Chapter 49: Duel of the Fated Rivals
Chapter 21
"You're too slow!" Jin bellowed as he belted the spin kicking Rock Lee with a punch that sent the green clad genin flying.
Demonstrating much greater straight-line speed than the other boy displayed, Jin launched himself after his flying foe and arrived ahead of him already delivering an overhand right that shattered the ground when Rock Lee rolled around the punch before he landed. He spun into another kick which Jin caught between his ribs and his muscular arm, the bicep vein bulging as he put the squeeze on the limb.
"You dare!" he shouted as he began throwing punches which Rock Lee parried and blocked, "You dare to wear weights in a duel against your rival! Such disregard! No respect! Die now for this outrage!"
Jin pivoted and ran slamming the grappled Rock Lee into a tree as the other boy landed furious punches that split the shark boy's lip and started swelling around his eye. The scream of pain from Rock Lee made it sound like a one sided exchange. In a show of flexibility and toughness, Lee managed to slip out of the hold and back flip away.
"Guy Sensei!" Rock Lee shouted as he weaved Jin's assault and lowered his orange pinstripe leg warmers to reveal his hefty leg weights, "You made me swear to only remove these as a last resort when the lives of very important people are at stake, but this duel is important to me! Forgive me, Guy Sensei!"
With a final flourish he removed the weights and raised them to his shoulders, moving his head to dodge another punch from a grinning Jin, then dropped the weights. The ground shook and dirt flew as the massive restraints hit, and Lee blitzed away and around Jin to deliver a flying spinning roundhouse kick. Jin ducked under the kick and tackled the other boy into another tree in a display of explosive speed just as fast as the unrestrained Rock Lee.
"That's more like it!" Jin screamed as he held Rock Lee against the tree in a clinch with a hand behind his neck, the pair exchanging weak shots - comparatively speaking with their full destructive capabilities, not with average genin - with their knees and dirty boxing, Rock Lee demonstrating his incredibly conditioned body again with a feat of flexibility, delivering powerful leg kicks with so little room to work with.
Rock Lee wove under an over eager punch and wrapped his hands around Jin's waist, taking him from behind and dropping his hips to lift the bigger man into the air and slam him head first into the ground, blitzing away before Jin recovered to reestablish effective striking distance for his kicking style. Jin flipped back up and charged, and Rock Lee side stepped and hit him with a counter. This repeated itself a few times through a dozen exchanges - Jin's faster straight-line speed and Lee's greater lateral agility - as the boys displayed ferocity, power, and speed in their taijutsu, though ultimately Rock Lee came out the worse for wear between the two despite the big counter strikes.
"Hitting your skull feels like hitting a steel plate!" Lee grit out after landing a punch which Jin redirected to his forehead with a head tilt.
"And hitting yours feels like punching a big rock!" Jin roared and threw another overhand that Lee weaved under and counter overhanded.
Despite winning the punches, Jin grinned as Lee's bandage wrapped fist impacted his cheek, already throwing a leg kick that sent the other boy to the ground. Jin came after him with a diving punch that Lee rolled away from, kicking up dirt behind him like an explosive tag went off. Jin tried for another but received an upkick to the face that flipped the bigger teen onto his back. Lee sent out a low spinning kick to the downed Jin's legs, but the other boy exploded up onto just his shoulders and wrapped his legs around Lee's waist, pulling the other boy to the ground with his core strength and chakra sticking, rooting him in place. Lee struggled in the guard and created enough space to throw an elbow that opened a cut on Jin's dark brow that leaked blood down into his round sharklike eye.
Not just taking the hit, Jin had thrown his head into it, slipping past the slicing elbow despite the impact and getting that arm around his head while he sunk the underhook around Lee's shoulder and pulled him tight to his chest, connecting the under hand with the other sealing his powerful limbs around Rock Lee's neck, applying pressure from his arms and Lee's shoulder onto his neck to choke his rival out.
