The crowd was restless between matches.
"So which one are you here for? The Uchiha or the green kid?"
"Both. But honestly? I want to see Rock Lee fight more than anyone else on that bracket."
"The taijutsu kid? The one who beat the Sand monster?"
"Beat? He killed it. The whole thing. The sand monster, the boy inside it, all of it. With his fists. No ninjutsu. No genjutsu. Nothing but his body."
"That can't be real."
"The building's ceiling still has a hole in it because of what that kid did. They haven't even finished repairing it yet."
"What kind of genin puts a hole through a roof?"
"The kind that can use a forbidden jutsu."
"Forbidden?! Is that even fair?"
"I guess? I don't know how ninja rules work, man."
"And he killed a monster."
"He killed a sand monster."
A pause in the conversation. Someone two rows down leaned back into it.
"I heard the Kazekage was furious. Lost their village's weapon in a preliminary match. That's not something you bounce back from."
"Furious or not, I wouldn't want to be the one who has to fight that kid next. Uchiha's got his work cut out for him."
"You think Lee wins?"
"I think anyone who watched the preliminaries and bets against Lee is throwing their money away."
"Then why is everyone still talking about the Uchiha?"
"Because the Uchiha has the Sharingan and a famous last name. Lee has thick eyebrows and a green jumpsuit. People bet with their eyes before they bet with their brains."
Scattered laughter in the section.
"What's up with the next match?"
"Where's Uchiha?"
The crowd was not whispering anymore. It was boiling.
A swirl of leaves arrived in the middle of the arena. As the leaves dispersed, two figures revealed themselves. One tall. One short. Kakashi Hatake and Sasuke Uchiha.
"Ahh. Sorry we're late." Kakashi apologized.
"Your name?" Genma's senbon shifted.
"Sasuke Uchiha."
"Well, flashy entrance notwithstanding…" Kakashi's hand went to the back of his head, the embarrassed posture fitting him badly. "Don't tell me he lost by forfeit? I told you we'd be late, Sasuke."
"Maybe your tardiness is contagious. Sheesh." Genma chuckled.
"So what's the deal?" Kakashi wondered.
"Relax. Sasuke's match was postponed. Nothing was forfeited."
"Ah ha ha. Oh, good. Good." Kakashi's mask lifted up as he smiled behind it.
Sasuke's eyes lifted to the competitors' box. Kakashi's eyes followed.
They both found Lee.
Lee was already smiling. He had been waiting a full month for this.
The crowd had shifted again, the boil turning to something closer to a roar. Foreign dignitaries who had been muttering about the scandal of an absent Uchiha were now leaning against the railings. The civilian sections were on their feet. Konoha had produced its famous survivor of the massacre, and Konoha had produced a taijutsu specialist who had supposedly killed a fully transformed tailed beast on this arena floor a month earlier, and the village was about to find out which of these two was the worse one.
"Lee, you can come down."
"Yes, sir!" Lee hopped off the railing with multiple flips.
He landed a pace in front of Sasuke. The two of them faced each other across the distance Genma had reserved for the proctor's own standing room.
"Now then." Genma looked between them. "At long last."
"Yo, Guy. You really trained a monster, huh?" Kakashi had appeared at Guy's elbow in the stands.
"I could say the same to you, my friend." Guy smiled with his response.
"Kakashi-sensei!" Sakura had seen him from her seat.
"Oh. Sorry, sorry. You were worried, weren't you. I didn't keep in touch, my bad."
"…It's all right, I guess. I had company."
She didn't get mad. A month ago she would have been three decibels louder. He also noted who she was seated beside, and that Ino was wearing the grin of a girl whose plan was bearing fruit.
"That mark." Sakura's voice came lower. "On Sasuke's neck."
"It's nothing you need to worry about anymore."
"Begin."
Sasuke broke the distance immediately. A backward leap that put ten meters between himself and Lee before Lee had lifted a foot. Lee did not follow. His eyes had locked onto Sasuke's feet, the instant Genma's word hit the air, and his eyes stayed there. Ankles. Toes. Legs.
