108
Kaido's body traced a broken arc through the air.
He had not been knocked back or overpowered. He had been sliced cleanly in two, like rice paper beneath a paper cutter.
Half a second passed before blood mist erupted from the severed sections, refracting an eerie rainbow in the sunlight.
"Doffy!"
Before his shout had fully left his throat, the blond man on the other side had already raised both hands.
Countless milky-white strings materialized from the ground, the air, and even the light, gathering into a waterfall flowing upward to catch the falling pieces of his body.
The sight of strings burrowing into the wounds set teeth on edge-that was not stitching, but some kind of intricate weaving.
Broken bone ends were forcibly drawn together. Blood vessels were reconnected like embroidery, and muscle fibers writhed under the strings' pull, seeking their matching severed surfaces.
The reassembled man staggered upright.
White, web-like patterns covered his skin, rising and falling with every breath, as though his body were merely a piece of pottery temporarily glued together.
"Inside..."
Kaido's voice sounded as though it were being squeezed through a crack. "There's something that defies all reason."
He moved his newly reattached waist, and his joints gave muffled cracks like wet wood snapping.
"I left that opening deliberately."
Those words brought the taste of rust to Rossi's tongue.
Even with a deliberately exposed opening, there was probably only one name on this entire sea capable of seizing that fleeting instant to deliver such a slash.
An eerie silence suddenly fell over the battlefield.
Even the wind stopped blowing.
Then some kind of pressure began to build.
It did not come from any one direction. Like the pressure of the deep sea, it squeezed inward from all sides at once.
The air grew