Chapter 93: The Devil!

The messenger arrived at the Tsuchikage's tower at dawn. He was carried through the gate by two Stone chunin because his legs had given out three miles from the village, and the blood on his flak vest had dried brown overnight. The guards at the base of the tower took one look at his face and sent him straight up without questions.

Ōnoki stood behind his desk, poring over field reports from the front. The shape of a war that was already going worse than the projections his men had given him two weeks ago. Three thousand dead. More wounded than the hospitals could hold. And the jinchuriki Rōshi missing, last seen transforming into the Four-Tails before being driven from the battlefield by a damned shinobi in a green suit.

The door opened.

Ōnoki looked up. The messenger was young, early twenties, and whatever color his face had been before was gone now. His lips were cracked. His hands wouldn't stop shaking.

"Report." Ōnoki said.

The young man's mouth opened and nothing came out. He tried again.

"Kitsuchi-sama is dead, Lord Tsuchikage."

Ōnoki's hand, the one holding the field report, did not move. His expression did not change. He looked at the messenger.

"How…" He demanded.

"Konoha’s ANBU." The messenger's voice was barely holding together. "They attacked Kurotsuchi’s squad in the rear, and Kitsuchi ran back to protect her. In the ensuing battle, he perished."

"Kurotsuchi," he said. "Where is my granddaughter?"

"She's alive, Lord Tsuchikage. She's being escorted back to the village. She should arrive within the hour."

"Was she hurt?"

The messenger hesitated. The hesitation said more than the answer would.

"She was present when Kitsuchi-sama was killed. She... Lord Tsuchikage, during the attack, Kurotsuchi-sama awakened..." He couldn't find the word. Or he was afraid to say it.

"Say it."

"Particle Style. She used Particle Style against the assassin. It's the only reason the assassin didn't take her as well and we were able to learn of this incident at all."

Ōnoki's chest hitched.

"Leave me."

The messenger bowed and left. The door closed.

Ōnoki sat in the silence of his office and did not move for a long time. The field reports sat unread. The war maps on the wall marked positions that didn't matter anymore because nothing mattered except the thing the messenger had just told him.

Kitsuchi.

His boy.

Ōnoki pressed both palms flat on the desk and pushed himself to his feet. His back screamed at him like always, the vertebrae grinding, the muscles seizing. He ignored it this time. He walked to the window and looked out over Iwagakure, at the stone spires and the narrow streets and the mountains.

His son was dead.

His granddaughter had awakened the power that Ōnoki had spent a lifetime mastering, the same kekkei tōta that made him one of the most feared shinobi alive, and she had awakened it watching her father die.

…

The escort arrived forty minutes later. Ōnoki was waiting at the tower entrance when they came through the village gate. Several Stone shinobi surrounded a single figure walking between them, and even from a distance Ōnoki could see that Kurotsuchi was not the same girl who had left for the front.

She was covered in her father's blood.

It was on her hands and her arms and soaked into the front of her uniform. Her face was clean. Someone had at least tried to wash it. But the rest of her looked like she had crawled through a slaughterhouse. Her black hair was matted. Her eyes were fixed on something that wasn't in front of her.

The jonin escort stopped when they reached Ōnoki. Kurotsuchi kept walking until she was standing right in front of him, close enough to touch, and she looked down at him because even at her age she was taller than the old man who had been Tsuchikage since before she was born.

"Gramps…" Her voice broke on the word.

Ōnoki reached up and put his hand on the side of her face, and Kurotsuchi's composure shattered. She dropped to her knees on the stone street and grabbed the front of his robes and buried her face against his chest and she screamed.

Ōnoki held her. He was small and old and his back was a ruin and he held his granddaughter in the middle of the street with his arms around her shoulders and he said nothing because there was nothing to say.

She screamed until she couldn't scream anymore and then she sobbed and then she just shook, her whole body trembling against him, and Ōnoki held on and did not let go.

"I'll kill them…" She said into his chest. Her voice was raw, scraped to nothing. "Every single one of them. Every Konoha shinobi. I'll destroy their whole village…"

"I know."

"They tried to take me too." Her fingers tightened on his robes. "After they killed Dad. He grabbed me. I think he grabbed me. He was going to drag me back to Konoha. I could feel it. They were going to use me as a hostage to hurt our village."

Ōnoki's eyes narrowed. "What happened then?"

