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[— Manga Scene —]
'Sand? He can control sand?' Sakura thought in shock as she stared at Gaara's defense for the first time.
'What a strange jutsu.' Kakashi said as he watched Gaara's ability with a sharp eye.
'He has sand in the gourd?' Naruto stared in confusion as he tried to understand where the sand was coming from.
'Damn it!' Rock Lee cursed inwardly in frustration as he kept charging rapidly toward Gaara.
'He hasn't moved even a single step…' Rock Lee thought sharply as he noticed that Gaara had not changed his position despite Lee's relentless assault.
"Damn it! Hah! Hah! Hah!" Rock Lee cursed again as he panted for breath after his first attempt failed to bear fruit.*
"Lee-san's fast attacks haven't worked at all!" Sakura said anxiously as she watched the fight from the balcony.
"What's going on? The attacks are useless…" Naruto said in bewilderment as he watched Lee's attacks dissolve in front of Gaara.
"Physical attacks don't affect him. No matter what Gaara does, the sand will protect him." Kankuro said with analytical coldness as he explained the mechanism behind Gaara's defense.
"That's why no one has ever been able to hurt Gaara…" As he said that, the deep fear on Kankuro's face could clearly be seen.
"Why is Lee-san using only taijutsu? Winning with taijutsu will be difficult for him. If he backed off and used some ninja techniques instead…" Sakura asked in confusion as she turned to Gai, asking for an explanation.
"It's not like that. The simple truth is that he can't use them… Lee has no talent for ninjutsu."
"When I first met Lee, he had no talent for anything. No talent at all."
Gai said with a sincere expression.
"Impossible! I can't believe that!!" Sakura cried out in shock.
[— End Scene —]
The moment the scene ended, a brief silence settled over the corner where Might Dai and Gai were sitting in front of the open copy of the volume.
It was not the silence of emptiness, but the kind of silence suddenly filled with too many things at once: astonishment, admiration, and the weight of a confession no one had expected to be spoken with such blunt honesty.
Just moments earlier, the battle had looked, in the eyes of the spectators, like a contest of speed against a strange defense.
But now the page had become something else entirely. It was no longer merely a question of whether Rock Lee could touch Gaara, but of what it truly meant for someone like Lee to have reached this arena while possessing no talent for ninjutsu.
Young Gai's eyes widened so much that he nearly forgot to blink.
His breathing became a little uneven, not because he had run or shouted, but because the scene had struck somewhere very deep inside his heart.
He stared for a long time at the final two lines, at the future Gai's blunt confession, and at Sakura's shock, which to him seemed like the shock of everyone who had not truly understood Rock Lee until this very moment.
"So… this is the secret," Gai said in a low voice, unusual for him, while tightening his hand around the edge of the volume.
"It wasn't just that Lee trained hard… it's that he never had anything else to begin with."
Dai looked at his son and saw that the excitement blazing inside him moments ago had taken on a deeper shape. It had not disappeared, but it had suddenly matured.
That light now shone in his eyes, the kind that appears when admiration transforms into understanding.
"Yes," Dai said more quietly than usual, his smile fading slightly to make room for a rare sincerity.
"Now every one of Lee's movements carries a different weight, doesn't it? When you see a boy charging ahead with that kind of courage, you may admire his speed. But when you learn that he reached this point without any talent for ninjutsu… then you no longer see mere speed."
"You see entire years of rejection, exhaustion, and perseverance."
Dai himself felt an almost unimaginable bond with Lee… because after all, he too had never possessed any talent related to ninjutsu, and even at his age, his chakra level was still only that of a genin…
The only fighting style he knew was taijutsu. That was why he had begun to see himself, when he was young, in Lee.
And the same applied to his son Gai as well, though to a lesser degree, since Gai himself was not especially gifted in ninjutsu either.
Gai swallowed with difficulty. He was staring at Rock Lee's image as he panted after his first failed attack, and he no longer saw that expression the way he had moments earlier.
