"Naruto, what do you think? Why don't you try training together with the Nine-Tails too? Huh? Where did Naruto go?"
After finishing his spectacular Sage Mode demonstration, Rōshi suddenly remembered his fellow jinchūriki.
He looked around the cratered training ground, only to discover that the boy had vanished.
"Oh, I'm over here!"
Hearing Rōshi call for him, Naruto hurriedly raised his hand from his hiding spot behind a large boulder and ran back over.
"Naruto, did you hear what I just said? What do you think?" Rōshi walked over and slapped Naruto heartily on the shoulder.
"Uh..." Naruto hesitated, awkwardly scratching his cheek, completely unsure how to refuse.
He had only just promised Kurama that they absolutely would not let Son Gokū or Rōshi learn the "truth" about the Sage's favoritism.
Fortunately, the ever-"considerate" Kurama stepped in and solved the diplomatic crisis for him.
"Four-Tails' jinchūriki, worry about yourself. Naruto is the reincarnation of the Sage of Six Paths' son. He doesn't need a monkey telling him how to train!"
Kurama's booming, arrogant voice rang directly beside Rōshi's ear.
Through their physical contact, the Nine-Tails transmitted the words using pure chakra.
"..."
"Uh, sorry about that, Rōshi. Kurama's just like this. He's not actually bad at heart." Seeing how unbelievably rude Kurama had been, Naruto hurriedly apologized on his behalf.
"It's fine. Tailed Beasts usually treat strangers that way. I understand." Rōshi waved dismissively to show he didn't mind.
"Besides, the Nine-Tails has a point."
"Alright... Since you've already mastered Sage Mode, I guess we should head to the next village on our list. If anything comes up, have the Four-Tails contact me through the network. Oh, right. I still haven't put the power he gave me inside my body yet. Kurama said I should wait and do it together with the Five-Tails'."
"The Five-Tails? I understand." Rōshi immediately decided to help his fellow jinchūriki out. "Ōnoki! Get over here, you old bastard!"
He didn't know exactly where Han, the Five-Tails' jinchūriki, currently was, but he assumed the Tsuchikage would.
"What are you shouting for?! I'm still the former Tsuchikage! Now that you've finally returned, can't you show me at least a little respect?!" Ōnoki floated over, his face flushed with irritation.
"Sorry. I've called you that for so many years that I can't change now." Rōshi didn't sound sorry in the slightest.
"Ōnoki, where is Han? Hurry up and tell Naruto. Once he gets the Five-Tails' power, he'll finally possess a fragment of all nine Tailed Beasts. Then every jinchūriki and Tailed Beast will be able to use Naruto's body as a relay station to instantly exchange information."
"Not only information," Kakashi smoothly added. "According to Orochimaru's research, Tailed Beast power can also be transferred through the mental connection, though they apparently haven't fully developed that function yet."
It sounded like a casual addition to the conversation, but Kakashi was actually deploying a highly calculated diplomatic maneuver to soothe Ōnoki's paranoia.
Even if Ōnoki had rediscovered the Will of Stone and was now willing to think about the safety of the shinobi world as a whole, the idea of helping Naruto gather all nine Tailed Beasts' power would inevitably make him deeply uncomfortable.
Naruto was still a Konoha ninja.
Anyone who had lived through the misery of the previous Shinobi World Wars would instinctively feel terrified about Konoha centralizing the power of all nine Tailed Beasts into a single weapon.
Mentioning that their power could also be transferred outward to the other villages helped eliminate that paralyzing fear.
"I see. Fine, then. We've actually already discovered Han's approximate location. Once you find him, remember to tell him to return to Iwagakure while you're at it." Ōnoki decided to freely share the classified intelligence with them.
Rōshi and Han were essentially the Iwagakure's versions of Tsunade and Jiraiya in Konoha.
They both left their village years ago and wandered the continent unpredictably.
The village could neither control them nor command them, yet they still technically didn't qualify as rogue missing-nin.
After becoming Tsuchikage, Kurotsuchi immediately dumped the long-term, highly annoying mission of retrieving both jinchūriki squarely onto her grandfather.
