Tsunade snatched the pendant from Hiruzen's hand.
Wasn't that her grandfather's heirloom, the one she had lost as a wager in the Land of Rivers?
The pendant had ended up in Hiruzen's hands.
Thinking of what had happened to her on that night at the gambling den, and what had happened to Hiruzen afterward, she figured out many things.
"So that's how it was..." She clenched the recovered pendant, her eyes churning with stormy waves.
Urging me to wager the pendant hadn't been a spur-of-the-moment idea from that paper girl!
From the beginning, she hadn't been after my reputation as a fat sheep to make money! She had been after this pendant!
After getting the pendant through a gambling match, she used it as proof of my identity to lure that old Sarutobi out of Konoha... What a deep scheme!
Tsunade demanded angrily, "Who injured you? Was it that blue-haired woman with a paper flower in her hair?!"
Hiruzen sighed. "So you met that woman too."
Tsunade pressed, "Then she was one of them! Did the other one make a move too?! That masked woman!"
Hiruzen exclaimed in surprise, "What? Y-you saw the masked woman too??"
His unusual shock made Tsunade hesitate. "You didn't see her?"
Apparently... Tsunade had never met Nagato.
After taking a puff from his pipe, Hiruzen said without betraying anything, "Tell me what happened. How did this pendant end up in their hands?"
So Tsunade told him every detail of how she had unexpectedly won big at a gambling den in the Land of Rivers that night, only to be intercepted by Konan and Pain Rin, then let her emotions get the better of her and lose both her money and everything else.
So that was what happened... The confusion that had lingered in Hiruzen's heart