The eastern skirmish was losing, and Temari had run out of plans to help fix that.
She stood on a shelf of rock above the wadi with her fan open against her shoulder and watched her people give ground they could not afford to give. The border was somewhere behind her now. That was the part that turned her stomach. The fighting had started a good half day's march out in the Land of River, in Cloud's reach, where it belonged, and it had walked west the whole time since, kilometer by kilometer, until the line she was looking at was bent back across her own country's edge and bleeding into the Land of Wind. Suna's sand. Her sand. Cloud was killing her people on it.
"They've found the flaw at the third dune again…" she said, not turning. "Left of the dry channel. They keep feeding men into it because we keep plugging it with the men we can't spare."
Behind her, Jūza did not answer right away. He never answered right away. He sat folded on a camp stool with his hands resting on his knees and his eyes half shut, and from the wrists of him ran the thin near-invisible lines of chakra that held three puppets on the field at once.
Down in the wadi his three did the work he would not stand up to do himself. The first was all blades and jointed arms and the dull weep of poison off a hundred spines, and it walked the front rank apart wherever Cloud massed thickest. The second was a hunched barrel-bodied thing with a ribcage that opened like a hand, and it took men whole, folded them into its hollow and closed where only death awaited next. The third was broad and low and ugly, an iron carapace that planted itself in front of the Sand wounded and ate everything Cloud threw at it, lightning and steel and fire, and stopped it cold. Its job was to be a wall, and it was a very good wall.
"The flaw isn't the problem," Jūza said at last. His voice was dry as the rock. "The flaw is where they want my eyes. Watch the high line. North of the channel. That's where the next push comes from." A pause. "You saw it before I did. Say it next time without softening it. I don't keep you up here to be polite."
Temari frowned. He was right. "They're massing on the high line."
"Better." His puppet wall pivoted, planted again, twenty paces north. "Now we're both looking at the real battlefield."
That was the part about Jūza she was grateful for despite hating it. He did not coddle her like a little girl. He used her. Her eyes, her brain, her wisdom. To Jūza she was good clay, and he molded her into what was needed for Sunagakure and its future.
It still was not enough. She could read the battlefield and every dune between here and the river and it did not change the count. Cloud had the numbers. Cloud had the momentum. Cloud was walking her into her own country one corpse at a time, and all her intelligence bought was a slightly slower retreat.
Then she saw the green.
It came out of the west, which was wrong, because west was home and there was nothing in the west that should be moving that fast. A line of risen sand drew itself across the waste behind a single point of green, a wake standing in the air the height of houses, and the point grew and grew until it was a person, until it was a boy, until it was the boy, and Temari felt something that she immediately hated.
Relief. That was the first thing, and she hated that it was the first thing.
Then the disbelief came up right behind it.
That's not right, what the hell is he doing over here so soon?!
He went north. He went to my brother's front. We were all deployed at the same time, the whole Leaf cell, and the north and the east are two different wars on two different edges of a country it takes days to cross. She stared at the green line eating the desert. It's been barely a day. One day. He can't have done anything up there in a day, he can't have settled my brother's line and crossed the entire waste and arrived here to help so quickly…
The green line reached the lip of the wadi and did not slow down.
"Jūza." Her voice sounded strange. "Pull your wall off the wounded. Now. Trust me."
The giant salamander folded back out of the killing ground, and the killing ground opened, and into the open center of it, into the densest knot of the Cloud advance where hundreds of enemy shinobi were packed shoulder to shoulder pushing forward, the green thing came down out of the sky feet first.
Lee had run the last stretch low and close to the ground, close enough to the sand that his footfalls threw it sideways instead of up, and Cloud had not seen him. He had read the situation from a quarter mile out, found the place where they bunched thickest and pushed hardest, and he had thrown himself at it.
There, he thought. The middle of them.
He came down with both heels into the back of the Cloud spearhead and the spearhead stopped being such.
The two men directly under him died immediately, driven into the sand with a brief interrupted cry, and the force of the landing went out from him in a ring. Bodies left their feet in every direction. A dune of packed men came apart into loose men, loose men stumbling, loose men turning, loose men trying to understand why the part of the line that had been pushing was now a crater with a boy standing up out of it.
Lee did not give them the time to understand.
