The man who walked into the eastern camp was dying, and he would not admit it, because he was a courier.
He came up out of the waste at a stagger that had once been a run, bent nearly double under a load strapped to his back that no one his size should have been able to lift, let alone carry across two countries to do it. His lips were cracked white. His eyes had the glassy fixed shine of a man running on the last of something. And when the perimeter watch caught him and asked him to state his business, he straightened up to his full height, saluted with an arm that shook the whole way, and said, "Courier Ninja Five-Nine-Two-Eight. Delivery for the Konoha chunin, Rock Lee. Signature required."
Then he fell over.
They got him sitting up against a supply crate, and that was where Lee found him, because word of a half-dead Leaf courier reached Lee. He came at a dead sprint, dropped to his knees in front of the man, and took in the load still strapped to his back, and his whole face changed.
He knew that shape. He had been seeing that shape in his sleep for months.
"My new weights…" Lee breathed.
"Reforged. Chakra metal. Full set." The courier was reciting it through lips that did not want to move. "Customizable weights and tonfa. Smith says, and I am quoting the work order, tell the kid he's insane and it was an honor."
"You carried this?" Temari had drifted over, because the camp was quiet at the moment and a man nearly killing himself was the most interesting thing right now. She looked at the load, then at the wreck of the man under it, and her brow knit. "On your back. From the Land of Fire."
"Yes."
"Why didn't you seal it in a scroll?"
The courier looked at her like she was insane.
"A scroll?" he repeated.
Temari thought he was an idiot. "You crossed all this distance on foot, under a load that's clearly trying to kill you, when you could have walked here empty-handed and unsealed it at the gate."
"A courier delivers the package." The man said it like scripture, with the last air in his lungs. "A courier does not hand the customer a scroll and a chore. We carry. We do not stop. Five-Nine-Two-Eight has a perfect record and I am not going to ruin it for my own comfort. With respect, kunoichi, you would not understand. It is not your creed."
A vein pulsed at Temari's temple, but she cooled her head and refused to argue with a mere courier-nin.
Lee had tears pooling in his eyes.
"You almost died to bring me my weapons faster. You put your body on the edge of breaking for a stranger's package and a promise nobody would have checked." He gripped the man's shoulder. "That is one of the most youthful things I have ever heard!"
"It's my duty…" the courier rasped, but something in his ruined face glowed at being acknowledged.
Lee reached for his wallet to pay the man something extra, anything, and the pouch answered with the flat empty whisper it had been making since the smith took everything he owned, and would keep making until this mission paid out, which was not today.
Lee looked into the empty wallet.
The empty wallet wheezed back.
I have no money. I have nothing to give him. He half killed himself for me and I cannot even buy him a meal. Lee's fist clenched with youthful resolve. Then I will pay him in the only thing I own that is worth anything.
"Lie down on your front, please." Lee said.
"What?"
"On your front. Trust me." Lee was already rolling up his sleeves. "I cannot pay you in money. But I have spent every day of my life learning the human body. I'm no medical ninja but I could give quite a few a run for their money. Lie down. I am going to make you feel better than you did the morning you set out."
The courier, too tired to argue, lay down.
What followed, the rest of the camp watched with a sort of horrified fascination, because a fourteen-year-old monster who had turned two hundred Cloud shinobi into a stain a few weeks ago was now kneeling over an exhausted mailman, working his thumbs down either side of the man's spine with the same total focus he brought to training, and the mailman was making sounds no one wanted to hear in a war camp.
"There." Lee found a knot the size of a fist between the man's shoulder blades. "This is from the strap. You have been bracing against it for two countries and the muscle has locked solid around it. Breathe out."
The courier breathed out. Lee leaned in. Something deep in the man's back released with an audible click, and the sound the courier made then was close to ecstatic.
[Massage Skill Gained!]
[Massage Proficiency has reached the next level!]
Lee moved his thumbs down to the next knot and eased that one loose too, humming to himself.
By the time he was done the courier sat up, rolled his shoulders, turned his head one way and then the other, and stared at Lee with the dawning awe of a convert.
