"Don't be reckless!"
Dodai stopped Karui from throwing her life away. "We can't let the Cloud Village bear the burden of Uchiha Itachi alone. All we have is his word that he intends to kill the Eight-Tails."
"For all we know, he might return to the Akatsuki and hand the Eight-Tails over to them."
"After all, no one can fathom what Uchiha Itachi is thinking."
"As for him wiping out his own clan, it's hard to say he wasn't made a scapegoat by the Leaf Village."
None of them were fools.
Could Itachi really have wiped out the entire, sprawling Uchiha Clan by himself?
The Uchiha Clan's ninja were all elite fighters. They had given the Cloud Village plenty of trouble in past Ninja World Wars.
And would the Leaf Village really have stood by while Itachi destroyed a kekkei clan?
The Leaf Village wasn't a brain-dead village like the Mist Village, which treated kekkei genkai as a curse.
There had been no winners when the Third Shinobi War ended. Although the Leaf Village had won the war, the Third Hokage wanted to secure peace as soon as possible and had demanded no war reparations.
But after the Nine-Tails' Rampage, the Leaf Village had undoubtedly become the biggest loser.
With the Leaf Village badly weakened, the Cloud Village's military strength had been formidable by the standards of the Ninja World at the time. It had begun frequently challenging the Leaf Village's position as the foremost great ninja village.
Attempting to steal the Hyuga Clan's kekkei genkai, then threatening war to force the Leaf Village to hand over the Hyuga Clan's leader, had been one opening.
The Leaf Village had backed down and handed over the Hyuga Clan Head's younger twin brother.
That alone had shown how badly the Nine-Tails' Rampage