The heavy stone tiles of the arena floor groaned under the sudden, violent shift in the atmosphere.
Yuzuki stood amid the rising dust, his breathing shallow but deliberate. His signature dark sunglasses fell from his fingers, clattering against the shattered concrete before fracturing completely.
As his hands dropped, his bare eyes were revealed to the world for the very first time. They were a brilliant, ethereal, boundless blue, swirling with an infinite vortex of processing information. The raw, unadulterated power of the Six Eyes spilled outward, causing the air around his small frame to ripple with static electricity.
The eighty-thousand-seat stadium fell into an instantaneous, absolute hush.
Up in the highest tiers, a spectator blinked rapidly, leaning over the railing. "Are those... are those like the Kurta Clan eyes?"
"No," another veteran gambler whispered, his voice trembling as he gripped his betting ticket. "The Scarlet Eyes of the Kurta are a burning red born of fury. Those eyes... those look like you are staring directly into the sky and the ocean at the same time. It is terrifying."
Down near the fighter entry tunnels, Kastro stared with his mouth slightly agape. He spent days studying Yuzuki's combat patterns, yet he never realized the kid was concealing something so profoundly unnatural. "So that is the source of his sight," Kastro murmured, a cold sweat breaking out across his neck. "He wasn't just looking at me. He was reading my blueprint."
In the vip seating, Wing adjusted his glasses, his fingers locking onto the fabric of his trousers. His typical calm demeanor vanished entirely, replaced by pure academic shock. Zushi, who was standing right beside him, was practically shaking, his hands gripping the iron railing until his knuckles turned white.
"Master Wing," Zushi stammered, his eyes wide as he looked at the swirling blue irises down in the ring. "What kind of Ren is that? It feels like the air itself is being pulled into his face."
Wing didn't answer immediately. He swallowed hard, his mind racing through everything he knew about Nen anomalies. "It isn't just a high concentration of aura, Zushi. Those eyes are a physical manifestation of a Specialist condition. He is processing the entire stadium in real time."
Across the arena in the VIP boxes, Shalnark whistled sharply, leaning his back against the glass window while keeping his eyes locked onto the big projection screen. "Wow. So those are the eyes Chrollo was talking about. He told us the brat from Heaven's Arena had a gaze that could dissect a Hatsu just by looking at it, but seeing it in person is something else."
Pakunoda stood quietly beside him, her arms folded beneath her coat as her sharp gaze analyzed Yuzuki's posture. "Chrollo's intuition is never wrong," she said softly, her voice cool and analytical. "The boy isn't just talented. Those eyes possess a memory capacity that rivals my own psychometry. He isn't just watching Raizen. He is cataloging him."
Down on the floor, Raizen Voss did not join the crowd in their awe. He merely widened his stance, his pale gold eyes narrowing as his Specialist aura expanded into a hyper-dense, vibrating field.
Stage Two had fully matured. Raizen now possessed three complete Records on Yuzuki's physical baseline, his Systema pacing, and his defensive reflexes.
"An impressive display, young man," Raizen spoke, his deep baritone cutting through the residual static electricity in the air. "But a prettier gaze does not change the mechanics of your muscle contractions."
Raizen vanished.
The speed was fundamentally different from Stage One. He didn't explode forward with chaotic violence; he stepped exactly where Yuzuki was planning to transition.
Yuzuki's Six Eyes registered the movement a millisecond before it happened, but his body was already committed to a defensive pivot. Raizen's fist was already waiting at the exact coordinates of the exit angle.
THUD!
A heavy, reinforced punch slammed directly into Yuzuki's ribs. The sheer kinetic force traveled through his core, driving the wind completely from his lungs. Yuzuki coughed, his body lifting off the ground from the sheer leverage, but he forced his limbs to remain loose in a desperate attempt to disperse the impact via Systema.
Raizen did not give him the space to breathe.
A sweeping low kick cut through Yuzuki's footing before he could touch the ground. Yuzuki spun mid-air, attempting to launch a short-range palm strike to Raizen's temple, but Raizen simply tilted his head by three millimeters. The palm strike grazed his hair, completely missing its mark.
'He knows where my weight is going before my muscles even contract,' Yuzuki realized, his mind racing through hyper-speed calculations as a heavy elbow strike smashed into his shoulder, driving him hard into the concrete floor. 'This isn't just high-tier prediction. His Nen is treating my baseline actions like a script he already memorized.'
Yuzuki scrambled backward, his boots scraping against the ruined stone, but Raizen was relentless. The veteran strategist was now a fully active offensive monster. A brutal combination of straight jabs and devastating knee thrusts forced Yuzuki into a purely defensive cycle. Every block Yuzuki mounted was met with a counter-angle that bypassed his guard.
CRACK!
A heavy left hook caught Yuzuki across the cheek, sending a spray of blood into the air. He was heavily struggling, lagging behind the veteran's flawless pacing despite his ability to read the upcoming strikes. Because his Six Eyes kept his aura expenditure locked at almost zero percent waste, his reserves remained completely full, but his physical frame simply couldn't keep pace with a man who knew his script.
'If I keep trying to match his physical pacing, he will break my neck within the next two minutes,' Yuzuki thought, his bare blue eyes flashing with a dangerous, volatile light. 'I have to disrupt the data pool. I have to hit him with something his records cannot calculate.'
