Six weeks after the invasion, Konoha was still putting on a strong front.
The front was the most important work the village did. The walls were going back up, the roofs were being patched, the craters in the streets were being filled, but none of that was the real labor. The real labor was the appearance of strength. A village that had lost its Hokage and a lot of its active roster in a single afternoon could not afford to look like a village that had lost its Hokage and that roster. So the survivors worked twice as hard to make the wound invisible.
Shinobi who had never operated above their station were sent on missions above their station. Chunin took jonin assignments. Genin took chunin assignments. Iruka Umino, who had not seen a field posting in years, was pulled from the Academy and sent out, because a body that could throw a kunai was a body that was needed on a mission, and the village needed every mission fulfilled.
The elders ran it all.
Homura Mitokado and Koharu Utatane handled the day-to-day, the assignments, the logistics, the endless triage of too few people against too many demands. Danzo Shimura handled the parts that did not go in the official record. Between the three of them, they were the closest thing Konoha had to a leader, and all three of them knew it was a stopgap that could not hold forever.
Danzo Shimura intended to be the thing that replaced it.
He had never been quiet about wanting the hat, and he was not quiet about it now. He had run against Hiruzen Sarutobi for the Third's seat a lifetime ago and lost, and he had spent every year since certain the wrong man had worn it, that the village's long drift toward diplomacy and forgiveness had been a slow wound a harder hand would have closed. Now the soft man was dead, killed in the open by an enemy his mercy had let live, and three borders were heating up at once. If anything had ever proven that Konoha needed a Hokage who ruled by strength instead of sentiment, Danzo believed, it was this, and he believed he was the only man alive built to be that Hokage.
He pressed it where pressing it mattered. With the Fire Daimyo's people. With the council. The law was plain: a Hokage's chair was filled by the daimyo and the council and the jonin commander, and then put to the village's jonin for approval.
It was that last part he did not say aloud, and that Homura and Koharu were careful not to say to him. The chair could be argued for in every room but one. The jonin raised their hands for a name they trusted, and in thirty years of building Konoha's darkness in the places no one was meant to look, Danzo had made himself feared, and useful, and by his own accounting necessary. He had never once made himself loved. A village did not hand its heart to the man it called the Shinobi of Darkness behind his back.
Because the wolves were circling.
Cloud had pushed aggressive patrols south into the Land of Frost and shown no sign of pulling them back. Their Byakugan extraction had failed during the invasion, and a failed theft did not make the Raikage less hungry. It made him angrier. Stone was probing the southern borders, leaning on Grass and Waterfall, testing how much weight Konoha could still push back against. Mist watched from across the sea and waited for an opening. Suna, gutted by the same invasion they had helped start, had no Kazekage and no jinchuriki and could offer Konoha neither help nor threat.
Everyone with a reason to strike had a reason to strike now, while the Leaf was on one knee.
And almost no one did.
There were two reasons for that, and the elders understood both of them precisely. The first was the name moving through the back channels toward Konoha: Tsunade of the Sannin. A legend. A name that meant the village might have a leader again, and not a weak one, and the rumor of it alone was worth a regiment. Jiraiya had gone to find her and bring her home to the hat. What the elders did not say past their own door was that Tsunade had agreed to nothing, that she was the one Sannin who had spent the better part of her life running, and that Jiraiya had been gone for weeks now without a word.
The second reason was a boy in a green jumpsuit.
"His tactical instincts are the question," Homura said. "Not his strength. His strength is settled. The question is whether he can lead."
The three of them sat in the assignment office with a stack of mission reports between them, all of them stamped with the same name.
"He's fourteen," Koharu said. "A genin. We cannot promote a genin to chunin without a Hokage to authorize it."
"We can prepare the case." Homura tapped the stack. "Whoever ends up in that chair, the first thing they will want is a list of who is ready to rise. I intend for his name to be at the top of it, with a file thick enough to sign without debate."
Danzo said nothing. His single eye rested on the stack of reports, and on the name stamped across every one of them. A Hokage who commanded the loyalty of the strongest weapon the village had ever produced would be a Hokage no one could move against. He intended to know exactly what the weapon was.
