Sakura had planned this morning down to the minute, and the plan survived exactly four streets.
The plan was simple. Training, just the two of them, at the far ground by the river where nobody went. Some sparring. Some showing off of six months of Tsunade's training. And at the end of it, when he was smiling and sweaty and the morning had gone perfectly, the thing she had promised herself at the end of his bed and been owed ever since.
"Sakura! Hold up!"
Ino fell in beside them at the fourth street with her ponytail swinging and a pouch already on her hip, and Sakura felt the plan die quietly in her arms.
"I'm coming too," Ino announced. "You've been hogging the technique lessons long enough. Lady Tsunade keeps using you as the example and I am not spending another week being the before picture. Lee. Train me too."
"Tell her screw off, Lee." Sakura said flatly.
"Sakura-chan, I can't…" Lee was being asked to act outside of his character. "Anyone who wishes to train is welcome! The more the merrier, in my opinion!"
"Ugh..."
"Ino-chan, of course you may join us!"
Sakura pouted the whole rest of the walk, which helped nothing, because Ino had not come alone.
Choji drifted out of the side street with a bag of chips already open. And behind him came Kiba, Akamaru trotting at his heel. Kiba had his eyes locked on the green figure ahead like a man on a hunt.
"Oi! Lee!"
Lee turned. "Kiba-kun! Are you also here to train?"
"I'm here to see it." Kiba planted himself, arms crossed. "Everybody keeps talking. S-rank this, tailed beast that, the Devil of the Sand. I want to see how far ahead you actually are, because I don't buy half of it. So yeah. Train me. Fight me. Whatever you want to call it."
"Excellent!" Lee clapped his hands once, delighted. "Then let us make it worthwhile! All of you, come at me together! Sakura-chan, Ino-san, Kiba-kun, Akamaru-kun, Choji-kun! All at once! It will be more fun that way!"
Silence.
"You're so full of it man." Kiba's grin came out sideways and mean. "You might be strong, but nobody's that strong. Fine. Your funeral. Choji, let's go."
"Wha- me?" Choji looked up from his chips with a confused expression. "I just came to watch! How did I even get involved in this?!"
"You got involved when you followed me. Come on tubby."
"I'm not freaking tubby…" Choji sighed from the soles of his feet, rolled the chip bag closed with genuine grief, and tucked it into his pocket.
"FANG OVER FANG!"
He and Akamaru corkscrewed in from two angles, twin drills of claw and speed, and Lee read both spirals, stepped through the seam between them, and pushed their ankles with two fingers on the way past. The rotation ate itself. Kiba and Akamaru went from drill to tumbleweed and landed in a skidding pile of limbs and dog.
"Kiba-kun!" Lee called it across the ground, bright and earnest. "Do not shout the name of your technique unless it is already guaranteed to hit! You told me the drill was coming before you left the ground! Announce it after they are incapacitated, or when they cannot possibly avoid it, and never before!"
"You're not my sensei, dude! Don't be trying to freaking teach me stuff!" Kiba spat dirt.
Choji came in behind the advice, expanded into the Human Boulder, a spinning ball of weight that shook the ground, and Lee met it with two fingers and a lean, redirecting the whole rolling mass a hand's width off its line so it thundered past and flattened a dead log instead of him.
Sakura picked her moment. She had been waiting on the edges and when Choji's pass pulled Lee's weight onto his back foot she was already inside his guard with a raised fist.
The side of Lee's palm touched her wrist and her fist went past his ear into the ground.
The training ground detonated. A crater opened under her knuckles the width of a wagon, the shockwave slapping dust off the field in a ring, stones the size of heads jumping and rolling, and every other person on that ground stopped moving at once.
"...I missed?" Sakura said, into the ringing silence.
Choji's boulder unrolled itself into a wide-eyed Choji. Kiba looked at the crater, then at the girl attached to it, and took one full step backward on pure instinct. Akamaru whimpered.
"Sakura-chan! You did it perfectly!" Lee congratulated her.
"That girl who could barely fight in the Chunin Exams can do that after training with Lee?" Kiba muttered. "We might have to do this more often, dude…"
"Tch, whatever! She just got an early start with Lee!" Ino declared.
When Kiba and Choji picked themselves up she drifted between them and started whispering amongst each other, and Sakura got pulled in a moment later, and Lee stood politely at the center of the ground with one hand behind his back and let the enemy plan, because interrupting an enemy's planning was rude when the enemy was your friends.
"NO MISTAKES PEOPLE! CHOP CHOP!" Ino barked.
