Suddenly, the Demon Lord’s pushing grew weaker. Or it simply felt that way, because in fact another gear, the one with the flower pattern I had seen before, had attached itself to my sumo spirit and begun quickly rotating with the rest. Which god’s power was I borrowing with this? In the spectator seats, I noticed Adela praying with her eyes closed. Was it my imagination, or did she pray every time this flower-patterned gear appeared? Must’ve just been a coincidence. Adela was unrivaled in her ditziness as a maid, so there was no way she was the source of this power. Not like she was a goddess. Perhaps this girly, flower-patterned gear had come from the goddess Florence. Thank you, Goddess!
With my sumo spirit leveling up, strength filled me to the brim. The Demon Lord couldn’t push me anymore, and it was my turn to push him back. I pushed, and pushed, and pushed some more, until my feet entered the black part of the ring and I lost some of my power. Now we can have a proper bout, Demon Lord!
My leveled-up sumo spirit and the Demon Lord’s second form put us on roughly equal ground. We attempted techniques on each other and deflected all of them in turn. I felt our center of mass sway left and right as we moved. Anticipating the incoming move—a feint—I responded in kind. We read each other’s moves on a high level, using our intuition and instincts to block the opponent’s techniques and attempt to find success with our own.
I was starting to run out of breath. My body temperature was rising. It felt like walking along the edge of a cliff—as though one wrong step would send me falling down headfirst. Such a high-level competition was a first for me. The fear was oppressive. And yet, I was having fun. I had never come this far, and despite the fear pervading my mind, I was overjoyed.
“This is amazing. I’ve never had such a hard bout.”
“Me neither,” replied the Demon Lord.
I went for a throw. It didn’t work, and the Demon Lord tried to spin me around, but I stood firm. A throw. A twist. An attempted trip into an armlock. Opportunities for numerous techniques appeared one after another, only to vanish a moment later. In Aryakan Grand Sumo, some of those would’ve instantly led to a victory if performed, and yet they had to be passed over, allowed to burst and disappear like large bubbles on the surface of a soda pop in summer. How wasteful...
Our strength and skill were equal. The sheer volume of training the Demon Lord had done and his aptitude for sumo made him an amazing rikishi. It was no wonder he was a yokozuna of the demonic realm. He was an unbelievably formidable opponent.
“Now!” he spoke.
I was startled to see a shift in my opponent’s strength. As his muscles lost volume, he assumed a slender form. Even his weight became far lower than that of his usual form.
“This is my third form. I can’t believe you would make me use it for the first time in five hundred years—ever since I used it to fight gods.”
I felt an electric current run through my back. The Demon Lord’s strength had reached unbelievable levels. Was I destined to lose to this mobility-focused form? My opponent grabbed my mawashi and performed an overarm throw. The execution and speed of it were astonishing. It was the overarm throw of dreams.
Ramping up the speed of my sumo spirit, I braced my legs. It’s coming. It’s coming. It’s coming.
...I held out!
The Demon Lord looked at me with a quizzical expression.
“How did you hold out against that?”
“I don’t know!”
I truly didn’t. There was conviction in my mind that I would be thrown. That was simply how perfect the execution and how extreme the speed of that technique had been.
“A human can put up a fight against this form which brought down gods? You really are full of surprises, Floortje!” said the Demon Lord with a ferocious smile.
I was out of strength after resisting a god’s overarm throw. There was simply no way I could keep defending against techniques of that level—I had to go on the offensive. I lifted my knees for an inner thigh throw. Bzzzzzt! Lightning spawned.
But the Demon Lord moved even faster than lightning and avoided it. He can move that fast? What a fierce opponent!
“Blinding Head Chop Down!”
He raised his arm with the speed of light and brought it down towards my neck. Things were dire—I couldn’t afford to be blinded now of all times.
Smack! I received the technique with my forehead.
“What?”
A look of confusion appeared on the Demon Lord’s face, and he separated from our grapple so quickly, it was as though he had used teleportation. Then, he pulled his hand back.
“Harite...”
A midrange skill?!
“...Cannon.”
Not a catapult?! His magic-imbued harite was powerful enough to be classified as a cannon!
“Harite Catapult!”
I responded with a harite of my own. The shock wave of my harite collided with that of his Harite Cannon and broke up. But I didn’t mind. What was important was that it redirected the cannon’s shock wave, causing it to smash a walkway and demolish the nearby passage. This power was of a different dimension—no wonder this was the Demon Lord’s third form. He was the ruler of the demonic realm for a reason. It probably wasn’t an overstatement to call him a god.
“Heh heh heh, not bad! You humans keep surprising me, and I wouldn’t have it any other way!”
“Let’s settle this, Demon Lord!” I bellowed, and charged at him with all I had.
My opponent launched a series of slaps at me with the speed of a machine gun. Being hit by even one of them would no doubt smash my body into pieces and send it flying outside the ring. But so what? This wasn’t the first time I’d faced an unbeatable opponent. I would step forth and fight with my life on the line, for that was what made us sumo wrestlers!
I rerouted the entire output of my sumo spirit into my intuition and dodged all of the slaps. Step by step, I drew ever closer, running with the highest speed I could muster.
“Nuooooogh!!!”
At some point, my mouth had taken on the shape of a smile. This was my kind of sumo. The tension that made your soul tingle. The urgency of putting your life on the line. And the exaltation of facing a mighty foe!