Della Cruz doesn't understand it at first. His body is on the canvas, knees down, but his mind is still standing where he was just seconds ago, still inside that relentless pressure he had been pouring in without pause.
For more than half a minute, he had been driving Kenta back, trapping him, breaking at the guard piece by piece. He felt it, believed it was only a matter of time. And then, in less than two seconds, Kenta finally did something, and everything flipped.
"How…?"
"What did he just do…?"
His mind tries to follow the sequence backward, to make sense of it, but it doesn't line up.
There was the exchange he expected, the opening he thought he created, the punch he was sure would land. And then something cut through it, like the moment had been taken away from him before it even fully formed. And now he's on his knees.
