Previously on Hakuna, while patrolling the outer perimeter of the school to contain the fallout from Monk's political coup, the boys encountered a massive, multi-tiered army of demons bleeding out from a jagged tear in reality. But little did they know, the entire demonic horde was nothing more than a tactical distraction. A terrifying new foe from the depths of the multiverse has entered the scene, and his first move was a brutal, rule-breaking sucker punch that sent one of their own flying through a brick wall...
Fade in...
The dust on the shattered school field begins to settle, casting a hazy, grey film over the entire battlefield. Leragga is seen standing up straight, rolling his shoulder casually after delivering that monstrous, momentum-stopping punch to Freddie. He looks around at the remaining members of the BBC with a cold, completely unbothered expression.
He then says, his voice cutting through the ringing silence of the field, "Alright, let's skip the long-winded introductions. Straight to the killing."
Hakuna immediately steps forward, his school shoes crunching heavily against the debris of the ruined track. The sheer disrespect of the attack has completely erased his previous boredom. As he moves to the front of the group, he says, his voice dropping into a dangerous, protective register, "You must not know who we are, do you?"
Before Leragga can even offer a sarcastic retort, a voice echoes from the wreckage of the brick changing rooms. "Nope... he doesn't have a clue."
As he says this, Freddie walks out from the thick dust cloud. His uniform is torn, and there's a thin line of crimson running down his chin, but his stance is rock-solid. He stops, calmly brushing away the loose dirt and brick dust on his shoulder as if the impact was nothing more than an annoying breeze.
Leragga's eyes narrow as he watches the boy emerge from a hit that should have turned a normal human into a stain. He thinks to himself, "Hmm, he's far more resilient than I remember from the other timelines. Does he not recognize me?"
Leragga then steps forward, confidently declaring to the group, "Alright, before we actually get started and things get messy, I would like to introduce myself properly. The name's Leragga. Remember it, because it's the last one you're going to hear."
The moment the syllables leave his mouth, Freddie freezes. His entire body goes rigid, his eyes widening in absolute, paralyzing shock. The calm demeanor he just displayed vanishes, replaced by a deep, instinctual terror.
Hakuna, standing a few paces ahead, notices the sudden shift in his friend's posture. He thinks to himself, "I don't know who that is, I've never heard that name in my life... but Freddie knows him. And whoever he is, he must be a nightmare."
Deep within Hakuna's subconscious, the voice of Psycha mutters, the mental presence sounding more hurried than usual. "I think I do... But this isn't the time to dissect things. End him, Hakuna. Quickly."
"Noted," Hakuna says aloud. His voice is incredibly low and guttural now, completely devoid of his usual high-school emotion. The casual student is gone; the Prince has taken the wheel.
The rest of the BBC—Super, Enzo, Rems, Bodega, and MXO—stand down. They don't move to help. They know that when Hakuna enters the fight with that specific tone of voice, the conflict is already over.
As Hakuna then walks over to Leragga, stepping over the deep trenches left by the demonic army, his eyes begin to shift, fading from their dark shade to a glowing, luminescent light brown. The spiritual pressure around his body begins to compact, heavy and dense.
Leragga, sensing the sudden, exponential spike in energy, feels his own smirk falter for a micro-second. He thinks to himself, "Woah... this is the closest I've gotten to feeling like I'm fighting Him. The pressure... the weight of the aura... it's almost identical." He refers, once again, to the absolute powerhouse variant he follows through the void.
Hakuna then stops ten paces away, staring directly into Leragga's arrogant face. He says, "I don't know who you are, or what you crawled out of, but you just made my friend look like a Vincent van Gogh painting. For that, you pay the price... Kihimurra."
His energy flares outward in a violent wave. As the power peaks, his eyes flash a brilliant, dangerous yellow before returning to their steady, light brown glow.
Hakuna enters his classic, low-center-of-gravity fighting stance. Leragga tilts his head, a sadistic grin returning to his features, and then he obliges, dropping into his own loose, fluid guard.
The air tenses around them, warping from the sheer heat of their opposing auras. Then, before the sound of their breath could even keep up with their physical forms, they vanish.
BOOM!
The ground where they stood explodes backward as they clash on the complete opposite side of the sports field. The shockwave of their meeting shatters the remaining windows of the Science block.
Hakuna's expression remains perfectly stoic, an unmoving wall of focus.
