Lee crouched on a ridge above the northern front and made himself hold still. It was the hardest thing he had done in days.
Below him the battle was dust and noise. He could not pick out faces from up here, only shapes, and the shapes were doing exactly what Shikamaru said they would do. The Sand line bent. It folded. It gave ground, a stumble here, a broken formation there, men dragging wounded comrades back through the sand while the Stone poured after them, greedy, deeper with every meter the Sand surrendered.
It looked like losing. Lee knew it was not losing. He still had to grip his own knees to keep from launching early.
Wait for the signal. He told himself. You promised. Shikamaru and Tessen worked very hard on this. You will not be the reason it falls apart.
His weights sat heavy on his legs. He left them on. There was no reason to take them off for this.
The Stone kept coming. Hundreds of them now, packed tight in the throat of the valley, sure they were chasing a broken enemy into the ground. They had stopped watching their openings. They had stopped watching anything but the backs of the men they were killing.
Then the flare went up from the Sand position. A streak of red against the pale sky.
Lee grinned so wide it hurt.
"YOSH!!!"
He dropped into a crouch, gathered everything in his legs, and threw himself off the ridge into the open air. The rock he had been standing on shattered and slid down the slope behind him. He went up, and up, the wind tearing at his jumpsuit, the whole battlefield opening out beneath him, and at the top of the arc he turned himself over and pointed his heels at the center of the Stone army.
Then he came down.
Kankuro hated running.
He hated it more when he was good at it. His Crow puppet dragged its blades along the Stone ninjas as he pulled it back, poison already working in three men who did not know yet that they were dead, and he sold the retreat with everything he had, made his shoulders sag, made the puppet stutter. Behind him the Sand fell back through the rocks in that same staged shamble.
This is humiliating. he thought, working the threads. We do not run. We have never run. And here we are eating dirt for a Leaf dork's plan.
He gave another step of ground. Another. A Stone earth user threw up a wall to cut off a fleeing Sand squad and Kankuro's Crow spat a cloud of senbon over the top of it, dropping two of the three before they could climb.
The Stone were screaming victoriously. They shoved forward into the gap the Sand kept opening, packing themselves into the valley throat like the whole thing was a door they could break down.
That's it, you bastards. Kankuro thought. Keep coming. Keep attacking.
He could admit, deep inside, that the plan was good. The Nara had read the Stone commander in an afternoon, read that the man's whole game was pushing, and built a trap that asked the Stone to do the one thing they already wanted to do. Push. Push past the line. Push until there was no line left behind them to fall back to.
And then there was the other piece of the plan. The piece Kankuro liked least, because it worked best.
He felt it before he saw it. A pressure overhead. A shadow crossing the sun.
He looked up.
A green dot was falling out of the sky.
There he is… Kankuro thought, and for once he did not have a single clever thing to add. There's that damn monster killer.
He yanked every thread he had and threw Crow and himself flat behind a boulder.
Genshi was having the best day of his life.
He was nineteen and this was his first real skirmish and the desert rats were finally breaking. Two weeks of trading ninjutsu across a dead border, two weeks of his commander promising they would crack, and now it was cracking, the Sand coming apart in front of him while he pushed forward shoulder to shoulder with men who had been doing this since before he was born.
We've got them! he thought, breathless, grinning under the dust caked on his face. We've actually got them. I'm going to walk back home as one of the men who broke the Sand.
He deflected a thrown kunai by slashing it out of the air with a kunai and kept moving. He felt invincible. He felt unstoppable behind his rock and his hundreds of brothers and the running backs of a beaten enemy.
He heard someone shout to look up. He did not understand why anyone would look up when the enemy was in front of them.
He looked up anyway.
Something green was coming down out of the sky very, very fast.
He did not have time to make a defensive jutsu. He did not have time to do anything but take half a step back before the green thing hit the center of them, and the world exploded.
The sound came first and flattened everything else. Then the ground itself jumped. A wall of displaced sand and shattered rock and pieces of men blew outward from the impact in every direction, and Genshi was picked up off his feet and thrown a dozen paces and slammed down on his back hard enough that he could only wheeze afterward.
He lay there. The sky spun. His ears were a single high whine.
When he got his head up the first thing he saw was the crater. It sat where the densest part of the push had been, twenty paces wide, and the men who had been standing in it were not standing anywhere now. They were the red sprayed up the rocks. They were the broken shapes flung to the edges, a leg bent the wrong way here, a man's chest sunken, a man trying to crawl with nothing below his waist to crawl with. Hundreds. The proud front of the Stone, gone in one breath, and the dust still settling.
