What was that?!
The sudden change hit everyone like a sledgehammer to the heart.
Netero and Zeno both narrowed their eyes sharply.
Their pupils shook violently as they watched—
a gigantic blue arm suddenly burst out from behind Roy.
It was like a giant extending its limb: first the bones emerged, then muscle fibers condensed around them, then skin spread across the surface, then veins and blood followed—until, at exactly the right moment, it planted itself in front of Roy and took Silva's blow head-on!
On a giant tree nearly two kilometers away, Tsubone and the Kurta siblings stared so hard their eyes nearly popped out.
Even Kurapika, an ordinary boy whose aura nodes still hadn't been opened, felt it in that instant through pure animal instinct—
there was something vast and terrifying between heaven and earth.
Boom!
The impact rang out like a temple bell at dusk and dawn, shaking even the clouds out of the sky.
Silva's cannon punch—made brutally direct by shortening his force lines through his force field—smashed straight into the arm Susanoo had manifested.
The fire armor covering Susanoo only trembled lightly.
Then, in the next instant, Silva felt an immense, overwhelming force descend on him—something vast enough that he had never encountered anything like it before.
It blasted him away on the spot.
"The imagined nature is the false aspect. The dependent nature is the relative aspect. And the perfected nature is the absolute aspect."
Netero's face turned grave as he watched Silva fly higher and higher like a kite with its string cut, until he became no more than a black dot against the sky.
"This... is a Dharma Form."
A Dharma Form was a manifestation as vast as heaven and earth itself.
It was the outward display of both essence and phenomenon.
And it was the ultimate blooming of a Nen user's manifested inner world.
Just as he himself had the Hundred-Type Guanyin Bodhisattva,
and Zeno had his Dragon Head Game,
all of these things were insights they old men had only managed to attain after sinking decades into Nen.
Yet that same level of realization—
something that had taken him and Zeno dozens of years—
seemed to have been crossed by the boy in the sky, the moment he unfolded one arm of Susanoo, in only two or three short years.
Netero shot Zeno a glance.
"You knew?"
With his hands clasped behind his back, Zeno rubbed one hand against the other and thought, Should I have?
He forced himself to stay calm, putting on a serene expression and saying nothing.
Netero frowned.
Then he cast another glance toward that dim little room on the first floor of the Zoldyck castle...
Inside the dim room, the rocking chair stopped dead.
Maha and Betty, who had been dozing peacefully in each other's arms, seemed to have been stirred awake by the shaft of sunlight coming through the window. They slowly opened their eyes and rose from the chair.
"Maha... Roy finally looks like he's amounting to something."
Betty Zoldyck looped an arm through Maha's as she watched Roy. Manifesting one arm of Susanoo still wasn't enough for him.
Instead, Roy increased his aura output.
He fully released Susanoo itself.
It reached out.
Its chest expanded.
Its mass condensed.
A head formed.
Sun-halo armor covered it.
In its left hand, the Dawn Shield condensed.
In its right, it drew the Zenith Sword straight out of the morning glow.
Then two scorching flames ignited in the hollow sockets of its eyes, and it threw back its head with a roar.
"ROAR—"
An invisible pressure beyond mere sound waves swept across the sky.
Thump. Thump. Thump.
All across Kukuroo Mountain, every creature—whether flying in the air, running on land, or swimming in water—
even Mike—
felt its heart seize in fear. Their legs all went weak at once, and they collapsed to the ground with helpless whimpers.
A king should rule the world!
That scene on the television awakened old memories in Maha.
He watched it.
He listened.
And as the aura drifting naturally from above his head trembled faintly, different faces slowly emerged within it—
Brook Sell. Severus. Blake Shaw.
And countless others who had followed him, who had yearned for a better life, who had willingly sacrificed their lives for it, who had even perished together as a nation.
At that moment,
it was as if they all grew excited.
One said, "I've seen this before."
Another said, "My king... this feels familiar..."
Some stared in a daze.
Some fell into remembrance.
More of them flushed with emotion and shouted, as if they were about to awaken from a long silence.
Maha let his aura burn away at a terrifying speed. He simply stood there in front of the television with his subjects and subordinates, quietly watching the scene, and smiled in satisfaction.
"Betty... you were right. The child... finally looks the part."
Crack... crack... crack...
By the clear pool in the sky, the constantly arming Susanoo finally revealed its full posture.
Roy's current aura reserves and ocular power still weren't enough to support Susanoo's fourth stage—the fully humanoid form.
