Discovery

At the camp gate, Fugaku said goodbye to Hatake Sakumo and turned toward Konoha.

He moved silently through the forest. Being summoned back to the village so suddenly stirred little emotion in him.

If anything, he would rather stay in the village than fight outside it. Every rumor and every shift in public opinion began there.

Only by being at the source could he deal with the rumors as they appeared.

From outside the village, there was only so much he could do.

He needed to untangle the threads and distinguish friend from foe before deciding what to do next.

His Sharingan swept the forest. Suddenly, several blurred figures flashed past at the edge of his vision.

Fugaku sensed something amiss. He turned and raced after them. Black Mist billowed around him, and in an instant, he vanished without a trace.

He slipped silently through the forest. The figures ahead noticed nothing behind them.

They kept moving. It was a six-person Cloud shinobi squad, quite possibly one of the teams that had slipped in over the past two days.

The Land of the Moon was small, but one or two hundred Konoha shinobi could not watch every corner of it. They could only do their best and deal with enemies as they found them.

"Captain, Konoha has the Land of the Moon under its control now, but we haven't run into a single Konoha shinobi. Good thing your Summoning Beast spotted roughly where they were deployed."

"We were careless at the old Forward Camp. Who would have thought Jieyi, the man in charge of intelligence, was a Konoha spy?

"Every report the village received had been altered by him, and even the orders sent from the village were changed before they reached us.

"How else could the Kumogakure Vanguard Force