Chapter 86: Lava and Lotus.

The dust from the Daytime Dragon hadn't settled before Hiashi's voice cut across the ridge.

"Attack! All units, show them what happens when you mess with Konoha!"

Konoha's force poured down the slope. Two thousand shinobi sprinting into the valley, weapons drawn, jutsu building in their hands, the morning light at their backs and the devastation of Lee's attack ahead of them. The Stone army had a crater field in the front of it. Bodies lay in pieces if not obliterated. The survivors who had been outside the blast radius were stumbling through the smoke, disoriented, terrified, their chain of command blown apart.

Lee was the first one down the ridge. He hit the valley floor at a dead sprint, his students and comrades behind him. The Seventh Gate's toll wracked throughout his entire body but his Body Supremacy Jutsu was already working on it, knitting torn fibers and broken bones.

The two armies collided in the smoke.

Konoha shinobi slammed into Stone shinobi who were still trying to figure out which direction was north. The first minutes were ugly. Close-range chaos. Kunai in the throats. Fireballs at point blank. Earth walls thrown up only to be smashed through by rolling Akimichi. The smoke from the fires mixed with the dust from jutsu and the visibility dropped to nothing and people killed by sound and instinct.

Lee's squad stayed on him. Kiba and Akamaru tore through a cluster of Stone-nin on the left. Choji's partial expansion crushed a Stone barricade that a squad of chunin had thrown up. Shino's insects swarmed a group that tried to attack from the east, draining their chakra until they collapsed. Hinata's Byakugan pierced the smoke and she took out several shinobi, some above her own rank, with her Gentle Fist.

"I see you!" Ami shouted as she whipped her chain out and caught a Stone chunin around the neck, yanking him off his feet.

Fuki was next to her as her fist caved in a man's chest and put him down.

Kasumi stayed closed to her teammates as she deflected a kunai with her tonfa, redirecting a Stone-nin's punch to the side as her tonfa smashed into his face with double the force.

Lee pushed deeper into the field. Every Stone shinobi who saw him coming either attacked or ran, and the ones who attacked went down in single strikes. A kick that sent a ninja flying away, knocking a group of shinobi down. An elbow that shattered a jonin's jaw. He mowed through the battlefield refusing to allow his home to be destroyed.

Then he sensed immense danger from a certain direction.

An old man with red hair and a red beard that tapered to a point, wearing a magenta kimono over mesh armor, pushing against the tide of retreating Stone shinobi. The three-pointed crown headpiece was unmistakable. Konoha had intelligence on every known jinchuriki: their names, their appearances, their techniques, the beasts they carried.

Rōshi of Iwagakure. Jinchuriki of the Four-Tails. Lava Style user. Has been a jinchuriki for over forty years. One of the two jinchuriki deployed with the Stone army.

Rōshi was shouting at the retreating shinobi. Trying to stop the rout. Grabbing men by their collars and shoving them back toward the fight. The old man who had left his village decades ago on a journey of self-discovery, forced back to Iwagakure by a Tsuchikage who wouldn't take no for an answer, made to fight a war he had no stake in because the beast inside him was too valuable to let wander at a time like this.

Lee changed direction and intercepted.

The leaping kick caught Rōshi across the jaw. The old man's head snapped sideways and his body lurched from the impact. Before he could recover, Lee's fist drove upward into his chin in an uppercut that lifted Rōshi's feet off the ground. Lee's body continued its rotation into a spinning roundhouse aimed at Rōshi's gut.

Rōshi's arm came up. He caught the kick on his forearm and the impact drove him backward across the churned earth, his sandals carving furrows in the dirt. He landed on his feet, cracked his neck to one side, and spat out a bloody tooth.

So this was the upstart Ōnoki wouldn't shut up about. This was the boy the Tsuchikage had dragged him out of his journey for. The kid who killed the One-Tail, captured Cloud's jinchuriki, and apparently just threw a technique that vaporized a few thousand of their army. Rōshi wiped blood from his mouth with the back of his hand and looked at the ridiculous green suit and the young face wearing it.

Just a boy. Strong as hell, but just a boy.

"Rock Lee! Konoha's Youthful Green Noble Beast!" Lee introduced himself with a shout. Between the words, a kunai came screaming at his throat from behind. Lee swayed his head to the side without looking, the blade passing his neck by an inch. His hand came up and caught it out of the air, and in the same motion he whipped it back the way it came. The kunai drove completely through the Stone nin's throat who had thrown it. The man dropped.

Lee hadn't broken eye contact with Rōshi.

"Rōshi of the Lava Style." The old man responded properly.

They rushed in at the same time.

