“What the...?”
Everyone stared at the ring in shock. They couldn’t comprehend why it was Amane’s blood all over the ring and not Ikki’s. But as they watched the boy fall to his knees, they finally began to understand what had happened. At the very last second, Ikki had slashed up at him, cutting him down before his Azure could stab into Ikki’s neck.
“Whoooooa!”
“Wh-What a counterattack! Kurogane turned the tables yet again at the very last second! Shinomiya’s on his knees, and he’s bleeding pretty bad! That slash cut to the bone!”
Amane was so stunned that it seemed he wasn’t even registering the pain yet.
Wh-What just happened? Did Nameless Glory not work? No, that’s not possible. That’s never happened before. And I definitely felt fate bending to my will. Ikki-kun’s heart stopped. I know it did.
Naturally, a person couldn’t move if their heart wasn’t functioning. The heart pumped blood to the rest of the body, and that blood carried the oxygen all the body’s muscles needed to expand and contract. In the same way a car couldn’t run without gasoline, the human body was incapable of moving without the oxygen and other nutrients blood carried to it. Ikki should have been dead from the moment his heart stopped. He shouldn’t have been able to fight back.
How did he move? Why am I the one who got cut?!
“What...did you do?!” Amane gasped, looking up at Ikki. He no longer seemed to be in pain, and he looked calmly back down at Amane.
“I just restarted my heart, that’s all,” he said simply.
“Ah, I get it now! Ha ha ha, what a guy!” Saikyou shouted from the commentator’s box, clapping excitedly.
“S-Saikyou-sensei, what does Kurogane mean by that?!”
“Exactly what he said. Kuro-bou’s heart stopped, but he got it working again and cut Ama-chan to ribbons.”
“B-But how did he do that?!”
“Aha ha. Just so you know, I wouldn’t be able to do what he did. The heart isn’t one of the muscles you can control consciously. There’s pacemaker cells inside every person’s heart, and they’re the ones that send orders to it. It’s a muscle that functions completely autonomously. The thing is, Kuro-bou can control all of his body’s muscles, including the ones that people normally can’t. He had to learn how, after all.”
“Huh?”
“Twin Wings’s swordsmanship demands it. Her techniques require you to use all the muscles in your body at once. And I mean literally all of them. In order to do that, you need to rewire your brain to be able to send those signals. But there’s something else you need to do first: increase blood flow.
“Activating every muscle at once requires a lot of energy, and your heart doesn’t normally pump that much blood with that much pressure,” Saikyou went on. “After all, the human body wasn’t designed to do the kind of things Twin Wings can. You’ve gotta consciously start boosting your heart rate and blood pressure well beyond what your body normally wants them at if you’re gonna use her techniques. That means you need to be able to send conscious signals to your heart. Kuro-bou’s able to command even his pacemaker cells, so messing a few of them up to stop his heart isn’t a problem for him. It just means he has to switch from automatic drive to manual.”
Saikyou’s analysis was spot-on. The moment Ikki’s heart had stopped beating automatically, he’d had his brain take over managing his heartbeat. Furthermore, the human heart was a surprisingly resilient organ. Pacemaker cells were designed such that they could be resuscitated with a massage, an electric shock, or some other external stimulus if they ever stopped functioning properly.
“Basically, Ama-chan’s command barely even hurt Kuro-bou. But Ama-chan thought it had won him the match, so he let his guard down. He stepped into Kuro-bou’s range. That was a deadly mistake.”
“J-Judging by the amount of blood he’s lost, it certainly doesn’t look like he’ll be able to keep fighting.”
“And why do you think Kuro-bou was able to land such a huge blow? Remember, Ama-chan’s Nameless Glory has the power to warp fate and make everything work in his favor. What that means is that it should have found some way to stop him from carelessly walking into Kuro-bou’s range since he was only pretending that his heart had stopped. But the thing is, by overcoming the death that Nameless Glory handed down to him, Kuro-bou proved that there’s simply no world in which Ama-chan can beat him.”
Shinomiya Amane could never beat Kurogane Ikki. That was an ironclad fact that no amount of coincidences could ever overturn. As a result, the goddess who protected Amane had finally folded, letting Amane get grievously wounded.
“This match is over. With Nameless Glory no longer affecting Kuro-bou, there’s nothing Ama-chan can do.”
“Nnngh!”
At Saikyou’s comment, Amane’s face paled, and the pain of the cut started registering. Like she’d said, Nameless Glory should have prevented him from getting hurt this badly. The fact that it hadn’t meant Ikki had well and truly overcome his power.
This can’t be happening!
“I wished for you to die, and that wish was granted! So just stay dead, god damn it! Why won’t you ever give up?!” he screamed, glaring up at Ikki.
“It’s nothing special, really,” Ikki replied in a calm voice. “Powers that interfere with fate can only make something that’s theoretically possible happen. But this result was inevitable. You seem to think quite highly of your powers, Amane-kun, but in the Blazer world, what you have is nothing special.”
“What?!”
“Sure, it’s a versatile power that you can use in pretty much any situation, but that’s all it is. You know, I fought a knight who could make not just himself but even the arrows he shot imperceptible to all senses. I also fought a knight who can swing her sword fast enough to cut through lightning, and a knight whose flames burn hotter than the sun. All of them possessed powers far stronger than yours. The Seven Stars Battle Festival is where knights like that compete. And unlike you, they’ve all trained relentlessly because they actually want to win. I’m only standing here now because I’ve beaten a fair few of them in this tournament. If I could beat them, there’s no way I’d lose to someone like you, who’s jealous of others and uses underhanded tricks to bring them down. You’re not interested in winning against yourself, much less anyone else.”
As Ikki said that, the pain finally overcame Amane.
“Gaaah?!”
Coughing up blood, he collapsed in a heap. Though he tried to struggle back to his feet, his trembling limbs didn’t have the strength left to raise him up.
I...can’t get back up?!
He’d lost too much blood, and his muscles were deprived of energy. No matter how badly he wanted to get back up, he couldn’t.
Everything’s...going dark...
His vision was fading, and he could tell he was losing consciousness. While reality was a bitter pill to swallow, he had no choice but to accept the fact that Saikyou had been right. He’d lost.
“Stop fighting! The winner is Kurogane Ikki!”
Just before he completely lost consciousness, he heard the referee declare Ikki’s victory, cementing his loss. Shinomiya Amane and Nameless Glory had well and truly been defeated.
No way... Was my power really so easy to overcome all this time?
Even now, he found it hard to believe. There wasn’t a single wish Nameless Glory hadn’t been able to grant before. And yet, it had been overcome by a Rank F Blazer whose only strength was his unwillingness to give up. To add insult to injury, Ikki had achieved a flawless victory. He hadn’t taken a single hit, and he hadn’t even needed to use his trump card, Ittou Shura. He’d been calm and composed the whole time, never once breaking a sweat.
Someone like him...was able to take everything from me? Really?
Just then, he recalled a voice from his past.
“Find happiness, Shion-chan.”
The cheers of the audience sounded distant, but that woman’s voice felt like it had come from right next to him.