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[— Manga Scene —]
"I can't tell what kind of moves that kid is using…" Kankuro said with a scrutinizing look as he watched Lee from above.
"But he won't surpass Gaara…" Kankuro added with cold confidence, already judging the outcome of the fight in advance.
"No… he's strong." Naruto said with sudden sharpness, pushing back against Kankuro's dismissal of Lee.
"Don't rush." Rock Lee said with steady calm as he fixed his stance before lunging forward.
"...…" Sakura stared at the arena in tense silence, her worry plain to see.
"Now then, let the ninth match begin!!" the proctor announced loudly from the middle of the arena.
"Be careful, Lee…" Maito Gai said with deep seriousness as he watched his student with tense eyes.
'That boy has speed, but his kicks don't have that much power…' Temari thought as she evaluated Lee's style with a critical eye.
'Hmmmmm… he won't be able to touch Gaara…' Kankuro thought confidently, believing Gaara's defense could not be breached.
"Leaf Hurricane!!" Rock Lee shouted powerfully as he charged at Gaara with his swift spinning attack.
[— End Scene —]
The moment the final line of the scene ended, it felt as if the very air inside the art store had tightened all at once.
There had not been many words, but their impact was far heavier than their number. The mere shift from doubtful looks in the stands to the cry of "Leaf Hurricane!!" was enough to make the arena, even if only on paper, throb violently before the eyes of those reading.
Young Gai fixed his gaze on the open page, then clenched his fist until the joints of his fingers stood out clearly.
"He really started it!" Gai said with explosive excitement, practically pressing himself against the volume.
"Rock Lee didn't back down, and he didn't care about what they were saying at all! He charged straight at Gaara!"
Maito Dai sat beside him, his broad smile never quite settling into one shape.
He was looking at his son more than at the page sometimes, as if he could see a direct reflection between the excitement burning in young Gai's chest and the name that had kept repeating before them since the beginning of the volume: Rock Lee.
"That is the right path!" Dai said with sincere enthusiasm, striking his palm with his fist.
"When others look down on you, you don't answer with words… you answer with a single move that makes them rethink everything they said!"
Gai's eyes trembled with emotion. In his father's words, he did not hear mere passing encouragement. He heard something deeper, something he understood well even while he was still young. That steadfast belief that effort did not need anyone's permission in order to prove itself.
'They said he wouldn't be able to touch Gaara…' Gai thought as he stared at the name of the technique written before him.
'But Lee wasn't just trying to look cool… he really attacked. He challenged something everyone believed was absolute.'
"Dad…" Gai said this time in a lower voice, but one more filled with feeling. "Even my future counterpart wasn't smiling here. He only said: Be careful, Lee… that means Gaara is even more dangerous than he looks."
Dai's smile dimmed slightly, not because his excitement had faded, but because it had taken on a more serious shape.
"That's right." Dai said as he looked at the image of future Gai on the page.
"When a warning becomes this sincere, it means the fight is not a performance. This is a moment when each of them is putting something real on the line."
Then the glow quickly returned to his face, as usual, and he pointed at the name of the move on the page.
"Even so… what an incredible opening! Leaf Hurricane! Even the name alone makes the heat of youth leap through the blood!"
Gai let out a short laugh, born more from the intensity of the tension than from lightheartedness, then returned to reading with eyes that barely blinked.
He paused at every line of the scene as if he were reconstructing the fight inside his head moment by moment. Naruto had sensed Lee's strength. Kankuro had underestimated him. Sakura had grown tense. Future Gai had warned his student. Temari had seen the speed without the power. And then the attack came.
Each line laid a new stone in the structure.
"They're all looking at him from different angles…" Gai murmured, never lifting his eyes from the page.
"One doubts him, one warns him, one acknowledges his strength… but Lee is the only one who's actually moving."
Dai's smile widened when he heard that.
"Excellent!" he said with clear enthusiasm.
"That is an important observation! There is a difference between the one who watches the battle and the one who enters it. And the bigger a fighter's heart becomes, the clearer that difference is."
At that moment, a calm voice came from behind them, a tone that knew how to cut through noise without ever raising itself.
"It seems you two found something worth all this commotion." Sakumo Hatake said as he approached in measured steps, with young Kakashi beside him, his gaze already arriving at the open page before the rest of him did.
Gai turned quickly, then waved the volume as if he had found a new witness to what he was seeing.
"Sakumo-san! Kakashi! You two came at exactly the right moment! The battle has started, and Lee already shouted the name of the technique!"
Kakashi lifted his eye toward Gai for a single moment, then returned his gaze to the written text.
"I heard you before I saw the page," Kakashi said in his usual cool tone, but that coolness did not hide the faint gleam in his eye. He was interested. Deeply.
Sakumo stepped up beside Dai, while Kakashi moved close enough to Gai that their shoulders nearly touched in front of the open volume. For a brief moment, the scene itself seemed both amusing and significant: two different fathers and two different sons, all brought together by a fight from a time that had not yet arrived.
"We just opened the volume," Gai said quickly, pointing to the first lines of the scene.
"Haha! The fun started with the very first scene. Lee didn't even wait for us to relax in our seats a little!"
Kakashi tilted his head slightly, then let his eyes pass over the sequence once again.
"Hmm," he said in a low voice. "That means Lee didn't only seem strong when he moved. His expression and his stance before the movement were already enough for Naruto to feel that there was something real behind him."
"No, Naruto already knows Lee is strong, ever since Lee completely crushed Sasuke," Gai replied.
"And I say that is the heat of youth, visible even before it erupts!" Dai said with a laugh, not bothered by Kakashi's cool analysis at all. If anything, he seemed pleased that they had reached the same conclusion by different paths.
