Inside the narrowing pocket of spatial division, the world was completely silent.
Four seconds remained on Infinity.
Above Yuzuki, thousands of tons of concrete and structural steel groaned against the boundary of subdividing space, coming to a near-halt inches from his head. The compressed air inside the dying arena tasted of iron, concrete dust, and ozone.
Yuzuki's body was breaking down. The thinnest secondary lattice of aura held the lodged playing card in his left chest, but every shallow breath spilled warm blood into his chest cavity. His torn right hip and shredded lower back screamed with every micro-adjustment of his frame, while his arms. Numb, bruised, and bleeding internally from Red's violent recoil trembled violently in front of his chest.
Three seconds.
To survive the implosion, he had to erase the central convergence point of Hisoka's elastic trap. But Purple was not a tool for duels. It fused Blue's convergence and Red's divergence into a destructive imaginary mass that erased matter and aura along a calculated corridor.
If he miscalculated the vector by a fraction of a millimetre, the corridor of erasure would slice through the collapsing roof, pass through the back wall of the 251st floor, and plough straight into the lower spectator tiers, disintegrating hundreds of evacuating civilians.
Two seconds.
Yuzuki forced his damaged aura pathways to ignite. His hands, hovering inches apart, began to channel the opposing forces.
A strange warmth spread from Yuzuki's core. Under the pressure of approaching death, two opposed aura flows folded through one another and inverted. The result was a thin restorative current. A sort of positive aura unlike anything he had consciously produced before.
The leak in his left lung eased. Torn fibres in his lower back began tightening, and several smaller internal bleeds started to close.
Yuzuki's eyes widened beneath the blindfold.
'My body is healing—'
Then Blue and Red collided.
The formation of Purple consumed the restorative current and tore fresh damage through the tissue it had only begun to repair. The healing did not reverse; it was overwhelmed. By the time the violet mass stabilised, Yuzuki had gained no lasting recovery. Every remaining reserve had been committed to Purple and the final second of Infinity. \
One second.
In front of him, Hisoka watched the air between Yuzuki's palms distort into a terrifying shade of deep, void-like violet.
The magician's single open eye widened, bloodshot and brilliant. He didn't flinch. He didn't raise a block. Recognising the absolute nature of the technique, Hisoka contracted one final strand behind him and launched himself directly towards the forming violet mass, leaning into the falling debris with a wide, bloody smile stretching across his broken face. He was ecstatic. Yuzuki had abandoned nonlethal options; the boy had finally chosen absolute, violent destruction.
"Yes..." Hisoka rasped, a wet breath tearing from his throat. "Show me—"
"Purple."
Matter and aura vanished wherever its calculated corridor advanced.
BZZZZT—
There was no sound of an explosion, no thunderous shockwave. There was only a terrifying, hollow hum that vibrated through the marrow of everyone still inside the tower.
The imaginary mass surged forward along Yuzuki's calculated line. It erased a corridor through the nearest slabs and passed directly through the central knot where Hisoka's major Bungee Gum lines converged. Aura and anchor points vanished together.
The remaining web lost its coordinated inward pull. Slabs that had been converging on Yuzuki sheared past one another and crashed into the central void and surrounding ruins instead.
And then the corridor reached Hisoka.
The violet light passed cleanly through the magician's chest. It did not blow him backward, nor did it detonate. It simply erased a precise cylinder of tissue and aura pathways across his thoracic cavity.
Hisoka's heart vanished. Portions of both lungs and the surrounding aura pathways disappeared with it.
Yet, Yuzuki's precision had held. The corridor spared his head, throat, upper great vessels, major limbs, and most of the surrounding torso. The pre-threaded Bungee Gum inside the surviving chest tissue remained intact. The corridor snapped out of existence fifty feet past the outer edge of the ring, dissipating harmlessly into the open sky far above the city.
Hisoka's forward momentum carried his dead weight several more feet before he struck the stone and slid to a stop beside Yuzuki.
Yuzuki fell to his knees as Infinity collapsed. The recoil of releasing Purple through damaged channels tore muscle fibres and aura pathways throughout both forearms and shoulders, overwhelming the tissue the restorative current had only begun to repair. His vision swam with pitch-black spots as his temporary lung brace flickered and died, causing him to cough up a thick splatter of scarlet onto the cracked stone.
Hisoka lay flat on his back, his right eye staring blankly up at the open sky through the ruined ceiling. Respiration ceased instantly. The pulse in his carotid artery stopped dead. His body went limp, entering the profound silence of clinical death.
Yuzuki dragged himself forward an inch on his hands and knees, staring at the motionless frame two feet away. He had not held back to spare the man; he had calculated the bare minimum required to save the crowd and survive the falling mountain. As far as Yuzuki was concerned, the monster was dead.
