"Run! Konoha's ninja are too strong!"
A heart-rending scream, a desperate cry.
Nine-year-old Kabuto Yakushi lay in a muddy thicket like a gray rat.
Rainwater slid down the edges of his round glasses, blurring his vision, but he did not raise a hand to wipe them.
Kabuto Yakushi stared fixedly at the one-sided slaughter ahead.
So this is... a Konoha ninja? Kabuto muttered inwardly, his fingers lightly pressing into the mud as he sensed the unnatural tremors.
Around him was the Iwagakure Anbu squad he belonged to—an elite reconnaissance team composed of three chunin and one jonin captain.
He was one of Iwagakure's three chunin, responsible for gathering intelligence and infiltration.
But now, the situation was completely different from what he had imagined.
Even though he had long known that Konoha's ninja were far stronger than Iwagakure's, so much so that the Allied Shinobi Forces of seventeen nations had needed to launch an attack on Konoha, witnessing the battle between Konoha's ninja and their own—
It still left him unable to suppress his astonishment.
"Captain! We can't stop him—completely can't stop him!! That isn't ninjutsu! That is—"
Not far away, his teammate, a chunin with fifteen years of combat experience, desperately formed hand seals.
A massive rock wall rose from the ground. It was Iwagakure's prized defensive technique, impervious to ordinary ninjutsu!
Yet the enemy standing before him did not even raise a hand.
He was a man in a strange black-and-white checkered shirt, with messy hair and thick-lensed glasses.
There was a slash across his forehead protector—the mark of a Konoha rogue ninja.
He was not even part of Konoha's regular forces!
The rogue ninja merely muttered something under his breath, his face twisted in fury. "Damn it, they wanted to lock me up for twenty-five years over something