"I feel…" he said slowly, "better than I did before I left the village!"
"I'm happy I could help!"
"I carried a mountain across a war and I feel like I had a vacation." The courier got to his feet, tested his back, found it perfect, and bowed so low his forehead nearly touched his knees. "Konoha's Green Devil gave me a back rub. Nobody is going to believe this. I don't care. Five-Nine-Two-Eight, delivery complete." He shouldered his empty pack as if he was twenty years younger, fixed Lee with a tearful look of pure professional respect, and added, "Spread the word. Use a courier-nin. We deliver no matter what!"
Then he sped off east into the waste, at a pace that suggested he might just run the whole way home for the joy of it, and Lee saluted him for his admirable work.
…
Lee waited until the camp slept before he opened the case.
The metal had a weight to it that his old gear had never had, it was far heavier and denser somehow. He put together the nunchaku first. Ran his hands down the bars. Felt the joints turn, the chains move, every link conducting smoothly the way the smith had charged him triple to make it.
Then he closed his eyes and converted his chakra into water, the one thing his chakra could do that did not need a single hand sign, and he poured it down his arms and into the steel.
The metal took it and the water came.
It wrapped them. A skin of living water sheathed each nunchaku from end to end, moving, clinging, fed straight from his own chakra so that it never dripped and never fell, a layer of ocean held to the metal by will alone. He moved the bars and the water moved with them, trailing into ribbons and snapping back, and where the moonlight caught it the whole weapon ran silver.
Lee smiled in the dark, and then he started to train.
He brought up imagined enemies and he fought against them. The water nunchaku first, the bars whirling and the water trailing them in long bright arcs, every strike landing on a foe who was not there and would have been ended if he were. Then he grabbed an extra weight and folded the nunchaku into a staff, and the water raced up the length of it and sheathed the whole pole, and he swept it through a rank of ghosts in a single turn that flung silver across the sand. Then with all of his weights, he broke the staff into a chain, and the water ran out along every link to the weight at the end, and he spun it over his head in a wheel of water that hummed in the night air, and brought it down through the last ghost standing.
It was, anyone who had been awake to see it would have agreed, magnificent. A boy in green alone in the moonlight, flowing between water and water and water, weaving an entire silent battle out of nothing but ghosts and ocean and the years of fighting experience.
Then he stopped. Converted his water chakra back into regular chakra. And placed his weights back around his legs.
He had only been testing his new weapons and his muscles certainly felt the strain. Which was perfect for him. Lee was getting used to the weight of his old ones which was never a good thing for a man aiming for the top.
…
The campaign slowed down when Rock Lee arrived because a shinobi with Lee's level of force decided most engagements by himself.
It was a strange way to fight a war and the commanders on both sides learned it fast. There were no more great battles after the first two, because great battles needed both sides to believe they could win one, and the green devil made that impossible. Where the green devil was, the enemy did not advance. They did not even hold. The moment a forward Cloud company or a dug-in Stone post caught sight of something bright green drawing itself across the waste toward them, the engagement was already decided, and the only choice left to the man in charge was whether to order the retreat before the killing started or after.
Most ordered it before.
So Lee ran. North and east, east and north, a green streak crossing the dead center of the Land of Wind so often that the desert between the two fronts wore a faint permanent haze of risen sand along the line he favored. He would break a Stone push in the morning and be standing in Jūza's wadi by dusk, and the front he had left would hold for days afterward on nothing but the rumor that he might come back. He was one boy. He could only be in one place. But their enemies not knowing which place did half his work for him, and Shikamaru and Temari, each on their own front, learned to use that uncertainty like a second army, feinting where he had been, striking where the enemy had thinned to guard against where it might go next. He was a deterrent with a face.
And in the weeks of it, between the running, he helped his allies.
He came at Izumo and Kotetsu with both hands and the clear intent to kill them, and that was the lesson.
He had told them the rule first. He had sat them down the night before.