"I killed him." Kurotsuchi pulled back enough to look at her grandfather. Her eyes were red and swollen and something else. Something new. "I used Particle Style, Gramps. Your Particle Style. It just came out of me. I didn't even think about it. He grabbed me and I felt it build in my hands and I put it right through him." She looked at her own hands. They were still trembling. "I erased his arm. Part of the wall behind him. Part of the ground. I couldn't control how big it was or where it stopped."

Ōnoki took her hands in his. They were small in his grip and crusted with dried blood that cracked when he turned them palm-up. He held them there, between his own gnarled fingers, and he looked at the girl who was all he had left of his son.

"You awakened it…" he said quietly.

"I need to control it." Kurotsuchi's eyes hardened. The tears were still wet on her face but her expression changed. "Teach me everything. I want to master it. I want to erase everything about Konoha!" She gripped his hands tight enough that her knuckles went white. "Promise me."

"I promise."

"I'm going to kill them, Gramps. The ones who did this. And then the ones who sent them. And then anyone who stands between me and the gates of their village. I don't care how long it takes."

Ōnoki looked at her. His granddaughter. The last piece of Kitsuchi that still breathed. Her father's stubborn jaw and her mother's dark eyes and now her grandfather's amazing gift, the power to reduce matter itself to nothing, awakened in blood and grief at fifteen years old.

Looks like they just received a new weapon to use in this war.

"We will start today." Ōnoki said. He straightened, ignoring the pain in his spine. "I will teach you personally. Every technique I know. Everything I have spent a lifetime developing. And when you are ready, you and I are going to go to that village together."

His voice was calm.

"They killed my son and tried to take my granddaughter." Ōnoki said. "Konoha will answer for that. No matter what."

Kurotsuchi stood up. She wiped her eyes with the back of a blood-crusted hand. When she dropped her hand, her face was determined.

"When do we start?"

"Now. Follow me." Ōnoki floated away.

The Land of Earth stretched ahead of them in shades of brown and grey.

Lee's squad had crossed the Stone border two days ago. They moved at night and sheltered in caves during the day, eating cold rations because fire smoke carried for miles in the dry mountain air. The terrain was bare rock and steep passes, with scrubby brush clinging to cracks in cliff faces. Nothing like the forests back home.

There were eight of them, nine if you counted Akamaru. Lee at the head, his three students Ami, Fuki, and Kasumi behind him, and then Choji Akimichi, Shino Aburame, Hinata Hyuga, and Kiba Inuzuka with Akamaru padding alongside him. Hiashi had sent them to wipe out the Stone encampments scattered through the region, the camps where Iwa was gathering fresh shinobi before pushing them toward the front. Hit them hard, move fast, get out before the enemy could respond in force.

They found the first camp on the morning of the third day.

Hinata spotted it from a ridge overlooking a wide, flat valley. "Three hundred meters northeast. Twenty tents. Guards posted at four points. Roughly forty shinobi." Her Byakugan pulsed, the veins standing out along her temples. "Wagons in the center. Weapons, food, what looks like medical supplies."

Lee studied the camp from the ridge. Forty shinobi. Taking them in a straight fight would work, but it would take time and make noise and risk injuries they couldn't afford this deep in enemy territory.

He looked at Choji.

Choji looked back at him with a confused expression on his face.

"Choji, are you afraid of heights?" Lee asked.

"Uhh, I don’t know… Why?"

Lee smiled a smile that was strangely terrifying. He turned to the rest of the squad. "Stay here. Watch and learn."

He walked up to Choji, whispered in his ear, planted his feet, and grabbed Choji by the front of his shirt with both hands. 

“Wait! Can I have a second to think about it?! At least?!” Choji shouted.

Lee’s muscles swelled and the veins in his arms stood out and he spun his entire body into the throw, putting every pound of force he had into launching Choji Akimichi up and out over the valley in a towering arc.

Choji rocketed upward with a scream. A hundred meters. Two hundred. Three hundred. He became a dot against the grey sky, and the Stone camp below didn't even notice. Their guards were watching the passes and the tree line, not looking straight up.

At the peak of his arc, Choji placed his hands together.

"Super Expansion Jutsu!"

The dot expanded. It kept expanding. Choji's body swelled outward and upward and in every direction at once, his torso and limbs ballooning to a size that blocked out the sky above the valley. His shadow fell over the camp like nightfall, and by the time the first Stone shinobi looked up and saw what was coming down on them, there was nowhere to go.