"Die knowing that I will be an excellent husband for Sakura," Jin roared as he used his chakra to keep them both in position and put a lethal squeeze onto the other boy who tried desperately to heave the bigger boy off the ground and slam him down to get out of the choke, "and that our children will be the best of both of us, my strength and resilience, and her exotic beauty! And they shall have the best of you, my worthy rival! I will take your strength deep within me, and you shall live on and experience Sakura's love and my martial glory through me!"
"How can a fight over a girl be so gay?" Keiko muttered and sighed as she spectated what appeared to be the closing moments of the duel.
"I believe Jin means that he is going to eat Rock Lee in some sort of quasi-religious cannibalistic ritual." Haruto stated with his chin in his hand as if merely observing some quaint bit of rare anthropology.
"Are you serious?" Keiko recoiled, "Do Hoshigaki do that?"
"No, but I doubt even Kami knows what fresh and dramatic idiocy that Jin will come up with next." Haruto concluded.
It appeared that Rock Lee finally succumbed to Jin's choke hold, but suddenly he renewed his efforts as if receiving an entirely second wind, and then the boy's skin turned bright red and his hair stood on end. With a mighty heave lifted Jin right off the ground, the ground coming up with him still attached by his chakra.
"Hey guys!" Jin called over to them, "He suddenly got way stronger!"
Then Rock Lee slammed Jin into the freshly excavated ground so hard it cratered under his wide muscular back.
"I don't think I'm going to win this one!" Jin groaned in pain and then Rock Lee descended like the grim reaper delivering thundering punches in such rapid assault that it sounded like one long continuous impact that left Jin a bloody mess on the floor.
Rock Lee backflipped away and let out a breath that released whatever technique he used for that brief flash of power, his shoulders slumping in exhaustion. He appeared to have nothing left to give, and expected his rival to have no chance of moving under his own power any time this year, which is why he startled when Jin Hoshigaki make his way back to his feet on trembling legs, his face and chest two swollen masses of bruised and bleeding flesh.
"Yes my rival!" he screamed through swollen and split lips, "Slay me now in glorious combat, and consume my body, take my strength deep within yourself and rise harder and stronger! Take me with you to love and legend as you make this world your oyster!"
Rock Lee's face twitched as he listened to the shaking man's speech then shouted, "No way!"
"You dare!" Jin growled as he tried charge his rival and reenter combat, but instead fell on the shattered earth of the crater and had to turn his face to keep himself from suffocating in the soft dirt, "You dare… no-no respect!" he gasped before his consciousness faded away.
"Good fight!" Keiko declared and put her hand on her sword, "Now it's time to deal with you."
The exhausted Rock Lee didn't even have the energy to complain about Keiko doing exactly as she said she would, ignoring any deals made by Jin. He also didn't have the energy to dodge the pair of scrolls that she threw at his face hard enough to knock him down to the ground.
"Huh?" Lee gaped as his eyes fell upon the paired exam scrolls.
"You could have killed Jin back there even easier than knocking him out." Keiko explained the sudden change of heart, "Even if he's dumber than most stray cats and dogs, Jin's life has value to Kirigakure. Take the scrolls, you and your team are allowed to make it to the next stage."
"I concur." Haruto nodded his pale head, "Go quickly, and don't try to free the other teams. You've only earned yourself so much leniency with your show of power and restraint. Who knows, maybe your fists rearranged Jin's brain into something resembling normalcy. A man can dream, at the very least."
"I… thank you!" Rock Lee expressed himself as he kneeled with the scrolls in front of him, clutched in his aching bandaged hand.
"Thank Lord Fifth." Haruto dismissed his gratitude, "Under his rule Kirigakure values the lives of its shinobi. This much is a bargain for us."
"I see." Rock Lee nodded, "I'd very much like to meet the Lord Fifth that you all seem to respect so much."
