The stadium clock was a phantom entity, ticking away fifteen seconds of absolute vulnerability in a void of roaring noise.
Yuzuki did not move. His right arm hung at his side, a ruined canvas of split skin and pulsing crimson, but his bare blue eyes remained entirely wide, spinning with the hyper-velocity calculations of the Six Eyes.
Raizen Voss did not offer a pause. The veteran strategist closed the distance, his movements no longer resembling human acceleration. He didn't run; he simply existed in the next space.
Five Records were complete. Judgment State was active.
To the untrained eye of the spectators in the stands, it looked as though Raizen had suddenly unlocked an impossible, divine speed. But for the masters watching from the VIP boxes, the reality was far more terrifying.
Raizen's Specialist Hatsu, Final Verdict, had completely mapped the blueprint of Yuzuki's combat style. By gathering five distinct Records, capturing Yuzuki's aura flow, his fighting habits, his timing patterns, his emotional tendencies, and his precise Nen activation sequences. Raizen had essentially turned Yuzuki's own biology against him.
In Judgment State, Raizen didn't need to waste time perceiving an attack, processing it in his brain, and deciding on a countermeasure. The moment Yuzuki's muscles began to twitch, Raizen's automatic Nen script bypassed his conscious mind entirely. His reaction speed rose to a near-instantaneous level, moving his limbs to the perfect defensive or offensive coordinates before Yuzuki's own thoughts could even travel down his nervous system.
It was an untouchable, absolute state of pure combat efficiency.
Yuzuki launched a desperate, short-range wave of Blue to drag a massive slab of concrete upward from the ring, placing a solid stone barrier between himself and the advancing Master.
Raizen didn't even shift his gaze. Moving with a fluid, terrifying economy of motion that looked completely automatic, he stepped into the blind spot of the rising stone before it reached his chest. His reaction speed was near instantaneous, bypassing the obstacle before Yuzuki's mind could register the trajectory.
THUD!
A straight palm thrust caught Yuzuki in the solar plexus. The kinetic force bypassed his physical reinforcement entirely, striking with a calculated frequency that rattled his spine.
Yuzuki tumbled backward, but he snapped his left fingers mid-air. Blue detonated behind Raizen, a sudden localized gravity well designed to violently yank the old man backward and break his posture.
It was a flawless tactical trap, executed at a speed no normal hunter could perceive.
Yet Raizen's body twisted in mid-air before the vacuum force even fully materialized. His Nen had decoded the exact activation sequence of Yuzuki's spatial manipulation. His torso arched at an impossible angle, his boots catching the edge of a shattered stone tile, completely neutralizing the gravitational pull with microscopic adjustments to his aura distribution.
He looked like a ghost dancing through the rain, responding to the wind before the drops could even touch his skin.
"Your Blue is a masterful manipulation of space, Yuzuki," Raizen spoke, his voice echoing from right beside Yuzuki's ear. "But its activation rhythm has been logged."
CRACK!
A devastating knee strike caught Yuzuki in the chin, launching him completely out of the ring.
The two combatants smashed through the iron safety barriers, their momentum tearing into the concrete stairs of the lower spectator tier. Terrified fans screamed, scrambling over seats to escape the localized disaster zone as the fight spilled violently into the crowd.
Yuzuki used his left hand to grab a heavy steel support pillar, using Blue to magnetically accelerate his swing as he launched a sweeping kick toward Raizen's neck.
Raizen didn't block. He didn't need to. His head tilted backward by a fraction of an inch, the sole of Yuzuki's boot missing his skin by the width of a single hair. In the same microsecond, Raizen's right elbow drove downward, shattering Yuzuki's collarbone with a sickening crunch.
Yuzuki gasped, falling through three rows of plastic seating that exploded into shards of blue resin under the weight of his impact.
He was completely outmatched in physical exchange. Raizen was moving on pure, unadulterated instinct, his brain processing Yuzuki's muscle movements and weight shifts before Yuzuki's own nervous system could complete the transmission. It was an untouchable, absolute state of combat efficiency.
'He isn't thinking anymore,' Yuzuki realized, coughing up a dark spray of blood onto the concrete aisle as he forced himself to stand. 'His Nen is moving his muscles automatically based on the data he stole from me. Every basic attack I throw is just giving his body a command to dodge.'
Raizen descended through the shattered seats, his shredded white coat flowing like a shroud. "The dialogue is over, young man," he said, his golden eyes glowing with a terrifying, mechanical vacuum of focus. "Your movements have no more secrets to give."
