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[— Manga Scene —]
"But that is precisely why he can win." Gai-sensei said with quiet confidence as he watched Rock Lee with the eyes of someone who knew what his student was hiding.
"Lee, take him down!!" Naruto shouted excitedly from the stands, waving fervently at Rock Lee.
"Huh?" Sakura said in confusion as she turned toward Kakashi after hearing Gai's words.
"Hm?" Kakashi reacted in surprise.
"!" Rock Lee gasped suddenly as the decisive idea flashed through his mind.
"...!" Naruto stared ahead in suspense, feeling that Rock Lee was about to do something unexpected.
"But, Gai-sensei, I believe this is only allowed… when we want to protect someone important?" Rock Lee said with respectful hesitation as he asked his teacher for permission.
"Do not worry! I will allow you to do it!!" Gai-sensei declared firmly from the stands, granting Rock Lee the permission he had been waiting for.
"...…." Rock Lee fell silent for a moment, his resolve settling after hearing that permission. Then he breathed slowly and reached toward his leg, preparing to reveal what he had concealed.
"Hehehe…" Rock Lee let out a low, excited laugh as he began undoing what had been weighing down his movement.
"Remove." The description came briefly, indicating that Lee had begun removing the weights from his leg.
"Weights?" Sakura said in clear astonishment as she stared at the object Lee had taken from his leg.
"What an old-fashioned way of training…" Kakashi said in a contemplative tone, immediately recognizing the meaning of the weights.
"Idiot…" Kankuro said flatly, though he did not hide how intently he was watching.
"I get it now..!" Naruto said, finally beginning to understand the secret behind Lee's strange movement.
"All right! Now I can move freely!" Rock Lee said with renewed confidence after freeing himself from the burden that had restrained him.
"Heh… getting rid of a few… weights will not let you touch Gaara…" Kankuro said with cold mockery, unconvinced that this would change anything.
"...…." Gaara remained silent, but his eyes stayed fixed on Lee with growing focus.
"Isn't this a bit much, Gai?" Kakashi said with quiet concern as he looked at Gai-sensei after seeing what Lee had removed slam into the ground with such force that dust burst up and the floor cracked.
"Go, Lee!!" Gai-sensei shouted with surging excitement, raising his finger as he urged his student forward.
"Tch." The sharp sound rang out as the air around the arena trembled after the weight hit the ground.
"Yes, sir!!" Rock Lee shouted in obedience and excitement, lunging forward at once to carry out what he had resolved to do.
"!" Gaara's eyes widened suddenly when he realized that his opponent's rhythm had changed.
"He got closer!!" Sakura cried out in shock as she saw Lee finally manage to close the distance with Gaara.
"He's fast…" Kakashi said with sharp focus as he followed Lee's astonishing acceleration.
"He can't use any ninjutsu or genjutsu…" Gai-sensei said frankly, revealing the true limit of what Lee could use.
"That is why he devoted all his time to taijutsu, hand-to-hand combat… hard work gave him everything."
"Hah." Gaara released a short breath as he tried to keep up with Lee's speed.
"He is a taijutsu specialist, a hand-to-hand fighter." Gai-sensei said with a slight smile, declaring the true identity of Lee's style.
"?!" Gaara faltered for a moment as he turned toward the movement that had caught him from above his defense.
"!!" Astonishment flashed across the spectators' faces when Lee's attack reached a point dangerously close to Gaara.
"I told you this guy was strong!!" Naruto said with victorious excitement, answering everyone who had underestimated Rock Lee before.
"Now… the fight has truly begun!!" Rock Lee said with a confident smile as he landed in a new offensive stance after the battle had genuinely changed.
"...…." Gaara remained silent, but the heavy look in his eyes suggested that, for him, the battle had truly begun in that moment.
[— End Scene —]
The moment the scene ended, it felt as though the little corner where Maito Dai and Gai were sitting had exploded from within, not with sound alone, but with feeling as well.
It was no longer merely an exciting fight between a fast boy and a terrifying opponent. The entire rhythm of the confrontation had changed before their eyes in a single instant, the instant the weights struck the arena floor as if they had fallen on everyone's assumptions at once.
Little Gai's eyes widened as far as they could, and then he leaned forward so much that he nearly fell onto the open page.
"The weights! He was fighting while carrying weights all this time!" Gai said loudly, then quickly swallowed as he returned to the lines that came immediately after their fall.
"That is why my future counterpart said he could win… because he knew Lee had not even been fighting at his true speed in the first place!"
Dai stood beside him like a man struck by the idea and delighted by it at the same time. The corners of his smile trembled, not with levity, but with silent recognition of how harsh the road Rock Lee had walked truly was.
"This… this is very beautiful. Truly amazing!" Dai said slowly, as if he needed a moment to give his feeling a name.
