The thing standing in front of Lee wasn't Rōshi anymore.
The dark red shroud had consumed the old man's body entirely. It clung to him like a second skeleton, forming the outline of something larger than a human, something with the proportions of an ape. Muscle ridged across the surface of the chakra cloak. Four tails whipped behind the figure, each one dense enough to crack the ground where they dragged. The face was gone. In its place was a blank mask of dark chakra with white circles for eyes and a maw lined with teeth.
The heat coming off this new form hit Lee from ten meters away. The grass between them caught fire. The dirt softened. Nearby shinobi from both sides stumbled back from the sudden wave of pressure, the fight around them faltering as Stone and Leaf shinobi alike turned toward the thing that had just been born in their midst.
Lee stood at the Sixth Gate. His skin was flushed red, veins standing out along his arms and neck, the green of his suit darkened with sweat and blood from the earlier phases of the fight.
Rōshi disappeared.
This version of Rōshi was much faster than the earlier Rōshi. His right claw came forward and Lee sidestepped it by a hand's width. The attack hit the ground where Lee had been standing and the earth exploded outward in a ten-meter crater. Dirt and rock sprayed across a cluster of Stone shinobi fighting twenty meters away and two of them went down from the shrapnel alone.
Lee saw it. He saw it immediately.
Rōshi's own comrades were all around them. Within fifty meters in every direction, hundreds of Stone shinobi were locked in combat with Konoha forces. The crater Rōshi had just made with one punch had injured his own people. A chakra arm, a lava technique, any of them would kill dozens of Stone shinobi along with whatever Leaf forces were nearby.
Rōshi knew it too. His follow-up punch pulled short. Not by much. But enough that Lee noticed. The fist that should have been aimed at Lee's chest came in at half extension, and Lee pushed the side of the wrist with one palm and redirected it sideways. The punch tore a trench in the ground instead of hitting anything living.
Lee drove his knee into Rōshi's gut. The Version 2 shroud absorbed part of the impact but Lee felt something give beneath it. Rōshi doubled forward and Lee hammered his elbow down on the back of Rōshi's neck. The ground splintered under Rōshi's feet from the downward force as he refused to drop.
Rōshi's tail whipped around at Lee's legs. Lee jumped over it and landed on the tail itself, using it as a platform to launch himself into a rising kick that caught Rōshi under the chin. The old man's head snapped up and his body followed, lifting off the ground for half a second before crashing back down.
A Stone chunin stumbled into the space between them, eyes wide, not understanding how he got in between these two monsters. Lee grabbed him by the back of his vest and threw him into Rōshi's next attack, turning him into something unrecognizable after it landed.
That was the moment Lee understood the shape of this fight.
Rōshi was stronger than him in Version 2. The chakra output was enormous. Every hit that landed rocked Lee's bones and the ones he blocked numbed his arms. If Rōshi could go all out, if he could use the lava, the chakra arms, the area attacks that Version 2 was built for, Lee would have to open the Seventh Gate just to survive.
But Rōshi couldn't go all out. Because his comrades were right here.
And Lee's taijutsu didn't have that problem. Every punch Lee threw hit one target. Every kick landed on one body. His fighting style could be less destructive at his choice. He could fight in a crowd without killing bystanders.
Lee pressed forward.
He came in low, sliding under Rōshi's wild swing, and drove his fist into the older man's ribs from below. The impact lifted Rōshi's entire body an inch off the ground. Lee spun and caught him across the jaw with a spinning back kick before his feet even settled. Rōshi stumbled backward into a knot of his own shinobi and they scattered, screaming.
Rōshi's claw came back swinging. Lee weaved inside the arc and struck him several dozen times in the chest before the claw could complete its path. Each blow cracked against the chakra shroud and pushed Rōshi back another step. Lee could feel the shroud resisting, eating his punches, but the man underneath was still taking the force. The shroud didn't stop physics. It dulled impact. It didn't erase it.
