Yugito had expected a Green Devil. What she found was not that at all.
The Sand on the eastern front had grown bold in his shadow. Weeks of a rumor doing their fighting for them had taught them to push, to lean their weight forward into ground they should have respected, because for weeks anything that pushed back got a green thing dropped on its head. So when Yugito came down out of the river country at the head of Cloud's renewed weight, she walked into a Sand line stretched long and arrogant, a line built around a boy who was, today, several kilometers away to the north.
She corrected their arrogance over three days, and she did it with her own two claws.
The first day she opened their forward camps. She moved faster than most of them could track, and where she closed the distance her claws came out, long and curved and sharp, and she ripped the shinobi to pieces before any of them got a jutsu off. By the time the Sand understood that things were screwed, several body parts were cooking in the sand and heat. The few survivors were running west to tell the next camp, who did not believe them until it was their turn.
The second day they stopped trying to hold and started trying to slow her, and that went worse, because a fighting retreat against someone faster and stronger than you is just dying in a worse way.
This is what was holding the front, Yugito thought, walking through the third broken camp with blood drying on her claws and not a scratch on her. Not their strength. His. They built a whole campaign on a boy who can only stand in one place, and the one place he is standing is not here.
She felt pity for them. They had been brave on borrowed courage, and now the loan was due, and she was the collector.
On the third day they sent her their best, because they had run out of choices.
The wind came first. A kunoichi with a war fan as long as her arm stood on a rise and swung it, and a ferocious gale came down the slope at Yugito with three purple moons screaming behind it. Yugito utilized her flames.
A thin blue corona off her skin, and wind is what fire eats. The kunoichi's gale hit Yugito's flame and did not put it out. It fed it. The blue corona roared up into a sheet, doubled, tripled, fed fat on the very wind meant to demolish her, and Yugito burst through the wind while grinning. The Sand commander's face went pale with the understanding of what she had just done to her own best technique.
The puppets came next, and the puppets were worse off than the wind.
An old man sat far back and did not move as his hands constantly moved. Three puppets rushing forward to greet her. Yugito had to admit they were beautiful toys, but that did not matter, because they were made of wood and she was made of fire. She let the blade-puppet come. She caught it in both burning hands and held it while it burned, and the old man's threads carried the fire straight back up to his other two before he could cut them loose, and then the puppeteer had no puppets, only three torches he could not put down fast enough.
They fought well together, the wind girl and the old man. Yugito would say so later. They covered each other, they read her, they did not panic even when the old man's tools turned to ash. He simply summoned three more copies and they made her work for the better part of an hour, which was more than anyone else on this front had managed so far.
Unfortunately it was the wrong hour and the wrong tools and the wrong matchup, and good was not the same as enough.
She severed the old man's arm and broke three of his ribs and put him down when his last puppet was cinders. She caught the wind girl across the side with a clawed hand that opened her to the bone and would have opened her throat if the girl had been a half second slower, and when the girl went down hard and did not get up clean, Yugito stood over her with the fire still on her skin and was met with a swarm of kunai, shuriken, and other attacks.
The sand shinobi sacrificed their lives to ensure the two made it back. And Yugito allowed it. She turned the front around in three days. The Sand stopped pushing and started bleeding backward.
Lee came into the eastern camp fast. As soon as he arrived, he could tell that things had gotten bad. Because when he arrived, the sand ninjas actually looked at him with hope and positivity. Instead of the opposite in which they have been looking at him this entire time.
The medical tent was full. Cots crammed end to end and pallets laid between them on the ground and the medic-nin moving down the rows with their hands lit green and their faces strained, and the smell of burns over everything, dozens of them, more Sand laid out hurt in this one tent than Lee had seen since the invasion.
He found Temari on a cot near the center because someone had put their commander where they could watch her. Her whole left side was wrapped, the bandages already showing where the wound under them wept, and her skin was grey, and her war fan leaned against the cot post where someone had set it because no one had the heart to take it away from her, even unconscious. Two cots down, the commander, Jūza, lay with one good arm and his breath coming shallow and rough around broken ribs.
