The atmosphere inside the 251st floor arena had condensed into something suffocating and motionless. Across the vast platform, the air smelled of powdered cement, scorched ozone, and fresh blood.
Yuzuki stood near the center of the ring, his boots rooted to a single five-foot slab of reinforced concrete. Blood continued to soak down the right leg of his trousers, spreading under the halogen arrays. His right forearm remained clamped against his flank, compressing the reopened wound where Chrollo's knife had previously severed his flesh and Hisoka's card had freshly torn the sutures.
Behind his silk blindfold, the Six Eyes operated at an excruciating computational limit.
Information no longer arrived cleanly. Too much of it demanded his attention at once. His brain, carrying the heavy fatigue of his fight with Chrollo, was forced to map dozens of environmental variables simultaneously: the structural integrity of the cracked floor, the micro-vibrations of the stadium frame, and above all, the ambient aura of Hisoka Morrow.
Twenty feet away, Hisoka was circling.
He moved with fluid grace, golden eyes locked on Yuzuki's posture. Thin, translucent strands of Bungee Gum streamed from his heels and fingertips with every stride, spreading across the floor like a spider spinning silk in dark water.
'The ground is his,' Yuzuki thought, tracking the faint hum of aura beneath the concrete. 'He knows Infinity stops his body and his cards. He's targeting my footing.'
Hisoka's left hand flicked upward.
It wasn't a card. It was a sharp contraction of two main Bungee Gum lines anchored beneath the heavy concrete plate directly behind Yuzuki's heels.
CRACK.
The slab buckled, snapped from its frame, and ripped upward into the air. Hisoka contracted the lines with maximum elasticity, snapping the giant slab violently into the plate directly beneath Yuzuki's feet.
The horizontal platform beneath Yuzuki tilted forty-five degrees as its structural support sheared away. Loose gravel and iron rebar cascaded into the dark service levels below the stage.
Yuzuki's balance broke. To avoid falling into the pit, he was forced to spring upward.
"Up," Hisoka murmured.
The instant Yuzuki was airborne, Hisoka snapped four concealed gum lines anchored to the surrounding floor plates. Three massive chunks of concrete were torn from the ring and drawn inward like a collapsing box, converging on Yuzuki mid-air.
Infinity.
The three concrete slabs rushed toward Yuzuki, then their forward progress rapidly slowed as they entered the subdivided space surrounding his body. An inch from his skin, the massive slabs crawled to a standstill, trembling as their approach was subdivided.
Second one.
Yuzuki began to fall between the closing slabs. Hisoka adjusted the gum lines with him, dragging the concrete downward just fast enough to keep the cage around his descent. Yuzuki couldn't push against the stone without letting it close further around him.
Two seconds. Hisoka shot a thick line of Bungee Gum onto the outside of the left concrete slab, another onto the right, and pulled hard.
He used his elastic aura to drag the two slabs together, keeping tension on the gum to hold the slabs compressed against the unreachable space around Yuzuki.
Three. The barrier held, but the physical volume of the slabs completely enclosed Yuzuki. Dust packed the narrow gaps around him, clouding his vision and turning every shallow breath gritty.
Four. Hisoka sprang onto the top of the gum-suspended right slab, flicking four ordinary playing cards reinforced with Shu into the narrow gap between the blocks.
Five. The cards froze mid-air, inches from Yuzuki.
Yuzuki disengaged Infinity.
The spatial effect vanished, and the fifteen-second cooldown began its unforgiving march in his mind.
15... 14... 13...
The instant Infinity vanished, Hisoka released the lines holding the cage. The slabs plunged downward toward the ruined substructure of the ring. Yuzuki dropped through the falling debris, his boots striking a narrow steel beam fifteen feet below the original floor level.
CRASH.
The stone slabs shattered against the lower foundation, sending a fountain of dust upward.
In the spectator stands, Bisky gripped the cold railing tightly. "His side's still bleeding," she muttered. "He can't keep spending aura like this."
A few rows back, Chrollo Lucilfer watched the pit with quiet detachment. He ignored the falling rubble and tracked the web of aura lines crisscrossing the darkness below.
'He isn't attacking Yuzuki directly anymore,' Chrollo observed. 'He's building the cage.'
Down in the dust-filled pit, Yuzuki crouched on the steel beam, his breath coming in short rasps.
9... 8... 7...
The hard drop onto the beam sent a sharp spike of pain through his cracked ribs and reopened flank.
