Host: Rock Lee
Age: 14
Rank: Chunin
Skills: Taijutsu A (18,400/1,000,000), Ninjutsu F (0.290/10), Genjutsu F (0.290/10), Shurikenjutsu C (5,150/10,000), Chakra Control B (37,800/100,000), Nunchaku Mastery B (19,200/100,000), Eight Gates B (27,600/100,000), Bojutsu C (7,100/10,000), Chain Mastery C (6,300/10,000), Tonfa Mastery C (2,900/10,000), Muscle Mimicry B (0/100,000), Teaching B (11,400/100,000), Leadership C (5,321/10,000), Drunken Fist C (849/10,000), Inspire D (180/1,000), Water Style D (160/1,000)
Unique Skills: Body Supremacy Jutsu, Chakra Enhanced Strength, Strengthened Chakra Network, Regeneration Ability, Increased Chakra Reserves
Equipment: Customized Weights, Might Suit, Shinobi Tools, flask of special medicine, Tonfas
"Forget it in death." Kimimaro said as he swung to decapitate Naruto.
The bone blade was already at the side of Naruto's neck, already slicing skin, when a green shape came in low across the grass faster than the blade could finish its arc.
"LEAF HURRICANE!"
Lee's shin caught Kimimaro across the jaw and ribs together, a single flat sweep with the whole weight of a sprint behind it, and the bone blade went wide of Naruto's throat by the width of a hair. Kimimaro left the ground. He skipped once off the grass and dug a heel in and slid, carving two long furrows through the field before he stopped, and there was a moment, just a moment, where the most feared of the Sound Five had to plant a hand in the dirt to keep from going over.
Lee landed between him and Naruto. One arm behind his back, the other forward, chin up, the afternoon catching the green of him. His chunin vest sat properly across his chest.
"Konoha's Handsome Wild Green Devil has arrived! The name's Rock Lee!"
"Bushy Brows…" Naruto couldn't help but grin, not knowing how close he was to dying just a moment ago. "You don't know how happy I am to see you."
"Naruto, I'll handle this guy. Just go get Sasuke back."
Lee said it lightly, but his head was not light. None of this added up. If these people were the ones stealing Sasuke-kun away, then why was Sasuke-kun the one running? Was he caught in a genjutsu? Did Naruto-kun know how to break a person out of one? He surely hoped so...
"Careful, Bushy Brow!" Naruto staggered up. "This guy can control his own bones to attack!"
"Bones, huh? Interesting." Lee's smile widened a notch. He had crossed weapons with chains, blades, sand, a tailed beast. He had never once stood across from a man whose own skeleton was the weapon.
"He's super strong…" Naruto said seriously. Hundreds of clones, the Nine-Tails' chakra running through every one of them, and this man had walked through all of it without taking a scratch.
"I'll beat this guy, Naruto. And if I can't, I'll turn in this vest!"
"Kick his ass, Bushy Brows." Naruto nodded once, turned, and ran for the trees Sasuke had vanished into.
Kimimaro watched the blond go and did not chase. Not yet. His pale eyes came back to the boy in green.
"Rock Lee. I have heard of you."
"I'm proud to make your acquaintance. I wish it were under better circumstances though. You know, with you trying to kill my friends and kidnap my comrades and all." Lee started removing his weights from his leg warmers, placing them on his waist for easy access. He had a feeling this guy wouldn't be so simple.
"I'm Kimimaro of the Sound Five. Lord Orochimaru's most valued…" A pause, brief, something passing behind the calm. "well was once his most valued subordinate."
"Orochimaru wants his hands on Sasuke-kun. For what purpose?" Lee kept his voice calm and his eyes on the man's feet. "I don't believe he would go so far as to kidnap the last Uchiha just to make him a subordinate."
"Like I told the blond one from before. Sasuke will become Orochimaru's new vessel."
"Vessel? To take over his body?"
"That's enough questions." Kimimaro's weight rolled forward onto the balls of his feet. "I don't have long. I have to catch up and kill that blond boy as a final service to my lord."