It was, Lee had to admit, a genuinely good combination.
Kiba and Akamaru came as twin drills again, but silent this time, no announcement, opposite sides and offset heights so there was no flaw to step through. Choji's boulder thundered in from directly behind, the third wall of the box. And the sky closed too, Sakura dropping from above with her fist cocked and the grass already flinching in anticipation, four attacks with no way of escaping, all converging on one boy with nowhere left that was not inside something dangerous.
Excellent, Lee thought, with total delight. Truly excellent! Blocking any one of them risks injuring them with their own force. Evading along the ground is closed. Then there is no helping it!
The world briefly went slow as Lee utilized more of his strength, and for one blink of a green blur Lee was simply elsewhere, up and through the single closing gap between Sakura's descending arm and Kiba's spiral, gone before the box finished shutting.
The box shut on itself.
Kiba's drill met Choji's boulder with a sound like a temple bell falling down a mountain. Sakura's fist met the ground where Lee had been and opened crater number two. Akamaru spun out of the wreckage sneezing. For a moment the combination attack was a pile of its own components, groaning.
"You were supposed to break OFF if he-" Ino started.
Then she stopped, because Lee had landed ten paces away, and he was wide open, feet planted, catching his balance, stationary for a whole half second.
Ino's hands were already in the seal. She had been holding it the entire time. The combination was never the attack. The combination was the setup.
"Mind-Body Reversal Jutsu!"
Her body slumped into Choji's waiting catch, and her consciousness crossed the training ground like a thrown spear and struck Rock Lee square in the mind.
Ino fell through into Rock Lee, and Rock Lee, for the first time in his life, left his own body in someone else's hands and went visiting.
Ino's first thought, inside him, was that she was drowning. Drowning in chakra.
Okay, she thought, steadying. Body check. Legs, arms, everything where it should be. Feels... light? Feels really light. Feels-
She took one step and crossed thirty feet of training ground.
The world smeared. Ino sailed past a startled Choji, clipped through the space where Kiba's head had just been, and ran face-first into the fence at the edge of the ground hard enough to leave a boy-shaped dent in it.
"OW! What the? WHY IS IT LIKE THIS?!"
Across the field, her own body straightened up out of Choji's arms with a completely different posture, spine like a plumb line, shoulders down, chin level, and her own voice called back with an enthusiasm her voice had never once contained:
"Ino-chan! I'm pretty sure our bodies are very different! Be careful of how you control it!"
"What the hell is wrong with you?!"
"Uhh? I wouldn't say anything is wrong with my body to say… It sounds a bit mean when you put it that way."
"Ino-pig, just shut up and learn how to use his body!"
Ino peeled her borrowed face out of the fence, turned, and saw what was happening. The fight had gotten worse. Kiba, having realized that the terrifying thing was now controlled by Ino and that Lee was in the body of Ino of all people, had made the obvious call and charged the girl.
It went very badly for him.
Lee met the charge in Ino's body and it should have been a slaughter in Kiba's favor, and instead it was a slaughter for him. Lee gave ground in small exact amounts, let Kiba's claws pass a finger's width from Ino's face, countered with a fierce punch to the gut, that bent him over clutching his stomach. Before he could recover, Lee did a backflip, his dainty feet connecting with Kiba's chin and sending him flying.
Kiba hit the dirt for the fifth time that morning with the growing suspicion that the body had never been the problem.
"How?" Kiba demanded, from the ground.
"Taijutsu is not muscle, Kiba-kun! Muscle is just one part of many!" Lee told him. "Taijutsu lives in the mind as well! Not just the body"
By the time the newcomers arrived, the training ground had descended into a full and glorious brawl, and the two people who arrived and did not join were exactly the two people equipped to understand what they were looking at.
Tenten stopped at the edge of the field with a travel pack on her shoulders. Shikamaru stopped beside her with his hands in his pockets, took one look, and began, visibly, the process of leaving.
Then he stopped too.
"...Huh?" Shikamaru said.
Because Ino Yamanaka had just thrown a punch at Rock Lee, and Rock Lee had not moved like Rock Lee. And across the field, "Lee" had swung at Ino, missed by a meter, and tripped over from his own momentum, and no version of the boy Shikamaru had spent six months in a war with had ever once fallen over.
"Lee doesn't trip like that…" Tenten said slowly. "And Ino just... Lee isn't being sent flying by Ino, of all people." Her eyes went wide.