"Your legs are slowing, Yuzuki-kun," Hisoka said from above, dropping into the pit as three strands of Bungee Gum stretched from his heels to anchors overhead, braking his descent.
A shower of stone fragments rained down into the pit. To the naked eye, all eight pieces looked like ordinary falling debris.
5... 4...
Seven fragments carried nothing beyond the faint residual aura smeared across the ruined arena. But through the Six Eyes, Yuzuki caught a subtle discrepancy on the eighth piece. It carried a deliberate layer of Hisoka's aura. A thin playing card whose surface had been covered with Texture Surprise, making it look like a flat shard of grey concrete.
However, Yuzuki's sensory processing was heavily degraded. The sheer volume of aura strands vibrating around him overloaded his attention.
3... 2... 1...
Yuzuki shifted his weight to dodge, attempting to step back along the steel beam.
The reopened wound seized through his core, and his weakened right leg buckled beneath the sudden shift. His foot slipped an inch on the dusty steel.
The disguised card passed his defence.
SLICE.
The card carved deep into Yuzuki's left outer quadriceps before spinning free into the darkness below. Blood immediately ran down his leg, and the muscle seized when he tried to put weight on it.
Yuzuki squeezed his teeth together, a sharp hiss escaping his lips.
Hisoka continued his controlled drop toward Yuzuki, his hand extended, fingers curved like talons.
The cooldown ended, but Yuzuki didn't activate Infinity. Burning aura on a defensive shell while trapped on a narrow beam would only allow Hisoka to collapse the structure on top of him.
'Break the web.'
He pointed his index and middle fingers toward the darkness beneath the beam.
Blue.
Yuzuki did not aim the attraction at Hisoka. He aimed it at a cluster of four main Bungee Gum anchor points beneath Hisoka's feet.
A compressed point of Blue formed between the four anchors.
The attraction dragged the stretched lines violently toward the same point. The four strands of Bungee Gum snapped inward at extreme velocity, crossing over one another.
Because the strands were still attached to Hisoka, the sudden shift in line geometry threw his balance into chaos.
The tangled lines yanked Hisoka's right arm backward, hooked his left leg upward, and twisted his torso, briefly pinning his right shoulder against an iron pillar.
Hisoka was caught in his own web.
Yuzuki trusted the footwork and timing Bisky had drilled into him. Despite the torn muscle in his thigh, he drove forward off his less-damaged right leg. For one heartbeat, he flared his aura into Ken and shifted most of it into his right palm with Ryu.
His target was Hisoka's throat.
Hisoka grinned in wild ecstasy. He released three tangled lines at once. The fourth was looped around his already-damaged right hand and anchored to a distant girder.
He contracted it violently.
The gum ripped him sideways before Yuzuki's palm could reach his throat. His ruined pinky caught beneath the tightening loop. The joint failed completely, and the finger tore free as Hisoka escaped. His palm scraped across the steel hard enough to strip skin with it.
Yuzuki's palm missed his throat and clipped the top of Hisoka's chest instead, knocking the magician sideways onto an exposed girder. Yuzuki landed awkwardly on a neighbouring slab, his wounded thigh almost folding beneath him.
Hisoka stabilised his stance on the steel beam, bleeding from his palm and missing finger, yet a resonant laugh bubbled from his chest.
"Beautiful…" Hisoka purred, wiping blood from his chin. "You turned my own web against me."
Yuzuki stood five paces away on a tilted slab, his left leg shaking. He didn't speak. He kept his stance low, compressing his bleeding side with his forearm.
Most of the central floor had collapsed. What remained was a cavernous labyrinth of concrete slabs suspended on Bungee Gum, exposed steel girders, and hanging iron cables.
And stretched across this ruined landscape were dozens of elastic lines of Bungee Gum, forming an intricate, three-dimensional lattice in the dark air.
Hisoka raised his left hand, his thumb hooked into a single line concealed with In that ran deep into the foundation beneath Yuzuki's feet. A thread Yuzuki's overloaded processing had missed.
"You've answered everything so far, Yuzuki-kun," Hisoka said softly. "Let's try one you missed."
Hisoka plucked the single thread.
The tension across the entire three-dimensional lattice shifted instantly. Every concrete slab, iron girder, and piece of hanging debris began to move at once, vectoring inward toward the center of the pit in a synchronized, elastic crushing motion.
Yuzuki stood in the center of the collapsing world, his Ten clinging weakly to his skin as the heavy structure closed in around him.
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