The transformation took perhaps twenty seconds. Lee watched it happen between one breath and the next. He's never seen anything like this before or even heard of it. Shinobi didn't really transform and become stronger.
Wait, no.
He did that.
Sure there was a cost, but still it could be considered a transformation.
Lee felt a bit silly now and shook his head.
The sand layered across Gaara's right arm first, thicker than his sand armor, and it changed the arm's shape entirely. The fingers elongated, each one tapering to a point that curled slightly inward. The shoulder broadened, the joint disappearing beneath an accumulation of packed sand. His neck and the right side of his face came next, the sand climbing his jawline and cheek, and as it reached the corner of his eye the color of the iris changed. The pale teal transformed into a yellow pupil and the left side of his face became monstrous.
Then he attacked.
Lee barely avoided the blow, a talon managing to claw a fresh red line across his chest.
"You're faster! Even though you look heavier. Quite impressive, Gaara-kun!"
"I'll kill you!" Gaara cried out.
"Oh, sorry." Lee politely apologized, realizing this probably wasn't the time for compliments.
Above him, the arena had gone very quiet.
On the observation balcony, the jonin had realized something was incredibly wrong.
Kakashi's visible eye was narrow. He said nothing for a moment, his gaze focusing on Gaara.
"The Hidden Sand brought their jinchuriki."
"They brought one here." This came from Kurenai, her voice low.
"Well, to be fair, we have one as well." Guy quietly added.
Several of the observing jonin exchanged glances. All of them locking onto Baki's figure. Baki's face did not change nor did a drop of sweat release from his pores. He had not spoken since the transformation began. He was watching the arena floor, and he was watching the Konoha jonin on either side of him, and he was very carefully doing nothing else.
Temari's hand gripped her fan.
Beside her, Kankuro was ready to unleash his puppet.
This was not the plan.
The invasion rested on a specific sequence of events that had been prepared and adjusted and refined across months. Gaara was the last piece of it. His full transformation was supposed to be far far later! During the finals, when all the important people in Konoha and even across the world were present. To cause chaos and havoc that would lead to the destruction of Konoha!
Instead, Gaara was currently trying to catch a Konoha genin who could not perform ninjutsu or genjutsu, and failing, and the genin was still smiling.
"He's lost it…" Kankuro said under his breath. "We're so screwed…"
Temari didn't answer. She knew exactly what Gaara going off-script could mean for everyone in the building.
Down on the arena floor, Lee was not standing still.
The partially-transformed Gaara was faster than he had been at any point in the fight. Each sweep of that elongated arm covered a range that Lee had to work to stay outside of. Each step Gaara took sent cracks radiating through the arena stone.
And Gaara was not fully in his right mind.
That was the thing that was different from every other moment of this fight. Every previous action had some thought behind it. Even in the anger that had built across the fight's duration, the shinobi underneath had remained.
Now the arm swept toward whatever was in front of it. Gaara's eye tracked Lee's movement, but the tracking was that of a predator following motion rather than a shinobi reading his opponent.
It was worse in some ways. There was no hesitation anywhere in it. No self-preservation. He simply wanted to kill Lee. He wanted to kill Lee in the most horrific, brutal, and painful way possible.
Lee had encountered something similar to this before.
He had spent seven years fighting Neji Hyuga, and Neji had tried to kill him sincerely most of those times. Well, at least when their sensei wasn't around. But also Lee may or may not have been egging him on to gain more from their battle.
He hadn't minded it then.
A person who fought you with the full commitment of wanting you to stop existing was, in a strange way, paying you the highest compliment available in the shinobi world. They had decided you were worth the full expenditure of everything they had.
Gaara, in whatever state he currently occupied, had arrived at the same conclusion.
Lee felt the familiar warmth of appreciation for a truly serious opponent.
"Should we stop the match?" A member of ANBU asked.
"As soon as possible," Kakashi replied. "We don't know how long Lee can keep this up. Even if he was winning in the beginning, if Gaara further progresses…"
"I agree with Kakashi." Asuma added.
"Someone needs to get down there," Anko said from the proctor's position. She raised her hand toward the arena floor.
Three Konoha jonin moved toward the stairs.
And from the arena floor, cutting through everything else in the building, Rock Lee's voice arrived.
"Please do not interfere!"
He did not plan to shout that. The words came from somewhere deeper than planning, from the part of him that had been carrying this fight since before it started, since before the exam started, since before the academy when he was five years old and someone first told him he could never be a shinobi.
The jonin stopped on the stairs.