He couldn't hold his frame up any longer. Yuzuki's vision cut to black, and he collapsed sideways onto the concrete.
Silence lay over the 251st floor.
The dust began to settle. The remaining structural debris hung suspended only by broken rebar and tangled wires. The roaring wind from the massive wall breach blew through the space, whipping through Hisoka's bloody hair and Yuzuki's ruined clothes.
In the upper spectator tiers, no one cheered.
The thousands of spectators who had spent the morning roaring for blood were frozen in terror. They had come to watch a martial arts spectacle, a high-stakes Grandmaster match between two eccentric prodigies. Instead, they had just witnessed an incomprehensible erasure of reality, and the instant, quiet execution of one of the Arena's most famous floor masters.
"Is... is it over?" a fan whispered three rows up, his voice trembling violently.
No one answered him.
A squad of eight Arena emergency medical technicians, clad in heavy protective vests and carrying trauma kits, sprinted into the ruined ring from the lower access tunnels. Behind them, four heavily armed security officers formed a defensive perimeter around the downed fighters.
Two medics pulled Yuzuki clear and began assessing his airway while the head medic dropped beside Hisoka.
The head medic checked Hisoka's carotid and femoral pulses while another cut away the remaining coat. There was no spontaneous breathing and no chest movement.
They attached a portable cardiac monitor. The display showed a flat line. A handheld ultrasound passed over the ruined chest and found no cardiac motion. Only the empty cavity where the heart had been.
"No pulse. No respiration. Asystole," the medic said. His voice tightened as he looked into the erased chest. " He's dead!" He turned to the main referee, who was standing frozen ten yards away. "Call it!"
The referee swallowed hard, raising a single, trembling hand into the air. His voice echoed through the PA system, hollow and distorted.
"Match... match over!" the referee stammered, his authority completely broken. "By reason of total combat incapacity... the winner, and new Battle Olympia Champion... is Yuzuki!"
The announcement hung in the air, greeted not by applause, but by a low, horrified murmur that rippled through the stands as spectators began frantically turning toward the exits.
In the VIP box, Bisky was through the door before the referee finished speaking, racing towards the nearest emergency stairwell.
Netero stood slowly, his hands tucked behind his back. The playful, bored glint in his eyes had completely vanished, replaced by an ancient, heavy seriousness.
"To narrow an erasure like that under the threat of death..." Netero murmured softly to the empty room. "What a terrifying child."
Three tiers down, amidst the fleeing crowd, Wing held a pale-faced Kastro by the shoulder. Kastro was staring at Hisoka's lifeless body, his jaw clenched so tightly that his teeth ground together. To see Hisoka erased so completely by the final technique filled him with a bitter, hollow coldness.
"If he hadn't used that, neither fighter nor anyone in the front rows would have survived," Wing said quietly, his own hands shaking as he adjusted his glasses.
Shizuku said nothing. She watched the medics lift Yuzuki, one hand closed around the spare blindfold she had promised to take back. The moment they entered the medical corridor, she followed.
Further up in the dark shadows of the upper exits, Chrollo Lucilfer stood motionless, his dark coat draped over his shoulders.
'Hisoka knew the risk of facing that spatial technique,' Chrollo thought, his eyes narrowing slightly behind his fallen bangs. 'He lunged into it. A man like Hisoka does not seek suicide without a grander punchline...'
Without a word, Chrollo turned his back on the arena and vanished into the panicking crowd.
On the arena floor, the medical team worked with frantic, practised efficiency.
Two medics stabilised Yuzuki's neck, carefully sliding a spinal board beneath his limp form. Blood was still trickling slowly from his nose, but his heart was beating. Faintly and irregularly, but it was still beating.
"We have a pulse on the boy! Get him to the intensive recovery unit immediately! Notify the Association trauma team and prepare for emergency chest surgery!" the lead doctor barked.
They lifted Yuzuki's stretcher, rushing him down the northern medical corridor under heavy guard.
Meanwhile, four secondary attendants unrolled a heavy, black insulated body bag beside Hisoka. They carefully lifted the limp, pale corpse of the magician, sliding him into the heavy vinyl casing.
Zzzzzt.
The heavy zipper closed over Hisoka's broken, painted face. They hoisted the body bag onto a transport gurney, securing the restraint straps across his chest and legs before wheeling him toward the high-security basement morgue designated for deceased Floor Masters.
The heavy steel doors of the morgue corridor swung shut with a deep, echoing CLANG, sealing out the distant noise of the panicking tower.
Inside the quiet, cold darkness of the sealed hallway, the gurney rolled smoothly along the concrete floor.
Beneath the thick black vinyl, deep inside the hollowed space of Hisoka's chest, a microscopic loop of translucent pink gum. Threaded hours earlier through surviving pulmonary vessels and lung tissue bordering his heart pulled taut for the first time.
---
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