Five Kage Summit's Eve

Pinned to a wall, Naruto is pressed by Karui for anything he knows about Sasuke, and he argues that handing over his friend would only spark a fresh cycle of revenge between Kumo and Konoha. To bleed the hatred out of her, he offers his own body as a target and takes a brutal beating until Sai steps in to block her fist. Omoi restrains his teammate too, admitting he respects how Naruto refuses to abandon a comrade, and when Samui arrives she pulls her squad away to decode fresh intel on Sasuke. Naruto asks to come along and meet the Raikage, but Samui tells him the leader is already moving and far too occupied.

Zetsu reports to Madara and Taka that it was Naruto, not Sasuke, who brought down Pain, hinting the boy may now be the stronger of the two. Unbothered, Sasuke sets Taka's new goal on reaching the Five Kage Summit to kill Danzo, and with Madara's blessing Zetsu divides into his black and white halves, the white guiding Taka while the black stays behind. In the temporary Hokage office, Danzo orders his Root operatives to reach Kabuto before Anko does and seize the human experimentation files he holds, prizing them for his bandaged eye and arm, and he assigns Torune Aburame and Fu Yamanaka as his personal guards for the summit while insisting the Nine-Tails never leave the village.

Recovering in his tent, Naruto tells Kakashi and Yamato he means to persuade the Raikage to spare Sasuke. Yamato reminds him a jinchuriki is barred from leaving, all the more so now that the First Hokage's necklace is gone and he slipped into a dangerous transformed state against Pain. Naruto reveals he met the Fourth Hokage, who calmed that transformation and warned that the masked man steering the Akatsuki orchestrated the beast's attack years earlier. Kakashi reasons the Fourth must have woven part of his mind into the seal and that the masked figure is Madara Uchiha. Recalling his own reunion with his father in the afterlife, Kakashi asks what the Fourth said to his son, and Naruto answers, smiling, that his father simply told him he believed in him.

The episode confirms that Kakashi, Sai, and Yamato all knew the Fourth Hokage was Naruto's father, and since Sai is aware of the village secret, Danzo and much of Root almost certainly are as well. Choosing to bend Konoha's rule against sending shinobi abroad during the summit, Kakashi resolves to escort Naruto to Kumogakure alongside Yamato. Drawn from chapters 453 through 455, the installment belongs to the Five Kage Summit arc and first aired in Japan on February 10, 2011.