He dashed.
There was no wind-up to it and no warning. One instant he stood twenty feet off and the next a bone had slid from his palm into a white sword and the point of it was a hand's width from Lee's heart, closing.
Lee's fingers were already at the flask. It was just him and one opponent. No allies to worry about accidentally hurting. He could afford a little bit of life-or-death training to master the Drunken Fist…
He took a single drop on his tongue as the sword came in, and the change ran through him before he had swallowed. His spine went loose. He bent backward off his hips as though the bones had quietly left his body, the heart the blade had been aimed at simply folding out of the line, and the point passed over his chest and drove down past his exposed hip into the grass.
Kimimaro's eyes widened a fraction. He pulled the sword back, re-angled it, and stabbed straight down at the torso the boy had so stupidly left open.
"What the hell do ya think ya doing?!"
Lee's leg came up out of the backbend and kicked Kimimaro's wrist skyward, and the stab went nowhere. From flat on his back the drunk chunin loaded both legs, sank them into Kimimaro's chest, and shoved with everything his glutes had. Kimimaro went up and back like a kicked door.
"Oi! Oi! What do ya think ya doing stabbing at me!" Lee was on his feet, more or less, swaying left then right, his footwork a thing with no straight lines in it. "Who even are you, bastard?!"
"A drunken fist user…" Kimimaro landed on his feet and studied the swaying boy with a small interested look. "I've never met one before."
"I'm just enjoying my youth, damn it!!!"
Lee charged. Halfway across the gap his ankles tangled and he went down, but down turned into a forward roll, and the roll turned into a wheel of green coming at the Sound nin fast and crooked.
Kimimaro read it. He raised the sword and thrust for the center of the rolling shape.
The body was not there. Lee uncoiled off the ground at the wrong moment, leg snapping up over the blade toward Kimimaro's face. "Right in the middle of my youth!" Kimimaro got the sword across in time and the shin cracked against bone. Then again, and again, kicks coming from angles that had no rhythm to them, each one driving him back a step, the calm in his face thinning by the kick.
He leaned away from one that whistled over the top of his head. He gave ground to set his feet and steal a breath of distance.
The breath never came. Lee had already landed behind him, back turned, fists flying over his own shoulders at a man he was not even facing.
"I-I can't see you but I can hear you!" Lee hiccuped.
Fast… Strong… and Hard to predict…
Kimimaro twisted, brought the sword up, caught the blind blows on the flat of it. He pivoted and drove a kick of his own at the boy's exposed back. Lee's leg came up to meet it without looking, sole to shin, then the next, then the next, the two of them trading kicks back to back like a mirror trick, until Lee leapt, hooked both legs around Kimimaro's planted ankle, and tore his footing out from under him. Kimimaro fell. Lee hit the grass first, rolled up under the falling guy, and drove a single ferocious fist up into his open chest.
Kimimaro flew. He skidded across the field and slammed his bone sword down into the earth to drag himself to a stop, the blade carving a long gash through the dirt.
That last one had not felt like the others. That last one had cracked something. He looked down, then up, and the boy who had thrown it was lying on his side in the grass, fast asleep, a snot bubble swelling and shrinking at one nostril.
Kimimaro tilted his head.
He had been about to reach for the gift Lord Orochimaru had given him. It seemed there was no need. He pulled the sword out of the ground and crossed the field to where the boy lay snoring, this fifteen-year-old vessel standing over a sleeping child, and without ceremony he stabbed down.
The sleeping Lee rolled left.
He stabbed again.
The sleeping Lee rolled right.
He stabbed again, again, a flurry of them down into the grass, and the boy rolled and lolled and flopped clear of every single one, eyes shut, dead to the world, until on the last thrust his hand shot up and closed around Kimimaro's wrist.
"You fell for my trick!!!"
Before Kimimaro could rip the hand loose, the rapid strikes came. A fist buried in his chest. A rising uppercut that snapped his chin up. A spinning backfist that cracked across his cheekbone and threw him across the field.
