The world was collapsing in on itself along four different vectors.
Concrete slabs, exposed iron rebar, and jagged chunks of stone suspended across the dark abyss by dozens of taut lines of Bungee Gum vectored inward toward the exact coordinate where Yuzuki stood. The air roared with the sudden, violent displacement of wind and concrete.
Yuzuki didn't retreat. There was nowhere to retreat. The perimeter was a closing jaw of steel and stone, owned completely by Hisoka's elastic network.
'To stay at range is to die inside his cage.'
Behind the silk blindfold, the Six Eyes processed the kinetic trajectories in rapid bursts measured in fractions of a second. Instead of activating Infinity to stall the crushing environment. Which would consume more of his remaining aura and leave him trapped in another fifteen-second dead zone. Yuzuki dropped his centre of gravity.
He leaped forward, diving straight into the closing gap between two incoming slabs, directly toward the man holding the strings.
Hisoka's eyes dilated with predatory delight. "Brave," he purred.
Yuzuki hit the narrow, trembling surface of the exposed steel girder where Hisoka stood. His wounded left thigh buckled upon impact, the deep quadriceps laceration tearing fresh fire through his leg, but he absorbed the momentum through a fluid roll derived from Systema. Rolling across his uninjured right shoulder, sweeping beneath a horizontal strand of Bungee Gum concealed with In, and popping upward directly inside Hisoka's intimate striking range.
Zero distance.
At that range, collapsing a massive slab onto Yuzuki meant risking himself with it.
Yuzuki kept the punch compact, hiding its real commitment until the last instant. He drove his right fist forward. A straight punch originating from his hip, refined by Bisky's Shingen-ryu drills. His aura shifted sharply into his right fist with Ryu.
Then, he pulsed Blue.
A compressed point of attraction formed precisely against Hisoka's sternum. The sudden, localised pull dragged Yuzuki's fist through the final inch faster than Hisoka expected.
Hisoka shifted his Ryu toward his chest, but he was late. Yuzuki's knuckles hammered through the thinner guard and cracked two ribs beneath it.
Hisoka gasped, a spray of crimson flecking his lips, but his grin only widened. He didn't step back. Instead, Hisoka peeled his right foot free. A pre-stretched strand behind his heel contracted, whipping the leg upward in an elastic axe-kick targeted directly at Yuzuki's damaged right flank.
Yuzuki felt the displacement of air before the strike landed. He shifted his weight onto his compromised left leg, bearing the agonizing tear in his quad, and rotated with the strike instead of meeting it rigidly.
Hisoka's heel scraped across Yuzuki's open flank wound. The impact didn't break bone, but it stripped away the half-coagulated blood, reopening the deep slash Chrollo's knife had left. Fresh blood ran freely down Yuzuki's black trousers, making the steel beneath their boots slick.
"Your breath is hitching, Yuzuki-kun," Hisoka whispered, his voice hovering inches from Yuzuki's ear as their arms remained tangled. The magician's breath smelled faintly of blood. During the clinch, a thin strand of Bungee Gum snapped onto the knot of Yuzuki's blindfold and tightened, pulling the silk against his temples.
"Do you remember it, Yuzuki-kun?" Hisoka murmured, his voice dropping into a low, intimate cadence. "My hand going through your chest. The way your body jerked before I let you fall. The sound you made when you hit the stone and didn't get back up..."
Memory crashed through Yuzuki. The ruined exam hall, blood on the cold stone, the impossible pressure through his chest, and the sickening, sudden absence of his own heartbeat.
A spike of raw, primitive adrenaline flooded Yuzuki's bloodstream. His heart hammered against his cracked ribs, his vision flaring with static behind the blindfold.
'He wants me angry,' Yuzuki's mind screamed through the panic. 'Rage narrows the world. If I focus only on him, I miss everything around him.'
Yuzuki forced his lungs to expand, drawing in a ragged breath of concrete dust and ozone. He didn't deny the tremor in his hands. He didn't try to suppress the cold sweat breaking out across his neck.
"I was terrified then," Yuzuki said aloud, his voice flat, devoid of the theatrical anger Hisoka was feeding upon. "I'm still afraid now."
