Dawn did not so much arrive over Konoha as it was demanded into existence by Might Guy.
It was the kind of morning where any reasonable person would have looked at the grey light seeping between the curtains, rolled back over, and claimed another hour. Tenten had attempted this. She had attempted it twice, in fact. The second attempt had lasted approximately three minutes before the knowledge that her teammates were already awake defeated her entirely, and she had dragged herself upright and into her training clothes with the grim reluctance of someone going somewhere they did not want to go.
The clearing on the village's outskirts was still wet from the night. Dew clung to every blade of grass and soaked through the soles of their sandals within minutes. The large trees around the perimeter were completely indifferent to any of this.
Lee was already shadow-boxing.
He had been here before any of them, Tenten was fairly sure. She had stopped asking when he woke up because the answer was never satisfying. He moved through attacks in the half-light, his weight wraps catching the first grey rays of morning, his breath coming out in small clouds. He looked, as he always did at this hour, like he had never encountered the concept of tiredness.
Tenten came to stand beside Neji with a yawn so thorough it cracked her jaw.
Neji didn't look too happy about it either, but when did Neji ever look happy about anything? His posture was perfect, as always, because his posture was always perfect regardless of how he felt about it. His pale eyes held a cold that had nothing to do with the weather.
Guy-sensei arrived last, which should not have been possible given that he had surely been awake since before dawn, but was apparently working with a different definition of time. He stepped into the clearing with his smile already at full capacity.
"Today, my youthful students, we shall undertake a training session that will test the very limits of our physical prowess and mental fortitude!"
"Like we do almost every day?" Tenten said flatly.
"You betcha, Tenten!" Thumbs-up. Gleaming teeth.
"I hate waking up early," she groaned, drawing both arms across her chest against the chill.
"You'll surpass Lady Tsunade in no time, Tenten!" Lee flipped over to her, full of genuine enthusiasm for Tenten's ambitions at an hour she considered unreasonable. "You can do it!"
"EUGH!" The sound came from somewhere deep in her core. She threw her hands up. "Maybe it was a mistake to say I would surpass Lady Tsunade."
"Haha." Guy began stretching, dropping smoothly into a low lunge and rotating his ankle with the ease of a man whose body had been maintained like a weapon for three decades. "That's the beauty of youth, Tenten. Regret hits harder when you're older."
Tenten stared at the sky and thought about what she had done to deserve this.
...
The warm-ups began.
Six months in, none of them needed to be told what that meant. It meant the clearing filling with a collection of cracks and pops as four people convinced their cold joints to cooperate, the sound somewhere between a bundle of kindling snapping and something very old being woken up too quickly. It meant Tenten working through the lower body stretches she had only did at the Academy because it was required and now considered a fundamental requirement for survival. It meant Neji rolling his shoulders back with an expression that suggested he still found the whole thing beneath him, even knowing from experience what happened when he skipped it.
Lee needed the least warming up and used the time to practice forms instead, moving through the early motions of the Strong Fist with the unhurried care of someone reviewing something they had done so many times it had become the language their body spoke naturally. He did not show off during warm-ups. He never did. He simply went about his own work.
Guy ran them through everything. Handstand walking came first, as it usually did on days that started with Guy looking especially pleased with himself.
He demonstrated it with his usual total commitment: both palms planted on the wet grass, fingers spread wide, legs kicking up overhead in one fluid movement that left him balanced perfectly on his hands. Then he walked, which was the part that still seemed impossible no matter how many times Tenten had watched it. Not shuffling, not wobbling. Actual walking, smooth and unhurried, inverted, as if the morning's dew had simply decided to pool on the ceiling and Guy had adjusted his frame of reference accordingly.
"Core tight, fingers spread, and breathe!" he called out from his upside-down vantage. "The moment you stop breathing is the moment you fall!"
Lee inverted himself without ceremony and followed. His balance was almost exact to Guy's, his form shaped by months of practice and what Tenten suspected was an absolute inability to do things halfway.
