The world bled in shades of violet and crimson.
Rock Lee stood atop a mountain of corpses, friends and foes alike scattered beneath him; long had he lost count of how many of them had fallen by his hand.
His body was a furnace, the Eighth Gate — the final gate — had long been open, burning through every fibre of his being with a hunger that made the sun seem pale. His blood boiled in his veins like lava in a volcanic chamber, his heartbeat a thunder that echoed across a ravaged battlefield.
The sky itself had cracked, fractured into jagged seams where reality bent and warped beneath a clash of powers so powerful, they carved scars into the bones of the world. Only two Otsutsuki invaders remained. 'Will It be enough?' he asked himself, as his body burned through the last of its borrowed time.
The younger between the two—and Lee could only think of him as young because of the ageless perfection that carved his features—possessed a dōjutsu, a pair of eyes that made the air shimmer in ways that defied comprehension. It wasn't a Byakugan, nor was it a Rinnegan, but something Lee himself had never once seen before but now that he had, he could never hope to unsee it. His eyes were spirals within spirals, nested geometries of pupil and iris that seemed to fold inward infinitely. Time pooled around him like water, moving at velocities that belonged to no natural world. Where he stood, seconds bled into hours. Where he gestured, the very passage of moments stuttered and reversed.
Lee's muscles screamed in a language beyond pain. There was agony, yes—the fundamental wrongness of a human body pushed beyond every biological boundary—but beneath that was something purer: The ecstasy of absolute certainty. This was what he had trained for. Every single day since childhood, every repetition, every failure, every moment he had been told he could never be anything more than a taijutsu specialist, that his lack of ninjutsu and genjutsu would make him obsolete in a world of shinobi—all of it had been forging him into this crucible of will and flesh.
"Rejoice little one, you have my recognition,".
The oldest among the remaining Otsutsuki—the one with horns that curved like the fangs of some primordial beast—raised both of her palms in tandem. A boundless wave of chakra gathered between them, compressing space itself into a sphere of blinding white. Lee had seen jutsu before. He had fought in wars where the sky rained fire and the earth split open. But this was different. This was power that had no category, no name in any shinobi language he knew. It was simply: annihilation.
Lee moved.
With a speed that tore through the fabric of space, he transcended the limitations of human velocity. His muscles were accelerating past the point where conventional physics applied. His bones, reinforced by chakra beyond measure, conducted force through his frame like lightning rods, channelling a youthful flame that boiled the blood in his heart. His silhouette broke into fractals, multiple images of himself layering atop one another as momentum carried him forward faster than even his own eyes could track.
The Otsutsuki never saw it coming.
Lee's heel connected with the creature's jaw—a contact so sudden and violent that the air screamed. The Otsutsuki's head snapped backward with a crack that pierced the sky; her mind collapsing into an eternal darkness before she ever had time to comprehend what had happened. She had lived for Millenia, conquering worlds one after the other but today she had had died not understanding that in the eyes of this singular human, in this singular moment, she was nothing.
But the younger Otsutsuki, the one with the spiral-fold eyes was different, he reacted with a speed that suggested something other than mere physical prowess. "As expected..." He had anticipated this moment. Lee's trajectory carried him forward into a web that sealed his fate, the young Otsutsuki extended his palm, and time itself caught.
Lee felt it, like slamming into a wall made of crystalline moments. His momentum didn't stop—that would have been merciful, would have been comprehensible. Instead, it fractured. His body continued moving at eight-gates velocity while his consciousness slowed to a crawl. His neurons fired like synapses made of lead. His heartbeat became audible as a vast, booming drum. The space between seconds elongated into eternities.
Through the temporal distortion, he saw the Otsutsuki's face—and there was something almost human in the expression there. Not mercy. Not even fear, not exactly. But recognition. This creature was seeing, truly seeing, what Rock Lee was in this moment: a force of nature wearing a human skin, something that had transcended the categories of "shinobi" or "human" entirely.
And then, inexplicably, the Otsutsuki panicked.
It was almost imperceptible—a widening of those impossible spiral eyes, a tremor through its perfect frame—but Lee perceived it across the gulf of distorted time. The creature that had treated galaxies as playthings, that had moved through the cosmos as casually as a human walked across grass, was afraid. Not of Lee's physical power, though that was certainly catastrophic. But afraid of something deeper: the unpredictable force of pure willpower incarnate, a human who had refused to accept limitation and had somehow won despite being outmatched by every measure that should have mattered.
The Otsutsuki's next action was not calculated. It was desperate.
His other hand, the one without the temporal jutsu, began to glow with an energy that was different from the first—older, something that smelled of rust and forgotten ages. His fingers splayed wide, and he began speaking in a language that predated written history. The words scraped against Lee's ears like grinding stone, and even across the gulf of slowed time, Lee felt something fundamental beginning to tear.
The Otsutsuki didn't try to stop Lee's kick. Instead, he reached through the moment of impact, his palm pressing directly into Lee's chest where heart and soul converged. Lee felt the contact like being struck by an axe made of ice and starlight. The words the Otsutsuki chanted became louder, more insistent, and Lee realized with a clarity that cut through even the euphoria of combat that this creature was doing something monumentally, cosmically wrong.
