After Brand Break connected and sent her staggering, a cornered Yachiho immediately activated her Peach Fruit Blessing, «Golden Hour», winding time back five seconds to the moment before the match whistle had even blown.
In an instant, they were back at the starting positions. But something was different. Himari, standing across from her sister, noticed the sharp change in Yachiho's physical state.
Her breathing was ragged, and beads of sweat had already begun to form at her temples, as though she had just finished a grueling marathon rather than a fight that had barely started.
For Himari, that was all the confirmation she needed. Yachiho already looked exhausted before a single exchange had happened between them. That could only mean one thing: her sister had just reversed time.
Kyouka and Tenka, watching from the sideline, had reached the same conclusion. The dramatic drop in Yachiho's stamina was a clear indicator that «Golden Hour» had been used.
But unlike the three of them, who could only infer this from the physical symptoms, Naoki was the sole person who had retained a complete, uninterrupted memory of everything that had occurred before time was reset.
It was likely because «Golden Hour» also resided within his own «Pandemonium» that his consciousness stayed synchronized even as time rewound five seconds. He stood without moving, watching Yachiho with an expression that gave nothing away.
(Yachiho's ability is genuinely at a broken level, but the problem is that her Time Manipulation is purely utilitarian.)
(She has no direct attack method integrated with time itself. That's why she has to depend on that modified pistol of hers. And the trouble with that is it only works against low-level Shuuki or ordinary people. Against a skilled fighter with superhuman reflexes, that gun is completely useless.)
His thoughts then shifted to his own private experimentation.
(I've been trying to develop my own «Golden Hour» into something capable of delivering a time-based attack, something that could destroy a target from within the temporal dimension. But so far the results have been nothing. Not a single meaningful breakthrough. Compared to Spatial Manipulation, which comes far more naturally in a fight, Time Manipulation is many times harder to train and even harder to weaponize.)
Naoki narrowed his eyes, standing with his arms folded at the edge of the arena, watching with genuine curiosity. He wanted to confirm one thing for himself: whether his existence as an anomaly in Unit Six would trigger a butterfly effect capable of shifting fate's course, or whether Yachiho's defeat was already a plot thread too firmly fixed to be changed.
◆━⊰✿✧✿⊱━◆
In the center of the arena, Yachiho tracked her sister's movements with careful eyes. The moment to strike back had arrived.
With a quick motion, she reached into her uniform pocket and drew out her modified pistol.
On the other side, without Yachiho noticing, Himari had already pulled the control chain taut, sending a surge of energy into Yuuki's legs. His muscles swelled with the force of explosive power being loaded into them.
Yachiho bent her arm at a perfect ninety-degree angle, taking aim. In her mind, jumping skyward was a foolish move because there was no way to dodge in midair. Her plan was clean: freeze time at the precise moment they were up in the air and riddle them with bullets from point-blank range.
"Now!"
*WHOOSH!*
Himari's shout was the signal. Yuuki rocketed skyward like a guided missile, then came screaming back down at a velocity far beyond what Yachiho had anticipated, straight toward her.
*BAM!*
In that critical instant, Yuuki executed Marking again, driving the blow directly into her. The force of the impact was devastating. Yachiho was hurled hard into the ground. Her eyes rolled back for a moment, and the pistol flew from her hand, ringing as it clattered across the arena floor.
Himari kept her guard up. She knew that inside Ginna's arena, the healing properties in place meant Yachiho's injuries wouldn't be fatal. Sure enough, she watched her sister's body begin to stir despite the punishment it had just received.
With blood still seeping from the corner of her mouth and a thin, vicious smile cutting across her face, Yachiho repositioned her arm in her familiar gesture.
"«Golden Hour»!"
The world blinked. Time rewound five seconds, pulling both Himari and Yuuki back to the moment they had still been airborne before the strike landed.
