# Chapter 11: The Wall
"So you're Rock Lee — the special boy with the talent for Taijutsu?"
The kind elderly voice belonged to a short, wrinkled old man in a red-and-white robe with a wide, stately hat resting on his head and a smoking pipe tucked into the corner of his mouth, trailing the sharp, dense smell of tobacco through the air.
A noble, benevolent aura radiated off him — the unmistakable aura of a powerful leader. Specifically, the Hokage himself, the man the peaceful citizens of the Land of Fire spoke of with admiration, and enemies with dread. The smoke dissipated slowly but steadily through the classroom, allowing the full weight of Hiruzen Sarutobi's penetrating gaze — paired with his friendly, untroubled smile — to settle over the room with appropriate gravity.
Pure pomp and ceremony, in the style befitting a village head. But Rock's mind was already on a different question: where was his teacher? The sensei was supposed to be the one escorting him to this meeting, accompanying the Hokage personally — yet the old man had apparently arrived alone and without notice, which struck the boy as genuinely strange.
Then again, two heads are better than one, as the saying goes.
The events that followed finally saw fit to explain everything to Lee — while paradoxically explaining nothing at all, and bringing the situation straight to the edge of the absurd.
"Hokage-sama, was it strictly necessary to use Ninjutsu instead of simply walking through the door?" A thick-browed man in a green jumpsuit with a bowl cut stepped through the doorframe, leading Rock's sensei and several other shinobi in combat vests — Chunin, most likely. "Forgive me, but I don't quite follow your enlightened humor. I've grown accustomed to using my legs for locomotion."
"Khem-khem. Gai, I am the Hokage, after all — I can hardly embarrass myself in front of someone who will, without question, protect our village from harm many more times to come, can I?" Hiruzen smirked, his gaze settling on the thoroughly caught-off-guard Lee, who had not remotely expected the most important part of his Genin exam to dissolve into this kind of good-natured chaos.
"I greet you, Hokage-sama!" Rock pulled himself together and bowed to the old man, then turned and bowed again to all the others who had entered — Might Guy, the Chunin, his own teacher — because all of them would apparently be watching his demonstration of the technique he had supposedly "invented," the Rankyaku.
It made sense, in retrospect, that Hiruzen would bring company. Lee had told his teacher that Rankyaku was closer to Taijutsu than Ninjutsu, which was presumably why the Hokage had invited Might Guy — a true master of that particular ninja art, where it wasn't magic but fists and feet that split boulders and parted seas. As for the Chunin, Lee couldn't say much about them, except that one of them appeared to have been quietly picking his nose when he thought no one was looking.
"Ho-ho-ho. You have manners — excellent. So. You cannot use Ninjutsu or Genjutsu, yet rather than surrendering to the weight of a life where no one recognizes you or bothers to notice you, you chose to train and advance exclusively in the art of Taijutsu. Know this, young man — it is not the first time I have witnessed something like this. Shinobi who walk an unconventional path, who stand apart from the rest — they have always existed, and they always will, heh…"
For a fraction of a second, the Hokage flicked his gaze sideways at Gai with a knowing smirk on his wrinkled face — a clear reference, because Might Guy and Lee were unnaturally, uncannily similar in ways that had nothing to do with their faces or their voices. It was something in the steel of their spirits, the iron of their will, the quality of their aura. And as sharp an observer as Hiruzen was, he couldn't help noticing the boy's hands — calloused and rough, as if he'd been grinding them bloody against dirt and pavement on a daily basis.
Exactly like Gai.
So there it was. Training masochism, in the flesh. The Will of Fire, passed down through a different kind of inheritance.
"Alright. In this cramped little classroom, you can hardly show us your technique at full capacity, can you, Lee? Then let's step out to the academy's rear courtyard — there's plenty of open space there, a full training ground, even with the other classes using parts of it."
The Hokage spoke at an unhurried pace, puffed his pipe, then distributed nods to Gai, Lee's teacher, and the Chunin.
The old man walked over to Lee and placed a thin, bony hand on his shoulder. In the very next instant, Rock felt a sharp wave of dizziness and nausea. The world blurred — and then the dizzying whirl of colors stopped, and Lee blinked and wiped his eyes with his sleeve and understood that he was no longer standing inside four gray walls. He was outside in the fresh air, with a smiling Hiruzen standing beside him.
*Was that… the Body Flicker Technique? Working like actual teleportation!*
Lee stared in wonder, finally grasping firsthand what Ninjutsu actually felt like — once the disorientation of such rapid displacement had passed.