He did not check whether the Sharingan was on. There was no reason to. If it was on, he did not want to meet the eyes. If it wasn't on, he did not need to meet the eyes. Reading the feet solved both problems without requiring him to know which one was the case.
"Sasuke-kun." Lee raised his voice for the crowd's benefit. "Please face me with everything you have, or this match will be over faster than the first time we fought."
"Heh." Sasuke's hand was already at his pouch. "I wasn't planning on holding back."
Kunai came out in a spread.
Not aimed at Lee. Not even close to aimed at Lee. The spread arced wide, kunai thudding into the arena dirt and the stone of the far wall in a pattern that made no sense as an attack.
Lee swayed out of the way of the two that came near him, reflex more than necessity, and his eyes tracked where the rest landed.
A grid.
Sasuke was setting a wire grid. Every kunai had a ninja wire looped through its ring, the wires catching the afternoon sun in thin flashes between the embedded blades. In the space of three throws, an invisible lattice of razor wire had bloomed across two-thirds of the arena floor.
Sasuke leaped. His foot found the nearest wire and held. He climbed two more levels on the invisible staircase until he stood on air twelve meters above Lee, balanced on something that to the crowd looked like nothing at all.
Lee stopped moving.
He understood immediately what had been done to him. Any burst of speed would carry him into wires he could not see at full speed. Any rush would cost him a limb. His weapons did not cut. The weights, broken down and reassembled, became a chain, a bo staff, or nunchaku, and none of those were designed for slicing through a wire grid without catching on it and making him a target.
Sasuke had taken one of Lee's most dangerous assets off the table.
Lee's smile widened.
Sasuke-kun. You prepared for me.
Above him, Sasuke's hands were already moving through seals. His fingers flickered.
"Fire Style." The last seal locked. "Phoenix Flower Jutsu."
A spread of fireballs left Sasuke's mouth in a tight cluster, each one peeling away from the others in flight to arc down from different angles. Six. Ten. More. They came at Lee from above like a concentrated meteor shower.
The crowd screamed.
Lee's fist was already moving.
He brought it down into the arena floor at what was, by his current standards, a casual punch.
The ground exploded.
The slab under Lee's fist folded upward in a rising sheet, the fault line running in every direction at once, huge chunks of stone breaking free and rising on the pressure wave of the strike. Wires snapped or were torn out of their anchor points. Kunai ripped free from their embedded positions. The fireballs met the rising wall of stone and burst against it in a rippling dispersal of orange, the heat washing sideways across the arena in a gust that made the front row of the stands flinch.
Lee was already gone.
He was ascending on the chunks of rising stone, footing them like stepping stones, leaping from one to the next in the same rising wave his punch had created. Sasuke was turning toward him in the air with his hands weaving, and Lee met him at the top of the rise.
Lee's fist buried itself in Sasuke's chest.
Sasuke grinned as he welcomed the blow. His hand came up and clamped onto Lee's forearm at the instant of impact. Lee felt ribs give under his knuckles. One. Two. He could hear the cracks and damage.
"Chidori Stream."
Lightning jumped from Sasuke's palm into Lee's arm.
A flood. Every muscle in Lee's body received a jolt of high-voltage current at once, and every muscle adhered to physics: it locked. His fingers curled in. His jaw clamped. His legs seized in whatever position they had been in.
He was paralyzed, mid-air, with his arm embedded in Sasuke's chest and Sasuke's hand locked around his forearm, and the two of them were falling.
"Even a freak like you can't resist this!" Sasuke poured more chakra into the current.
The arena flashed white. Lightning arcs jumped from their joined bodies and carved trenches across the arena floor and walls as they fell, strips of stone glowing molten along the paths the current chose. Sasuke was burning his reserves to hold this, emptying everything he had into keeping Lee paralyzed on the way down.
