Chapter 33

Chapter 33

"Now then—MASS MEDIA!! The moment we've all been waiting for, the final showdown!!" Present Mic's rock-and-roll voice rang out.

This sentence, together with the torches at the four corners of the cement platform, ignited the entire venue, sending the audience into a frenzy.

"With flawless skills and a path of sheer dominance to the finals—the explosive villain-faced Bakugo!!"

The person named didn't change his expression.

"VS—"

"Equally pushing the limits of power with each round! Our unfathomable black-flame swordswoman—Aizawa Kirisame!!"

When the term "black-flame swordswoman" was uttered, Mina Ashido in the stands swore on Aoyama's name that she heard the gleeful schadenfreude of Monoma from the neighboring class.

"Heaven shows no mercy~"

The black-flame swordswoman, Kirisame, bore the gaze of the entire Sports Festival crowd, desperately wanting to bury her face.

Struggling to appear composed, the girl focused her gaze on her opponent.

The effects of the previous match still lingered; he wasn't smiling anymore, most of his face hidden in the shadow of his lowered head, revealing only those familiar crimson eyes.

Kirisame knew exactly what he meant.

—He was reminding her of the promise she'd made.

He really didn't have to worry so much.

Black flames erupted from her hand, surging from the blade to the tip, the pitch-black fire casting a fierce glow, making the cold golden gleam in her eyes all the more striking. The girl smiled at her opponent across the arena.

This was the first time she wanted to respond to someone this way.

"Now then—"

"START!"

Boom—

The flames and shockwaves roared forward as if snapping at the heels of Present Mic's words, swallowing the girl in the middle of the arena in an instant.

"Bakugo!!! Launching a fierce assault right from the start!!"

Katsuki Bakugo, having unleashed that blast, didn't pause at all. He ducked low, and the black flash of her blade tore through the smoke and dust, grazing just past his lowered head.

Aizawa Kirisame wielded two blades. The first swing missed, but she spun and swung the second one down, the sword moved so fast the flames couldn't keep up, leaving two half-moon arcs of black fire in the air.

"Damn, these two are going at it this hard?!" Kaminari's eyes were about to pop out.

Yes, ferocity.

From the very start, this battle radiated ferocity.

Unlike Shoto Todoroki's flashy and overwhelming Quirk, or Midoriya's strategic style, Aizawa Kirisame and Katsuki Bakugo were the pinnacle of technique in their class.

Attack speed, evasion posture, movement patterns, when and to what extent to use their Quirks, the subtlety of their aim—in every public spar, they surpassed their previous records.

Since the USJ incident, large-scale combat training had become rare in their class. Everyone knew these two had been training, but no one realized they had come to understand each other to this degree.

—This was the kind of mutual understanding that, even with no holds barred, they knew the other would always be able to handle it.

After the initial lightning-fast exchange of probing attacks, the warm-up was over.

Dodging another of Bakugo's blasts, Kirisame leaped and planted her feet on his outstretched arm, still extended from a close-range explosion. Her waist bent at an impossible angle as she swung a blade at his back, her black hair brushing his cheek in a move like a backward arch.

Evasion was a skill—especially when stamina was limited.

When to dodge, how far to dodge, and what posture to adopt to facilitate the next attack?

Bakugo couldn't see the blade aimed at his back, but those with sharp eyes in the stands saw it clearly.

...This was a technique Kirisame had almost never used against a classmate in real combat.

One of her twin blades vanished into thin air as she let it go, and the other, held with both hands, swept horizontally, leaving a sharp arc in its afterimage.

—Then, just as it was about to touch Bakugo's back, it abruptly transformed into another blade.

The seamless switch yielded two nearly identical blades, except the latter was slightly longer.

Midoriya drew a sharp breath.

If that precision-focused counter-dodge technique landed, Katsu's lower back would definitely be sliced open!

"Are they insane?!" Iida cried out.

[No.]

In that calm golden gaze, there was no trace of superfluous emotion. The girl cut halfway through her swing, already poised to retreat.

—Danger, danger, danger, danger!!!

Almost instantly, a jolt shot from Bakugo's tailbone to the top of his head. The chill on one side of his lower back, even through the fabric, raised goosebumps on his skin.

The blade tip had already grazed the side of his gym uniform.

His body screamed warnings. In the fraction of a second before the blade edge scraped across, he abandoned his half-finished dodge, instead keeping his back to Kirisame and reaching awkwardly backward.

[He can dodge it.]

Boom—

The blast wave erupted just in time, partially counteracting the sword's momentum. Bakugo was thrown forward by the recoil, rolling twice before spinning to the side.

