Ami Tanaka had rehearsed this morning in the mirror, and already prepared everything.
"Remember, let me do the talking. Sensei types love a responsible-sounding student. We present as a team, I make the impression, and by lunch he's telling the Hokage he got the best of the best." She said, for the fourth time since the academy gates.
"Uh-huh." Fuki had her hands jammed in her pockets, not even listening.
"Fuki. I mean it. Let me do the talking."
"Shuddap already. I get it. Play sweet and cute until it's official."
"Okay," Kasumi said quietly, from half a step behind them. "Okay, we're okay. We're going to be okay."
Nobody was sure who she was reassuring. Nobody asked either. The summons had named training ground nine, and Ami talked the whole way there, right up until the treeline opened, and then she stopped talking, because training ground nine was broken.
There was a crater in the middle of it wide enough to lose a wagon in. There was a second crater. There was a third crater, biggest of all, a bowl of torn earth with the grass peeled back in a ring, and at the far treeline a full-grown tree had been blown apart at the trunk, its crown lying dead beside the shattered stump.
"...Was there a battle here?" Kasumi whispered.
"There's no battles in the village, stupid. It's obvious this is the remainder after his training." A small grin appeared on Fuki's face. Someone this strong as their sensei… She clenched her fist with excitement.
And in the middle of the wrecked field, with the dawn behind him, stood their sensei.
He did not look like the stories and he looked exactly like them. Green from collar to ankle, bandaged hands, a vest, a bowl of black hair, and the biggest eyebrows any of them had ever seen, and on any other man in the world the whole picture would have been funny. It was not funny. He stood with his hands folded behind his back and his spine straight as an arrow, perfectly still, and his eyes were already on them, and had been, Ami realized with a crawling feeling, since long before they cleared the trees. He wasn't smiling or frowning. It was creepy.
"You are late." He pointed out.
"We… Lord Lee, good morning! I'm-" Ami tried to be friendly and polite.
"I did not ask you to speak." His words cut through Ami's script. "Names. Left to right. Loudly enough that I do not have to ask twice."
They gave their names. Ami's came out polished and only slightly too fast. Fuki's came out excited and eager. Kasumi's came out at a volume suitable for confessing to a pillow.
"I didn't hear you." Lee turned his eyes to her.
She flinched. "K-Kasumi. Watanabe."
"I can't hear you." The smallest sense of frustration could be heard in his voice.
"Kasumi Watanabe!" It cracked in the middle and echoed off the craters and she looked like she wanted to fold up and be mailed home.
"Finally." His eyes moved across the three of them. "I am Rock Lee. Special Jonin. Potentially your new jonin sensei. However, that title must be earned, and this village does not agree with me that you can earn it." A folder rose in one bandaged hand. Three report cards looked out of it. "I have read everything the academy knows about you. I will now tell you what your final assessment is, and you will listen without interrupting."
He let the folder fall shut.
"Your test is this. You will fight me. All three of you, together, with everything you have, starting when I say begin. That is all."
The silence lasted three seconds, and then it broke in two voices at once.
"Fight you?!" Fuki's hands came out of her pockets.
"That's not…" Ami's composure went over the same cliff, "with respect, Lee-san, that is not a fair test! You're a jonin! We're academy students! Genin cells get bell tests, capture drills, survival exercises, nobody is asked to FIGHT their sensei. How are we supposed to even- that isn't FAIR!"
"No," Lee agreed. "It is not fair."
He said it as if it was obvious.
"Life is not fair. The shinobi world is built from its unfairness, and every enemy you ever meet will be happy that you expected otherwise." His head tilted, one degree. "Perhaps the examiners were right about you. Perhaps your fate is to be nobodies. Three names on a list of people who attended an academy once, who were given seven years and produced nothing, who accomplish nothing, and are remembered by no one. If that is what you are, then it is already decided, and no test of mine will change it." He turned his shoulder to them, dismissing all three with the motion. "Get out of my sight, and stop wasting my time."
The world went white at the edges for Fuki Sato.
She had been failed before. She had been yelled at, written up, sat outside offices. This man had looked at thirteen years of her life and decided she was worth nothing.
Her blood boiled.
"DON'T YOU TURN YOUR BACK ON ME!"
She went in with everything, dimly aware that Ami was beside her.
"THERE'S NO WAY I'M GOING TO FREAKING FAIL FOR A STUPID REASON LIKE THAT!" Ami screamed with a kunai out.
Fuki's fist was the first thing to come at him.
It did not reach him. His head moved the width of her hand and her whole body kept going past where he had been, and then something like a green tree trunk swung out of the world's edge and took her across the chest.
