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Atop Mount Myōboku, Gerotora walks Naruto through a painful memory. Jiraiya had once eased the stomach seal to teach the boy control over the Nine-Tails, yet the loosened lock let a four-tailed rage break loose that badly hurt the toad sage himself. Naruto insists the lapse was not his intent and that Jiraiya deliberately provoked it, framing the risk as part of the Fourth Hokage's design. Gerotora clarifies that borrowing a beast's chakra also means brushing against its hatred, which is precisely why the Fourth blended his son's chakra with the fox through the Eight Trigrams Sealing Style, so the strength could be tapped without the will overtaking him.

Naruto recalls every time the fox's power slipped its leash: the clash with Orochimaru on the Tenchi Bridge, the moment he wounded Sakura, and the surrender that came when he believed Pain had killed Hinata. His father's faith steadies him, and he puts his name to the contract for the Fourth's sake. Fukasaku then boots Gerotora down Naruto's throat with a Frog Kata kick to lock the frog away, and the Great Toad Sage sends the boy off to seek the eight-tailed ox back in Konoha. Far away, Kabuto meets Tobi and greets him as Madara Uchiha, then answers the masked man's accusation of betrayal by reviving Itachi, Sasori, Deidara, Kakuzu, and Nagato with his reincarnation technique.

Kabuto pitches a war partnership, offering an endless supply of reanimated dead in exchange for custody of Sasuke as a test subject. Tobi rejects the terms until one final, hidden corpse is summoned, a sight that leaves him furious and eventually forces his grudging consent. Anko's squad, meanwhile, traces the bodies Kabuto scattered straight to the hideout. The episode also carries a pair of animation slips: the reincarnated Akatsuki robes appear in the wrong black-and-red coloring, and a single frame tints Nagato's hair too dark during his summoning.