The Exploding Human

On a stormy road outside a hot spring, a man named Tadaichi is stopped by a stranger who wants to confirm he served Konoha. Tadaichi admits his home but insists he is only a merchant, yet the stranger, having dug up his Anbu record, turns a dojutsu on him. A companion arrives to praise the deed, and the first vows to stain everything crimson. In the village, Sakura and Naruto bring word of vanished shinobi to Kakashi, who already knows. An explosion then rips through one of Konoha's gates, and the two rush to find five attackers assaulting the guards.

Ino, Shikamaru and Choji reach the scene, and Ino recognises Tadaichi as a familiar face from Yamanaka Flowers, sure he would never betray the village. Struck by a shuriken, Tadaichi registers no pain and instead begins to swell before bursting. Naruto's clones haul the guards clear of the blast, while the four remaining attackers push inside and start expanding too. Following Shikamaru's plan, Choji enlarges himself and fans the detonations away with butterfly wings, and Naruto adds a Rasengan. Sakura works out that it is their injuries that trigger the explosions. Hinata arrives, finds no genjutsu caster nearby but senses a foreign chakra inside the victims, and after Shikamaru pins them with his shadow she severs their chakra networks, subduing them without setting off a blast.

Unable to break the genjutsu even afterward, Kakashi resolves to send the puzzle to Sasuke and has Sai deliver the request. Far away, Sasuke feeds stray cats until one of Sai's ink hawks reaches him with the message. He soon witnesses the same phenomenon in another village and steps in when an old man named Io mistakes him for one of the attackers and orders two performers, Chino and Nowaki, to strike. Sasuke smothers Chino's Water Release with Fire Release, evades Nowaki's wind-charged weapons, and halts the exploding villagers with his Sharingan. The horror deepens when Io's own daughter, Amino, caught in the genjutsu, stabs herself and detonates inside a shelter.

The episode launches the Sasuke Shinden: Book of Sunrise arc and first aired in Japan on December 1, 2016. Io curses the name Fushin, and a freed villager tells Sasuke that Fushin leads the Lightning Group, robbers who took from the corrupt to aid the poor before being betrayed by Kirigakure. Probing an attacker's memories, Sasuke meets resistance and glimpses a single red eye, leading him to suspect a kekkei genkai lies behind the attacks.