"Mind Transfer Jutsu." Shikamaru realized. "They've swapped. She's in his body, and she can't control it properly. He's in hers." He watched Lee-in-Ino slip three attacks at once with a hair's width to spare each time. "And he's still the taijutsu monster he was like in his original body..."
Naruto did not perform any such analysis. Naruto saw a brawl, lit up like a festival, and joined it at a dead run, and Hinata came after him at a shy jog, and Shino walked in last with his hands in his pockets and didn't like being left out.
"I was not selected for the retrieval mission," Shino said, to no one in particular, adjusting his glasses. "This gathering represents an opportunity for the bonding I was denied. Why? Because comrades who bleed together, bond. Even if the bleeding appears to be entirely one-sided."
"Bushy Brows!" Naruto skidded into the melee, then stopped dead, staring at the swaying, staggering green figure that had just walked into a training post. "Wait. What's wrong with you? Why are you moving like that?"
"THAT'S NOT HIM!" half the field shouted.
…
What followed, the training ground would remember for years, because Rock Lee had been given the two things he had wanted since he was old enough to want anything: a body that could mold chakra, and an afternoon.
It started with the hand signs.
Lee wove them through Ino's fingers.
Ram, Snake, Tiger.
And the field filled with Ino Yamanakas. A dozen of her, two dozen, a crowd of blonde figures fanning out in every direction, every clone standing with one arm behind their back and one hand forward.
"The Clone Jutsu…" Shikamaru observed from the grass, where he had sat down on the grounds that he was not getting involved in this for any money. "The basic academy Clone Jutsu. He's had ninjutsu for ninety seconds."
"They're illusions, they've got no substance," Kiba snarled, wading in. "I'll be able to smell the real one!"
"I agree," Shino said, and the air around him hummed as his kikaichu poured out in a searching net, threading between the clone images, hunting the one body in the crowd that carried heat and chakra and mass. "My friends will locate the original momentarily. Why? Because illusions do not have chakra networks, and the original cannot hide from-"
The real one came out of the crowd of herselves spinning, and the roundhouse caught Shino across the side of the head and sent him sliding away across the training ground on his back, glasses askew, coat flapping, bugs streaming after their host in an alarmed black ribbon.
"You found me, Shino-kun!" Lee called after him, sincerely congratulatory. "Excellent sensing! Your reaction speed is the part that needs work!"
Shino lay where he had stopped, adjusted his glasses at the sky, and did not immediately get up, on the grounds that the ground was where the dignity was.
Hinata, Kiba, Choji, and Sakura had learned to come at him together, and even the clumsy Lee-body had rejoined the war, Ino gradually finding a gear in it that did not immediately fling her into fences, and five-on-one in a borrowed civilian body should have finally been enough pressure. So Lee made three hand signs, and there was a burst of smoke, and out of the smoke came Ino Yamanaka with four arms.
"WHAT?!" said the actual Ino, from Lee's body.
"THE TRANSFORMATION JUTSU CAN DO THAT?!" said Naruto, with the pure professional envy of the village's foremost Transformation abuser.
"He got ninjutsu for one afternoon and his first idea was more arms for taijutsu." Shikamaru snickered.
Kiba came in first on Lee's blind side while the upper arms were tangled with Sakura, and the lower-left hand caught his wrist without the head even turning, wrenched it high, and the lower-right drove three short hooks into his ribs, before dumping him into Choji's path. Choji barreled through anyway, arms wide for the bear-grab, and two hands seized his lead arm, a third braced against his shoulder, and Lee slammed him into the earth itself.
Sakura tried the overhead again. Two palms caught her descending forearm and killed the blow a hand's width from contact, and before she could wrench free the other two hands hit her, a hook into the ribs that knocked her staggering. She went down on one knee, arm wrapped around her ribs, wheezing.
"That… is going to bruise, you jerk." She managed.
"Sorry! Try to break free faster after being caught, Sakura-chan!"
The Substitution came out when they finally boxed him properly. Choji rolled in from the front and Sakura came off the crater behind him, both committed, both arriving at once, and the four-armed Ino between them burst into white smoke. Choji's boulder plowed through the smoke and hit not a girl but Kiba, freshly substituted into the space and still mid-blink, and the two of them went end over end across the field in a tangled avalanche of dog-boy and boulder while somewhere to the left Lee reappeared beside the fence post.
"THE SUBSTITUTION JUTSU ISN'T SUPPOSED TO WORK WITH OTHER PEOPLE!" Kiba howled from inside the avalanche.