"The gates are not a technique you learn because it is strong," Lee had said. "They are a technique you learn because there is something you would rather die than fail to protect. My sensei's father made a rule, and he gave it to my sensei, and my sensei gave it to me, and now I give it to you. You open the gates only to protect something precious enough to be worth your life. A comrade. A loved one. Your ninja way. Never for pride. Never for a fight that does not need it. The gates exist because the body keeps most of its strength locked away so you cannot hurt yourself reaching for it, and to open one is to tell your body you would rather be hurt than lose what you are fighting for. If you cannot say that honestly, the gate should not open."
They had taken it on.
So in the morning he tried to kill them, because the First Gate, the Gate of Opening, did not open through mere training. It opened when the body stood at the edge of dying and decided the limiter was the only option to stay alive. He came at them with strikes that would have shattered rib cages if they had not moved, faster than either of them could honestly track, and he did not let up, and he did not pretend, and the only protection the two of them had was each other and what Lee taught them about the Eight Inner Gates.
Kotetsu felt it go first. Somewhere past the point where his arms should have given out, with Lee's heel coming at his throat and Izumo down and the cold certainty arriving that he could not block this one, something in the front of his skull unlocked, and his battered body answered with a surge of strength it had been hiding from him since birth. He got the block up. The Gate of Opening was open, and it felt like being more himself than he had ever been and like dying at the same time.
Izumo's went a breath later, off the same fear.
Lee stepped back, grinning, and let them collapse. They lay in the churned sand shaking, drained to the floor, every muscle screaming from a power their bodies had never been built to spend, and they were both, faintly, laughing.
"That is the worst thing anyone has ever taught me." Kotetsu wheezed
"You opened it on the first real attempt!" Lee was beaming over them like a proud parent. "You two did excellent!"
"Don't ever do that to me again."
"I will absolutely have to do that to you again, the body forgets. But not today!"
[Teaching Proficiency +1,940 points!]
Teaching the gates was the hardest thing Lee knew how to teach, harder than anything else he had ever shown another person, because it asked him to nearly kill people he cared about and trust them to choose life by choosing something worth more than life. He reached down and helped his two comrades up out of the sand, prouder of them than he had words for.
Shikamaru's taijutsu touch-up went considerably worse, in that Shikamaru was conscious for all of it and complained the entire way through.
"This is such a drag," Shikamaru said, on his back in the sand for the fourth time. "My whole thing is not being in range of anyone's fists. Yours included."
"And on the day someone closes that range anyway," Lee said brightly, hauling him up, "you will thank me. Now let's go again! Keep your guard up this time!"
"I will not thank you. I will be dead, and being dead, I will not thank anyone." Shikamaru raised his guard half an inch. "Can we stop and look at clouds instead?"
"After fifty more rounds!"
"Ughh."
Rock Lee was a carefully used asset on the battlefield.
On the north Shikamaru built an ambush in an area the Stone liked to move through, and when the squad came through it his shadow ran out along the floor of the draw and took every one of them at once, froze them mid-stride in the dark, and held them, drained and patient, just long enough. Lee came down the draw wall and finished them with five strikes before any of the five understood they had been caught. Shikamaru never threw a blow.
On the north again, Kankuro got to be smug. He transformed one of his puppets as Rock Lee, sent it walking along a ridgeline where a Stone scouting force would see it, and watched the entire enemy element reorganize their whole day around the green dot, peeling wide to avoid the spot the Devil appeared to be holding, funneling themselves down the one safe-looking gully, which was of course the gully where the real Lee was sitting. Kankuro worked the puppet's little wave from half a mile off as the screaming started in the gully.
"They are such dumbasses." He cackled. "Best idea I've ever had."
And on the east, with Temari, they made something the survivors would describe for years and never be quite believed.
It was a Cloud base camp tucked against a bend in the river, and Temari opened her fan and threw a cyclone at it, all three moons, a spinning column of wind that tore the tents and stood the river on end, and into the base of that spinning column Lee whirled his weighted chain, the chakra metal sheathed in his water, and let the wind take the water off it. The cyclone caught the thick chakra water and carried it up and around, faster and faster, until the whole towering column was no longer a thing of wind but a thing of water and wind together, a tornado with the ocean in it, screaming down on the Cloud camp and scouring it off the riverbank to the mud. Lee stood in the eye of it spinning along with his chain and feeding it, and Temari stood on the bank with her fan and shaped it, and neither of them said a word, and the camp simply ceased to be a camp.
