She was faster now. Lee realized it a fraction of a second too late as a searing line of red opened across his cheek, the intense heat of her blue flames singeing the air as she blurred past him.
He needed more speed. Without hesitating, Lee launched himself high into the air. Mid-vault, his hands flew to his calves, unbuckling his remaining weights and letting them plummet toward the dunes below while he remained airborne.
Below, Yugito's slit pupils dilated. Her feline vision perfectly tracked the plunging weights and the falling shinobi above them. Muscles coiled tight beneath her cloak of azure fire, she launched herself toward his projected landing zone, her claws extended to cleave him in two the moment he touched the earth.
But she had completely underestimated the sheer, impossible mass of Rock Lee's weights.
They didn't just sink into the sand; they struck the desert floor like twin meteors. The seismic impact sent a concussive shockwave through the earth, detonating the dunes into a towering tsunami of sand. The eruption engulfed Yugito instantly, swallowing her mid-lunge.
The trap was sprung, but the reaction was violently unexpected. The avalanche of sand didn't just blind her, the moment the millions of grains collided with her flame cloak, the silica flash-melted. Yugito suddenly found her momentum halted, trapped inside a blinding, roaring storm of superheated, glowing liquid glass.
High above the chaos, Lee accelerated toward his discombobulated opponent.
He streamlined his descent, plummeting toward the dunes while extending his right leg downward. He was a human meteor, and his target was the center of the blinding blue vortex below.
Inside the swirling maelstrom of flash-melted silica, Yugito was effectively blind. She barely had a fraction of a second to register the sudden, crushing shift in atmospheric pressure before the sky fell on her.
Yugito barely formed the hand sign to escape.
When Lee collided with the rapidly cooling, brittle outer shell of the glass dome, the reaction was nothing short of volcanic. The impact detonated the structure instantly. A concussive shockwave ripped across the desert floor, turning the molten trap into a massive fragmentation bomb.
Razor-sharp, translucent glass shrapnel and searing droplets of still-liquid silica were blown outward in a catastrophic, radial blast. Even several meters away, Yugito was violently showered by the debris. Her flame cloak barely hot enough to melt them before they reached her. The surrounding watching shinobi had to escape and make further distance as well lest they get caught up in this battle between monsters.
What a freaking lunatic! He was actually wearing things like that around his legs?!
"I'd be happy if you surrendered." Lee suddenly appeared in front of Yugito.
"Huh?!" Yugito barely saw him move!
Lee's knee smashed into Yugito's chin, ignoring the hot dense blue flames searing his outfit. Before she could be sent straight into the sky, Lee's fist crashed into her gut, and his leg finished the combination with a spinning kick that sent Yugito carving through the sand at a diagonal angle.
Yugito's brain smashed against her skull, dazing her. He still hasn't used the Eight Inner Gates… And he was this strong and this fast…He truly is a monster… Is Matatabi even enough…?
Yugito shook her head. Now wasn't the time for doubts. She had to do the job she was given. Let's see if this boy truly is the Tailed Beast Killer they call him.
Her hand barely caught Lee's foot as blackish-blue flames erupted from Yugito's body. Lee lifted with his other leg and smashed it into the transforming jinchūriki. The now giant blue feline was sent sliding back as its claws dug into the sand, slowing its momentum.
So this was his opponent this time… First was a tanuki. Now it's a cat. Lee hoped there wouldn't be any strange rumors about him hating animals coming from this. Kagerou-kun would be his first defense!
Lee stood in front of the giant burning monster, down two leg warmers and two sandals. He had a feeling he was going to be down a bit more than that by the end of this… But, a shinobi had to do what a shinobi had to do!
"HOOOOOO!!!" Lee powered up as he unlocked the Eight Inner Gates.
The green rose around his figure drastically.
It rose from his skin, a haze that was not quite fire and not quite light, the seventh gate throwing its aura around him in a shroud of bright green. Rock Lee, wreathed in green, looked up at the mountain of blue fire that had been Yugito Nii and did not hesitate.