A chakra arm began to form from Rōshi's shoulder. It extended three meters, clawed and grasping, reaching for Lee's throat. Then it stopped. The arm hung in the air, trembling, and Lee watched Rōshi pull it back. Not because he wanted to. Because twenty Stone shinobi were fighting directly behind Lee and a chakra arm swung at full extension would have torn through all of them.
Lee kicked Rōshi in the face when the old man hesitated.
The pattern repeated. Rōshi attacked. Lee dodged or blocked and countered. Rōshi tried to create space to use his bigger techniques and found his own comrades in the way. Every time he hesitated, Lee was already inside his guard landing another series of blows. Rōshi was getting beaten by a sixteen-year-old who had figured out that the most dangerous man on the battlefield couldn't actually fight on the battlefield. At least, not one like this.
Rōshi's frustration showed in his movement. His strikes were getting wider, less disciplined. He threw a slashing attack that would have taken Lee's head off if it connected. Lee ducked it and the fist passed over him and smashed through a boulder that three Stone shinobi had been using for cover. The boulder disintegrated. The three shinobi were thrown sideways by the shockwave. One of them didn't get up.
Rōshi stared at the body of his own soldier.
Lee hit him again.
Dozens of rapid punches to the gut, a knee to the chin as Rōshi folded, and a hammering axe kick to the top of his skull that drove him face-first into the dirt. The earth cratered. Lee jumped away before Rōshi's tails could catch him on the rebound.
Rōshi pushed himself up. The white eyes of the Version 2 mask stared at Lee with something that had gone past frustration into cold fury. The old man had been fighting wars since before Lee's parents were born. He'd held Son Gokū for four decades. He'd survived things that would have killed any ordinary shinobi ten times over.
And he was losing to a boy who didn't even use ninjutsu. What was that idiotic old man thinking bringing him to a battlefield full of idiots who would only be in his way, stopping him from going all out!?
Something shifted in Rōshi's stance. The cold fury burned away and what replaced it was the stubbornness that Son Gokū said was just like Ōnoki's. The stubbornness of a Stone shinobi who would rather break than bend.
The chakra pressure around Rōshi tripled.
Lee felt it in his bones before he saw it. The deeper shroud expanded. The ape-like outline grew larger, denser. The four tails thickened and lengthened. The ground beneath Rōshi sank as if a mountain was pressing down on it. The heat, already unbearable, jumped to something Lee could feel cooking the moisture in his eyes.
He was transforming.
"GET OUT OF HERE YOU IDIOTS!" Rōshi bellowed.
The Stone shinobi nearest to Rōshi ran. They didn't even need that verbal warning. The wave of chakra that was expanding outward from the growing form was enough of a warning. Leaf and Stone shinobi alike broke from each other and sprinted in every direction as the thing in the center of the battlefield swelled.
Lee's comrades were out here as well.
If the Four-Tails finished transforming here, in the middle of thousands of combatants from both armies, the casualties would be devastating...
Lee opened the Seventh Gate.
The Gate of Wonder tore open in his pelvis and the power hit like a lightning bolt. Green chakra vapor poured from every pore. A bluish aura formed from the evaporating sweat around his body. Lee coiled his legs and launched forward. At Seventh Gate speed his body combusted. The friction of the air against his skin ignited the chakra vapor that surrounded him and he became a streak of bluish-green fire crossing the gap between himself and the growing form of the Four-Tails.
He appeared in front of the man. Both feet together, his entire body weight and every ounce of Seventh Gate power concentrated into a single descending point. A drop kick that hit on the half-formed body of the Four-Tails like a meteor.
The impact was concussive. The area around the point of contact shattered in concentric rings that spread fifty meters outward. The half-formed beast, still growing, still in the process of expanding from Rōshi's human frame into the full gorilla, was sent flying. The burning green foot drove the half-formed beast off the battlefield entirely, sending it hurtling through the sky in a rising arc that cleared the fighting below by hundreds of meters.
