"Yawn... What a thick fog."
Near dawn, when the human body clock was at its most fatigued, several groups of guards stationed around Kumogakure's forces noticed a dense fog drifting rapidly toward the camp from the pitch-black sea.
"Yeah, there wasn't any fog this thick all night. It's almost daybreak already—where did such heavy sea fog come from...?"
As he spoke, the guard gradually sensed that something was wrong.
"Something's wrong with this fog..."
Before he could finish, however, he felt his consciousness growing increasingly hazy, while the strength in his body was slowly being drained away.
It was not just him. His teammates and the other personnel keeping watch through the night displayed the same symptoms.
"Thud, thud..."
After several successive sounds of bodies hitting the ground, the Kumogakure shinobi assigned to night watch had all fallen unconscious, sprawled across the beach.
Because the sand cushioned their falls, the Kumogakure shinobi made little noise when they collapsed, and the camp was not alerted at all.
Suddenly, a human foot stepped out of the fog, where visibility was less than five meters, and planted itself directly on the face of an unconscious Cloud Ninja. The man did not react in the slightest, proving that he had indeed fallen into a deep coma.
"So these are the shinobi of Kumogakure, the village supposedly known as the strongest? They aren't much, are they? They couldn't even detect my Super Hidden Mist Technique."
A young man's contemptuous voice emerged from the thick fog, followed immediately by a youthful face appearing through the mist.
He was a young man with white hair, purple eyes, sharp teeth, a large sword on his back, and a scroll and water bottle at his waist. He was Hozuki Suigetsu, the leader of the Kirigakure force sent to carry