By the time I shoved my way back onto the balcony, the air in the arena felt wrong.
Not just tense. Wrong.
Naruto was plastered to the railing already, knuckles white, eyes huge. The stone under our feet still shook in little after-tremors from Lee's last impact crater.
"YOU SEE THAT?!" he was yelling at nobody in particular. "HE DROPPED HIM! HE DROPPED SAND GUY!"
I squeezed in beside him, grabbing the railing mostly so I didn't fall over. My head pulsed in time with my heartbeat, the lingering migraine from the Hinata match turning all the sounds into a dull throb.
Down below, Lee stood wobbling on the broken floor, green jumpsuit stained grey with dust.
Across from him, Gaara pulled himself up out of that grain-packed cocoon.
He looked… annoyed. Not injured. Hair messed up, a crack in the plated sand on his cheek, one trickle of blood. That was it.
Lee saw it too.
Even from this far up, I watched his shoulders tighten.
He moved his feet back into stance.
Something in his chakra went dark.
Up until now, Lee's chakra had always looked very straightforward to me. Simple, honest green, surging mostly in his limbs, muscle over muscle. No fancy flourishes, no weird flavor. Just raw effort.
Now, deep inside his body, along his spine, I saw something else.
Gates.
They'd always been there, faint outlines, little loops and knots built into his network like closed doors. Everyone had them. Lock points, limiters, whatever you wanted to call them.
Most people never touched them.
Lee grabbed one with his will and ripped it open.
At least, that's what it felt like.
A point in his lower back flared, then another higher up. Light followed, more of that vivid green, but sharper now, edged with white. It poured into his channels like someone had turned up the pressure in a hose that was already near bursting.
"Gai-sensei," I breathed, "what did you teach him…"
I couldn't hear Gai from here, but I could feel him. His chakra on the opposite balcony spiked with Lee's, bright sun-green, but there was a gutter of fear in it now.
"His energy just went crazy!" Naruto shouted, leaning even farther over the rail. "Hey, pinkbrain, what's happening?!"
"He's… opening something," I said, fingers digging into the metal. "Like… taking the brakes off. A lot of brakes."
"That sounds awesome," Naruto said immediately.
"It's not," I said.
The arena went very quiet for a heartbeat.
Lee vanished.
He'd been fast before. This was… different. Before, you could at least follow the blur if you tried. Now he was in front of Gaara, then behind, then above, his afterimages snapping around the Sand-nin like lightning bugs gone feral.
Each blow landed with a meaty thud that we could hear even up here, followed by the harsher crack of sand armor breaking. The shield struggled to keep up, walls rising and shattering as Lee's fists and feet tore into them.
"YES!" Naruto whooped, voice cracking. "KICK HIS ASS, BUSHY BROWS!"
The other genin surged up against the rail, drawn in despite themselves. Even Neji had both hands on the stone, eyes wide, Byakugan veins just starting to bulge as he tracked the impossible speed.
I watched Lee's chakra tear itself apart.
It looked like paper getting wet.
At first, it held: channels overfull but intact, muscles wrapped in energy, every fiber screaming and obeying anyway. Then, little rips started forming. Tiny leaks, jagged edges where the flow was too strong, too fast.
"Slow down," I whispered, pointless. "Lee, slow down, slow down—"
He didn't.
Couldn't.
He was all momentum now, a living weapon that had forgotten it had bones.
Below, Gaara staggered, his granular armor cracking around his limbs, his eyes wide in something that might have been panic. For the first time, he threw up his own arms, not just sand, to block a blow.
Lee's kick shattered the guard and slammed into his chest, sending him skidding backward in a shower of grit.
"You see?" Naruto yelled at no one, gesturing wildly. "Hard work beats weird creepy sand! That's what you get for being a jerk!"
"Don't jinx it," I hissed, but my voice shook.
Because for one dizzy moment, it really did look like Lee might do it. Might win. Might prove every smug genius wrong in one glorious, self-destructive explosion.