Rōshi's body, still mid-transformation, flew nearly a kilometer from the battlefield before gravity remembered it existed.
Lee didn't waste time watching him land. He was already running. The Seventh Gate carried him across the ground at speeds that turned the landscape into a blur of brown and green and gray. He covered the distance in seconds, arriving at the impact site just as the dust was still settling.
The transformation had completed during the flight. What crawled out of the crater wasn't a man anymore.
Son Gokū. The Four-Tails. A massive red-furred gorilla with green skin visible beneath the fur, four tails with protruding spikes along it, horns curving upward from its head like a crown. The beast was gigantic like all of them, towering above the treeline, its yellow eyes burning with a fury that was older than any human war.
It roared.
The sound wave flattened trees for a hundred meters in every direction. Lee planted his feet and leaned into it, the Seventh Gate's chakra keeping him rooted against a wall of sound that would have killed a normal person.
The Four-Tails swung its arm. The fist was the size of a house and it came down where Lee was standing with enough force to reshape geography. Lee kicked off the ground and the fist hit the earth behind him. The crater was deep enough to bury a building.
Lee kicked off the air. The compressed chakra beneath his foot created a shockwave that propelled him upward, and he struck the beast across the jaw with a spinning kick that snapped its head to the left. The Four-Tails staggered, one step, then recovered and swatted at Lee with its other hand.
Lee kicked off the air again, changing direction mid-flight, and came in from the right. His fist, burning with Seventh Gate chakra, struck the beast in the ribs. The beast howled and a tail whipped around to catch him. Lee dropped, the tail passing over his head by inches, and he planted his feet on the beast's own leg and ran up its body before launching himself off its shoulder.
From above, Lee came down with both fists and struck the top of the Four-Tails' skull. The beast's legs buckled. Its knees hit the ground and the impact sent tremors through the earth.
The Four-Tails recovered faster than it should have. It threw its weight forward and the momentum carried it into a roll that nearly crushed Lee beneath it. He kicked off the air at the last second, the beast's body missing him by meters, and the ground where he'd been standing was flattened under tons of chakra-dense flesh.
The beast rose and opened its mouth. Lee could see the volcano-shaped opening at the back of its throat, the place where lava was born. Heat poured out in visible waves and the air between them ignited. Lava erupted from the beast's maw in a torrent that consumed everything in its path. Trees, rocks, the earth itself, all of it melted and burned.
Lee was already moving. At Seventh Gate speed he was faster than the lava stream and he circled wide, the molten rock scorching the ground to his left as he ran a half-circle around the beast's spray. The lava stopped. The beast tracked him with its yellow eyes and swung a tail like a whip.
The tail caught a line of trees and they exploded into splinters. Lee ducked through the debris field, wood fragments bouncing off his body like rain, and came in low toward the beast's legs. His kick hit the inside of the beast's knee and the leg buckled. The Four-Tails stumbled to one side, caught itself on its fists, and pushed off the ground into a leap that carried it thirty meters.
When it landed, the impact shook the earth hard enough that Lee lost his footing for a heartbeat. The beast used that heartbeat. An arm shot toward Lee and caught Lee across the chest. Lee caught the arm before it could be pulled back and he pulled. His Seventh Gate strength against the beast. The arm didn't budge as the beast fought back, so Lee dropped his hold on the creature's fist and shot himself toward the beast's face.
His knee connected with the bridge of the Four-Tails' nose. The beast's head rocked backward. Lee bounced off the impact and kicked off the air above the beast, changing direction again, and struck the back of its neck with both legs. The beast pitched forward.
It was fighting him. It was powerful. It was enormous. But something was wrong with it.
Every attack the Four-Tails threw had a stutter in it. A half-second delay between the windup and the execution, like the body was arguing with itself about whether to follow through. Lee didn't understand why but he didn't need to. A stutter was an opening and this thing was his enemy.