Yachiho acknowledged inwardly that she had underestimated them. She hadn't anticipated that the slave could use air pressure to launch himself in a manner that defied normal expectations. But the failure of that previous timeline had given her something more useful, a refined plan. This time she simply needed to activate her Blessing to freeze time completely the instant Yuuki was directly in front of her.
The moment came. Yachiho raised her arm to the perfect ninety-degree angle. With a single motion, she activated «Golden Hour».
*SHIII!*
The world around her immediately inverted into negative color, silent and utterly still. In this dimension, Yachiho was the sole authority. She lifted the pistol with a satisfied smile, ready to pour bullets into her opponents at close range.
But that smile faded as she looked toward where Himari and Yuuki should have been. There was no one in front of her.
"They were just here!"
"Did they vanish? How is that possible?!"
Yachiho spun left, then right. They could not simply cease to exist within her time domain. And just as she wheeled around to check behind her, she finally found them.
They were airborne, a considerable distance away from her, hovering at height but with a wide gap between them and where she stood.
It turned out that Yuuki had used the explosive force in his legs to vault upward at tremendous speed, carrying both of them well outside the reach of her previous domain just before Yachiho managed to activate «Golden Hour».
The worst part was that they were beyond the effective range of her weapon. Even if Yachiho sprinted toward them with everything she had, she wouldn't close that distance before the five-second window expired.
The enemy's strategy had shifted without warning, and her time trap had been rendered completely useless.
5... 4... 3... 2...
The five seconds elapsed.
The world returned to its natural color. Time resumed its normal flow, and Yachiho was left having to overhaul a strategy that had just fallen apart.
"..."
Across the arena, Himari looked at her sister, who was now breathing hard and moving toward them.
Watching the pallor beginning to creep into Yachiho's face, Himari knew her reading of the situation had been correct. Her sister was approaching the edge of her stamina.
(She must have burned «Golden Hour» again for nothing.)
Everything was proceeding according to the plan she had carefully constructed. She had deliberately ordered Yuuki to leap high and clear of the pistol's range at exactly those critical moments, confident that Yachiho would never predict a defensive movement executed that quickly.
By doing this, they had successfully forced Yachiho to drain her energy through repeated uses of «Golden Hour», each one yielding nothing. They only needed to hold their position and apply a little more pressure until her defenses finally broke.
"Let's keep moving, same as planned!" Himari called out, issuing the next set of instructions.
"Yes!" Yuuki answered, the fire back in his voice.
Himari's expression was set with absolute determination. Victory was within her sight now, and she would give everything she had to make sure Unit Seven took this match.
*WHOOSH!*
The ground seemed to tremble as Himari and Yuuki began circling at high speed, weaving around Yachiho in a pattern that created flickering afterimages.
The sight clearly threw Yachiho off for a moment. Her eyes kept chasing their movement, but the speed was simply too great to track with any accuracy.
Yachiho continued to watch in silence as her sister and the slave enclosed her from all sides. The high-speed rotation had caught her off guard at first, but gradually the cold, familiar calm settled back over her face.
A contemptuous smile found its way to her lips. She knew perfectly well what Himari was trying to do. Her sister wanted to drain her stamina, to force her into burning «Golden Hour» over and over until exhaustion simply dropped her. She had seen this kind of outdated strategy before, and she now had something considerably more brutal prepared in response. She would make absolutely certain that Himari went home wearing the expression of humiliating defeat.
The time had come to show her real hand.
Yachiho raised both arms high above her head toward the sky.
"Witness the true capability of Unit Six's Vice-Captain!"
"..."
Himari narrowed her eyes, keeping her full attention on every movement her sister made. She expected Yachiho to activate «Golden Hour» again. She felt secure in her positioning, convinced that no amount of rushing could close the distance between them in only five seconds.
Even so, a faint unease had begun to curl in her chest. Something about Yachiho's bearing in this moment was different from before.
Yachiho began striking a series of unusual poses, and this time her body started to radiate a blinding golden light.