Choji crashed down.

The ground shook hard enough that Lee's squad felt it through the soles of their sandals three hundred meters away. Dust and debris erupted in a ring around the impact site, a shockwave of dirt and shattered stone that swept outward in all directions, flattening every tent and every wagon and every wall in the camp.

When the dust settled, there was no camp. There was a crater the size of a small lake with Choji sitting in the middle of it, already shrinking back to his normal size, coughing and brushing rubble off his shoulders.

"Ow…" Choji said. He rubbed his backside. "I never want to do that again..."

Lee's squad stared from the ridge.

Ami's mouth was open. Fuki's was too. Kasumi had her hand over her mouth.

"That's… insane…" Ami started.

"That looked like so much fun!" Fuki was already thinking about how she would land safely.

Lee appeared beside Choji in a blur. He helped his friend to his feet and dusted off his outfit, which accomplished nothing because Choji was covered head-to-toe in dust.

"Are you okay?" Lee asked.

"No, I’m not okay." Choji rolled his neck. "I really wished we had at least a discussion about this before you decided to throw me!"

"You were amazing, Choji-kun!" Lee gave him a thumbs up. "The power of your clan's techniques never ceases to amaze me!"

Choji blushed. “Don’t think by freaking complimenting me makes up for what you did. At the very least, you’ll have to pay me back with three if not five of your meals in the mess hall!”

“I apologize, Choji-kun. I am willing to offer you the next five of my meals if it makes up for what I did.” Lee gave an exaggerated bow with a smile.

“I forgive you…” Choji exhaled through his nose. “This time!”

The rest of the squad made their way down from the ridge. They walked through what was left of the camp, which wasn't much. The tents were flat. The wagons were matchsticks. The Stone shinobi who had been guarding the camp were buried under rubble or crushed outright. There were no survivors.

Lee gathered his students. His face grew serious, the enthusiasm from a moment ago replaced by the expression he wore when he was teaching.

"What did you see?" he asked them.

"Total destruction!" Fuki said, still grinning.

"Yes. But what did you not see?"

The three girls looked at each other.

"We did not see them try to fight." Lee said. "They had forty shinobi. Some of them might have been able to use earth jutsu to shield themselves or counter the attack. None of them did. Do you know why?"

"Because they didn't have time." Kasumi said quietly.

"Because they were not watching the sky." Lee corrected. "They were watching the passes. Watching the tree line. Watching the directions that made sense. The attack came from somewhere they never thought to look." He held up one finger. "A shinobi must always be vigilant. If you only guard against the threats you expect, the threat you do not expect will be the one that kills you. Remember that."

The three of them nodded.

Lee turned to Choji. "How is your chakra?"

Choji wobbled a hand. "Low. The Super Expansion Jutsu takes a lot out of me. You got anything to eat."

“No, but I got something else.” Lee put his hand on Choji's shoulder. Chakra flowed from Lee's palm into Choji's body, filling up the reserves that the technique had drained. The Chakra Transfer Jutsu was simple in theory. Pouring your own chakra into someone else. In practice, it required fine control to match your chakra's frequency to the recipient's network, and Lee was quite skilled in chakra control. He held the connection for ten seconds, then fifteen, watching Choji's posture straighten as the energy returned.

"There," Lee said, releasing his hand. "How is that?"

Choji flexed his fingers. Rolled his shoulders. Bounced on the balls of his feet. "Like I didn't even use it. How much chakra do you have?"

"Haha, enough I suppose." Lee rubbed the back of his head. "Let us move. The next camp is reportedly six kilometers north according to Lord Danzo’s spy network."

…

They found the second camp nestled in a canyon, hidden behind a natural rock wall with a single narrow entrance. Hinata counted thirty-five shinobi inside, with lookouts posted on the canyon rim.

"This one is different," Lee said, studying the narrow mouth of the canyon. "The approach is tight. They can hold us off with a few defenders while the rest escape through the back. We need to hit them all at once, before they know we are here."

He turned to Shino. "Can your insects reach them from here?"

Shino adjusted his collar. "Possibly, but I would need more than I have on hand right now. They would need additional chakra to breed rapidly enough for what you’re planning."