He dropped low, legs coiling. Chakra soared through him, lighting up another gate higher along his spine. His aura blazed, kicking up dust just from existing.
He sprang.
Gaara's eyes snapped fully wide.
The sand moved—not as shield now, but as weapon.
The ground under Lee buckled.
The arena floor had been cracked all match. Now it outright betrayed him. Sand erupted in a spiked column, grabbing his ankle mid-air, yanking him sideways out of his arc.
He twisted, tried to correct, but his body was milliseconds ahead of where his brain could really steer. All that overclocked power shoved him into the trap harder.
Sand swarmed him.
It wrapped around his legs, his torso, his arms, dragging, constricting. For a moment he was a green blur inside a brown cocoon, still trying to move—and then the sand won.
Lee hit the ground half-wrapped, the impact kicking a cloud of dust into the air.
My heart lurched.
"Get out get out get out—" I muttered, fingers numb.
He did, at first. He tried.
His chakra flared again, tearing more, and he stood back up. Shaking, wrapped in thick bands of sand, he managed to wrench an arm free, then a leg, kicking, panting, eyes wild.
The sand responded like an offended animal.
Gaara raised one hand, fingers curled.
I felt his chakra surge.
I'd felt it before, in the forest. Back then it had just been wrong—too dense, too layered, like two currents fighting inside one vessel. Now it was worse. It boiled.
Thick, suffocating, suffused with something old and hungry that didn't feel like it belonged to a person at all. It stormed out of him into that swirling mass, painting it with that same suffocating presence.
The air around him tasted gritty.
"Stop," I whispered, throat tight.
Gaara's hand snapped down.
"Sand Coffin," he said.
The shell around Lee tightened.
I heard the sound of it, even over the crowd—the grind and pop of something giving way inside a body. Not a little crack. A crushing.
Lee screamed.
It went right through the inside of my skull like a spike.
"HEY!" Naruto howled, voice breaking. "HEY THAT'S ENOUGH, YOU WON ALREADY!"
Did he? I wasn't sure Hayate had even called anything yet. The proctor was doubled over in a coughing fit near the wall, eyes watering, a useless speck in the corner of the carnage.
"Stop!" I shouted, louder this time, voice tearing. "He can't move, stop—"
Gaara didn't stop.
His eyes were wide, yes, but not in panic anymore.
Ecstatic.
Like he'd found something interesting and wanted to see how it broke.
The sand crept higher, wrapping tighter. Lee jerked, trying to pull free, but his chakra was flickering now, green glow sputtering.
"He can't—he can't fight back," I said, words tumbling out. "He can't, it's not a match anymore, it's just—"
Lee tried to lift his arm.
The coil snapped around it.
Crunch.
His forearm bent sideways at a wrong angle, bone tearing through energy like wet cardboard.
I didn't realize I'd screamed until my throat hurt.
"STOP IT!" I shrieked over the roar of the crowd. "HE CAN'T FIGHT, YOU ALREADY PROVED IT, STOP—"
Naruto's voice collided with mine.
"BASTARD!" he roared, face red, eyes wild. "YOU'RE GONNA KILL HIM!"
Kiba was suddenly yelling too, and Ino, and even Shikamaru, cursing under his breath. The Konoha genin surged forward, slamming into the railing as if sheer will could physically change the outcome.
On the floor, Gaara's sand twisted around Lee's leg.
Lee couldn't even scream this time. His mouth opened, but the sound got swallowed by the dirt.
"Sand Coffin," Gaara repeated, as if it was a science experiment.
The grip constricted.
Something in Lee snapped.
Arm and leg at wrong angles now, body sagging. The green blaze of his chakra guttered, then flickered out, leaving only the faint, stubborn glow of someone who refused to acknowledge they were unconscious.
The adults still hadn't moved.
They watched.
They watched, and for half a heartbeat nobody did a damn thing. Baki's face was blank satisfaction. Some of the other jōnin looked grim. A few turned away.
