The Bet

More than half a month had passed since Sunagakure took the initiative to pursue peace talks with Konoha. The deadline set by the Daimyo was drawing ever closer, yet the negotiations had made no progress whatsoever. As more and more cities in the Land of Wind fell, the Sunagakure delegation grew increasingly anxious.

They simply could not fathom what Skywalker was thinking. Did he truly intend to annex the Land of Wind? The remaining fifty thousand ninjas of Sunagakure might not be a match for Konoha, but if they were pushed too far, they could certainly make Konoha pay a terrible price! To say nothing else, if every Sunagakure ninja went underground and hid for a while, then imitated terrorist groups by targeting ordinary civilians in the Land of Fire, it would be enough to give Konoha a serious headache.

As for the unspoken rule that ninjas could not slaughter civilians, if their ninja village was on the verge of destruction, they would no longer care about such things. Besides, the other nations would never simply stand by and watch Sunagakure perish.

That was the fundamental reason why, during the era when the Hashirama brothers and Madara led Konoha, they had been forced to maintain a standoff despite possessing the strength to sweep across the Shinobi World. The gap between ninjas and ordinary people was simply too vast. If any ninja village cast aside its scruples and began destroying and slaughtering without restraint, it could easily drag another nation down with it. Even if it could not destroy that nation outright, it could still set its national strength back by decades.

Before ninjutsu became universally available, this problem could not be solved. That was also why Akatsuki, with only a dozen or so members in the original story, had been