One from All raised his hand.
"King's Magic: Infinite Vanguard."
The sky answered.
Hundreds of weapons erupted through the atmosphere all at once — spears, blades, axes, swords without modern names, weapons from dead civilizations and forgotten masters. Sacred weapons. Brutal weapons. Eight years of roads and kingdoms and masters who taught without him had left something behind for him and this was where it all lived. The sky above the planet went dark with steel.
He moved the moment they appeared.
Not standing back directing from a distance — into it, through it, his fingers commanding trajectories mid-movement while his body attacked from angles that forced Reina to split her attention between the weapons above and the person in front. His fingers moved constantly — small precise gestures that redirected weapons mid-flight, curved spears around obstacles, held certain blades in orbit around himself as a moving perimeter while the rest did the work.
Reina moved.
The first wave came down hard and she was already going — left, ducking under a spear, stepping around a blade that adjusted its angle to follow her. Diamond embodiment gave her strength and near-indestructibility but speed was a different conversation and the weapons were smarter than terrain. When she went left three followed. When she stopped two were already waiting. She was dodging by inches — a spear past her right ear, a blade under her arm, an axe she had to drop flat to avoid.
One from All pushed through his own field toward her.
A straight attack — his fist coated in void, King's Magic spreading from the contact point outward. She blocked it with both arms crossed, the diamond embodiment taking the impact and distributing it, the ground beneath her feet cracking from the force transfer. She pushed back and he was already gone — back into the weapon field, fingers moving, three spears redirecting toward the position she had pushed him from before he left it.
She charged after him.
He wasn't there.
She turned — he was behind her, another strike, void-coated and precise. She took it on the shoulder and felt it properly — the King's Magic interfacing with the diamond surface in a way that was less about force and more about authority, less about breaking and more about insisting. She stumbled one step.
The failed weapons looped back into formation. Fresh ones replaced the ones still in flight. The sky never emptied. The rotation was constant — waves arriving, waves returning, the arsenal self-sustaining, Some weapons hung permanently close to One from All, orbiting at a distance that made approaching him directly a conversation with several hundred edges simultaneously.
She couldn't find an opening.
Every gap closed before she reached it. Every committed angle became dangerous mid-commitment. He was moving and attacking and commanding simultaneously — three things at once without any of them suffering for the others — and she was spending everything she had just staying in the conversation.
She hit the ground with her palm.
The surface was Boron Nitride — dense, crystalline, the hardest material on this planet. Her embodiment read it instantly and updated. The molecular arrangement shifted, restructured, her skin converting to match what she touched. She stood up and the difference was immediate — the ceiling on her movement lifted, the weight redistribution giving her a relationship with the ground she hadn't had thirty seconds ago.
She was faster now.
One from All felt it the moment she stood.
He didn't add more weapons. He didn't change the system. He moved harder — his own speed increasing, the finger commands coming faster, his body closing distance and creating distance in shorter intervals. The attack and the vanguard working together more aggressively now, his movement sharper, the angles he attacked from less predictable.
Reina pushed faster through the field.
She was getting to positions before the weapons arrived and he was filling those positions before she settled into them. Back and forth — her speed against his simultaneous management of everything, the planet's surface between them being destroyed section by section by the accumulated force of exchanges neither of them was treating lightly.
She was still closing.
Slowly. Earning every foot of distance through the weapon field. Her Boron Nitride conversion grazing edges she couldn't fully avoid, the embodiment holding but the impacts accumulating. She bled where the conversion was kissed by something moving faster than it could fully account for. She kept going.
He picked the lightest blade he had from the arsenal and sent it at full speed.
His fingers directed it — aimed at the specific point her left arm occupied when she completed the dodge she was mid-way through. He had watched her movement long enough to know where she landed.
She landed there and saw the blade coming but she couldn't evade it the only option was taking it where it hurt less.
The blade hit her left forearm. The Boron Nitride held — no clean cut — but the force behind it traveled through the conversion and into the arm beneath it and her body registered it before she could decide how to register it.