Neji went next. No drama, no adjustment period. He just went up and stayed there.
Tenten wobbled on her first attempt. Her second attempt held. She began moving forward on her hands, her shoulders burning immediately, the blood rushing to her face, her arms shaking slightly with the effort of supporting weight she was not quite built for. But she moved. One hand, then the other, slowly and without anything resembling grace, but definitely moving.
They ran a thousand circuits of the clearing like that, upside down, the world a blurred green-and-brown that smeared past her inverted eyes as Tenten tried to breathe and not fall over and move forward all at the same time. By the five hundredth circuit she had stopped thinking about form and was simply surviving. By the eighth hundredth she had found something on the other side of exhaustion that felt almost steady.
She crossed the finish mark of the thousandth circuit still on her hands, which she counted as a personal victory.
Pull-ups on the worn-smooth bar between the trees. Push-ups with their faces inches from the dew-soaked earth, which warmed and then muddied under four people's breath over hundreds of repetitions. Sit-ups with Lee talking encouragingly about the springtime of youth that helped distract her from the agony her abdomen was in and caused Neji to tell him to shut up once or twice.
The race went through the forest, as it always did. It was never against each other, technically, though it was absolutely against each other because that was just how things worked. Lee went first and very quickly became unreachable, a fact that neither Tenten nor Neji wasted any energy being bitter about anymore. They had both independently concluded, somewhere around the second month, that trying to match Lee across a distance run after four hours of strength work was an exercise in misery that produced neither results nor satisfaction. The lesson had taken.
Instead, Neji pushed his own pace, watching his footfalls and his breath, tracking the small increments by which his best time was improving. Tenten did the same, keeping him in sight not to chase him but because having something ahead was better than having nothing.
The trees blurred. Her lungs burned. Her legs felt like they were made of wet clay.
She crossed the finish back at the clearing and immediately sat down on the grass, because sitting down was the only sensible choice.
"Great job, everybody!" Guy smiled brightly at them. "You have completed morning training! Enjoy the rest of your day." His smile softened as he said the last part, the overwhelming enthusiasm dropping away for just a moment into something quieter and genuinely warm. He meant it.
Lee's chest was heaving but his face was bright, the way it was always bright when he had pushed himself as far as he could go and found the limit had moved again. He looked, as he always looked after training, like someone who had received news they had been waiting for.
Neji had found a spot near the tree line and was cooling down in silence, his damp hair clinging to his forehead. He would not admit it had been a good session. He also would not deny it, because he had stopped lying to himself about the training approximately a month in, when he realized that his strikes were landing faster and holding longer than they had before.
Tenten lay flat on the grass and looked at the sky.
"Same time tomorrow?" Lee asked.
"I don't really have a choice with this team," she said at the sky.
...
The river was three hours from the village, at the eastern edge of a broad stretch of forest where the land began to slope down toward the flats bordering the Land of Rivers. The mission briefing had been straightforward: a waterway running along a disputed trading route had been used as a dump by merchants and travellers for years, and the communities downstream were dealing with the consequences. Team 3 was tasked with clearing the debris.
Not glamorous. Not even close to glamorous. But Tenten had noticed, since the Sugi mission, that she had started approaching even the straightforward assignments with the understanding that they still paid good money.
The trees here were older and taller than the ones around Konoha's training grounds, their roots running deep enough that they had outlasted several generations of shinobi. The air smelled of mineral water and rich soil and the kind of deep green that never quite dried out. Sunlight came down in long angled shafts between the branches, illuminating columns of floating dust and drifting insects.
The river came into view around a bend in the trail: wide and clear, running over rounded stones, the kind of water that would have been beautiful without the mess that humans had made of its edges. Bottles. Cans. Waterlogged rope and cloth. A broken cart wheel half-buried in the mud. Pieces of pottery and rusted metal that had been sitting long enough to become part of the bank rather than additions to it.
