The silence hanging over the ruined centre of the 251st-floor arena didn't last. It was broken not by a voice, but by the groan of remaining structural steel beneath the weight of shifting debris.
Yuzuki knelt on an exposed girder, his right knee planted in a pool of his own blood. Ten feet across the abyss, Hisoka stood on a tilted slab. The magician's right arm dangled unnaturally, held up only by the translucent pink sheen of Bungee Gum woven like external tendons across his chest and collarbone. Three of his left ribs were broken, his right pinky was missing, and his palm was skinned bare.
Yet, Hisoka showed no surrender to the pain. His golden eyes remained bright, sharp, and fixed entirely on Yuzuki.
The air around Yuzuki began to warp.
He simply raised his right hand, extending two fingers toward the space between them. The Six Eyes, working on redline reserves, calculated the spatial distortion. He couldn't afford another drawn-out engagement with Blue. His legs were failing; the deep laceration across his left quadriceps made lateral evasion impossible, and the reopened wound on his flank was leaking warmth down his leg with every heartbeat.
He needed overwhelming force to clear the field.
Red.
Red was Blue's opposite application: a repulsive spatial divergence produced by reversing the direction of Yuzuki's aura calculations. He forced far more aura through the technique than his damaged arms could safely carry.
Crimson aura compressed at Yuzuki's fingertips. Space buckled outward, and the focused repulsive wave tore dust and loose stone from its path as it expanded.
Hisoka didn't try to block it directly. Bungee Gum could stretch around ordinary impacts, but it could not cancel spatial repulsion itself. A direct block would only drive the force through Hisoka's guard and shred his body.
Instead, Hisoka released four major anchor lines holding the surrounding concrete slabs.
As the blast tore forward, Hisoka fired a concentrated strand of Bungee Gum behind him, anchoring it to an intact pillar. Simultaneously, he contracted three pre-existing lines attached to the upper ceiling rafters.
The simultaneous release and rapid contraction bent his trajectory in a parabolic arc, swinging his body around the outer perimeter of the expanding repulsive wave.
He avoided the direct centre, but he couldn't outrun the spatial shear entirely.
The edge of Red caught Hisoka's right side. The wave tore through his coat and seared the exposed skin beneath into an open, weeping burn. Two of his support strands snapped under the backlash, scattering stone across the structure behind him.
The wave detonated against the far wall of the arena, tearing a broad crater through reinforced concrete and exposing structural framework to the open morning air.
On the girder, Yuzuki took the full recoil of his own technique.
The explosive pressure pushed backward into his right arm and torso. His damaged shoulder joints screamed as muscle tissue tore further. The force drove him down onto both hands, locking his elbows to keep his face from hitting the steel.
His arms shook violently, a profound, icy numbness spreading up to his shoulders.
Above him, the shattered remnants of the upper ceiling structure collapsed downward in a cascade of heavy concrete slabs. Yuzuki triggered Infinity. The falling slabs slowed as they entered the subdivided space around him, their downward progress reduced to a crawl. Using the full five-second window, Yuzuki dragged himself along the girder and dropped onto a lower crossbeam outside their path.
The barrier expired. The debris resumed its fall and smashed through the position he had just abandoned. The mandatory fifteen-second cooldown began. Infinity was unavailable.
Across the pit, Hisoka landed heavily on a narrow ledge. He tumbled once, his broken ribs grinding together, his burned flank smouldering. He breathed out a long, shuddering hiss, smearing a layer of Bungee Gum directly over the charred flesh on his ribs to compress the wound.
His smile was gone, replaced by a cold, sharp focus. He had waited for this exact window.
"That technique again..." Hisoka rasped.
With a flick of his left wrist, Hisoka initiated his prepared sling.
Dozens of playing cards scattered across the arena snapped into motion. Hisoka had attached hair-thin strands of Bungee Gum to thirty-two cards prior to the blast. As he contracted the web overhead, the cards descended on Yuzuki in a multi-directional pattern.
Eight cards were weighted with heavy aura, targeted directly at Yuzuki's blind spots. Twelve were light, trailing strands of Bungee Gum concealed with In to bind his limbs. Six were angled wide to trick his spatial perception, while six more were set on delayed rebound trajectories to snap back from behind.