He dashed in without fear.
The giant cat did not see the punch. Neither did the field. One instant Lee stood in the churned sand and the next he was buried to the shoulder in the beast's jaw, the sound it produced was like a lightning bolt that rolled out across the desert, and the whole burning bulk of Matatabi's body left the ground and went tumbling across the sky.
His arm was ruined. The fist that struck had punched through the flame cloak to reach the flesh under it, and the flame had punished him for it, the skin gone black and split, two bones in his forearm shattered white through the meat. He did not so much as glance at it. He was already running, and as he ran the arm knitted, the split skin drawing shut, the bones grinding back into line, the whole thing healed again inside the span of three strides, and each of those strides carried him the length of a house.
He beat the falling beast to the ground.
He was under it when it came down, and his rising kick met the giant cat in the chest and reversed it, drove all that burning weight straight back up into the air it had just fallen from, and the boom of the impact flattened the dunes for fifty paces in a ring.
High above, the cat twisted like the cat it was. Its head came around and its jaws split wide and the blue fire gathered there, condensed, roared, and then poured down at Lee in a river of flame as broad as the wadi, a column of heat that turned the sand it touched to running glass before it ever reached him.
Lee responded with a kick. "SEVERE LEAF HURRICANE!"
He turned his whole body into it, a spinning backwards kick thrown with everything the seventh gate gave him, and the gale that came off his heel was a fierce gust. It slammed up into the descending fire and split it, the flame breaking around the wind and gouting off to either side, cooking the desert on his sides and leaving the ground beneath him untouched. Yugito poured more into it, the river of fire swelling, determined to bury the wind and the boy behind it both.
She had read it as a contest of force. It was not. Lee had never meant the kick to win. He had meant it to hold her eyes for one breath, and it did.
He leaped out of the fire's path, sideways, and while the whole burning mass of her strained downward against a fierce hurricane that no longer needed holding, he came up the side of the sky at her.
His head smashed into her jaw.
He was moving fast enough that the friction lit him, a spinning point of green fire drilling up into the giant cat's skull, and the crack of it snapped the beast's mouth close and drove the entire body higher still, up and up until Matatabi was a blue smear against the pale sky and Yugito, somewhere inside the piloting of it, felt her own borrowed skull ring like a struck bell.
Lee fell back to the sand and planted himself, and began moving.
He moved his left foot forward. He raised his right. He tapped the sole of it against his shin, and the air pressure that leapt off the contact was the pressure of a seventh-gate body moving at seventh-gate speed, and it took shape before the motion had even finished. A palm of wind, folding out from him, finding the line his momentum had given it and building along it, reaching, lengthening, the displaced air compacting into something long and coiled and alive.
And into it he poured the water chakra.
His nature flowed out of him and flooded the compressed air, sheathing the whole rising shape in a skin of living ocean, so that what stood off the desert floor and lifted its head toward the falling cat was not only a dragon of compressed wind but a dragon of water over wind, blue and roaring and wet, the drops flung off its coiling length hissing where they struck the hot sand.
"DAYLIGHT SEA DRAGON!!!"
It roared as it climbed the sky at the beast with the power of the seventh gate behind it, jaws first, and Yugito saw it coming and did the only thing left to a jinchuriki with the ground taken from her at every range. The fire gathered again in the giant cat's maw, denser this time, blacker, spinning down into a sphere no bigger than a boulder and heavier than a mountain, and she fired the Tailed Beast Ball straight down the throat of the thing rising to meet her.
They met far up in the sky.
The instant the water touched her, the fire lost. The dragon's flood broke over the outer skin of the Ball and the beast's cloak both, and where the ocean met the flame it screamed into steam and swallowed the heat and the blue fire guttered and thinned, her whole shroud dimming as the water ate at it. But the Ball was a bijuu's chakra pressed into a fist, and the dragon was a boy's, and neither one gave. They folded into each other, the water and the wind and the black sphere, and for half a breath they simply pressed, and then the sky came apart.