Gai shattered.
He moved in a blur, leaping off the balcony, chakra cracking the stone under his feet.
"LEE!" Gai's voice broke all its usual bounds. It was a raw howl, something ripped right out of his chest.
Gaara's sand reared up to meet him, a tidal wave preparing to crash down on Lee's limp body, to finish what it started.
Gai's kick met it.
He smashed through the sand shield like it was nothing, planting himself between Gaara and his student, one arm outstretched in a block, the other ready to strike.
His eyes were nothing like I'd ever seen.
Gone was the goofy, sparkling grin. Gone were the poses. He looked like someone had taken a chisel to his face and carved away everything but rage and terror.
"Enough," he snarled.
The wave of sand shuddered, then withdrew an inch.
Gaara blinked, head tilting.
The killing intent in the arena lightened by a fraction.
Around us, the crowd went from roar to frantic buzz, everyone trying to adjust to what they'd just seen.
Hayate finally staggered forward, hand up, voice ragged.
"M-match… over," he wheezed. "Winner… Sabaku no… Gaara…"
The official words sounded obscene to me.
Winner.
Lee lay twisted on the stone, blood pooling under torn skin, limbs at wrong angles. The green glow of his chakra was a tiny stubborn ember, flickering.
"Move, move, move!" someone shouted below.
Med-nin rushed in.
I recognized one of them immediately—Mitate, the same sharp-eyed medic who'd been conferring with Kusushi earlier, his chakra a cool, precise blue-green. He slid to Lee's side, hands already glowing, fingers running gently over shattered limbs.
Even from here, I saw his face tighten.
"No good," he muttered. "Compound fractures… muscle fibers torn… inner network overloaded…"
"Fix him," Gai growled, kneeling on the other side. His voice shook. "You will fix him."
Mitate didn't flinch.
"We'll do what we can," he said. "But even if he recovers… he might not be able to be a shinobi anymore."
The words hit the arena like a thrown knife.
Naruto went strangely quiet beside me.
I didn't.
"Are you kidding me?" I screamed, voice cracking. "He almost died for us in the Forest! He saved Naruto, he saved Sasuke, he saved me—and you're just going to write him off as 'might not be useful anymore'?!"
Heads turned.
Some of the adults looked up in faint disapproval, like I was being "disrespectful." I wanted to hurl the word back at them and set it on fire.
Gaara's gaze flicked up to the Konoha balcony.
His eyes met mine.
It felt like being pinned under something heavy. His chakra pressed up at me from the arena floor—wrong, wrong, suffocating, like a hand over my mouth, like sand in my lungs.
I grabbed the top of the railing so hard my fingers went numb.
"You think this is strength?" I shouted at him, at the proctors, at the exam system, at the Hokage's stone face looming over all of us. "Breaking someone so they can't stand anymore?! That's not winning, that's just—just ruining things because you can!"
"Sylvie—" someone started to say.
I didn't care.
Naruto snapped out of his shocked silence, eyes blazing.
"YEAH!" he bellowed, jabbing a finger toward Gaara. "YOU HEAR HER?! LEE FOUGHT FOR US! YOU'RE JUST SOME LOSER HIDING BEHIND SAND!"
Kiba slammed a fist into the railing. "You're psycho!" he shouted. "What, crushing his arm wasn't enough?!"
Ino's voice cut sharp through theirs. "This was supposed to be an exam, not a slaughterhouse!"
Even Shikamaru, who usually specialized in looking bored, was red-faced. "What a drag," he called down, voice dripping acid. "Guess some people think 'victory' means 'career-ending maiming.'"
The proctor on our side of the balcony moved in, hands up.
"Hey—hey, kids, back off the rail—"
Too late.
I swung a leg over the railing.
I didn't even realize I was climbing until I was halfway over. My body had gone full stupid, fueled by adrenaline and the memory of Lee dropping out of nowhere in the Forest, kicking Zaku back from Naruto's unconscious body like an avenging green comet.