"Lord Fifth is a visionary leader, a great warrior and a great peacemaker. Under his rule all lives in Kirigakure and eventually in the wider Land of Water are lifted up into the future." Haruto explained, "You'll have the chance to see him for yourself when he travels to Konoha for the Chunin Exam Finals."
"I can't wait, he sounds like a really great man!" Rock Lee smiled.
-meanwhile in Kirigakure-
"I believe we have reached the end of our time today, master." Bullseye bowed low to me, with his head pressed to the ground.
"I didn't notice any gains." I stated, having trained with the man extensively since Obito's attack, his predictive skills and spatial intelligence paying bills against the hard to counter villain, "Report to the medical facility."
Lester dedicated himself to pure evil, so I didn't feel any way about what happened next. I just wish we had someone on staff besides Haku capable of the procedure. As such I ended up stuck for hours keeping Lester's brain alive with iryojutsu while a genjutsu zonked out Chigure carved out the adamantium reinforcing his and in some cases entirely replacing his bones.
Once we finished, I activated the full heal from his Body Tune up restoring him to factory default without taking away the pile of super metal we harvested. We hit repeat on the brutal surgery, and then a third time with the full heal from Body Defense, before I patched him up enough to not immediately die and Refunded him, making the barely alive lump of flesh someone else's problem while restoring eighty percent of his purchase value to me. I spent 2 Points for a mastery of trajectory and spatial awareness mixed with mean improvised ranged combat. What a bargain.
After cleaning the operating room, I left Shizune with her shiny pile of super metal and the command to integrate it into the next version of Shorikimasu. Something in my gut told me that it is going to be the swordiest sword that ever sworded. The light gleaming of that future blade flashed across time to give me inner strength in the present, the strength to take up Kubikiribocho once more and not feel like an idiot swinging one of the worst of the Seven Swords around. Juzo Biwa bitched when I took the sword back from her, but until the glorious day that I carry the reforged Shorikimasu around, I might as well carry around a spare that at least has the decency to perform its own maintenance.
My chosen training ground for the day centered around an enormous waterfall dumping an endless torrent of white water from the snow capped mountains of the interior, and generated a thick mist in the area. On my signal my minions released an evergreen from the top and I leapt with Kubikiribocho in hand, cutting as many limbs from the trunk as possible as it fell. I only cleared half off the tree by the time it hit the water below, and even then, not well. Shigure cleared the entire tree trunk clean with a wooden spoon in that time. Mightiest Disciple characters go hard as fuck with the ridiculous feats.
I needed to tune up her inculcation regularly, the woman entirely unsuited in temperament for working under me, preventing me from allowing her to access most of her personality and memories. She comes from a preachy shonen of merciful good guys overcoming murderous bad guys with hyper exaggerated martial arts, and belongs to the goodiest of factions wherein dwell a pack of Gary and Mary Stu giga-prodigies who basically already finished their own shonen story lines by the first chapter. Useful as all hell to me, but a pain in the ass to manage. It's not easy keeping people smarter than me under my thumb.
Despite the difficulty, she is useful beyond compare. The way Shigure's mind works makes her seem more like a learning machine than a human, the woman crushing through Mito Uzumaki's template with ease, soon to reach the levels that allowed her to safely seal the most powerful of the bijuu into herself - something that would destroy the juubi husk - and keep it completely locked away until the time of her choosing. Already, Shigure could design buildings based on seals, and she did all this while still working as the sword instructor of my Retinue and smith. If I had her neuroplasticity I'd already be done with all of Hiruzen's Template, a master of all the jutsu of Konoha. Sucks to suck, am I right?
Whatever, it's not healthy to compare yourself to overpowered shonen characters written to be beyond mundane humans. Hax I say, her whole squad, hax! At least I got those hax working for me right now. I sent up the signal once more and got back to work. I just needed to remember Shigure's instructions for my Talents to kick back into closing the gap between me and her. I'd get there soon enough.
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Rejoice for I have returned from the Land of Shadow glut on conquest and victory.
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