The ceiling of Intensive Recovery Ward 4 was painted a sterile, glare-reducing beige, but the white emergency lights kept flickering against the glass of the observation window.
Yuzuki lay flat on his back, his torso encased in a high-tension orthopaedic brace extending from his lower sternum to his pelvic crest. A thick plastic tube snaked into his left intercostal space, draining fluid into a canister that hummed with rhythmic suction. His left lung had been surgically repaired, but the tissue remained fragile, reacting to every shallow draw of oxygen with a sharp pinch. Both forearms were bound tight in pressure dressings over thick layers of anti-inflammatory gel; the internal tearing caused by the recoil of Purple had left his aura pathways feeling like raw, charred wires.
Beside the bed, Bisky sat on a metal stool, cross-legged, methodically peeling an apple with a pocket knife. Her usual twin-tailed ribbons were lopsided, her dress stained with concrete dust around the hem, but her hands were steady.
"They brought the transfer papers," she said, not looking up as the knife pared away a continuous spiral of red skin. "The full championship purse. Tens of billions of Jenny, transferred to a protected account under medical hold."
Yuzuki didn't move his head. His usual blindfold was absent, replaced by a simple dark silk cloth tied loosely over his eyes to keep the hospital lights from aggravating his neurological fatigue.
"And the crown?" his voice was a dry rasp.
"A sapphire-set piece sitting in a rosewood box in the anteroom," Bisky replied, slicing a neat wedge of apple. "The Arena Committee wanted to hold the formal presentation in the central plaza with three brass bands. I told them that if they tried to put you on a stage, I would put their president in the next hospital bed."
Yuzuki's lips twitched in a faint attempt at a smile, but the movement pulled on the deep stitches along his flank, forcing a muted wince.
"Thank you, Bisky," he murmured.
"The press unit is crowding the hallway," she grunted, setting the knife down. "They want quotes, Yuzuki. They want to know how it feels to stand at the peak of the fighting world."
"I can't stand," Yuzuki said quietly.
"Precisely. Which is why I'm allowing the Arena President, two attendants, and one camera operator inside for three minutes."
The door opened with a soft hiss of pneumatic seals. Wing stepped into the room, his white shirt untucked, his hair dishevelled. Behind him came Shizuku, moving silently in her dark turtleneck, her hands tucked into her pockets. She carried a small, sealed plastic bag containing Yuzuki's original, blood-soaked blindfold, which she placed on the bedside table near his pillow.
"Kastro has left the building," Wing said, stopping at the foot of the bed. "He watched the final medical report from the third-floor lounge, collected his belongings, and took private transport out of the city. It gave him no closure. He left looking emptier than when he arrived."
Yuzuki stared up into the dark cloth over his eyes. In the quiet of his mind, behind the painkillers and the pressure of the thoracic brace, he searched for the sense of resolution he had assumed would follow the final blow. He had avenged the broken fighters and the silent corpses left in Hisoka's wake. Yet there was no sudden lightness, no grand internal shift.
'Revenge didn't fill the void,' he thought, his jaw setting tightly.
During the fraction of a second when his aura pathways had inverted under the threat of immediate death. When that strange, fleeting warmth had surged through his core he had felt his body begin to knit itself back together. But he hadn't understood the pattern. He couldn't grasp the thread. When Purple formed, the raw, destructive output had devoured that delicate restorative current completely, tearing through his muscle fibres and leaving his body broken. He remembered the sensation, but he had no deliberate control over it.
The Arena President, a balding man wearing a tailored tuxedo, stepped into the room accompanied by a camera operator and two attendants carrying an open rosewood box.
One attendant placed the rosewood box on the bedside table and turned the open crown towards the camera.
"By authority of Heavens Arena," the President said, "I formally present Kagetsu Yuzuki with the Olympia crown and recognise him as the youngest Battle Olympia Champion in recorded history." He held a microphone near the bed. "Do you have a statement for the millions watching across the globe?"
Yuzuki's head remained still on the pillow.
"I survived because Bisky, Wing, Shizuku, and Kastro got me here," Yuzuki said between shallow breaths. "Chrollo forced me to think beyond winning. Hisoka forced me to choose between him and everyone still inside the arena."
Bisky immediately stepped between the camera and the bed. "That's three minutes. Out."
The delegation backed out of the room, closing the heavy door. Yuzuki reached down with a trembling right hand, his bruised fingers brushing the velvet lining of the crown box on the bedside table before closing his eyes.
Elsewhere, in a restricted cleanup bay adjoining the ruined 251st-floor arena, three men dressed in grey coveralls moved among debris awaiting evidence classification.
The lead worker stopped beside a pile of pulverised concrete, scanning until his eyes caught a dark stain across a jagged fragment of rebar. He pulled a vacuum-sealed glass vial from his sleeve, scraped the dried blood and a tiny flake of high-density fabric into the container, and passed it to a companion carrying a lead-lined thermal case.
Ten minutes later, the case was delivered to an idling sedan in a nondescript loading dock. The rear window rolled down two inches, revealing Morena Prudo.
"The material was exposed to heat, dust, and mixed blood," the worker reported. "It may retain traces of the aura, but it is not clean enough for a reliable genetic profile."
Morena rested her fingers on the case.
"Then it is a lead, not proof," she said smoothly. "The Prince receives the anomaly report. The biological sample stays with me until I know whether it is worth protecting."
The sedan pulled quietly into gear and merged into the evening traffic.
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