Following Tessai Tsukabishi into the warehouse, Tsuna immediately noticed that the interior was filled with the same earth-and-stone terrain as the underground space beneath Urahara Shop. If nothing else, Urahara had clearly had a hand in constructing this place too.
Coming toward them were two men—one with a yellow bowl cut, the other with a close-cropped white buzz cut.
One wore a strange grin that made it impossible to tell what he was thinking.
The other looked openly irritated, the sort of person whose temper clearly ran hot.
Tsuna recognized them at a glance.
They were Shinji Hirako and Kensei Muguruma of the Visored.
"Tessai, since when did your shop start keeping another brat around?" Shinji said. His lazy tone made it obvious that he was lumping Tsuna together with Ururu and Jinta from Urahara Shop. "So? What does Urahara want from us this time?"
"I was only asked to escort Sawada-san here," Tessai replied, stepping aside and yielding the lead position to Tsuna. "The one who actually came to see you is Sawada Tsunayoshi."
"Oh?"
Shinji had only just started voicing his confusion when Tsuna opened with complete bluntness:
"Shinji Hirako-san, would you let me see your Hollowfication?"
Shinji's eyes narrowed into slits.
First the boy reversed his name, and then he brought up Hollowfication right away. Had Kisuke Urahara seriously told this kid everything about them?
Kensei, unlike Shinji, had no such patience.
As one of the first people to be Hollowfied, the word itself was still an open wound to him. In his mind, if only he had been stronger back then, he wouldn't have dragged so many others down with him.
"Brat, don't think I won't beat you up just because you're young. Get out now, and I'll pretend I never saw you," Kensei growled, crouching in front of Tsuna with obvious anger. The veins in his clenched fist were already starting to bulge. One step further and that punch would have gone straight into Tsuna's face.
Tsuna, however, paid the threat no mind.
He was too busy wondering whether the current Kensei Muguruma really deserved to be used as a unit of measurement—"one Kensei"—and if so, how many "Kenseis" strong he himself currently was.
Seeing Tsuna ignore him, Kensei turned with a foul expression toward Tessai.
"Hey, Tessai—did you bring in some kid with something wrong in his head?"
"Kensei, I'm the one who came to see you today," Tsuna said. "There's no need to drag Tessai-san into this."
At once, Kensei felt a tremendous force press down on the hand he had been pointing with. At the same time, a thick surge of spiritual pressure appeared at his side.
"Watch out!"
The instant Kensei heard Shinji's warning, a pale fist filled his field of vision, growing larger and larger. He couldn't even dodge.
One of his arms was already locked down by Tsuna.
Tsuna's punch landed squarely on Kensei's cheek, and Kensei—completely unprepared—was knocked flat onto the ground.
"Hey, Tsunayoshi-kun," Shinji said in a low voice, "is this really how you behave when you come asking for something?"
Tsuna spread his hands helplessly.
"What can I do? It's not like you were going to just show me your Hollowfication for free, right? So, to avoid wasting time, I had to take a few measures."
Shinji was momentarily speechless.
True enough, they would never casually reveal Hollowfication to someone they'd just met. Still, Tsuna's immediate jump to violence felt less like a request and more like he had come to smash the place up.
"You don't need to say any more, Shinji."
Kensei sprang back to his feet and crouched low, his eyes already tinged with red, the thrill of battle rising in him.
"Brat… your punch had some real weight behind it! Then let's see if you can take…"
"One of mine!"
In the next instant, Kensei vanished with Shunpo and appeared right in front of Tsuna. He drove a straight punch at Tsuna's face, with only one thought in mind:
Pay him back the exact same way.
Faced with Kensei's furious strike, Tsuna calmly opened his hand and caught the punch.
Only then did Kensei realize that the kid he had looked down on was emitting spiritual pressure that was in no way inferior to his own.
"Interesting!" Kensei's face immediately lit up with excitement.
In the hundred years they'd spent hiding out in the World of the Living, everyone else had found some sort of pastime. Only he kept training every single day, to the point where life had become dull enough to make birds yawn. Now that someone had come looking for trouble, why wouldn't he welcome it?
"Shinji, move! We've got someone here to wreck the place!" Kensei barked, jumping backward to open space and kicking Shinji entirely out of his combat range, grinning so hard his face almost split.
"Hey, hey, don't take it too far," Shinji said aloud.
But even as he said it, he moved quickly to Tessai's side. He wanted to see for himself what this kid who had come looking for them was capable of.
"Relax," Kensei said excitedly. "This won't take long!"
He whipped his Zanpakutō out from behind him. His captain-class spiritual pressure poured through the warehouse without restraint.
His weapon was little more than a short, dagger-sized hilt with a square grip and a small ring above it. Perhaps because he had never let go of what happened during the old Hollowfication incident, Kensei had trained his Zanpakutō into a constantly released state after coming to the World of the Living.
He spun the weapon twice in his hand, then gripped it forward like a boxer setting his stance.
"It's called Tachikaze. Kid, I'll let you make the first move."
