Chapter 200: Will You Win?
"You..."
The word died in Akaza's throat. His golden eyes, etched with the kanji for Upper Rank Three, widened in sheer disbelief.
The complex snowflake-like array of his Compass Needle, which had flawlessly tracked the battle spirit of every opponent he had ever faced, suddenly went completely blind. Akira stood merely paces away, his sword drawn, yet the Compass Needle registered absolutely nothing. It was as if the young swordsman had vanished from the very fabric of reality, leaving behind only an eerie, fathomless emptiness.
Akira had purposefully masked his presence, stepping smoothly into the Transparent World. He had reined in every ounce of his fighting intent and bloodlust specifically to bait the demon into a false sense of security. Now that his prey was locked in his sights, the facade dropped.
"The Supreme Territory!" Akaza gasped, his voice trembling with a volatile mix of awe and fury. "How is this possible?!"
A torrential wave of conflicting emotions crashed over the Upper Rank demon. Shock at the human's terrifyingly rapid growth collided with a bitter, venomous resentment. For over a century, Akaza had bled and slaughtered in pursuit of that exact martial pinnacle, only to be denied. A blinding rage—at Akira, at his own stagnant weakness, at the unfairness of the world itself—threatened to consume him.
Akira, however, could not care less about the demon's existential crisis. His expression remained a mask of absolute calm. He simply raised his Nichirin Blade, the metal humming with lethal intent.
As the blade rose, another sensation pierced through Akaza's boiling rage. It was a cold, suffocating grip around his throat, a primal instinct he had not felt since his human days. Fear.
His Compass Needle remained dead and silent, but the survival instincts forged through hundreds of years of endless carnage were screaming at him to run. The suffocating aura of inevitable death pressed against his skin.
'Will I win?' The fleeting, almost absurd thought echoed in Akaza's mind as he stared at the boy.
As if reading the demon's very soul, Akira's voice cut through the tense air, cold and absolute. "You are already dead."
"Thunder Breathing, First Form: Thunderclap and Flash."
The air shattered. A blinding streak of golden lightning tore through the space between them, moving with a velocity that even Akaza's enhanced kinetic vision struggled to track. The thunderous boom echoed a fraction of a second later. Akira materialized directly behind the Upper Rank, his posture low, the blade in his hands radiating an intense, searing crimson light.
Driven entirely by the blind instinct of mortal peril, Akaza violently wrenched his body sideways. He barely managed to shift his trajectory at the absolute last microsecond, preventing the crimson blade from cleanly severing his neck. The desperate evasion came at a brutal cost; the violent contortion nearly snapped his own cervical vertebrae and shattered his spine.
A geyser of dark blood erupted into the night air. The horrific gash, which had cleaved halfway through his throat, immediately began to knit back together under his demonic regeneration. But the moment the flesh tried to close, an agonizing, white-hot burning sensation flared from the wound.
Under normal circumstances, Akaza possessed a willpower forged in iron; he would not have flinched even if his body were engulfed in roaring flames. Yet this was entirely different. The searing agony radiating from the cut bypassed his physical nerves and pierced directly into his soul. It felt exactly as if the raw tissue had been thrust into the unforgiving glare of the midday sun.
He had no time to process the excruciating torment. Even completely blind to Akira's movements, his combat instincts roared that the onslaught was far from over.
"Thunderclap and Flash, Twofold."
The moment the first strike failed to claim the demon's head, Akira's boots cracked against the earth, ricocheting him into a second, even faster assault. The crimson blade arced through the air, aiming directly for the unhealed, vulnerable side of Akaza's neck.
Sensing the incoming decapitation, Akaza slammed his heel into the ground with devastating force. He desperately corrected his ruined posture, launching himself upward into the air. The evasion saved his head, but Akira's blade carved a devastating path through his torso, tearing through muscle and bone from the back of his shoulder all the way down, slicing through more than half of his body.
"Destructive Death: Crushing Type - Willow of a Thousand Flashes!"
Completely ignoring the horrific, gaping chasm that had nearly bisected his chest, Akaza twisted his mangled body mid-air. With a roar of pure exertion, he inverted his stance and drove a devastating punch directly toward the earth below.
The impact detonated like a bomb. The ground within a ten-meter radius pulverized instantly, sending massive chunks of rock flying. The sheer kinetic force generated violent, razor-sharp air currents that acted like countless wind blades. The resulting shockwave and blinding cloud of debris exploded outward, effectively halting Akira's momentum and interrupting his lethal third strike.
Snatching this singular, desperate moment of respite, Akaza hit the ground and immediately unleashed his ultimate technique without a fraction of hesitation.
"Destructive Death: Final Form - Blue Silver Chaotic Afterglow!"
An apocalyptic storm of dense, overlapping shockwaves erupted outward, turning the surrounding space into a meat grinder with Akaza at its epicenter. The sheer density of the omnidirectional attack forced Akira to break his offensive rhythm and retreat a few paces.