"That's incorrect, Kiba-kun! It's just far more difficult."
Then Hinata came in alone.
She had been growing bolder all morning, the Byakugan veins standing proud at her temples, and against a borrowed body with no monstrous strength in it her Gentle Fist was genuinely dangerous, palms flickering for the tenketsu in the arms, the shoulders, the sternum. Lee smiled as he saw that familiar style. It felt like so long since he had seen it, when he used to see it almost every day…
Ino's frame dropped into a stance Hinata knew better than her own reflection. Back foot bladed, front palm floating, stance low and ready, and the palms that came at her did not come like Lee's fists came. They came in soft interceptions and redirections, two-finger touches that turned her chakra points closed, and Hinata's rhythm stuttered, and her breath hitched, because for one full second this didn't resemble Ino or Lee.
It was Neji. Neji's Gentle Fist…
Neji Nii-san, her mind said and her guard, for one heartbeat, simply was not there.
The palm took her square in the chest and she flew.
She landed rolling, the strike a fraction of what his own body would have carried and still enough to knock the sky into her eyes and the air out of her.
Naruto then decided the field needed an army.
"SHADOW CLONE JUTSU!"
The training ground filled with orange. Thirty Narutos, forty, pouring off the treeline in a howling flood, and the whole battered squad rallied behind the tide of them, Kiba and Akamaru on one side, Choji rolling up the other, Sakura and the clumsy Lee-body closing the back, everyone and everything converging on one slim blonde figure with four arms and nowhere left to be.
Excellent, Lee thought, and meant it with his whole heart. Then let us see what else this wonderful body can do!
Gate of Opening!
It answered. Ino's slender frame bulked up.
"Hmm. I didn't think he'd be able to use that technique in someone else's body. Ino's body isn't nearly as trained as Lee's. She's going to be feeling that tomorrow." Tenten giggled.
"Heh, if she's not bedridden all day, someone has to listen to her complain all day. Thankfully, I got a mission and won't be here." Shikamaru said.
The five times as strong and fast Ino went through the clone army like a one-man-army. Orange bodies burst in chains, two and three to a blow, and Lee carved a corridor through the middle of Naruto's horde in the time it took the real one to shout half an order. Then the survivors surged to dogpile the corridor shut, dozens of them leaping in from every side at once, and Lee planted Ino's feet, cocked her slim right arm, and her fist met the ground.
The training ground got its third crater, and the biggest. The earth heaved up in a wave and went outward in a ring of force and flying turf, and the clone dogpile detonated wholesale, twenty Narutos blasted to smoke in a single blooming shockwave, and when the dust rolled back, Ino Yamanaka's body stood in the middle of a broken crater of earth.
"I knew I could do it! I just didn't know the right trick for it!" Ino shouted.
The real Naruto stood alone amid the smoke of his entire army with one clone left beside him, and he did the most Naruto thing in the world: he grinned and doubled down.
"Okay, okay, OKAY! You're crazy strong even as Ino, fine! But I've been saving this one!" The last clone's hands were already moving over his palm, winding the chakra tighter, tighter, the pale sphere screaming up to full spin. "Pervy Sage taught me this and it BEATS EVERYTHING!"
The Rasengan snarled. Naruto charged, clone poofing away, the sphere howling in his hand. Even as Lee inspected the ninjutsu while Naruto was forming it. Rotation, power, and containment were the key points he saw. It was a highly advanced ninjutsu for sure. Quite dangerous looking as well…
Lee's hands moved through three signs.
He didn't dodge, he stood exactly where he was, directly in front of the thick tree, and as Naruto bore down on him Rock Lee came apart into leaves, his whole borrowed body unraveling into a spiral of leaves that scattered on the wind, and Naruto, committed at a full sprint with a howling sphere of destruction in one hand, had nowhere to put it but forward.
The Rasengan hit the tree.
The tree trunk blew apart in a grinding spiral of splinters and the crown came down in a rush, and Naruto stood in the wreckage whipping his head around, swinging at the drifting leaves, grabbing at empty air.
"Where'd he, HEY! Where'd he go?! He turned into LEAVES! GET BACK HERE AND FIGHT ME, Bushy Brows!"
Hinata, kind to her bones, was already at Naruto's side, two fingers flicking against his shoulder with a pulse of chakra. "Naruto-kun, it's okay, it was a genjutsu, there's nobody-"
Naruto blinked. Stopped mid-swing at a bush. Looked around at the demolished tree, the drifting leaves, the entire training ground watching him.
