Bitter Rivals and Broken Bonds

Just as Naruto and Sasuke are about to collide, Kakashi appears and steers each attack into a separate water tower. Admiring the neat hole his Chidori punched through, Sasuke assumes he has pulled ahead, until a closer look at Naruto's tower, torn wide open on one side, twists his pride into fresh envy. Kakashi, astonished that Naruto has mastered the Rasengan, realizes at once that Jiraiya must be behind it. The two mentors round on each other, Kakashi accusing Jiraiya of handing a boy a technique that might have killed Sasuke, and Jiraiya firing back that the Chidori in Sasuke's revenge-bent hands was just as lethal.

Kakashi likens the pair to Jiraiya and Orochimaru in their youth, noting that Naruto prizes Sasuke as his greatest rival while Sasuke cannot stomach how fast Naruto keeps closing the gap. Later he binds Sasuke and lectures him against ever turning on his own comrades, urging him to let his thirst for vengeance go. Sasuke retorts that Kakashi could never understand until he too loses everyone dear to him, only for Kakashi to reveal that all of his own loved ones are already gone. He reminds Sasuke that both of them were lucky enough to find friends to fill that emptiness, then walks away and leaves the choice in the boy's hands.

Left alone to weigh accepting Naruto and Sakura against hunting down Itachi, Sasuke is set upon by the Sound Four, dispatched by Orochimaru to bring him in. Elsewhere, Sakura coaxes Naruto out for a walk to tell him about the cursed seal Orochimaru branded onto Sasuke during the Chunin Exams, since Naruto lay unconscious when it happened, and she stays uneasy despite Kakashi's assurance that he dealt with it. The episode belongs to the Sasuke Recovery Mission arc, adapts chapters 176 and 177, and first aired in Japan on 10 November 2004.