"At least it's a good day for it," Lee said.
Tenten and Neji looked at the stretch of contaminated riverbank and said nothing.
They spread out along the water with their storage scrolls, working down the bank. Neji used his Byakugan to spot material that had been buried in the mud or obscured by overhanging vegetation, grabbing the trash himself. Tenten sealed each item away as it was found, her scroll filling steadily with the accumulated carelessness of everyone who had passed this way.
Lee, after watching the work for approximately two minutes, came to a decision that was recognizably his in its structure.
"I'll handle the underwater trash," he announced, and before anyone could raise a practical objection to this, he had pulled off his gi and was jogging toward the water's edge.
His torso, in the morning light, was the visual record of everything he had been doing since he was five years old. The muscles were not the kind that developed from standard training; they were the product of a program that had never acknowledged the word enough and a jutsu that worked on parts of the body that training alone couldn't reach. Tenten had seen it before. It was still slightly alarming each time.
The river swallowed him smoothly. He cut through the water without the splash and struggle of someone forcing their way in, his body finding the current and adjusting to it like something that had always understood how water moved. Within seconds he was below the surface, visible only as a blurred shape against the pale riverbed.
Then objects began appearing on the bank. A bottle arced through the air and landed neatly by Tenten's feet. A length of rusted chain followed. A wooden bucket that had been down there long enough to sprout algae. They came at regular intervals, each one emerging from the river and landing on the bank with the accuracy of someone who had a very clear idea of where the bank was even from below.
Tenten sealed each one and said nothing.
Beneath the surface, Lee was in a different world.
The river had its own population, entirely unconcerned with the trash cleanup happening in its shallower stretches. Fish moved in slow-turning formations through the mid-water, their scales catching the light that filtered down in broken columns. A turtle was parked on the riverbed beside a flat stone, old and large, regarding Lee with the look of something that had been existing in this river since before most of the village above it was built. Frogs kicked through the water in the reed-heavy shallows. Small crabs picked through the gravel of the bottom. A water snake wound between the rocks near the far bank, smooth and unbothered.
It reminded him, in some small way, of Kagerou.
His snake had taken to the apartment like a fish in water. It had found the warm patch near the south-facing window within the first day and claimed it as its own. Lee had arranged some branches and a water dish, and Kagerou had accepted these additions without visible opinion. In the mornings, before training, he would find the snake awake and watching him with small dark eyes that communicated nothing he could understand.
He gathered a rusted pot from the riverbed and tossed it skyward, then continued along the bottom toward a cluster of broken pottery he had spotted in the deeper water near the far bank.
Tenten was watching the river surface when Guy-sensei appeared at her elbow. She had been watching it for a while, she realized. The pile of salvaged debris on the bank had grown significantly. Lee had been down there long enough that she had lost count.
"How long can a normal person hold their breath underwater, sensei?" she asked.
Guy's eyes went to the river immediately. The tone of her question had been too careful to be casual.
"Lee!" His voice carried across the water without straining. "Are you okay down there?"
A beat.
Then the surface broke, and Lee came up.
He emerged facing them with a frog sitting on top of his head. The frog was large and greenish-brown and wore the expression of an animal that had not made any of the decisions that had led to its current situation. It sat on Lee's wet hair with the slightly dazed dignity of something that had survived an unexpected ordeal.
Tenten laughed. It came out before she could decide not to, genuine and sharp, cutting through the morning air. All her careful concern evaporated in an instant.
"Lee," she managed. "I think you found another friend." She pointed at the top of her own head.
"Huh?" Lee reached up slowly, touched something damp and living, and understood. His face immediately arranged itself into the expression it made when he had accidentally startled an animal. He cupped his hands carefully around the frog as he lifted it off his head, bringing it to eye level with the particular gentleness he reserved for creatures that hadn't chosen to be there.
The frog looked at him.
Lee looked at the frog.