Had he stayed within point-blank range, there would have been absolutely no gaps to slip through; the shockwaves would have shredded him to bone. Only by maintaining a slight distance could he perceive the microscopic openings in the chaotic barrage.
During their last encounter nearly two years ago, even though Akira possessed the visual prowess to see the gaps in this devastating technique, his body had lacked the sheer speed and precision to handle them. He had nearly paid with his life.
Now, it was a completely different story. Akira moved like a phantom, his body weaving and tilting through the lethal storm of shockwaves with stunning grace. His calm, unblinking eyes remained locked onto Akaza, patiently waiting for the inevitable opening to launch his counterattack.
Both combatants knew the absolute truth: the moment this technique ended, the battle would be decided.
When Akira had first unveiled the Transparent World, Akaza had already foreseen his own demise. The demon had obsessively chased that supreme martial realm for over a century; no one understood its impossible advantage better than he did. Combined with the young swordsman's god-like speed—a speed that had been permanently burned into Akaza's memory during their previous clash—the Upper Rank's current resistance was nothing more than the futile thrashing of a cornered beast, driven solely by bitter resentment and raw survival instinct.
Pushing himself to unleash this final barrage was the absolute limit of Akaza's current strength. In truth, if Akira had been willing to trade a severe injury for a guaranteed kill, the demon would never have found the breathing room to activate Blue Silver Chaotic Afterglow in the first place. The swordsman's pragmatic caution had merely bought the Upper Rank a few extra seconds of life.
Through the chaotic flurry of his own shockwaves, Akaza watched in despair. Akira was completely unscathed. The storm-like assault raged around him, yet not a single thread of his uniform had been grazed. The contrast was staggering. Two years ago, this exact technique had nearly torn the boy apart. Today, Akira danced through the destruction with effortless precision, rendering the demon's ultimate attack entirely obsolete.
The horrific, gaping wound on Akaza's chest was still gushing dark blood. Because the flesh had been seared by the Bright Red Nichirin Sword, his normally instantaneous regeneration had slowed to an agonizing crawl. The structural damage to his musculature severely compromised his technique.
Worse still, the soul-piercing burn continued to ravage his nervous system, stinging his mind incessantly. His stamina was bleeding out. The terrifying frequency of his punches was visibly slowing down.
'I can still be faster! I can be stronger!'Akaza's heart roared with defiant resentment.'I must reach the supreme!'
But reality was merciless. His internal screams of ambition were drowned out by the debilitating agony of his scorched wounds. His demonic body was hitting a hard limit, and the once-impenetrable wall of shockwaves was beginning to thin.
The moment the density of the shockwaves dropped by a fraction of a percent, Akira moved.
"Thunder Breathing, Seventh Form: Dragon's Glide."
The air screamed. A massive, serpentine bolt of lightning, tinged with a faint, lethal crimson glow, tore through the remaining gaps in the shockwaves. It moved with the fluid, unstoppable grace of a mythical beast. Before Akaza's brain could even process the shift in momentum, the crimson lightning streaked directly past his side.
A split second later, a massive geyser of blood erupted into the night sky.
Akaza's head was launched high into the air, spinning wildly.
For a brief moment, the decapitated head retained its expression—a frozen mask of surprise, anger, and bitter resentment. But as the world spun around him, those violent emotions suddenly evaporated. In their place, an indescribable, overwhelming sense of relief and deep tranquility washed over his heart.
Akira had defeated him head-on, crushing his ultimate technique with absolute, obvious strength. For a martial arts fanatic who lived only for the fight, dying to a vastly superior opponent was not an unacceptable end.
If anything, as his vision began to blur, the only lingering bitterness was a deep, quiet jealousy toward the boy's monstrous talent. The supreme territory that Akaza had bled and suffered for over a century had been conquered by this human in less than two years.
Knowing he could no longer fight the strong, that his endless climb toward the peak of martial arts had finally been severed, brought a hollow ache to his chest.
'Am I... dying?'
In his fading consciousness, the world dissolved into a daze. Countless blurred, fragmented memories began to flash rapidly through his mind. Among the chaotic montage of blood and battle, two distinct figures emerged—figures that felt as though they had been deliberately, violently erased from his soul by an outside force.
During his previous battle with Akira, the swordsman's words had triggered a fleeting glimpse of these very same silhouettes. But before he could grasp them, Muzan's oppressive will had forcefully crushed the memory, locking it away in darkness.
Now, standing on the absolute precipice of death, Muzan's grip on his mind was slipping. Akaza recklessly reached into the abyss of his forgotten human past, desperately trying to pull those two unforgettable figures back into the light.
The world around him seemed to quiet down. The next moment, the hazy silhouette of a petite young woman suddenly solidified. She stood gracefully before his falling head, her gentle presence cutting through the stench of blood and death.
A few paces away, Akira stood with his blade lowered but his muscles coiled tight. He was watching the crumbling demon intently, fully prepared to strike again should Akaza attempt to enter his headless survival stage.
But suddenly, the young swordsman's breath hitched. His eyes widened slightly as he stared at the empty space directly in front of the dying Upper Rank, freezing completely in place.
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