Puppet Testing

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After treating Naoki's wounds, Anko understood their situation well enough and did not say anything more. She quietly returned to her own room.

Naoki lay on his bed and carefully sorted through everything that had happened that day.

There was no doubt that the mission had been a trap, and the Hidden Sand had taken part in it. If Sasori had not interfered, then what awaited him today would probably have been the Hidden Sand assassination squad.

And if necessary, Captain Chuichi Mitsui beside him might have joined in as well.

As for why the Hidden Sand would get involved in Konoha's purge, Naoki only needed to think for a moment before he had an answer.

The Fourth Kazekage had taken office in haste because of the Third Kazekage's disappearance.

With the pressure of war gone, the Fourth Kazekage would inevitably need to weaken the Third Kazekage's remaining influence inside the Hidden Sand. In reality, the Hidden Sand also had a need to purge its own people, and that need was even stronger than Konoha's.

On top of that, the postwar Hidden Sand wanted to form an alliance with Konoha.

That explained why the Hidden Sand had joined Konoha's purge. The highest leaders of both villages had clearly reached some kind of agreement, using each other to clean up abandoned pieces.

This let them avoid staining their own hands with the blood of comrades from the same village. And if anything went wrong, it gave them an excuse to shift blame elsewhere.

Once Naoki understood that, he also understood something else. Even if Danzo was the one presiding over the purge inside the village, the Third Hokage and the rest of Konoha's leadership had to know about it, or at least tacitly approve it.

Otherwise, Danzo alone would not have the ability to bypass the village and negotiate such a major operation with the Hidden Sand.

The thought that so many people had been abandoned by the village so coldly left Naoki both shocked and furious.

Ninety percent of those people were innocent. Only a tiny handful had truly taken part in Orochimaru's human experimentation, and most of them were like Naoki, involved only in peripheral projects.

The truly central work, the bloody human experiments, had almost all been carried out personally by Orochimaru. Very few people were qualified to participate. Even Naoki had never been allowed near them.

That was not Naoki trying to dodge responsibility. It was simply that there were very few people in the village, aside from Orochimaru, who had the skill to conduct complex human experiments on their own.

'What exactly made the village go this far?'

The more Naoki thought about it, the more wrong it felt. Konoha's leadership could not possibly be unaware that this purge would sweep up many innocent people, yet they had still done it. There had to be a reason he did not know.

Then he thought of Orochimaru's voluntary defection, and of Danzo, who had always cooperated with Orochimaru yet was suddenly acting so differently.

Naoki abruptly wondered if Orochimaru had truly done something so outrageous that the village leadership had become almost hysterical in pursuing anyone connected to him.

Whatever the cause, the purge had already begun. Naoki could only rein in his scattered thoughts and calmly sort through the threats he now faced.

The nearest threat was undoubtedly the village purge.

Since Konoha had already started cleaning house, it would not stop after one failed attempt. Even if Naoki had escaped this time, another attempt would be waiting for him, and each one would likely be stronger than the last.

Beyond that, Sasori could not be ignored.

The Third Kazekage had once been hailed as the strongest Kazekage, yet he had still fallen silently into Sasori's hands. That alone showed how dangerous Sasori was at ambush and assassination.

Now that Naoki had become Sasori's enemy, he had no choice but to guard against being killed in the shadows.

After thinking it over again and again, however, the most urgent problem remained Konoha's reaction to Chuichi Mitsui's death. If the village suspected Naoki had done something, then his only path would be defection.

'I wonder if that little performance was enough to fool the village.'

Having the Third Kazekage human puppet play the part of a wandering shinobi had actually been a clever move. Because of the recent war, large numbers of missing-nin and wandering shinobi were active across the region. Along a border where every shinobi village had weak control, running into a wandering shinobi by chance was perfectly normal.

On top of that, the other two squad captains in the outpost, both suspected Root operatives, had personally seen the Third Kazekage human puppet disguised as a wandering shinobi and even exchanged blows with it. That made Naoki's story far more convincing.

After spending the whole night turning the matter over in his mind, Naoki found an opening the next day, retrieved the Third Kazekage human puppet hidden near the outpost, and sealed it into the scroll he carried.

Right now, the outpost was severely undermanned.

Only four shinobi remained, and two of them, Anko and Naoki, were injured. The village could send a support squad at any time. In fact, that squad might already be on its way.

Any support squad would certainly include a reconnaissance specialist. If Naoki continued letting the Third Kazekage human puppet wander near the outpost, it might run straight into them and expose everything.

In the end, the Third Kazekage human puppet was simply too conspicuous.

Forget Naoki. Even Sasori, bold as he was, would not dare use it casually in daily life. If it were exposed in Naoki's hands, not only would he lose a trump card, he would have no way to explain it.

The Third Kazekage was dead, but he had once been the Kage of a village. He had represented the face and authority of the Hidden Sand.

Even if it was only to preserve the dignity of one of the Five Great Shinobi Villages, the Hidden Sand would pay any price to recover the Third Kazekage's human puppet and kill whoever possessed it.

Naoki, already marked for purging by Konoha, had no desire to invite trouble from the Hidden Sand as well.

For now, only Naoki and Sasori knew that the Third Kazekage had been turned into a human puppet. And Sasori, as the culprit who had killed the Third Kazekage and made him into a puppet, would never take the initiative to spread that fact.

Besides, with Sasori's personality, he was probably still thinking about how to take the Third Kazekage human puppet back from Naoki. As long as Naoki did not make a mistake, the puppet's existence would not be exposed anytime soon.

For the next few days, everything was calm.

Using this brief breathing room, Naoki stayed behind closed doors and studied the Tenseigan's ability to control puppets.

After repeated attempts, he discovered that a puppet's flexibility depended entirely on the amount of Tenseigan chakra he infused into it. In simple terms, the more chakra he poured in, the more agile the puppet became.

Naoki did not know much about puppets.

He also did not know whether the Third Kazekage human puppet was simply a high-end specimen. In any case, just activating it required at least half of Naoki's chakra to maintain. If he wanted it to use Magnet Release, that cost rose to at least two-thirds of his chakra.

In other words, while the Third Kazekage human puppet was active, Naoki could keep at most half of his chakra for himself, barely reaching the chakra level of an elite chunin.

Naoki had also tried pouring all of his chakra into the Third Kazekage human puppet to see whether it could go a step further and gain a small amount of autonomous awareness.

The result disappointed him.

Whether his total chakra was still too low or the reason lay elsewhere, even after he poured in every bit of chakra he had, the Third Kazekage human puppet showed no further transformation. At most, it became a little more lifelike than when he infused two-thirds of his chakra.

By now, though, Naoki had learned to adjust his expectations. He no longer compared everything he did with the impression Toneri Otsutsuki had left in his memories. So he did not feel much frustration. He was only a little annoyed.

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