Yuzuki wiped his mouth with his left sleeve, his bare blue eyes burning with a sudden, wild, and utterly chaotic light.
"Then let's try an illiterate conversation, old man," Yuzuki muttered, his teeth gritted in sheer defiance.
Yuzuki stepped forward, his left hand extending outward, fingers splaying wide. At the same time, he forced his ruined right arm to rise, his shattered fingers twisting into an identical, mirroring posture despite the absolute agony screaming through his nervous system.
The Six Eyes spun at their absolute maximum processing capacity. He wasn't just pulling aura; he was doing something fundamentally forbidden by the laws of Nen.
On his left hand, the space began to collapse into a deep, infinite blue of attraction.
On his right hand, the space began to expand into a violent, volatile red of repulsion.
The two opposing infinities existed simultaneously, separated only by the bridge of his own small torso. The air between his palms began to scream, a high-frequency frequency that shattered every glass window in the VIP booths above.
Up in the stands, Wing stood up so fast his chair flipped over. "What is he doing?! He's trying to manifest two contradictory Specialist outputs at the same coordinates!"
Bisky's jaw tightened, her eyes wide with uncharacteristic dread. "The boy is going to tear his own body apart! That balance is impossible!"
Chrollo Lucilfer leaned forward from his seat, his dark eyes widening in profound fascination as he watched the air around Yuzuki warp into a twisting, violet distortion. "No... he isn't balancing them. He is forcing them to collide."
Yuzuki roared, his voice cutting through the localized hurricane as he brought his hands together, forcing the blue and the red into a single, singular point of convergence.
"Hollow Technique..." Yuzuki hissed, his bare eyes turning almost entirely white from the sheer cognitive strain.
"Purple."
BOOM!
An imaginary mass exploded into existence.
It wasn't a blast of energy; it was a localized distortion of reality, a purple sphere that tore through the concrete stairs, the iron railings, and the atmosphere itself, leaving a perfectly smooth, circular trench in its wake.
Raizen's automatic reaction state spiked. His body attempted to pivot to the left, his instincts screaming at him to avoid the trajectory.
But there was no trajectory to read. The Purple didn't follow the laws of kinetic movement; it was a spatial anomaly that simply consumed everything in its path. Raizen's near-instantaneous reactions couldn't calculate a script that didn't exist in his database.
For the first time in the entire match, Raizen's gold eyes widened in genuine, absolute shock.
The purple sphere grazed him dead-on.
At the very last microsecond, Yuzuki snapped his eyes open and forcibly pulled back the effectiveness of the technique, intentionally skewing the mass calculations. He didn't want to kill the old man.
Even with the suppression, the impact was catastrophic.
The Purple clipped Raizen's left side, entirely erasing his defensive aura field and shattering his ribs, his shoulder, and his collarbone instantly. The sheer concussive backlash hurled his massive frame across the stadium, throwing him entirely out of the spectator tiers and back onto the central ring, where he crashed into the stone floor with a thunderous impact.
At the same instant, the backlash hit Yuzuki.
CRACK!
The sheer recoil of forcing the two infinities to collide tore through his upper body. The skin along both of his arms split completely open, blood spraying across the concrete as his capillaries burst from the absolute pressure. He fell to his knees, his muscles convulsing violently as a wave of white-hot agony washed over his brain.
His physical body was completely spent, his arms trembling and useless at his sides, blood dripping from his nose, his eyes, and his fingertips.
The entire stadium was frozen in a state of absolute, deafening silence.
Down in the center of the primary ring, the smoke slowly cleared.
Raizen Voss lay on his back, his breathing heavy and rattling. His left arm was completely broken, his chest was covered in deep, smoldering burns, and his entire shredded coat was soaked in blood. He tried to raise his head, but his muscles finally failed him, his active Nen shroud dissolving entirely into the air.
He was severely injured, his Judgment State completely broken by an attack that defied his calculus.
The referee dropped into the ring, checking Raizen's pulse before raising his hand high toward the spectator tier where Yuzuki knelt.
"Winner... YUZUKI!"
The eighty thousand spectators erupted into a wall of sound that shook the very foundations of Heaven's Arena.
Yuzuki sat amid the rubble of the crowd section, his chest heaving as he struggled to maintain consciousness. His bare blue eyes looked down at his bleeding, ruined hands, a faint, exhausted smirk touching his lips.
'I need a new shirt,' Yuzuki thought, his vision swimming slightly as the adrenaline began to fade. 'And a very long nap.'
---
Find early chapters on my patreon
[Patreon.com/tenten100?]