The plan was simple, and it had been Danzo's. Run Rock Lee through every command structure the village had. Put him in charge of those beneath him. Put him beneath those who outranked him. Put him shoulder to shoulder with peers. Watch how he moved in each position. A chunin was not a strong genin with a new vest. A chunin was a shinobi who could think past their own fists, who could carry other people's lives without dropping them, who could look at a battlefield and see more than the enemy in front of them.
If Rock Lee could do that, he would have the rank the moment there was a hand to sign for it.
If he could not, the village would learn it now, in skirmishes, rather than later, in a war.
The girl, Tenten, was a different matter. She had supposedly killed Araumi Funato by herself and held a flank against Cloud with Lee, and the elders had read every word of those reports. But in their eyes she remained, undeniably, a genin. Skilled. Promising. Not a candidate. The evaluation was not hers. She would be run on her own missions.
The first mission, they gave Lee command of three genin.
Tenten went with him as his second-in-command, while Lee shepherded two fresh Academy graduates through a C-rank that had been bumped to B-rank because everything was being bumped these days. Bandits in the Land of Fire's eastern farmland, preying on the harvest caravans the village could not spare proper escorts for.
Lee did not fight most of it himself. That was the point, and he understood it. He positioned the genin. He gave them tasks sized to their ability. He let the nervous one and the cocky one take on a missing-nin genin under close supervision and Tenten to watch the rear. When one of them froze at the sight of blood, Lee did not yell. He put a hand on the boy's shoulder, told him that freezing was a thing that happened to everyone the first time, and that the measure of a shinobi was not whether he froze but whether he moved again afterward. Then he sent him back in.
The boy could fight again afterward.
Nobody died. The caravan got through. Tenten watched Lee lead them through a fight without losing any of them and said, on the road home, that he was surprisingly a good captain.
Lee said he had a good teacher to thank for it. They both knew who he meant.
…
The second mission, they put Lee under a group of chunin.
This was the harder test, and the elders knew it. A prodigy who could win any fight himself had to learn to stand in formation and take orders from people he could, physically, have flattened. Border reinforcement in the Land of Fire's north, a four-chunin cell with Lee attached, holding a line against Stone nin who infiltrated deeper than they should have.
Lee held his position. He did not freelance. When the cell leader, a reliable chunin named Tatsumi who had ten years on him and a fraction of his raw power, gave an order Lee thought was too cautious, Lee voiced the concern once, quietly, and then followed the order when it was upheld. He carried his assigned section of the line and not an inch more. When the Stone-nin attempted to extract intel and were repelled, it was the cell's plan that repelled them, executed by the cell, with Lee as one moving part among five.
Tatsumi's report noted that the boy was disciplined, took correction without ego, and understood the difference between being the strongest person present and being in charge. He wrote that he would serve under or over Rock Lee without hesitation.
The elders added it to the file.
…
The third mission, they slotted Lee into a jonin-led squad as a peer.
A jonin, two chunin, and Lee. A retrieval deep in contested territory near the Waterfall border, the kind of operation where the margin for error was thin and the enemy was life-threatening. Lee operated as a professional among professionals. He pulled his weight, offered input when it was useful and held his tongue when it was not, and when the operation went briefly sideways and the jonin took a wound, Lee covered the extraction without being told and without trying to seize command that was not his to take.
The jonin's report was three lines long. It said that Rock Lee was already a chunin in everything but the vest, and that the village was wasting a resource by waiting.
The elders read all three reports together, on an evening six weeks into the long pretending, and Homura set them down and looked at the other two.
"He's ready."
"He's ready," Koharu agreed.
Danzo said nothing. But he did not disagree.
"One more," Homura said. "Give him a command of his own squad. An A-rank. Something that will actually test him. If he handles it the way he's handled everything else, the case is closed, and the day this village has a Hokage in that chair again, Rock Lee gets his promotion before the ink is dry."
There was an A-rank waiting that fit.
The Land of Grass.
Stone had been pushing into the Land of Grass for weeks.
It was a softer kind of invasion. A patrol here. An outpost there. A slow accretion of Iwagakure forces along the border, each individual movement small enough to deny, the whole of it adding up to a force that Grass, a small country, could not dislodge. Onoki was testing. Probing the line to see how much of the southern frontier Konoha could still hold while it bled.
The estimate put the Iwa force at roughly a hundred shinobi, spread across a string of forward positions, with a concentration at an old border fortification the maps called the Gate of Grass, a stone chokepoint where the trade road passed between two ridges.
