Conqueror's Haki flashed and vanished. Having only just awakened it, he couldn't actually control it consciously yet.
Besides, it had been so embarrassing that Sephiroth even wished he hadn't awakened it at all.
If he had a King of Space Twisted Hammer in front of him right now, he reckoned his sheer power of frustration could smash Kizaru's damn head open.
The surging seawater and electric charges formed a gigantic vortex at the center of the battlefield. Sephiroth stood suspended on an electromagnetic field, the arcs dancing through the ends of his hair beginning to glow an eerie blue.
The black lightning coiling around the tip of the lightning spear in Sephiroth's hand distorted space. His second throw was coming-
For the first time, Kizaru gripped his sword with both hands. The projected Ama no Murakumo Sword swelled into a gigantic blade of light forty meters long.
As though mythical weapons had collided, the resulting shock wave tore a circular hole dozens of kilometers wide through the clouds.
The Lightsaber warped the Dark Thunder javelin, deflecting its trajectory. It grazed past Kizaru's side and plunged into the sea, blasting a gigantic whirlpool into existence.
Kizaru would selectively ignore ordinary lightning attacks to charge in and close the distance. But the slippery Sephiroth had never given him a chance to get close.
After taking one hit from that Dark Thunder attack, however, he had no desire to get hammered a second time.
Even as Kizaru swung the Ama no Murakumo Sword with all his strength to block the dark lightning javelin and bend its trajectory, he actually fired beams from his eyes to counterattack.
"Bzzzt-"
Sephiroth's body suddenly turned into lightning. As Kizaru's counterattacking beams pierced the afterimage, they stirred up ripples that distorted the air.
Even though he could detect Kizaru's intentions through Mantra, the gap in their combat experience and the Glint-Glint Fruit's mobility remained.
In an exchange of barrages at a combat distance of around twenty kilometers, Sephiroth couldn't gain much of an advantage.
The preset "emergency escape device" had almost triggered the instant his arm was grazed just now.
Cautious-or rather, cowardly-as Sephiroth was, even though he was certain Kizaru wouldn't go for the kill,
he had still installed a trigger program on his satellite that would instantly "transfer" him to the other side of the planet if he suffered significant damage.
Sephiroth turned into lightning to evade, and the two began their second round of speedster combat, chasing each other down.
Both relied on Observation Haki to predict their opponent's moves, then planned their "routes" accordingly. Sephiroth's Mantra could read his opponent's emotions and intentions.
Since the fight began, Kizaru had been hit more than a dozen times. Sephiroth, however, had only been grazed once.
Sephiroth still held the advantage in conventional, beyond-visual-range combat without direct contact. The central problem was that he couldn't launch long-range Haki attacks.
-If ordinary beyond-visual-range combat won't work, then let's compete over even greater distances...
-To me now, nothing else matters. All I need is victory. Even when light shines into the darkness, it cannot reach its depths.
Sephiroth turned into lightning. Since he didn't want to expose his satellite, his only option for rapid movement was to transform into his element and become a lightning bolt that broke through the atmosphere.
When he expanded his radio-wave-based Mantra to its limit without regard for precision, it could even cover a diameter of 2,500 kilometers.
Much like ground-based early-warning radar, it relied entirely on the vast energy supplied by the Rumble-Rumble Fruit to brute-force the process.
Sephiroth guided natural electric charges four hundred kilometers away, establishing a "leader" channel in advance.
The leader and the return stroke were the two stages that naturally occurring lightning inevitably passed through.
Leader: establishing a discharge channel by progressively ionizing the air to create a conductive path in preparation for the return stroke.
"...?"
Before Kizaru's eyes, Sephiroth turned into a bolt of lightning and instantly vanished. Kizaru expanded his Observation Haki to its maximum range, but his opponent had disappeared completely.
In an instant, Sephiroth had moved beyond the range of his Observation Haki. Kizaru hadn't even detected which direction he had gone, leaving him unable to pursue even in a general direction.
Return stroke: the actual discharge process, in which large amounts of electric charge traveled rapidly through the highly ionized air channel, producing intense current and light to complete a lightning discharge.
A leader traveled at approximately one two-thousandth the speed of light. This was the method behind what Sephiroth normally called short-range Teleportation.
When traveling extremely long distances, however, Sephiroth used Mantra to establish a channel in reverse ahead of time, then moved by means of a return stroke.
The speed of a return stroke varied depending on the medium. In an ordinary atmosphere, it could reach one-third to one-half the speed of light.
Against sublight speed, even Future Sight-level Observation Haki could only identify the general direction "after the fact," since nerve cells couldn't react quickly enough.
Kizaru's Observation Haki was highly developed, but it wasn't a special variant. He could only stare helplessly.
Had... he run away?
In fact, Kizaru could also disengage instantly. All he needed to do was pick any direction and move for half a second without using the Yata Mirror to constrain his movement. Doing so, however, would leave him with no idea where he would emerge.
