"This way..." Ōtsutsuki Isshiki's voice grew even lower. "The suppressive effect your Power of Thunder has on my Kāma will be weakened by at least thirty percent. And my power can keep rising."
He took a step forward, and the ground beneath his feet cracked like a spiderweb.
"Now, the real battle begins."
Just as he was about to lunge again!
Hatake Cang Kong raised his right hand.
The movement was light, like brushing dust off his shoulder.
But the instant he raised his hand, the surrounding space-the entire ruined laboratory-shuddered violently!
It was not a physical tremor, but something deeper, a quiver as though space itself were breathing.
Ōtsutsuki Isshiki's body abruptly froze.
He sensed it... the spatial coordinates around him were... rearranging themselves in an utterly inconceivable way.
"What?!" His Black Eye suddenly contracted!
He felt the ground beneath his feet-no, the entire space-rapidly retreating.
It was like standing on a speeding train, with the scenery racing backward around him, but that backward motion was not physical displacement! It was space itself folding and unfolding!
The laboratory's ruins rapidly shrank in his vision, blurred, and finally vanished. The shattered instruments, collapsed walls, and scattered metal fragments rippled and twisted like reflections cast into water, then disappeared completely.
In their place was a boundless, golden desert.
The blazing sun hung overhead, waves of heat surged, and the fine sand beneath his feet was scorching hot. The air was filled with dry, searing heat. Distant dunes rose and fell like a frozen ocean, forming a hazy golden line where the horizon met the sky.
This place was at least several hundred kilometers from Rōran.
Ōtsutsuki Isshiki's pupils abruptly contracted.
He whipped his head around and surveyed his surroundings. As far as he could see, there was nothing but desert. There