Leragga's expression, however, is pure, maniacal glee. He's a man who thrives on the threshold of death.
They vanish again, moving across the field like twin streaks of lightning. This time, the sound finally gets its act together, catching up to their movements with a continuous barrage of thunderous cracks that echo across the entire Klerksdorp region.
Hakuna sends a devastating straight punch aimed right at Leragga's throat. Leragga sways backward, the wind of the fist cutting a line across his cheek as he dodges.
Leragga counter-attacks immediately, throwing a heavy left hook intended to cave in Hakuna's ribs. Hakuna dodges, ducking beneath the arc of the arm.
But he doesn't just avoid the blow—he dodges in a specific, calculated way that turns his entire body like a gyroscope, allowing him to use the momentum to catch Leragga completely off guard with a brutal, blind-spot backhanded fist.
CRACK!
Leragga's instincts are elite. He manages to raise his right hand just in time, catching the backhand punch in his palm. But the force is immense. He clamps his fingers down and uses Hakuna's own forward momentum against him, slamming Hakuna face-first into the ground.
The impact is so severe that Hakuna bounces off the earth like a stone skipped across water. As he is airborne, the brown in his eyes fades completely, replaced by a sharp, piercing yellow.
Hakuna uses the bounce to flip his positioning, quickly moving away to create distance. Leragga throws a follow-up punch meant to pin him down, but he misses, his fist plunging deep into the floor and getting slightly stuck in a self-made crater of concrete and soil.
Suddenly, through the ringing of the battle, Leragga hears a sharp, terrified gasp from the edge of the pavilion. He pauses, his head snapping to the right to see Wase standing there behind a pillar, frozen in horror as she witnesses the cataclysmic battle.
He snarls, his face contorting in annoyance, "Ugh. Witnesses."
Before he even knew it, the air to his left catches fire. Hakuna appears out of nowhere, his yellow eyes glowing menacingly through the dark. His right fist is completely engulfed in a roaring, superheated plasma as he drives it forward, shouting, "Fist of Inferno!"
Leragga's eyes widen as he senses the lethal heat. He violently twists his torso, weaving away by mere millimeters as Hakuna's fist misses his chest and detonates directly into the ground. The resulting explosion obliterates the very crater Leragga's hand was stuck in, inadvertently freeing him and allowing him to ride the shockwave to escape the worst of the blast radius.
Leragga skids across the grass on his feet, his boots smoking. He thinks to himself, a genuine laugh bubbling in his chest, "I guess it really was worth the wait to find this timeline. This is gonna be far more interesting than those broken, miserable variants I cleared out earlier."
Through the billowing black dust cloud of the inferno explosion, a distinct silhouette begins to take shape. The figure walks out with slow, deliberate steps, those glowing yellow eyes piercing through the smog. Oh, it's Hakuna, completely untouched by his own flames.
Hakuna stops, his gaze fixing on the older man. Sensing something deeply odd about Leragga's aged, battle-worn visage, yet recognizing behavioral patterns and combat quirks that match someone of his own teenage age group, he speaks. He says, "You seem rather cowardly for a grown man."
It is a profound level of observation—a logical deduction that almost perfectly matches the tactical genius of 'King Hakuna' from another universe.
Leragga responds, tilting his chin up, "Hmph. Cowardly? No, kid. I'm merely just savoring my meal."
Hakuna, entirely unbothered and not understanding the foe's unearned confidence after being forced to dodge twice, mutters, "Huh? A meal? You talk too much for someone who's running out of breath."
Leragga then steps closer, his aura beginning to shift into a cold, dark violet. He says, "Haha! You think you're winning because I'm letting you swing? Let me clarify something for you, little Prince: I am far more powerful than all of you combined."
Hakuna queries, a genuinely cold scoff escaping his lips as he looks down on Leragga, "Is that so? Heh. Let's test that theory."
As he says this, the yellow in his eyes immediately fades, replaced by a deep, regal purple. His entire aura undergoes a radical transformation, condensing until it becomes like heavy, pressurized steam rising from his skin, crackling with raw, psionic force. He concludes, "Let's see how much you can chew."
He then vanishes. No sound, no dust, no transition.
He reappears directly above Leragga, his face positioned only centimeters away from Leragga's nose, descending with terrifying gravitational speed.
