Bonds

Team Kakashi slips into Sai's room, Yamato shaping his finger into a key with a wood-release technique, and Sakura returns the picture book Sai treasures. Pressed angrily by Naruto over his betrayal, Sai concedes that his true assignment, kept secret until now, has failed, and lays it bare: Danzo planted him at Orochimaru's side as part of a scheme to seize control of Konoha by destroying it. Sakura recalls the lives lost the last time Orochimaru struck the village, the Third Hokage among them, but Sai stays unmoved. Yamato explains that Sai was raised in Root, where training strips away emotion much as it does in the Hidden Mist.

Sakura rejects the idea that feeling can be erased so completely, arguing that Sai's fondness for the book proves otherwise, since it keeps alive the memory of a brother he once shared a bond with. Sai insists no such bond existed and that even his name is a fiction, calling himself a tool with no identity beyond serving Danzo. He clarifies the boy was not blood kin but someone raised alongside him in Root, and, with a faint crack in his composure, denies killing him, saying illness took his brother. The picture book had been meant as a gift Sai never learned how to finish.

While Kabuto returns for a hidden envelope of Anbu personnel files only to find the room empty, the team resurfaces outside the base, where Yamato binds Sai in wood. Naruto declares the mission the same as before, to bring Sasuke home, and answers Sai's bafflement by recounting how a boyhood rivalry with Sasuke grew into the first bond that ever truly accepted him. Sai is faintly stirred yet still detached as Naruto steels himself for the rescue. The episode belongs to the Tenchi Bridge Reconnaissance Mission arc, adapts chapters 302 and 303, and first aired in Japan on 28 February 2008.