Because weapons in one from all's inventory didn't care if your body was made of the hardest weapon the universe could register as long as it's given a command to cut it dose so upon impact effective immediately.
She stopped.
One second. Her body demanding its report before continuing.
One from All crossed the distance before the second finished.
He was in front of her — void pressing against the outer edge of her embodiment's field, close enough that the space between them had a weight to it. His red eyes found hers and held them with the particular coldness of someone who had already decided what came next.
Reina looked back at him.
Her body understood something was happening before her mind caught up. She felt the edges of it — not physical, not Anym, something that operated underneath both and didn't introduce itself before it arrived.
Then she was somewhere else.
Red.
Everything red — the walls, the floor, the ceiling, the air itself carrying the color like it had been soaked in it. The only thing not red was the bed. White. Simple. She was on it. Dark chains wrapped her wrists and ankles — heavy, present, communicating their purpose without demonstrating it yet.
She pulled against them once.
They tightened instantly. Not gradually — total, immediate, the grip increasing the moment resistance registered. She stopped. They returned to their resting weight but remembered. She could feel them remembering.
No sound.
That was the thing that arrived after the red and after the chains — the complete absence of sound. A silence so total it pressed against her ears from the inside. She was breathing fast and she couldn't hear herself. The red room absorbed everything.
One from All's voice came from everywhere.
"You have a really nice gift."
No direction to it. No source. Just present in the red the way the red was present.
"The ability to increase your attack force whether it landed or not. Every exchange building on the last one."
Reina said nothing. There was nowhere to say it to.
"Sanjutsu no Hakai. It's a good system."
A pause.
"Do you know what my gift is?"
She waited.
"Heavenly Judgement."
The words carried something the previous words hadn't.
"If I made eye contact with you and find you guilty — and I will find something — you get continuously stabbed. Although it only last Thirty seconds its enough to take you down." Another pause. "No sound. Nothing you can do about it."
The first one arrived before he finished.
She couldn't scream. The room had no sound for a scream to exist in — it absorbed the intention before it became the act, absorbed everything, absorbed the weapons that came and the damage they did and the thirty seconds of her body being put through something it had no framework for enduring. She felt all of it completely and in total silence, the red walls offering nothing, the white bed beneath her offering nothing, the dark chains tightening every time her body's instinct told it to fight back and then releasing and then tightening again.
Thirty seconds in a room with no sound.
She endured it because there was nothing else available.
She came back to the planet on her knees.
The Boron Nitride surface was cold. She was breathing — fast, shallow, her body running its recovery with the urgency of something that had been given significant work to do in a short time. The embodiment had fractures. Both forearms. She didn't count them.
The blood was everywhere.
In the school Yuki was standing. She hadn't decided to stand — she was just standing, her hand against the screen showing Reina's planet, her face carrying something that had left the territory of competitive assessment entirely.
Levi looked at the screen.
At Reina on her knees covered in blood with her Boron Nitride embodiment fractured in multiple places.
"She needs more training."
He looked away.
Yuki turned to look at him. Said nothing. Turned back to the screen.
On the planet One from All let the Infinite Vanguard dissolve.
Hundreds of weapons lost their orders and became nothing. The sky cleared. The Boron Nitride surface settled back into silence.
He stood still and reached outward — his King's Magic extending through the space of Hayato's universe the way it extended through everything, past the distance between planets, past the dark and the cold between them.
He found Shiro.
Her Anym signature precise and controlled and oriented toward him. She knew where he was. He knew where she was.
Then he found the other thing.
Sora's Anym — present, alive, but quiet. Pulled back from everything it had been climbing toward during the fight. Shut down properly.
She lost.
He opened his eyes. Looked in Shiro's direction across the dark between planets.
Neither of them moved.
Not from hesitation. From the particular patience of two fighters who understood that the space before a fight was the last space that belonged entirely to them. She wasn't entering his domain. He wasn't entering hers.
They waited.
Both of them knowing that the next person to move would be defining the terms of what came after.
The finals hadn't started yet.
But they had already begun.
End of Chapter 28