The scene moved faster than the eye could follow.
Everyone launched at once from the Zenin side — a single wave trying to break through the surrounding barriers and force their way in through sheer numbers.
While the soldiers traded cursed strikes along the front line, the commanders broke from the crowd and moved directly toward Michizane.
He didn't fall back.
He told everyone to handle the soldiers and leave the commanders to him alone.
That's the thing he shares with Gojo — the refusal to be slowed down by the people on his side.
The clan head released his shikigami all at once.
Nue. The Elephant. The rest — every one of them at the same moment. The level of control he held over them was beyond anything Megumi had shown by a wide margin. Not just power — precision. Each one moving like an extension of his will.
And still —
None of them touched him.
Michizane slipped past all of them with a calm that didn't match the situation. He drew his sword and angled it toward the clan head's throat —
His hand was caught before it arrived.
A partner moved at the exact same moment. Chains. And something black rising with them like smoke — a poison fused into the iron itself, spreading with every link.
In one instant — he released cursed energy across his body and shattered the chains.
But the poison had already entered.
They surrounded him from every direction.
He understood in that moment that bringing down their leader meant clearing all of them first — he couldn't take them one at a time.
They attacked together.
And in the same moment — the space around him shifted.
Not a shield. A redirection — he rotated the arc of every incoming strike and sent them back toward the people who had launched them. Nothing touched him. And the return was faster than the original attack because of the rotation itself.
At the same time —
The ground beneath their feet became elastic. They lost their center of gravity. The pull of the earth stopped working the way they knew it.
Most of them took the damage from their own reflected attacks.
But the clan head dissolved into shadow before the impact reached him — and stepped out unharmed.
The other Zenin commanders took damage.
And Michizane — coughed blood for the first time.
The poison. It had been working the whole time.
I hadn't let myself think too much about what that meant. But watching it — the first crack in something I'd started to see as unbreakable — settled into my chest with a weight I wasn't expecting.
On the other side of the battle — Leon.
Three fighters surrounding him with no support. Swordsmen from the Sugawara elite — fast and precise. They weren't here to test him.
But he was slipping past all three of them.
Then he drove his sword into the ground and released a pulse around himself at the same moment.
Rings of energy expanded outward — pure heat that scattered everyone within range. He didn't feel it. Steam was rising from his body like the heat was passing through him rather than into him.
The teacher noticed from a distance.
He recognized immediately that Leon was the most dangerous one here — and broke away from his own fight, moving toward him without hesitation.
I hadn't put it together until that moment. The quiet man from the training hall. The one who watched Michizane test the students without flinching, like he already knew how it would go. That calm wasn't passivity. It was the stillness of someone who doesn't need to prove anything until he does.
Leon looked at him and smiled.
He attacked with a sword strike carrying concentrated forward energy.
The teacher manipulated space — the same kind of technique Michizane used, like reaching into the air and rearranging it. He slipped the strike.
Then instead of his sword — he hit Leon with his fist. Reinforced with a black pulse.
The blow launched Leon backward over a long distance — fragments of his armor scattering through the air alongside the blood from his mouth.
He didn't give him a single second.
He followed immediately and launched a second black pulse.
This looks like Yuji fighting. The comparison came before I could stop it. Same overwhelming forward pressure, same refusal to let the other person breathe. I hadn't imagined the quiet man from the training hall carried this kind of weight.
Leon dodged the second pulse by a margin that barely existed — absorbing the peripheral damage from the rebound.
Then he said quietly — but to who exactly:
— Looks like our lives are actually on the line this time, partner.
The teacher looked around with a puzzled expression.
No one was near him.
Who is he talking to?
He let it go. It didn't matter right now.
Leon raised his sword into the air.
— Heart of the Lion — release your power. Let everyone here hear your roar.
A beam launched — light that blinded everyone in front of it, heat that dissolved whatever stood in its path. The teacher manipulated space to reflect the attack back, the same way he had before.
But the technique dissolved the moment the light touched it.
Gone. Like it had never existed.
The confusion on the teacher's face was immediate — how?
He didn't have time to find an answer.
Until he vanished.
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