With so much time having passed and the accounts so vague, outsiders knew little about Princess Senju's tomb.
Rumor had it that the princess buried there was the younger sister of the God of Shinobi, the First Hokage, and the lover of the Asura of the Ninja World. The Senju Clan and the Uchiha Clan had been wealthy since the Warring States Period. The princess had died young, in Konoha's early days. Though both clans were even more illustrious now, they had been far from poor back then, and her burial goods were lavish.
This was also why neither clan had ever visited the Princess Mausoleum to pay their respects during festivals, for fear of revealing the tomb's exact location to anyone with ulterior motives.
Two Kumogakure shinobi, wearing yukata specially made by the Konoha Hot Spring Baths, quietly arrived at Back Mountain behind Konoha's Memorial Stone.
They felt their way through the snow, their conversation broken apart by the wind.
Suddenly, both froze.
With a rush of wind, their bodies felt heavy, and a flash of light flared beneath their feet. Green thorns, utterly out of place in winter, burst from the ground. Their spikes pierced the men's trouser legs and wound tightly into their flesh.
Both men immediately roared and began to fight back.
Blood and thorns danced, adding vivid red and green to the desolate world of white snow.
More and more thorns appeared, soon forming a rectangular cage that imprisoned the two men.
Even after the thorns finally stopped moving, that patch of green remained strikingly vivid amid the heavy snow.
At the sight of those thorns, both burly men were already drenched in sweat.
No one in the Land of Lightning would ever forget those green thorns.
Besides the meteorites, the thorns were another nightmare