Board Thread:Episode Discussions/@comment-1181222-20171011112920/@comment-734582-20171013155800

BerserkerPhantom wrote: ehhhh. Perhaps, but the sword just stood there as a gravestone for over three years, and no Hunter-Nin received news of Zabuza being defeated, despite Kakashi/Naruto/Sasuke being referenced by quite a few people as the guy who killed the Demon of the Mist. It's just very difficult to believe. I mean, it would require there to be someone with control over the hunter nins to retrieve the sword. If they truly were in a civil war back then, they simply may not have had the manpower to spare in order to get that sword back, or among the chaos nobody had the authority to demand it back.

It's not the best explanation, but i think that during a war there would be more to do than just retrieving a sword, since there wasn't anyone really to wield it anyway.