The roundhouse landed with everything a real kick has. The air left her in one block. Her feet left the ground. The field spun, sky, craters, sky, and she hit the dirt on her back and slid, plowing a groove with her shoulder blades, all the way across the ground until she fetched up in the grass at Kasumi's feet, and lay there making a small awful wheeze that she'd never made in her life before.
Somewhere above her, briefly, Ami flew. Lee had caught her kunai wrist, turned, and thrown her, a full-body arc that ended with Ami slamming down next to Kasumi, her kunai landing separately, point-down, a polite distance away.
The training ground was quiet again. Lee stood where he had been standing, hands returning to the small of his back, expression unchanged, as though the last four seconds had been weather.
"Get…" Fuki wheezed, from the ground. Her chest felt like a struck bell. She rolled onto her side and found Kasumi's frozen face six inches from hers, kunai clutched in both shaking hands, unthrown, unswung, unraised. "Get your crap together!" It came out as a bloody rasp; she'd caught her tongue between her teeth on the landing and could taste it. "How are we EVER going to be ninjas if you can't get yourself together?!"
"I-I'm sorry… I-" Kasumi's kunai rattled against itself. She was shaking like leaf on a branch.
"He SAID it's our last chance!" Ami was pushing herself up on her arms on the other side, hair out of place, actually showing her true nature. "Last! Chance! We do this or we're done, so what was the POINT, Kasumi, what was the point of all those years in that classroom if we just go home and be regular people?!"
Fuki got a knee under herself. Ami got a foot planted. Two battered girls rose off the grass on either side of a frozen one, and across the field, Rock Lee moved for the first time since the throw.
He unclasped his hands from behind his back.
"If you don't want to willingly succumb to your fate, then allow me to help you." he said.
And he turned red.
His skin flushing crimson from the collar of his suit to his hairline, and the veins rose along his temples and his forearms, and the air around him began to move, a slow pressure rolling off his body and out across the grass, flattening it in a ring, reaching the girls like heat off an open forge.
Every academy student in Konoha after the invasion knew some things about Rock Lee. The names came first, the Green Devil, the Savage Devil, the ones the foreign villages used rather than his preferred. His appearance or general look. And the third thing, the one whispered with the most gossip in the back rows of every classroom, was the forbidden jutsu. The Eight Inner Gates. The technique so dangerous it was banned, that only two men alive in the village had mastered, and it was said, everyone said, everyone knew, that with that jutsu, Rock Lee had killed a tailed beast.
The red thing across the field took a single step forward.
Kasumi screamed.
It came out of her whole body at once, no decision in it anywhere, and her legs took her one stumbling step backward before anything resembling her mind could vote. Beside her, Fuki had gone rigid, jaw clamped, and a thin line of blood escaped the corner of her mouth where her teeth had found her lip. On the other side, Ami stood shivering, actually shivering, fine and continuous like a leaf in wind, and inside the shivering, Ami's thoughts had gone terribly clear.
We can't. We can't do this... Look at him. That's not a test… We'll die. If we walk at that, we will die…
Fuki moved.
It was an animal thing; somewhere in Fuki Sato the ancient divide between flight or fight had only ever had one working path, and her body took it. She forced herself up off her knee with her chest screaming and her mouth bleeding, and she planted one foot ahead of the other, and she screamed back at him, wordless, furious, terrified, and began to force her way forward through the pressure.
Ami watched her go.
That's just Fuki, said the cold clear voice in her head. That's not bravery, that's just what Fuki is, she doesn't think, she never thinks, she just…
She's trying her hardest.
She's trying her hardest, so why am I not…?
Ami looked down. Her legs would not move. She had tried and they had declined, and they were her own legs, hers, and this was her last chance, he had said so. And her legs were going to stand here in the grass and waste it for her.
Ami Tanaka took her kunai in one hand and stabbed it into her own thigh.
The pain went up her leg like a lit fuse and the leg, shocked into obedience, moved, and she wrenched the blade free and threw it aside and stepped forward, one step, another, tears cutting clean lines down her face, matching Fuki's pace, which was no pace at all, a snail's crawl into a headwind, the two of them advancing on the Savage Devil of the Hidden Leaf one impossible foot at a time.
Neither of them looked back at Kasumi.
Kasumi stood alone in the grass behind them, kunai clutched to her chest, and watched her two best friends walk toward the thing that was going to kill them, and the edges of her vision were going gray. She was on the verge of passing out. And she thought, with what was left, how.
