."

"From today on, his name will resound throughout the Shinobi World."

Tsunade glanced at the two of them and said nothing. She had little to explain to people who trusted mysticism over medicine.

Hatake Sakumo truly wasn't an ordinary ninja. On one hand, he was incredibly strong. On the other, he had little "influence"—it was absurd that a ninja of his caliber could be driven to "delete himself" from the Shinobi World.

The arrival of Konoha's first reinforcements effectively meant Sunagakure's operation had failed. Their sneak attack had turned into a head-on battle. That didn't mean Sunagakure was certain to lose, but winning now would come at an outrageous cost.

More and more Konoha Ninja appeared on the battlefield. Chiyo promptly decided to break contact and make a strategic retreat toward the Land of Wind... It was the right decision, because she also needed to cut her losses.

According to the laws of "winning studies," cutting your losses was a victory.

If they didn't disengage now, the battle would become a stalemate. It would be much harder to withdraw then—only by holding complete control of the battlefield could they advance or retreat at their leisure.

The earlier battle between Konoha and Iwagakure in the Land of Grass was a case in point.

Compared with Shimura Danzō, Chiyo was at least the more capable commander in this operation.

To sum up, Sunagakure felt that Konoha's intelligence network had relayed information far too quickly. After all, Konoha had the Hyūga and Yamanaka clans, among others, who specialized in gathering and transmitting intelligence.

They also felt that some ninjas had grown far too quickly, beyond anything Sunagakure had imagined. If they hadn't been harassed by such an absurdly powerful figure, the operation would have succeeded.

Konoha, for its part, simply thought Sunagakure was far too devious to have tried a sneak attack.

Meanwhile, Iwagakure, having received the relevant intelligence, felt that it was a great pity.

The truly devious one was the Third Tsuchikage, Ōnoki. When he decided to change his army's route, he hadn't just been scheming against Konoha; he had also been scheming against Sunagakure... As it turned out, Sunagakure had fallen for it, though not completely.

The two sides had only traded a few blows. The stalemate Ōnoki had hoped for never came to pass.

Yuzuru and the others later heard that a Konoha Ninja had made a name for himself in a single battle. When Yuzuru learned the man was Hatake Sakumo, he wasn't surprised in the least.

He had only one thought: "The Konoha White Fang really did become famous before the Sannin." If you looked at it through the lens of conspiracy theories, that wasn't good news for Hatake Sakumo.

Konoha's transfer of power followed a discernible pattern, and Hatake Sakumo didn't seem to fit into it.

But Yuzuru—or the Eleventh Squad, to put it another way—had little energy to spare for that matter. The operation was over, Sunagakure's plot had been thwarted, and Konoha had weathered the crisis without incident. Now it was time to deal with all the "minor details."

A leader's poor decision-making wasn't considered a problem, of course. But the Eleventh Squad had demonstrated actual combat strength that didn't match its paper record, so a routine investigation was in order.

To put it bluntly, the squad should have been wiped out the moment it ran into a Kazekage. Instead, the opposite had happened: they had survived, and not a single member had been lost.

Inside a black tent, Yuzuru met a Konoha Ninja who looked downright "friendly." His appearance was quite misleading.

But if Yuzuru wasn't mistaken, the man was either from the Interrogation Department or the Anbu.

"Chunin Yuzuru, don't be nervous. We just want to learn a few details about the battle in the Land of Rivers," the man said after verifying Yuzuru's identity.

All right, he was planning to start with the details and gradually get to the heart of the matter.

"Uh, I'm not nervous."

Yuzuru really had no reason to be nervous. He wasn't going to lie, and the Konoha Ninja on the battlefield in the Land of Rivers hadn't all been wiped out apart from the four members of his squad. Their accounts would surely corroborate each other's.

As for directly "searching his brain"...

In reality, they would never use that method lightly on a fellow villager who was still alive... In some ways, it was even more brutal than straightforward interrogation.

The Eleventh Squad's situation wasn't serious enough to warrant that.

All right, telling the whole truth was out of the question. Yuzuru still had to lie about a few things... At the very least, he needed to cultivate an image as a prodigy.