The heavy helmet dropped to the ground, revealing none other than Canus beneath.
Tsushima’s prediction had been correct.
Canus was so abjectly vicious in nature that he would surely want to finish off Tsushima himself. The boy might even force Tsushima to lick the soles of his shoes before he killed him. It came as no surprise to Tsushima that Canus had been lurking nearby.
By contrast, it seemed the boy hadn’t expected Tsushima would uncover his location. Looking shocked, Canus attempted to execute a Code to protect himself.
Without hesitation, Tsushima closed the distance between them. Despite his battered body, he pushed himself forward and swung at Canus’s cheek. Naturally, his fist was imbued with a Code.
Fwooosh!
Tsushima delivered his punch in a composed stance, rather than let his emotions make him sloppy.
Perhaps due to being shaken, Canus was late in executing a Code of his own. Before any of the boy’s creations could protect him, Tsushima had struck him in the face.
A wet, resounding impact echoed as Tsushima’s fist landed. Canus was sent crashing through his armor of ash and tumbled across the battlefield. Blood sprayed into the air, and by the time it fell to earth, Canus had already bounced twice off the ground.
When his momentum slowed, Canus somehow managed to break his fall. But he was unsteady on his feet. As he rose to his feet, his knees were shaking like a newborn fawn’s.
Touching his cheek as if to check whether his face was still there, Canus looked up at Tsushima. His eyes gradually filled with fiery rage.
“You bastard!” Canus yelled, several of his white teeth falling from his wide-open mouth.
Tsushima staggered and dropped to a knee on the ground, chuckling to himself.
“First a burn scar and now missing teeth? This kid should buy himself some dentures.”
Pressing down on the gushing wound on his abdomen, Tsushima cauterized it to stop the bleeding.
Though Tsushima had managed to identify Canus’s true body, he remained at a disadvantage. He had a serious stab wound in his abdomen, while his enemy had only lost a few teeth.
“Damn, this really isn’t worth it.” Tsushima was beyond fed up with the situation. He clenched his blood-soaked fist.
Across from him, Canus’s rage boiled over, his expression now bordering on a daze as his eyes glowed.
“Ah, enough already. I’ll return everything—every last thing—to ash,” Canus declared as he once again executed his Code. This time, it wasn’t just an infinite number of knights that materialized. No, an enormous skeleton had also emerged to conceal Canus. The creature was armored with several additional skeletal structures, and its eyes glowed an ominous red as it let out a ferocious war cry.
The execution of such an aggressive Code seemed to take its toll on Canus, as blood began seeping from his eyes. Even so, he continued summoning an overwhelming number of creations: creepy spiderlike monsters, four-legged abominations, flying winged creatures. As the scene morphed into a landscape straight from hell, Tsushima narrowed his eyes in a smile.
“You’ve lost, and there’s nothing you can do to change that. You sealed your fate the moment you revealed yourself.”
The blue glow in Tsushima’s eyes faded, leaving behind only ominous black irises, like the depths of the abyss. Seeing this, Canus felt a sense of unease and an eerie, foreboding presence.
Behind his boiling rage, Canus calmly considered why his instincts were screaming he was in danger. It was something obvious, yet so minor that he had overlooked it in his frustration and arrogance.
Why had he only now noticed the blackness of Tsushima’s eyes? It was because this was his first time looking directly at them.
For some reason, Tsushima’s eyes had been glowing the entire time up to this point. An Informationist’s eyes glowed while executing a Code and returned to normal when this process was complete. In other words, they only turned blue when an Informationist was producing a Code.
So why had Tsushima’s eyes been glowing nonstop?
Several possibilities came to mind. For instance, perhaps Tsushima had been executing something vast and intricate—a Code that took an extremely long time to complete. That was a possibility.
If that was true, then what kind of Code could take this long to execute for a man capable of unleashing heat rays without delay? The thought sent a chill down Canus’s spine so intense he forgot his anger.
“Giant skeleton! Protect me!”
Acting on instinct, Canus chose to go on the defensive. The massive skeleton he’d summoned shifted with surprising speed for its size, bracing to shield him. Meanwhile, Canus issued commands to his other creations.
“Tear Tsushima to shreds like a ragged cloth! Right now!” he roared, his voice rising as if to drown out his inexplicable sense of dread.
But his decision, though logical, proved foolish.
The moment the skeleton shielded him, Canus noticed Tsushima pointing upward, directing his attention to the sky. Compelled by the gesture, Canus glanced above and froze.
There was a single mass of light overhead. No, it was far too ominous to simply be called a light—it was a malicious glow, as though formed from the compressed heat of the sun. The sphere of heat was so blindingly bright that it appeared reddish-black to the eye, and it looked like it was getting larger.
Indeed, the orb wasn’t getting larger—it was getting closer.
“You asshole! Are you trying to kill us both?!” Canus yelled upon realizing this.
The enormous sphere of heat plummeted straight for Canus, accelerating under the pull of gravity. Tsushima gazed up at it, the hem of his jacket fluttering.
“Wanna see who can last longer?” he taunted spitefully, his tone dripping with either sarcasm or mockery. Hiding his face within his jacket to shield himself from the heat, Tsushima braced for impact.
At that moment, Canus understood. The heat was so intense that he could feel it even with the skeleton sheltering him—it would be impossible for a single jacket to block it. Tsushima must have anticipated this situation and executed a heat-resistant Code to protect himself.
This was undoubtedly the ace up Tsushima’s sleeve. He had been biding his time until he pinpointed Canus’s location, preparing a wide-range attack capable of obliterating everything in one fell swoop. It was the ultimate offensive move, leveraging Tsushima’s abilities to their fullest.