According to her logic, they both abandoned the village while Ōnoki was in office, so he was personally responsible for cleaning up his own mess.
Unlike Rōshi, Han had no known personal conflict with Ōnoki.
Nobody actually knew why he left the village in the first place.
Ōnoki originally assumed Han would be much easier to bring back first.
Instead, thanks to Kurotsuchi's brilliant political maneuvering, Rōshi appeared and returned before him.
Iwagakure's elite intelligence division finally narrowed Han's location down to a general geographic area after conducting an exhaustive, continent-wide search.
However, because nobody understood why the quiet, heavily armored, withdrawn man had left, Ōnoki had not immediately sent an Anbu squad to approach him.
Now that Naruto actively needed the Five-Tails' power and would inevitably make contact with Han, they might as well let Konoha's golden boy handle the negotiation.
Ōnoki had already realized that Naruto's identity as the prophesied reincarnation of the Sage of Six Paths' son affected Tailed Beasts the exact same way premium catnip affected cats.
The moment they saw him, they practically started wagging their tails.
Naruto's arrival completely erased decades of tension between Rōshi and Son Gokū, turning them into a perfectly synced jinchūriki pair overnight.
That massive improvement also put Rōshi in such a good mood that he finally reconciled with Ōnoki.
Therefore, sending Naruto to find Han and asking him to deliver a diplomatic message about returning to the village offered the highest statistical chance of success.
"Alright! Leave it to me." Naruto thumped his chest and made a confident promise.
Naruto had always been excessively, pathologically eager to help others.
Even in the original timeline, after achieving his lifelong dream of becoming the Seventh Hokage, he would completely neglect his own family and his personal training to spend every day helping elderly women cross the street or finding lost cats.
This eventually caused a massive midlife family crisis while his combat strength stagnated for years.
So whenever an outsider asked him for help, warmhearted Naruto always agreed without a second of hesitation.
As for the basic, ironclad shinobi rule that ninja from one village absolutely could not interfere in another village's domestic affairs or casually accept their missions off the books?
That rule did not exist.
Naruto hadn't paid a single ounce of attention when the Academy taught those international regulations.
If he never heard them and did not know them, then clearly they were not real.
...
Ōnoki personally escorted the Konoha diplomatic group out of the village gates.
They were preparing to follow the Tsuchikage's intelligence and travel southeast through the Land of Earth to search for Han, when a voice suddenly echoed from above.
"Wait! You—the one called Uzumaki Naruto! Stop right there!"
"Hm? Who's calling me?"
Naruto looked up in confusion and saw another blond-haired ninja leaping down from the sky.
Some deeply unpleasant, traumatizing memories immediately resurfaced.
Naruto panicked and hurriedly covered his head with both arms.
"What are you doing, hm?"
After landing gracefully, Deidara stared blankly at Naruto, who was currently crouched on the ground, frantically protecting his skull.
Forget the fact that Deidara hadn't even launched an attack yet.
Even if he had, was the mighty Nine-Tails' jinchūriki really planning to defend himself against high-yield explosives simply by covering his head?
Had Deidara made a massive mistake by coming here to challenge an idiot?
"..."
Naruto finally recovered his senses and cautiously lowered his arms.
He had suddenly remembered the traumatizing incident back home when Boruto fell out of the sky and knocked him unconscious.
After Boruto smashed into him, Naruto vaguely endured inhuman psychological torment in his dreams.
Then, when he woke up, he found Boruto doing something incredibly inappropriate to him that he still strongly preferred not to remember!
Seeing another blond guy dropping directly from the sky had violently triggered Naruto's PTSD.
"Deidara, what are you doing here?! Naruto and the others are official guests of Iwagakure, so show them some proper respect!" Ōnoki immediately moved in front of Naruto, glaring at his former student.
"They're your guests, old man, not mine," Deidara muttered dismissively.
Then, ignoring the Tsuchikage, he looked directly at Naruto, a manic glint in his eye.
"Uzumaki Naruto. I heard Sasori had you test the combat abilities of his brand-new puppet body back in the Sand Village. So... how about helping me test my new explosive technique too, hm?!"
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