Lee put his hand on Shino's shoulder the same way he had with Choji. The chakra flowed longer this time, deeper, a sustained current of energy pouring from Lee's body into Shino's. Inside Shino's body, the kikaichū stirred. Fed on the new chakra, they multiplied. Shino concentrated on the massive amount of chakra. Thousands became tens of thousands. Tens of thousands became hundreds of thousands. The buzzing was audible even from outside Shino's body, a low vibration that made his coat tremble.

Shino's eyebrows rose behind his dark glasses. He said nothing, but the slight incline of his head told Lee everything.

"You got this." Lee nodded.

Shino raised both arms.

The insects poured out of him. From his sleeves, from his collar, from beneath his coat, a dense, living tsunami erupted from his body and swept forward into the canyon. They moved as a single mass, a wall of black that rolled through the narrow entrance and expanded as it entered the wider space beyond. The sound of them filled the canyon, a deep, rushing roar that drowned out the wind and the voices and everything else.

The lookouts on the canyon rim saw the cloud coming. One of them shouted an alarm. It didn't matter. The insects were faster.

The swarm engulfed the camp in seconds. It swept through tents and over supply crates and around every standing figure, coating everything in a layer of crawling, feeding bodies. Stone shinobi screamed and swatted and threw jutsu into the cloud, but it wasn’t enough. An earth wall went up and the swarm flowed over it. A fire technique ignited and took out a few.

In under a minute, it was over.

The squad waited at the canyon entrance. They could hear the buzzing recede as the swarm finished its work and began to return. When Shino lowered his arms, the insects flowed back to him in a dark ribbon, vanishing into his coat, into his skin, settling back into the places they lived.

The canyon behind them was silent.

"Done." Shino said.

Fuki leaned over to Ami. "That was the scariest thing I've ever seen…" She whispered.

"And he's on our side…" Ami whispered back.

Lee smiled. "Excellent work, Shino. Your colony performed beautifully."

"They were well-fed." Shino replied. He adjusted his glasses. "Your chakra is... substantial despite not being able to utilize ninjutsu."

"Thank you! I will take that as a compliment!"

They moved on. Eight of them walked, one of them with a white dog at his heels.

…

The third camp was larger than the first two combined.

It sat on a wide plateau overlooking a river gorge, with stone buildings instead of tents and a wooden palisade around the outside. Hinata counted over a hundred shinobi.

"This one we cannot take quietly." Lee said, crouching behind a boulder on a ridge above the plateau. The squad crouched beside him, studying the camp below. "And we cannot take it in one strike the way we did the others. This will be a fight."

He looked at each of them in turn.

"Here is what we will do," Lee said. "I will go in through the front. When they see me, they will focus on me. That is what I am for." He pointed to the plateau's eastern edge, where the palisade was least guarded. "The rest of you will circle around the camp. When I have drawn their attention, you will hit them from behind. Do not let anyone escape if you can help it. If they run, it’ll make our job much harder."

"Do you really think we’re ready?" Ami asked.

"If I didn’t, I wouldn’t have you here.” Lee reassured her. " Remember to protect each other. Your lives are more valuable to me than our enemies." He looked at his three students. "Use everything I taught you. Show me what you can do."

Fuki cracked her knuckles. Kasumi unstrapped her tonfas.

"Hinata," Lee said. "Guide them in. Tell them where the enemy is and where the openings are. I trust you to be their eyes and a voice of reason."

"Yes, Lee-kun." Hinata nodded.

"Go."

The squad split. Lee went left, toward the front gate of the camp. The others went right, circling wide around the plateau's edge, keeping low against the rock.

Lee reached the front gate two minutes later. It was a wooden double-door set into the palisade wall, reinforced with iron bands, with two guards sitting on stools on either side of it. They were playing a card game on an upturned crate between them.

Lee walked out from behind a boulder and approached the gate at a casual pace. The guards saw him and stood up. They saw the green suit and they looked at each other, and one of them opened his mouth to shout an alarm.

Lee's foot hit him in the chest before the sound came out. The guard went through the gate. The iron-banded wood exploded inward in a shower of splinters and the guard's body tumbled through the wreckage and kept rolling until it hit a stone building fifty meters inside the camp.

The second guard attempted to shout but Lee drove his fist through his stomach and shook the blood off his hand as the man fell.

Lee stepped through the ruined gate and into the camp.

"Good morning. Or is it the afternoon? We’ve been working for a while today… I apologize." He muttered to the Stone shinobi who were now staring at him.