Lee's body was rigid. His mind was not.
Sasuke-kun. You truly prepared for me.
Your speed was not enough, so you removed mine. Your taijutsu was not enough, so you did not engage. Your ninjutsu was not enough, so you set a trap that required me to come to you. And when I came to you, you absorbed my strongest blow in order to land the technique you knew would be the only one that could stop me in close quarters.
My Sensei's Eternal Rival trained you well.
But.
"Gate of Opening." His voice came out through clenched teeth. "Gate of Healing."
The first two gates opened inside him in a single breath.
The flood of chakra through his network did what Chidori Stream could not stop it from doing. It overwrote. The current in his muscles was massive, yes, but the chakra running through his pathways at the pressure of two open gates was larger. His muscles unlocked one by one in a wave that started at his shoulders and ran out to his extremities. His jaw loosened. His fingers opened.
He dropped back to the first gate. Then out of it entirely.
They were still falling.
Lee lifted his free hand.
He placed a single fingertip against Sasuke's forehead.
Chakra flared into the finger. A pinpoint. The kind of chakra-enhanced strength that could pulverize boulders, concentrated into a contact surface the size of a grain of rice.
He flicked.
Sasuke's body left his chest and vanished horizontally across the arena.
The impact of the flick cracked like a small thunderclap. Sasuke's silhouette blurred through the air as a dark line and struck the arena wall a hundred meters distant, punching into the stone hard enough to bury himself to the shoulders. A cloud of dust and pulverized rock rolled outward from the impact crater.
Lee landed on the floor of the arena, crouched, one hand down for balance.
He stood up.
He rolled his shoulders. Rolled his neck. A few muscles were still twitching from the aftershock of the current. He stretched his arms and felt the last of the cramping work its way out of his biceps and his fingers.
"Close, Sasuke-kun." Lee's voice carried across the arena. "That was very close."
He began unwrapping his weights from his shins.
The first weight hit the ground with a sound like a small meteor landing. The arena floor cracked beneath it. The second weight joined it, the second crater eating into the first.
"But I hope you have more to show me." Lee's fingers were already at the clasps on his forearm wraps. "Because I am only just warming up."
The metal bars came off. Lee snapped them together. The assembled length became two segments joined by a chain. His nunchaku. He rolled them once around his forearm, once across his shoulders, once in a low figure-eight at his hip, the bars whistling through the air.
He waited.
Dust in the far crater stirred.
Sasuke climbed out of the wall. His jacket was torn across the chest. Blood ran from a split above his eyebrow. He was holding his right arm against his side.
His left hand came up.
Lightning bloomed around it. The chirp of Chidori filled the arena, the sound carrying the particular shocking intensity that made everyone in the stands lean forward.
Sasuke pushed off the wall.
He came across the arena at a speed that had not been his speed before the month. Kakashi's month. Whatever else Kakashi had drilled into him, he had drilled speed. Sasuke covered the hundred meters in a handful of strides, the ground cratering behind his push-offs, the Chidori carving a bright line of lightning through the ground.
Lee's eyes stayed on his feet.
Sasuke's eyes were Sharingan-red. The tomoe were spinning. The Sharingan would not help him here because Lee's eyes were not up there.
Sasuke arrived.
His Chidori-wrapped hand came forward for a strike that would have punched through a rib cage.
Lee's nunchaku blurred.
The metal stick whipped down across the back of Sasuke's wrist at a speed that arrived before Sasuke's own eyes could complete the Sharingan's prediction loop. The impact cracked like a gunshot. Sasuke's hand spasmed. The Chidori dissolved. Sasuke's cry of pain was swallowed by Lee's follow-up, a spinning kick to the ribs that lifted Sasuke from the ground and spun him in the air, and then a rising kick from low to high that caught him under the jaw and sent him skyward.
Lee flicked his wrists.
