-Broadcast-
Three on three. On paper, it looked fair.
It wasn't.
The SWORD members had made the same mistake every opponent before them eventually made — they'd underestimated how quickly the Sixth Form learned. Kurozumi Orochi wasn't simply copying movements. He was absorbing them, refining each stolen technique with every exchange until the mimicry became something worse than the original.
Sett gritted his teeth as the bald, bronze-skinned figure across from him moved in a mirror image of his own footwork. Red light shimmered along the Sixth Form's fists — a pale imitation of Heroic Spirit, but only pale in color. In execution, it was already dangerously close to the real thing.
"Sett." The Sixth Form tilted its head, studying him with unsettling calm. "You are very talented. I find myself admiring you more and more."
Sett said nothing. He'd felt it from the first exchange — the way the monster absorbed each technique like water soaking into dry earth. The speed of that theft was maddening. If this dragged on much longer, there wouldn't be a single technique left that he could use without it being turned against him.
Quick and decisive. Finish it now.
Helmeppo was having his own problems.
The Form he faced was bathed in a pale, golden radiance — a mockery of the Arhat light that Helmeppo himself channeled. The fake Arhat had observed enough of his abilities to reproduce most of them, even surfacing hidden applications that Helmeppo hadn't thought to guard. Every attack he threw was met with a reflection. Every defense anticipated.
It's copying me. Not just the moves — the rhythm.
"We need to find the real body," Helmeppo said, loud enough for the others to hear. "Or we take down every clone at once."
Todoroki had made the most progress. His ice and fire had already destroyed two copies but each time a new Sixth Form stepped in from the periphery to absorb the technique he'd just used. The battle line had stabilized into something frustrating: a dead heat, grinding toward no conclusion.
The clones shared. Whatever one Sixth Form observed was distributed to all the rest. Fighting them one at a time simply trained the entire group.
Find the original. End this.
Helmeppo's eyes shifted.
The golden light that filled his irises intensified — his Clairvoyance, the deepest application of the Arhat Fruit's sight, scanning past surface and appearance to the nature beneath. Clones had no soul fire. They were shells assembled from flesh, accurate in every visible detail but hollow at the core. Only the original body carried that quiet, irreducible flame.
His gaze moved across the ring of bald figures until it settled on one.
"There," Helmeppo said. "That one. His soul doesn't change no matter how many times his shape does. That's the real body."
Sett was already moving before the sentence finished.
He crossed the distance in a near-instant, getting inside the Sixth Form's guard before it could react. Both arms locked around its waist in a crushing grip, pinning it in place.
"We can settle anything else after you survive this," Sett said quietly.
He exhaled. Every reserve of Heroic Spirit he'd held back flooded into his limbs at once — a red luminescence that made the air around him feel heavy.
His legs drove into the ground, launched him upward. The Sixth Form couldn't do anything; pinned against his shoulder, it had no leverage, no angle. They rose together like a cannonball fired straight up.
Then Sett reversed.
The descent was violent. His body tilted, driving the Sixth Form headfirst toward the ground with his full weight and the accumulated force of the drop hammering down together. The impact was catastrophic — the earth cracked in a wide ring around the point of contact, dust exploding outward in a billowing curtain.
When it cleared, Sett stood. Covered in blood and grime, breathing hard. The Sixth Form was buried from the waist down, its limbs unresponsive. Heroic Spirit had been poured directly into its body through the grip — enough to suppress the fruit's regeneration, at least temporarily.
"Your turn," Sett said. "Hurry up."
Helmeppo stepped back to a safe distance and closed his eyes.
Something moved inside him — a resonance, low and vast, like the turning of something old and enormous. A faint red light rose across his skin beneath the gold of the Arhat's blessing, the two energies layering over each other until he looked less like a man and more like a carved icon given breath.
His hands came together. His lips moved through words too quiet to hear.
Then his eyes snapped open.
"Evil beast." His voice rang out, clear and unhurried. "You don't know the height of heaven or the depth of earth. You did not take me seriously at all."
A great and powerful dragon answered him.
It erupted from his body in a surge of crimson light — a hundred meters of serpentine mass, scales glinting like hammered metal, each one catching the darkness and throwing it back as dull fire. The dragon's whiskers trailed in the turbulence of its own wake. Its claws split the air as it circled once above him, the pressure of its presence flattening the dust below.
Helmeppo extended one arm.
The dragon dove.
It struck the buried Sixth Form like a falling tower — the impact releasing a pillar of red light that swallowed the surrounding area whole. The shockwave spread outward in a crimson halo, dyeing the night blood-red. The explosion that followed shook the ground, sent debris spiraling into the dark.
When the light contracted, the area was ruin.
Above it, Todoroki Shoto was already descending.
He'd climbed high while the dragon struck, building altitude and time. Now he held both hands extended — left gathering cold, right gathering heat — forcing them toward each other despite every instinct the two opposing forces had against it. The cold flame that formed between his palms was the result: blue-white, utterly still, radiating a chill that had no business existing inside something that was also burning.
"I'll cremate what's left for you," he said, almost conversationally. "Consider it a courtesy."
He released it.
The orb fell like a comet, its tail illuminating the descent in cold blue light. It grew as it fell — blooming, spreading, opening like a lotus the size of a building.
The moment it hit the ground, ice erupted outward in every direction. A biting cold swept across the battlefield, forcing both Sett and Helmeppo back another dozen steps. The temperature dropped sharply, instantly. The spreading ice field swallowed the crater and everything in it, locking the ground beneath a thick, pale shell.
The night went quiet.
No movement. No regeneration. No black blood pulling itself back together.
The ground where Kurozumi Orochi had been was sealed under ice, and nothing remained above the surface.