Boom!
The water wrapping the entire hotel erupted with a thunderous roar, and a towering column of water blasted up into the sky.
At the same time, the water temperature below began rising rapidly.
But the heat spread didn't last long. It didn't boil the whole mass of water—then it stopped.
All of it was caused by the bomb dropped from that toy plane.
No flames—only the instantaneous shock of the explosion and a radiating burst of extreme heat.
Up on the 18th floor, Chrollo sensed trouble the instant the flood appeared.
But it was already too late to control Super Fortress and stop the bomb drop. In the moment of crisis, all he could do was grab Kortopi by the window and shout for Pakunoda to retreat, sprinting backward.
Water surged in through the shattered window—but that wasn't even the worst part.
Chrollo understood best what those bombs could do.
Even if he closed Bandit's Secret right now, he still wouldn't be able to stop the blast.
Because the bombs Super Fortress dropped would explode the instant they were struck by the floodwater.
So Chrollo gave Kortopi only one command:
"Cover it!"
At the same time, Chrollo flipped to a new page in his book.
Kortopi's left hand touched a wall, his right hand copied it—walls sprang up behind the retreating trio, repeatedly blocking the flooding water.
More walls appeared like stacked building blocks, forming a crude enclosure around them.
But a barrier built from walls like this had countless gaps, and water still tried to pour in through every seam.
Only then did Chrollo finally release Kortopi, and his aura shot toward the cracks.
Once it left his body, his aura's nature shifted, becoming sticky web-like strands.
This was the Nen ability he had stolen earlier—from a Shadow Beast called Spider.
The webbing sealed the gaps, stopping the floodwater from pouring in.
At that moment, Pakunoda—who hadn't been able to contribute much—crouched and touched the remaining water on the floor.
"Warm!" Her face changed. Now she understood what Chrollo had been guarding against.
Outside the hotel, the sky-high water pillar began to fall back down.
And the water below, now unbound, started to surge outward fast.
Like a water balloon punctured open—once released, the water carried everything that had been enclosed inside it and slammed it outward.
Ronin, however, was wrapped in a shark-shaped layer of water, riding the current at high speed.
Water Style: Water Shark Bullet Jutsu.
Kisame's signature technique: form a shark-shaped water bullet from chakra, wrap it around yourself, and move rapidly through water—able even to briefly "glide" through air.
Amaterasu and Susanoo were both chakra hogs. More importantly, using them consumed Ronin's ocular power.
His eyes were still in Mangekyō form.
Ocular power would recover slowly, but Ronin had no intention of continuing to use Amaterasu in his right eye.
Using it repeatedly could damage his right eye—
and overuse could even make him go blind.
So everything matched the Naruto Mangekyō drawbacks.
The question was: if damage occurred, would continued fusion of Scarlet Eyes fix it?
If fusion could repair it, then once he accumulated enough Scarlet Eyes, perhaps he truly could awaken the Eternal Mangekyō.
If fusion couldn't repair the damage, then the Eternal Mangekyō would become a new problem.
Either way, by the manga's logic, the Eternal Mangekyō required fusing compatible eyes from one's own clan—siblings being the most compatible.
And in the manga, once you failed, it seemed you didn't get a second chance.
But Ronin was different.
He could keep fusing. Out of the remaining two dozen-plus pairs, Ronin believed he would eventually find a compatible set.
He even had a more extreme thought:
If none were compatible… then he would create compatible eyes himself.
Inside the Water Shark Bullet wasn't only Ronin—
it also held Kurapika's "corpse."
But the weight of that corpse felt wrong.
As that thought formed, Ronin felt the "corpse" in his hands pushing outward, trying to slip free of the flow.
A layer of aura appeared on the "body," and as the aura spread, the "corpse" rapidly shrank.
Ronin's heart jolted. His aura snapped into Ken.
Had someone tampered with Kurapika's body?
The moment that thought appeared, Ronin realized his hands were empty—yet something had appeared inside the water bubble.
It was a small, exquisitely crafted figurine—
a perfect replica of the "dead Kurapika" that had been lying under the sheet in front of the hotel.
Ronin froze.
Then relief and anger surged up together.
That "Kurapika's death" was probably nothing but a performance.
A performance staged for him.
Ronin remembered what he'd told Kurapika: his eyes seemed stuck at a bottleneck. Fusing clan eyes alone might not be enough—he needed intense emotional upheaval.
He'd explained it partly to justify why his eyes had changed from Scarlet Eyes to Sharingan in the first place.
Emotion.
Violent emotional swings were the key to transformation.
To Ronin, that wasn't a secret too dangerous to share. He even thought telling Kurapika might help Kurapika strategize.
He just hadn't expected Kurapika to act so decisively.
And then Ronin remembered Kurapika's question last night:
"If you relive that day, could you break through your bottleneck?"
So Kurapika had been planning from the moment he learned.
Ronin hadn't known the answer then.
Now he did.
The key wasn't reliving the massacre day—
it was believing Kurapika had died. That was the one thing Ronin couldn't accept.
And that was exactly what forced his eyes to evolve from three-tomoe Sharingan into Mangekyō.
After three months together, Ronin had truly come to treat Kurapika as family in this world.
That bastard…
Whoosh!
Ronin shot out of the water and landed on a nearby street that hadn't yet been flooded.
The Water Shark Bullet burst apart. He gripped the little figurine tightly.
He glanced once toward the hotel, then cast Shadow Clone. The clone sprinted toward Neon's location.
Ronin himself turned his gaze to a Phantom Troupe member being swept toward him by the water surge—
Isri.
But before Ronin could act, a figure jumped down from the top of a nearby building.
It was Silva.