"WHACHA!" Lee swayed upright, hiccuping, beaming. "How did you like that?!"
Kimimaro rose. He touched the split skin over his cheek where the bone underneath had moved when it should not have.
"It appears you're stronger than the rumors suggest." Black lines crawled up out of the seal at his chest and spread across his skin in twisting parallel veins. "I don't believe I can defeat you by holding back."
"Guy-sensei says…" Lee squinted at nothing, one finger raised. "Guy-sensei told me… Wha… What did he say again…?"
"Not many have witnessed this form and lived." Kimimaro sank low, the marks finishing their crawl to his fingertips. "Be proud, Rock Lee of Konoha."
"LUCKY! I AM VERY LUCKY! Without my-"
Kimimaro was already inside the sentence, the sword leading for Lee's throat. Lee slapped the flat of it aside with the side of his palm and punched. Kimimaro caught the punch on a crossed forearm and a second sword bloomed out of his other hand and came in low.
"Camellia Dance!"
The blade became many blades. Not truly, but the eye could not tell the difference. Kimimaro stabbed at a speed that left a fan of afterimages hanging in the air, each thrust at a slightly different height and a slightly different angle and a slightly different beat, a pattern built to break a dodge by giving it nothing to settle on. A normal man would have read the rhythm and stepped into the one strike that was real and died on it.
Lee had no rhythm to break, because Lee had no plan. He weaved and swayed and tipped through the storm of points like a leaf coming off a branch in a gusting wind, drunk and boneless and impossible, and not one of the afterimage stabs found him.
"HIYAH!" He caught both of Kimimaro's wrists, dropped to his back, and snapped both feet up into the man's gut to kick him into the sky.
He would have. The kick met a wall of sharpened ribs. A whole cage of them had burst outward through Kimimaro's chest in the half second of contact, white and curved and spiky, and Lee's feet slammed into a fence of his own enemy's bones. Lee let go and rolled clear, came up on his heels, and stared.
"You… You…" He pointed, genuinely thrown. "When could you do that?"
"The human body is composed of over two hundred bones." He politely explained. "And yet for me that number is not fixed."
"Two hundred bones…" Lee's finger drifted up to his own temple, processing this through a haze of alcohol with visible effort. "You-You have more than two hundred bones… That must mean…" His eyes lit. "You're a skeleton man!"
"…"
Kimimaro answered by throwing both bone swords and parting his fingertips at the same time. The swords spun in flat and the fingers fired, dozens of bone bullets screaming out behind the blades on a tight spiral, the air cracking as they came.
Lee poured himself out of the way. A side roll under the swords, a split that flowed into a one-handed stand, a slow tip sideways into a pose no sober body should have been able to hold, and the bullets shredded the grass where each part of him had just been. While he was still folded into that impossible shape, Kimimaro closed.
Bones came out of him as he ran, not from a sword now but from everywhere, the willow's branches, blades sprouting from his palms and knuckles and forearms, his shoulders, his neck, his spine, his chest, a man became a thicket of sharpness. He drove a fist of them at the boy.
Lee shoved off the ground and skipped back out of reach, then stood up straight, and stopped, and broke into a small and dreadful dance, arms wandering, knees loose.
"You may be a scarier skeleton man." He swayed. "But I'm, Devil Lee! No wait. I mean Beast Lee! Wait… What was my…"
He fell asleep on his feet.
Kimimaro did not move at once. He had learned. He came in with full intent and a follow-up loaded behind the first strike for the instant the boy "woke," driving a bladed fist straight for the sleeping face.
"YOU FELL FOR IT AGAIN!"
Lee's head snapped forward to meet the incoming fist, and his skull hammered into the spiked bone of Kimimaro's arm. The bone did not hold. Kimimaro watched his own hardened blades crush and powder in real time against the boy's forehead, the chakra packed into that headbutt enough to pulp a boulder, and he ripped his arm back a hair before the cranium reached his actual fist.
This boy is this strong and he hasn't even awakened the Eight Inner Gates?
