Pain's Assault

This Part II arc, titled Two Saviours in the anime, centers on Pain's strike against Konohagakure in search of Naruto Uzumaki. In the manga it stretches across four volumes, running from chapter 413 to 453, after the Fated Battle Between Brothers and before the Five Kage Summit. The anime version fills episodes 152 to 169 plus 172 to 175 of Naruto: Shippuden, with a pair of standalone episodes slotted in between, and there it is framed by Six-Tails Unleashed and the Past Arc.

The arc opens with Sasuke's team subduing Killer B, the Eight-Tails host, at heavy cost before delivering him to Tobi, though B quietly survives by leaving a tentacle behind. At Konoha, Pain scatters his six bodies across the village so its defenders cannot pin down a single attacker, while his partner Konan questions shinobi who refuse to betray Naruto's location. After learning the boy is training at Mount Myoboku, the Deva Path unleashes a colossal gravity blast that flattens the settlement.

Reverse-summoned home with Fukasaku and the giant toads, Naruto arrives wielding senjutsu and a perfected Rasenshuriken, and tears through five of the Six Paths one after another. When Hinata throws herself between him and Pain and is struck down, grief drives Naruto into a runaway change that swells toward eight tails, only for the spirit of his father Minato to repair the seal from within his mind. Freed of the fox's grip, Naruto baits the last body into a self-defeating gravity pulse and lands the finishing strike, then follows the black receivers to Nagato himself.

Rather than kill him, Naruto hears out Nagato's history: orphaned by war, awakening the Rinnegan, and losing his friend Yahiko to the schemes of Hanzo and Danzo, which soured his dream of peace into rule through fear. Reading aloud from Jiraiya's book, Naruto swears to break that cycle without vengeance. Moved, Nagato spends his life on the Outer Path technique to revive everyone slain in the attack, then dies, and Konan departs the Akatsuki carrying his and Yahiko's bodies.

Carried back to the ruins on Kakashi's shoulders, Naruto is met at the village edge by a jubilant crowd, and even those who once branded him a menace now hail him as a hero, fulfilling his lifelong wish for recognition. Tsunade, having drained her chakra shielding the villagers, collapses into a coma.

In the power vacuum, Danzo talks the Fire Daimyo into naming him acting Sixth Hokage, and he promptly brands Sasuke a rogue ninja marked for death. Elsewhere Tobi intercepts Sasuke's team, reassigns them to assassinate Danzo at the coming summit, and decides to step out of the shadows to begin his Eye of the Moon Plan.