Lee felt guilty but knew he could not blame himself. He truly could not be in two places at once. Instead of feeling guilty, he simply made sure to put an end to this back-and-forth as soon as possible. No matter who was on the other side.
"Devil sir!" She actually smiled when she looked at him.
He turned. A kunoichi stood at the tent flap, lean, near forty, dust still on her from the field, a coil of fine wire at her hip and a tired but hopeful look on her face.
"I'm Sajō. Jūza's second, after her." She tipped her head at Temari. "Which makes me what's left in charge of this front, which is not a thing I planned for."
"Yeah… Things aren't so good. I could tell…" Lee nodded.
"A new enemy arrived. A fire and taijutsu specialist. Three days. Three days and she walked our whole front back to here." Hate could be heard in Sajō's voice. "I have a plan that is not really a plan. Sell weakness, fold back, draw them into the low ground east of the ridge, and you come out of the dead space and hit whatever's leading them before it knows you're back on this front." She met his eyes. "It's a bad plan because it's the only plan, and because whatever's leading them is the reason I need it to work and the reason I think it won't. But you're here now. The board changes when you're on it."
Lee looked at Temari one more time. At Jūza. At the dozens.
"Then let's shake things up. Set the trap. I will be the part to ensure our success." Lee gave her a serious nod.
…
The Sand sold the weakness, because after three real days of losing they barely had to act. They folded back east of the ridge in a shambling broken line, and Cloud, scenting the same blood they had been drinking for three days, came after them. And Lee came out of nowhere.
He hit the Cloud spearhead before the front registered green, and the front stopped existing, and the rest of them got perhaps two heartbeats of the old terror, the Devil, the Devil is back, the Devil is here, before the thing every one of them had been told to hope for stepped out of the Cloud line to meet him.
She was already moving when his second strike should have landed. It did not land. A clawed hand turned it, the first thing on this entire campaign to turn one of his blows, and a clawed strike answered for his ribs, and Lee gave ground for the first time in weeks and he realized this was who turned the Sand's feelings about him around.
They slid apart from each other after the clash.
"The Green Devil." Yugito rolled her shoulders, the long claws catching the light. "You're shorter than the rumors. Not even a man yet, are you?"
"I'm getting there." Lee told her.
"Not for long." She vanished.
Then they fought, and the others stopped fighting on both sides.
The two of them met in the low ground and started trading, and the fighting around them simply died, company by company, as men on both sides turned to look and could not look away and then could not bring themselves to start swinging again with that happening forty paces off. A Cloud jonin lowered his blade. A Sand chunin let her hands fall open. The war stopped to watch the battle, because every shinobi on that field understood in their gut the same thing at the same moment, that the whole campaign, all of it, every dead camp and every burned puppet and every meter of sand traded back and forth for a season, had just narrowed down to these two people in a circle of churned ground, and that whatever happened here decided the rest. Their greatest hope against ours. Nobody gave the order. The field went silent on its own.
He could see where her claws were going before she threw them. He slipped a swipe that would have opened his face and was inside her guard with an elbow she barely avoided, and when she spun away clawing for distance he was already where she was spinning to. A kick rounded toward her face that she was forced to block. The force of the impact was strong enough to shatter her lengthened nails and send her sliding across the sand.
Yugito's eyes widened as she quickly regrew her lengthened claws. She leaned back as if there wasn't a spine in her body just as Lee was about to take her head off with a kick. When he reared his foot upward to stomp a hole through her chest, she leaped away, low to the ground. Sand exploded like a water spout. Lee and Yugito locked eyes as sand covered and blocked their vision. Then they both disappeared.