He could not believe it. He could not make any of it make sense.
Kimimaro supposed there was nothing left to hold back for. Ten times the chakra. Ten times the strength. If that was not enough, he had never had a chance from the start.
His skin went dark. His spine drew up out of his back into six thick bones, more sprouting along the ridge of it, a heavy spiked tail uncoiling behind him, two dark curved marks settling beneath his eyes and two more above them like painted brows. The thing that straightened to its full height on the field was no longer quite a man.
"Skeleton Man is turning into Lizard Man…?" Lee blinked at him, owlish. "Now this is just getting ridi-" he hiccuped, "Ridiculous! I can transform too you know! Watch this!"
He giggled and reached inside himself and started to open the gates.
Gate of Opening!
The first gate threw a surge through his network that burned the alcohol out of him like a match to a film of oil. The sway left his legs. The fog left his eyes.
Gate of Healing!
Gate of Life!
Gate of Pain!
Gate of Limit!
Gate of Joy!
His skin flushed red. His pupils vanished. His hair lifted off his scalp and the veins stood up along his arms and his throat, and a green aura peeled off his body and hung in the air around him, the grass flattening in a ring at his feet.
"Sorry about that!" Sober now, and a bit more serious. "Guy-sensei said that mastering the Drunken Fist is impossible. But as a man who can only use Taijutsu, I want to prove that it is possible to master it."
"Only my master has ever seen this form." Kimimaro's transformed voice came low and even. "Strangely enough, I'm still not sure it is enough to kill a freak like you."
"Freak is a bit harsh, don't you think?" Lee settled into the Strong Fist stance, lead hand open, rear hand cocked.
"How else is one supposed to describe someone like you?" Kimimaro genuinely asked.
Lee threw a straight punch. Kimimaro slipped it as a bone lanced out of his shoulder at Lee's eye; Lee deflected it with the side of his palm a finger's width from his face and put a kick into Kimimaro's gut that skidded the heavier form back across the field. Bones erupted to answer, a dozen, two dozen, too many to count, jutting from every plane of the lizard body. Lee gave ground and cleared them as he went, a palm strike here snapping a bone, a heel there shearing one off at the root. More came. They climbed off Kimimaro's back and arched up and blotted out the sky overhead, a ceiling of white spears, and then they bent and rained down toward him all at once.
Lee grinned and planted and let his legs go.
The kicks came so fast the air could not get out of the way; friction lit his shins, then his whole legs, a blur of flame turning above his head.
"Morning Chicken!!!"
The falling ceiling of bone met the fire and came apart, blade after blade bursting to white dust, the whole rain of them ground to nothing before a single point reached him.
Across the smoke of it, Kimimaro laid a palm flat on the earth.
"You are indeed formidable…" The ground shuddered. "Bracken Dance."
The field died. Ten thousand blades of bone tore up out of the earth in every direction, a forest of them, sprouting and stacking and climbing higher than the trees, an entire landscape turned to teeth in the space of a breath. There was no floor anymore. There was only the spaces between the spikes.
Lee's pupilless eyes tracked all of it at once, the whole erupting forest, and he twisted himself through gaps that closed as he passed, breaking the blades that left him no room with hammering hands and feet, carving himself a place to stand.
A sound behind him. Very wrong and very close!
Kimimaro came out of one of the bone shards he had merged himself into, blind side, a spiraled lance of compressed bone already drawn back in his fist.
"Whoa!"
Lee got his nunchaku up barely in time, the bars snapping out of his weights and into his hands and across the lance's path in the last fraction. The lance hit them and the shock of it ran down into his arms. And it did not stop, because while Lee held that one point Kimimaro bent the whole forest inward, ten thousand blades twisting toward the single boy at once.
Lee spun the nunchaku into a screaming figure-eight, faster, faster, until friction took them and the bars became a dome of fire and strength walling off his body, batting away thrusting bone, shearing the nearest spears, holding back a closing world of edges with a blur of burning steel.