"Huh? Where'd Bushy Brow go?" He lowered his fists, deeply suspicious of the shrubbery. "Hinata?"
That was the moment Ino quit.
Her chakra flared across the field, the technique released, and two bodies staggered as two consciousnesses flew home. Lee blinked back into his own body and rolled his shoulders once, and everything about his body felt right again. Ino surfaced in her own body, felt everything the morning had done to it, the ribs, the knuckles, the deep strange burn in every muscle that a gate leaves behind, and rounded on him with her finger already out.
"How in the world are you more annoying with ninjutsu?! You never even used it before!"
"I've spent a long time in the academy, dreaming of myself using ninjutsu. I practiced the hand signs for those jutsus probably more times than I actually trained." Lee revealed it simply, and then he smiled, and the smile had something in it that made her finger slowly lower. "Thank you, Ino, for allowing me to live out my childhood self's dream."
"I-It wasn't such a big deal..." Ino turned away with a faint blush crossing her face, arms folding. "If you want, I can do it more often."
"That's okay. Still, thank you very much. I know you didn't mean to, but that experience meant the world to me." Lee told her, sincerely.
"Okay! Enough praising Ino!" Sakura materialized between them, took Lee's arm, and relocated him a full step toward herself, staking the claim with her whole body. "Thank you for helping us train, Lee!"
"Man, you were whipping our butts even in Ino's body..." Kiba sat in the dirt where the morning had left him, rubbing the back of his head while Akamaru whined agreement beside him. "Just how far ahead of the rest of us are you?"
"You're crazy, man. No wonder you were promoted to Chunin along with Shikamaru." Choji had, somehow, at some point, reacquired his chips, and was munching them.
"How did you replicate cousin Neji's Gentle Fist so well...?" Hinata asked it quietly, and a little of the morning's ghost was still in her face.
"Neji... I grew up with him, basically. How could I not remember?" Lee told her.
"How the hell did you move my body better than me?! That's the real question!" Ino jabbed the finger at him again.
"Heh... The power of youth?" Lee rubbed the back of his head, electing, visibly, not to tell her that she simply needed to train harder.
"The power of my butt! My body feels like it's been tossed and passed around by those animals in the Forest of Death." Ino told him.
"Bushy Brows! I thought you couldn't use ninjutsu or genjutsu! What the hell was that?!" Naruto demanded, pointing at the corpse of the training tree.
"My inability to use ninjutsu or genjutsu stems from my body. Most likely a physical defect I was born with. Ino does not have that. So when she switched bodies with me, I was able to mould chakra into ninjutsu and genjutsu properly." Lee explained.
"Hmm. How did it feel?" Naruto grinned.
"It was nice, but I still prefer my own body." Lee clenched his fist, and the fist said everything the words left out.
I prefer your body as well, Sakura thought to herself, admiring him secretly from one step away.
"I couldn't imagine being a girl either." Shikamaru shared, from the grass.
That was not Lee's point, but...
"What are you trying to say, Pineapple Head?!" Ino rounded on him instead. "You think boys are better than girls or something?!"
Shikamaru looked up into the many eyes now pointed at him. Including Tenten's, who looked very much interested in his answer. And she was strong enough to have dealt with three of those Sound guys by herself, when he had barely dealt with one, and Choji and Kiba had almost died to some of them.
"Nope." Shikamaru lied intelligently.
"Good." Tenten patted his shoulder. "We would've had to go for a round if you thought that." Then she laughed.
"Oh, Tenten, what did you come by to say?" Lee asked her.
"I'm heading out to take the Chunin Exams in the Stone Village. Just came to give you a heads up, and let you know that I'll be wearing that comfy little vest over my shoulders the next time you see me." She smiled.
"That's awesome, Tenten! Do your best out there, and make sure to stay safe! I, uh, recently made some enemies with the Stone... I wouldn't recommend mentioning we're best friends, or that you're on my team, or anything involving me like at all." Lee chuckled nervously.
"I'll be fine. Kakashi-san will be with me during the exam. So if anything does happen, I doubt he'll let it." Tenten was confident and positive.
"Show 'em the power of Team Guy!" Lee balled his fist.
"You know it." Tenten balled hers.
"Wait! Hold up! Hold on!" Naruto's head had been swiveling between them with mounting outrage. "Another Chunin Exams?! Why haven't we been told about this?!"
"I haven't heard anything either." Shino was displeased.
"Us either." Choji said, while munching.
They turned to Lee and Shikamaru.
