Just as the compressed spiral of wind, bound to shred anything it touched beyond recognition, swallowed the Worst One, a boy with a yellow spear jumped between them. The boy, with a muscular form and the sharp eyes of a carnivore, was the Seven Stars King, Yuudai Moroboshi.
“Take a bite, Tiger Kiiing!”
His booming voice shook the air as he stabbed his spear at the descending tornado blade. In an instant, the golden light of magic ran through Tiger King, shooting out of its head. The beam it created then took on a familiar form: the head of a great tiger, its maw opened wide to expose its fangs.
The golden tiger chomped down on the approaching tornado sword. In doing so, it quite literally took a bite of Kusanagi, the very ability that had toppled first-rate knights like the Crimson Princess and Raikiri all on its own. The half-eaten sword then dissipated until it was gone entirely. Moroboshi, still standing in front of Ikki to protect him, looked at the injured knight.
“You all right, Kurogane?!”
“M-Moroboshi?! Why are you—”
“Just bringing back something you forgot,” he said, tossing Ikki his student handbook. “I called Doc about it, and she told me you were walking home alone. Figured I’d just head to your hotel, and what do I find along the way but a flashy brothers’ quarrel?”
Moroboshi then turned his attention to the Gale Sword Emperor.
“Been a while. I think the last time we saw each other face-to-face was elementary school?”
“The Star of Naniwa. Or I suppose you’re the Seven Stars King now, aren’t you, Moroboshi?”
“Hah. I don’t want you calling me ‘King’. A title won in a tournament without you is a worthless one. But hey, none of that matters now.” The two were former rivals who had once fought each other in the Little League. As the two spoke, Moroboshi frowned and surveyed the sorry state of the park. Fissures and crevices that littered the area, trees uprooted by the fierce winds, and one cracked stone wall. “This went a little far for a brothers’ quarrel, though. One of you’d be dead if I hadn’t stepped in.”
“Tiger’s Bite, a Noble Art-nullifying skill that can bite away any technique. You even tore away Mukuu Kekkai when you stopped my Kusanagi, I see.”
“Yep. That means your storm’s got no effect on me. Now that we’ve made that clear, I wanna ask you: are you gonna keep up this pointless carnage? If you wanna keep making a mess of my home, I’ll gladly take up fighting you.”
Moroboshi gave his threat with a menacing tone. He then pointed his magic-enveloped spear, Tiger King, at Ouma, intimidating him with its ability to nullify any and all Noble Arts. In response to his threats, Ouma closed his eyes and allowed the glow of his Ryuuzume to fade.
“No, I’ve lost my appetite for battle.”
Even his trump card, the strongest of all his techniques, was easily defeated by Moroboshi’s Tiger’s Bite. With reinforcements having arrived, perhaps he’d realized his odds of winning were poor.
No. He wasn’t such a noble man. Rather, he had simply, honestly lost any reason to continue his fight. As if losing the last of his already-weak interest, he glared daggers at the fallen Ikki, still on the ground behind Moroboshi.
“If you’ve not accepted the last piece of Twin Wings’ parting gift, then you will fail tomorrow regardless of whether I finish you right here. I have no need to deal the final blow myself. When she sees your pathetic defeat, perhaps the Crimson Princess will open her eyes at last.” Leaving them with that last bit of vitriol, he turned away and stepped into the darkness from whence he came. As he did, he left them with one last comment. “Saved by a forgotten handbook? Hmph. What a lucky man.”
“He looks a lot different than he did back in elementary school, but he’s just as unfriendly as ever,” Moroboshi sighed annoyedly as he watched Ouma leave. Once the boy had disappeared, Moroboshi turned back to Ikki, who was leaning against the stone wall. “So, what was that all about? I heard him say something about Stella; you guys better not have some sorta love triangle thing going on. I mean, two bros who’re in love with the same chick? That’s, like, straight outta Lurren Gagann.”
“Ugh, stop. I just about died back there,” Ikki chuckled at Moroboshi’s casual tone and slowly stood up. “Anyway, thank you. You really saved me. And my handbook, too.”
“No prob, man. But more importantly…” Moroboshi suddenly narrowed his eyes. “What was that, Kurogane? Even watching from afar, you were acting plain weird. That couldn’t’ve been ’cause of your injuries, right?”