Where he had just rolled, a deep cut marred the ground.

"Hey, hey, hey! What insane reflexes, Bakugo!! But both of you, be careful!"

"How is that possible?!" Bakugo, who had narrowly escaped being slashed across the back, stared in disbelief at the tear in his uniform. That strike should have created enough distance!! How could she still hit me?!

The smoke cleared, revealing the girl hovering in the air, twin blades in hand, serene.

"I promised you." Kirisame raised Tsurumaru Kuninaga in her grip, its tip pointing toward his neck from afar. "This is everything I've got."

She had once asked Bakugo, during a pre-Sports Festival fight, why she could never fly steadily.

From Kirisame's perspective, Bao Hao's flying method was truly high-difficulty: if one burst of power couldn't connect, control over direction and altitude would become very unsatisfactory.

But he always seemed to adapt to it well.

By then, they had already fought quite a few times. She didn't know how many times he had practiced privately, but Bao Hao had gone from having no ability to withstand her attacks at the start to a point where, in normal combat, he could trade blows with Kirisame on equal footing.

Unlike Kirisame, who had trained out of sheer instinct to avoid being killed by others, this classmate of hers seemed born for battle. Aside from lacking experience, his basic physical abilities and combat awareness were flawless.

Back when Qing Guang and Yasusada were still swords, they had taught Kirisame some Tenryu Shinryu for a while, but the results were always less than satisfactory. In Yasusada's words, Kirisame's sword was fast enough and sharp enough, and her skills were gradually maturing through years of practice, but it was not a sword that could secure victory.

Regardless of skill level, Kirisame was always missing something compared to a true swordsman. This slight gap might not matter much against opponents of vastly different strength, but it would inevitably come to heavily influence her battles against others.

Not long ago, when Yasusada insisted on telling Kirisame this through the excruciating pain of Qing Guang stomping on his feet, the first person that came to Kirisame's mind was her frequent sparring partner.

...For some reason, but she always felt that, setting aside his irritable personality, that guy would probably meet Yasusada's standards.

And the answer that person—the one who "had what she lacked"—gave her at the time was—

Go watch Midoriya.

...Of all people, he told her to watch Midoriya.

In the few months since school started, in Kirisame's memory, Bao Hao's normal way of looking at Midoriya was out of the corner of his eye. Back when she wasn't familiar with Bao Hao, Kirisame had genuinely asked Midoriya if he needed her to put a bag over his head and beat him up.

The mix of panic and surprise on Midoriya's face at the time was something Kirisame still remembered.

Sure enough, it was a bafflingly strange relationship.

But during Midoriya's match against Todoroki, Kirisame suddenly understood what Bao Hao meant.

It was at the moment that freckled boy, with his already completely wrecked right hand, fired off another Smash.

That punch shattered not just Todoroki's ice, but also something inside Kirisame.

Izuku Midoriya had a mediocre physique, poor close-combat skills, and the use of his Quirk was clumsy, dealing more damage to himself than to his opponent.

—But he trusted the power in his own hands more than anyone else.

Even though using it brought him unbearable pain and unknown effects on his body every single time, he never hesitated because of it.

The pain of summoning Tsurumaru Kuninaga every time had not left Kirisame unscathed—the constant physical pain, the vague fear of unknown aftereffects, a power of unclear origin, a strange doctor who had taken her blood... all of these heavy, unsolvable burdens had long been weighing on her heart, making this sword an unconscious vessel for all those unplaceable negative emotions.

Using it hurt and scared her.

But she was forced to force herself to use it.

The transmission of power was closely tied to the wielder's will, and as a sword that was extremely difficult to control in itself, a flickering, faint flame was not enough to ignite this Tsurumaru Kuninaga.

And Kirisame had never seen her own weakness.

Now she understood.

...That seemingly irritable Bao Hao probably didn't know it himself, but he was surprisingly gentle when it came to occasionally helping his sparring partner.

"Sorry, Mr. He Wan, it's been my fault all along," the girl said to her sword in her heart.

She must have used the sword that could increase her weight to stabilize her body and then flew over when the blast wave came...

Katsuki Bakugo squinted, revealing his first smile since the match with Todoroki ended.

...Though it still didn't look very friendly.

"Can you handle it?"

"I've been waiting for this day for a long time! Bring it on!!"

Both figures rose into the air simultaneously. The tail of black fire and the red glow of explosions intertwined, chasing each other within the circumference of the stadium, constantly clashing and separating like fireworks bursting in the sky.

