Cursed Warrior Extermination Mission

This anime-only case runs across six episodes of the original series, tucked between the Gosunkugi Capture Mission and the Kaima Capture Mission. It sends a squad far from the village to unravel a haunting that masks a bid for power.

Between training sessions while he waits for Jiraiya, Naruto meets a young man named Chishima and agrees to help with the unrest gripping the Land of Birds. He joins Neji and Tenten to look into the so-called Cursed Warrior, a ghostly figure clad in armor. A nighttime encounter reveals the suit to be empty, and Neji's Byakugan detects no living occupant. An advisor, Mōsō, pins the disturbances on the lord's chief strategist, Kōmei, painting him as a would-be usurper.

The young ruler, Sagi, turns out to be a childhood friend of Chishima who has grown cold since losing his twin sister. After the team foils an attempt on his life and traces the weapons to Kōmei's men, they shadow the strategist and battle a far deadlier phantom, whose defeated wielder dissolves himself in acid rather than be captured. Kōmei is jailed, yet the tidy conclusion leaves Naruto and Neji uneasy.

Poking around underground passages, Naruto is caught inside the palace and later attacked in his cell by the Cursed Warrior, only to unmask Sagi beneath the armor, a guise the lord had adopted to hunt his family's killer. A wounded Chishima names Mōsō as the culprit. When the truth finally unravels, Sagi proves to be the twin sister Toki posing as her dead brother, and Mōsō is exposed as Hōki of the Watari ninja, scheming to seize the country.

Hōki abducts Toki, and while Kakashi, Neji, and Tenten hold off the Watari, Naruto and Chishima give chase. Outmatched by the enemy's trickery until Sagi's spirit urges him to pull Toki back from her rage, Naruto outlasts Hōki in a duel of clones. In the end Toki claims her place as ruler in her own name and thanks Naruto for restoring her compassion.