Infiltration: The Den of the Snake!

Deep inside a Kusagakure lair, Sai reaches the one person Team Kakashi has chased across two nations. Sasuke, irritated at being kept from a new jutsu Orochimaru promised him, greets the intruder by locking eyes and dropping a specialised Sharingan illusion over him. Even the normally blank Sai buckles under the terror and sinks to his knees. Recovering his footing, Sai names Naruto and repeats Sakura's claim that Naruto once regarded Sasuke as a brother. The remark barely registers. Sasuke replies that only one brother exists for him, Itachi, and that his sole aim is to end that man.

Sasuke slips away and Orochimaru follows, handing Sai over to Kabuto. On his way out, Orochimaru passes along the papers Danzō sealed in an envelope and orders a Bingo Book prepared. When Kabuto looks inside, he finds dossiers on every Anbu operative serving the Hokage, the Hokage Guard Platoon included. Aboveground, Yamato rejoins Naruto and Sakura through a wood clone that has pinpointed the entrance behind a boulder. He absorbs the clone and doles out tracking seeds, revealing he tagged both Sai's meal and his clothing to trail him. Using an earth tunnelling jutsu, then a wood-shaping technique to bore through the final wall, Yamato brings the trio inside while urging them to spend as little chakra as possible.

Distrusting Sai as a member of Root, Kabuto confines him to a locked room. Once alone, Sai sweeps the space for watchers, then produces two scrolls and summons a Bingo Book of his own. Kabuto, realising he abandoned the envelope in that same room, doubles back down the corridor, never noticing that Naruto's group is threading a parallel passage in search of the same door. Sai has just begun reading when the lock clicks open. This installment is the forty-seventh of the Shippūden series and covers the Tenchi Bridge Reconnaissance Mission arc, adapting chapters 301 and 302.