Chiba didn’t stop to rest.
A word or two, and the next instant he was already moving, Body Flicker carrying him forward.
Might Guy reined in his own speed, holding himself roughly to Chiba’s level.
Fists and feet flew between them, a real exchange now, no holding back.
Guy vanished mid-motion.
Chiba caught the danger a beat before it arrived and shifted his stance instantly, sweeping a whip kick backward.
Boom!
A dull, heavy impact.
A small crater bloomed in the ground.
Guy’s eyebrows rose.
Legs too?
And the force behind it hit even harder than the fist had—
There was something to this.
Something about it stirred a vague memory of Tsunade’s own taijutsu.
Splitting his attention between dodging and studying the technique, he was still turning the thought over when—
A knot of chakra suddenly bloomed around the boy’s swinging fist.
Whump.
Guy went flying.
Fortunately it was only the chakra that had landed, and he’d regained control of his body midair before Chiba could close the distance again, twisting to plant a foot against a tree trunk and launch himself back into the fight.
Lee, watching from the sidelines, felt his blood racing.
If he’d already mastered the Gates without the usual risk to his body, he might well have opened the Eighth right there just to join in.
When Chiba had first taught him the technique, he’d said that with enough mastery, any point on the body capable of generating force could become a weapon.
Now Lee was seeing it in action—shoulders, elbows, every part of him a potential strike.
The force behind each varied, but none of it was anything an ordinary opponent could stand up to.
Only someone as tough as Might Guy could shrug it off entirely—if anything, the harder the exchange got, the more excited he became.
“Burn bright, youth!”
Guy roared, and launched into a flying kick.
Chiba’s expression sharpened.
That speed had jumped a full level from before.
Somewhere in the shadows, a certain copy ninja who’d been quietly observing the whole exchange broke cover and moved to intervene.
Guy, going that hard against a child—this was reckless, no matter how you looked at it—
Hm?
Just as Kakashi thought it, he saw two chakra needles take shape in Chiba’s hands.
Dense, compressed chakra, needle-thin but honed to a razor’s edge—every bit as sharp as the chakra scalpel, if not more so.
And the boy seemed to have some precise sense of exactly where to strike.
One slash, a shift of the body—
Guy’s kick landed in perfect form, and then he simply didn’t move.
“Sensei Guy, what if you’d actually hurt Chiba just now?”
“Ha ha ha ha, guess I got a little carried away.”
Guy stood back up, the muscles around his eyes twitching.
That hurt.
The kid had gotten one over on him at exactly the right moment.
Sly little thing.
But.
He couldn’t afford to look weak in front of Lee, so he gave a thumbs up instead.
“Lee, you see that?
Put in the effort, and even taijutsu has a bright future ahead of it.
You can become just as fine a shinobi, no question!”
“Yes, Sensei Guy!”
Lee took the words at face value, no suspicion at all.
Every step Guy took after that, he was gritting his teeth through real pain.
He knew perfectly well the muscle in his foot had been sliced open.
“Yo, if it isn’t my eternal rival, Kakashi!
How about a hot-blooded handstand challenge—whoever reaches the Konoha Hospital first wins!”
Guy said this while already flipping himself upside down onto his hands.
Ah.
Much better, actually.
Kakashi narrowed his one visible eye, at a genuine loss for how to respond to any of this.
If you’re hurt, don’t push through it like that.
Getting so worked up sparring with a student that he actually took real damage—that was embarrassing enough on its own, and Kakashi understood the impulse, in a way.
But.
If you need the hospital, just go to the hospital.
Why drag me into it?
Kakashi decided he was simply a passerby, absorbed in his book, who hadn’t heard a word of that.
“Kakashi!
Truly my eternal rival!”
“Sensei Guy, I’ll come with you!”
“Good, let’s go!”
Guy went sprinting off, upside down, in that thoroughly bizarre posture.
Chiba could only stay quiet.
This—
Yeah.
