Kokushibo's six eyes lit up.
They lit up differently this time. The moonlight swirling in his pupils suddenly accelerated, and the patterns in his dark gold irises grew incredibly fine and dense, as though someone had etched a map into his eyes with a needle.
Transparent World.
In those six eyes, Yaha's body became a transparent specimen. The orientation of his muscle fibers, the distribution of weight across his bones, the speed and direction of blood flowing through his vessels-all lay exposed beneath that moonlit vision.
Right arm. From wrist to elbow, over seventy percent of his meridians had ruptured. Beneath the bandages, the tissue alternated between charred black and dark red, and signal transmission through his nerve endings was so chaotic it bordered on paralysis.
Left flank. A deep, dark fissure lay where his seventh and eighth ribs met, a lingering consequence of the conflicting origins after he had repeatedly devoured upper rank origin. Every sharp twist of his torso would widen that fissure.
Kokushibo held his long sword level at his side.
"A broken body," he said, his voice as heavy as old iron scraping. "Your right arm is useless. Your left ribs are wounded. And you face my blade with that body."
It was not mockery. It was a statement.
Yaha's dead-fish eyes remained half-lidded, his left-handed grip on his sword unchanged. The curve of his lips even rose a fraction higher.
"You talk too much."
Kokushibo moved.
Moon Breathing, Sixth Form-Eternal Lonely Moon: Endless.
His long sword swept diagonally upward, its moon blade precisely targeting the hidden injury in Yaha's left ribs under the Transparent World's prediction. The angle was vicious: blocking required a sharp twist of the torso, twisting would aggravate the injury, and the widening fissure would delay his movement by a tenth of