The blast went off high enough that it did not touch the earth. It bloomed white and blue where the two techniques died together, a second sun opening over the desert, and the sound of it arrived a moment after the light and knocked every standing shinobi on both sides flat. Then the wind of it came down, and the wind picked up the desert, and the desert stood up on end.
A wall of sand rose across the whole front and rolled outward, a blizzard the height of the sky, blotting out the light and the sun and the burning smear that had been in it. Nobody could see. Nobody, on either side, knew who had lived.
Lee stood in the roaring dark of it with his feet planted and his eyes wide open against the grit, looking up at where the falling shape had to be.
"Fall back!" His voice cut through the storm. "All of you, back to camp, now! Do not wait on me!"
The Sand shinobi listened. They did not question it and they did not stall, they turned and ran into the blizzard toward the ridge, and a few of them, passing the boy who stood alone in the eye of it, called back through the wind.
"Don't you die out here, Devil!"
"You bring us back good news!"
"Kick those Cloud bastards all the way home!"
Lee did not answer them. His clothes were gone, burned off him in the exchange, every stitch of the green cooked away by her fire and his own, and he stood there nude in the screaming sand without a mark on him where the burns had healed, and he turned his head just enough to give the retreating men a smile and threw them a thumbs up. From behind, lit by the dying glow of the blast, a naked young man standing his ground in a sandstorm with one thumb raised to the sky was, aside from the obvious, a genuinely magnificent sight, and it put steel back into every Sand spine that saw it.
Then the wind fell, and the sand came down, and the front went quiet.
Lee watched the sky clear like a hawk that had not blinked. The blizzard thinned. The pale light came back through it in shafts, and the desert lay churned and scorched and glassed for half a mile in every direction, and out of the settling haze the shape of the thing became clear at last.
There was no giant cat.
There was Yugito Nii, small and human again, the transformation torn off her by the blast, and there were Cloud shinobi already at her, hauling her limp body up between them, her blonde head lolling, blood down her front, her chest barely moving. And there were more of them behind, the whole Cloud force fleeing.
A full retreat. Toward the Land of Rivers and past it, toward the border, toward the Land of Lightning and the Hidden Cloud beyond it, carrying their greatest weapon off the field on the shoulders of the men she had been sent to save.
Lee watched them for exactly two seconds.
Then he ran.
The seventh gate was still open and the desert had nothing in it that could match what that meant. He suddenly appeared in between the group of Cloud.
They tried to do something about it.
Three of them turned. One threw a lightning jutsu that Lee leisurely swayed out of the way of. The second drew a blade and rushed forward, and Lee kicked him with a spinning kick that sent his corpse crashing into several others.
The rest of the group looked at the three bodies and ran faster.
Lee reached the group carrying Yugito in under ten seconds. Four Cloud shinobi, two holding her arms across their shoulders, two flanking with weapons drawn. They saw the green approaching and the flankers stepped forward, hands shaking, jutsu half-formed, everything in their posture saying they knew how this ended and were going to try anyway.
Lee respected that. He did not slow down.
The first flanker threw a wind technique that Lee flipped over. His leg caught the man in the back of the head. The second shinobi swung a kusarigama at Lee's head, the weighted chain whipping around in a wide arc, and Lee caught the chain in his fist, yanked the man off his feet, and drove a leg through his stomach that came out the other side.
The two carrying Yugito stopped. They looked at the naked, green-lit demon standing over their unconscious comrades. They looked at the jinchuriki hanging between them, breathing but broken. They looked at each other.
"Put her down, please." Lee politely requested.
One of them reached for a kunai.
Lee was between them before the hand reached the pouch. He palmed both of them from under the chin and sent them flying. Yugito slumped to the sand.