Chaos erupted.

Stone shinobi poured out of buildings and from behind stacked crates. Earth walls rose around the camp's interior as the defenders scrambled to contain the intruder. Kunai and shuriken rained from the rooftops. A volley of earth spikes erupted from the ground beneath Lee's feet.

Lee avoided the earth spikes like they were standing still, weaving left and right and under and over, never stopping. He let them chase him. He let them throw everything they had at the green blur tearing through their camp, and every eye in the compound locked onto him, because you could not look away from someone like that.

A Stone jonin came off a rooftop and dropped toward Lee with a rock-coated fist raised overhead. Lee sidestepped the falling punch, countered with a punch to the throat that closed it shut, and kept moving without breaking stride.

On the eastern wall, Hinata's Byakugan watched everything.

"Now," she said. "The eastern side is empty. They've all moved toward the gate."

The squad went over the wall.

Fuki went first. She sprinted along the top of the palisade, spotted a cluster of Stone shinobi who had turned their backs to the east side to face Lee, and launched herself off the wall feet-first.

"Dynamic Entry!"

Her heel caught a chunin between the shoulder blades and drove him face-first into the dirt. She landed on top of him, rolled forward, came up into a crouch, and her hands were already weaving signs. “Earth Style: Stone Pistol Jutsu.” Three pieces of stone shot out from her mouth and as they flew, they turned into massive boulders that crushed the three nearest Stone shinobi.

Ami came over the wall right behind her. Her chain whip was already out, the weighted end swinging in a wide arc. A Stone shinobi turned toward the commotion and the chain’s tip smashed into his neck. He dropped to his knees clutching his throat that would no longer open, hacking and coughing. Ami stepped over his body and kept moving.

Two Stone genin rushed her at once. Ami ducked under the first one's sword swing, struck the man’s leg with her weighted chain, dropping him with a scream. The second genin came in with a kunai. Ami whipped the chain low, striking him in the gut and sending him flying.

Choji came over the wall and didn't stop. "Partial Expansion Jutsu!" He expanded his right arm to three times its normal size and swung it in a wide horizontal arc. The fist connected with a Stone shinobi's entire body and launched him sideways into two of his comrades. All three of them hit a stone wall and went through it in a shower of rubble.

Kiba and Akamaru hit the ground running. Akamaru transformed mid-leap, a blur of white fur shifting into a perfect copy of Kiba, and the two of them tore into a group of Stone shinobi who were scrambling to attack. They moved as a pair, one going high while the other went low, trading positions so fast the defenders couldn't track which was which. Kiba drove his claws across a shinobi’s neck and the man staggered back into Akamaru, who dug his claws into a man's gut and ripped into him. A Stone kunoichi hurled a volley of shuriken at Kiba's back. Akamaru was already there, slamming into her from the side and sending her sprawling.

"Fang Over Fang!"

The two of them spun, twin drills that carved through the enemy and scattered the Stone shinobi in every direction. Bodies flew. A wooden crate exploded into splinters. Kiba and Akamaru pulled out of the rotation, landed on all fours side by side, and bared their teeth at whatever was still standing.

Not much was.

Hinata dropped from the palisade and landed in her ready stance, palms open, fingers extended. A Stone-nin came at her. She deflected his wrist with her left palm, stepped inside his guard, and drove two fingers into the tenketsu at his right shoulder. His arm went dead. She struck again, three rapid palms to his chest, each one sealing a different point along his chakra network. He crumpled, his chakra network shutting down faster than he could understand what was happening.

Another Stone shinobi tried to catch Hinata from her blind side. She saw him with the Byakugan before he took his second step, pivoted, and delivered a single palm strike to the center of his chest. The impact carried her chakra through his ribcage and into his heart. He went down without a sound.

A third came with a drawn sword, swinging hard at her neck. Hinata swayed under the blade, close enough that it sheared a strand of her hair, and her right hand shot up and pressed two fingers into his elbow joint. The arm holding the sword went limp. Her left palm followed, catching him under the chin with a rising strike that knocked him off his feet and left him flat on his back, eyes rolled white.

Shino stood at the wall and didn't move. He didn't need to. His insects fanned out from him in a thin, almost invisible veil, covering the eastern side of the camp. Stone shinobi who ran toward the wall to escape the fighting found their legs going numb, their chakra draining, their movements slowing. They stumbled and fell and didn't understand why until they saw the crawling black bodies on their skin. Those who collapsed were finished off by his insects devouring all of their chakra.