But Sakumo remained calmer. He took his time reading the line, "Don't rush," and then the line, "Be careful, Lee…" before he spoke.
"The important thing here is not just the final attack," Sakumo said in an even tone, placing his finger near the line without touching the page. "What matters is that Lee began from calm, not from recklessness. He said: Don't rush. That alone tells us that he is not fighting with unrestrained emotion, but with discipline."
Gai blinked once, then looked back at the image of Rock Lee.
"Right…" Gai said, slower than usual. "I was thinking about the final shout, but the beginning was very calm."
As for Kakashi, he was looking at the lines that carried Temari's and Kankuro's assessments, then at the image of the attack that followed.
'Speed, not power…' Kakashi thought, fixing his eye on the name of the technique. 'But that is an early judgment. Speed itself can be power if it is enough to break through the distance before the defense fully forms.'
"One thing is clear," Kakashi said at last, phrasing his observation briefly as usual. "Everyone is talking about Gaara as if reaching him is impossible. But the value of Lee's attack here is not just that it is beautiful or fast… it's that he is trying to break that assumption from the beginning."
Sakumo turned to him, and a faint gleam of approval appeared in his eyes.
"Good analysis," Sakumo said simply. "When a fighter starts striking at what everyone believes is a fixed rule, the whole battle becomes something else."
Gai felt something like a spark leap in his chest. He no longer saw the scene as merely the opening to an anticipated fight, but as the start of a greater test. A test of an entire idea.
Could someone, through pure effort alone, shake people's certainty in the strength of an opponent who seemed untouchable?
"That's what makes this so great!" Gai said with renewed fervor, then lifted his head directly toward Kakashi. "See? Even if everyone thinks Gaara is beyond reach, Lee didn't accept that! He entered the battle to test it for himself!"
Kakashi looked at him and remained silent for a brief second.
"Yes," he said calmly afterward. "And that's exactly why I want to see the next page immediately."
Gai could not help himself and laughed out loud.
"Ha! So you are excited too!"
"I'm interested in the outcome," Kakashi said in a seemingly neutral tone, but Sakumo easily caught what lay behind it.
"And sometimes interest is just excitement in quieter clothes," Sakumo said with a small sideways smile.
Dai smiled broadly at that, then spread his arm as if he wanted to gather the whole moment in a single embrace.
"What a wonderful morning!" Dai said in a voice full of life. "I can already feel that this volume is not going to show our hearts any mercy! Lee is going to surprise us a lot!"
But before Gai could reach for the next page, a slight change passed through the atmosphere around them. Not total silence, but a gradual shrinking of people's voices. Some stepped a little aside from the aisle, some straightened where they stood, and others lowered their tones without anyone asking them to.
It was a presence that needed no introduction.
The Third Hokage, Sarutobi Hiruzen, stepped forward in calm strides, with two ANBU behind him at an unobtrusive distance. He did not seem hurried, and there was no visible emotion on his face, but the mere fact that he had entered the scene made the entire space straighten itself automatically.
Sakumo turned first, then Dai, and Kakashi and Gai followed a moment later. Those nearby bowed respectfully, while many hands froze midway over their open volumes.
"Hokage-sama," Sakumo said with firm respect.
Hiruzen gave a small nod, then his eyes moved from the faces to the open page in Gai's hand. His gaze lingered for a moment on the extracted scene, on the line, "Be careful, Lee…" and then on the cry of "Leaf Hurricane!!" before he lifted his eyes again.
"It seems Volume Ten knew how to begin with force," Hiruzen said in a calm voice, but his words settled in the space as though they were heavier than a passing remark.
"It's amazing, sir!" Gai said quickly, his excitement once again outrunning his caution as usual.
"I'm sure Lee is going to win!"
Hiruzen studied the young boy for a moment, then looked toward Kakashi, as though he wanted to hear how another mind had read the same scene.
"What do you think, Kakashi?" the Third Hokage asked in a quiet tone.
Kakashi lifted his eye to him, then answered without hesitation.
"It's easy to assume Gaara will win, but it won't be easy at all," Kakashi said steadily.
A faint light flashed in Hiruzen's eyes, then he shifted his gaze to Dai and Sakumo.
"These two children will become pillars of Konoha. Take good care of them."
Because the manga had already shown what both Gai and Kakashi would become, the Hokage placed great importance on them, and there was no one better than their fathers to truly raise them.
Even if one of them was called the eternal genin, Hiruzen trusted that such a title was nothing but nonsense in the face of the man's true strength.
After both Dai and Sakumo nodded with smiles, Hiruzen made a light gesture with his hand toward the volume and said in his resonant voice, which gathered them all into a single thread of attention:
"Keep reading. If the beginning is like this… then what follows may be more important than many people realize."
And after he said that, the page remained open between them for another moment, as if no one wanted to be the first to break its spell. Gai's eyes were still fixed on the name of the technique, and Kakashi's eye was weighing the lines as if they were the data of a real battle, while Dai and Sakumo stood in brief silence, each of them seeing something different in the scene.
As for Konoha, that morning it seemed as though the whole village had bent slightly over that first page of the volume, waiting to see whether Rock Lee would remain merely a fast boy in the eyes of others… or whether, from his very first face-to-face clash against Gaara, he would force them to rethink everything.
After all, the title of the first chapter had been: Lee's Secret!
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Upcoming chapter titles (spoilers):
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Chapter 187: Lee's Secret!
Chapter 188: Amazing!
Chapter 189: A Fierce Battle!
Chapter 190: Shocking!
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