# Chapter 12: Genin
The Third Hokage, Might Guy, and the rest of them found that after his burst of so-called positive emotions, the boy Rock Lee did not return the energy in kind. He didn't change his expression, didn't stop to bask in what he'd accomplished.
Instead, he shifted into a new stance, pushed off the ground, and in the space of a lightning-fast instant closed the distance to the rocky wall — one half of which had already fallen with a thundering crash of rubble and dust, though the solid base still stood firm. And against that remaining foundation, the thick-browed follower of the Taijutsu path proceeded to deliver, in precise chronological order, several dozen strikes that were impressive by any physical measure.
Legs, palms, fists — blurring through the air. Impact after impact, like a signature written over and over. Lee showed no mercy to himself or to the wall that was currently serving as his training dummy, and why would he? He understood perfectly well that stopping at Rankyaku alone would never be enough. So Rock struck as if his life depended on it — slowly but surely coaxing the stone to crack, watching a beautiful web of fracture lines bloom across its surface.
"I see enormous potential. What do you think, Guy?" Hiruzen asked quietly, turning to the finest Taijutsu practitioner in all of Konoha for his overall assessment of Rock's abilities — in the village that Sarutobi himself had been governing through the long, grueling years.
"You know, Hokage-sama, I've been thinking about taking on a Genin team to raise as a full Jonin." The man in the green jumpsuit smiled brilliantly and stuck up a thumbs-up, making his approval of Rock and his abilities unmistakably clear. "Lee would be an ideal student for me — given his talent in one area and his limitations in certain others. And beyond that, there's the Power of Youth in him — that force which is both intangible and simultaneously all-powerful. Ha ha!"
"Good," the old Hokage nodded.
From inside his robes, he produced a thin rolled bundle containing a forehead protector — which he had prepared, on a fifty-fifty chance, in case Lee actually passed the exam. He had. So apparently none of it had been wasted.
When Lee finished his kata demonstration — drawn briefly and involuntarily into the memories of another life — the question of his rank had already been effectively decided. Hiruzen wasted no time. He presented Rock with the gleaming iron-sheen hitaiate, telling him to wear it with pride as a mark that Rock was a shinobi of Konoha and no one else's — the kind of sentiment that sounded like something out of a patriotism test, but the boy saw no reason to resist it. He tied the protector across his forehead and let a quiet smirk pull at the corner of his mouth, feeling, for no particular reason he could name, like a considerably more important person than usual.
Some kind of magic, surely.
---
*[Name: Rock Lee]*
*[Shinobi Rank: Genin]*
*[Health: 100%]*
*[Stamina: 90%]*
*[Chakra: 88%]*
*[Taijutsu Rank: C+]*
*[Ninjutsu Rank: —]*
*[Genjutsu Rank: —]*
*[Inventory]*
*[Achievements: 1]*
*[Hell's Training List: 2]*
---
*Hm? Achievements?*
Lee puzzled over the new entry — but the old Hokage showed no sign of leaving, and there were still a handful of tedious formalities ahead, including the profile photograph every shinobi needed. He set aside his curiosity about the system's update and forced himself to focus on the present.
Besides, from what he'd caught in passing, it seemed like he really was being placed on Guy's team rather than assigned to some random Jonin — which had quietly worried him sometimes. Thick brows recognize thick brows from a mile away, but more seriously: there was simply no better teacher in the Hidden Leaf than a man with the surname Maito.
---
By the end of the day, Lee arrived at the clan compound in the kind of exhaustion that had nothing to do with the body — it was his mind that had given out. As the last one processed due to his unconventional exam route, all the documentation a newly minted Genin needed had been drawn up for him only after everyone else on the list, dead last of the last. So like it or not, Lee had failed to escape the mind-numbing tedium of paperwork, and the deep-as-a-chasm bags under his eyes were proof of it — though he was not, for the record, sleeping badly. That part was simply untrue.
Bureaucratic red tape, it turned out, was torture by another name.
