The Rules or a Comrade

Shizune arrives with a meal and is caught off guard when Tsunade snaps at how Jiraiya has written Sakura into his book. Finding the food too salty and the drink too hot, the Hokage simply goes back to reading. Within the tale, the masked figure blocks Neji from rushing to help Sasuke and Sakura, promising he will not let them die and demanding that Neji instead observe who they truly are.

The masked man nudges Sasori back toward his assignment, and the puppeteer opens an assault on Sakura. She weaves around his strikes, lands a blow of her own, and drives him to pull back, freeing her to purge the poison from Sasuke. Elsewhere, Jiraiya reopens the pressure points that had been sealed shut in Naruto's body.

When Naruto asks why he has appeared, Jiraiya explains that he came searching for someone and had Minato send him over through the sealing formula woven into Naruto's own mark. A test summoning fails, prompting Jiraiya to offer to ease the Eight Trigrams seal. Lee and Tenten regroup with the Asuma and Kurenai squads while Kiba and Hinata pinpoint Sasuke, Sakura, and the lurking Sasori. As Sakura heals him, Sasuke recalls a childhood slight when his father, awaiting Itachi, measured him poorly against his brother at his first Great Fireball attempt. Sasori returns with his army of a hundred puppets, the genin converge, the masked man withdraws with Neji, and Jiraiya's loosening of the seal pushes Naruto into a four-tailed transformation.

The episode belongs to the Jiraiya Shinobi Handbook: The Tale of Naruto the Hero arc, an anime-original storyline presented as a book Tsunade is reading. Its alternate framing lets long-dead figures such as Minato and Jiraiya act alongside the current generation, and the Ame Orphans observe events from a distance as the drama unfolds.