Then the frog launched itself from his palms with a powerful kick of its back legs, arced through the air, and hit the water. It was gone beneath the surface in a second, swimming away at impressive speed toward the reed beds.
"Sorry, little buddy," Lee called after it, waving.
Tenten was still laughing.
Neji, working farther down the bank, did not acknowledge any of this. His Byakugan had found a pocket of debris buried deep in the riverbed mud, and he was directing his attention there. Not indulging in Lee's foolishness.
...
They worked through the morning and into early afternoon, the pile on the bank growing and the river steadily improving. It was not exciting work. It was also, quietly, the kind of work that produced visible results, which was its own satisfaction. Each sealed item was a small piece of someone else's life put somewhere it couldn't cause more damage.
Lee had surfaced a few more times, usually to deposit a load of debris too large to throw from underwater, and once to check on the situation after apparently dislodging a section of the bank while moving something heavy. Tenten had gone along the bank to check on him. He had been fine, still smiling, with mud in his hair.
Neji had not commented.
The afternoon birds had started up in the trees above the bank. Somewhere in the reed beds, frogs were calling to each other in their ribbits and croaks. The river itself moved calmly over the stones, carrying its debris toward the flats it had been carrying it toward for centuries, patient with the changes and unchanged by them.
Tenten was sealing the last of a batch of debris when she noticed Neji stop moving.
He had been working steadily down the bank, using his Byakugan to find buried material. Then he simply stopped. His body went very still, the kind of stillness that was not relaxation.
She caught the change before she understood it.
Then she understood it.
Neji's hand went up with two fingers extended, a gesture she had seen him use during training when he identified something.
"Enemy shinobi," he said, not loudly, his voice carrying the flat weight of complete certainty. "Four of them. We are surrounded."
He had already moved into the opening stance of his Gentle Fist by the time the words were out.
"What?!" The scroll Tenten had been working with hit the ground. Her hand went to her weapons pouch and then to the larger scroll at her back, the one with her combat tools, and her fingers fumbled for a half-second before finding the right grip. Her heart was going fast. She had known, in the abstract way that all genin know things before they know them in the way that matters, that this could happen on a mission. Knowing and having it happen were not the same thing at all.
Lee's head appeared above the surface of the river, just his eyes and the top of his hair, like something waiting to see if it was safe to come up. He scanned the bank without moving.
"Get behind me!" Guy-sensei covered the distance between himself and his students with the kind of speed that still occasionally surprised Tenten despite everything she had seen in six months of training with him. He had already placed himself between the team and the most likely direction of approach before she had finished processing his words.
"Reveal yourselves to the Blue Noble Beast of Konoha!"
His voice rang through the trees and over the river and presumably quite a long way beyond. The birds in the reed beds went quiet.
They revealed themselves.
The adult that came out of the trees wore dark red and moved with the economic certainty of someone who had been in more fights than she had remembered. She did not answer Guy's declaration. She simply came at him with her fist raised, and her fist was covered in stone.
The blow connected. Not cleanly, not fully, because Guy was already shifting when it landed, but it pushed him back with enough force that his boots carved two lines in the muddy bank before he found his footing. She had hit a jonin and he had moved with it rather than against it, and that was the only reason he was still standing.
He held her gaze for one moment.
An Iwagakure jonin. Earth style, to judge by the gauntlets. He turned the information over quickly: the Land of Rivers lay between the Land of Fire and the Land of Wind. Iwagakure was in the Land of Earth, which was not in either of those directions. Whatever these shinobi were doing here, they were a long way from where they were supposed to be.
Three of the enemy were genin. He could see them through the trees, moving toward Team 3 with the focused purpose of a coordinated approach. Each of them his students' age, maybe a year older. All of them carrying the readiness of people who had been told this would go quickly.
Guy settled into his stance and looked at the woman who had hit him.
"Get them, Team 3," he said, and meant it.
Behind him, the river churned.