He wasn't trying to kill him.
He was trying to unmake him.
The jutsu—because what else could it be called?—began to unravel the very thread of Lee's existence. His body and soul, though that seemed secondary to his continuity, his presence in the timeline. The Otsutsuki was using his spiral-fold dōjutsu in concert with some ancient technique, trying to claw Lee backward through the river of time itself, to erase the sequence of events that had led to this moment. If he succeeded, Rock Lee would be removed from the pages that told the historic tale of the Ninja world.
Through the temporal distortion, he saw the Otsutsuki's face, and the creature's spiral eyes locked onto Lee's own with absolute conviction. "A person like you should never have been born," the Otsutsuki spoke, his voice cutting through the fractured moments like obsidian. "Once you're gone, everything you've done will be undone and all those that had fallen today would never had meet their end by your hands, human."
Lee should have been terrified.
Instead, he felt something close to peace.
He had always known this was possible. Every shinobi who pushed hard enough, far enough, eventually encountered a wall that could not be breached by effort alone. Some called it fate. Some called it destiny. Lee had simply called it the way things were. He had never expected to survive the Eighth Gate. Opening it meant embracing death—a death in slow motion, a death that was also transcendence. He had made peace with that calculus long ago.
But he had also never expected to experience the sensation of his own timeline being rewound.
As the Otsutsuki's jutsu took hold, Lee felt his memories begin to slip backward through the folds of time, moments of his life erased in reverse sequence. His first kiss with—no, that memory dissolved before it could fully form. His final conversation with Guy-sensei, his graduation as a genin, the first time he had ever opened a Gate, his birth—all of it streaming backward like stream pouring uphill.
His last coherent thought, before the cascade became too intense to follow, was simple and warm:
'This is the end Guy Sensei, I can only leave the rest to...'
Then everything became light.
Lee's consciousness felt as though it was being pulled apart at the molecular level, one at a time, his atoms scattered like ash across time and space.
He heard screaming, and realized it was his own voice, echoing across a distance that had no measurement. He felt his body, felt it being unmade and remade and unmade again and again in rapid succession, each iteration slightly different, each one a shade of who he had been or might have been. Past versions of Lee rose up around him like ghosts—his younger self at age five, at age ten, at age twelve when he had first sworn to become strong through hard work alone. They all looked at him with the same expression: recognition and farewell.
The world inverted.
Everything became wrong in ways that had no name. Time didn't just move backward—it moved sideways. Lee experienced moments out of sequence. He lived the same second four times over. He watched his own birth and his own death occurring simultaneously. Entire years passed in the span of a heartbeat while a single breath stretched across centuries. His mind, brilliant as it was, began to fracture under the weight of existing in too many temporal states at once.
Then, abruptly, the pressure released.
Lee crashed into something solid—grass, earth, the physical world asserting its presence with sudden, absolute finality. His lungs seized. His heart stuttered. His eyes flew open to a sky that was blue.
He gasped for air, his body convulsing, every muscle quaking with shock. His skin was slick with the sweat of his youth. His vision waned, refocused and waned again. He was surrounded by trees in a training ground that looked far too familiar. The morning sun filtered through the leaves, casting dappled shadows across his trembling form.
Lee pushed himself upright on shaking arms, certain that this was death, that this tranquility was the final mercy granted to those who had pushed too far. But then he felt it—the solid, undeniable thud of his own heartbeat. His lungs continued their frantic work. His fingers, when he looked down at them, were small. Young. Callused but not yet bearing the scars he suffered in battle.
He brought his hand to his chest and felt the absence of the wounds he sustained as a result of opening the eight-gates. He reached for his chakra, tried to summon the roaring power of the Eighth Gate, and felt instead the shallow reserves of a boy not yet fully grown. His muscles, when he tensed them, were strong but not yet hardened into the instruments of absolute destruction that he remembered.
Lee's breath came in ragged gasps. He tried to stand and found his legs unreliable, still learning to support a frame they were no longer accustomed to carrying. He managed to rise to a crouch, then to standing, swaying slightly as the world continued to assert its solidity around him.
Above, in the distance, he heard a voice that made his entire being crystallize into a single moment of recognition.
"LEE!"
Might Guy burst from the towering tree in a blur of motion, his form streaking downward before he planted himself firmly on the ground before Lee with a force that stirred the morning air. His green jumpsuit seemed to glow in the early light, his smile brilliant and wide, his hair spiked defiantly upward.
Lee's breath caught in his throat. His sensei stood before him, alive and vital in the dawn. Everything was wrong—he should be dead, should be unmade.
But here he stood, Guy calling his name with that unmistakable voice. Lee was young again and his body was that of frail genin. What is happening? How was life still clinging to him?
Rock Lee opened his mouth. Closed it again. His gaze dropped, looking down at the hands of his younger self.
The Otsutsuki's power hadn't killed him.
It failed
Sending him backward.
To where it all began.