The reason he didn't fly into space was that light followed the shortest path, and the distortion of spacetime caused by the planet's gravity formed a curve. He didn't "escape" because the binding force of that "shortest trajectory," though weak, wasn't nonexistent. A light-speed ability user with "consciousness" merely needed to "naturally follow" it. (Otherwise, across all worlds, every light-speed character who wasn't a "true speedster" would accidentally end up in space.)
So although he could move at the speed of light, he rarely did so, mainly because he had absolutely no control over where he would appear when he stopped.
"-!!"
His Observation Haki screamed a warning, but there was no time to react.
A Dark Thunder shot fired from four hundred kilometers away pierced Kizaru's body. The intense energy jet caused his stamina to plummet.
With his Admiral-level constitution, that loss of stamina wasn't serious. But if he kept taking these attacks without limit, things would turn ugly.
Four hundred kilometers was completely beyond the detection range of Kizaru's Observation Haki. Still, the attack's trajectory told him his opponent's general direction.
"What an extraordinary young man-!"
Kizaru knew the Five Elders wanted him to teach this Rumble-Rumble Fruit kid a lesson. Fleet Admiral Sengoku supported the idea too.
Now, never mind teaching him a lesson. If this brat started wreaking havoc without restraint, he might be more dangerous than even the Four Emperors.
Following the direction of the Dark Thunder shot with his Observation Haki, Kizaru placed a Yata Mirror at the farthest point he could reach.
He then moved at "true light speed," arriving at what had originally been the farthest boundary of his Observation Haki's detection range.
Next, he repeated the process, maintaining his Observation Haki at full strength throughout.
Using this method, he did indeed pinpoint Sephiroth's location.
But Sephiroth's detection radius far exceeded Kizaru's. As soon as he sensed Kizaru approaching, he used a return stroke to open the gap, keeping the distance between them at four hundred to seven hundred kilometers whenever possible.
Four hundred kilometers was the limit at which he could maintain relatively precise Mantra. Seven hundred kilometers was the maximum attack range for lightning breaking through the atmosphere.
(The longest lightning bolt recorded in Blue Star's history was the enormous Texas bolt recorded in 2020, which stretched 768 kilometers.)
If he used his satellites for "relay-style" transmission, Sephiroth could even launch "intercontinental" attacks from 2,500 kilometers away.
Kizaru had never encountered such a bizarre combat situation before, and it opened his eyes to quite a few possibilities.
The awkward part right now, however, was that he simply couldn't catch his opponent.
Even when they occasionally crossed paths, they remained far apart. Kizaru only sensed his opponent's presence through Observation Haki; he never actually saw him.
Helpless, Kizaru could only fire token beams in his opponent's general direction.
The two fought high in the stratosphere, with their combat distance routinely exceeding a hundred kilometers.
Even their occasional, supposedly close-range encounters took place twenty or thirty kilometers apart, and lasted only an instant.
Their fighting route began to follow the Calm Belt, while their combat radius spanned nearly half the planet.
Sephiroth wasn't really trying to do anything to Kizaru. After several rounds of this back-and-forth, only two or three minutes had actually passed, given their speed.
At the moment his Conqueror's Haki awakened, his Mantra had also grasped a new form of advanced Observation Haki-Telepathy.
"-Hey, old man Kizaru!"
"-!?"
Sephiroth's voice suddenly appeared inside Kizaru's head. Even Kizaru was startled.
"We've pretty much finished testing my strength, haven't we? Next comes my final attack-don't die!"
Hearing the "voice" in his head, Kizaru suddenly felt his heart tighten.
The problem was, what could he do when he couldn't determine the direction?
-1,400 kilometers away.
After confirming that both of them were within the Calm Belt and that there were no human settlements in his line of fire, Sephiroth revealed a "struggle.jpg" smile.
One look at such a wholesome smile was enough to tell he must have been good at cards.
Sephiroth exerted himself to the utmost, stirring up natural electric charges. A thunderstorm rapidly descended.
The enormous electric field accelerated electrons to near-light, or relativistic, speeds.
When these high-speed electrons collided with atomic nuclei in the atmosphere, they produced bremsstrahlung radiation-gamma rays.
Sephiroth used a powerful magnetic field to focus and confine the gamma rays, gradually gathering them together and establishing a stable, directional channel.
This move was powerful, but its windup was too long.
Fortunately, its attack range was also thoroughly "intercontinental."
He only needed to fire it from a location his opponent didn't know.
-Gamma-Ray Burst.
This was a cosmic phenomenon that only occurred during stellar-scale supernova explosions.
Sephiroth released energy equivalent to an "island-destroying attack [Raigo]," yet all he managed to gather was a directional gamma-ray burst less than a meter in diameter.
Although its scale was extremely, extremely small, its nature was equivalent to a supernova explosion.
"-!"
-An eerie hum rang through the air.
Faster than the sound came a dazzling radiance.
Gamma rays themselves were electromagnetic waves with wavelengths below 0.1 nanometers, invisible to the naked eye. But the dust and air along their path were excited by the rays' high energy and emitted light.
That radiance contained the power to destroy everything. A shock wave spread through the atmosphere, forming a spectacular wave of energy.
*-**This is my struggle to stay alive!!!***
Before you continue