Deer Garden.
The forest was deep and the mist thick. Not long after Nara Shikaku and the other two entered, they sensed that there was something strange about the fog.
"Stop. This fog doesn't look natural. On such a clear day, even a dense forest shouldn't have fog this thick."
Shikaku waved to halt the team, then turned to Yamanaka Inoichi. "Inoichi, please scout the whole area and see exactly how far this fog extends."
"Alright!"
Inoichi had no objections to Shikaku's decision. He summoned a messenger hawk, then used his clan's secret technique on it. "Mind Body Switch Technique!"
Before his words had even faded, Inoichi's body went limp and slumped against the roots of a large tree. Meanwhile, the messenger hawk's eyes became noticeably more lively as it spread its wings and shot into the sky.
Chirp, chirp!
Flapping its brown wings, it circled above the Deer Garden. With its powerful eyesight, it quickly located the source of the fog!
"Shikaku, the fog is thickest over there, at three o'clock, roughly four kilometers away."
Inoichi pointed into the distance.
"Three o'clock, four kilometers away... that place is..."
Having received the information, Shikaku quickly recalled what lay there. "There's a small river there that runs through the entire Deer Garden."
"A river? Then that's probably the medium the enemy used to release the fog," Inoichi added.
"River water, fog..."
Those two keywords made Nara Shikaku's face turn grim, because he had already realized who the enemy was most likely to be.
"Mist Village... They've actually infiltrated this far!"
Though he was only a young jonin in his early twenties, the Nara Clan's special status, along with the close relationship between Ino-Shika-Cho and the Sarutobi Clan, meant that Shikaku was familiar with certain high-level confidential intelligence.
Naturally, he knew that