The beast's fist came down and Lee stepped into the gap where the punch hesitated. He struck the beast's forearm with a Seventh Gate punch that cracked the bone beneath the fur. The beast screamed. Its tails whipped in every direction, tearing up the landscape, but Lee was already gone, kicking off the air, circling, coming back in from an angle the beast wasn't covering.
He hit it in the ribs. In the jaw. In the kidneys. In the back of the knee again. Each blow landed with the full weight of the Seventh Gate behind it and each one rattled the beast's massive frame. The Four-Tails was swinging wildly now, its attacks losing coherence, the stutters getting longer and more frequent.
Lee needed to end this.
He landed on the ground fifty meters from the beast. The Four-Tails was on one knee, breathing hard, three of its four tails drooping. Its yellow eyes found him.
Lee punched the ground.
The Seventh Gate's full power channeled through his fist and into the earth. The ground detonated. A shockwave erupted outward from the point of impact, tearing through the soil, and the force hit the Four-Tails from below. The beast was staggered upward, its massive body lifting off the ground as the earth beneath it was destroyed.
Lee leaped.
At Seventh Gate speed, the air ignited around him. He became a streak of green fire rising toward the suspended beast and he struck it once across the jaw. Before the beast could react he was already gone, appearing at its left side and striking the ribs. Then the right side. Then behind it. Then above.
He moved so fast that the image of him hadn't faded from one position before he was already striking from another. To the Four-Tails' eyes, there was no single attacker. There were dozens. Hundreds. Green figures wreathed in flame, suspended in the air on every side, each one mid-strike. Above, below, left, right, behind, in front, at angles that shouldn't be possible for a creature bound by gravity.
"Mad Dance of a Thousand Leaves!"
Every strike was a Seventh Gate punch. Every impact easily carried enough force to destroy mountains. And there were hundreds of them, landing in what felt like a single drawn-out instant, a barrage so dense and so fast that the beast couldn't distinguish individual blows. Its body was hit from every conceivable direction at once. Bones cracked. Ribs broke. The flesh beneath the fur dented and ruptured from accumulated trauma.
The beast crashed to the ground.
The earth split open when it landed. A crater so deep that water began seeping from the broken rock at the bottom. Dust and debris exploded upward in a column that was visible from the battlefield a kilometer away.
Lee landed at the edge of the crater. His body was screaming. His arms were shaking. His skin was raw and cracked and bleeding from the sustained combustion. Body Supremacy was already working, he could feel it, the slow knitting of torn muscle and split skin, but the damage was extensive.
Below him, in the bottom of the crater, the Four-Tails lay on its side. Its chest was rising and falling. Its eyes were closed. Three of its tails were bent at wrong angles. The red fur was matted with blood where Lee's strikes had broken the skin and what was beneath.
Then the eyes opened.
But they were different.
The rage that had been driving the beast, the wild fury of the fight, was gone. What looked up at Lee now was something else. It was like when he was fighting Gaara and then that other voice came out.
The beast moved. Slowly. It rolled onto its stomach and pushed itself up on its forearms. Its yellow eyes locked onto Lee and they studied him with an intelligence that hadn't been present a moment ago.
When it spoke, the voice wasn't Rōshi's.
It was deeper. Older.
"So the old fool finally couldn't hold on anymore." The words rumbled from the beast's throat. The volcano-shaped opening in its mouth glowed faintly with residual heat.
Lee didn't relax. His fists were still raised. His body was still at the Seventh Gate even though he could not sustain this level of fighting forever.
"You're not Rōshi." Lee realized.
"No." The beast's eyes were calm. "Rōshi is asleep. The stubborn old man finally took a blow he couldn't will himself through." A rumble that might have been a laugh. "You did that. Human."
Lee didn't lower his guard. He'd learned from Shukaku that tailed beasts didn't stop fighting just because their host was unconscious.
"Are you going to keep fighting?" Lee asked.