And in the middle of the crater, rising up out of a crouch, was a boy in a green jumpsuit.
Genshi's whine of an ear finally cleared enough to let the screaming back in.
The boy disappeared. He became a green line that connected one Stone shinobi to the next, and where the line touched, men came apart. A fist went through a chest. A heel took a head sideways off a neck. A spinning kick knocked three men into each other and dropped the pile. There were no hand signs. There was no mud, no rock, no fire, no lightning. Just nothing but pure terrible awful taijutsu. A green blur, faster than anything else on the battlefield, tearing through trained Iwa shinobi as if they were straw dummies in a yard.
No jutsu… Genshi understood immediately. He's not using any jutsu. Green. Bowl cut. Big eyebrows. No ninjutsu, just his hands…
The bingo book page opened in his memory instantaneously.
He had read it on the march, passed around the fire, everyone laughing about the Leaf freak who could not mold chakra. Green jumpsuit. Taijutsu only. A bounty that did not make sense for a chunin until you read the line under the picture.
The man who killed the One Tail's jinchūriki. Konoha's Green Savage Devil. The Tailed Beast Killer.
He's here. On our front. He's HERE.
Genshi legs decided to run for him. He scrambled up and turned and ran, and he was not the first and he was nowhere near the last, and the proud Stone push that had been chasing a broken enemy a minute ago became a stampede going the other way.
The command tent smelled of hot canvas and old maps, and the woman running it tried not to look at Shikamaru once since he walked in.
Tessen was older than he expected, a stern face, grey threading her dark hair, an iron war fan as long as her arm leaning against the table within reach of her hand. She stood over the map and moved the markers herself, and every line of her said she did not keep foreign chunin in her tent and did not intend to start.
"You understand I did not want you in here," she said, finally, not turning around.
"Yeah, I had a feeling…" Shikamaru gave her an unimpressed stare.
"Your captain asked. Personally. The one who killed our jinchuriki stood in my command post and asked me to put a Leaf boy at my elbow, and there is no version of refusing him that ends with my village still standing." She moved a marker. "So you are at my elbow. Stay quiet and do not touch my map."
Shikamaru put his hands in his pockets and watched the markers. "We're allies, lady. I'm not some chunin under your command that you can bark any type of orders at."
She glared at him.
He had given her the plan an hour ago and watched her hate every word of it. Give ground. Sell weakness. Let the Stone think they were winning and walk them into the throat of the valley where there was no room to spread out and no line left to retreat behind. Then drop the hammer into the middle of them.
"Suna does not run." she had said then, and he had watched the words cost her, because a commander who had buried as many men as her markers said she had knew exactly how few she had left to spend.
"You are not running, lady." he had said. "You are choosing where they die. There is a difference, and it is the only one that matters right now."
She continued to glare at him. Then she had moved her own markers into the shape he drew.
Now a runner came through the flap, breathless. "They have crossed the dry bed. All of them. The whole push is past the line."
Tessen's hand tightened on the edge of the table.
"The flare, lady." Shikamaru told her.
She gave the order. Outside, a flare went up.
For ten seconds nothing happened, and Shikamaru waited patiently because this was the part of every plan where it either worked or it did not and there was nothing left for the planner to do but stand there and find out.
Then the ground shook. Even here, a half mile back, the table jumped and a marker tipped over. A sound rolled across the desert that did not belong to any jutsu Shikamaru knew, a single flat crack of impact and then a long roar under it that he slowly understood was screaming.
The runner came back. Then another. The words came in pieces. The center of the push, gone. The Stone breaking. The Devil on the field and the Stone running from him in every direction that was not toward him.
Tessen was already moving markers, snapping orders, wheeling her wind units back around to fold in on the broken push from the flanks. Her tone changed when she spoke to Shikamaru.
"Your plan worked…" she realized.
"I'm glad you can see that now." Shikamaru smirked. "Lee is one of the best kind of pieces a leader can have. Adaptable, useful, resourceful, and a board flipper."
She turned back to the front. "Do not let it go to your head, shadow brat. One good plan is not everything."
Shikamaru ignored her. Maybe… he let himself think. Maybe I'm not as bad a chunin as I thought… Then he went back to reading her map, because the battle was not over and she needed a second pair of eyes whether she wanted to admit it or not.
Sari had stopped being afraid an hour ago. Now she was just furious, and the fury made good fuel.
The signal had turned the whole line around at once, and the shame of the fake retreat poured out of every Sand shinobi on the field as one thing: a counter-charge with everything they had held back. Sari went with it. She ran forward while weaving through hand signs and multiple sharpened winds peeled three Stone nin into pieces.
