"Alright, everyone off the ship."
Aoba stood on the ruined deck and clapped his hands once. The mast was gone. Half the railing was gone. The deck had more weapons embedded in it than wood remaining. The cabin below was taking on water through three separate hull breaches.
This ship was not going to make it to the Land of Water.
"Lord Daimyo, with your permission, we'll be transferring you and your attendants to one of the pirate vessels." Aoba pointed across the water to the least damaged ship in the scattered remains of the fleet. It still had both masts. It still had a deck. It was, by every reasonable standard, a better ship than the one they were currently standing on.
The Water Daimyo looked at the pirate ship. He looked at the ruined escort vessel beneath his feet. He looked at the four shinobi who had just killed every pirate within a mile of his position.
"Whatever you think is best," he said. There was no argument in his voice. There had not been any argument in his voice since Tenten had revealed she was strong enough to kill a notorious pirate that had plagued these seas for decades. Not even his own land's shinobi did such a thing.
Lee carried the Daimyo on his back across the water. The old man's hands gripped Lee's shoulders tightly. He had not been carried like this since childhood and was not enjoying the reminder. Lee ran across the water steadily without too much shaking. He didn't want to inconvenience the Water Daimyo.
Hana carried the aide, who said nothing the entire crossing. He had not said much of anything since Araumi had boarded the ship. His earlier concerns about proper decorum appeared to have been entirely forgotten.
Aoba and the Haimaru brothers handled the four attendants between them, ferrying them across the gap in two trips.
Once everyone was aboard the pirate vessel, the attendants got to work. The rigging was different from what they were used to but a sail was a sail and these men had been sailing long enough to adapt. Within twenty minutes, the ship was underway, heading northeast toward the Land of Water's capital.
The Daimyo sat on a crate on the deck because the pirate ship did not have a private cabin fit for a head of country. He did not complain. His aide sat beside him on a smaller crate. He did not complain either.
"Tenten-chan." The Daimyo's voice caught her as she was checking the ship's supplies.
"Yes, Lord Daimyo?"
"That man. Araumi Funato." The Daimyo's small black eyes were studying her in a way they had not studied her before. "He has been a terror on our waters for longer than you have been alive. Decades. Ships lost. People taken. Entire fishing villages emptied. Our own shinobi in Kirigakure have been unable to deal with him for years."
Tenten waited.
"And you killed him. On my ship. At such a young age."
"It wasn't easy," Tenten said. "He was very strong. If I didn't get lucky, I would've died."
"I imagine he was." The Daimyo's hands clasped together in his lap. "When we arrive at the capital, I intend to hold a celebration in your honor. All four of you. But especially yours."
"Lord Daimyo, that really isn't nec-" Tenten blushed as she rapidly waved her hands back and forth, not feeling she really deserved that much praise.
"It is necessary." His voice was quiet but firm. "My country needs to know what Konoha did for us today."
Tenten looked at Lee, who gave her an enthusiastic thumbs up. She looked at Hana, who gave a small nod. She looked at Aoba, who grinned behind his cracked sunglasses.
"Then we'd be honored, Lord Daimyo."
…
The capital of the Land of Water sat on the largest island at the center of the archipelago. It emerged from the mist like a painting being revealed one layer at a time, first the dark shapes of the harbor, then the pale spires of the governmental buildings, then the sprawl of the city itself, built in tiers that climbed the island's central hill. Lanterns were already being lit along the waterfront despite the early hour, the mist eating enough sunlight to make them necessary.
The harbor master nearly fell into the water when he saw the pirate ship flying no flag pull into the diplomatic berth with the Water Daimyo standing on its bow.
The explanation that followed took approximately forty minutes and involved the harbor master, the captain of the port guard, a representative from the Daimyo's court, and eventually the Daimyo himself, who cut through the chaos by raising his hand and saying: "These four Konoha shinobi saved my life. Araumi Funato is dead. Prepare a banquet."
The court representative's mouth hung open before he regained his senses again. He bowed and ran.
The banquet hall was larger than any room Lee had been inside.
It occupied the entire top floor of the Daimyo's palace, open on three sides to catch the sea breeze, with paper lanterns strung between the pillars in cascading rows that turned the mist outside into a glowing curtain. Long tables had been arranged in a horseshoe pattern around a central area where musicians were already playing. The food was arriving in waves carried by servants who seemed to materialize from the walls.
Seafood. Mountains of it. Grilled fish and steamed shellfish and raw preparations that Lee had never seen before, arranged on beds of ice with garnishes that looked more like art than food. Rice in seven different styles. Soups with ingredients Lee could not identify. Sweets shaped like sea creatures.
The hall was filled with the Daimyo's court, local merchants, military officials, and a significant number of civilians who had been invited because the Daimyo wanted the story of Araumi's death to spread through his country by morning.
