The roar of the packed arena echoed through the concrete bulk of Heavens Arena like an enclosed thunderstorm. Far above the ring, brilliant halogen arrays cast a relentless glare over the platform, illuminating the wide arena where the largest rubble from the semifinals had been cleared, though the hurried repairs had left several reinforced floor plates cracked or uneven around the edges.
In the red corner stood Kagetsu Yuzuki.
He was thirteen years old, pale, and dressed in simple loose black trousers and a high-collared black shirt. Across his eyes sat a fresh, immaculate band of black silk, tied tight around the back of his head. To the global television audience, he looked like a frail, underdressed boy standing in the path of a monster.
Behind the silk, Yuzuki's mind worked in silent arithmetic.
Almost every movement hurt.
In the blue corner, Hisoka Morrow waited casually.
His short magenta hair was swept back, his pale face painted with a dark maroon star on his right cheek and a tear on his left. He wore a sleeveless vest, exposing pale forearms where a raw abrasion was held closed by Bungee Gum and hidden beneath Texture Surprise. His dislocated right pinky finger had been pulled back into alignment, held straight by elastic aura.
Hisoka's eyes burned with a quiet heat. He shuffled a deck of ordinary playing cards between his fingers, the crisp thwip-thwip-thwip sharp and rhythmic.
"You smell like blood, Yuzuki-kun," Hisoka said, his voice easily carrying across the neutral space between them. "Chrollo almost broke you… and you still came."
Yuzuki kept his stance light, resting his weight slightly back on his right heel to take pressure off his strained lower spine. "Save the act, Hisoka. I came here to fight."
Hisoka's grin widened. "I almost killed you once, and somehow you came back even sweeter. Now show me how long you can keep me from touching you."
The referee stepped into the center of the ring, raising his hand high.
"Battle Olympia Final Match! Kagetsu Yuzuki versus Hisoka Morrow! BEGIN!"
Hisoka moved the instant the hand dropped.
His hand snapped forward, flicking three playing cards in a wide horizontal fan. Coated in sharp Shu, the cards cut through the air toward Yuzuki's neck, chest, and thigh.
Yuzuki didn't dodge.
Infinity.
The cards crossed the first few feet normally, then their forward progress rapidly slowed. An inch from Yuzuki, they crawled to an absolute standstill, trapped in a distance that refused to finish closing, before gravity reclaimed them and they tumbled harmlessly to the concrete floor.
Second one.
Hisoka was already closing the distance, springing off his left foot. As he advanced, his right hand flicked backward, discharging a thread of Bungee Gum toward a heavy concrete floor fragment lying fifteen feet behind Yuzuki.
Two seconds. Hisoka launched a high kick aimed at Yuzuki's left temple while contracting the gum behind him. The heavy slab of concrete whipped off the ground, speeding toward the back of Yuzuki's head from his blind spot.
Through the Six Eyes, sensory information flooded Yuzuki's mind without physical line of sight. He perceived the trajectory of the leg, the tension vector of the gum thread, and the speed of the airborne stone.
Three. Hisoka's heel drove toward Yuzuki's temple, then bled speed with every fraction of an inch, unable to reach him. A heartbeat later, the heavy stone rushed toward Yuzuki, slowed violently inside Infinity, then hung there trembling before dropping straight down.
Four. Hisoka used his momentum to perform an aerial spin, unleashing a spray of five cards aimed at Yuzuki's lower face from an angle obscured by stone dust.
Five. The cards froze in mid-air.
Yuzuki disengaged Infinity.
The spatial effect vanished, and the fifteen-second cooldown began counting down in Yuzuki's mind.
15... 14... 13...
Hisoka landed lightly ten feet away. "Still as Interesting as before…" he murmured, tapping his chin with a card. "The closer I get, the less distance I seem to cover."
Hisoka's eyes narrowed as he noticed something subtle. Yuzuki had not adjusted his foot placement by more than two inches. His left arm hung slightly rigid at his side, and his breathing was shallow.
"You aren't moving, Yuzuki-kun," Hisoka said softly. "Are you conserving your strength... or can you not move?"
