The training ground they used most mornings was nothing remarkable to look at. A wide clearing carved out of the forest by years of use, its edges defined by trees whose trunks were notched and scarred from kunai practice and stray jutsu, its floor a patchwork of packed earth and stubborn grass that refused to surrender entirely to the sandals that crossed it daily. The morning sun came through the gaps in the tree line in long low angles that would shift and shorten as the day progressed.
Tenten was already there when Lee arrived, and she was grinning.
That alone told him something. Tenten was never smiling when it came to morning training. She had several scrolls arranged across her waist that hadn't been there the last time he saw her, and she was standing with her spine straight, arms crossed.
"Thanks for helping me out with my training, Lee!" She said. "I finally know what path I want to go down as a kunoichi."
"That's incredible, Tenten! I can't wait to see it." Lee beamed at her.
"Oh, you'll see it, alright." She grinned with a glint of mischief in her eyes. "Let me show you."
Neji showed up at the edge of the clearing eventually, arms crossed.
"Do you mind telling me why I must be here for this, sensei?" His brows had drawn together by two millimeters. He was not pleased.
"Our ally is growing stronger, Neji!" Might Guy explained, his voice already at full volume. "I see no reason why we shouldn't be here to support her development into a fine shinobi!"
"I could be training on my own to become a finer shinobi." Neji countered.
Guy's voice softened. "No shinobi can become great on their own, Neji. Not a single great ninja has reached the top by themselves. It is only through our friends, allies, and loved ones that we become stronger people."
Neji did not respond. He looked away, toward the training posts at the far end of the clearing, and something in his jaw set. There was something in his teacher's words that he couldn't quite refute and it irritated him. He turned his attention to Tenten, who had beckoned Lee toward the center of the clearing.
He would not argue with an older shinobi who was stronger and more experienced than him. It was a losing battle, and Neji Hyuga did not participate in losing battles.
______________________________________________
Lee moved first.
He came in straight, no telegraphing, his right fist on a line with Tenten's midsection. Tenten's hand snapped to a scroll at her waist. The long sword came out in a poof of smoke with the action of a single blur of unfurling parchment, already positioned horizontally across her front. Lee's fist hit the edge of the blade a fraction of a second before it would have hit her stomach.
The edge sunk into his knuckle. His knuckle was nearly split in half. He pulled back, shook the hand out. The cut across his knuckle was already doing something it should not have been able to do that quickly or if at all. The muscles beneath it flexed visibly. Tissue regathering itself around the site of damage, pulling closed in a slow, strange way that had taken him months of recovery in the hospital to produce on command. He blew on it from the sharp pain.
"What in the- Lee, what is that?!" Tenten slashed outward with the sword, buying herself room.
Lee leaped back, grinning. "Shinobi secret." He pressed a finger to his lips.
She came at him.
Despite never having trained in kenjutsu, Tenten fought like a skilled swordsman. She kept the edge toward him whenever he attempted to attack, which meant every time Lee's hands came up to punch or strike, he was greeting sharpened steel.
He went on the defensive. Entirely on the defensive, which was an uncomfortable place to be when your primary answer to most problems was forward aggression. Two exchanges in, a tear opened along his left sleeve where the edge had caught it instead of him. Then another across his right hip.
She was taking control of the pace of this battle.
He went low.
The low sweep came fast, aimed at her front ankle, meant to kick her feet out from under her. Tenten read it or felt it, or both and jumped. Her feet left the ground and she brought the sword down flat in the same motion, laying it across the path of Lee's leg like a barrier. His shin met the blade's edge and the contact rang up through the metal into his bones and he felt the edge threatening.
He committed the kick anyway.
The weights wrapped around his leg hit the sword with everything the swing had behind it.
The blade shattered.
Tenten's eyes widened as she forgot about those insane weights around Lee's legs and she leapt from the handle of the sword, already reaching for the next scroll.
Lee was already moving.
He came at her before the next weapon could fully form. She was mid-unfurl when he arrived and she was forced to throw the scroll sideways and pull kunai from her pouch instead, scattering five of them at his face on a flat trajectory to interrupt his forward momentum.
He couldn't abort cleanly. Too committed, too close, the wrong angle to turn without eating at least two of them broadside. He dropped his chin, turned his shoulder in, and took three of the five in the places he had decided were acceptable: upper arm, left side of the ribs, the outside of his right thigh. None of them went deep.
And Tenten had used the opportunity. The hammer came out of the second scroll and it was not a small thing. Short handle, thick head, the kind of hammer that was meant for smashing. She swung it from the hip as he crossed the last meter between them, putting her full bodyweight into the arc.
Lee's foot met it.
He had meant the kick to send the hammer flying. What actually happened was that the hammer was heavier than the power of his foot and it sent him backward instead. He hit the ground, rolled, came up on one knee.
Tenten was already pouring the next scroll.
He understood what she was doing. She was cycling him. Keep a weapon in front of him, keep him reacting, keep deploying something new before he could reset from the last. She was faster than he had expected with the summoning jutsu.
Dozens of metal tools came screaming out of the unfurled scroll: kunai, shuriken, two short swords, a length of serrated chain, things he couldn't immediately categorize. They spread across the clearing in a radius that covered every obvious angle of approach. He went left and the wave went with him, tracking. He went right, same. He found a gap and pushed through it and one of the short swords clipped the shoulder of his gi and spun away.
He cleared the volley with some distance between him and Tenten, came around to reassess.
Then he heard it.
A sound that shouldn't have been there. A high, thin singing of metal under tension. Coming from every direction.
The weapons were in the ground and the trees around him and he was only now seeing the thin, near-invisible wires that connected them all back to Tenten's hands, caught in the morning light at just the wrong angle. Not a ranged attack. A net with teeth.