Somewhere in my head, something older than this life screamed about watching someone get broken and doing nothing.
"Get back here!" the proctor snapped, grabbing for my arm.
A hand like a steel cable looped around my middle, hauling me bodily backward.
"Easy, easy," Anko's voice drawled right in my ear. "Fun as it would be to watch you charge a homicidal raccoon kid, I am not doing the paperwork."
I thrashed anyway, heel kicking uselessly at the air.
"Let me go!" I gasped, vision blurring. "They're just going to—he can't even– he can't walk—"
"Yeah," Anko said, voice low now, too close. "Welcome to the fine print, brat. The village loves prodigies and martyrs. Everyone else gets what's left."
It wasn't comforting.
She muscled me back from the edge, shoving me into the knot of furious genin. Naruto put a hand on my back automatically to steady me, his own face twisted between rage and something smaller, more scared.
Down below, Gai bowed his head over Lee's limp form, shoulders shaking. His chakra flickered all over the place—rage, grief, terror, love, all bleeding out at once.
"I will not let you take his dream," he hissed at Mitate. "If there is a way, I will find it."
"We'll stabilize him first," Mitate said quietly. "Argue about the rest when he's not actively dying, please."
They lifted Lee onto a stretcher as gently as they could, but even that made his broken limbs twitch. He didn't wake.
The loose grains around Gaara trickled into streams that flowed back into his gourd.
He glanced once more at the Konoha balcony, something unreadable in his eyes, then turned away, walking out of the arena without a backward look.
The adults let him.
Of course they did.
I sagged against the railing, hands shaking, throat raw.
To the exam, this was just… data.
Gaara's power: confirmed. Lee's limit: found. Casualty: acceptable.
I hated it.
I hated that I could see the shape of it so clearly: an elaborate machine built to grind up kids and sort the broken pieces by usefulness.
The stretcher finally reached the tunnel under our balcony.
On impulse, I tore free of the knot of bodies and sprinted for the exit stairs.
"Sylvie?" Naruto called.
I didn't answer.
The stairwell blurred. The world tipped sideways. I caught myself on the wall once, twice. By the time I burst into the lower corridor, my head was pounding so hard I could taste it.
"Wait!" I yelled.
The med-nin carrying the stretcher startled. Mitate looked up, frown ready.
Lee lay strapped down, arm and leg splinted in thick, ugly braces, face slack under twitching eyelids. Up close, his chakra looked even worse—faded, frayed, like someone had taken sandpaper to his network.
I grabbed the side of the stretcher anyway.
My fingers dug into metal.
Mitate's frown deepened. "You shouldn't be down here," he started. "You're a competitor. This area is—"
"I know," I snapped. "I don't care."
My voice came out too loud in the narrow hall. It echoed.
"I just—" I swallowed. My eyes burned. "He saved my life. In the Forest. Naruto's, Sasuke's, mine. He didn't even know us and he still… he still jumped in."
Lee's eyelids fluttered.
I leaned over him, glasses slipping down my nose.
"Lee," I said. "Hey, hey, can you hear me?"
His mouth moved.
No sound came out, but his chakra flickered, a faint flare in response to my voice. Stubborn. Always stubborn.
Tears blurred my vision.
"Listen," I said, words tumbling over each other, too fast. "I know what they just said. I heard it. 'Might not be a shinobi anymore.' I don't accept that. Okay? I don't."
Mitate opened his mouth. I talked over him.
"I'll find a way," I said, too loud, too wild. "I don't care if I have to study every scroll in the hospital or draw seals on my own bones or drag some legendary healer out of retirement, I'm going to help you walk again. Run again. Kick some idiot's teeth in again."
My voice cracked hard on that last word.
"My life's already owed to you," I said, softer. "So if it kills me… that's fair."
Lee's chakra pulsed once more.
I hoped, desperately, that some part of him was hearing me even through the pain.