*SWING!*
"Prime Time!"
The world shifted again into inverted negative silence. Yachiho turned her gaze toward Himari and Yuuki, who were suspended several meters above the ground.
She broke into a full sprint toward them. It was true that under five seconds they would have been safely out of range. But the entire equation changed with ten.
Yachiho leveled her pistol, aimed with lethal precision, and pulled the trigger without mercy.
*BANG! BANG! BANG!*
Prime Time's weakness was the longer activation time it required, demanding a signature pose before it could be used. But Yachiho understood that when deployed at exactly the right moment, her opponent's evasive instincts would become the very trap that ended them.
Time resumed.
In an instant, a burst of bullets tore into Himari and Yuuki, the impact arriving as though conjured from empty air, with no warning whatsoever.
Both of them crashed hard to the ground. Without Ginna's Blessing preventing fatal injury, those shots would have been lethal. Even so, the pain tore through them with a ferocity that left no room for anything else.
It had all happened so fast that the other members of Unit Seven stared in silent disbelief. Tenka, who had already anticipated this development from her subordinate, allowed herself only the faintest trace of a smile.
Naoki, equally unsurprised given his own access to «Golden Hour», watched with the composure of someone who had simply been waiting for the inevitable.
"I present to you... my Prime Time!" Yachiho cried out with a laugh of pure triumph, walking elegantly toward where her opponents had fallen. "By striking my signature pose, I can double the length of my time manipulation to a full ten seconds!"
"I can't believe it..." Himari rasped, struggling to push herself up on what remained of her strength. "You had something like this hidden..."
"My power has grown in perfect step with my boundless genius!" Yachiho announced, lifting her chin with imperious pride. "Failing to account for the fact that I never stop growing is exactly what brought about your defeat today, Himari!"
◆━⊰✿✧✿⊱━◆
While the battle raged below, a portal opened at the peak of a high cliff far outside the field of vision of anyone in the Anti-Demon Corps. From within that dark passage, three figures emerged one by one, taking their places side by side as they looked down over the Exhibition with calm, observant eyes.
The first to step forward was a petite woman, standing roughly five feet tall. Her face was beautiful, her eyes a soft pink, and a traditional Japanese kimono draped her frame with a quality that was both elegant and unsettling. Her true, non-human nature became immediately apparent in her long purple hair, which was not made of ordinary strands at all, but of living serpentine heads that writhed and moved of their own accord.
The second figure was also female, but taller and considerably more powerfully built than the first. Her skin was deep, her ears pointed, and her long white hair fell freely behind her. Two short golden horns curved from her head. She wore what appeared to be gold armor, though it covered very little of her. The same material wrapped her arms and legs, and great wings lay folded against her back.
The third figure stood tallest of the three, a humanoid being who, unlike the others, had facial features that resembled a Shuuki more than any human. A strange gold metal mask obscured its face entirely, and the garments it wore bore the unmistakable look of traditional Japanese battle armor.
All three watched the arena below with distinctly different expressions of interest.
"Heh. Things are getting more entertaining down there." The serpent-haired woman remarked, a thin smile on her lips as she watched Yachiho celebrating her advantage over Himari. "For now, we only observe from here."
She paused, her eyes moving with a reptilian patience across the full scope of the arena, as though she were quietly tallying the strength of everyone below.
"Our number of enemies may well be growing." Her tone light, as though the scale of opposition was a matter of no particular concern. "The more that come, the better it will be for us."
"This time, I'll be the one to handle them! That man in particular!" the muscular figure called out in a deep, weighty voice, one fist beginning to glow with building energy, eyes fixed sharply on Naoki. "He is the one truly unique man in this world! I want to test his limits for myself! You had more than enough fun with Unit Three yesterday."
Hearing her companion's eagerness, the exotic-skinned woman offered no verbal response. She simply remained still, watching the fighters below with a furrowed brow and an expression that was difficult to read.
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