After Shisui left the office, he went to the ANBU quarters to take some rest. Since he was supposed to be out on a mission for one month, there was no need to go back to his house and make them unnecessarily worried.
After 4 hours of proper rest and gaining some of his mental clarity back—apparently, casting such specific genjutsu on tens of ninja and to such an extreme degree that they were to die for their enemy village was highly mentally taxing—he prepared to leave.
This was one of the reasons why Hiruzen had not sent him on another mission as reinforcement for Jiraiya. Now that he was relatively fine, Shisui left for his next mission in silence, making his way toward the daimyo's caravan.
While he was making his way toward the caravan, Jiraiya was having a meeting with his teammates.
"The timing will be the most crucial part of this formation. If a single one of us messes up, the price will be the lives of many of us present," Jiraiya said, gaining serious, resolute nods from his teammates.
A quality separating them from inexperienced ninja—not being intimidated by the revelation, but rather being motivated by it, ready to give their all for the mission.
Jiraiya had spent almost all of the day trying to find the most optimal way to destroy the array in the shortest time possible without giving the Kumo ninja any chance of forming any retaliation in between.
The process should be completed before they even registered they were under attack. This was specifically important now, as according to just the rough calculation from the Hyuga ninja present in the room, the area which didn't have the seal to hide from his vision had more than 150 ninja.
Considering other areas, the number could very well reach 250, and what did they have? Just 31 ninja. Due to the massive difference, they didn't have even the tiniest bit of error margin during the mission.
Any error would give the enemy time to organize against them, and considering the numbers, they may have a similar number of jonin themselves. So if the enemy organized themselves, going back with just half of the team would be an achievement in itself.
Since every member of Jiraiya's team understood this, they paid every bit of attention to his explanation that they could.
Each one of them was assigned a special role, with timing and work given to the millisecond. After Jiraiya gave the basic explanation, he chose five team leaders who would be responsible for coordinating the attack of their teams. The work was simple.
After that, it was the job of team leaders to make sure there was perfect coordination among the teammates. Considering the rank of the ninja, the job was not as difficult as it looked.
Due to that, in the few hours they had before the sun went down, they had already mastered perfect teamwork for the jutsu using a simple communication tag.
All of them communicated the timing of their attack through a simple vibration which would begin the sequence. In practice, they all faced different directions, and as soon as the tag vibrated, they started weaving hand signs.
Each seal had a perfect interval to time the attack perfectly. Since they couldn't actually use the jutsu this close to the base, the practice just involved the hand seals and no actual chakra usage.
After constant practice, it was looking like many mirrors were placed around the room, reflecting the movement of a single person, showing true efficiency of a team consisting of only jonin and elite jonin of a major village—a team which had now become a single machine ready to fight foes at least thrice as strong as them.
Though while his teammates were training like their lives depended on it (literally), Jiraiya was just sitting in a small room he created for himself. After creating an array around the base to hide the chakra signature of everyone present—a highly complex concealment array—he then went to write something.
His teammates thought he was busy with the analysis of the array once again, most likely trying to find any problems or details he may have missed.
If they found out how wrong they were and that Jiraiya was just writing another chapter of his Icha Icha Paradise Volume 5, they might have vomited blood on those pages.
But in hindsight, there was nothing else for Jiraiya to do anymore. The practice was going as fine as it could, he had already analyzed the array completely, and it's not like he could increase his strength through a few hours of training.
So the most efficient thing was to utilize this time in a productive way, which he was doing just fine.
While the Konoha team at the Kumo outpost was busy with their practice, Kakashi and team were moving through the predefined path toward their next post. It was a port town of the Land of Hot Water, big enough to host a few ships at a time, but it was not the stop for the daimyo.
They still had a few hours of the day, which they were going to use to complete the first part of their journey by sea, their destination being an island under the Land of Lightning. The permission and clearance were already handled by the daimyo, and they already had a few hotels booked on the island.
Just as the caravan was moving toward the port town, suddenly—
BOOM
A shattering explosion happened in front of the road. The trees near the road then swaggered, and the rogue ninja on them were about to make a move when they saw Jiraiya coming toward the front of the caravan.
"It's Jiraiya the Gallant from Konoha—retreat!" the leader of the rogue ninja shouted, clearly intimidated by Jiraiya's appearance, or so the samurai and ninja thought when they saw the scene playing in front of them.
They quickly surrounded the daimyo's carriage while the ANBU ninja made an earth wall all around the caravan, five patrolling the wall while the other three gave a quick chase to the rogue ninja.
While that was happening, Jiraiya appeared at the front, complimenting Kakashi who was at the front and had 'predicted' the attack beforehand, creating an earth wall just in time to 'protect' all of them.
After which there was not even a need for them to ask the daimyo about staying in the port town.
"It is not that I don't trust you or other Konoha ninja, but I am just saying that there is no need for us to hurry. Since these bandits are plaguing our neighbor country, it is our duty to help them as a good neighbor.
So I will be staying in the Yuugashi Port town. In the meantime, please handle them so that civilians don't have to live in fear anymore," the daimyo said to Jiraiya and Kakashi standing in front of him.
The person who didn't spare a cent's worth of attention to the starving population of the Fire Country—his own country—was now worried about the civilians of another country.
Even though the irony was almost palpable in the surroundings when he spoke these words, Kakashi and Jiraiya's clone nodded their heads like they completely agreed with him.
The impact of Shikaku's strategy was clear—as the order directly came from the daimyo himself, there was no way he was going to doubt them when the time came in the future.