The first time, it had looked to him like the face of a fighter who had crashed into an unexpected obstacle. But now, it had become the face of someone who had been colliding with obstacles from the very beginning, and then rising again every single time.
'If Lee truly had no talent at all…' Gai thought, gritting his teeth.
'Then how many times did he have to fall? And how many times did he get back up before becoming the person now standing in front of Gaara?'
"Father…" Gai said at last, without lifting his eyes from the page.
"If everyone had known this from the start, they would have looked at the fight in a completely different way."
Dai smiled a small smile this time, warm and weary at once.
"But that is always the truth, Gai," he said, placing his hand gently on his son's shoulder.
"People see the result before they see the road. They see the final punch, but not the years that came before it. That is why some truths hurt when they are spoken aloud… because they force everyone to reevaluate what they thought was simple."
Before he could add anything else, Sakumo Hatake had already stepped closer, while Kakashi remained at his side, silent in a way that was unusual for him.
Yet it was not the silence of indifference. His eyes were fixed on the same lines, and his calm features carried a sharp concentration that only deepened as the full meaning of the scene widened before him.
"That explains a lot," Sakumo said at last in his measured tone.
"Not only why he relies entirely on taijutsu, but also why he is so disciplined. A person deprived of the tools most shinobi depend on cannot afford the luxury of distraction. He must have been built step by step, and through severe hardship as well."
Gai looked quickly toward Sakumo, then toward Kakashi, as though he were waiting for both of them to confirm that what he was feeling now was not an exaggeration.
As for Kakashi, he kept staring at the sentence: "No talent at all."
His face barely shifted, yet something subtle changed in his gaze. Until now, he had read Lee as a disciplined, fast fighter, dangerous in his own particular way. But after this confession, the evaluation had become far more complex.
'No ninjutsu. And no genjutsu,' Kakashi thought with silent intensity.
'Then everything we see here was forged by the body alone… and by will. No shortcuts. No way to compensate for weakness with tricks or variety of tools. That means every part of his style was sharpened to the edge.'
"Now the fight has become more dangerous," Kakashi said in his short, calm voice.
"Not just because Lee is stronger than they thought… but because a fighter like that will not collapse easily. Someone who reached this stage under those conditions must be used to fighting while starting from behind."
Gai's eyes widened even further at that, while Sakumo sent his son a brief glance filled with quiet approval. Dai, meanwhile, nodded slowly, as though Kakashi's words had given precise form to something he himself had felt by instinct.
"Well said, Kakashi," Dai said with open sincerity.
"That is exactly what makes a boy like Lee frightening in a different way. The gifted may be shaken the first time they run into a wall… but someone who is used to starting from below knows how to strike that wall again and again until it cracks."
Gai let out a short, nervous laugh, then pointed at the page.
"Even Sakura couldn't believe it!" he said, a measure of his old quick energy returning to him.
"That means the secret isn't small at all! This isn't ordinary information… this is information that changes the entire battle!"
"It changes Lee's entire image," Sakumo said.
"Every spectator in the arena had been measuring him by a different standard, but this truth redefines everything."
"Even his first failure against Gaara's defense no longer looks like weakness, but like the opening of a clash between two extremes, each of which has reached its limit in its own way: a strange, almost absolute defense… and pure physical determination that has reached a level most people never attain."
A brief silence fell over them again, but this time its cause was not shock, but awe at the idea itself.
…
Then, hundreds of kilometers away from Konoha, Sunagakure was living through a different morning, though bound by the same tension.
At the art store there, the wide aisles could no longer easily contain the new arrivals.
From the very first moments of the new volume's appearance, readers began pouring into the place in small groups and then in larger waves, until the atmosphere became a mixture of desert heat carried in on clothing, the scent of fresh paper, and raised whispers blending with gasps of surprise and the hurried sound of footsteps.
Some shinobi stood stiffly as they read in heavy silence, while some civilians leaned over shoulders to catch a line or an image, and others reread the same dialogue two or three times, as though their eyes refused to believe what the page was saying about Gaara.
