"Maybe we should follow her."
"Wh-what? That would be totally creepy." A gentleman doesn't follow around a blossoming beauty like a bandit or a rapist or something!
But he was worried too. For three Mondays in a row now, Sakaki came to school covered in bandages and scabbed-over cuts. She sometimes had little adhesive-strip bandages on her cheeks, across her nose, and bigger ones winding around her arms, and one day when she wore shorts, they could see she had them on her legs too.
Chiyo-chan said, "Well, we could just ask her."
"Nooo!" Osaka exclaimed. "What if she's being blackmailed by gangsters or something? Or maybe she's dating some bad boy who abuses her in all sorts of ways! If she tells, maybe he'll whip her!"
Now that was too much! Lee exploded to his feet, "Nooo! Nobody can whip Sakaki-san!" He could just imagine some huge beast of a man restraining her, tearing at her clothes and doing... Then he was crying, "Poor, poor Sakaki-san! We should definitely follow her one weekend, it's our duty as friends!"
Then he paused, suddenly having this weird feeling. He looked over his shoulder and there was just a lamp post there.
"N-no, Osaka-chan, Lee-kun... I'm sure she's just fine. She wouldn't let some boy hurt her!"
Osaka murmured, "But what if it's a cute dominatrix girl with cat eyes and furry cat ears?"
They all paused at that thought, imagining some neko-girl in black leather clawing and whipping at a blushing, gasping Sakaki.
"Nooooooo!" Lee and Chiyo-chan wailed together.
They kept walking. The argument was mostly winding down at this point. Even though Chiyo-chan was sure that there was no way Sakaki was in some kind of abusive relationship with a secret bad-boy goon or evil S and M cat-girl, well. Better to be sure. Sakaki was just the sort who might let the right (wrong) sort of person take advantage of her.
"Okay, let's go to her place early on Sunday."
Anyway, it had been quite a while since they'd all done something together on the weekend.
Lee whipped his head around again. It was just the old man selling tofu in sweet molasses at the corner, like usual.
"What are you looking at, Lee-kun?"
"I just had this feeling."
And then he dropped a weighted chain from his sleeve into his palm and flung his arm back as he turned, a blurry black line of steel.
"Got you!"
The tall figure sighed, started unwrapping Lee's chain from his wrist.
"I'm getting careless if you can sense me, Lee."
"Ah!" Chiyo-chan chirped, "Neji-kun! If you were worried about Sakaki too, you could have just said so."
"I'm not worried. She's too strong for any situation remotely similar to what your over-active imaginations are coming up with."
Lee accepted the other end of his combat chain from Neji and pocketed it again. Then he tilted his head and peered suspiciously at Neji.
"Did you just have a nose-bleed?"
"O-of course not!"
Osaka smacked her fist into her palm. "I see! The thought of a busty girl getting the clothes torn off her can make boys act weird!"
"No way," Lee said. "I'm not that kind of guy!"
Neji, wiping self-consciously at his nose with a black scarf he'd pulled from his coat pocket, muttered, "Your nose is red too, idiot."
Somehow, through the storm of teasing that happened, during which even Chiyo-chan was reduced to blushing by Osaka's casual remarks, they made the resolution to meet at dawn on Sunday. Neji too.
For some reason, Lee didn't mind so much, knowing that Neji was also an admirer of Sakaki-san at this point. It was a kind of kinship, wasn't it? It made him feel better that he wasn't the only boy who felt that Sakaki was somehow beyond their reach. It wasn't just her age, and it wasn't her looks. There was a part of her that always seemed guarded, even from Chiyo-chan and Osaka.
Before he knew it, it was already the dawn of their appointed meeting. He wanted to wear something nice since it was sort of an outing with friends, but then, what if they had to beat up some person taking advantage of Sakaki? Heck, either the person was very strong and could force himself or herself onto the strongest student in the Academy, or the person was gut-wrenchingly cute and manipulated Sakaki that way. In either case... He vowed he would not be helpless!
But he was. They all were. Even though they showed up fairly bristling with weapons and knives, and Neji wore the white Hyuuga combat robes that he'd stopped wearing everyday since his defeat at Sakaki's hands.