Yuzuki's Six Eyes mapped the incoming vectors, but his physical frame could not match the visual data.
He couldn't run. Infinity was on cooldown.
He used his crude, short-range spatial skip.
Yuzuki targeted a coordinate just under six feet away. An iron crossbeam. He forced Blue to collapse the micro-distance, folding space beneath his feet.
He vanished and reappeared just under six feet away, dodging the first salvo. But without smooth acceleration, the violent displacement slammed his internal organs against his ribcage. His lower back muscles tore under the shift.
He skipped again. Two feet backward, avoiding three cards slicing through empty air.
A third skip, one metre to the right. The sudden correction tore through the muscles of his right hip, further destabilising his stance.
Most of the remaining cards tore through the coordinates he had just abandoned or buried themselves in the girders and broken slabs around him. Several Gum-bearing cards crossed behind him, tightening the space through which he could still move.
Each crude displacement caused another burst of neurological static. Static flared behind his blindfold, and blood began to trickle from his right nostril.
He dodged six close cards. With one last shift of Ryu, he knocked two cards aside using his blood-soaked right forearm.
He couldn't dodge them all.
A card on a delayed return trajectory snapped back from his blind spot. Yuzuki sensed the displacement a fraction of a second too late; his torn quadriceps locked, freezing his footwork.
THWACK.
The returning card struck his upper back just below the left shoulder blade. It slipped between two ribs and buried itself into his chest. The Bungee Gum tether peeled free as Hisoka released it, leaving the card lodged in place.
The edge punctured his left lung.
Yuzuki's body locked instantly. Air escaped his chest in a wet gasp, and blood rose into his mouth when he tried to breathe.
In the VIP spectator box, Bisky shot to her feet, knocking her chair backwards.
"Enough," Bisky snapped. "His lung is punctured."
She moved for the door.
"Wait," Netero said.
Bisky turned on him.
"He's still conscious," Netero continued. "If that changes, I will stop it."
Bisky halted, forcing herself to look back down at the pit.
On the exposed girder, Yuzuki didn't scream. He became utterly quiet.
The chaotic noise of his pain and the roaring crowd receded into background hum. His breathing shifted. Shallow, rhythmic gasps through his nose, avoiding full chest expansion to protect the damaged tissue.
Concentrating a thin brace of aura around the embedded card and the punctured tissue, he slowed the air leak and bleeding without healing either wound.
It was a crude, temporary patch. Each breath remained incomplete, but the improvised seal bought him a little time. Borrowed breath.
He raised his head. Through the blindfold, the Six Eyes mapped Hisoka's position.
Hisoka stood on a central girder twenty feet away, his chest heaving, his left hand clamped over his scorched flank. His dislocated right arm hung loose, held by the pink lines binding it to his ribs. But his smile was slowly returning. A dark twitch at the corner of his lips.
Yuzuki raised his right hand again.
Crimson aura began to gather once more at his fingertips. The air grew heavy with spatial tension.
Hisoka's posture tightened as he prepared to leap.
Across the arena, directly behind Hisoka, sat the lower spectator tiers. Evacuation had begun, but thousands of spectators still crowded the stands directly in his line of fire.
If Yuzuki discharged another Red from this angle, the repulsive wave would strike Hisoka and carry its destructive force straight into the populated seating blocks behind him.
Yuzuki's finger trembled.
The Six Eyes calculated the trajectory, the angle, and the collateral destruction.
Yuzuki lowered his hand. The crimson aura faded. He chose not to fire.
Hisoka locked eyes with Yuzuki. He saw the subtle shift in Yuzuki's wrist, the deliberate suppression of the technique, and the look toward the stands behind him.
Hisoka's smile widened into a manic grin.
"You checked the crowd..." Hisoka whispered.
During the brief moment Yuzuki had raised his hand, droplets of blood sprayed from his mouth had drifted through the air.
Hisoka flicked his left index finger. Three microscopic strands caught separate droplets of blood and snapped them against different blood-stiffened folds of Yuzuki's torn shirt. Gum, blood, and fabric adhered together firmly.
Hisoka gathered the three strands in his left hand and drew the distributed anchors taut.
One second remained before Infinity returned.
"Got you," Hisoka whispered.
---
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