This whole thing was, evidently, a level of culture he wasn’t quite ready to appreciate yet.
“What’s this technique of yours called?”
“Doesn’t have a name yet.”
“Interesting technique.
You’re clearly working off Lady Tsunade’s secret art, in some fashion—chakra reinforcement combined with muscular output.
No wonder you went to study at the medical division.”
Kakashi wasn’t like Guy.
Guy’s attention landed in strange places—sharp enough when it mattered, but he tended to miss the point on smaller things.
Kakashi, meanwhile, had been curious for a while now about why Chiba had gone to the medical division in the first place.
Now he understood.
Part of it was the chakra scalpel.
But the other part was the technique he’d just witnessed—without the time he’d spent observing and studying at the hospital, there was no way Chiba could have put something like that together.
And beyond that—
When Guy had finally cut loose, losing his grip on his own force and speed, Chiba’s response to it had been close to flawless.
In the instant Chiba’s counter had landed, one name had surfaced in Kakashi’s mind.
Orochimaru.
The same overwhelming natural gift.
“That’s right.
Though I’ve never actually met Lady Tsunade or seen how she uses her technique myself.
I only heard about it secondhand and worked out something of my own from guesswork.”
Chiba didn’t deny it.
Kakashi—known in certain circles as the Copy Ninja, with a thousand techniques committed to memory—could hardly miss the underlying logic of what he’d just watched.
“Any interest in ANBU?”
“ANBU?”
Chiba blinked, caught off guard.
Kakashi hasn’t left the force yet at this point?
“Yes.
The special assassination and tactics division.
You’ve probably heard of it.”
Kakashi nodded.
Chiba frowned, thought it over for a long moment, and shook his head.
“Honestly, I am interested.
Just not right now.
ANBU is a place built for killing, and I’m still in the stage of accumulating knowledge.”
Kakashi went quiet, his single visible eye resting steadily on Chiba.
Anyone ordinary, hearing an invitation to ANBU, would have jumped at the chance without a second thought.
But this kid—
He was twelve.
Hadn’t even graduated yet.
And faced with an offer like that, he showed no excitement at all—if anything, he seemed to view it as an interruption to his own study plans.
Kakashi himself, at that age, hadn’t been half this composed.
Far too rational for his years.
The boy clearly had a full plan mapped out already, each step laid in place ahead of time.
Kakashi said nothing for a while.
He thought it over, then scratched his head, a little awkwardly.
“All right.
If you ever have questions, come find me.
Well—if our paths happen to cross.
If not, don’t worry about it.”
“Wait!
Senior Kakashi, since you mentioned it, there’s actually something I’d like to ask you about.”
“Hm?
Go ahead.”
Kakashi tilted his head, not expecting the question to come quite so fast.
He thought it over, then hedged himself just in case.
“If I happen to know the answer, that is.”
“I’ve heard you’re quite skilled with a blade.
The Land of Iron is mostly samurai—how does their swordsmanship differ from yours?”
Chiba didn’t know much about the Land of Iron.
Beyond a handful of moves tied to Mifune, he had no real grasp of it, and Kakashi, as a former ANBU captain, understood this territory far better than most.
Kakashi considered it for a moment, then said, “They come from a samurai tradition, so for them chakra is a tool for enhancing strength and speed, not the core of the technique itself.
My swordsmanship, and my father’s, treats both as equally central.
The Uchiha clan’s swordsmanship, meanwhile, is built around ninjutsu at its core—”
He ran through several more examples before finally stopping to look at Chiba.
“You’re asking about this because you’re working on your own swordsmanship?”
“Yes.
I heard the Land of Iron doesn’t train in ninjutsu at all, that they focus entirely on swordsmanship instead, so I was curious.”
“The Land of Iron’s swordsmanship grew out of their old samurai era.”
Kakashi gave him a brief rundown, holding nothing back.
Some of it Chiba already knew, some of it he didn’t, and by the end his sense of the subject had broadened considerably.