"Hmph." The beast lifted its head higher and looked down at Lee with something that wasn't hostility. It was something closer to curiosity, mixed with the kind of arrogance that came from being ancient. "I am Son Gokū, the Great Sage Equalling Heaven. The Handsome Monkey King of the Water Screen Cave. I did not choose this war. The old man dragged me into it." The beast's lip curled. "Without asking."
Lee stared up at it, his fists slowly lowering.
"You broke his willpower," Son Gokū continued. "Every punch you landed rattled his focus. Every bone you cracked made it harder for him to hold me down. I have been fighting him from the inside while you fought him from the outside." The beast's eyes narrowed. "So I suppose I owe you something, human. For the first time in a long time, I can feel the wind without a cage around me."
"...You're welcome?" Lee said, because he genuinely did not know what else to say to a giant talking monkey that had just stopped trying to kill him.
"Do not thank me," Son Gokū said sharply. "I owe you. Not the other way around. And I am leaving. This war is not mine. It was never mine." The beast began to rise, its massive form pulling itself out of the crater with movements that were suddenly graceful instead of violent. "I have no interest in your village, or the Stone village, or any of the human kingdoms that have enslaved my kind for generations. I am going somewhere that none of you will find me."
The beast paused at the edge of the crater and turned one enormous yellow eye toward Lee. "You are abnormally strong for a young human. But do not make the mistake of thinking that means I am interested in you. All humans want the same thing from my kind. Power. I have had enough of being someone's weapon."
"I don't want your power," Lee shook his hand back and forth. "I was just trying to..."
Son Gokū turned away. The conversation was over. The great red gorilla moved through the destroyed landscape, each step covering thirty meters, and within seconds it was at the treeline. Within a minute it was gone, a red shape disappearing over the hills to the west, leaving behind a trail of flattened trees and deep footprints in the earth.
Lee stood at the edge of the crater and watched it go.
He closed the Seventh Gate.
The power drained out of him like water from a broken vessel. Everything hurt. His arms, his legs, his ribs, the line across his chest where the chakra arm had burned him. Body Supremacy was working but it wasn't fast enough to make standing comfortable.
He sat down on the edge of the crater because his legs made the decision for him.
The One-Tail had talked to him too. Back during the Chunin Exams, when Shukaku had surfaced during the fight with Gaara. That beast had been hostile, unreasonable, full of spite and murder and the desire to crush everything in front of it. Lee hadn't gotten the impression that conversation was possible with Shukaku. The tanuki wanted to destroy. That was the beginning and end of its personality.
This one was different. Son Gokū hadn't tried to continue the fight. It had thanked him. In its own arrogant, dismissive way, the beast had expressed something that looked like gratitude before leaving. It didn't want to fight. It didn't want to destroy. It wanted to be left alone.
Lee hoped it would be. Konoha couldn't spare anyone to chase a tailed beast right now. Three villages were trying to destroy them. If all Son Gokū wanted was to go sit in a cave somewhere and not bother anyone, that was a problem for after the war. Or never. Lee didn't know the political implications of a tailed beast going free. That was above his rank as a simple special jonin.
What he did know was that Rōshi was gone. The Stone front had just lost one of its two jinchuriki. And the battlefield was still going on behind him, filled with his students and his comrades and his friends who were fighting without him.
He stood up. His legs protested. He stood up anyway.
Body Supremacy would handle the rest. It always did.
Lee turned toward the distant sounds of war and started running back.
[Taijutsu Proficiency +12,000 points!]
[Eight Gates Proficiency +18,000 points!]
[Water Style Proficiency has reached the next level!]
[Water Style Proficiency +7,500 points!]
[Chakra Control Proficiency +2,500 points!]
[Bojutsu Proficiency +700 points!]
[Chain Mastery Proficiency +550 points!]
[Tonfa Mastery Proficiency +450 points!]
[Nunchaku Mastery Proficiency +650 points!]
[Inspire Proficiency has reached the next level!]
[Inspire Proficiency +8,500 points!]
[Leadership Proficiency +950 points!]