The Third watches the Plague Doctor joking with Naruto, brow locked tight.
Did he have it wrong?
Is this thing actually peaceful?
**Otogakure**
Orochimaru studies that same friendliness, thoughts turning.
By its own word, it is only a wandering doctor.
It doesn’t even know what chakra is.
Then the earlier worry can wait.
When the time comes, he can simply send people to take it.
On the boat, the Plague Doctor talks and laughs with the team.
“Ah—so you’re a traveling doctor, Uncle?”
A little conversation is all it takes.
After a while Kakashi asks the question that has been sitting in his throat.
Why did a “no-danger” C-rank already draw a ninja attack?
Tazuna has no way out.
He tells them everything.
The Third hears it and explodes.
“You little—Grandson, I could *kill* you—”
He had thought the job was safe.
He had given it to Naruto’s team as training.
From that talk on the boat he now knows they were ambushed on the road, and Naruto was hurt.
Had he known the mission was that dangerous, he would never have sent them.
Ashamed, Tazuna leans on guilt until Team 7 agrees to finish the escort to the Land of Waves.
The Plague Doctor is going there too.
It stays kind.
The ninja world starts to believe it: maybe the Plague Doctor really is harmless.
They walk inland.
On a narrow path, the Plague Doctor stops dead.
Naruto and the others stare.
Naruto steps up and pats its arm.
“Doctor Uncle? What’s wrong?”
The man who had been nothing but kind is rigid now, every muscle tight, eyes fixed on the trees ahead.
He mutters under his breath.
Then the voice tears out of him, raw with rage.
“**PLAGUE!!!**”
“The plague is coming!”