His weights came off his arms and legs in the same motion he rose with, and they did not hit the ground. They were brought together, four heavy bars dropping into each palm joined by their short chains, and he closed his fists around them and the weights that had ground him down into something monstrous became the two nunchaku he hunted with.
"Twin Fangs," he muttered. That was their name.
Then he was moving, and the front of Cloud's eastern army learned what the joy of it cost.
The first nunchaku came around in a flat horizontal whip and caught a man across the temple and caved it in before it kept going. The follow-through carried the bar into the catch under his other arm and he was already turning, already feeding the second nunchaku out at the man behind that one, a downward crack that crushed a collarbone flat and dropped its owner screaming into the sand.
Two men came at his back with blades. He did not look at them. His ears had them. He let the right-hand nunchaku spin out to its full length behind him on the chain and the weighted end took the first across the throat hard enough to lift him off his feet with a crushed throat, and on the recoil Lee caught the bar back into his palm and used the same arm to drive an elbow through the second man's guard and his sternum behind it.
They started trying to get away from him. That was the mistake. There was nowhere to get to. They were packed too tight, and the ones at the front who wanted to flee could not move because the ones at the back did not know yet, and Lee stood in the spot they had spent half a day opening and worked it like the gift it was.
Both nunchaku now, both hands, the figure between them never stopping. He used everything. A bar in each fist, the chains snapping out and reeling in, and when his hands were full a heel took a jaw sideways off its hinge, and when a man got inside his reach a knee erased him from the land of the living. The nunchaku gave him a circle of death that nothing crossed and lived, and into that circle he pulled them one and two and three at a time, and out of that circle came corpses. A blurring green whirlwind of death and immense physical force.
A lightning user got a jutsu half formed. Lee heard the chakra gather and the long left nunchaku was already there, the bar smashing the man's hands together while he was weaving through hand signs so that whatever he had been building was interrupted, and then Lee was three men past him before the body finished dropping.
He did not enjoy taking the lives of people. But he certainly enjoyed seeing the results of his training thus far. The speed and the weight and the chains, the years of daily training made flesh, his sensei's teachings moving through his arms, and he smiled, not because he enjoyed taking the lives of other people, but because Guy-sensei had also taught him that a man who could not find joy in his own efforts would never accomplish anything.
Break the middle, he thought, and broke more of it. Break the middle and let my allies do the rest.
C felt his chakra before he saw him.
His stomach dropped through the snow of a memory.
"No," he said. "No, no."
"What?" Samui was beside him on the rear rise, tanto already in her hand. "C. What?"
"It's him." C's mouth had gone dry. "Captain. It's Rock Lee."
"Here?" Samui said. Flat. "He's here? On this front?"
"That chakra. I'd know it anywhere." Sweat dripped down C's forehead. "Captain, we are not prepared for this. We came to fight a weakened Sand village. We did not prepare for someone like him."
Atsui arrived at a dead run, katana out, fire already crawling the edge of it, and his eyes found the green chaos working it and lit up the exact wrong way.
"Is that who I think it is?" Atsui breathed. "Yo, Captain. Captain, is that the green devil guy? The one you wouldn't let me-"
"Yes."
"I said next time I wouldn't run." His knuckles were white on the grip. The fire on the blade climbed higher. "Captain, I said it. He's right there. Let me-"
"Atsui." Her voice was cold. "Look at what's going on."
Atsui looked at the green.
The battlefield was a place where two hundred of their own had been winning a war, and it was becoming a field of corpses, and there was one boy in the middle of it with two iron bars and no jutsu at all.
The fire on Atsui's blade guttered.
"We pick the ground next time," Samui said quietly. "This is his ground. He chose it. He chose it the moment he arrived, and we don't fight a man who set the terms of engagement. Especially not him, not without three times these numbers and a plan built for nothing but him." Her voice rose, snapped out across the rear ranks. "All units! Disengage and fall back! East, to the Land of River, now! Do not let him fix you in place! MOVE!"
Atsui sheathed his blade. The steam hissed up between them. His jaw was so tight C thought it might break.
"Next time. No matter what!" Atsui said.
"Next time." Samui agreed, and even she did not sound like she believed there was a version of next time that went any way but this one.
Temari watched the green boy break the heart out of an army and felt her own troops freeze around her. A rage surged through her body.
