This time, they did not rush to attack.
Because they had noticed it-Kannazuki's left arm was moving more slowly.
"His left hand's hurt," Glasses reminded them quietly.
The four men tightened their circle around him.
Kannazuki began bouncing on the balls of his feet again.
Tap, tap, tap-
The rhythm was a little faster than before.
His breathing had quickened too.
His chest was rising and falling much more noticeably than it had a minute earlier.
But his feet never stopped.
L stood beneath the plane tree.
His thumb had moved completely away from his mouth.
He interlaced all ten fingers, gripping them together until his knuckles turned white.
He was counting.
He had been counting from the very second Kannazuki began bouncing on his toes.
The frequency of the bounces, the distance between his steps, the angle at which his center of gravity shifted.
All that data raced through his mind.
This footwork doesn't belong to any known fighting style.
He's using the rhythm of those bounces to control the order in which his muscles activate. Every bounce fine-tunes all the muscle groups in his body-which muscle exerts force first, which joint turns first. He switches between them entirely through the frequency of his toes touching the ground.
That requires an extremely precise understanding of human biomechanics. Down to every muscle fiber.
Why would a graduate student at the Law School have an ability like this?
L's pupils contracted.
In his mind, the probability that Light Yagami was Kira ticked up a notch.
On the main road.
The four men had yet to begin their second attack.
A whistle sounded in the distance.
Sharp and piercing.
Security had arrived.
Two campus security guards in dark blue uniforms ran over from the South District cafeteria. One held a walkie-talkie and