[Taijutsu Proficiency +880 points!]
[Nunchaku Mastery Proficiency +410 points!]
[Chain Mastery Proficiency +330 points!]
[Water Style Proficiency +640 points!]
[Eight Gates Proficiency +120 points!]
[Leadership Proficiency +290 points!]
[Inspire Proficiency +160 points!]
The weeks turned and Sunagakure's borders became stable, and for a stretch of the war the most powerful thing in the Land of Wind was a man in a green jumpsuit that could not be everywhere and did not need to be.
The Hidden Cloud noticed eventually.
The Fourth Raikage read the report, put it down, and then broke his desk.
It was not a large break, by his standards. The desk simply developed a split down its center under the flat of his hand and sagged, and the two attendants in the room did not flinch. This was a regular occurrence.
"One boy…" A said.
"Yes, Lord Raikage."
"A campaign on two fronts, my field commander pinned at a river he should have crossed a month ago, my eastern push turned into a babysitting operation, and the cause of it, the entire cause of it, is one Konoha chunin with no ninjutsu and a pair of metal sticks."
"The reports are consistent across both fronts and three separate sources." The attendant kept his voice level. "They call him the Green Savage Devil. The Tailed Beast Killer."
"I know what they call him." A stood, and the room felt smaller for it, all that muscle and fury filling the room. "I have read what they call him. I have read the part where they say a child who cannot mold a single jutsu killed the One Tail's host and the beast with his bare hands, and I will tell you exactly how much of that I believe, because it matters."
He held up one finger.
"That he killed the host. That, I believe. A host is a person. People can be killed, even hosts, even worthless Sand weapons. Fine. A strong boy killed a weak jinchuriki. That's not normal but isn't outside the realm of possibility." He lowered the finger. "But that is not what the rumor says anymore. It does not say he killed a host. It says he killed a tailed beast. It says a boy with no ninjutsu or genjutsu put down one of the nine. And that, I don't believe."
He turned to the window. Outside, the lightning country dropped away green and storm-dark below the tower.
"So I am going to find out. Not because I think it is true. Because I cannot afford to think it is false." He was quiet a moment. "Send for Yugito."
She was already near. She came in ready, a tall blonde kunoichi with bandages wound up her arms and a chain of blue beads about one hand, and she waved.
"Lord Raikage."
"There is a problem on the Sand front. A Leaf-nin. One man." A looked at her. "You probably have heard the rumor."
"The tailed beast killer." Yugito's mouth curved. "Everyone has heard it. The guys at the bar love talking about it. A boy with taijutsu who kills monsters." She said it like a fairy tale. "I assume you want me to go and be the part of the story where the monster turns out to be real and eats the hero."
"I want you to go and end a campaign that one man is single-handedly stalling, yes." A's voice hardened. "And I want you to settle the other thing while you are there, because I am tired of a children's story setting the mood in my own army. You are the Two-Tails. If a boy with no jutsu can so much as inconvenience you, I need to know it, today, while it is still a boy and not a man. And if he cannot, which is what I expect, then you break him in half and my fronts come unstuck and the war goes back to being a war I am winning."
"You're sending me to disprove a rumor." Yugito tilted her head. "That's a strange use of a jinchuriki."
"You are a weapon of this village, and I am pointing you at the thing I most need to understand. That is the only use of a jinchuriki." He said it simply, and Yugito did not argue, because she had been told what she was since she was two years old and had long ago decided to be proud of it instead.
She did not believe all the rumors. She was nearly certain she did not believe the most egregious one. Killed a tailed beast… Even the Third Raikage could only match the Eight-Tails.
"Cats have nine lives," Yugito said, which was the thing she always said, and turned for the door. "I'll go see how many this boy is worth."
"Yugito."
She paused.
"Don't let me down." Fourth Raikage ordered.
She went down out of the tower and toward the long road to the Land of Wind.