A few minutes later.
The Konoha reconnaissance squad arrived before "Qian." The Special Jonin leading them was someone Qian knew, a man named Iwata Ichiki, a ninja skilled in intelligence gathering and sensing.
When Iwata Ichiki saw "Qian," he hurriedly said, "Jonin Qian, what exactly happened here?"
As he spoke, his gaze flicked around the surroundings.
It was clear that a great battle had taken place here not long ago. Though there might have been only two people involved, the fighting had been extremely fierce.
Then, looking at the pile of ash at Qian's feet, Iwata Ichiki basically understood the enemy's end.
But what he wanted to ask was not what had just happened on this battlefield, but what exactly had happened across this entire area over the past stretch of time.
In truth, they had set out from the outpost not long after the fighting here began.
But despite hurrying as fast as they could, they had not run into any enemies in the end. Instead, they had seen plenty of traces of battle along the way.
They had even found several Mist Village Chunin corpses cut in half at the waist in the area where the fighting had been most intense.
With that, combined with everything he had seen on the way, Iwata Ichiki had roughly pieced together the whole sequence of events, but in the end, he still needed Qian to confirm it.
After all, he was the one who had experienced it all firsthand.
Hearing his question, "Qian" withdrew his gaze from Hyuga Ling, then looked at Iwata Ichiki and said, "About ten minutes ago, while I was on routine patrol, I discovered a small Mist Ninja squad over here. From the look of them, they intended to launch a surprise attack on the outpost, so