"It is not amazing just because it is a spectacle. It is amazing because it is honest. A boy who possesses neither ninjutsu nor genjutsu, and who does not merely train until he becomes strong… but adds weight upon weight to himself. This is not ordinary training, Gai. This is a declaration of war against the limits of the body itself."
Gai felt a shiver run through his arms. He was no longer looking at Rock Lee as merely a future reflection of enthusiasm or diligence, but as someone who had driven his entire body to the utmost edge of what it could endure.
In his eyes, the weights were no longer simple training tools. They had become tangible proof of the silent years Lee had endured before his feet ever stepped into this arena.
'He was slow by his own standards… and yet he still looked faster than everyone else.' Gai thought emotionally as he stared at the moment Lee surged forward after freeing himself. 'Then how much had he been enduring before this?'
As for Dai, he felt something deeper than admiration. In those weights, he saw an image he knew well. His life had never been easy, and the body had never been a guaranteed gift to him. So when he saw Lee removing the weight from his legs, he felt as if he were seeing before him a confession of a kind only he could truly understand: a confession from someone who had lived a long time forcing his body to carry more than was ever asked of it.
"People think hard work means repetition, and nothing more." Dai said more quietly this time, his eyes settling on the line: "hard work gave him everything."
"But true hard work means knowing that you are lacking somewhere, and then refusing to stop at that lack. Lee did not train merely to catch up with others… he trained as if he wanted to tear away, by force, his right to stand among them."
Gai remained silent for a moment, then lifted his head toward his father with shining eyes.
"Father…" he said, almost in a whisper.
"Did Lee feel, every single day, that he had to carry more than everyone else just to become their equal?"
Dai delayed before answering. It was not because he lacked the words, but because he knew the answer would not be far from himself either.
"Yes," he said at last with complete honesty. "And sometimes, Gai, a person does not carry weight merely to equal others… but to keep himself from breaking. Some people train because they are gifted. Others train because if they stop, there will be nothing left with which they can protect themselves from the feeling of helplessness."
…
Sakumo and Kakashi arrived at that very moment. They did not interrupt the scene; they entered it as though the tension itself had drawn their steps from the corridor to the reading corner.
Kakashi's eyes were the first to land on the image of the weights, and then on the line spoken by his future self: "What an old-fashioned way of training…"
His expression paused for a brief instant, that tiny pause that appeared only when his curiosity moved from observation into serious analysis.
"So that is the explanation," Sakumo said in an even tone as he stood beside Dai.
"It was not merely a strange style of movement or hard training in the general sense. He was creating constant resistance for himself, then fighting with it as though it were his natural state."
Kakashi nodded slowly. His gaze remained fixed on the arrangement of the pages, on the rapid transition from the fall of the weights to the shock on Gaara's face itself. That alone was enough to tell him that the battle had broken out of its original pattern.
'Even Gaara was forced to turn and look,' Kakashi thought silently.
'That matters more than all the emotional reactions around him. If his automatic defense had grown accustomed to a certain rhythm of movement, then Lee shattered that rhythm all at once. He forced him to recalculate.'
"What is striking here is not simply that he became faster," Kakashi finally said in his short, calm voice.
"What is striking is that he concealed his true speed even inside the fight itself. He measured Gaara's defense first, and then revealed his cards at the moment he understood the limits of his opponent. This is not blind recklessness… it is disciplined calculation."
Gai turned to him immediately.
"Yes! Yes, exactly!" Gai said with renewed excitement. "At first everyone thought his attacks were useless, and then suddenly he became the one changing the shape of the battle!"
"Because the real fight began after the testing stage ended," Sakumo said, letting his eyes pass over the final lines of the scene.
"And even more noteworthy than that is the fact that Gaara himself is no longer dealing with him the same way he was at the beginning. His silence here is different."
Dai raised a finger, as though the idea had lit a new spark inside him.
"And that is the most beautiful part of all!" he said with his usual warm enthusiasm.
"When an opponent like Gaara is forced to acknowledge, even through silence alone, that the battle has begun now… that means Lee has succeeded! Not merely in striking him, but in shaking the image everyone had placed him inside."
As for Gai, his gaze remained fixed on the line: "Now… the fight has truly begun!!" and he felt that the sentence did not belong to Rock Lee alone. It belonged to everyone who had once been forced to wait a long time before being allowed to show what they truly possessed.
'So this is the moment when endurance turns into offense,' Gai thought, a hot feeling gathering in his chest. 'And this is the moment when fatigue itself becomes part of strength.'
…
Far from Konoha, the tension created by the chapter's final scene was no less intense.