The one thing that bothered him was Ikki’s apparent inaction just as he was about to be killed by Kusanagi. But little did he know that Ikki was the one most confused by it.
“I don’t know either, honestly. I can’t make heads or tails of it.”
There was no foreshadowing of the event. Up until it happened, Ikki had believed he was in perfect condition for the tournament. All he could do was to shake his head.
“Really? To me, you looked like a deer in headlights.” Moroboshi calmly explained things as he saw them. “Then again, you’re stronger than that.”
That much was obvious. A knight who would take the stage at the Seven Stars wouldn’t be so afraid of an enemy’s technique that he would freeze up, and that was especially true of Ikki. The Worst One had faced the Crimson Princess’ Katharterio Salamandra and had the guts to smirk at it.
“…Ah!”
It may not have been possible that he’d been afraid, but Moroboshi’s thoughtless statement led to a flash of inspiration within Ikki.
“You fought the strongest swordsman in the world and thought nothing about you would change because of it? Even if you remain physically sound, that doesn’t mean your heart made it out unscathed.”
The words Ouma had spat at him during their battle actually seemed to ring true. Ikki had fought the world’s strongest sword fighter and lost, yet he seemed to be in perfect health. Could that really have ended so anticlimactically, so conveniently? Could one truly have toed the line between life and death, only to return without being changed in any way? Wasn’t that idea too naïve?
Those thoughts gave Ikki a bad feeling, accompanied by a cold sweat that rolled down his back. What had happened to him was a common occurrence within the various realms of fighting. If a boxer suffered an awful loss, they would start to be afraid of their opponent’s punches. In an average fight, where multiple punches get exchanged in the space of a second, their body would stiffen and freeze up, almost like a form of PTSD. As long as one suffered from such a disorder, they would be unable to fight—a problem which some fighters considered to mean they were “broken”.
Could Ikki perhaps have subconsciously become “broken”? The physical he’d undergone after his fight with Edelweiss showed no abnormalities, and he was able to train as normal, but neither of those situations involved any danger to his life. What if, then, he had just never noticed it until Ouma’s raw desire to murder him exposed that mortal fear?
Such a supposition, while unimaginably terrible, was not terribly unimaginable. In fact, as Ouma had claimed, it would have been much more abnormal for him to have played a game of life and death with the world’s strongest sword fighter and not have come out scarred in some way. After a battle such as theirs, it should have been expected for either his body or his mind—if not both—to have been irreparably damaged.
“Why the scary face? Something come to mind, maybe?” Moroboshi asked. He must have noticed that Ikki got paler the more he thought.
“…No, not especially.”
Ikki couldn’t explain why. He couldn’t show weakness to his future opponent. At least, that was one reason he kept quiet.
“I want you to use that motivation to build up your energy and get yourself in perfect condition for tomorrow’s match.”
He swallowed the lump in his throat. There was simply no way he could breathe a word of his weakness to someone who was so excited to fight him.
“Huh. Well, I better call you a doctor. You should sit down for a while.”
Moroboshi spoke once more after looking at him for a short time, but he didn’t pursue the matter any further. Instead, he merely procured an ambulance using his student handbook.
“Thanks. Sorry.”
A mixture of gratitude and apology filled his words as he put a broken hand up to his chest. Ittou Shura had finally worn off, filling him with its usual heavy fatigue. The fatigue dulled the full-body pain brought on by the injuries he’d sustained, but the fear in his heart that he might be a broken knight was not relieved in the slightest.
What’s happening to me? And my body?
Even after he had received treatment and returned to the hotel, Ikki continued to ask himself the same questions. He pushed his consciousness deeper and deeper within himself, searching for an unobstructed view of his body and mind. No matter how deep he went, though, he could find no traces or wounds; he could only think of himself as sound in both body and mind.
Was he really broken? If not, how could he explain the moment his body had seized up? He didn’t know, and without knowing, he couldn’t hope to overcome the problem.
Things were looking grim. There was a time bomb ticking inside of him, which would make it foolhardy to challenge the Seven Stars King. After freezing at the climax of battle, how could he hope to win against such a foe? It was something he had no choice but to overcome, but as if laughing at Ikki’s fretting mind, the light of day finally broke, heralding the morning when everything would truly begin.