Tenten was seated at the Daimyo's right hand with a red blush on her face.
She had been cleaned up, given a formal kimono by the palace staff (pale blue with white wave patterns along the hem), and positioned at the place of honor before she could protest. The court was watching her with open curiosity. A fourteen-year-old girl from Konoha who had killed the pirate lord of the Funato clan. The story had already begun circulating through the hall in whispered fragments, each retelling adding details that had not been present in the original.
"I heard she cut him in half with a single swing."
"No, she dropped him from the sky onto a bed of swords."
"She used some kind of jutsu that gave her the strength of a hundred men."
"She's fourteen? She looks twelve."
Tenten heard all of it. She covered her face.
Lee was three seats down from her, and he was in heaven. The food was incredible. The atmosphere was incredible. The fact that his teammate was being celebrated as a hero by an entire country was the most incredible thing of all.
Lee looked at Tenten in her pale blue kimono and the thought that crossed his mind had nothing to do with her. He was wondering what Sakura-chan would look like dressed up like that. In pink, probably. With the obi a darker shade, like the one she had worn at the festival. Her hair would catch the lantern light the way it always did, and she would look absolutely beautiful in it.
He smiled into his grilled squid and thought about her.
Hana was seated beside Lee, the Haimaru Brothers sprawled under the table at her feet. One of them was accepting scraps of fish from a court official who had been brave enough to reach under the tablecloth. Another was asleep. The third had his head in Hana's lap, eyes half-closed.
"You're spacing out," Hana said.
"Just thinking about someone back home." Lee's smile was warm.
Hana's eyebrow rose, "Oh, a girlfriend?"
"I wouldn't say that…" Lee blushed as he rubbed the back of his head.
"Oh really?" Hana smirked. "Tell me about her."
Aoba, meanwhile, had found the sake. He was three cups in and telling the story of the battle to a circle of court officials who were hanging on every word, his cracked sunglasses adding an authenticity to the tale that no amount of embellishment could have matched.
The court officials gasped in the appropriate places.
Lee reached for another piece of grilled squid. A local man, broad-shouldered and red-faced from drink, slid into the seat beside him and clapped him on the shoulder with enough force to rattle the plates.
"You! You're one of the heroes, yeah? The one with the eyebrows?"
"That's me! Rock Lee!" Lee smiled.
"Here, here! You gotta try this!" The man pushed a small cup toward Lee. "Local specialty. Best in the islands. Just a sip!"
Lee looked at the cup. The liquid inside was clear.
"What is it?"
"Ah, it's nothing! Just a local rice drink. Think of it as a toast! To the heroes of the Land of Water!"
Lee picked up the cup. The amount inside was tiny. Maybe two mouthfuls. The man was grinning at him with the genuine warmth of someone who had just been saved from a pirate lord and wanted to share a drink with the people responsible.
"To being heroes!" Lee raised the cup and drank.
It went down smooth.
It went down warm.
Lee's body recognized the substance before his brain did.
The man watched Lee's face with an expectant smile, waiting for the appreciative nod that always followed the first taste of the island's finest.
Lee's cheeks went red.
A red that his team had seen exactly once in a restaurant and had subsequently spent half an hour trying to contain.
"Oh," Lee said. His voice had dropped half an octave. "That's... pretty good."
The man beamed. "Right?! I told you! Best in the-"
Lee's hand came down on the table. The table cracked down the middle.
"PRETTY GOOD?!" Lee stood up. The chair behind him launched backward into the wall. "THAT WAS INCREDIBLE! HEY! HEY EVERYONE! THIS GUY'S DRINK IS INCREDIBLE!"
The hall went silent.
Tenten's head snapped around from the head table. Her eyes went wide. She had seen this before.
"Oh no."
Lee swayed. His body moved in a pattern that had no pattern. His feet found positions that no sober person's feet would find. His arms hung down.
He picked up a serving platter. A full serving platter of grilled tuna.
"WHO WANTS SOME?!" Lee offered with a grin that covered his entire face.
"Lee!" Hana was on her feet. The Haimaru Brothers scrambled out from under the table, ears flat, hackles up. They could smell the alcohol seeping through his pores and the sudden spike in his body chemistry had their instincts screaming wrong.
Lee spun on his heel and launched the platter like a frisbee. It sailed across the hall and embedded itself in a pillar with a crack that silenced the musicians.
Aoba had already abandoned his sake and his audience. His hands were moving through seals.
"Scattering Thousand Crows!"
A cloud of black shapes materialized around Lee, swarming his vision, blocking his sight lines. Lee laughed and began punching the crows out of the air with the casual joy of a boy who had just discovered that the world was full of things to hit.
"CAW! CAW! CAW!!" Lee made bird noises with every bird he punched out of the sky.