As they meet eye-to-eye, they both begin flaring their energy at absolute maximum output—not striking yet, but using their raw auras as a brutal show of pure intimidation.
The purple steam of Hakuna's Psycha collides with the dark violet frequency of Leragga. This psychological and spiritual deadlock goes on for a few agonizing seconds. The air between them becomes so dense that regular matter begins to disintegrate, and the ground beneath their floating forms begins to violently shake.
Deep, rolling tremors are felt across the entire school campus. In the main quad, Monk's soldiers stumble, their tactical formations breaking as the earth ripples beneath their boots.
Standing outside the perimeter, Super watches the shockwaves distorting the horizon. He thinks to himself, his fingers twitching against his pockets, "He's keeping up with Hakuna's purple state without even breaking a sweat. I don't like how this is going."
High above the shaking field, Hakuna decides to break the stalemate. On purpose, he raises his right arm with an agonizingly slow, deliberate motion, telegraphing a heavy straight punch as he attempts to cave in Leragga's face.
Leragga smiles, his hand moving like a flash of light as he catches the punch dead-center in his palm once again.
He then thinks, feeling the immense physical weight behind the slow movement, "Oh? He's actually taking me seriously now? He's trying to crush my hand with sheer muscle? Eh—"
Hakuna's expression doesn't change as he simply says two words: "Concentrated Atmospheric Burst."
Leragga mutters in genuine confusion, his smile faltering, "Wha—?"
Suddenly, from the very point where Hakuna's fist meets Leragga's palm, a localized, hyper-compressed pocket of atmospheric pressure bursts outward. It doesn't explode; it implodes inward onto Leragga's hand structure. The sheer force is so mathematically precise that it violently bends all of Leragga's fingers backward, snapping them in the opposite direction from normal.
Leragga looks at his broken, mangled hand for a fraction of a second, his expression neutral. He simply responds by saying, "Cute. A neat little parlor trick."
He then violently vibrates his entire hand at a microscopic frequency. With a series of wet, metallic snaps, the bones, tendons, and muscles immediately slide back into place, returning his hand to normal within a single heartbeat.
Hakuna observes the instant regeneration, his eyes narrowing slightly as he mumbles, "Hmm."
"You still don't see the grand design here, do you?" Leragga queries, stepping forward as if his hand hadn't just been inverted.
Hakuna faces down, his breathing slowing to an absolute stop. A massive, silent ripple suddenly appears in reality, spreading outward from his body in perfect, concentric circles that freeze the dust in mid-air.
Leragga, noticing the sudden, ancient weight dropping over the field, feels a chill down his spine for the first time. He thinks to himself, "This pressure... it's not physical. Divine Energy? Don't tell me—"
Hakuna raises his head slowly. The purple in his eyes has vanished, fading instead into a brilliant, shining silver that looks like starlight.
Before Leragga's brain could even register the neural impulse to move, Hakuna is already there. He is in front of him, his palm pressed firmly against Leragga's face, sealing his vision. Hakuna says, his voice sounding like a chorus of deities, "Celestial Pulse."
THOOM!
Leragga doesn't fly away; he gets momentarily flung off the ground as a strange, geometric distortion wraps around his body. In an instant, his physical form separates into a million little cubes and blocks, vanishing entirely from existence as if he were deleted from the timeline.
But before the BBC can even process the victory, the space warps again. The entire sequence violently reverses like a rewound tape. The blocks snap back together, and the impact of Leragga's forced landing cracks the ground beneath him as he materializes perfectly intact.
Hakuna's silver eyes widen in genuine disbelief. He mutters, "Huh?!"
Leragga's entire physical outline begins to glow with a strange, shimmering resonance that rejects the laws of the universe.
As he stands up, dusting off his uniform, he looks at the Prince. He says, "Do you want to know why you cannot defeat me, Hakuna?"
He then takes a single, casual step forward. He doesn't sprint; he just steps, and immediately appears directly next to Hakuna's ear, continuing his speech without a break in his breath, "How is it that you have all this magnificent, Divine power... and yet none of it can actually affect a true wanderer of Void?"
Before Hakuna can turn his head, Leragga delivers a short, compact punch to his ribs. The force is catastrophic, sending the Prince flying across the field like a meteor. As Hakuna skids through the dirt, Leragga concludes his thought, his voice echoing over the plains, "Because that power... is not yours."