He turned his head, looking around. A short distance away, another academy sensei was conducting pre-lesson instructions for a practical session — a man with dark brown hair tied up in a topknot and a scar running across the bridge of his nose. Rock recognized him almost immediately. How could he not?
Iruka Umino was explaining to his students — including the troublemaker Naruto lurking among them — how to avoid cutting themselves on sharp metal, and how to throw kunai and shuriken properly, with accuracy. And visible in the crowd of heads were other figures no less significant than Uzumaki himself.
A gloomy, impassive dark-haired boy — Sasuke Uchiha — trailed by an actual queue of lovesick girls, including Sakura Haruno and Ino Yamanaka, who were simultaneously something like friends and bitter rivals in their shared obsession.
*A lot of central characters, all still small and not particularly capable yet. Though they have more potential than almost anyone to become genuinely powerful — especially the future team under Jonin Kakashi. Naruto, Sasuke, Sakura — all three of them carry such destined fortune as main characters that even with the system, I'm going to have to work extremely hard to outpace their protagonist luck, heh.*
Rock let out a quiet laugh at himself, then stepped a few paces away from the Hokage — whose attention had drifted toward Iruka's students — and prepared to actually get serious about his exam.
A moment later, with a small swirl of leaves, Gai arrived in high spirits. Behind him came Lee's anxious academy teacher and the thoroughly bored Chunin, who were doing their best to look useful.
"Hokage-sama, I'll need a target for the demonstration — large or small, it doesn't matter, anything will do!" Rock's voice came out firm and sharp, like a soldier reporting for duty. Hiruzen gave a single nod and exhaled a lungful of pipe smoke, shifting his gaze to the shinobi standing nearby.
"Kato, Hiroshi — you heard him. You understand what's needed? Stop daydreaming — raise a large earthen wall on request, quickly now!" The old man turned to the two Chunin in flak vests, letting a note of steel into his tone, and that was all it took. At least two of them snapped immediately to attention, shaking off their glazed boredom and making themselves useful at speed.
The ones called Kato and Hiroshi stepped forward, formed several hand seals in unison, and pressed their open palms flat against the ground. No more idle standing around — because at the request of one thick-browed boy and, by extension, the Hokage himself, they ended up pouring nearly a quarter of their combined chakra into the effort. Possibly closer to half.
But the two Chunin managed not to disappoint Konoha's leader. If anything, they appeared to deliberately — or perhaps instinctively — amplify the durability of the jutsu beyond what was strictly necessary. A deep, rolling tremor moved through the earth across a narrow stretch of ground nearby, and from beneath the soil rose a tall, jagged cliff face — uneven and rough, exactly the kind of natural formation that served as a shield for shinobi with an affinity for Earth Release Ninjutsu.
Lee now stood before what looked, in effect, like a small mountain. Indestructible and insurmountable, like the walls that come to ambitious but mortal people in their dreams. And yet — he was not in some world where people were gray mice under the thumb of those above them. He was in a reality saturated with all-encompassing chakra, where shinobi moved at speeds that defied human comprehension.
And yes. Right now, he was going to show the experienced ninja watching him exactly what a month of punishing, masochistic training-by-challenge could produce — when all you had in your arsenal was an iron will, a body that adapted with terrifying efficiency, and a hell's training system that showed its user no mercy whatsoever, and which sent its own particular regards to every transmigrator who stumbled into another world and immediately received the bloodline of some ancient or extinct clan, but—
"Come on, Lee!"
The old man's voice rang sharp through his ears, cutting through every stray thought that had been racing through his mind at the speed of light — or possibly faster.
It didn't matter.
Lee closed his black eyes. Then opened them, revealing the fire of controlled fury and immense resolve.
He stepped forward toward the wall. Fearlessly. Filling the air around him with something unmistakably physical — a pressure building to become lethal force. He gathered that force into his posture, his stance, letting speed and sharpness saturate every line of him, and then he spun — the kick releasing from his leg a gleaming blue blade of compressed air and chakra, something the universe itself seemed to have destined for this exact collision with the rocky, earthen surface the Chunin had called into being — splitting it cleanly into two halves, straight as a ruler's edge, and leaving the Third Hokage in a silence of deep, genuine shock.
"What?!" Kato and Hiroshi cried out, their voices trembling.
"Ha ha ha! This is what it does — the Power of Youth! The power of Taijutsu!" Might Guy burst into laughter.
"B-rank at minimum…" the old Hokage whispered in unfeigned admiration, quietly assigning a remarkably high rating to a technique "created" by a mere academy student sitting his Genin exam.