But even so...
when that half-bodied Susanoo sat among Kukuroo Mountain's peaks, holding the Zenith Sword glowing with sun-halo light in its left hand and the Dawn Shield wrapped in dawnlight in its right, its height—hundreds of meters tall—was still enough to make every Zoldyck, even the trainee butlers, shiver and look up in awe.
"Nii-san... is this your real strength?"
Deep in Kukuroo Mountain, about five hundred meters from the clear pool, Illumi stood with his back against a surviving tree, his smooth black hair hanging behind him.
He stared blankly up at Susanoo—
and at Roy, whose silver hair was visible at the center of its chest cavity.
Ripples rose and fell in those hollow eyes of his, and for a very long time they refused to settle.
It wasn't that he didn't know Nii-san was strong.
He had long since given up on the idea of actually competing with him.
For the past two years, once he had recognized the gap between them, his only wish had been simple: as long as he could stand by Nii-san's side and not fall too far behind, he would be satisfied.
But now...
did he really have the strength to stand there?
Illumi's thoughts were a mess. As his emotions shifted, he kept remembering Roy's warning:
Make sure you train properly. Don't actually let Gotoh surpass you.
Illumi narrowed his eyes and gripped the Divine Spear nail Roy had given him as a birthday present.
"If Gotoh can do it, so can I. No matter what, I won't be worse than him."
Buzz...
Inside Gotoh's room in the butler villa, a thought slowly emerged from the trembling blood cocoon.
Is that you, Young Master?
Yes...
Was that really still the young master?
To be more precise...
was the young master even still human?
The beasts crouched low. Heaven and earth fell silent.
Tsubone had already pulled the Kurta siblings farther away, but the moment she saw Susanoo crash down into the forest like a small mountain, she still felt it was far too close. Her pink twin-tails swayed wildly as she grabbed Kuraging and Kurapika again and retreated even farther.
Whoosh... whoosh...
Wind screamed past their ears the entire way.
Quietly feeling the weight of that overwhelming atmosphere, Kurapika, still being carried by Tsubone, lowered his eyes. After several breaths of frantic movement, they finally landed again, and he couldn't hold back any longer.
"Sis... what did you see?"
Kuraging took hold of Tsubone's hand, opened her aura nodes, and directed a thread of aura onto Kurapika, coating his eyes with Gyo.
"See for yourself."
Kurapika suddenly felt his vision become much clearer.
Before he even had time to think about why, he looked up—
and his mouth dropped open.
His amber eyes shook violently from the surge of emotion, instantly turning Scarlet.
No less intense than when he first met the Spiders in the original story.
That alone showed how violently his emotions were moving.
A... giant?
The blue Susanoo, covered in crimson flame armor, its cloak spread wide behind it and stamped with a blazing solar ring, looked like a god descending into the world.
In an instant, it shattered the boy's understanding of reality.
He tilted his small head upward with difficulty and stared—
just like the beasts and fish crawling helplessly below,
gazing up at Susanoo.
Then, at one moment, a pair of crimson wings suddenly burst out from beneath Susanoo's ribs and lifted it into the sky, its target pointed straight at—
the tiny speck on the horizon that was Silva.
Whoosh—
Like a roc spreading its wings, it shot straight into the heavens.
Susanoo, hundreds of meters tall, soared upward and blocked out the sunlight over all living things.
Then vast swaths of shadow spread across the land,
giving Netero and Zeno a brief, rare taste of coolness in the sweltering midsummer heat.
Too bad that compared to the terror of what they were seeing, the cool air meant nothing.
"Oh? It flies too."
Netero's brows twitched.
Thinking of his own Hundred-Type Guanyin Bodhisattva—which combined offense and defense, but lacked mobility—he spoke with a trace of sour envy that vanished almost as soon as it appeared.
"You came late," Zeno said calmly, hands behind his back as he watched Roy go after Silva. "If you'd come a day earlier, you wouldn't just have seen him fly. You would've seen him fly in a chariot."
He recalled Roy commanding the Three-Legged Golden Crow and driving the Sun Chariot as if touring the skies on behalf of heaven itself.
A flash passed through Netero's eyes, and he shook his head with a bitter laugh.
"Looks like I missed yet another thing."
Though by now it hardly mattered.
He had already seen so many shocking things in a single day that his fingers were twitching on their own, restless and eager to move.
Whoosh—
A gust rose.
Susanoo spread its wings and the vast forests of Kukuroo Mountain bent beneath the pressure.
