-Broadcast-
Wind's Last Breath hit.
The blade storm scoured everything in its path — a howling, churning mass of compressed wind and sword energy that engulfed the Eighth Form entirely, wrapping it in currents sharp enough to shear stone. Yasuo moved through the storm himself, never stopping, the long sword in his hand finding the monster's body again and again from every angle the wind offered. The cuts were clean. Smooth-edged. A swordsman who had spent his entire life reducing waste from his technique left marks that looked less like wounds and more like something planned.
He took the head himself. When the skeleton demigod's neck separated and the skull came loose, Yasuo followed it down and drove the blade through it several more times. He was not going to wonder afterward whether he'd done enough.
When the storm finally subsided, there was nothing left of the Eighth Form that could be called a body. The battlefield was meat and fragments, every visible part of Kurozumi Orochi carved into pieces too small to reassemble — a scene past the point of dismemberment.
Yasuo planted his sword in the ground and leaned on it, breathing hard. Sweat ran down his face and neck. His hands were trembling faintly — not from fear, but from the simple calculation of an old body that had just spent everything it had.
"I'm getting old," he said quietly, to no one. "If any more time passes, I probably won't be able to pull Last Breath out at all." The thought arrived without self-pity. It was just true. The body kept its own accounting, and the debt from decades of accumulated injuries had interest that compounded every year.
He had done it, though. There was nothing left of the Eighth Form that looked alive.
Then a red light bloomed in the wreckage.
It started small — a point of dull crimson in the pile of fragments — and expanded fast, like a fire catching wind. Wherever the light touched the scattered pieces, they moved. Each shard of bone and torn flesh responded to it, sliding toward the others along the ground, rotating and reconfiguring during the approach. The reconstitution wasn't quiet. There were shapes visible in it — the outline of the Second Form's mass, the skull of the Third, the silhouettes of each version Orochi had passed through on his way to this one — as though the fruit was cycling through every death on its way back to the end.
The Eighth Form stood again. Larger than before, the bone spurs on its back longer and more numerous, the red light still pulsing in the hollow sockets where its eyes should be. It rolled its neck once. The joints cracked loudly in the still air.
"Yasuo." The grinding voice had not changed. "That swordsmanship of yours — it's better than Kozuki Oden's. I mean that." A pause. "Surrender to me. Swear your blade to the Kurozumi clan. I'll leave you alive today."
Yasuo straightened up from the sword.
The self-deprecating smile that crossed his face was brief and genuine. He had reached his ceiling. He understood that with perfect clarity now — not as defeat, but as a fact about human limits that applied to him as much as anyone else. Swordsmanship grew with the body, and the body grew until it didn't. To go further from here, he would have to become something other than what he was.
He would not do that. His predecessors had chosen that road and he'd watched where it led. He was proudest of the fact that he was still, entirely, a human being.
"My fate belongs to me," Yasuo said. He turned his sword in his grip, reset his stance. "Face the gale, Kurozumi Orochi."
He moved.
The Eighth Form moved faster.
The skeletal arm crossed the distance between them in a fraction of a second, and the claws opened. The arm that held Yasuo's sword came apart at the shoulder in a burst of blood. The sword dropped. Yasuo's hand was still around the grip, separated from the rest of him, and the pain arrived a moment later as a white-out that his body processed somewhere behind the part of him that kept moving.
He reached down with his other hand, picked up the sword.
Non-dominant. Shaking. It didn't matter.
The steps toward Kurozumi Orochi were steady. Slower than before, but steady. The memories came as he walked — the mornings when he and his brother had practiced together from first light to dark, two young men who wanted the same things and trusted each other without thinking about it. The day the misunderstanding happened. The day their teacher died. The day he'd stopped knowing where Yone was, and started the decades of searching that had led him in a circle all the way back to where he was born.
He was crying. He realized it distantly, the way you notice weather when you've already decided to go outside.
"I'm really useless," he said. His voice was steady. "Maybe I'll see Yone on the other side."
The Eighth Form had already decided. Since Yasuo had made his choice, there was no reason to wait. It raised its arm — the bone spurs along the length of it pointing forward, a dozen overlapping blades — and drove it through the blade storm Yasuo had managed to raise in his final charge, punching through the last defense and into the old swordsman's chest.
It paused before completing the motion that would end it.
Something hit its arm.
The impact was not subtle. A kanabō wrapped in red and black lightning connected with the bone spur arm at full force, the crack of contact audible across the entire area. The arm broke. Not cracked — broke, the bone structure separating where the weapon had landed.
Yamato dropped out of the sky, her gradient hair streaming, the kanabō already moving to a guard position between Yasuo and the Eighth Form. Her face was set.
"I told myself I wouldn't let anyone else get hurt." Her voice was tight. "Even someone who's already given up. Especially someone like that."
She caught Yasuo under his remaining arm before he could go down and pulled him back, stepping away from the Eighth Form without turning her back to it. The Raikō Bagua — her father's technique in her hands, Conqueror's Haki crackling through the kanabō's length — had bought the separation she needed.
She had not come to Wano Country to watch capable people die for nothing. The old man had already given more than his body had to spare. She was going to make sure it counted for something.