Dark Clouds

An unseen figure works to sour Sai on the Leaf, needling him about his place in Team 7 and about Sasuke's return. Chasing Sai's trail to an inn, Shikamaru dresses himself, Hinoko, and Rō as traveling merchants to slip through a checkpoint into Tobari. Hinoko favors killing the lookouts outright, but Shikamaru warns that leaving bodies would expose the Leaf's hand, noting that Sai's original team was already wiped out. She ignores him and drops two spying shinobi with her chakra needles, one of whom lands on their cover vehicle. Inside the inn, Shikamaru wins useful information over a game of shōgi.

The discovery of Hinoko's incapacitated victim locks down the inn, forcing an identity check that a local named Komori, no friend of Tobari's officials, helps them dodge. Hinoko keeps clashing with Shikamaru over her freedom to act and muses aloud about the Land of Silence, while Rō confides her fear that peacetime will make shinobi obsolete. After overhearing Rō and Shikamaru discuss silencing her should she truly defect, Hinoko heads for the checkpoint and announces her wish to join the Land of Silence, wounding a guard to prove herself. The guards recognize the injury as matching their dead comrades, and a fight erupts when Shikamaru and Rō arrive.

The apparent betrayal is a ruse. Hinoko strikes down Rō and Shikamaru with her needles to sell her defection, but only puts them into a temporary death-like state, and later sedates Komori as well. Rō and Shikamaru had already pegged Komori as a plant, confirming it when he reacted to a faked chakra presence, and the trio successfully slip into Tobari. The episode opens the Shikamaru Hiden arc, adapting the light novel, and uses the theme Empty Heart with the ending Absolutely.