# Chapter 5: Sparring
*[Stamina: 83%]*
*Should be enough.*
Lee glanced between his system status and the opponent standing across from him in the circle. Messy chestnut hair. Crimson streaks painted across both cheeks. The boy from the Inuzuka clan — Kero — was baring his teeth at him with open hostility, his wild eyes making it perfectly clear that he had no intention of holding back.
Then again, that was entirely in character for the Inuzuka clan, known for their feral nature and their teamwork with specially trained ninken — dogs of remarkable intelligence that fought alongside their partners. Kero hadn't received his companion yet, though, which meant this would be a clean one-on-one fight.
*He'll try to provoke me. Humiliate me. Probably.*
Lee answered his own question and promptly decided to handle it the sensible way: ignore the annoying child entirely.
"Are you both ready? Rock? Kero? Form the Seal of Confrontation and begin!"
Their teacher stepped between the two twelve-year-olds — one perfectly calm, still as a lotus on still water, the other huffing and sneering with those sharpened canine teeth on full display.
Both boys formed the seal.
"You beat me in the physical drills today," Kero said, venom seeping into every word. "Which is stupid. Impossible. Bad enough on its own — but you also knocked Neji off his rightful first place in this class. You worm. I'm going to beat you so badly that you won't even think about making Genin rank."
He dropped to all fours and let out a low, rumbling growl, like an animal coiling to lunge at its prey.
Lee remained completely unbothered.
The watching classmates went still. A cold current moved through the air — something that found its way under the skin and made hearts knock against ribs. And why?
Because the aura around the thick-browed boy had shifted. It had become vivid, intense, and unmistakably real. Rock Lee no longer looked like a pathetic weakling.
"No chance," he said flatly.
He dropped into the original Lee's iconic stance — knees bent, right palm extended forward, a quiet invitation to come and try — which only infuriated his opponent further and sent a ripple of unease through the gathered students.
*Is that actually the same idiot Lee?*
That was the thought moving through the crowd, nervous energy building with nowhere to go.
"What?" Kero blinked, head tilting sideways in genuine confusion.
Lee's answer came like a sentence being handed down.
"In Taijutsu, you don't have a single chance against me. Pup."
*[Taijutsu Rank: C]*
At this moment, by the system's assessment, Lee's mastery of the martial arts was on par with seasoned Genin who had completed a range of missions. Combined with everything he carried from his past life, Rock read Kero's charge with crystalline clarity — and remained impossibly composed, trusting completely in his own skill.
Two steps. That was all it took before the hostile silhouette exploded into a furious lunge.
The Inuzuka boy, for his part, had nothing going for him except exceptional reflexes. He hadn't reached Genin rank yet, which meant he had no special clan techniques or Ninjutsu to fall back on — so he came at Lee with nothing but his fists, which was already a losing hand before the fight even started.
The battle unfolded like this: the boy with the messy chestnut hair rained down a storm of blows, occasionally throwing himself onto his hands and launching kicks in an attempt to catch the elusive Lee. But the thick-browed Rock floated around the ring like a butterfly — twice as fast — without yet delivering the sting. Kero simply could not land a hit, turning himself into a small dog endlessly chasing its own tail. All he could do was grunt like a tractor and complain loudly about his opponent's cowardice.
"Fight me! Stop dodging! Fight or just die, you gutless Konoha trash!"
He spat variations of the same curse over and over, his dark brown eyes going bloodshot with rage. Against that frothing fury, Lee's serenity was quietly winning people over. Slowly, tentatively, his classmates were beginning to root for him — only in their heads for now, not out loud, but still. It was something.
Everything in its own time.
"Alright."
Rock gave a single nod.
He let his thick black brows settle into a faint furrow, stopped dodging, and planted himself directly in the path of the Inuzuka's oncoming fist — then, in the same instant, seized the arm, pivoted, and hurled the snarling twelve-year-old clean over his shoulder. The wind whistled in Kero's ears. The world went blurry.
The evasions had never been about survival. Lee had been reading his own limits — testing his actual speed against a run-of-the-mill shinobi trainee, taking honest stock of where his ceiling was. With those results now in hand, Rock prepared to teach the "child" some manners, in the way only a karate practitioner could.
"I'm not losing like this — not to a weakling like you!" Kero snarled, scrambling back to his feet.
He was immediately knocked off them again.
A powerful kick to the chest — the kind that felt like a cannonball of solid steel — sent him flying. Before he could process what had happened, a hand seized the edge of his collar and wrenched him close, and a knee drove into his solar plexus with enough force to hollow him out completely. The Inuzuka nearly blacked out from the combination, but a firm slap across the cheek jolted him back — right in time to look directly into Lee's eyes, empty and absolute, and begin to truly shake.
Instant karma. The bully gets what he deserves. That would have been the headline.
"Emotions get in the way during a fight," Lee said, his voice calm and unhurried. "You gave in to them, and you never landed a single hit. Insults don't help either, not when you're weak and the moment counts. Stop poking the bear." He exhaled. "Remember — without a cool head on the battlefield, you won't survive. Now sleep."
He turned, and with a spinning kick, drove his heel into the side of the stunned Inuzuka's face. The nose cracked. Kero dropped like a broken doll.
"Ohhh—"
The watching students hissed in sympathetic pain on behalf of the boy who had just crumpled unconscious to the ground.
Knockout.
Everyone present stood in shock. The teacher included — though technically it had been his job to stop the match earlier, back at the decisive moment when Kero went flying over Lee's shoulder, which had already been a clear and obvious defeat. Somehow, that had not happened.
The fight had simply been too mesmerizing for anyone to interrupt.
"Rock Lee wins!" the sensei finally declared, pulling himself together enough to say it with something resembling firmness — doing his best to process the fact that the former class outcast had, in the span of a single match, revealed himself to be a prodigy with genuine potential, a Taijutsu talent of a completely different order.
"Woah! Lee, where did you learn Taijutsu like that? Tell us, please!"
His energetic classmates swarmed him from every direction, apparently having forgotten within the space of five minutes that they had, until very recently, written Rock off as a cripple without Ninjutsu or Genjutsu, and had been expecting Kero Inuzuka to make quick work of him.
Lee had not forgotten. He couldn't. He hadn't forgotten how these small hypocrites had driven the original Rock to his grave — pushing him to the breaking point, soaking him in enough melancholy and fear that the boy had spent his days in tears, terrified of being a useless weakling that no one would ever remember.
So the coldness in the current Lee's eyes was completely genuine. He truly held them in contempt. Not out of nowhere — but because they had ganged up to satisfy their egos at the expense of someone who was already down, someone too kind and too gentle to ever tell them off the way they deserved.
*I've watched too many martial arts films in my time to stay as naive as that Lee was.*
Without a shred of hesitation, Rock looked at the children crowding around him and said it plainly, out loud:
"Get away from me. You shameless little brats."
Was that fair?
*[Stamina: 75%]*