"I didn't know about it either. I'm a chunin already, why would I?" Shikamaru responded.
"I haven't heard any news about it. Sorry," Lee bowed apologetically.
Then they turned their gaze toward Tenten.
She covered her mouth. "I didn't know it was a secret..."
"It's probably because we're still recovering from the invasion. Even half a year later, our numbers are still gutted. Shinobi are still being sent out on higher-ranked missions than their rank is for. Tenten has probably shown off enough to be trusted. Not to mention we aren't even allied with Iwagakure. It'd be too risky to send so many of our genin to an enemy nation and just hope they'll return safely. Especially since Lee also just made them hate our guts like ten times more on our last mission." Shikamaru explained.
Despite his logical understanding, most of the genin there were definitely still going to complain to their jonin-sensei about it.
…
The field emptied slowly after Ino and Sakura healed everyone up.
Tenten left first, pack squared, off toward the gates and an enemy village. Shikamaru peeled away with Choji, chatting about getting something to eat. Kiba left with Akamaru, loudly informing the dog that they were going to train even harder, starting tomorrow. Ino walked away gingerly even after being healed. Her potential was a lot higher than she thought it was after seeing Lee use her body… Naruto left after being taught by Hinata how to properly escape genjutsu and Shino on the side of them.
And then it was just the two of them, and the wrecked training ground, and the late gold light.
Lee stood in the middle of it all looking, somehow, exactly as he had at dawn. Not a smudge. Not a scuff. He had fought eight people across two bodies and the only casualties were the fence, three craters, one training post, one tree, and everyone else's pride.
Sakura looked at him and remembered her original plan, come quietly back up out of its grave.
"Hey," she said. "Lee."
"Sakura-chan?"
She stepped in. Her heart was going like a drum and her face was already warming and she did not care, she had been owed this since his bed, since the letters, since six entire months, and she caught the front of his suit and pulled him down and he came, blinking, obligingly, leaning in-
The messenger bird landed on his head.
It came down out of the gold light with a leathery flutter and landed directly on top of Lee's hair, a lean official hawk with a message tube on its leg and it immediately began pecking his scalp with brisk administrative urgency. Recipient located. Delivery ready. Sign here. Sign here. Sign here.
Sakura stared at the bird.
The bird stared at Sakura.
Something behind her eyes, six months of letters and one hijacked training date and one interrupted forehead-kiss and one negotiated, budgeted, twice-deferred peck, quietly caught fire.
A quick peck, Inner Sakura had bargained, once. Just a peck. Nothing more.
Screw the peck, every part of Sakura answered, in unison.
She pulled him the rest of the way down and kissed him.
A real one, both hands fisted in the green of his collar, pressed up on her toes with her whole furious heart in it, and the world went away for Rock Lee in one direction while the messenger bird continued pecking the top of his head in the other, tap, tap, tap, a hero of the Hidden Leaf being simultaneously kissed into the afterlife and jackhammered by the postal service, his soul visibly attempting to exit through the crown of his skull at both events at once.
Sakura broke it off. Her face had achieved the exact color of a ripe tomato and was climbing toward something riper. She did not look at him. She reached up past his frozen face, relieved the affronted hawk of its message tube with trembling fingers, and pressed the scroll flat against Lee's motionless chest until his hand rose, automatically, corpse-like, to hold it.
"Hokage's office," she read off the tube's seal, in a voice one octave too high and moving too fast. "As soon as possible. Okay. Bye!"
She turned and ran away at full speed, giggling helplessly the whole way, both fists clutched against her chest tightly.
Behind her, in the middle of three craters and a murdered tree, Rock Lee stood absolutely still, scroll pressed to his chest, eyes very wide, a statue of the village's newest legend erected on the spot where he had fallen.
The hawk pecked him once more, pointedly, got no response whatsoever, and flew off in irritation.
[Taijutsu Proficiency +850 points!]
[Chakra Control Proficiency +1,100 points!]
[Eight Gates Proficiency +150 points!]
[Muscle Mimicry Proficiency +2,400 points!]
[Teaching Proficiency +2,800 points!]
[Inspire Proficiency +900 points!]
[Ninjutsu Proficiency has reached the next level!]
[Ninjutsu Proficiency has reached the next level!]
[Ninjutsu Proficiency +240 points!]
[Genjutsu Proficiency has reached the next level!]
[Genjutsu Proficiency has reached the next level!]
[Genjutsu Proficiency +180 points!]
[Spiritual Resistance Skill Gained!]