Chapter 166: Fighting in the Arena
An enemy completely invisible to Observation Haki — in six months of operating across multiple dimensions, Ryū had never encountered one. Not a flicker of presence, not a hint of intent. His sensing layer reached out and found nothing, like trying to hold a handful of air.
Couldn't see it either. And when it moved to attack, the air didn't even stir.
His first two deaths had been that. Pure blind spots.
The third revival, though — that punch had connected. He'd felt it land. Real mass, real resistance. And on the ground afterward, a small dark stain.
Blood.
Fast, highly concealed, high attack output — but not heavily built, Ryū assessed, eyes fixed on the direction the thing had gone flying. A few hundred metres at minimum, from a single hit.
One punch drawing blood meant it wasn't armoured. It had a physical body — the contact had been unmistakably solid, nothing like striking an elemental form. Which meant it could be hurt. Which meant this was workable.
He had partial information. Partial information was enough to start.
The smell of blood drifted toward him on the breeze.
The ground under his feet caved in.
He was already moving — body snapping backward at full Shave speed before the thought had finished forming, the air in front of him displaced as something passed through where his face had been. A faint sting at the tip of his nose. A few drops of his own blood hung in the air.
He'd dodged it.
Barely. But he'd dodged it.
He planted his feet — both heels driving into the earth like anchors, momentum arrested mid-flight — and stood still.
"Can't sense you, can't see you, and you don't move any air when you strike. But that punch made you bleed. That specific smell, I've got it now. And you're solid."
Armament Haki spread over his palm, knuckles darkening.
Then he let the Decompose Fruit run.
The ground detonated.
A sound like a thunderclap — the earth split outward in all directions, massive slabs of soil and rock launching skyward. Cracks propagated across hundreds of metres of grassland. The whole landscape shuddered.
White light blazed from his palm. Within a ten-metre radius, every floating chunk of earth — every clod and stone and spinning mass of dirt — reduced instantly to powder. Fine as smoke.
One sweep of his arm sent it outward.
A dust cloud billowed across hundreds of metres and held its shape: a dense grey sphere of suspended particles.
Anything solid moving through it would leave a trace.
"Found you."
He was already gone from where he'd been standing.
His fist connected with something hard — a weapon edge, from the feel of it. Sparks scattered on impact, a few reaching his eyes. He didn't blink.
His hand bones screamed. He kept the expression off his face.
He could feel the opponent's weapon bending under the force.
Roughly equal strength. This is going to take a while.
"Can you talk?"
Silence.
"No intelligence? Just instinct?"
Silence.
Ryū sighed quietly.
Fine.
He drove a Haki-coated kick at the gap between two of the dust disturbances.
His hand suddenly came free. His foot struck nothing.
It had slipped the grapple — found a fraction of an opening during a moment of locked struggle and used it. This thing was fast in ways that went beyond raw speed. Even when pinned, it found the exit.
Harder than I thought. Probably a hair above me overall, not just even.
He was holding his own only because the dust gave him a reference point. Strip that away and he'd be blind again. He was reactive, not proactive. That was a bad position to be in.
He'd be dead by now in a real fight.
Then — a shift. He felt the air change near his back and bent hard at the waist. The rear of his shirt parted. Cloth drifted. But his right leg lit up with sudden heat — a long gash opening across it, blood immediately sheeting out in a way that suggested something important had been cut.
A lot of blood. Very fast.
He'd been tracking the cloth. The leg wound was the real strike.
And then he saw it: a few drops of his own blood, suspended in the air at a precise point. Not falling. Held.
There.
He moved before the thought resolved, crossing the distance at zero warning, and drove his fist into the coordinates.
Something received it. Something solid. He felt a wet impact and heard, distantly, the sound of something structural failing.
Whatever he'd hit went supersonic. An actual shockwave ring bloomed in the air where it had been — a visible condensation ring from the speed of its departure.
That should have been decisive. With Decompose active, that punch—
The character appeared in his vision.
死
Ryū: ???
…What.
He looked down at himself.
His chest. His forehead. His face. His abdomen. Multiple wounds — punctures, each one clean through, each one still bleeding freely, nothing clotting. He counted them without expression.
He'd been hit that many times. In the same moment he'd thrown the punch. He hadn't felt a single one land.
He hadn't even perceived the attacks.
"Revive."
He lost count of how many times he said it.
At thirty minutes:
"Revive."
At ten hours:
"Revive."
At twenty-four hours:
"Revive."
When there were sixteen hours left on his free access window, the thing finally showed itself.
It had a body. Or it had had one. What remained of it was on the ground, visible at last, partial and broken.
Ryū stood over it and exhaled.
Eighty hours. He'd been fighting without a single second of rest for eighty hours. Death to revival, revival to death, continuous — not a pause, not a breath, nothing. Just the same opponent, the same invisible threat, and the slow accumulation of understanding.
He'd figured out its weaknesses in the end. It had taken eighty hours and a number of deaths he would prefer not to think about, but he'd found them.
And as he'd found them, something else had happened: he'd gotten better. Measurably, genuinely better. Not in raw power — his stats hadn't changed — but in how he used what he had. His Devil Fruit and his physical techniques were integrating in ways they hadn't before. The coordination felt different. More fluid. More automatic.
If I fought myself from eighty hours ago right now, there's no version of that where I lose. The experience gap would be insurmountable.
He looked out over what remained of the Arena's grassland.
Roughly the surface area of a mid-sized city, he estimated. Most of it was unrecognisable. Not a single patch of ground that hadn't been broken, charred, cratered, or swept clean.
"The main problem with this thing," he said to nobody, "was the Observation Haki immunity. No sensing, no visible trace, no air displacement on attack. Without the revival mechanic to iterate on, I'd have been dead in the first exchange and stayed that way."
He logged out of Solo Mode.
His benchmark assessment: at this point, in pure combat terms, he was operating at the level of Senju Hashirama or Uchiha Madara. Possibly a narrow margin above, given the experience he'd just accumulated. The one gap that remained was area-of-effect capability — the Decompose Fruit required physical contact, which meant no ranged decomposition unless he achieved Awakening someday.
He checked his balance.
His mouth twitched.
1,300 Points.
He'd had 1,700 when he'd entered.
"That's 400 Points. At 20 per revival, that's…"
He did the arithmetic.
"Twenty deaths. I died twenty times."
He stood with this information for a moment.
"Though I suppose that makes sense. Every time I revived, the opponent fully reset too — full health, every wound gone. So each death was essentially a complete restart against a healthy opponent."
He'd nearly broken himself against it. His patience had carried him through where his power alone wouldn't have.
If that had been real, I'd be dead.
"The Arena," Ryū said, with the exhausted conviction of someone who had just had an extremely unpleasant and thoroughly instructive experience, "is a genuinely excellent feature."
He paused.
"I just wish revival wasn't 20 Points. Twenty deaths. Four hundred Points. That's — that's a lot."
He pressed his hand to his chest.
"It physically hurts."
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