Lee appeared in Yugito's guard with a rising knee as Yugito appeared ready to pierce through Lee's chest. Yugito snarled in frustration as she realized this boy really didn't care! He was willing to allow himself to be impaled if it meant landing a hit on her! Yugito wasn't insane. She couldn't underestimate this boy who managed to shatter her claws. And from what the rumors said, he has access to the Eight Inner Gates! A forbidden jutsu that would strengthen him even further beyond his current strength!
Yugito didn't follow through with her attack, allowing Lee to momentarily spot a flaw to capitalize on. He grabbed her by the ponytail, lifted her through the air, and smashed her into the sand. The sand erupted once more as Lee felt something shattering in his grip. And it certainly wasn't a person.
She used the substitution jutsu… he realized.
Yugito changed the range of engagement after realizing that close combat taijutsu was not advantageous. The nails grew, longer, reaching, turning her arms into something that could open him from outside his fists, and the message was clear, you cannot hit what you cannot reach.
Some of Lee's weights came off and combined and the staff was in his hands, and his reach was suddenly longer than her claws, and the message went back the other way.
So she broke for distance and brought the fire, because surely the boy with no ninjutsu had no answer for fire. She weaved through hand signs, putting a wall of flames between them and then threw the blue mouse-flames that chased and burst, and a fan of fireballs to herd him, and waited for the Green Devil to flinch from the one thing his hands could not punch. Giving her the opening she needed.
Lee did not play along with her plans. He spun his bo staff incredibly fast and the mouse fireballs were blown away harmlessly, not even touching him. And when she poured it on, when she filled the whole low ground with blue fire and kunai and shuriken, Lee connected the weights end to end into the long chain and he swung it.
It came out of the fire at her head in a wheel of iron with several building's worth of weight behind it.
Yugito ducked.
She ducked as low to the ground as she could go and the chain went over her where her head had been and kept going and took the top off a boulder behind her like it was nothing. She came up out of the duck with her eyes wide because if that chain had hit her, it would've torn her in half.
He has range too, she realized. He has close and he has range. The fire doesn't keep him out and the distance doesn't keep him off. What does that leave…
It left the thing she had been sent here to use if needed.
Across the circle, Lee reeled the chain back in and wrapped it around his arms.
He could see them now, the whole Cloud force, frozen at the edges of the circle watching this woman as their final hope. Every soldier on that side had hung the entire war on her, and Lee understood something.
I do not have to beat this whole army, he thought. I just have to beat her. She is the thing holding them up. The moment she falls, every ninja in this circle runs for the Land of Lightning, and the eastern skirmish is over. His grip settled on the chain. So I bring her down. Not their army. Her. That is the whole battle.
It was then, in the quiet, that the whispering reached him, low and frightened, rolling around the edge of the circle from the Cloud ranks.
"The jinchuriki is losing…"
"We sent our jinchuriki and she's still losing…"
"The Two-Tails is fighting him. When is she going to unleash that monster?"
"She's not going to win unless she lets it out…"
A jinchuriki. He almost smiled. Of course. It was this or a Kage. He rolled the chain once at his side. But a jinchuriki is not a Kage. A jinchuriki is a shinobi. A strong one, a fast one, a frightening one, with a monster sleeping inside of them.
He shifted his weight forward to finish closing the distance, to take her down and end the front and send the rest of them running, as simple as that.
Yugito Nii watched the Green Devil come to a decision. And the proud daughter of the Hidden Cloud, who had been told what she was since she was two years old and had decided to be proud of it. Reached for the thing she had been hoping to not need.
The fire changed.
It came up off her skin no longer a corona but a tide, dense and deep and blue, and through it, crawling up over her shoulders and down her arms and across her face, came the marks, black against the blue, spreading like cracks in the world, taking a monstrous inhuman shape. Two tails of fire unfolded behind her. The heat of it bowed the watching ranks back a full step on every side. And the thing that looked out at Lee through the rising blue flame was no longer entirely Yugito Nii.
The monster inside the person was waking up.
And it had heard exactly what Rock Lee thought of it.