Lee had maybe two seconds before the arm came around again. He used both of them standing still, turning his face upward toward the balcony with the full weight of what he needed to say pressed behind his voice.
"I am still standing. I am still fighting." The arm swept. Lee stepped inside the arc, let the elongated fingers pass behind his shoulder, and kept his eyes on the balcony. "This fight is not over. Please do not interfere."
He ducked under the follow-through, dropped into a roll, came back to his feet at a different angle. The sand reached for him from the floor and he sidestepped it without looking, his body handling the immediate problem while his mind stayed on the thing that mattered more.
"I do not care what Gaara-kun might be." His voice was not loud anymore. "I do not care what is inside him. I am a shinobi of Konoha and I am telling you that I can still fight this battle. I have not asked for help."
The arm came down.
Lee threw himself sideways, hit the arena floor rolling, absorbed the impact across his shoulder, and came up moving, and finished the sentence from the new position.
"Please. Let me fight."
A beat. The arm swept again. Lee went under it and came out the other side still talking.
"As a shinobi that cannot use ninjutsu or genjutsu." His voice cracked slightly. "This fight is proof that I can still become a splendid shinobi. Please do not take that proof away from me."
He dashed to the left, narrowly skirted a swarm of very fast and sharp sand shuriken. Several more tears and nicks added to his outfit.
"Gaara-kun still has so much more to show me. And so do I."
The jonin on the stairs looked up at Might Guy.
Guy had not moved from his position at the railing. His eyes had not left Lee since the transformation began, and they would not leave Lee for as long as the fight continued.
It was the expression of a man who knows something about a person that no one else in the room fully understood yet. Something that cannot be explained in the time available and would not be believed even if it could.
Guy had watched Lee for a long time. He had been there for all of it. And there was not a single person in this arena who understood what Rock Lee was built from the way that Might Guy understood it.
Kakashi appeared at his shoulder.
"Guy." There was no humor in his voice. "You cannot be serious. It'd be irresponsible. It'd be dangerous."
"I know my student."
"That is a jinchuriki."
"I know my student and he knows himself." The arena below was chaos and Lee was in the middle of it and Guy watched him.
"Lee." His voice carried down to the arena floor, steady and warm and absolute. "Remove your weights."
"Weights? You think weights are enough to change the outcome of this fight?" Kurenai questioned as if he was crazy.
"It's certainly possible." Guy smiled. "That boy is going to surpass me one day. I have known it for some time now." He paused. "It would be irresponsible as his teacher to doubt him at a moment like this one."
On the arena floor, Lee heard Guy's voice and felt something unlock in his chest.
He didn't waste time on ceremony. He found the window inside the partially-transformed Gaara's pattern of movement, the interval between one lethal swipe and the pullback of the next, and in that window he crouched and pulled the leg weights free in two sharp motions.
He held them for exactly one second.
Then he let go.
The leg weights hit the arena floor.
The sound arrived before the crater. A deep, bone-level impact that sent a visible shockwave through the stone, cracks racing outward from the point of contact in a starburst pattern, stone fragments lifting and then dropping into the newly formed depression. Dust puffed upward in a ring. The entire building seemed to register the event, a low resonance running through the walls that could be felt more than heard, like the building itself acknowledging that something significant had just been set down.
On the observation balcony, the sequence of reactions that erupted had nothing to do with the main event.
"WHAT!?"
"How could?!"
"Aren't you overdoing it a bit, Guy…?" Kakashi muttered.
Naruto's voice, rising above the rest with its carrying power: "THOSE WERE ON HIS LEGS THE WHOLE EXAM?!"
"I feel like I need to sit down," Choji said faintly, a chip bag held forgotten in one hand.
Shikamaru's voice, flat and dry in the middle of the commotion: "I carried my mission pack uphill one time and complained for the entire time. This guy really is a freak..."
The difference was immediate.
The first step he took carried him directly into Gaara's reach.
Gaara's arm came around, that enormous elongated sweep, and Lee went under it so cleanly that the sand trailing from the fingers didn't catch even a thread of his jumpsuit. He was inside the arc before it committed. He was at Gaara's center before the arm's momentum had finished.
His right hand drove upward.
He had been building the chakra for it since Guy's permission, channeling it toward his hand, not outward into the world but inward first, then directed, a concentration of energy pressed into the smallest possible point of contact.
The chakra-enhanced strike hit Gaara in the midsection with a sound like stone fracturing underwater.
Gaara's entire body lifted from the impact and arced backward through the air.
He hit the far wall.