How can they be so brave…? How can they be so strong…? That's THE Rock Lee. That's the Green Devil. He killed a tailed beast, he became a chunin on his first try, he's the strongest, scariest, there's no chance, there was never any chance… Not even, not even Sasuke-kun could beat him during the Chunin Exams...
Then something clicked.
Three academy students can't beat him. He knows that. So, why would he ask us to do the impossible? You don't ask for the impossible and expect to receive it. Nobody does that. Unless the impossible thing isn't the thing you're actually asking for.
He doesn't want us to win.
He wants to see if do something other than what is expected...
The light came back to her eyes.
He didn't want a fight. He's testing whether we'll stand up to something we cannot beat, whether we'll go forward anyway, together, and Fuki just went with her instincts and Ami just went with her pride and they came to the right answer the wrong way but that doesn't matter…
Kasumi Watanabe put her kunai away.
She walked forward on legs that had been beyond her reach thirty seconds ago, and she came up between her two friends, who were leaning into the pressure with their heads down, and she did the bravest thing she had ever done in her life.
She took their hands.
Fuki looked at her as if she was looking at a totally different person. Ami looked at her as if she had grown a second head. And Kasumi, the weakling, the extra, the girl whose own friends lost track of her, stood between them with her chin up and her eyes forward and a look on her face that neither of them had ever seen there before, that nobody had, because it had never surfaced before.
"Together, he's waiting for us. So let's do this." Kasumi said.
And the three of them walked.
The pressure did not lessen. The red figure did not lighten. They walked into it anyway, hand in hand in hand, three battered girls crossing the broken field one step at a time, past the craters, past the murdered tree, Fuki's blood on her chin and Ami's blood on her leg and Kasumi's hands crushing both of theirs, and the walk felt like it was hours long before they reached the Devil. Close enough to touch, red and terrible and staring down at them.
They let go of each other's hands.
Three fists drew back.
They hit him at the same time, all three, everything each of them had left, three punches landing together on the face of the strongest man any of them would ever meet, and his face didn't move an inch.
And the red drained out of him instantly as the face that came back down to look at them was wearing the widest, warmest, brightest smile that had ever been aimed at any of the three of them in their lives.
"YOU PASS!!!"
The world turned upside down. An arm like a dockyard cable swept all three of them off the ground at once, and Rock Lee, Special Jonin of the Hidden Leaf, growing terror of nations, spun in a circle in the middle of the wrecked training ground hugging three screaming girls to his chest like a man who had just won them at a festival.
"You really did it! You truly, really did it! You surpassed ALL of my expectations and proved your instructors wrong, every one of them, on the FIRST TRY!" He was laughing and the pressure that had flattened the grass was simply gone, and in its place was joy, relief, and pride. "I am so proud of you!"
"Heheheh, I passed… I'm a ninja…" Ami couldn't believe it.
"WE'RE NINJAS! WE'RE ACTUALLY FREAKING NINJAS!" Fuki managed, louder.
"I'm going to puke if you don't put me down, sensei…" Kasumi covered her mouth.
"AH! Yes! Of course! Forgive me!" He set them down carefully.
He stepped back and fixed himself, one knuckle rising to his mouth. He coughed. He straightened his vest. He folded his hands behind his back, and got approximately one and a half seconds of dignity assembled before the smile broke through it again.
The three of them stood in a battered, bleeding, wobbling row, and stared at him.
"You," Ami said. Her hair was ruined and her leg was bleeding and her voice had nothing left in it but the question. "What, WHO ARE YOU? What happened to the guy five minutes ago?! "
"That person could smile?" Kasumi whispered.
"I apologize!" And he bowed to them. "For all of it. The coldness, the cruelty, the words I said about your fates. Not one of those words was mine and not one of them was true, and speaking them was the hardest training exercise I have performed all year." He straightened. "But it was necessary. It was the test."
"The test was to FIGHT you!" Fuki spat, though some of the heat was already confused about its own purpose.
"No. That is simply what I told you." He held up the folder again, and this time he opened it, and turned it toward them, and there were their own report cards, looking back at them. "I read these many times. Your instructors wrote many things. Ami-chan: you command, but you have never once followed, and you have never once stood alone. Fuki-chan: you fight, but you have never once fought as a team. Kasumi-chan: you see everything, and you have never once been seen. And on all three cards, the same mark, in the same place." His finger tapped each one in turn. "The academy says the three of you cannot work well with others, only against others. Others that are weaker than you."
He closed the folder.