The nunchaku unclasped. The chain extended. The two bars swung out wide and became the head and tail of a seven-meter weighted chain whip, and Lee let the full length go in a spiraling throw that wrapped around Sasuke's rising body like a snare closing on a rabbit.
Sasuke was caught, airborne, wrapped from shoulder to knee in weighted chain, and Lee was already setting his footing for the yank that would bring him crashing back down.
And then feathers began to fall.
White feathers.
They drifted down from nothing, from empty air above the arena, a slow descent that seemed to fall faster in the peripheral vision than in the direct line of sight.
Lee felt his eyelids go heavy.
Genjutsu.
"Gate of Opening!"
The First Gate flared back open inside him. The chakra surge through his network did what chakra surges always did to genjutsu. The illusion snapped. His eyelids reopened with the clarity of a man who had just been doused in cold water.
But the arena had changed while he had been shrugging the illusion off.
Smoke was rising from the central Kage box. A curtain of it. The Third Hokage's seat was no longer visible. ANBU were in motion across the roof of the box, their cloaks whipping in the air as they moved toward the Kazekage's position. The Kazekage's robes had come open at the shoulder and Lee, turning his head, caught a single frozen instant of a gold-robed figure pressing a kunai against the Third Hokage's throat.
Around the arena, civilians were slumping in their seats. The feather genjutsu had caught most of them. A small number of shinobi in the stands were already on their feet, already drawing weapons, already moving against other shinobi who had been sitting beside them only moments ago.
Smoke bombs detonated across four of the balconies at once.
Something had begun.
Lee's chain whip, still wrapped around the airborne Sasuke, reeled itself back in with a sharp jerk. Lee caught Sasuke under the arms on the descent and lowered him to the arena floor rather than slamming him into it.
The match was over and not because either of them had said so.
Lee looked up at the proctor's stand.
Genma was already moving. The Sand trio's jonin had come down from the stands and engaged him across the dirt, senbon against what looked like a wind-infused short blade.
"Proctor." Lee raised his voice over the rising noise of the arena. "I take it the Chunin Exams are suspended?"
Genma parried a strike, pivoted, and answered without looking.
"Good guess. In my opinion, you're already above a regular chunin. If you consider yourself a Konoha shinobi, go make yourself useful. We're being attacked by the Sand and Sound, it looks like."
"Yes, sir!"
Lee let Sasuke's body lean against the ground. He did not have time to take him to the medics himself. Kakashi-san was already on his way down; Lee had seen the blur of the Body Flicker in his peripheral vision the instant the smoke had started. Sasuke would be in his sensei's hands within seconds.
Lee straightened.
"Gate of Opening. Gate of Healing. Gate of Life. Gate of Pain. Gate of Limit."
His skin flushed red. The veins along his arms and neck swelled with the pressure of five open gates running at once. His pupils vanished. His hair lifted from his scalp. The air around him began to distort with rising chakra, and the stone under his feet cracked outward from him in a widening spiderweb.
He vanished.
To the shinobi fighting across the arena floor and balconies, what followed was not visible as a person moving.
A reddish green blur appeared and disappeared across the arena, and wherever it appeared, a Sand or Sound ninja came apart. A jonin in the Sand flak jacket turned his head toward a sound behind him and the sound turned out to be a kneecap disintegrating under a heel kick; the rest of him followed the knee to the ground in the half-second after. A Sound chunin swung a blade at a Leaf genin and his own blade appeared in his throat a moment later because something had redirected his arm at twice his usual speed.
The blur crossed the main arena. Crossed the west balcony. Crossed the east balcony. Crossed the south stands where a team of Sand nin had been executing genjutsu-sleeping civilians. It arrived, and it left, and the four jonin were scattered across three rows of seating in pieces that did not fit back together.
Dozens upon dozens. Lee moved through them.
"Lee!" Guy's voice found him somewhere across the chaos. "Are you sure you can keep that pace?"
"Yes, Guy-sensei!" Lee's voice answered from three different positions at the same time, the afterimages still speaking as he had already moved.