With his multiversal experience, he easily detects the truth: the Prince's current divine reservoir is an inherited power originally belonging to his variant of Nolitha.
Hakuna, having already known the bitter truth of his unearned legacy, struggles to his feet, his silver eyes flashing with a mix of rage and shame. He yells, "Shut up! You don't know anything about my burden!"
Leragga then calmly states, clasping his hands behind his back, "You can never hope to defeat an apex predator like me when you can't even master your own base Talent. You're playing with borrowed tools, kid."
Hakuna shouts, his voice cracking into a roar of pure defiance, "I said, SHUT UP!"
As he says this, he channels every ounce of his remaining Nzilo into his right fist. The energy is so volatile that it shifts past orange, past yellow, turning into a blinding, white-hot plasma flame that distorts the space around his arm.
"Fist of Inferno: Celesti!" he calls out, naming a hybrid technique born of desperation.
He then flies towards Leragga with so much speed and violent kinetic energy that time itself seems to lag. It takes a full, agonizing 1.2 seconds after he has already taken off for the ground beneath his starting point to even show signs of movement and shatter from the vacuum.
And by that time, he's already millimeters away from landing the definitive, plasma-fueled blow right into Leragga's chest. It's a perfect strike.
But in a split second—a fraction of time that shouldn't exist—Leragga moves. With a sequence of movements that look like an eerie dance, his right hand casually taps Hakuna's soaring right wrist, guiding the massive plasma fist harmlessly to the side. Simultaneously, his foot sweeps out, kicking Hakuna's left knee from behind, forcing his leg to touch the ground and causing the Prince to stumble forward, completely off-balance.
As Hakuna falls forward, his guard utterly broken, Leragga thrusts his right hand straight into Hakuna's chest cavity.
The entire field goes dead silent.
Woah... what?! What just happened?!
"Ah—?!" the Prince utters, his breath catching in his throat. His silver eyes flicker rapidly, the light draining out of them.
Is he...?
Leragga looks down at him, his face inches away, and says with a chilling calmness, "Don't worry. You're not dead. Not yet."
Hakuna slowly looks down at his own torso. He is horrified to see that Leragga's hand hasn't pierced his skin with blood; instead, the hand is vibrating at a high frequency, existing in a semi-phased state inside his actual chest cavity, right next to his beating heart.
Super's stoic facade completely breaks from the sidelines. He steps forward, his voice full of panic as he utters, "Hakuna?!"
Leragga immediately raises his left hand toward the horizon, his fingers spread out in a warning gesture, stopping Super from even making a single step forward.
He then says, his voice melodic and mocking, "Ah, ah, aaahhh... don't take another step, genius. At any given moment, I can simply stop the vibration of my hand, my atoms will become solid again, and your little Prince will be dead from the inside out. End of story. Do you understand the cosmic difference in our power levels now?"
Hakuna's eyes return to their normal, dark state. The realization of his absolute helplessness hits him like a physical blow. He immediately loses his will to fight, his knees buckling as he falls to the ground in total, uncharacteristic despair. The Prince has been completely broken.
Damn... this is heavy.
Leragga continues his lecture, looking down at the kneeling boy with pity. "That power you are using, while yes, it is a mastered Talent on paper, it is not your mastered Talent. Did you really think you would defeat a person who has spent lifetimes perfecting a mastered talent of their own, with a tool that wasn't yours to begin with?"
On the other side of the crater, Freddie silently snaps back into reality. Seeing Hakuna—the unmovable pillar of their group—kneeling in the dirt, broken and defeated, something inside Freddie's mind finally fractures. His eyes widen, the shock completely burning away, replaced by an indescribable, white-hot rage that causes the air around his body to hum.
Leragga, completely oblivious to Freddie's rising rage as he focuses on his lecture, continues, "Take mine for instance. I don't rely on stolen gods . I am one with the universe's natural law. I am the master of the Talent... Volant."
Immediately as he finishes his sentence, before the word Volant can even echo across the field...
A massive sonic boom tears through the pavilion. Freddie is seen flying towards Leragga at a speed that defies logic, a streak of absolute fury cutting through the dust. With indescribable rage burning in his eyes, his fist pulled back to deliver a strike that could shatter a mountain, he stares at the multiversal assassin.
Leragga's eyes dart to the side, a new grin spreading across his face as he sees the boy incoming. He whispers, "Interesting."
Fade out...
End of Episode 70...