"You Visored really do love telling your enemies all your information, don't you?" Tsuna said flatly. If these people would just talk a little less in the middle of combat, maybe their fight records wouldn't look so terrible.
"Brat, catch this!"
Kensei's expression darkened further. Announcing his weapon was his way of showing respect to an opponent. Since Tsuna clearly didn't want that respect, there was no reason for him to hold back.
Captain-class spiritual pressure filled the warehouse. Holding Tachikaze like a boxer's weapon, Kensei threw a punch at Tsuna.
"Kensei really is…" Shinji muttered from the sidelines, unsure what to even say. Kensei was just that explosive by nature. What worried Shinji now was whether one blow from him might accidentally wreck the "guest" Urahara had sent, which would be difficult to explain later.
At the same time, elsewhere in the warehouse—
"Kensei's spiritual pressure? I'm going to take a look." A short-haired green-haired girl in a white-and-orange skin-tight outfit—completely obsessed with playing superhero in the human world—vanished in a blur.
"Love… honestly. We'd better go too…"
Back on the battlefield, fist met fist.
The burst of spiritual pressure scattered all the dust in the air.
And when Kensei saw Tsuna properly—wearing boxing gloves lit with yellow flames—the excitement on his face only deepened.
"This is great! We might actually get along, you know!"
He exchanged another two heated punches with Tsuna. Then, in the hand holding Tachikaze, a mass of highly condensed spiritual pressure suddenly formed. His entire right arm began to glow intensely. With his left hand shielding the motion, he pressed the attack.
"Bakudantsuki!"
The spiritual pressure gathered in his fist was like a bomb on the verge of detonation. The instant he threw the punch, it exploded outward with devastating force.
"Extreme Sun!"
An even fiercer light burst across the field. This was Tsuna's attack in his Sun Attribute Shikai state—likewise a strike built from highly condensed spiritual pressure, just as blinding, and it smashed directly into Kensei's Bakudantsuki.
White light engulfed the area, too bright to look at.
When the glare finally faded, Shinji saw Tsuna and Kensei already in the middle of a furious flurry of punches, both of them bearing fresh wounds.
That was a boxer's instinct.
Neither of them had waited for the explosion to finish. Both had used the moment of impact to launch straight into their next assault.
"Now this is satisfying!" Kensei shouted. "Give it up, kid. Tachikaze is a wind-type Zanpakutō—it doesn't only work in close combat!"
Thin blue-green threads floated around the two of them. These were the razor-sharp wind threads created by Tachikaze. The moment Kensei wrapped them around Tsuna, the fight would be over.
Kensei had no wish to seriously injure this interesting new opponent. If Tsuna simply admitted defeat, he could stop at once. It wasn't every day he found someone this suitable for a fight.
But Tsuna didn't beg.
Instead, he yawned and said in a listless voice,
"This is really boring."
Suddenly, yellow flames spread all across Tsuna's body. His injuries began healing at a speed visible to the naked eye.
The abrupt change made Kensei instinctively call every floating thread in around them.
A wind-bound punching bag—once caught by Tachikaze's threads, the opponent could only stand there and take the beating like a sandbag.
But Tsuna clearly had no intention of becoming Kensei's punching bag.
He stepped forward toward Kensei, forcing his way through the razor-sharp threads.
Each time the threads carved fresh wounds into his body, the Sun Attribute Flame ignited at the cuts, healing them instantly. At the same time, Tsuna's movements grew faster and faster.
Kensei began to struggle to keep up.
That was the property of the Sun Flame: activation.
Tsuna was using it to accelerate cellular activity, healing his injuries and simultaneously increasing the speed and force of his attacks.
His punches grew faster and faster.
Then suddenly Kensei felt as if his vision had split. Three Tsunas appeared before him at once, all throwing punches together.
He had no time left to defend.
"Extreme Charge Cannon!"
Three fists landed on Kensei at the same instant, and in a perfectly smooth continuation of force, he was knocked down and sent rolling across the floor.
In only a few exchanges, Kensei Muguruma had been brought down.
"What a frightening young man," Shinji said to Tessai beside him. "Since when did Soul Society produce someone like this?"
Even though Tsuna's outfit looked much more like a modern suit than a standard Shihakushō, Shinji could still recognize from his spiritual pressure alone that Tsuna was a Soul Reaper.
"Sawada-san is not from Soul Society," Tessai explained. "He's from the World of the Living."
"The World of the Living, huh…" Shinji clicked his tongue and said no more. Now that Kensei had lost, maybe they would finally be able to talk properly.
But just as Shinji started to step forward, Tsuna's voice cut across the warehouse:
"Kensei-san, if you don't use Hollowfication, you don't even measure up to one Kensei."
Shinji quietly drew his foot back.
Knowing Kensei as he did, there was no way this fight was ending here.
Sure enough, Kensei exploded in anger.
"Hollowfication, Hollowfication? Then I'll show you a power even stronger than Hollowfication!"
"Bankai! Tekken Tachikaze!"
===================
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