The mission was suppression. Drive the Iwa forces back across the border. Make the cost of probing the Land of Grass higher than Onoki wanted to pay.
They gave it to Lee, with a squad of four chunin under his command.
He briefed them the night before, in a camp two ridges back from the chokepoint, by the light of a single shielded lantern.
"A hundred enemies," Lee said. He had a map spread on the ground, weighted at the corners with kunai. "Maybe more. There's five of us. So we will not win this by trading blows. We will win it by making them fight the battle we choose instead of the battle they choose."
The four chunin watched him. They knew who he was. They had heard the stories. None of them had worked under him before, and all of them were privately wondering whether the legend was going to get them killed.
"I am the front," Lee said. "When this begins, every eye on that line is going to be on me. That is what I am for. I will hold their attention at the chokepoint and give you the room to do the real work." He moved a kunai across the map. "We have three plans, and which one we use depends on what they do when they see me."
He laid them out.
"Plan one. If they decide to fight, you raise a sealing barrier across the mouth of the chokepoint behind them. You trap them inside, with me. Once they are sealed in, they have nowhere to go and no way to bring up reinforcements, and I will handle what is inside." He said calmly. "Only enter the barrier if I give the signal. Understood?"
Four nods.
"Plan two. If they break and run, they will run back the way they came, north, toward the border. So before any of this begins, tonight, we booby-trap the northern approach. Explosive tags, wires, pit traps, all of it. If they flee, they flee into a trap we built in advance, and we weaken them as they go." Another kunai moved. "This is the one I think they'll choose personally."
"Plan three." His voice changed, just slightly. "If it goes wrong. If I fall or if the enemy turns out to be something we did not plan for, you do not avenge me and you do not try to win. You withdraw. You take the intelligence we have gathered and you get it back to Konoha. I will buy you the time to run. That is an order, and it overrides every other order I give. Is that clear?"
The chunin glanced at each other. It was not a thing they were used to hearing from a commander. Most commanders did not plan for their own deaths out loud and then tell their squad to leave the body.
"Understood." the senior of them said.
"Excellent." Lee smiled and rolled up the map. "Then let us go get everything prepared. Plan two is going to need a great deal of explosive tags."
They worked through the night.
The Iwa force at the Gate of Grass numbered ninety-three.
They were not an elite unit. They were a probing force, a mix of chunin, genin, and a handful of jonin, sent to lean on a soft border and report back on how hard Konoha pushed against them. They had been told to expect a Leaf response, stretched thin like everything Konoha fielded these days, the kind of force a hundred Iwa shinobi could deal with easily.
They had not been told about a tailed-beast killer.
Intelligence is the thing that wins battles before they start, and the intelligence that reached this particular probing force had a hole in it exactly the size of one boy. Onoki knew what Rock Lee was. Most people in the Elemental Nations knew. But that knowledge had not traveled down to the ninety-three shinobi standing at a chokepoint in the Land of Grass at dawn, because no one had expected the boy who killed the One-Tail to be sent to suppress a border probe. You did not use a sledgehammer to swat a fly. The Leaf, surely, would send something proportionate.
The Leaf sent Rock Lee.
He came up the trade road alone, on foot, at first light, while his four chunin took their positions in the rocks above and behind the Iwa line. The Iwa sentries saw a single figure approaching and called it up the line, and the line formed, ninety-three shinobi spreading across the chokepoint in a loose wall, more curious than alarmed. One boy. Green jumpsuit. Walking up the road toward a hundred enemies like he was out for a stroll.
"Is that it?" one of the Iwa jonin said. "One child?"
"Bait, has to be. Where's the rest of them?"
Lee stopped a hundred meters from the line.
He looked up at the wall of shinobi. He did not draw a weapon. He did not take a stance. He simply stood there, in the middle of the road, and let them look at him.
Then he opened the gates.
The first three came fast, one after another. His skin flushed. His pupils vanished. His hair lifted. The fourth came, and the muscles in his arms drew tight, and the fifth, and the ground beneath his feet cracked from the pressure building in his body. The sixth opened and a green aura bloomed off his skin like a flame catching in still air, and the loose stones around him began to lift and drift in the updraft of his own chakra.
The Iwa line had gone speechless with mouths hung open.
Lee opened the seventh.
The Gate of Wonder.