She pulled.
Everything came at him simultaneously.
Lee ran. Not away, at Tenten, the only point in the closing circle with a person behind it instead of metal. He pushed into the gap that existed for the half-second before the net finished contracting, head down, arms in, letting the outermost weapons find his gi and his arms and his shoulders rather than anything that couldn't afford to be hit, and Tenten's eyes went wide as she registered what he was doing.
She needed the net to contract. If she let him reach her, the whole trap collapsed.
She let go of the wires. Hoisted everything upward at once, all of it, the entire mass of metal rising on the same wires and climbing above her head, above both of them, a cloud of suspended sharpened things hanging overhead waiting for her signal.
And Lee arrived.
She took his fist on the cheek.
She had decided to. That was what made it impressive. She had seen him coming, understood she couldn't pull back in time to avoid it and couldn't redirect around it either, and she had chosen to take it cleanly rather than catch it at a bad angle and go down worse. The decision took something.
The problem was that Lee's right cross in a full forward sprint was a Lee right cross in full forward sprint. She had braced for it. She still left the ground.
She hit the grass three meters back and skipped once, hard, and the crater her shoulder made on the second contact was not a large one but it was real. Her ears were ringing. The cheek was already swelling. Her vision had the specific tilted quality of a head that had just been moved faster than the brain expected.
Lee was standing over her.
His fist came down.
It came down in the space between her feet forcing her to roll out the way, and the impact made a second crater in the dirt. The shockwave from the ground contact hit her through the earth and made her teeth rattle, and caused her to roll away, crashing into a tree. She forced herself up before bringing her hands down at the same moment she rolled clear.
The metal net dropped.
Every piece of it. Straight down, as dense and complete as it had been suspended, descending on the area where Lee was crouching with no gaps available and no time to create them. It would hit him from every direction. Some of it would definitely hit flesh.
Lee laughed.
He vanished.
Not the way shinobi vanished with a substitution jutsu, without a puff of smoke, without a log appearing in his place, just there and then not there, and then the weight hit her from behind. His arms came around her torso from behind her and his legs hooked around her legs below the knee and the full dense weight of him, which included his weighted wraps, his weighted gi, and a body that had been built upward from its original frame by two years of pre-dawn training with Might Guy, descended onto her back and drove her knees into the dirt.
The metal net landed where he had been.
It landed where both of them would have been.
"You've really improved, Tenten! You'll surpass Lady Tsunade in no time at this rate!" He was still talking at full conversational volume directly behind her ear.
"GET OFF ME, IDIOT!" She threw her weight sideways, then forward, then tried to straighten her legs, and none of it budged him at all. He weighed as much as something significantly larger than he had any right to weigh.
"Right, sorry, hehe." He released her, stood, rubbed the back of his head. Looked at the scattered net of weapons around them, then at her. "I guess we can call that a tie?"
Tenten sat in the dirt for a moment. Her cheek was throbbing. Her knees had grass stains. There were three kunai still in his arm and shoulder from the earlier volley, which he had apparently not felt strongly enough to remove mid-fight, which was extremely irritating to look at.
"Fine." She pushed herself up. "Next time don't hold back."
"I wasn't holding back."
She stared at him. "...Why didn't you use your nunchaku?"
"I haven't gotten used to the new weight yet." He shrugged, the kunai in his shoulder shifting with the motion. "I'd create more problems for myself right now using them than not."
"Oh." She remembered the weapon store. The look on his face when he'd hefted the new chain-weighted nunchaku and immediately started thinking about how to train with them rather than how to use them. "Sorry for assuming."
"Great work, you two!" Guy's voice was already at full volume behind them. He had a thumb raised, the other hand at his hip, and an expression that would have been embarrassing to anyone less than Might Guy. "Tenten, you are setting your feet firmly on the path toward surpassing Lady Tsunade herself!"
"Thank you, sensei." She meant it. Guy was often much and loud, but he was a jonin, and his opinions on a shinobi's progress were not things to dismiss.
"You're better than before."
That one came from a different direction. She turned. Neji had moved from the edge of the clearing to somewhere behind Guy's left shoulder, arms still in his sleeves, expression still arranged into its neutral setting.
She felt the sun on her face. Felt the bruise on her cheek and the grass stains on her knees and the specific quality of a morning where something had gone right in a way that would matter later. The path to Tsunade's level was impossibly long. That was fine. She had just taken a step on it, and two teammates and a jonin had watched her take it.
That was enough for today.
"Now." Neji had already taken his hands out of his sleeves. He was looking at her with a gaze he's never sent her way before. "Let's see how you match up against a real genius."
Tenten looked at him. Looked at the scattered weapons around the clearing, the torn dirt, the broken sword hilt still jutting from the ground behind her. She breathed out once.
She nodded. "Let's do this."
[Taijutsu Proficiency +148 points!]
[Muscle Mimicry Proficiency +300 points!]
[Chakra Control Proficiency +100 points!]
[Teaching has reached the next level!]
Host: Rock Lee
Age: 13
Rank: Genin
Skills: Taijutsu B (10,380/100,000), Ninjutsu F (0.090/10), Genjutsu F (0.090/10), Shurikenjutsu C (1,840/10,000), Chakra Control B (3,918/100,000), Nunchaku Mastery C (7,420/10,000), Teaching D (0/1,000), Muscle Mimicry D (610/1,000)
Unique Skills: Body Supremacy Jutsu, Chakra Enhanced Strength
Equipment: Weighted Wraps, Weighted Nunchaku, Weighted Gi, Shinobi Tools (Kunai, shuriken, flash bomb, smoke bomb)