Rock Lee's arms wobbled, flapping like butterfly wings.
He was still seventy short of five hundred. No matter how you looked at it, he didn't seem capable of holding on much longer. It looked like he might collapse at any moment.
But he didn't. He did each push-up slowly, with great difficulty, drenched in sweat and enduring the pain.
For a boy still growing, this would undoubtedly damage his body and limit his potential.
But neither Rock Lee nor Might Guy thought about the future. They focused only on the present: if they said they would do something, they had to do it. If they couldn't, they had to accept the punishment.
Naruto watched, standing ramrod straight, swept up in the atmosphere.
He had once asked his adoptive father: What did it mean to train?
The answer he'd received was: To demand something of yourself and seek to obtain it—that is training.
In the first half of his life, his adoptive father had lost his father and brother. His own cultivation had stalled, and day and night, the two elders his father had left behind had humiliated him.
His mother had told him to take revenge. So he trained and trained without stopping.
In the end, he had established the Celestial Kingdom, only to have it destroyed by his enemy's son, Killer Whale Orga. The two hundred and eighty thousand men under him had all been slaughtered by Orga while trying to save him.
Heartbreak. Hatred. Revenge. Power. He sought power.
In the end, he had built a mighty Celestial Kingdom with his own strength, never fearing or retreating, standing alone against the heroes of the world, and claiming the title of the strongest man alive.
There had only ever been one person born the strongest: Orga. But the strongest