They used Neji's vision to follow her from distances and angles where there was always something between them and her.
Maybe it was because he was straining himself to stay focused on her despite the distance and the obstacles like lamp posts and newsstands and people walking their dogs or biking or jogging, but when they did finally, cautiously approach the training ground she used, outside the outer wall of the city and a mile into the forest, Neji was surprised too.
They cowered there, at the edge of the clearing, hiding behind bushes and trees, on their knees, glimpsing the battle that had already begun through the twigs and branches and leaves, and the clouds of dust and steam in the distance.
There were old craters scattered around the ten thousand square foot field. Tree-stumps dotted the uneven surface, charred pieces of wood, shattered boulders.
And on that field of combat, Sakaki was magnificent. She wore her battle gloves and snug, faded, cut-off jeans and her beat-up sneakers and the leather vest Lee had given her and a sports bra beneath that. She was surrounded with the gold-white radiance of her maximized Tenryu Kokyu Ho, her dark eyes sparkling with power, the muscles of her long arms and legs and on her exposed belly and shoulders rippling, taut.
She moved like the wind.
And a Red Beast was ripping through everything in between them. Boulders exploded into clouds of fragments with Its passage. When it roared, it was thunder. The light coming from its dark heart was baleful, oppressive - just seeing it made Lee tremble in place.
Over the sound of the explosive impacts of Sakaki's feet against the ground, and the snarling crash of the beast, they could hear her voice.
"You're moving like how you think It would have moved!" she said loudly, over the howling, dust-whipping winds churned up around them. "You're not moving the way you could move! Use your tails - they're not just for show, and they're not just for balance! You can push off of the ground with them to jump faster and higher, you can use them to cushion your landings, you can extend them around trees as you move to make impossible turns!"
The beast screamed louder, but apparently did as she said, and its blurring speed increased. The tails of light could move faster than its own limbs, and became sets of additional legs, propelling it towards her, no longer an over-sized fox but a burning red, multi-armed comet that cut a violent wake along the ground, kicking up gravel and bits of grass behind it.
"Wh-what's going on?" Chiyo-chan whispered, shaking as she held tightly onto Osaka, who was hunched over, eyes closed, fists pressed against her temples, rocking back and forth.
Neji whispered, "The demon boy... Sakaki-san is teaching him."
A flicker, a beam of searing red stretched out and opened a shallow cut that stretched all the way across Sakaki's tanned belly.
"That's it! You can change the shape of the light! You don't have to have claws and tails, or you can have more of them than the real Kyuubi ever had! It's all in your head!" she was calling out, dancing back and forth, avoiding the explosions of dust and rock from the beast's missed attacks smashing into their surroundings. "The light doesn't belong to It anymore, the light is yours! It's up to you how you shape it!"
There was a gasp then. Lee wasn't sure if he was the one that let it out. Maybe it was Neji.
As Sakaki skidded around in a spin that whirled her between a pair of massive granite boulders, she kicked out against one and then the other, reversing her motion, flipping towards the beast. Tendrils of razor light sliced the air, and she twisted through them, leg stretched out in a kick.
When her foot made contact, the gold and the red mingled, exploded.
The sound: a deafening thunderbolt. The earth shifted under the feet of the watching friends, and blistering hot waves of air pressure pushed back at the them, set the trees around them swaying, shriveled up the leaves on the ground.
Lee's eyes watered. Neji was writhing on the ground, clutching at his face. It was surely far worse for him, since he had been watching with his doujutsu activated.
The impact flung the creature a hundred feet back to the other end of the clearing, its tails and claws and arms hooking, cutting deep grooves in the dark earth. Even that soil, wet from last night's rain, was steaming, lines of vapor climbing around it.
The earth was too soft to form a crater, so at the point of impact, the ground rippled outward in concentric waves from the pressure, stretching out in a fifty foot radius. Sakaki was crouched down there, one knee down in the dirt, he hands planted down too, ready to help launch her forward again. Her eyes were alive, so much more alive than when Lee saw her at school or even at the Dojo.
She straightened up, clapped her hands together, and bowed. "That's enough today, Uzumaki-kun. Umm. We have an audience."