Muscular exploded forward like a projectile. Zoro drove his feet into the rock and raised his two swords in a cross-guard.
(BOOM)
The earth cracked. Gravel flew. Zoro was pushed back centimetres, but he did not bend.
"What's wrong?" Muscular laughed, pressing his full weight forward. "Where's that speed? Oh, I get it! You're playing the shield! Sacrificing yourself for trash, just like their parents did!"
"They took this eye from me." Muscular raised his shoulder with a terrifying calm. "I took their lives in return. A fair trade, don't you think?"
The memory of a funeral, a cold room, the rage Kota had carried for years, all of it turned to a fear that paralysed his limbs. The air froze in Kota's lungs.
Those words stung Zoro. He felt Kota's pain and suffering, and for a second or two his gaze broke from Muscular. Muscular seized on it. With terrifying speed he launched a savage sideways kick into Zoro's ribs. There was no time to evade. Zoro barely managed to brace, the kick connected, his chest shuddered, and he coughed blood... but he stayed on his feet.
"Why won't you run?!" Kota screamed from behind him, his voice broken. "You'll end up just like them! Leave me!"
Zoro turned half his face. His eye met the child's. "Shut up and watch." He said it with a dead calm. "I'm not one of your heroes, but I chose to stand here. No one dies behind my back."
Muscular's body swelled, muscle fibres coiling around him like steel armour. "I'll crush you!"
Zoro decided to end the passive defence. "Three-Sword Style, Oni Giri!"
He lunged. Blades met muscle in bursts of burning sparks. The edges broke through, but then the fibres contracted and fused around the swords like a living trap.
"You walked right into it."
Muscular stood back, the muscle fibres gripping both swords with the iron certainty of a closed trap. He watched Zoro through his single artificial eye, and in his voice was something close to genuine satisfaction.
"Two out of three. You miscounted, you outsider."
Zoro did not move.
He stood still, Wado Ichimonji held in his teeth as always, his right arm hanging loose at his side. He made no attempt to reclaim the trapped swords. He did not even look at them.
"Even with that one sword left..." Muscular gave a rough laugh that filled the air. "What will you do with it? Scratch yourself?"
Behind him, Kota watched without understanding. A massive man holding two captured swords, and the person protecting him standing motionless as though he had lost nothing of value. But Kota could feel the difference. A moment ago Zoro had moved with the weight of three blades, and now...
You'll die. Just like them. Because of me.
Zoro did not hear Kota's voice.
Or perhaps he heard it and didn't care.
His eyes moved steadily across Muscular's body. Not the look of a frightened man searching for escape, but the look of someone solving a problem.
The outer fibres... layered and overlapping. No gap between them. A normal strike hits them and stops before it ever reaches the real body underneath.
But...
An old voice stirred somewhere in his memory. Shimotsuki's voice, from the time he had spoken to him about Armament Haki, about how it must be forced to flow with density into one precise part of the body, not spread across everything at once. Like compressing an entire river into the eye of a needle.
And another image, from that bout with Yoroi Musha during the practical exam. Zoro had watched how that man's armour was not distributed evenly across his body. It was heaviest at certain points, densest wherever he anticipated the strike. It was not merely protection, it was control of flow. And in one single moment of that bout, when Zoro's blade had met that concentrated point, he had felt something identical in his own hand, for one second only, before it vanished before he could grasp it.
That second was all he needed now to understand how to find it again.
Zoro closed his eyes.
Not in surrender. In concentration.
Inside him, something that had been moving for weeks, something like a current beneath water, invisible but present, began to condense. Narrowing from a wide channel to a single point. From the shoulder. Down the arm. To the hand.
To the fingers.
Kota saw something.
The colour of Zoro's right hand began to change.
Not the redness of effort. Not the blue of cold. Something else entirely. A deeper colour, denser, as though the light itself was retreating from that hand and leaving it to something without a name.
Black.
Zoro laughed.
Not the laugh of provocation. Not the laugh of forced confidence. The laugh of a man who has searched for something for a long time and found it in the strangest moment.
"Finally."
Kota did not understand the word. Did not understand the smile. Did not understand anything he was seeing.
Zoro opened his eyes and looked directly at Muscular.
"You said I walked into a trap?"
He took one step forward.
"Let's see which of us did."
Meanwhile... below
The forest had turned into a piece of hell. The training camp had become a vile hunting ground.
In the arena of the Courage Test, Pixie-Bob lay bleeding on the ground after a cowardly blow from Magne. Tiger roared with fury as he shielded his colleague's body, while Spinner, obsessed with Stain, clashed with his enormous knife-studded sword against Mandalay and Midoriya, his shouts about fake heroes filling the space.
Far away in the depths of the forest, Bakugo and Todoroki stood back to back. The poisonous purple mist crept toward them. Todoroki had tried to build an ice wall, but he had realised the gas could not be stopped by ice. Bakugo was boiling with rage, unaware that a hunter watched them from above the trees, the villain Moonfish, with his blade-like teeth, waiting for the right moment to snatch Target Number Two.
Many of the Class 1-B students had collapsed unconscious from Mustard's gas. Tetsutetsu and Kendo were desperately trying to locate the source of the poison, while the rest hid behind the undergrowth, trembling at the sounds of explosions that had shaken the mountain to its foundations.
Minutes before the disaster...
Aizawa had been rushing out of the residence, his senses warning him of something abnormal. He had barely moved away when the darkness split open with a blue glow unlike anything he had seen before. From between the charred trees, Dabi stepped out.
There was no time for words. Dabi was not looking for conversation.
"You're the teacher, aren't you?" He said it with a cold that froze the veins, before raising his hand and unleashing a vast wave of blue flames that consumed everything in their path toward Aizawa.
.
.
For Advanced Chapters:
Chapter 80 is Available Now
Crumbling Trust and a Beast in Chains
Zoro finally appeared in the villains' hideout (the bar).
Zoro is exhausted, drained, and bleeding, but he still defies them.
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