Konoha Plans Recapture Mission

Running across episodes 197 through 201, this anime-original story slots into the stretch after the Third Great Beast Arc, leading on toward the Yakumo Kurama Rescue Mission. Its plot leans on the heavy reconstruction underway in Konoha, using the influx of outside workers as cover for a decades-old plot against the village.

To speed the rebuilding effort, Konoha brings in laborers from beyond its walls, one of them an elderly craftsman called Genno. Over shared bowls at Ichiraku, Naruto forms a warm bond with the old man, never suspecting he is a feared tactician out of Kagero Village. One night Genno makes his move, lifting a batch of the village's structural blueprints before Anbu corner him. Rather than be taken, he seemingly detonates himself. Acting on a threat he had voiced about an assault from Takigakure, Tsunade posts almost every ninja above genin rank along the Land of Fire's border, holding back only Shikamaru, then gathers Naruto and the younger shinobi to help recover the stolen documents. The boy is devastated to learn his kind companion was a foe all along.

Anbu haul Naruto in for questioning as their best link to the scheme, yet even hypnosis pulls nothing loose beyond the detail that he reminded Genno of a lost grandson. Investigators soon realize the death was faked with a substitute corpse, and that Takigakure had no hand in any of it, meaning the border deployment left Konoha nearly defenseless for no reason. The trail leads to the Academy, where a sprawling chain of paper bombs is found threading out across the village. As the group races to disarm them, Homura Mitokado and Koharu Utatane help establish that most of the tags had been planted three decades earlier, during a war in which Konoha destroyed Genno's home, only for a rival power to wipe out the survivors two days later.

Remembering how Genno kept glancing at the Hokage Monument during their meals, Naruto climbs the mountain and finds the old man alive, having wired the carved faces with charges. The tags scattered through the village, it turns out, were only a diversion; the real aim was to bury Konoha beneath a landslide. Shikamaru pieces together the true target and knocks out the main trigger, and when Genno calls down a giant bird to set off the charges by hand, Naruto brings it down with a Rasengan. Gravely ill and near his end, the saboteur finally reveals that his so-called grandson was in fact his own son, and that after coming to care for Naruto he had quietly weakened the tags so they would leave only faint cracks in the stone. Genno dies at peace, and Naruto, shaken by the near miss, commits himself to training harder for the day genuine enemies come for his home.