"Director, something isn't quite right."
In Sunagakure, deep in the Land of Wind, Murashima Takumi and the others were hiding in a small house.
They had arrived in Sunagakure several days ago, and apart from meeting the Anbu hidden in the village, they had spent those days hiding in this little house.
Their target was Ebizo. That had never changed, but unfortunately, Ebizo seemed to have gone into hiding, and no one knew his whereabouts.
Even those whom Konoha had brought over to their side through various means could not obtain any information about Ebizo.
This situation put Murashima Takumi and the others in a difficult position. They had considered infiltrating Sunagakure's Anbu to investigate.
Unfortunately, after Root's last operation, Sunagakure's Anbu was no longer somewhere they could easily infiltrate.
Even elites like them found it a headache and felt powerless to do anything.
After all, however strong they were, they could never single-handedly take on an entire village's defenses!
Lone Wolf might have managed it before, but that had been during the war. Almost all the Shinobi had gone to the front, leaving Sunagakure's internal defenses weak to begin with.
Even then, Lone Wolf's squad had paid the price of near-total annihilation just to get him out alone.
As they lay low and patiently gathered intelligence using various little Anbu tricks, they suddenly noticed something different about Sunagakure today.
Signal hawks were the most common means of communication between Shinobi, but there were clearly far more of them today.
The Shinobi within Sunagakure were also being mobilized rather frequently, and security in particular had grown tighter.
This could only mean one thing: something had gone wrong in Sunagakure!
Sunagakure certainly had no shortage of problems at the moment. On one side, they faced pressure from Iwagakure, and even the