"The rest of you can go home." Lee told them. "There doesn't need to be more lives lost."
After what they've seen, they very much decided not to continue to fight the monstrous boy. They ran fast, and they did not look back. The boy who had beaten their jinchuriki and tailed beast was carrying her body. And for the ones that did look back. They saw a gigantic demonic avatar of green smiling down at them. Whether it was real or the terror playing tricks on their mind, they would never know. However, they would share it regardless back home.
Lee closed the seventh gate. The green haze died around him and the world returned to its normal speed, and he was standing in the desert naked and holding an unconscious enemy jinchuriki and realizing he had absolutely no rope or anything.
He looked down at Yugito. He could see her severe injuries slowly healing themselves. It made him wonder…
Could all jinchuriki heal like this? If so, why didn't Gaara heal himself? Maybe there's a limit to the regeneration…
Her blonde hair was matted with blood and sand and the burns on her body were severe but survivable. She was out cold.
Lee tore strips from what remained of the Cloud corpses on the ground and bound her wrists behind her back, then her ankles. It wasn't the best restraints, but it was the best he could do for what he had. He also took their pants. A proper man couldn't have his lotus flopping out like this.
He lifted her onto his shoulder and started walking west.
Lee walked in carrying Yugito on his shoulder. He was greeted with shocked faces, smiles, and pride?
"Is that her?"
"That's her! She killed my cousin!"
"Kill her! Torture her!"
Lee simply glanced at them and their cheers of revenge and pain quieted down. He did not agree with those thoughts because some time ago, they would've been saying the same about him no doubt.
Sajō met him at the medical tent. She looked at Lee. She looked at the unconscious blonde woman on his shoulder.
Her face didn't quite know which emotion to settle on.
"Ah." Was the sound her mouth made.
"I need rope." Lee said. "And chakra suppression seals."
"You captured Cloud's jinchuriki." Sajō said it slowly.
"It happened."
Sajō stared at him for three more seconds. "You really are a Tailed Beast Killer…" She muttered.
Then she started giving orders because as the one currently in charge of this eastern skirmish she could not stand around gaping when the battle just changed shape.
Chakra suppression seals came out of the medical supplies. Rope came out of the rigging crates. Sand shinobi who had been lying in cots with burns and broken bones sat up to watch the Green Devil tie up a jinchuriki in the middle of their camp, and all of them softly talked amongst each other about it.
"He's a lot more muscular than I thought without that jumpsuit…"
"What do we do with a captured jinchuriki?"
"I think protocol is to flee on sight."
"No! What?! Did you even hear the question?!"
Inside the command tent, Temari heard the commotion. She was sitting up, which was still a victory, her left side wrapped and weeping through the bandages, her war fan against the cot post.
"What's happening?" she asked the medic.
The medic looked out the tent flap. Looked back at Temari.
"Rock Lee captured an enemy combatant. Someone important it seems."
Temari stared at the medic. The medic stared back.
"Help me stand." Temari said.
"You are not standing. You'll tear the wound open."
"Then help me to the flap so I can see."
The medic helped her to the tent flap, and Temari leaned against the canvas and watched Lee standing over the bound form of Yugito Nii. The same woman who had clawed Temari open three days ago, who had cut off Jūza's arm, who had walked their whole front backward in seventy-two hours.
Now she was bound, unconscious, and in their camp.
Because a freak of a boy had dealt with her.
She looked at Lee, who was asking for a messenger hawk. Something like this certainly needed to be handled by someone above a chunin.
[Eight Gates Proficiency +6,800 points!]
[Taijutsu Proficiency +5,400 points!]
[Bojutsu Proficiency has reached the next level!]
[Chain Mastery Proficiency has reached the next level!]
[Water Style Proficiency has reached the next level!]
[Water Style Proficiency +4,150 points!]
[Chakra Control Proficiency +2,200 points!]
[Inspire Proficiency has reached the next level!]
[Leadership Proficiency +1,050 points!]