-Broadcast-
Yamato in her hybrid form had no interest in pretending this was anything other than a fight. The skeleton demigod standing across the ruins had, in a sideways sense, done Wano Country a service — the Night Parade had chewed through the God's Knights and reduced the Celestial Dragons' most loyal armed force to a fraction of itself. That was, objectively, good for Wano. But there was no version of Kurozumi Orochi that looked like a person who'd done something good, and the Eighth Form standing in front of her looked like what it was: the final shape of a monster that had spent decades with its boot on this country's throat.
"Since you won't accept what's offered," the skeleton demigod said, raising one hand, the familiar black compression forming at its fingertip, "let me teach you some manners on your father's behalf. Elders deserve respect."
The Black Flash released in a column, broader than before, the dark energy spreading as it expanded and pouring into everything around it. The air warped. The surviving small demons of the Night Parade — Inugami and Karasu-Tengu's scattered remnants, onlookers who'd stayed too close — caught the edges of it and had no time to go anywhere.
Yamato moved with the Eighth Form's own attack as her guide, reading the gaps in the column's spread, weaving through the blind spots in the coverage at a speed the hybrid form made possible. She kept one arm around Yasuo's body as she moved — she wasn't leaving him there.
When she'd cleared enough distance to put the body somewhere safe, she turned back.
"I'm going to smash your head to pieces, Kurozumi Orochi."
She came in fast, using the Raikō Bagua the way her father used it — the kanabō wrapped in Conqueror's Haki, the red and black lightning threading through the steel, the approach itself carrying enough threat that the technique was already working before the hit landed. The mace connected with the skeleton demigod's face at full force.
Teeth flew.
The Eighth Form registered the pain. What it registered more was the insult — Kaido's daughter, using Kaido's technique, landing it on him. Twenty years of performing helplessness while Kaido occupied his country, twenty years of bowing and pretending, and now the man's own child was standing here using his strikes to knock teeth out of the final form.
The frustration it produced was not small.
"Since you're so eager," Orochi said, its expression flat, "I'll send you off first. Then I'll send Kaido down to join you."
It punched.
No technique. No buildup. Just a straight, simple punch thrown with the full weight of what the Eighth Form was.
The air shrieked along the fist's path. Yamato had no window to move — the gap between intent and arrival was too small. The fist landed.
And shattered.
Not Yamato — ice. A shell of dense, solid ice that had covered her body absorbed the full impact and exploded into chips on contact, the shards scattering across the ground around the skeleton demigod's knuckles. Yamato was already five meters back, reforming her guard.
Kagamiyama — an ice-armor substitute technique she'd developed ally for situations where her father's punch was incoming and she couldn't get clear in time. The irony of using it on Orochi first was not lost on her.
"He's in a different category," she thought, recalibrating. The contempt she'd carried into this fight was gone. But the intent to fight wasn't. She had a monster-class opponent willing to stand still and hit her, and she had no intention of running.
She opened her mouth.
The cold current that came out was not breath in any ordinary sense — it was a sustained torrent of concentrated frozen air, the Great Wolf's natural element channeled through her transformed throat and directed forward in a pressured stream.
"Musō Hyōga!"
The air around the Eighth Form crystallized. The cold expanded outward from Yamato as its center, the surrounding temperature dropping fast enough to make the remaining moisture in the air precipitate as frost on every surface. The skeleton demigod's body caught it — the cold working into the gaps in the bone and the meat, the ice building layer over layer, working through the outer surface and into the monster's cells.
Orochi roared. Its limbs locked. The ice thickened, accumulated, wrapped the Eighth Form into something that looked like a sculpture — a frozen monument standing in the ruins of the Flower Capital.
Yamato stopped and walked toward it slowly, claws up, watching.
"I don't know how to do Kaido's fire breath," she said, touching the ice lightly with one claw. "But I can do the cold."
Fire answered her from inside the sculpture.
It burst outward without warning — not from the surface, but from within the frozen mass, a heat that had been building since the moment the ice first touched Orochi's body. The flames were Todoroki Shoto's technique, absorbed through Imitation, now deployed from the inside of an ice prison to melt it from the core outward. The ice cracked in a web of fracture lines, hissed as the meltwater ran down the Eighth Form's frame, and fell away in steaming slabs.
Orochi stood there untouched, shaking its arms loose.
Yamato looked at the puddles on the ground.
Her ice breath — the technique she was most confident in, the one she'd developed against the hardest opponent she knew — had done nothing that mattered against Kurozumi Orochi.
The same technique wouldn't work against her father either.
She understood, clearly and without comfort, what she'd been underestimating. Not just Orochi. The standard her father represented, and how far she still was from it.