Hisoka flicked his wrist, shooting two strands of Bungee Gum.
Yuzuki executed a minimal sidestep, tilting his head three inches to the right. The first strand passed his cheek.
However, the second strand attached firmly to the fabric of Yuzuki's loose shirt over his left chest.
Hisoka pulled back, testing the connection. The gum tightened instantly. Bungee Gum couldn't cross Infinity to reach Yuzuki himself, but his clothes gave Hisoka something else to grab. A hard pull could drag him off balance, or tear away whatever the gum had caught.
"Got you," Hisoka murmured, flexing his fingers to contract the strand.
Blue.
Yuzuki pointed his right forefinger at his chest, generating a localized point of convergent attraction over the fabric attached to the gum.
Hisoka contracted the gum the instant Blue began crushing the cloth. For a fraction of a second, before the fabric tore free, Yuzuki's body remained the heavier anchor. Hisoka used that brief pull to launch himself forward. The scrap ripped loose a heartbeat later, but Hisoka was already moving, converting the momentum into a burst of speed.
As the torn cloth vanished, Yuzuki's upper torso was exposed on the left side, bringing the white support wraps binding his cracked ribs into plain view.
In the commentary booth, the announcer gasped. "Yuzuki's heavily wrapped! Those injuries from the semifinal are still there!"
In the crowd, Bisky clenched her fists. "Damn it. Now Hisoka can see where he's hurt."
8... 7... 6... Yuzuki tracked the cooldown silently.
Hisoka caught the torn black cloth, his golden eyes locking onto the white bandages. "Those ribs are worse than I thought."
Hisoka closed the remaining gap instantly, dropping low. His left hand snapped out, a card glimmering with Shu. The target wasn't the ribs. It was a feint. Hisoka's angle shifted mid-stroke, driving the card directly into the sutured laceration on Yuzuki's right flank. The wound Chrollo's knife had carved open.
Yuzuki couldn't twist clear. Instead, he let his hips give with the strike, moving in the same direction as the card. He shifted what little defensive aura he could spare toward his right flank, but Hisoka's Shu-coated card still cut through.
The reinforced edge sliced through Yuzuki's shirt, biting into the fresh wound and snapping the surgical sutures. Dark red blood immediately soaked through the fabric.
Yuzuki raised his right palm.
Blue.
A tiny point of attraction manifested directly behind Hisoka's left shoulder blade. The sudden gravitational tug jerked Hisoka backward by two inches, disrupting his balance.
Yuzuki drove forward off his right foot, delivering a short, compact straight palm strike directly into Hisoka's solar plexus.
Hisoka shifted his Ryu toward his torso at the last instant, but the palm still drove the air from his lungs. The impact forced Hisoka back three paces, a thin thread of dark blood trickling from the corner of his mouth.
The crowd erupted into a roar.
Yuzuki stood five paces away, pressing his right forearm tightly against his bleeding side to compress the ruptured wound. Blood seeped past his fingers, dripping onto the floor.
Across the ring, Hisoka wiped the blood from his lip with his thumb, trembling slightly with quiet pleasure.
"Beautiful…" Hisoka murmured. "You let me cut you just so you could hit me back."
Hisoka took a slow step back, shuffling his remaining cards. "Now let's see what breaks first."
Hisoka began to circle around the perimeter of the ring, keeping a distance of twenty feet.
As his boots tapped against the concrete floor plates, Hisoka thinned several Bungee Gum strands and concealed them with In beneath the edges of the shattered ring plates loosened during the earlier repairs. He was anchoring his aura across the surface of the stage, connecting the floor itself to his fingers.
Through the Six Eyes, Yuzuki tracked the ambient aura streams. He caught two of the concealed anchors near Hisoka's feet. Three more were buried beneath overlapping aura, dust, and broken stone, and his exhausted processing missed them.
Yuzuki lowered his stance slightly, feeling the warm trickle of blood running down his leg. The ground beneath their boots was becoming a weapon. Every piece of loose concrete was being wired to collapse, flip, or launch at Hisoka's command.
Yuzuki took a single, measured breath, keeping his Ten tightly compressed against his skin as the crowd waited in breathless silence.
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