Mitate cleared his throat.
"Heroic speeches are bad for shock patients," he said, not unkindly. "We need to move him. If you really want to help, don't get in our way."
I nodded, biting my lip so hard I tasted blood.
My hands didn't want to let go of the stretcher.
I forced them to.
They rolled Lee away, white coats and green vests closing around him like waves.
I stood in the emptying hall, fists clenched at my sides, chest heaving.
The exam wasn't just a test anymore.
It was a countdown.
High in the shadows of the arena's superstructure, where the carved faces of past Hokage loomed and the stone beams met, a pale figure watched.
Orochimaru leaned against the cold wall, arms folded, cloak blending with the dark. From this vantage point, the arena floor was a shallow bowl. The genin were bright insects scurrying across it, chakra flaring and fading in little patterns.
He had always liked ant farms as a child.
The Sand jinchūriki's last attack replayed behind his yellow eyes.
He'd felt Shukaku's chakra flare even before a single grain stirred. Coarse, unstable, maddening. An old friend, in a way, that taste of something inhuman forced into a human shape.
Konoha had let that into their walls.
How… bold of them.
Below, the taijutsu boy's broken body disappeared into the tunnel.
Orochimaru's lips curved faintly.
"Such a waste," he murmured to himself. "A pure specimen, too. No ninjutsu, no genjutsu. All adaptation poured into the body. Gai always was sentimental about his toys."
Still, data was data.
Now he knew approximately how far Rock Lee could be pushed before he broke. Good to have on record, even if he had no current interest in the boy.
His interests lay elsewhere.
His gaze slid up, to the Konoha balcony.
To the place where Kakashi had stood earlier, fingers pressed over the scarred eye, chakra flexing around his little Uchiha like a watchful snake of his own.
Hatake had done… adequately, given the circumstances. The Five Elements Seal he'd placed over Orochimaru's own work was annoying, but not insoluble. A bandage over rot.
Sasuke would peel it off himself, once he understood how.
He would understand.
Orochimaru hummed under his breath, pleased.
His attention drifted sideways, to a different flicker of color.
The pink-haired girl stood apart from the knot of genin on the balcony now, leaning against the rail with white-knuckled grip. Her chakra was unusual—layered, shot through with a thread he did not recognize.
Foreign.
It had flared in the Forest, when she'd tried to burn his mark out of the Uchiha boy's neck with her own clumsy seal. It had buzzed again in the tower, prickling at the edge of his senses when she'd screamed at him she couldn't see.
Just now, in that little hallway scene with the stretcher, it had spiked again. Desperation and promise braided together.
Interesting.
Not important, not yet. But interesting.
"A village of surprises," he said softly, almost fond. "You do pick up the most unusual strays, Sensei."
Down on the Kage's balcony, Sarutobi sat very straight, pipe gone out, eyes shadowed. Even from here, Orochimaru could see the old man's jaw clenched tight behind his beard.
He wondered if Kakashi had delivered his report yet. If Hiruzen had lain awake the last few nights thinking of snakes in the walls and sand in the streets.
He hoped so.
Fear kept the blood thin.
Orochimaru pushed away from the wall, cloak whispering.
He had seen enough for today.
The forest had given him one sample of Konoha's new generation. The tower prelims had given him several more. The jinchūriki, the Hyūga fractures, the taijutsu freak, the anomaly girl, and, most importantly, the Uchiha with a wound on his soul that matched Orochimaru's hunger measure for measure.
It was almost time to stop watching and start cutting.
He stepped back into the darkness of the service tunnels, sandals silent on the stone. Chakra smoothed itself over his presence, making him vanish into the bones of the building as easily as Gaara vanished into his sand.
Outside, beyond the arena's high walls, Konoha went about its business, unaware that its own exams had just measured out the first doses of its coming collapse.
Orochimaru smiled, thin and delighted.
"Until next time, little leaves," he whispered.
Then he was gone.