All around her the Sand were doing the same, men and women who had spent two weeks losing and one minute pretending to lose, and now they were paying it all back at once into an enemy that had lost its nerve.
Because of him.
She could see the green blur from here, a hundred paces off, the eye of the whole storm. The Stone would not face it. They bunched away from it and that bunching shoved them into lethal Sand attacks, and her comrades were winning, really winning, for the first time since the invasion.
I hate this. she thought, cutting down another fleeing Stone nin. I hate that it's him. I hate that we needed him. I hate that my brother is in the ground because of that green bastard.
She pushed too far on the fury. She chased a group of Stone past the edge of her own line and into a pocket of rock, and the group turned out to have an earth user in it, a big one, and she was out of senbon and low on chakra and a half second too slow.
The earth user slammed both hands down. A slab of stone the size of a door tore up out of the ground and swung at her like a fist.
Sari got an arm up. It would not be enough and she knew it would not be enough.
The slab never reached her.
Green crossed her vision. There was a sound like something breaking, very loud and very close, and the earth user's head was suddenly facing the wrong way on his shoulders, snapped past anything a neck was built to do, and his slab of stone lost its master and crashed down dead into the sand a pace short of her feet.
The Stone nin dropped. Lee stood over the body with one leg still extended from the kick that had killed him, and he turned to her, and his face split into an enormous smile in the middle of all that blood.
"Are you alright?" he asked. He sounded delighted. "I can tell you are blazing with the power of youth! Keep it up, you are blooming excellently!"
Then he was gone again, a green streak back toward the thickest fighting, off to save someone else who would hate him for it.
Sari stood there with a flushed face and a loudly beating heart and a Stone corpse cooling at her feet, and she did not have a single word for what she felt, so she screamed it into the next Stone nin she found instead.
"I DIDN'T NEED YOUR HELP, FREAK!"
The field thinned out around Lee. Fewer and fewer of them would stand in front of him, and the ones who ran he let run, because chasing them only spread them out, and spread out was good. He slowed in the churned red sand and let himself breathe.
They hate me. He thought, watching the Sand surge past on either side of him, none of them meeting his eyes, all of them fighting like they had wings. Every one of them but beneath their cursing, I can see their gratitude and burning spirit... A tiny step forward is better than no step at all, Lee figured as he clenched his fist.
He cracked his neck and looked for the next place he was needed.
[Taijutsu Proficiency +740 points!]
[Chakra Control Proficiency +160 points!]
[Leadership Proficiency +205 points!]
[Inspire Proficiency +90 points!]
Renga had taken eleven border posts in two weeks and he understood, standing in the ruin of his army, that he was going to lose all of them.
It had been working. That was the part that would keep him up at night for the rest of his short or long life. It had been working perfectly. The Sand were breaking, his men were inside their line, the whole push had momentum, and then the sky had fallen on the center of his column and turned three hundred men into a crater and a memory.
He did what a commander was supposed to do. He hardened his skin to stone and waded into the rout and threw up walls to break the panic, screaming for them to hold, screaming for ranks, screaming the names of officers who were already dead. Earth answered his hands. The men did not. They flowed past him and around him and through the gaps in his own walls, and the only word he could make out in the noise they made was one he was beginning to hate.
Devil. The Green Savage Devil. The Tailed Beast Killer is here.
He looked for the thing himself. He found it far across the field, a green smear moving through what had been his left flank, and he understood that he would never reach it. The Sand were between him and it. His own fleeing men were between him and it. And even if the field cleared and left the two of them alone, he had watched what that green smear did to his men for the last ten minutes and he was not a fool.
There is nothing here for me to push against. He thought, and the thought tasted like shit.
He gnashed his teeth in frustration and made the only call left to a man who wanted to keep any of his people at all.
"FALL BACK," Renga bellowed. "Full retreat! Back to the Stone line! MOVE!"
They were already moving. He only made it official.
He went last, the way a commander should, walking backward out of the valley with his stone skin taking the few thrown weapons that found him, watching the green dot work until the rocks cut off his view.
This was not over. He promised himself that with every step. One bad day did not end a campaign, and one freak in a green suit, however terrible, was still one man who could only stand in one place at a time. The Land of Stone had more men. It had more time. And next time Renga came down this valley, he would come knowing exactly what was waiting, and he would bring something built for it.
The desert took the sound of the fighting behind him and slowly gave it back to the wind.
It had been one day. This battle had many days left in it.