"Could it be...?" Senju Tobirama thought of a possibility and murmured softly.
"Could it be what?" Uzumaki Mito asked, puzzled.
Senju Tobirama thought for a moment, then said, "It must be. As Kazekage, if he wanted to get rid of dissenters, he could simply kill Kazama Ryojin and the others."
"He probably went to all this trouble to borrow Konoha's blade because he's wary of something else—perhaps the people behind Kazama Ryojin, or his family and friends."
"Judging from what just happened, the Sunagakure experts must already know what the Kazekage faction has been doing. That's why they deliberately held back and let that fellow Retto make a fool of himself."
Mito asked worriedly, "Should we warn those youngsters? If they keep acting so arrogantly, they might run into trouble at Iwagakure."
Tobirama rejected the idea without hesitation. "No. That boy Xingzhuo has obviously come to the same conclusion I have, so he's deliberately putting the other villages in their place."
"There are things I can't do as an adult younger brother, but that doesn't mean the children of the next generation can't. If we step in to warn Xingzhuo, we might miss the best opportunity before the Tailed Beast distribution. So unless we absolutely have to, we can't interfere."
Leaving aside the "uncle and sister-in-law" who were secretly following the three of them, Xingzhuo began pondering how to weaken the Land of Earth's war potential as soon as he'd talked his teammates around.
He turned it over in his mind, but couldn't come up with a good idea. In the end, his attention settled on one of the few plains in the Land of Earth marked on the map.
Though the Land of Earth was a populous nation, the area devoted to growing crops was pitifully small.
This plain