In the center of the camp, Lee was doing what Lee did.

Three Stone shinobi attacked him at once. The first threw a straight right. Lee caught the fist with his open palm and pulled the man forward, past him, and into the path of the second attacker's earth jutsu. The earth spike meant for Lee went through the first man's stomach instead. Lee released the dead man's fist and closed the distance on the earth user with a single step, driving his left knee into the man's ribs hard enough to fold him in half. The third attacker came from above, dropping off a crate with a kunai in each hand. Lee spun, hooked the man's ankle with his foot as he landed, swept him off his feet, and stomped on his wrist. The kunai clattered free. Lee kicked the man in the jaw and he stopped moving.

A kunai came from his left. Lee leaned right. It passed his ear close enough to cut the air. He traced the throw back to a rooftop, where a Stone kunoichi was already throwing her second one. Lee plucked it out of the air, reversed it, and threw it back. It buried itself in her forehead and she pitched off the rooftop silently.

"Devil-sensei's doing his thing." Fuki said to no one in particular as she kicked a Stone shinobi in the jaw hard enough to spin him off his feet.

Kasumi faced a Stone shinobi, heavyset, with a vest. He'd been barking orders at the defenders when the eastern wall was breached, and now he turned toward Kasumi with a boulder-coated fist and a hostile look as he took in her appearance. That outfit… She had to mean something to that freak attacking their camp.

Kasumi pulled her tonfas forward and prepared to fight. The jonin came at her far faster than she expected, his fist driving forward in a straight line aimed at her chest. She stepped left and deflected the strike with her right tonfa, the weapon ringing against the earth chakra coating on his knuckles. The impact vibrated up her arm hard enough to numb her fingers.

He threw a second punch, a hooking left aimed at her temple. Kasumi ducked under it and swung her left tonfa into his exposed ribs. He took the hit, grunting, and countered with a knee aimed at her stomach that she barely twisted away from. The edge of his knee grazed her hip and sent a bolt of pain through her side.

He was too strong for her at this level.

Kasumi opened the First Gate. Then the Second. Then the Third.

Her skin flushed red. The veins in her neck and arms swelled. The air around her shifted as the limiters came off, and her next movement was several times faster than the one before it.

She went in low. The jonin threw a downward elbow to crush her skull and as it seemingly landed, Kasumi was falling toward the ground. The man’s eyes lit up as the girl in green dropped. Until he realized that something wasn’t quite right…

Kasumi used the core principle of her Soft Fist and as she was hit in the back of the head, she moved with the hit, flipping forward and bringing her heel down on top of his head.

The crack was final.

The jonin's body smashed into the ground and didn't move. Kasumi stood over him with her tonfas at her sides, breathing hard, her red skin already fading as she let the Gates close. She looked at her hands for a moment. Then she looked away from the body and went to help out her comrades.

The camp was falling. Stone shinobi were dying or running, and Lee's squad was driving them toward the center of the plateau. Lee had taken down over a dozen on his own and was making his way toward the last cluster of resistance, a group of seven Stone shinobi who had formed a circle in front of the camp's main building, backs to each other, weapons drawn, holding their ground.

Lee would give them the respect they deserved if they chose to fight to the end.

He walked toward them, giving them a chance to see what was coming and make their choice.

Nobody ran.

Lee came in fast. He dropped the first one with a spinning kick that caved in his skull and sent him skidding across the stone. The second tried to grab him from behind and Lee drove his elbow backward into the man's gut without looking, dropping him. The third and fourth attacked together, one high and one low, and Lee flowed between them, ducking the high strike and jumping the low sweep, and his feet found both of them in the same heartbeat, as he backflipped, his feet landing under their jaws. They flew through the air with shattered jaws.

Three left.

They looked at each other. They knew they were going to die. Lee could see it in their faces. And they chose to fight anyway.

"Earth Style: Stone Pillar Prison!"

Two of them slammed their palms down simultaneously. The ground around Lee's feet liquefied and then hardened in an instant, encasing his ankles in solid stone. Walls of rock shot up on all four sides of him, thick, reinforced, layered with chakra. They rose fast, twelve feet high in under a second, and sealed at the top, forming a stone coffin with Lee trapped inside.