The aura exploded outward into a roaring blue corona that turned the dawn light strange. Blue sweat evaporated off his skin the instant it formed, feeding the aura, thickening it, until the boy in the road was no longer quite visible inside the fire of his own power. The pressure wave reached the Iwa line a half-second later, and the front rank felt it in their teeth, in their chests, in the animal part of the brain that had kept their ancestors alive by knowing, without thinking, when they were standing in front of something that could kill them.
A hundred meters away, a fourteen-year-old boy stood wrapped in blue, his skin red, his eyes white and empty, and every shinobi on that line understood, all at once and without a word being spoken, exactly what they were looking at.
Konoha's Green Savage Devil.
The boy who killed a tailed beast with his hands.
And they had come with a probing force. A border patrol. A unit briefed to bloody a tired suppression squad and go home. They had no plan for this. No formation built to contain it, no jutsu prepared to counter it, no orders that accounted for the possibility that the Leaf would throw the monster of the elemental nations at a border skirmish.
If they had known, they would have come differently. They would have brought their jonin elite, their sealing teams, their own answer to a Gates user. They would have planned for it, and a hundred prepared Iwa shinobi could have fought a single Lee and made it a battle.
They had not known.
So they ran.
It was not a decision any one of them made. It was a decision all of them made at the same instant, the way a flock of birds turns without a leader. The front rank broke first, and the break ran backward through the line like a crack through glass, and in the space of three seconds the wall of ninety-three Iwa shinobi at the Gate of Grass dissolved into ninety-three individuals sprinting in every direction that was not toward the boy in the blue cloak.
Up in the rocks, the four Konoha chunin watched their meticulously planned operation become irrelevant.
"They're…" the senior chunin started.
"They're running, they're just. Running."
"The barrier," the first one said. "Plan one, do we seal them in?"
"Seal them in with HIM? Are you insane? That's not a trap, that's an execution. We'd be feeding them to-"
"Plan two! The kill zone, they're running north, they're-"
But they were not running north. Not exactly. That had been the assumption, that a routed enemy would flee back the way they came, into the prepared ground. But this was not an orderly retreat. This was a hundred-man panic, and panicking men do not run in tidy directions toward convenient kill zones. They ran everywhere. East into the ridges. West into the trees. A scattered handful did go north and hit the wire and the tags, and the dawn cracked with a string of explosions that took perhaps a dozen of them, but the rest simply scattered into the Land of Grass like spilled water, every man for himself, the unit ceasing to exist as a unit somewhere in the first ten seconds.
Lee stood in the road in the seventh gate with his fists half-raised and absolutely nothing to hit.
The plan he had spent the entire night building, the three-pronged plan, the careful delegation, the kill zone, the barrier, the contingency for his own death, all of it had assumed there would be a battle. He had prepared to fight a hundred shinobi. He had prepared, if it came to it, to die fighting a hundred shinobi.
He had not prepared for a hundred shinobi to take one look at him and leave.
He let the gates close, one by one, the blue aura dispersing, the red draining from his skin, his hair settling, until he was just a fourteen-year-old standing alone on an empty road with a dozen scattered explosions still echoing off the ridges and ninety-three sets of footprints fleeing in ninety-three directions.
His four chunin climbed down from the rocks and walked out to join him in the road.
For a while, none of them said anything.
"So," the senior chunin finally said. "That was the mission."
"Mission complete team!" Lee gave them a thumbs up.
"They just left…"
"We spent six hours rigging that kill zone…"
"What the fuck?"
The chunin looked at the empty chokepoint. At the drifting smoke. At the boy beside him who had, without throwing a single punch, suppressed a hundred-man Iwa incursion and driven Stone back across the Grass border by the simple act of showing up and getting serious.
"I'm going to be telling this story for the rest of my life," the chunin said. "And nobody is ever going to believe me."
Lee scratched the back of his head, suddenly sheepish.
"We should still check the area," he said. "And recover our explosive tags. Some of them did not go off. Those things are not cheap…"
They recovered the tags.
The mission was logged as a complete success. Objective achieved. Enemy forces suppressed and driven back across the border. Casualties on the Konoha side: zero. Casualties on the enemy side: unknown.
The elders read the report and added it to the file, and the file was now thick enough to make a Hokage sign without debate.
In a tavern in the Land of Fire, three weeks later, a Konoha chunin named Renji was four drinks deep and telling the story for the fourth time that night.
