With an earth-shaking explosion, layers of white Mach rings burst in succession in midair.
Grimmjow's figure vanished completely the instant he moved.
His movement had already passed beyond what ordinary sight or even perception could track.
All that remained in the void was the shrill sound of the entire sky being sliced as though by a thousand blades.
Gerard's massive broadsword, burning with pale flames, was still mid-swing, not even a third of the way through its downward arc.
The entire space seemed to plunge into a vacuum scoured madly by hundreds of millions of invisible razors.
There were no sparks from clashing weapons, nor any heavy thuds of fists striking flesh.
In that instant, Gerard's towering divine body, constructed from pure sacred laws, melted and peeled away inch by inch like lingering snow beneath a blazing sun.
His sturdy golden sacred armor disintegrated into dust first, without breaking off a single large fragment.
Next came his tough muscles, gnarled like ancient trees, which were shaved away and vaporized in swathes amid countless crisscrossing streaks of blue-black light.
A section of his arm was carved into nothing within a thousandth of a second, and his broad shoulder blade and breastbone vanished in the blink of an eye.
The arrogant battle helm on Gerard's face did not even have time to register astonishment before his features peeled away and disintegrated.
His mountain-sized body was completely dismantled in midair by sheer, ultra-high-speed slashes.
Countless blue-black storms of bone blades howled and spun, crushing every strand of Reishi fluid that attempted to regenerate.
Not even a full second had elapsed.
Gerard's magnificent, thousand-foot-tall body had been utterly scoured from existence.
At the center of the neatly ravaged space, only a faintly glowing Pure White Cross Core remained suspended in midair.
It was the