The blade's tip touched the leading edge of Annihilation Type's fist.
There was no sound.
There should have been. Blue destructive energy collided with the steel of a Nichirin Blade. By the laws of physics, it should have unleashed a sonic boom capable of shattering half the surrounding space.
But there was nothing.
The air at the point of contact stopped vibrating. Light bent within that half-inch span, refracting into a warped image, like stones on a riverbed seen through water.
Muichiro's right wrist trembled.
Not because he lacked strength. Because he was sustaining something that did not belong anywhere near his level.
The spatial ripple half an inch ahead of his blade spread across the blue membrane of light the instant it touched Akaza's fist.
It did not cut flesh.
It did not sever bone.
The ripple's path bypassed Akaza's fist, his wrist, and every inch of muscle fiber in his forearm.
What it severed were the "spatial coordinates" surrounding Akaza's right arm.
More precisely, the "causal relationship" that allowed that arm to exist here.
Muichiro had no idea what he was doing. His brain had stopped analyzing. Every calculation, every form template, every breathing rhythm had been wiped clean three seconds earlier.
He remembered only one thing.
The backyard of the Swordsmith Village. That boulder. That cut surface.
The air on either side of the cut had trembled. That frequency. Those ripples.
What had happened in the space between that man's fingertips and the boulder when he held two fingers together.
It was not strength. It was not speed. It was not something a Breathing Style could explain.
It was something a level above.
With his fourteen-year-old body and one functioning arm, Muichiro forced one ten-thousandth of that "something" out through his blade's tip.
Akaza's right arm vanished.