One of the Haimaru Brothers lunged at Lee's legs. Lee hopped over the dog without looking, his body rotating in midair, and landed on the table behind him. The table split under his feet. Food went everywhere.
"What's happening to him?!" Hana shouted.
"He's a natural prodigy of the Drunken Fist!" Tenten was already moving from the head table, pulling wire from her pouch. "He gets out of control when he drinks even the tiniest sip of alcohol. Even Guy-sensei had trouble restraining him!"
"You're telling me this NOW?!"
"How was I supposed to know someone was going to give a kid alcohol?!"
The second Haimaru Brother hit Lee from behind, jaws closing on his jumpsuit sleeve. Lee pirouetted with the dog still attached, spinning the animal in a wide arc that cleared the nearest table of every dish on it. The dog let go, skidding across the floor with a yelp of confusion rather than pain. It had not been thrown violently.
"GOOD BOY! WHAT A GOOD DOG!" Lee reached down and scratched the bewildered Haimaru Brother behind the ears while simultaneously kicking Aoba's crows with his one foot, not even looking. His body was operating on a logic that belonged to nobody.
"HEY TENTEN!" Lee spotted her. "TENTEN! YOU'RE SO COOL! DID YOU KNOW THAT?! YOU KILLED A PIRATE LORD! THAT'S SO COOL! SAKURA-CHAN WOULD BE SO IMPRESSED!"
"THANK YOU! NOW HOLD STILL!"
"NO! I WANT TO CELEBRATE MORE!"
Tenten threw the wire. It looped around Lee's ankles. She pulled. Lee's feet went out from under him, but instead of falling, his body bent backward into a bridge and he launched himself upward off his hands, snapping the wire, and landed on top of a pillar.
"He broke my wire!" Tenten pulled the severed ends back. "He actually broke my wire!"
The three Haimaru Brothers circled the pillar, barking. Lee was perched on top of it, eating a piece of fish he had somehow acquired during the chaos.
"We need to pin him down," Hana said. "If I can get my hands on him, I can flush the alcohol from his system with medical ninjutsu. But I need him still for at least a few seconds."
"A few seconds." Aoba looked at Lee on the pillar. "Might as well ask for a few minutes."
"Tenten, chains." Hana's voice was sharp. "Can you hold him?"
"I can try." Tenten was already reaching into her scroll.
"Aoba, blind him again. All of you, on my signal."
Aoba's hands moved. A fresh cloud of crows exploded into existence around the pillar, thicker than the first wave, a black swarm that blocked out the lantern light and turned Lee's perch into a storm of feathers and cawing.
Lee laughed inside the cloud. His fists were swinging. Crows were popping into smoke with every hit.
"NOW!"
Tenten's chains launched from the scroll. Four of them. They shot into the crow cloud and found Lee by sound and instinct. The first chain caught his right arm. The second caught his left. The third wrapped around his torso. The fourth got his legs.
Lee's body fought the chains. His muscles bulged. The metal links groaned. He was pulling against them with a strength that most could not content with, and the chains were losing.
"He's breaking them! Hurry!"
All three Haimaru Brothers hit Lee at once. The combined weight of three full-grown dogs drove him off the pillar and onto the floor. Tenten yanked the chains tight. The dogs pinned his arms and chest with their bodies.
Hana was there in an instant.
Her palms glowed green. She pressed both hands flat against Lee's chest, the Mystical Palm Jutsu activating at full power, and instead of healing, she targeted the alcohol in his bloodstream. Her chakra moved through his system like a filter, finding the toxin, neutralizing it, breaking the molecules apart and pushing them toward his kidneys and liver for processing at an accelerated rate.
Lee's body thrashed. His head whipped side to side. One of the Haimaru Brothers shifted its weight to keep him pinned.
"Almost..." Hana's brow was creased with concentration. The green glow intensified.
Lee's movements slowed.
His muscles relaxed.
His eyes, which had been wild and unfocused and full of joyful chaos, blinked once. Twice. The red in his cheeks began to fade.
"Wha..." Lee looked up at the three dogs on his chest, the chains around his body, and the four faces staring down at him. "What happened? Why am I on the floor? Why are the doggies on top of me?"
"The Master of the Drunken Fist made a reappearance," Tenten said flatly.
Lee looked around the hall. The cracked tables. The food on the floor. The serving platter embedded in the pillar. The court officials peering out from behind overturned furniture. The musicians in the corner, clutching their instruments like shields.
"Oh no..." Lee's face went through five stages of horror in two seconds. "Was that... did I... was that alcohol?!"
"Local rice wine," Hana said, pulling her hands back. The green glow faded. "Your system has been flushed. You should be back to normal."
"I am so sorry!" Lee tried to bow but the chains and dogs prevented it. "I am so deeply, profoundly sorry! Did anyone get hurt?!"
"Just us thankfully," Aoba said. He was breathing hard. One lens of his sunglasses was now missing entirely.