"Well done, son! If I'm being honest, I didn't put any money on you — but! You surprised me, and I am very happy for your success, even if it might be the last success of your life! Still — Genin! Not Chunin, granted, but that's alright! My son is a shinobi at last! After so many failures and defeats! I am so proud of you, Rock! Your mother would've been proud too, if she hadn't abandoned us all those years ago — pfft, stupid woman!"
The "relatives" gathered in the house jostled and steered Lee back and forth in their celebration, his somewhat-drunk-with-joy father among them — genuinely happy for his son's achievement, but expressing it in a manner so appallingly embarrassing that Rock wanted to sink through the floor, or at least to land one clean hit to make the man stop talking and stop making him look bad.
The whole company of vaguely familiar so-called family members was grating on the thick-browed boy's nerves considerably. He wasn't an introvert — no — but anyone could see the situation for what it was if they simply looked at it from a different angle. People constantly crowding in and interrupting, asking the most obvious and pointless questions: how are things, how's life, how's the chakra control coming along, how are the tenketsu holding up — irritating enough on their own, and on top of that pushing at emotions that Lee, in his position, would certainly have valued and never wasted on idiots.
But when evening had fully claimed the day and the sacred moon had risen above everything, the Lee clan members hurried off to bed as early as possible — parents needing to get children ready for the academy tomorrow, others preparing for another morning mission to keep their lean wallets from going entirely flat. Such was life.
Son Lee, however — Rock's father — did something entirely out of character to mark the occasion.
"Get ready, Rock! No sleeping yet, my warrior! Tonight we have a special celebration, just the two of us, you and me — father and son, no one else!" the man announced, doing something theatrical and cartoonish with his eyebrows that managed to startle Lee considerably with the implications.
"What? Can we maybe not?" Rock answered with awkward reluctance, wanting nothing more than to rest — but Son Lee didn't appear to be asking. Or possibly genuinely wasn't.
"We can!" the man declared with immediate, hyperactive certainty — in the manner he always seemed to operate, as though in their household it was somehow the younger one who was actually the senior, paradoxical as that was in practice.
And so.
In the end, Son Lee brought his son to a restaurant. Not just any restaurant — one belonging to the great Akimichi clan. A clan famous for the generous build of its members, who tended to take poorly to jokes about weight, and for techniques capable of expanding their users to the size of enormous figures — more precisely, figures that were mathematically large, round, substantial.
"Well? Ha! Bet you thought your old man was a broke fool without a coin to his name — but no! I've been saving this money specifically for you, running mission after mission and barely coming home, son! Yes, we're going to spend it all tonight — right down to the last painful drop — but we'll celebrate like kings, the way our family deserves! The proper way, Rock!"
The man was radiant with joy, nodding toward the colorful building strung with lights, from which well-fed people of ample face and figure came and went in a steady stream.
*Hm. I had a lower opinion of him than he deserves. Probably unfairly so.*
The thought moved through Lee's mind as he watched Son Lee smile and exhale in quiet, relaxed contentment — looking for once like a genuinely good and caring father, one willing to make sacrifices and put in the effort for his own blood, and not the reckless buffoon he seemed to be on every other day of the year.
"Thank you," Rock said, and meant it.
He stepped inside alongside his father — now somewhat elevated in his estimation — to try the finest meat available, in a place he had never been before.
The Akimichi clan restaurant.
The system's Achievements could wait. So could the pre-sleep training.
---
The following morning.
A classroom full of twelve-year-olds who had only just become Genin the day before, and were still riding the cheerful high of it. Among the smiling, growing young bodies sat Rock Lee — true to form, occupying the very back row, watching everyone below him and taking in the final words of wisdom from their teacher, who today would no longer hold that role for them. From this point forward, the one at the head of each team of three would not be a single Chunin but a fully qualified Jonin assigned to them specifically.
"Team One…"
"Team Two…"
"Team Three — Neji Hyuga, Tenten, and Rock Lee."
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