Hisoka's eyebrow twitched slightly.
Yuzuki deflected a left hook with a soft, circular palm-sweep, using Ryu to shift more of his aura into his lead forearm to absorb the impact. "When I almost died back then, I didn't understand what I had to come back to."
He ducked beneath a sweeping strand of Bungee Gum, his wounded quad screaming in protest as he lowered his centre.
"I have people waiting for me now," Yuzuki said, planting his right heel firmly into the steel. "Fear makes me more careful, not less."
The strand on Yuzuki's blindfold peeled away as Hisoka released it, its purpose spent.
Hisoka's grin wavered. For a fraction of a second, the wild, predatory amusement in his golden eyes hardened into something colder. A sudden, unsettling irritation. Hatred was simple. Hatred was a predictable vector that made fighters swing wide and leave their flanks open. But fear transformed into quiet, meticulous discipline was useless to him.
"How disappointing," Hisoka spat softly. "You've grown sentimental."
Yuzuki pointed his index and middle fingers toward Hisoka's right forearm.
Blue.
A point of strong spatial attraction formed just beyond Hisoka's right elbow. The pull caught his arm and dragged it violently forward, threatening to yank Hisoka's entire torso off balance and straight into Yuzuki's line of fire.
Hisoka recognised the trap instantly. Resisting the pull normally would pull his whole body into Yuzuki's next strike.
Instead, Hisoka planted his torso with two Bungee Gum anchors and did something Yuzuki hadn't anticipated.
He let the arm go.
Hisoka twisted hard in the opposite direction while Blue continued pulling.
POP.
His right shoulder came out of its socket with a sickening wrench. The joint dislocated completely, allowing the arm to shoot forward without dragging the rest of Hisoka's body into Yuzuki's range.
'He dislocated his own shoulder!'
Hisoka didn't flinch. Thick strands of Bungee Gum ran from Hisoka's torso to his right elbow and wrist. They tightened like external tendons, lifting the dislocated arm despite the useless joint.
Hisoka's damaged right hand flicked a playing card straight past Yuzuki's head.
Yuzuki read the trajectory, it missed by three inches.
SNAP.
A hidden strand of Bungee Gum attached to the back of the card contracted violently. The card whipped back from behind Yuzuki's head in a blinding return arc.
Yuzuki pulled his left shoulder back to block. The shoulder already suffering from tissue loss.
SLASH.
The returning card carved across Yuzuki's left upper arm and tore through the dressing over his ruined shoulder. Fresh blood quickly darkened his sleeve as the damaged muscles spasmed violently.
Yuzuki swallowed the gasp of pain, leveraged the momentum of the strike, and drove his right knee straight upward into the exact spot where he had previously cracked Hisoka's ribs.
THWACK.
A third rib cracked beneath the knee, and the impact folded Hisoka around the strike, emptying his lungs.
Yuzuki used the leverage of the knee strike to push off, jumping backward off the narrow girder to create separation.
Hisoka disengaged his anchor lines simultaneously, leaping backward onto a tilted slab ten feet away.
Both fighters landed awkwardly, their bodies battered, bleeding, and trembling from physical degradation.
Silence settled over the pit.
Hisoka stood on the tilted slab, his left hand pressed against his three broken ribs, his right arm dangling unnaturally beneath the pink strands of Bungee Gum holding it to his neck and chest. Blood dripped steadily from his missing right pinky, his skinned palm, and his mouth.
For the first time since the fight had begun, the painted smile on Hisoka Morrow's face was completely gone.
His golden eyes were narrow, cold, and dark. He wasn't playing a game anymore. He wasn't testing a fruit to see if it was ripe.
Something had changed. Hisoka was beginning to treat his own survival as optional.
Across the narrow divide, Yuzuki rested on his right knee on an iron girder, his breath coming in ragged, shallow gasps. Blood soaked both legs of his trousers and ran down his left arm in a steady stream. His spatial processing was operating on emergency reserves, his head pounding behind the silk blindfold.
He looked across the gap at the magician, feeling the air alter around them.
'He's starting not to care what killing me costs him.'
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