"So I became the worst enemy I could build for you. One you could not beat, could not command, could not charm, and could not survive alone. A shinobi does not become a shinobi with easily exploitable flaws, and a shinobi does not get to choose fair missions, so I gave you an unfair one, and I made it as terrifying as I know how to make anything, because your weakest point was never your ninjutsu or your taijutsu or your grades." His voice dropped out of the lecture and into something that had gravel in it. "It was whether you would come back for each other at the bottom of the fear. And you did. You walked. Fuki-chan walked first with her courage, and Ami-chan walked second with her will," his eyes went to the smallest of them, and stayed, "and Kasumi-chan understood, and made you walk together, which was the only thing in the world I actually wanted for this morning."
Kasumi blushed.
"I-I just…" she said, to her sandals. "I just watched you. All morning. That's all I did."
"Yes," Lee said. "You watched all morning, and you were the only one who saw. And that was one of the most important things for a shinobi to be capable of. Watching, learning, and comprehending."
Which finished Kasumi off entirely.
"The scary act," Ami said slowly. She was staring at him with her eyes narrowed, replaying things. "The voice. The fate stuff. That wasn't... you're saying none of that was real?"
"It was a borrowed manner." For one moment, his eyes moved elsewhere beyond them. "The mannerisms of my late best friend. He would be very annoyed to see how I used them." He smiled. "I acted like him as well as I could! Was it scary?"
"I STABBED MY OWN LEG!" said Ami.
"I ALMOST PEED MYSELF!" said Fuki.
"And that," Lee said, and here his hand went into his pouch, "is the last thing I must apologize for, and the first thing I get to fix."
Three forehead protectors came out into the morning light, blue cloth, bright steel, the leaf sharp and new on each plate.
The row of girls went absolutely silent.
"I collected these from the tower yesterday evening," Lee said, "before I had met any of you. Before the test. Before anything." He held them out, one to each girl. "Because I read those cards, the same cards everyone else read, and where every other person saw three hopeless girls, I saw three girls nobody had ever properly given the chance. I never doubted this morning would end here. Not once. Take them. You earned them at the exact moment you took each other's hands and stood against me."
Three sets of hands took them. Slowly.
Fuki tied hers on immediately, fingers shaking, crying with joy and happiness. Ami held hers to her chest first, and then tied it with her ruined hair pushed back, and stood differently afterward, an inch taller, the raised chin finally holding something up. Kasumi looked at hers for a long time, at her own face reflected small and warped in the steel, and then tied it on, and touched the plate once with two fingers, as though checking it would still be there.
"Ami Tanaka, Fuki Sato, Kasumi Watanabe, you are now Genin of the Hidden Leaf! Students of Special Jonin Rock Lee!" Their sensei smiled and gave them a thumbs up. "You have officially passed your team assessment! And now, three orders from your sensei!" He raised one finger. "First! We are going to the hospital, all of us, right now, where excellent medics will see to a chest, a tongue, and one extremely convincing leg, and where I will apologize to the staff for the state of you, which will be embarrassing for me." A second finger. "Second! Tonight you will rest, and you will tell whoever waits at home that you passed and are now shinobi." A third finger. "And THIRD! Tomorrow evening, six o'clock, the bbq restaurant on the street behind the academy. Six o'clock SHARP, we will celebrate properly, and get to know one another as a true team, because as of this morning, that is what you are! I have duties today I cannot move, or I would celebrate this instant! Any questions?!"
"...Is the barbecue," Fuki asked, warily, "a trick too?"
"No more tri-" Lee stopped himself. "No it is not a trick.
"You were about to say no more tricks!" Fuki shouted.
"Why did you backtrack on that sensei?! You plan on tricking us some more in the future?! Hah?! Huh?!" Ami added.
Lee chuckled while rubbing the back of his head. "Tricks are good for lessons sometimes. Being able to see underneath the underneath is part of the job and something you have to learn sooner rather than later. Just like Kasumi did during the test. Because if she didn't stand with the two of you, you would have failed."
"WHAT?!" Fuki exclaimed.
"Really?!" Ami was just as shocked.
"..." Kasumi was really glad she found out the trick behind the test. She had a feeling she would no longer have any friends anymore if she didn't…
"Yes. Now let's go, girls. Can't let your injuries get worse. Come on, follow me." Lee took the lead as he hopped to his palms and started walking toward the hospital.
They walked off the wrecked training ground together, three new genin limping in a row and one green legend training like he does every morning.
[Taijutsu Proficiency +150 points!]
[Eight Gates Proficiency +100 points!]
[Muscle Mimicry Proficiency +1,800 points!]
[Teaching Proficiency +3,200 points!]
[Leadership Proficiency +600 points!]
[Inspire Proficiency +1,400 points!]