[Reward 3—]
There's more?!
The Sand ninja no longer knew whether they should be shocked or terrified.
[From the respondent's ninja village, ten deceased shinobi will be randomly selected. The respondent may freely choose one of them—]
[—to be resurrected.]
Complete silence fell over the area…
If there was anyone capable of reviving the dead, the only person they could think of was the legendary Sage of Six Paths.
Everyone thought the same thing—this had to be a joke, right?
But no matter how much they wanted to believe that, when they looked at the Human Puppet made from the Third Kazekage's corpse, doubt crept in.
Did the Hidden Leaf Village of the Land of Fire really possess such terrifying power?
Even if that legendary God of Shinobi were still alive…
Senju Hashirama.
"Elder, what should we do next?" A ninja outside asked the same elder who had earlier ordered them to summon Granny Chiyo.
"..." The elder fell silent for a moment. "There are still two chances left, correct? We must obtain the Third Kazekage's Human Puppet. At the same time, we need to verify whether the one behind all this truly has the power to resurrect the dead."
"Order everyone inside not to act rashly. We'll decide the next step after we figure this out!"
"Yes!" After responding, the Sand ninja hesitated. "But Elder… Absolute Defense is that monst—Gaara's ability, isn't it? Then why was Jonin Runa judged incorrect and executed?"
"Report——! A scroll delivered by a Konoha ninja hawk!" A Sand ninja flashed in beside the elder, dropped to one knee, and presented a scroll marked with Konoha's insignia.
As the scroll was unrolled, the sealing technique upon it released automatically.
The Sand elder scanned the contents at a glance…
"Yare yare, what kind of nonsense is it this time that you absolutely had to drag out an old woman with one foot in the grave?" The person hadn't arrived yet, but the voice did. When the others looked again, standing beside the elder was none other than Granny Chiyo—the top-tier puppet master who rarely showed her face these days.
"Konoha is convening a Five Kage Summit," the Sand elder said, rolling the scroll back up. "Either they're openly admitting to a conspiracy and aiming to become the leader of the five villages, or they intend to clarify that the earlier projections had nothing to do with them."
"And what does that have to do with me? You can decide that yourselves. You're about due for retirement anyway."
"Hmph. I called you here to take a look at that puppet—see if it was made by—"
Before the elder could finish, a gust of wind swept past him. The self-proclaimed "old woman with one foot in the grave" shot forward in a blur! That speed had nothing in common with the words "old" or "about to die"!
"Careful!!"
They didn't even need to warn her. Granny Chiyo stopped abruptly half a meter from the edge of the barrier, then leapt back two steps.
"That is…" Chiyo, who normally looked nearly blind with age, suddenly fixed the Human Puppet with razor-sharp eyes. "This craftsmanship, these details, and that marking… This is—this is Sasori's work! It's that child, Sasori!"
"So that's how it is… so that's how it is…" Chiyo muttered to herself.
Not long after the Third Kazekage disappeared, her only remaining grandson vanished as well.
After so many years, the truth turned out to be this. Her Sasori… had become a missing-nin? Had he killed the Third Kazekage and turned him into a Human Puppet?
The pain in Chiyo's eyes was impossible to hide. If not for war, her son and daughter-in-law would still be alive. If not for war, how could her grandson have ended up like this?!
It was impossible for her to forgive Hatake Sakumo, known as Konoha's White Fang—but Chiyo also understood that the real culprit was nothing more than two words: war. And what caused war was also nothing more than two words—interests. A life could only be lived once. Even killing the White Fang a thousand times wouldn't bring back Sasori's parents.
"A Five Kage Summit, hm… Didn't the Fourth Kazekage already go?" Chiyo said. "By now, he should've reached Konoha."
"We've already sent out ninja hawks to contact him," someone replied. "But we haven't received any instructions from the Kazekage yet."
Not only Sunagakure—Baki was also at her wits' end trying to contact the Kazekage. The signals she'd sent out had been gone for nearly three days, yet there was still no word.
At this moment, none of them knew that the Fourth Kazekage had already been killed by Orochimaru.
…
Hidden Leaf Village, Training Ground 44.
Surrounded by forty-four entrances, it formed a circular area roughly twenty kilometers in diameter. Inside were towering trees that blotted out the sky and clear, fast-flowing rivers and streams. From rare birds and ferocious beasts to venomous insects and snakes, countless species thrived here. It was practically a natural tropical rainforest.
As long as they had sufficient survival skills, examinees could always find something edible here.
At least in terms of survival alone, this place wasn't particularly difficult for shinobi from any village.
The real challenge was hiding oneself under these conditions, protecting the Heaven Scroll in one's possession, and at the same time locating opponents and seizing their scrolls.
If luck was bad, one might survive a life-or-death battle, finally defeat an enemy, only to discover that the scroll obtained was the same as their own. Holding two Heaven Scrolls or two Earth Scrolls meant automatic failure. By then, they often no longer had the strength to seek out new targets.
Even if teams with identical scrolls could find each other and exchange, as the Allied Shinobi Forces' future commander had said in the earlier projection—shinobi lived on the edge between life and death. Mutual distrust, as well as conflicts of interest between villages, often led to unnecessary bloodshed between teams.
"Anko-sensei!"
"Huh?" Mitarashi Anko looked up irritably at the chunin interrupting her dango. "What is it now?"
"P-Please come with us."
…
She followed several chunin to the Jizo statue. Three shattered corpses lay there. Judging from their clothing and build, they were Grass ninja who had come to take the exam.
After examining them closely, Anko confirmed, "I've never seen these examinees. If they were killed on the way here, they can only blame their lack of strength."
"No," Morino Ibiki said as he arrived, his expression grave. "This Grass ninja participated in the first exam. His other two teammates also died in the exam hall." They were the ones who immediately questioned the rules after the life-or-death Q&A appeared—wasting a chance and then having their lives 'revoked,' reduced to a mist of blood and flesh.
Anko thought for a moment. "So the ones killed in the first exam were impostors… Well, either way, they've already lost their qualifications. I didn't see them in the second exam."
Just then, voices called out from afar. "Anko-sensei! Anko-sensei!"
"Tch, what now?"
"Entrance number thirty-seven at Training Ground 44 has been breached!"
Everyone present understood immediately—
Someone had broken into this year's genin exam training ground!!
…