*GONG!!*
The air in front of Kira's face exploded.
To the crowd, it was the charge of an enraged bull — but for Kira, reality suddenly shattered into frames. His perception, sharpened by a week in tomb-like silence, broke free of its leash. He saw *everything*: the capillaries bursting in Halden's eyes, the knuckles of the incoming fist bleaching white as it locked onto its target.
Move! the command echoed in his mind, but it went unheard.
The trajectory was clear to him an eternity before the iron force arrived. He had seen that swing a hundred times in the alleyways, running from the guards.
Dodge left. Step back. Come on, Kira, see it coming! You've outrun the guards before — why won't your legs listen?!
The connection between brain and muscle had been severed by exhaustion. Kira watched his own death approaching, locked inside his skull like a cage.
He tried to wrench sideways — his body only lurched clumsily.
Halden's right fist connected with Kira's jaw.
*CRACK!!*
The sound wasn't like a punch. It was the dry snap of wood breaking. Kira flew through the air, flipped, and slammed into the arena floor.
*SLAM!*
**"HE'S DEAD!"** someone roared from the front row.
**"I TOLD YOU HE'S MADE OF SOAP!"**
**"HALDEN, YOU HIT LIKE A DRUNK OLD WOMAN!"** came the shout from the upper tiers.
Halden didn't even bother to check his work. He lazily dropped his hands and spat, gazing down at the motionless body with weary disappointment. He was already turning toward the Master's balcony, fist raised in a victory salute.
The referee stepped closer, eyeing the boy in the sand with barely concealed disgust.
**"ONE!"**
Kira tried to breathe. His chest was hollow. His mouth filled instantly with hot copper. White noise shrieked through his ears, drowning out the ecstatic screaming of the stands.
...I'm... still alive?
He wanted only one thing: to pull the blanket of darkness over himself, away from this insane light and noise. To pass out — because every impulse toward life answered back with a fresh burst of agony.
Please... make it stop. Let it end. I can't anymore...
**"TWO! THREE!"**
Kira's left arm was pinned beneath his torso. When he tried to move it —
*SCHLICK.*
Something wet and wrong shifted in his elbow. The joint simply popped free of its socket.
And then, into the chaos of pain, one word drilled itself in.
"Zero" it echoed through his mind with a strange resonance. Familiar. And at the same time, humiliating.
It was a protocol. One that didn't care at all about his desire to die.
**"FOUR!"**
The command didn't come from his brain. It came from his bones.
His right-hand fingers sank into the wood as if pulled by an unseen force.
*THUD.*
Kira felt like he was watching his own body being tortured.
It no longer belonged to him every movement sent a wave of nausea through his gut.
What the, what IS this?! STOP!
He tried to release his grip, to simply fall, but his right-hand fingers had sunk into the wood so deeply that his nails began peeling away from the skin.
*RIIIP—*
Then something shifted in his shoulder. A sharp, dry
*CRACK.*
Kira didn't understand at first that it was his own shoulder — that his body had forcibly rotated it into place.
He couldn't scream. His throat was packed with salt foam. But white light detonated behind his eyes for one blinding instant. The pain was a flash that burned away whatever vision he had left.
Confusion blazed brighter than the pain itself. He felt his tricep pulling taut to the absolute limit, forcing his broken body upward. His muscles should have given out. His nerves should have burned through. But his right arm worked with terrifying precision.
He was being *torn* out of the sand. His left arm — dislocated, dead — swung uselessly like a rag, grazing the boards. But the right side drove forward with frightening force.
**"FIVE!"**
The stands began to go quiet. Silence crept across the arena like fog.
His body rose in lurching increments. Kira felt the knee of his left leg — bearing the full weight — begin to shake. Tendons pulled taut until they sang. He waited for them to snap. Waited to collapse back into the merciful dust.
**"SIX..."** — the referee's voice cut off.
Instead, a cramp tore through his thigh. It locked the muscle, turning his leg into immovable steel. This wasn't recovery. This was *exploitation.*
Kira felt like a front-row spectator at the torture of his own body.
His body no longer belonged to him. Every centimeter of the climb answered back with a nauseating spasm through his gut.
Halden felt the silence with his back. He turned slowly — and his triumphant smirk slid off his face, leaving yellow teeth exposed in a grimace of pure disbelief.
"You... you immortal, you little rat?" he snarled, and for the first time, a thread of uncertainty cut through his voice.
The arena one second ago drowning in ecstatic screaming suddenly choked on its own cry.
The silence lasted a heartbeat.
Then the stands detonated into chaos. It was the collective hysteria of hundreds of people whose logic had just been crushed underfoot.
**"WHAT THE HELL"**
**"WHY ARE YOU GETTING UP?!"** the bookkeeper on the balcony shrieked, knuckles white on the railing.
**"STAY DOWN, YOU PIECE OF FILTH! JUST DIE ALREADY! YOU'RE RUINING ALL MY BETS!"**
The referee stood frozen, hand still raised, eyes wide:
"You... can you actually stand?"
Kira wanted to collapse. Wanted his knee to finally buckle. Wanted this torture to end.
Halden didn't wait. His ease evaporated, replaced by a leaden, absolute focus. He understood now — this wasn't meat in front of him. This was a broken
mechanism that, for some reason, refused to stay broken.
The giant closed the distance in one massive lunge.
*BOOM.*