Kara Actuation Arc

This seventeenth arc of the Boruto: Naruto Next Generations anime runs from episode 157 to 175. It follows the Mujina Bandits Arc and precedes the Ao Arc. The storyline splits between Sasuke and Sai probing Kara's presence in Amegakure and Team 7 undertaking a search mission that steadily uncovers the group's biological research, setting the stage for the wider Kara conflict to come.

Acting on a tip about a Kara hideout, Sasuke and Sai investigate an abandoned Amegakure facility and meet Garashi Tōno, who claims Kara killed his friends. He guides them into the ruins, but the pair anticipate his deception: Garashi is himself a Kara member who gassed his own comrades, lured by the organisation's false hope. Rather than be interrogated, he takes his own life. The two conclude that Kara is real, has sympathisers, and runs experiments resembling those Sasuke saw under Orochimaru, and they urge Naruto to reinstate the compromised researcher Katasuke to speed up Scientific Ninja Tool testing.

Meanwhile, Team 7 is dispatched to the Land of Valleys with the veteran Mugino to find a missing researcher named Anato. Tracking him leads them, and a company run by the elderly Kara member Victor, into a cave overgrown with strange roots, where a mutated Anato attacks before Victor's men strike him down. Soon after, Mitsuki collapses from a wood fragment lodged in his arm by his own snake. The skilled doctor Yubina extracts the matter and identifies it as a product of Wood Release and Hashirama's cells, revealing that such material is being sold on a black market.

Yubina's findings point the group toward the only place that hosts such a market, the lawless Land of Silence, a haven for rogues beyond the reach of any shinobi authority. The discovery alarms Mugino and Konohamaru and sets the next stage of the investigation into motion. Back at Kara's base, its leader dismisses the loss of Garashi and the destruction of the old facility, confident that the shinobi world still grasps nothing of the organisation's true aims.