At the heart of this crowd, behind the side bar counter that had become a fixed part of the store's daily scene, Rob's Suna Clone stood with remarkable calm that sharply contrasted with the surrounding chaos.
His hands moved smoothly between cups and pitchers, filling cold drinks for readers one after another and sliding them across the wooden surface with a steady smile that was neither forced nor devoid of cheer.
Whenever voices rose because of a shocking scene, he would raise an eyebrow slightly, smile as though people's astonishment had become familiar background music, and then continue his work without the slightest sign of fluster.
"Here you go," he said to one of the jonin, handing him an iced drink while the man was still staring at the open page in his other hand.
"Looks like you're going to need more than one drink today."
The jonin did not answer immediately. Instead, he swallowed hard as he reread the sentence about Lee's inability to use ninjutsu or genjutsu, and only then did he finally take the cup.
"He can't use ninjutsu!? Nonsense! Don't tell me he became a ninja through taijutsu alone!?" the man muttered, more to himself than to the one standing before him.
In the inner section of the store, inside the space Sunagakure's leaders had grown accustomed to using, the Third Kazekage, Shazan, sat before an open copy of the volume.
Around him were Chiyo, Ebizo, and several jonin whose outward discipline was clear, though their eyes revealed that they were no less tense than the surrounding readers.
The place was quieter here, yet the quiet itself felt sharp, like a thin cover stretched over something far heavier.
The first to speak was one of the jonin standing on the right, a broad-shouldered man whose features tightened every time his eyes returned to Gaara's name.
"This is not good," he said cautiously.
"The more the volume continues to reveal details about him, the harder it becomes to manage his image inside the village as something whose impression can still be controlled."
"People are now reading about his absolute defense, about the terror attached to his name, and about this boy attacking him without any talent for ninjutsu… I don't know whether this will increase Gaara's prestige, or increase the anxiety surrounding him."
"Both," Chiyo said at once, without raising her voice. Her eyes were half-lidded, but her gaze remained sharp as needles.
"Prestige and fear do not walk separately in cases like this. The real problem is not that people will fear him more, but that they will begin asking more precise questions. And once precise questions begin, easy lies erode quickly."
Ebizo folded his arms across his chest, then spoke after a moment's thought:
"But there is another side to this. The scene does not elevate Gaara alone. It also elevates the level of danger represented by his opponent in people's eyes."
"Once the reader learns that Rock Lee has neither ninjutsu nor genjutsu, and then sees him insist on attacking Gaara directly, the whole fight changes from a display of power into a collision between two extremes. And that may make any later outcome more sensitive."
Shazan tilted his head slightly and did not speak at once.
He was looking at the lines as though he were not merely reading what had been written, but reading what would happen inside people's minds after they finished reading.
"Gaara is a military, political, and psychological problem all at once," he said at last in a low voice, but everyone in the room listened to him immediately.
"And the new volume has not reduced that complexity. It has only made it clearer. Now people will not simply see a frightening child from Suna."
"They will see a name tied to the phrase: no one has ever been able to hurt Gaara. That sentence alone is enough to create an aura… or dread… or both together."
At that point, another jonin, younger than the first but more visibly tense, spoke up.
"Kazekage-sama, if the people of the village begin reading Gaara in this way, perhaps we should prepare for the possibility that the distance between them and him will grow even wider. If Gaara appears in the future, should we worry about how he will grow up!?"
"Why should we be the ones to worry?" the Kazekage replied coldly. "That would be a source of concern for his parents, not for us."
For some reason, at that moment his gaze fell upon a familiar pair. They were Karura and Rasa.
'Those two… could it be…?!' he thought to himself.
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Upcoming chapter titles (spoilers):
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Chapter 188: Amazing!
Chapter 189: A Fierce Battle!
Chapter 190: Shocking!
Chapter 191: The Genius of Hard Work.
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