It was not enough hands for that much death.
A blade opened his shoulder. Another raked his thigh. A third split the skin over his ribs, and through the gap they cost him Kimimaro drove the lance home.
It went in under Lee's sternum and out through his back and carried him off his feet, punched him backward through several bones, the green aura guttering as he crashed through and came to rest impaled and folded in the white forest.
Kimimaro stood in the ruin of the field and watched for the body to stop moving.
It did not stop moving. It rose.
"You aren't dead…?"
"Heh.. Heh…" Lee got a foot under himself, then the other, the lance sliding out of the hole it had made as he stood. "Oh man, you sure are strong…"
Kimimaro stared, because the hole was closing. He watched it happen, the torn meat inside the wound drawing back together, the gap in the boy's chest knitting shut from the inside out in the space of a few seconds, until there was a smear of blood and a split in the jumpsuit and underneath it whole skin where a moment ago he had been able to see daylight.
"You're the third person to almost kill me, you know?" Lee rolled the freshly healed shoulder, testing it. "You're so strong, why in the world are you working for a person like Orochimaru anyway?"
"He's my only purpose for existing…" The cursed form drew up to its full height, and for the first time something like grief moved under the calm. "And eliminating a threat like you would be my greatest and last gift to him…"
He roared and threw himself across the broken field, the whole forest leaning in with him.
"I wish we could've met under different circumstances, Kimimaro…"
Lee reached down past the sixth gate and opened the seventh.
Gate of Wonder.
A blue sweat broke across his skin and evaporated the instant it formed, and where the green aura had been a blue one erupted outward in a hard pulse, and the bone blades standing nearest to him simply shattered, blown to powder by the pressure coming off his body. The light around him stopped looking like a boy who was glowing and started looking like a boy who was burning cold.
"Lotus Style: Mad Dance of Infinity!"
He was gone from where he stood and he was everywhere.
There was no following it. To any eye in the world the field filled with green, a dozen Lees, two dozen, every one of them mid-strike, afterimages stacked so thick and so fast that the single boy at the center of them had become a swarm. Each blow that landed tore a piece off the thing Kimimaro had made of himself. A fist cratered the lizard chest and bone spat out of the exit. A kick took a spine off his back at the root. An elbow split the heavy skull-plate of the transformed head and the crack of it never caught up to the next strike. Kimimaro's defenses bloomed, ribs, blades, the willow's branches, and each one came apart faster than it formed, shaved and shattered and scattered into the churning air, the most feared body in Orochimaru's service unmade piece by piece by a boy moving at a speed it could no longer see, let alone answer.
All of the Lees came out of the swarm together into one last shape, one leg drawn back, and drove the kick clean through Kimimaro's chest.
It went all the way through. The blue light hung around them both for a heartbeat, the boy and the bone wielder pinned together on the end of that final blow.
"I-I'm sorry… Lord… Orochimaru…"
Kimimaro's eyes had lost the boy entirely. They were aimed at nothing, fixed on a master who was not there, and his last words went to him.
Lee drew his leg back out, and the heavy form folded down into the broken field among the wreckage of its own forest.
"You may have been my enemy but that doesn't mean you were my enemy…"
He stood over the body a moment, the blue aura thinning off his shoulders, and he meant it. In another life, one with no snake in it, he thought the two of them could've probably been friends. He had seen the loyalty and politeness in the man and could not hate something that pure even pointed the wrong way.
Lee turned toward the trees Naruto had run into.
Choji-kun was already given to the medical-nin; he had passed that fight on his way north and made sure of it. Now there was the matter of how well Naruto-kun was handling Sasuke-kun, and Lee did not intend to find out from a distance.
He ran.
[Taijutsu Proficiency +9,000 points!]
[Eight Gates Proficiency +12,000 points!]
[Chakra Control Proficiency +4,000 points!]
[Nunchaku Mastery Proficiency +2,000 points!]
[Drunken Fist Proficiency has reached the next level!]
[Drunken Fist Proficiency +10,651 points!]