Yuzuki planted his back foot, ignoring the incoming straight punch from Raizen. He lowered his stance completely, his left arm extending forward while his right hand drew backward, his fingers curling into a precise, unnatural claw shape.
The aura around his fingertips didn't just condense; it compressed until the atmosphere warped violently, creating a high-pitched humming sound that made the veteran Nen users in the front rows stiffen in collective panic.
"Nen Technique Reversal," Yuzuki whispered, his bare eyes focusing entirely on Raizen's massive chest.
Raizen's analytical aura spiked, his instincts screaming at him to abort the advance, but his forward momentum was too great.
"Red."
BOOM!
The violent, repulsive force detonated point-blank between them. It wasn't a standard emission blast; it was a localized spatial rejection that tore the stone tiles from the earth and turned them into dust within a microsecond.
The sheer concussive shockwave hit Raizen dead-on, shattering his offensive momentum and launching his massive frame across the stadium floor like a cannonball. He crashed through the concrete boundary wall of the primary ring, tumbling heavily into the iron support beams of the lower spectator tier.
A massive cloud of gray dust and pulverized metal rose into the air, obscuring the view.
Yuzuki staggered backward, his right arm shaking violently. The skin along his forearm was split in multiple places, blood seeping through his torn sleeve as his muscles spasmed from the horrific strain. His aura pool hadn't dropped at all, but his current body simply could not handle the devastating recoil of Red, leaving his attacking arm completely mangled and throbbing with agony.
'The recoil is brutal,' Yuzuki calculated, his teeth gritted against the agonizing muscle strain. 'My body can barely hold together after one shot. But that should have broken his ribs. He shouldn't be able to stay upright after a direct hit from a spatial rejection.'
From within the settling dust of the broken tier, a heavy, deliberate step echoed across the concrete.
Raizen Voss walked out of the rubble. His white martial arts coat was completely shredded, stained with dark crimson blood that poured from a deep laceration across his chest and shoulder. His left arm hung slightly loose, and multiple bruises were already turning a deep purple across his torso.
Yet, his expression remained entirely placid. His pale gold eyes were completely steady, devoid of anger or panic.
"A remarkable technique," Raizen said, his voice slightly raspy but entirely controlled as he wiped a trace of blood from his chin. "A repulsive force generated by reversing the natural flow of your Specialist affinity. It carries an exceptional destructive output, young man. If my aura efficiency hadn't peaked during our exchange, that blow would have severed my torso entirely."
Yuzuki's pupils contracted slightly. 'He didn't just endure it. His aura efficiency rose to mitigate the damage. He is already adapting to the output of my Hatsu.'
Raizen closed the distance again. He didn't use an explosive sprint; he simply walked forward, but the psychological pressure radiating from his bleeding form was suffocating.
Yuzuki forced his trembling legs to move, launching a series of rapid, magnetically accelerated punches using Blue to pull himself toward Raizen's blind spots. But the tactic was losing its efficacy. Raizen parried the accelerated strikes with mechanical precision, his gloved hands clipping Yuzuki's wrists to divert the momentum.
Raizen drove a devastating, straight palm thrust aimed directly at Yuzuki's throat. It was a clean, decisive killing blow executed with maximum lethal intent.
With his physical guard completely broken and his reflexes lagging from the physical pain of his injured arm, Yuzuki had no choice.
Infinity.
The palm strike stopped.
Exactly three centimeters from Yuzuki's throat, Raizen's gloved hand came to an absolute, unnatural halt. The immense kinetic force of the thrust didn't dissipate; it ran directly into the invisible wall of aura calculations, generating a sharp, high-frequency hum that vibrated through the air between their faces.
Raizen didn't look surprised. He kept his palm pressed against the invisible boundary, his pale gold eyes staring directly into Yuzuki's boundless blue gaze from mere inches away.
"So this is the true nature of your defense," Raizen murmured calmly, his pulse remaining perfectly flat despite the spatial anomaly separating his flesh from Yuzuki's neck. "An infinite convergence of space governed by complex mathematical calculations. My hand is moving toward you, yet the distance between us is being divided infinitely faster than my velocity can cover."
Yuzuki didn't speak. Sweat poured down his face, his bare eyes straining under the immense cognitive load required to maintain the five-second activation window while his body screamed from the physical damage of the fight.
Raizen slowly withdrew his hand, stepping back by two paces as the five-second limit expired and Infinity went into its strict fifteen-second cooldown.
The veteran strategist looked down at his own hand, then back up at the bleeding, injured prodigy standing before him. A faint, knowing smile touched the edges of Raizen's mouth.
"You possess an extraordinary arsenal, Yuzuki," Raizen said, his voice carrying the chilling certainty of an executioner who just finished reading the final page of a book. "But you have made a fundamental miscalculation against a strategist. The more you show me without defeating me, the sooner I will know everything about you."
Raizen adjusted his stance, his aura stabilizing into a terrifyingly pristine, unyielding rhythm.
"I have witnessed your physical baseline, your spatial attraction, your spatial repulsion, and now the exact parameters of your absolute boundary," Raizen declared, his golden eyes flashing with absolute clarity. "My records are nearly complete. The next time you attempt to hide behind that wall, I will already be standing on the other side of it."
Yuzuki wiped the blood from his cheek, his bare blue eyes narrowing to sharp slits as he realized his fifteen-second vulnerability window was currently ticking down in absolute silence.
---
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