The indentation left in the stone was deeper than any of the previous impacts. Several seconds passed. Then Gaara peeled away from the wall and fell.
He hit the arena floor face-first and lay still.
It didn't take long for Gaara to start moving again. As Gaara's body lifted from the floor more sand began to cover his body
"If I can defeat one strong enough to wound me, rob him of all that he is… I'll feel even more alive than ever!" Gaara laughed manically, drool leaking from the corner of his mouth. "Ha, ha, ha! More, I want more!"
They should not have been even close to each other in terms of capabilities.
The space between a genin without ninjutsu or genjutsu and a jinchuriki in partial-transformation should have been a slaughter before the genin stopped being a concern.
The power difference was not the kind that skill and experience could simply overcome. The power that Gaara had now was far different from how it was earlier in the fight.
He was much faster and stronger than before.
And yet.
A powerful body fighting without a sound mind could be considered worse than a weak body fighting with a strong mind.
The swing that comes from rage rather than intent was obvious and could be read multiple steps ahead.
He went under the first swing and drove his elbow into the sand-arm. The sand blew away along that line. The arm's momentum was stopped entirely with Gaara's arm underneath briefly revealing itself.
He stepped left from the follow-through, planted his foot, and kicked the knee.
Lee's kick hit the foundation with the full strength of a leg that had spent most of its life carrying weights possibly heavier than some small buildings, and partially-transformed Gaara lurched sideways with it, the knee breaking.
Lee was already following up.
He came over the top of the lurch, his body arcing above Gaara's shifting center of gravity, and drove his heel down toward the shoulder joint.
Gaara caught himself. The sand arm regrown to support him before the heel fully connected, and the deflection was clean enough that Lee's foot skidded off the sudden block and carried him past. But he had landed. He was already repositioning. The exchange had lasted perhaps four seconds and both of them were still standing and neither of them had retreated. That broken leg seemingly was not an issue at all as sand coated it and took over.
"Are you ready for me?!" Gaara screamed as he charged.
The exchange on the arena floor had found its pace.
Gaara swinging, Lee moving. Lee hitting, the sand breaking and rebuilding. The impacts were landing on both sides, but the balance of damage was not even. Lee was hitting something far more durable than anything he had ever hit, and his hands and feet were reporting that reality back to him with each exchange.
His knuckles were split on both hands. His right shin had taken a glancing contact from one of the arm-sweeps that had partially connected, and the bone was complaining insistently from somewhere above the ankle.
He kept fighting.
Partially-transformed Gaara had not landed a clean hit on him yet. The sweeps and grabs and the raw surging attempts to simply crush him under mass had all been read and avoided or partially turned aside, and the reason for this had nothing to do with Lee being faster in any absolute sense. He was faster now that the weights were gone, but that alone would not have been enough. The reason was that Gaara had stopped fighting like a shinobi.
He was fighting like a monster.
And as Lee had discovered at five years old when Neji Hyuga first looked at him with real killing intent, the desire to destroy your opponent was not a technique. It did not replace technique. It was, in fact, something that could be turned against you if you were not in control of it.
Lee spun inside a grab that tried to close on his collar, planted both feet, and hit Gaara multiple times in the ribs with short punches that concentrated his chakra-enhanced strength into the smallest possible striking surface. The first punch seemingly shattered the ribs in a line running from front to side. The second punch found the gap the first punch had made.
Gaara's body twisted from the impact. His feet shuffled sideways.
Gaara went to one knee.
The gourd moved. The seams along its base split and the sand that poured from them did not rise and did not spread. It gathered behind Gaara's body, thickening, massing, arching upward into a monstrous shape. It resembled a tail.
Lee watched it form from eight meters away, his pearly white smile still present. A tail thick as a tree's middle, growing out from Gaara's gourd, sand-packed and restless, each section of it adjusting and resettling as the coils lengthened. Its tip swept across the arena floor in an idle test of range. Stone cracked under the contact and the sound of it arrived after the motion, a sharp delayed report that bounced off the walls and didn't seem to fully stop.
Gaara rose from his knee.
His head came up. The eye that was still entirely his found Lee across the arena and the thing in it had passed through every state Lee had watched it cycle through during this fight and gone somewhere further than any of them. There was very little in it now that separated the feeling from the act. It was the simplest and most direct expression of intent Lee had ever had directed at him from another human face.
"I am going to enjoy killing you once I get my hands on you!" Gaara promised.
Lee breathed out and rolled his shoulders once.
"I'm waiting, Gaara-kun," he said, warm as sunrise. "Let's go until the very end!"