"What a reckless protégé." Kakashi was at Guy's shoulder now, his own Sharingan uncovered, his eye tracking the blur the way few other eyes in the village could.
"My pride and joy." Guy's tears were already pooling. "My beautiful, shining, youthful-"
"Speaking of protégés." Kakashi vanished mid-sentence, the Body Flicker pulling him toward the arena floor in a single compressed burst. He reappeared a fraction of a second later kicking Baki backward off of Genma, helped Genma reset his footing, and helped the unconscious Sasuke.
…
When Lee had thinned the invasion forces in the arena itself to a level he considered manageable for the remaining jonin and ANBU, he launched himself up the tower wall.
He cleared the upper walkway. Cleared the roof. Landed on the tower's outer parapet and looked out across Konoha.
Three enormous snakes were at work in the village.
Each one was the length of a main village street. They were pulling down buildings with tail swipes that collapsed rooftops like paper lanterns. Civilians were running in every direction in the streets below them. Leaf shinobi were attempting to engage the snakes and were being flattened by tails or swallowed outright.
Lee dropped off the parapet.
He ran down the wall and he did not slow down before leaping off the wall toward the snake.
The first snake saw him coming. Its head turned toward him as he closed the distance across the rooftops between the tower and the closest street. The mouth opened, the fangs dropping into position for a strike, the body coiling to launch.
He aimed at the snake's snout with his leap, and halfway through the arc, he began to spin.
"Leaf Roaring Blaze Gale!"
His leading leg caught fire.
The friction of the spin, combined with the chakra surging of the Fifth Gate bleeding off his skin, ignited the air around his extending leg in a rolling spiral of flame. The fire wrapped around him as he rotated, a turning cone of orange and white that traveled with him through the air at a speed the snake's reflexes could not answer.
His leg connected with the snake's snout.
The impact arrived before the sound. The snake's head simply disappeared into a ball of fire that bloomed outward from the contact point and consumed the upper third of its body in a single breath. The two snakes attached to it, close enough to share the coils, were caught in the expanding radius of the blast. All three bodies lit up simultaneously.
The street went white.
Leaf shinobi fighting Sand shinobi on adjacent streets froze in place, their duels briefly forgotten as the heat wash rolled past them. A Sand jonin who had been about to finish off a Leaf chunin lowered his blade by reflex and turned toward the inferno instead of the enemy he had been about to kill.
Lee landed.
The flames collapsed inward. The three snakes held their shape for a moment longer, charred from scale to spine. Unlike most summons that poof into smoke and return to their homeland, these snakes died on impact before they could even think to do so.
The Sand shinobi who had been advancing up the street found themselves facing Lee without the snakes they had been counting on to cover their push.
Lee's weights were still off. Not that they would've made much of a difference in the fifth gate.
The first Sand jonin raised his blade.
Lee was already inside his guard.
A hand came through the Sand jonin's chest from front to back, Lee's arm emerging bloodied from between the man's shoulder blades. Lee turned, and the second Sand jonin sneaking up on him with a sword caught a kick square to the jaw that spun his neck ninety degrees in the wrong direction. He dropped without a sound. The third, trying to retreat, caught a spinning kick to the ribs that destroyed his entire rib cage inward and sent him into the side of a building, where he stayed.
"Thank you!" the rescued Leaf chunin gasped. His eyes had not caught Lee's face. The blur had been too fast for him to register anything other than the outcome.
"Rock Lee, at your service!"
Lee was already gone.
He raced across the village, the Fifth Gate still open, red-green smears in his wake marking the positions where Sand and Sound ninja had stopped being problems. Every street he passed through cleared. Every rooftop he crossed thinned the enemy count by another handful. His body was supposed to be paying for this reckless usage of the Eight Gates, but ever since his breakthrough with Gaara, his healing seemingly increased a hundredfold. His home was under attack, his village was burning in patches, and his sensei had told him to make himself useful.
He was going to be very useful.