"A hundred of them," Renji said, to a table of off-duty shinobi who had heard him say it three times already and were no longer entirely sure of the number. "A hundred Iwa nin. Lined up across the whole chokepoint, wall to wall. And it's just us. Five. Me, three other chunin, and the kid."
"Rock Lee." somebody said.
"Konoha's Youthful Green Noble Beast." Renji raised his cup like he was toasting. "Now, I'd heard the stories same as everybody. Killed the Sand jinchuriki, killed a tailed beast, all of it. Figured it was half exaggeration. Nobody's that strong at fourteen." He drank. "I was wrong. I was so wrong."
He leaned in. The table leaned with him.
"He walks up the road. Alone. A hundred enemies in front of him and he doesn't even slow down. Stops in the middle of the road, looks up at all of them, and then." Renji spread his hands. "The gates. One after another, all the way up. Skin goes red. Eyes go white. And then this fire, this blue fire, comes pouring off him until you can't even see the kid inside it anymore. Rocks shooting away from him. The whole ground shaking. And I'm up in the cliffs and I can feel it in my chest from a hundred meters away. It was like feeling the Nine-Tails all over again."
"What'd the Iwa nin do?"
Renji paused for effect. He had learned, over four nights of telling this story, exactly how long to pause.
"They ran," he said. "All of them. Every single one. A hundred Stone shinobi took one look at that boy and forgot they had legs, then remembered all at once. Didn't throw a single jutsu. Didn't throw a single kunai or shuriken. They just turned around and ran like the Shinigami himself had come up that road." He sat back. "We had this whole plan. Barriers, traps, the works. Spent all night on it. Didn't use a bit of it. Didn't have to. The Green Noble Beast used his forbidden jutsu and a hundred men decided they had somewhere else to be."
The table was quiet for a moment.
"You're shitting me." someone said, without much conviction.
"I am not exaggerating." Renji's voice dropped as he made his voice sound serious. "I'm underselling it. I don't have the words for what it actually looked like. I've been a shinobi most of my life. I've seen jonin fight. I've seen things that would turn your stomach. I have never in my life seen anything like that boy standing in the road while a hundred enemies ran from his shadow." He looked into his cup. "And he's fourteen. And he was embarrassed afterward. Apologized that we didn't get to fight. Made us pick up our explosive tags." He shook his head slowly. "I don't know what he's going to be when he grows up. But I'm glad he's one of us."
In a different country, in a Stone outpost on the far side of the Grass border, a different man told a different version of the same story.
He was Iwa. He had been at the Gate of Grass. He did not drink to celebrate. He drank to sleep, because when he did not drink he saw it again every time he closed his eyes.
"You weren't there," he said to the young Iwa chunin across from him, who had made the mistake of asking why a hundred-man unit had come home as eighty with nothing to show for it. "So don't. Don't look at me like that. You weren't there."
"It was one Leaf brat," the young chunin said. "The reports said one. You're telling me a hundred of us ran from one."
"I'm telling you we ran from the Green Savage Devil." The older man's hands were not quite steady on his cup. "There's a difference. You ever hear what he did to the Sand's One-Tail? He killed it. A tailed beast. Fourteen years old, can't use a single jutsu, and he beat a tailed beast to death with his bare hands. That's not a shinobi. That's a fucking monster."
He drank.
"We thought we were chasing off a tired patrol. That's what they told us. Easy border work, the Leaf's bled white, send them home with a few corpses. Then this kid walks up the road by himself and lights up like the sun, and I swear to you, on my mother, I have never in my life felt anything like standing in front of that. Your body knows. Before your head catches up, your body already knows you are going to die if you stay. So you don't stay." His jaw tightened. "I am not ashamed. Every man on that line ran. Jonin included. The ones who tell you they wouldn't have are the ones who weren't there."
"They've raised the bounty," the young chunin said quietly. "On him. After Grass. It's higher than some men that have been alive for twice his age."
"Good." The older man set down his cup. "Let some fools go try to collect it. Let them find out what we found out." He looked at the younger man across the table, and his eyes were the eyes of someone who had seen the edge of something and stepped back from it. "There's a green light coming for the elemental nations, kid. Konoha's bleeding now, sure. But they've got that boy, and in a few years that boy is going to be the strongest thing alive if someone doesn't kill him."
He did not say anything else.