Once they entered the Land of Earth, Naruto took off his forehead protector. Although the five nations had reached an agreement at the Five Kage Summit, it had yet to be announced. This would spare them a lot of trouble, considering the two nations had previously been enemies.
Naruto and Jiraiya saw transport caravans of all sizes. Most of the people in them were ordinary civilians, and every caravan had ninja guards. Most of those guards were genin. There were some chunin too, but the genin far outnumbered them.
Seeing this, Jiraiya could not help marveling at just how many missions the Land of Earth had now. In the past, escort missions like these had mostly been handled by chunin, with only a few genin taking part. Newly graduated genin in particular usually stayed in the village to take on relatively simple D-Rank missions.
But now, even newly graduated genin in the Land of Iron had to take on C-Rank missions. Iwagakure simply had too many missions-so many that there was no time to let the genin adjust from being students to being ninja before rushing them into the field.
Naruto and Jiraiya stopped at a teahouse to have some tea and rest. Naruto asked, "Sir, have there been a lot of merchant caravans lately? I saw plenty of Iwagakure genin escorting them, and many of them had only just graduated from the Ninja Academy. Can rookies like that really keep a caravan safe?"
The owner smiled. "Haha, you must be visitors. You're not from our Land of Earth, are you? If you were, you wouldn't be asking that."
Naruto smiled. "That's right. I'm traveling with my master to train and broaden my horizons."
The owner smiled. "I see. We really have had far more merchant caravans lately. Even the