Lee threw a straight punch at Rōshi's chest. Rōshi deflected it with his palm and followed up with a punch aimed at Lee's face. Lee brought his knee up and caught the incoming fist against his gut, using his raised leg as a shield. With the block still holding, Lee spun into a spinning elbow aimed at Rōshi's jaw.

Rōshi ducked. The elbow cut the air above his head, close enough to ruffle his red hair. From his ducked position Rōshi's hands blurred through signs. He aimed his face upward and his mouth opened.

“Lava Style: Scorching Stream Rock Jutsu!”

A glob of molten rock the size of a man's head shot from Rōshi's mouth directly at Lee's face. The heat reached Lee before the rock did, a wall of shimmering air that singed his eyebrows.

Lee leaned backwards into a bridge.

The Stone shinobi who had been creeping up behind Lee with a kunai raised was not expecting this. The molten rock hit him square in the chest. The scream lasted less than a second before the lava ate through his chest, his ribs, and everything behind them. What hit the ground was barely recognizable.

Lee and Rōshi locked eyes across the body.

Lee moved first. Three shuriken left his hand in a spread pattern. One straight at Rōshi's center. One curving in from the left. One curving in from the right. The trajectories were staggered, each arriving at a slightly different time, forcing Rōshi to track all three.

Rōshi's eyes followed the shuriken. Center. Left. Right. He shifted his weight to dodge and then realized he'd lost sight of Rock Lee.

The shuriken had been a distraction.

Lee was already behind him. He'd used the Dancing Leaf Shadow the moment Rōshi's eyes went to the shuriken, closing the distance in the blind spot created by Rōshi's own turn. Lee's arms wrapped around Rōshi's waist from behind, locked tight, and Lee drove them both downward, aiming to smash the old man's head in the earth.

Rōshi's hands shot out. His palms hit the ground a half-second before his skull would have. A spiderweb of cracks exploded outward from the impact point. His arms shook from the force of holding against Lee's full-body momentum but they held.

Lee released. Rōshi kicked off his hands and flipped back to his feet. Lee was already in front of him.

A straight right at Rōshi's chest. Rōshi caught it on his palm and pushed it wide. Rōshi's left fist came around at Lee's face. Lee didn't dodge. He leaned into it, meeting the punch with his forehead, and the impact split the skin above Lee's brow but his skull was harder than Rōshi's knuckles. In the same motion Lee's right fist, freed from Rōshi's deflection, drove into the old man's gut.

Rōshi doubled forward but he didn't go down. His head came back up and his uppercut caught Lee clean under the chin.

Lee's head snapped back. Stars exploded across his vision. But his body was already moving on trained instinct. He went with the uppercut's momentum, letting it tilt him backward, and as his body arced he kicked both feet upward. The double kick caught Rōshi under the chin with the same rising force the uppercut had given Lee. Rōshi's jaw clamped shut and his body flipped backward from the impact.

Both of them hit the ground at the same time. Both of them got back to their feet at the same time.

And both of them were immediately swarmed.

Three Stone shinobi came at Lee from behind, thinking the green suit's back was turned, thinking the fight with the jinchuriki had left an opening. Lee's arm came around in a backfist without looking. The first one caught it across the temple and dropped. Lee's foot came up and caught the second in the chest and launched him ten meters backward. The third managed to get his kunai halfway to Lee's neck before Lee grabbed his wrist, twisted until the joint popped, took the kunai from his limp fingers, and put it through the man's eye.

Twenty meters away, Rōshi was dealing with his own interruption. Three Konoha shinobi had seen the old man get knocked around and decided he was vulnerable. One threw a fireball. Rōshi fired a ball of molten lava in response that went straight through the fireball and melted the shinobi. The other two looked at each other in terror. Rōshi dashed at them and buried a fist in both of their guts. As they crumpled to their knees, he kicked them both away into the distance.

The interruptions cleared. The chaos of the battlefield continued to rage around them, shinobi killing shinobi in every direction, jutsu lighting up smoke, screams and explosions and the horrific sounds of steel finding flesh. But in the space between Rock Lee and Rōshi of the Lava Style, there was a pocket of stillness.

Two men looking at each other across twenty meters of bloodied ground, surrounded by the bodies of people who had made the mistake of thinking either one of them was distracted.

Rōshi cracked his neck again. He rolled his jaw where Lee's opening kick had loosened it and ran his tongue across the gap where his tooth had been. The boy was fast. Strong too, strong enough that the gut punch was still throbbing and the uppercut kick had rattled his brain fierce.

Lee wiped the blood from his brow where Rōshi's punch had split the skin. The cut was already closing.

“To think a brat like you can keep up with me. I’m almost ashamed.” Rōshi chuckled as his body burst into magma.

“My home is under threat of annihilation.” Lee grinned. “I can’t just let that happen so easily.” Lee’s chakra slowly shaped and formed itself into a dense concentrated armor of water.