"That's my Lee!" Gai bawls, the tears flowing freely down his cheeks now.
Fu slides farther back, eyes wide. "Nice!"
"Thank you, kunoichi-san!" Lee replies in kind. He rushes forward again. "And you as well!"
...
On the other side of the arena Noriko is putting the breathing room given to her by Fu's jutsu to full use. She locks her hands into the last seal of her jutsu while Neji is still over two yards away from her and swipes a hand out at him. The veins surrounding his Byakguan pulse, and he leaps to the side. An invisible force rips through the air beside him, leaving a trail of ripples in its wake until it hits the wall on the other side of the arena, cutting another deep scar into the stone.
"She can use wind jutsu, too?" Sakura blurts.
"She probably has a double affinity for earth and wind," Hatake says, tracking the kunoichi as she hurls another wind blade at Neji with one hand while keeping the other held in the last hand seal. "It's pretty rare, but learning to manipulate an element contrary to the one you have an affinity to as a genin is even more so. Isn't that right, Sasuke?"
Sasuke grunts, Sharingan locked onto her hands.
"Are you actually going to be able to use all these jutsu that you're copying?" I ask, turning away from the fight. He shakes his head. "Then why are you bothering?"
"I have a photographic memory while the Sharingan is on," he explains, tomoe spinning. "So I can hold onto any jutsu I copy with it until I'm ready to use them."
"And?" Hatake prods. Sasuke rolls his crimson eyes.
"And knowing how they work will let me counter them whether or not I ever learn how to use them myself."
"Almost. You don't learn anything about a jutsu from copying it aside from how to use it. The benefit will be that you'll know when and what they're about to use before they use it, and act from there." He chuckles. "That particular ability is half the reason why it's said Uchiha can see the future."
Sakura blinks, looking over at him. "You can get all that just by looking at them once?"
"Yes."
I shake my head. "Those pretty red eyes are ridiculous."
"Uh oh," Hatake murmurs before Sasuke can retort, dragging my attention back to the arena.
Neji is still dodging jutsu from Noriko, who's switched from wind blades to earth spikes, and despite the sheer volume of crap being thrown at him he doesn't miss a single step as he weaves through the earthen constructs. He's gaining ground. Not much, but enough for me to notice, and more than enough for the Taki kunoichi to notice by the way she's backing herself up against the arena wall step by step. I look over to the other fight, and my stomach drops.
Lee is stuck in the middle of the arena, doing his best to fend off a distorted water dragon that breaks and reforms into a massive shark that snaps at him when he kicks out at it. He tries to dodge as the jutsu shifts again, this time into a charging bull, but for some reason he's too slow to get out of the way. It clips him in the side of the chest and sends him skidding across the water.
"I… I don't understand." His voice drifts up from the stadium, almost too soft to be heard. He pushes himself to his feet, a faint tremor going through his legs. "Why do I feel so tired?"
"Lee!" Gai calls, and the boisterous genin looks up at us. "Take off the weights!"
"Yes, Gai-sensei!" He gives his head a rough shake, and then bends and pulls down his orange legwarmers.
"What good is tossing some weight going to do?" Sasuke asks. "That jutsu is going to hit him before he even gets them off." Sure enough, the bull has turned itself around and is making another run at Lee, who's too busy unhooking the weights strapped to his ankles to even roll away.
"Lee does not use normal weights," is all Gai says. Lee finishes unhooking the weights on his right leg and lets them drop into the water. He moves on to his left leg while the bull closes in on him, lowering its horns gore him.
My brow furrows. "Those look like normal weights to me. How are they going to-"
Lee drops the second set of weights into the water, the bull lunges forward, and he disappears.
The bull hits the water head first and disperses back into its element, and I gape at where he just was. Beside me, Sasuke's crimson eyes are riveted on a point behind Fu. "I could barely track that," he says, voice tinted with disbelief.
"How heavy did you make those weights, Gai?" Hatake asks, and even he sounds bemused.
"Lee has been building them up since he graduated," Gai says, chest puffed out with pride as Lee flickers around Fu below, breaking her hasty guard punch by unforgiving punch. "He's gotten them heavier than mine were when I was a chunin."
"You can't be serious."
"It's true! He's the brightest example of youthful determination I've ever seen. He's going to surpass me someday, I know it." As if to prove his point, Lee leaps up into the air right then and launches a kick at Fu's head, and when she goes to block it he spins low and kicks her in the stomach.
"Leaf Whirlwind!"
The Taki kunoichi is thrown back, bouncing off the wall and landing on her hands and knees. She shoves herself up to her feet, hunched over and clutching her stomach, and for some reason Lee sits back in his Strong Fist stance and lets her. She sucks in a couple gasps of air, and Lee continues to sit back, apparently willing to wait until she's ready to fight again.
And while he waits, and her hands are concealed by her hunched over position, she flits through three quick hand seals.
I open my mouth to shout a warning, but the kunoichi has already thrown her hands forward. Water springs up from the pool beneath their feet and swirls in her palms, and before Lee can say 'youth' she fires both of them at him. They scream through the air twice as fast as the fin blades did, but Lee just blurs and appears a couple feet to the right.
More water springs up into the kunoichi's hands, and when he charges her again she leaps to the side and fires another round of water bolts at him. They move across the whole arena like that, Lee avoiding the water shots with ease and putting Fu on the constant defensive. She throws a couple of them down at the water beneath their feet, kicking up huge waves of water in an attempt to obscure his vision, but she can't even get another handful of water before he's made it around them and started towards her again.
He pushes her all the way up against the wall, and when she fires another two rounds at him he just spins and destroys both of the bolts with another roundhouse kick. He locks back on Fu, caught halfway through her next two bolts, and surges forward for the finishing blow.
He gets two steps before he stumbles and collapses to one knee.
"What the hell?"
Lee raises a hand up to his face, and I can see it shaking from all the way up here. "Again? I don't…"
Fu lets her jutsu drop and pushes off from the wall, wiping her forehead with the back of her hand. "Jeez, you're crazy. I thought you'd drop a lot faster than that." Lee looks up at her in confusion.
"Wha-?"
"I poisoned you when we shook hands," she explains, smiling mischievously. She wiggles her fingers. "You couldn't feel it because the blade is so thin and harmless. Not so much for the poison."
"I feel tired," Lee murmurs, wavering.
"Yup. You should be out in another minute or so. Though it was only supposed to take three minutes, period, and we're already past that point." She taps her chin. "You don't have a bloodline, do you?" Lee doesn't answer, wavering in place. Her smile softens.
"For what it's worth, I'm sorry I took advantage of your kindness like that. I wasn't expecting to get anyone with that trick."
"She's apologizing," Sasuke murmurs. "Why?"
"Taki and Konoha have been allies for years," Hatake says. "And she isn't loved by her village for nothing. All of the sensei from Taki say she has the charm of a leader to go with the skill." I take a quick look at Gai to see what he thinks of Fu's charm, and find him looking down at Lee with an even, expectant gaze. Almost unworried.
...
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