The third man was already running toward the box. He was older than the other two, with grey streaks in his hair, and his hands were moving through a sequence of signs that didn't match any standard earth technique Lee had ever seen.

Inside the coffin, Lee pulled at his legs. The stone around his ankles cracked but held. He punched the wall in front of him and it shattered but soon reformed with even more stone. They'd layered the chakra deep, feeding everything they had into the stone.

"Detonate everything!" the older man shouted at the two who had formed the prison.

"But you're right next to it! You'll-"

"DO IT!"

The two earth users who had formed the prison poured every ounce of remaining chakra into the walls. The stone began to glow orange with the sheer volume of energy being forced into it. At the same time, the older man reached the base of the prison and ripped open his vest, filled with numerous explosive tags attached on the inside.

"DIE YOU LEAF MONSTER!!!"

He detonated in a blinding explosion. The blast blew the older man apart. The two earth users who had formed the prison were thrown backward across the plateau, burned and broken but alive.

The explosion consumed the prison entirely. Where Lee had been standing, there was now a crater of shattered, smoking stone, the rock glowing where the chakra-packed walls had burst. The heat was intense enough to warp the air above it.

The two surviving earth users crawled to their feet. They stared at the crater. Other Stone shinobi who were still alive, five or six of them scattered around the camp's edges, stopped where they were and turned to look.

For a moment, it was quiet.

Then Lee stood up.

He rose from the center of the crater, one leg at a time, pulling his feet free of the cooling stone. His clothes were shredded. The green suit was burned through in a dozen places, hanging off his frame in charred strips. His skin was covered in deep burns that exposed muscle and sinew underneath. A chunk of stone the size of a fist was embedded in his left side, wedged between two ribs. Blood ran freely from wounds across his arms and chest and face.

He looked down at himself.

The burns began to close. The raw, exposed tissue knitted itself together in real time, new skin crawling across the wounds. The chunk of stone in his side shifted, pushed outward by the flesh regenerating around it, and fell to the ground with a wet thud. The hole it left sealed shut in the space of three breaths. The cuts on his arms stopped bleeding and then stopped being cuts. The burns on his face smoothed over, pink and new, and then faded to match the rest of his skin.

Lee's breathing evened out. He rolled his neck, popped his shoulders, and looked at the Stone shinobi who were watching him.

They were frozen. Every single one of them. The look on their faces was the look of people who had just watched something that just wasn’t fair...

One of the two earth users who had built the prison sat down. Placed a kunai to his throat and ended it.

The other one took a step backward. Then another. Then he turned and ran.

"The devil…" someone whispered. It was one of the remaining Stone shinobi, a woman with a broken arm pressed against her chest, staring at Lee with wide, white eyes. "Konoha's Green Savage Devil..."

He cleaned up the remaining Stone shinobi in the camp. They had no fight left in them. A few dropped their weapons and begged. It didn’t save them. Most tried to run. None of them made it past Shino's insects or Hinata's eyes or Kiba and Akamaru running them down or the three girls who were already covering the exits.

When all of the enemies were slaughtered, Lee walked to the eastern side of the plateau where his squad had gathered. They were bloodied and winded and several of them were sporting cuts and bruises, but all seven of them were standing. Kasumi had a gash across her forearm that was healing faster than it should have been. Fuki's knuckles were split. Ami was rewinding her chain whip with hands that shook slightly from the come-down. Kiba had a cut above his eye and Akamaru was licking blood off his muzzle.

Lee stopped in front of them. His suit was in tatters. His skin was clean and whole, every wound from the explosion already healed, and he stood in the ruins of the camp with the sun behind him and he smiled his blinding smile and gave them a thumbs up.

"Excellent work, everyone! That was a splendid display of teamwork and an amazing show of the power of youth! Let us return to camp!"

Choji stared at him. "Lee... you were just on fire."

"I was!" Lee agreed cheerfully. "But I am fine now! Let us move before more Stone shinobi arrive!"

He turned and started walking. After a moment, the rest of them followed. Because what else were they going to do? Stay behind?

Behind them, the camp burned.

[Taijutsu Proficiency +1,890 points!]

[Chakra Control Proficiency +9,873 points!]

[Leadership Proficiency +10,000 points!]

[Teaching Proficiency +7,315 points!]

[Inspire Proficiency +190 points!]

[Shurikenjutsu Proficiency +125 points!]