Diverting Attention

Tap~ tap-tap?

Namikaze Minato lightly tapped his fingers on the desk, his whole person seeming deep in thought.

Several minutes had already passed since Qian finished recounting the battle.

In fact, a few minutes ago, when he had finished speaking, Namikaze Minato had already been sitting like this.

Qian was not in a hurry, however. He could clearly feel the oppressive aura and faint anger emanating from the other man gradually subsiding as he continued his account.

And that was indeed the case.

At first, when he heard that Qian had been attacked, Namikaze Minato immediately thought the culprits might have been Sarutobi Hiruzen and the other higher-ups from the previous generation.

But when he heard Qian say that all the Ninjas from the Fourteenth Squad and Seventeenth Squad who had returned to the village with him had been killed, he dismissed that possibility.

If Danzo and his Root were still around, Namikaze Minato might not have been so certain, because those people had no bottom line when they acted.

Sarutobi Hiruzen and the others were different...

They might have had grievances against Qian, and might even have sent people to assassinate him, but they would never have involved and killed the village's ninjas like this.

There was a fundamental difference between the two.

Thus, he began to suspect that Qian had staged the whole incident himself.

After all, not long ago, Sarutobi Hiruzen and the others had just tripped him up.

And based on Namikaze Minato's observations of Qian, although Qian seemed to avoid competing with others and treated people kindly, he was actually vengeful and adept at exploiting rules.

Moreover, Qian had specifically mentioned that the corpses of the murdered Konoha ninja were gone, leaving no evidence to refute his account.

That was why he had been so