Soon, it had closed the distance and come right up behind Silva.
The wind pulled tight across the skin. The flames scorched and made his aura crackle.
Silva, who had only just been blasted back by Susanoo's single arm, forced himself to stop midair, stabilized his breathing, and turned.
Right in front of him, looming close enough to crush his soul, Susanoo stared down at him with those two blazing suns in its eyes.
That suffocating pressure was something only the person facing it could truly understand.
"Heh... hahaha...!"
Silva burst into wild laughter.
His silver hair whipped madly around him. His face twisted into something fierce and almost monstrous as he locked his hawk-like gaze on Roy inside Susanoo's chest.
"Good."
"Very good!"
Then his smile vanished in an instant.
Instead of retreating, he rushed straight at Susanoo.
"Force field—full release!"
Buzz...
An invisible wave instantly enveloped Roy and Susanoo together.
In Silva's eyes, the entire thing broke down into lines—
turning into a target point he could strike directly at its point of contact.
Bang. Bang. Bang.
The first hit landed without fail.
The second landed without fail.
The third, the fourth, the tenth, the hundredth, the thousandth.
His fists and legs, wrapped in Hard, hammered into Susanoo like artillery shells, falling in an endless storm like rain beating on broad leaves.
With the help of his force field, Silva erased the length of his force lines. Against "certain hit," prediction and the Transparent World became meaningless.
And once Roy realized that,
he simply summoned Susanoo fully and used its overwhelming defense to tank Silva's fists and kicks—each of which was only barely weaker than a missile—while he waited for an opening.
"The idea's not bad," Netero said.
"The key is the stamina war..."
Would Silva shatter Roy's turtle shell first, or would Roy exhaust Silva first?
Netero's eyes were viciously sharp. In an instant he caught on to Roy's intention and watched without blinking, reaching out with one hand to grab Beans, whose legs had gone so weak he almost fell out of the tree.
This is insane... completely insane... I knew I should never have come here...
Beans, his little pea-sized eyes full of exhausted despair, simply sat down on the branch and wrapped both arms around his head, refusing to look up any longer as he kept muttering complaints.
Beside him, Zeno remained expressionless, staring only at the sky.
Then, in the midst of Silva's unending offense and Roy's defense, a crack appeared across Susanoo's breastplate.
And the instant it did, Silva seized the chance, punched through it, and drove his arm inside.
Roy's eyes flashed.
At once, he knew the opportunity he had been waiting for had arrived.
"Sleep..."
The words left his mouth like a dreamy murmur.
Then the Mangekyō Sharingan, swirling with nebulae and wrapped in a blood-chilling crimson, suddenly glared straight at Silva!
His ocular power surged out like a flood, the first thing to slam into Silva.
With a genjutsu no weaker than Tsukuyomi enhancing it, the Blood Demon Art born from Enmu—
Forced Slumber—
struck Silva directly through both pupils!
His fist was already about to land.
The force of the punch was already pressing into Roy's face.
And yet Silva suddenly felt an overpowering wave of sleep seize him and drag him down. His eyes shut. His fist stopped.
And he fell—
into a bottomless abyss.
The sound of wind howled faintly around him.
Years, time, and space—
just like his force field—
peeled away before his eyes into countless multicolored lines.
In the blink of an eye, heaven and earth seemed to vanish.
It was as if only he remained, floating in endless emptiness, unable to tell north from south, unable to know where to go—
until at last, he landed.
And there, he saw—
a boy who looked almost as if he had been cast from the same mold as himself.
A single blade hung at the boy's waist.
Behind him floated a red sun.
And in a place filled with birdsong and flowers, he stood there quietly, waiting.
Silva's silver hair hung loose over his shoulders as his feet touched the ground.
He looked at Roy deeply and said, "This is a dream, isn't it?"
The false became real, the real became false. Illusion and truth blurred until they couldn't be separated.
Very quickly, Silva remembered the last time he had met Roy inside a dream—that night when he had thought a hug might break the ice, only for it to become something Roy later used to tease him with.
And then—
he saw Roy smile.
The boy lifted his blade and showed a row of white teeth.
"Father sees clearly."
"I have one sword strike."
"It's not convenient to use in the real world, so I have no choice but to show it to you here."
Silva crossed his arms.
"What kind of strike?"
Roy's expression turned solemn.
He held the blade horizontally in front of himself and said in a deep voice:
"A nuclear-blast slash."