-Broadcast-
Across the Flower Capital, every team that had entered for the contest was running into the same problem.
The weaker spirits — the ones that scattered through back alleys and skittered along rooftops — were manageable. A blade with enough force behind it handled them quickly enough, and nobody wasted time celebrating. But the elite-level yokai were a different matter entirely. God's Knights who stumbled into those encounters found themselves suddenly, humiliatingly, in the fight of their lives.
"Who in the hell are these two? At minimum they're cutting steel with raw swordsmanship."
"Are they even human?"
Number Five and Number Ten had been asking each other the same questions since the ambush. Hannya and Momotaro stood before them without any of the posture of trained warriors — no formal stance, no visible tension, the casual ease of people who simply did not feel threatened. They were taller than any Wano samurai the team had encountered, and nothing about them fit the shape of what CP0 had told them to expect.
CP0 had been ahead of them by hours. They'd sent nothing on these two.
That silence had cost the team dearly. One dead — Ninety-Nine's headless body still cooling at the far end of the street. One crippled — Eighty-Eight on her side in the gutter, her severed arm a foot away from her, her composure completely gone. Three fighters remained, and one of them was Number Zero: the pink-haired woman who had not drawn her weapon once all night.
Number Five glared at Bonney, then turned to the bearded captain. "She's dead weight. Forget about her and let's end this properly. Two-on-two — no more room for mistakes."
Number Ten didn't argue. He'd known Bonney's situation going in; she was what she was. Better to rely on himself.
They'd cut through samurai all the way here — some strong, most merely adequate. The God's Knights didn't hold any of them in high regard. These were people who had devoted themselves to surpassing Kozuki Oden, and not one of them had managed it. There was no satisfaction in the points they'd earned from those bodies. But this was different. The air between the four of them carried a different weight entirely.
"Together. Don't take chances."
Number Five and Number Ten moved simultaneously — clean, practiced, aiming for vital points without wasted motion. The duel collapsed into two separate engagements in an instant: steel on steel, the sharp collision of blades ringing through the darkened street.
For a time, the four of them were genuinely even.
That was the unnerving part. Hannya and Momotaro fought the way people fight when they don't need to try — unhurried strikes, minimal repositioning, no wasted energy. The gap between them and the samurai killed earlier tonight was absolute. These were not imitators. They weren't straining toward a ceiling they couldn't reach.
Sweat gathered on Number Five's brow. His breathing stayed controlled, but he felt it — the slow, steady drain that came when the opponent never tired. Momotaro's sword found angles that shouldn't have been available. Hannya moved like something that had been doing this for longer than either captain had been alive.
"They're not getting tired," Five said through clenched teeth. "They're playing with us."
"Then find an opening and use it," Ten answered.
Number Five found one.
A fractional misalignment in Momotaro's footwork — barely a gap — and he drove his sword through it. The blade entered Momotaro's body at the chest and kept going, splitting him through the heart, cleaving half his torso away. The impact shuddered back up Five's arms. He felt the hit land. He felt what it did.
Any normal man would already be dead.
Five let himself breathe. "All that buildup — and you fall apart like any other—"
Under his Observation Haki, Number Ten caught it first: a flicker of movement where there should be nothing left to move.
"Finish him — he's still alive!"
He was too late.
Momotaro's ruined face arranged itself into something that might have been a smile. The severed portions of his body pulled back together — not slowly, not in stages, but instantly, flesh and bone reknitting in the space between one heartbeat and the next. Before Five could raise his sword to respond, Momotaro's blade had already changed.
The steel went soft. It moved like a living thing — bending from an angle that bypassed every defensive position Five had instinctively adopted, threading through his guard the way a snake threads through tall grass. The tip found his temple.
Armament Haki reinforced his skull. It didn't matter.
The blade pushed through.
Number Ten watched his partner's head leave his shoulders and come to rest at his feet. The expression on it was still incredulous.
Momotaro rolled the flat of his blade across his lips, tasting the blood there. He considered it. "Filthy man. There's a strange smell to his blood." He said it the way someone might note that a meal was prepared wrong.
Mixed blood. He could tell.
Two against one now. Number Ten was not a man who deluded himself.
Bonney was behind him and would not move. Eighty-Eight was still on the ground and would not be getting up. There was no reinforcement coming, no second option on the board. The point tally he'd accumulated tonight had just become irrelevant.
Unlucky start to finish. Good fighters died. What's left is useless.
He began to fall back.
The yokai pair read his intention the moment he formed it.
"Leave your life in the Flower Capital."
Hannya stepped forward — and then the world became strange.
Swallow Returns.
Her long sword passed through the air once, a single clean arc. Then the concepts of sequence and direction stopped applying. Two more cuts appeared simultaneously — from different angles, from different points in space, as though three versions of the same blade had struck at the same instant from positions no single swordsman could occupy. Time seemed to hold its breath. The three slashes existed in the same moment, each arriving from a direction that cancelled any possible defense against the others.
Number Ten blocked the first. He never felt the other two.
He had been a better swordsman than most, and it hadn't mattered at all. His body joined the collection of headless corpses his team had become, and he left no last words. None of them had.
Hannya and Momotaro stepped past the bodies without looking at them and came to stand over the woman in the gutter — Eighty-Eight, one arm gone, the other pressed against the cobblestones, breath shallow and ragged.
"Dressed like that," Momotaro observed, the way someone might note bad weather.
The long sword came down. Not to end it — to begin something far slower. The blade traced lines across her flesh with the precision of a craftsman, peeling rather than piercing, taking its time the way ancient Lingchi was designed to. Eighty-Eight screamed. Begged. Made the only offer she still had left to make.
"Don't — please — I can — I'll do anything — both of you—"
They gave her nothing. The cuts continued. She would not die quickly. She would lose herself piece by piece, and the sounds she made would echo down the empty street for a long time.
Bonney stood at the end of the alley and did not look away.
She had watched all of it: the false confidence, the desperate skill, the regeneration that mocked everything they'd earned, the triple-slash that ended a man before he understood what was happening. And now this. The drawn-out ending that the Celestial Dragons themselves had invented — applied back to one of their own.
She committed it to memory. Every second of it.
They brought this upon themselves.
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