"WHAT ARE YOU DOING?!" Her voice cracked off the rock and rolled down into the wadi where two hundred Sand shinobi stood gaping at Him. "He is doing your job for you! MOVE! While they run! This is the easiest part of the battle! KILL THEM!"
The sand shinobi snapped out of their trance and remembered it was an army, and it surged into the gap the green boy had torn, and Temari opened her fan all the way and made sure they had something to surge behind.
One moon. Then two, as she dropped to her knee on the shelf and put her shoulders into it, the chakra pouring down the ribs of the fan. Then three, all three purple moons bared to the sky, and she swung.
"Wind Scythe Jutsu!"
The gale went off the rock and down the length of the Cloud retreat like a blade as wide as the valley. It caught the routing Cloud rear from behind and above where they had no guard up because their guard was all pointed at Him up front. Bodies went off their feet and into the rock. The sharpened air split the ones who chose to run into pieces. The Sand counter-charge ran in under her wind into the chaos of it and made the river country's edge a slaughter going the right direction for the first time in two days.
Temari had understood this front better than the man Cloud sent to take it and better than the man Suna sent to hold it, and it had not mattered, because being good was not the same as being enough, and Suna had not been enough for a long time now. The invasion had seen to that. Her late father's war had seen to that. The village that spent its shinobi like coin to finish a mission, that taught its children the mission was worth more than the ones who went on it, had finally run out of shinobi to spend, and here was the bill, come due on her own sand, in her own country, with her own people alive only because a boy in a green suit had crossed a desert in a day to save the village that had every reason to let them rot.
I owe him. The thought tasted like rust. We all owe him. My home is standing because of him. My people are breathing because of him. The proud shinobi of the desert are alive tonight because the Leaf's devil decided to be kind to us, and there is no part of that I can carry and stay proud.
Temari swung the fan again and gave her people more wind to win behind and let the shame smolder into her gut.
Below her, Jūza had not moved from his stool.
His three puppets pulled in tight around the green boy without ever touching him, the blade-doll clearing his right, the barrel-doll swallowing the few who tried to flank his blind side, the wall sliding up wherever a ranged jutsu sought him out, and Temari understood, watching it, that the old man was not protecting Lee. He was aiming him. He had taken the largest, heaviest, deadliest thing on the field and he had worked around it, and he was pointing it where it would do the most damage.
"The high line's breaking too," Jūza said mildly, eyes still half shut. "Your wind, if you would. They've stopped being an army. Let's not let them remember how to be one."
She swung the fan and said nothing and hated, with her entire competent heart, how useless she was. How useless they were in comparison to one boy…
[Taijutsu Proficiency +610 points!]
[Nunchaku Mastery Proficiency +480 points!]
[Chakra Control Proficiency +140 points!]
[Inspire Proficiency +120 points!]
The Cloud field commander watched his eastern campaign come apart from the back of a horse half a mile out, and he had been a shinobi long enough to know the difference between a setback and a verdict.
This was a verdict.
He had taken the resistance in the Land of Rivers in nine days. He had walked the Sand back across their own border and put their broken line where he wanted it and he had been one good morning from cracking it open for good, and then from out of nowhere came a green boy and the morning had become this, his army routed by a single child.
He did not cry about it. Crying was for children.
"Pull everyone back to the river," he said to the messenger at his stirrup. "All of it. We don't hold a meter west of the water tonight." The boy nodded and started to turn. "And the messenger bird. To the Raikage. Word for word, so write it down."
The messenger uncapped a brush.
"The intelligence on the Konoha attachment was correct and insufficient," the commander said, watching the green dot work. "The one they call the Green Savage Devil is on the eastern front. We do not have the men to take a threat of his order without preparation built for him and nothing else, and I will not feed this army into him to learn what we already know. I am holding at the river and requesting help." He paused. "Tell the Raikage the time has come to learn the truth of the rumors. We have long wondered whether the boy who is said to have killed the One-Tail could do such a thing twice." His horse shifted under him. "I think we should find out."
The brush stopped.
"Sir?"
"You heard me. Send it word for word." The commander turned his horse east, toward the water, toward the long patient war he had just decided to fight instead of the quick one he had lost. "Let's see if the devil truly is as capable as they say."