The broad-shouldered local man who had given Lee the drink stood up from the wreckage of his table, looked at the scene, and said:
"I'm so sorry… I didn't know his tolerance to alcohol was so low..."
The hall erupted in laughter.
Tenten released the chains. The Haimaru Brothers climbed off. Lee sat up, bowed to every direction he could think of, and apologized to the hall at a volume that carried to every corner.
The Daimyo had not moved from his seat through the entire episode.
He looked at Tenten.
"Is he always like that?"
"Only when someone accidentally gives him alcohol." Tenten pinched the bridge of her nose. "We'll pay for any damages he caused, Daimyo-sama…"
"Remarkable." The Daimyo took a sip of his own tea. "A truly interesting youth."
"Youth?" Tenten's eyes widened.
"Yes. Interesting youth you all are." The Water Daimyo was confused.
"Ah, it's nothing..." Tenten rubbed the back of her head.
The celebration continued late into the night. The music resumed. The food kept coming. Lee sat in the corner with his hands folded in his lap, sober and guilty, while Hana chatted with him. The Haimaru Brothers had stationed themselves around him in a triangle formation, apparently having decided that their new job was Making Sure The Green Boy Did Not Drink Again.
The story of Tenten and Araumi grew with every retelling until, by midnight, the version circulating through the outer halls had her fighting the pirate lord with her bare hands while standing on the back of a whale.
Tenten's attempts to correct them fell on deaf and drunk ears.
Somewhere far from the Land of Water, on a dusty road in Fire Country, a boy with blond hair and an orange jacket was holding a water balloon.
The water balloon was not cooperating.
"Focus, Naruto." Jiraiya sat on a rock with his arms crossed and his legs stretched out, watching his student struggle. "You've already got the basics. Walk-on-water taught you to emit chakra continuously. Tree-climbing taught you to focus and maintain emission from a specific point. Now combine them."
"I'm trying!" Naruto's hands squeezed the balloon. His face was scrunched in concentration. Chakra flickered at his palm, pushing into the balloon's surface, trying to reach the water inside.
"You need to spin the water. Create a stream of chakra and use it to rotate the water inside the balloon. When it spins fast enough, the balloon pops."
"I know! You said that already!"
"And I'm not seeing the balloon doing that for some reason."
Naruto growled at the balloon. The balloon did not react.
"Rotation," Jiraiya continued. "That's the key to the first step. You push chakra from your palm into the water and you make it spin. The direction depends on you. Clockwise, counterclockwise, doesn't matter for now. What matters is that you generate enough force to exceed the balloon's elasticity."
Naruto tried again. A tiny wobble appeared on the balloon's surface. Then nothing.
"This is stupid! Hey, Pervy Sage!"
"Don't call me that."
"Whatever! Listen, I saw something way cooler during the Chunin Exams. Bushy Brows. He made a freaking dragon! Out of air! Or chakra! Or something! It was huge and it hit that sand monster and blew the roof off the whole arena!" Naruto's hands released the balloon so he could gesture the size of the explosion. "Can you teach me something like that?! A dragon jutsu! That'd be way more useful than popping water balloons!"
Jiraiya's eyebrow rose.
"You want to learn a dragon jutsu?"
"Yeah! Something cool! Something that'll make people go whoa!"
"The technique you're describing was performed by a boy who opened seven of the Eight Inner Gates." Jiraiya's voice did not change but something in it gained weight. "Do you even know what the Eight Gates are?"
"Uh. Kind of. Bushy Brow Sensei explained it but I forgot."
"They're limiters on the body's chakra flow. Opening them gives you power that exceeds what a normal human body can produce. Opening seven of them puts you at a level where the air itself becomes a weapon. The 'dragon' you saw was not a jutsu. It was compressed air shaped by the physical force of a body that was burning itself alive to generate that kind of power."
Naruto stared.
"The boy who did that spent his entire life training his body because he couldn't use ninjutsu or genjutsu. He had no shortcuts. No bloodline. No stinky fox. Just his body and more determination than anyone I've seen in a long time."
Jiraiya picked up a fresh water balloon and tossed it to Naruto. Naruto caught it.
"The jutsu I'm teaching you right now was created by the Fourth Hokage. It took him three years to develop. It doesn't require the Eight Gates. It doesn't require you to burn your body down. But it does require you to master three steps, and you haven't even finished the first one."
Naruto looked at the water balloon in his hand.
"Learn this first." Jiraiya leaned back on the rock. "Pop the balloon. Then we can talk about learning a damn dragon jutsu."
Naruto balled his fist with determination.
"Just watch me, Pervy Sage!" Naruto exclaimed.
He squeezed the balloon. Chakra pushed from his palm. The water inside wobbled.
The balloon did not pop.
Naruto pushed harder.