In Sunagakure, the art store was growing more crowded with every new page of the volume, and with every reader who realized that what they were seeing on paper was no longer just an exciting scene, but the beginning of a disturbance in something that had once seemed fixed.
When the weights fell to the ground in the story, some of the readers in the shop almost lifted their heads instinctively, as if they had heard the sound in reality.
Shoulders crowded before the tables, and the whispers rose until they formed a continuous layer of suppressed unease.
Civilians exchanged unsettled glances, shinobi reread the same page two and three times, and fingers froze along the white edges of the volume as though their owners feared turning the next page too quickly.
Behind the bar counter, Rob's Suna Clone stood as usual, calm in a way that was almost provocative compared to the chaos surrounding him. His hands moved between glasses and pitchers with smooth professionalism, filling cold drinks and sliding them across the wood with a faint smile.
"Did our dear readers think Rock Lee was an easy opponent?" he said in a playful tone to one of the customers as he handed him a cold glass.
But the man did not answer at once. He was still staring at the open page, at the image of the discarded weights, and at the sudden leap that followed. Then he finally said, his voice coming out rough from his throat:
"If that boy was fighting at that speed while burdened… then how much had he really been hiding all along?"
…
Inside the section reserved for the village leaders and its senior shinobi, the atmosphere was calmer, but it was the kind of calm that resembled the surface of water hiding a strong current beneath it.
The Third Kazekage, Shazan, sat in composed silence, while Chiyo sat to his right, Ebizo to his left, and several jonin behind them at a short distance.
But this time, Shazan's attention was not confined to the volume alone.
His eyes fell once again upon the pair he had noticed at the end of the previous chapter: Karura and Rasa. They were not at the center of the council, but their presence in this very space, at this very moment, was enough to make his mind more alert than usual.
Karura was gripping the edge of her sleeve with almost unconscious tightness, while Rasa seemed more silent than necessary, his eyes fixed on Gaara's image in a way that did not resemble the curiosity of an ordinary reader.
'This is not curiosity,' Shazan thought coldly, without changing his expression. 'This is personal attention… and more tense than it ought to be.'
Chiyo was the first to break the silence.
"He did not merely manage to reach Gaara," she said as she stared at the page where Lee's movement brushed the path of the sand defense. "He forced him to pay attention. And that is a major difference."
One of the jonin clenched his jaw before speaking.
"If these pages continue like this, people will stop seeing Gaara as an opponent who cannot be touched," he said with visible concern. "Lee's mere ability to get close to him in this way is enough to plant a dangerous idea in the readers' minds."
"And more dangerous than that is the fact that the reason is not some monstrous talent," Ebizo said, folding his arms. "It is the exact opposite. The shock here is that the boy who shook Gaara's image possesses neither ninjutsu nor genjutsu. This kind of narrative clings to people quickly, because it turns the fight into a story of challenge rather than a mere display of power."
Chiyo tilted her head slightly, then said in a dry tone,
"And from Gaara's side, this will make his image more complicated. People will no longer be satisfied with fearing him. They will begin comparing him. They will say: that strange boy from Konoha, who has nothing but his body, managed to make Gaara pay attention."
Shazan kept his eyes on the page, but part of his attention still remained directed toward Karura and Rasa. He noticed the fleeting stiffness in Karura's shoulders at the line, "He got closer!!" and the brief tightening in Rasa's hand when Lee entered the dangerous distance around Gaara. It was not decisive proof yet, but it was more than coincidence as well.
"The problem here is not the scene alone," Shazan finally said in a low voice that made everyone else fall silent.
"The problem is what this scene does to the mind. Until now, Gaara has been a fearsome opponent. But now, a new word has entered his image: possibility. The possibility that he can be forced to pay attention. The possibility that he can be pushed into a real fight. And the possibility that he may not be absolute in the way people imagined."
One of the jonin raised an eyebrow tensely.
"Will that weaken him in the eyes of the village?"
"Not necessarily," Shazan said coldly. "But it will make him more human in their eyes, farther from the monster he truly is."
At that, Karura shifted slightly in her place, a movement so small it might have escaped notice, but not Chiyo's. The old woman glanced at her for a moment, then at Rasa, before turning her gaze back to Shazan. She said nothing, yet the sharp glint in her eyes suggested that she had caught the same thread.
Meanwhile, in the arena on the page, the final line still echoed in everyone's mind: "Now… the fight has truly begun!!"
The battle had truly begun.
And for the first time since the start of this confrontation, the question was no longer whether Rock Lee was capable of reaching Gaara.
The question had become: what would happen now that he already had?
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Upcoming chapter titles (spoilers):
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Chapter 189: A Fierce Battle!
Chapter 190: Shocking!
Chapter 191: The Genius of Hard Work.
Chapter 192: Hard Work Is Useless If You Aren't Confident in Yourself!
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