The girl's movements were dizzyingly fast and varied. The swords in her hands were like magic—appearing, switching, and disappearing: short swords, long swords, dual swords, single swords, fists, legs, elbows, wrists. The cold gleam of the blade was hidden in a straight punch, but when it came to the eye, it suddenly lengthened. After dodging an explosion with a flash of an afterimage, the tip of a spear broke through the smoke, sweeping with a whistling wind into Bao Hao's knee.

Katsuki Bakugo had never been so acutely aware of just how strong a serious Aizawa Kirisame was.

The first time he met this bastard, those two sword strikes had come out of nowhere, shattering the things that had trapped him, along with his long-held self-perception.

He trembled with anger at the fear he had felt in that moment.

—Such a self was not worthy of claiming to surpass All Might.

He had to wash away the self that was helpless when trapped by sludge, the self whose scalp had gone numb from the fear of a peer's sword, the self that was brought down by Deku's exploitation of his weakness—

He would become number one from here!!!

Defeat her, defeat her, defeat her!!

Without the help of support gear, the continuous high-intensity explosions made the boy's hands tremble uncontrollably, clenched fiercely by their owner.

The pent-up frustration from the match against Todoroki had now vanished completely. Right now, he was quite exhilarated!

"Yeah... that's it!" the boy roared as he charged again.

"Are these two really students?! This is already professional level!!" The audience, who had been holding their breath from the earlier movements and finally found a chance to speak out, couldn't remember how many times they had been left speechless that day: "The Yuei Sports Festival really lives up to its name..."

"Those two... seem to be venting their emotions..." Iida had already returned. Kirishima looked up at the spot in the air where they collided and exploded again, lost in thought.

"Can this work? I think this has already gone far beyond the scope of a sports festival... They'll lose control and hurt themselves, won't they?" That was B-class's Kendo.

"We probably don't need to worry too much about that," Shota Aizawa said, forcing himself to keep his eyes on the point where their fists and feet connected in the air, answering a similar question from Mic. "Those two are still maintaining a subtle calmness in some areas..."

Look, Klaus, see how crazy your kid gets when she's like this...

The homeroom teacher was obviously worried to death, but he vaguely knew that both of them were going through an extremely important moment right now. He couldn't bear to interrupt, so he could only stare at them unblinkingly, ready to erase their Quirks at any moment.

...Troublesome brats, your teacher's eyes aren't healed yet.

The turning point came the moment Bao Hao grabbed Kirisame's wrist, the one holding Tsurumaru.

This was the result of enduring a strike from the back of the blade.

"Aside from that one you can send flying, your swords only work when you're holding them, right? Every time you use a particular sword, there's a pattern in your eyes, isn't there?"

...To think he had observed to this extent?!

"That pattern—like a certain character—is used for acceleration. The flower one creates illusions," Katsuki Bakugo tightened his grip on Kirisame's right wrist. "By that logic, normally you can use at most two swords at a time. When a sword leaves your hand, its ability disappears too."

"Even though you keep switching hands and the flames block my view of which one, the pattern doesn't lie, right?"

He bared a ferocious grin and twisted her arm with force!

"Then the one on your right now—that's the one you use to stay airborne, isn't it?!"

The force of that move almost snapped Kirisame's wrist, and the close-range explosion, along with the intense pain, made it impossible for the girl to maintain her grip. Tsurumaru Kuninaga vanished from her hand almost instantly, and losing her anchor, Kirisame plummeted straight down.

Even if her swords appeared and disappeared at lightning speed, after this long, there was bound to be a split-second pause. Then—

The boy midair aimed both hands at Kirisame, who was suddenly weightless and defenseless, and sparks began gathering in his palms:

"Howitzer—Big Blast!!!"

It was the exact same move he used against Todoroki, and even more powerful than before.

Spiraling flames and a massive shockwave like a hurricane burst from the boy's palms, engulfing the girl falling through midair.

Heat waves and smoke, roaring explosions, a burning smile with eyes raised at ninety degrees and an unyielding spirit, fatigue, pain, scorching, dizziness, unwillingness, confusion, anger, fear, caught off guard, a blank slate—

—A pounding heartbeat.

One, two, three, four.

Throb after throb, deafeningly loud inside the hollow shell of her body.

—What should I do?

—What do I want to do?

"!!!!!"

Since the attack was made from the air toward the ground, Cementoss couldn't even cushion the impact in time.

Nearly half of the audience in the stands stood up.

"This is gonna kill someone!!!" Mineta was about to break down.

"No," Tokoyami said, staring at the arena thoughtfully.

He... could have sworn he saw the red letters from the entrance exam again.

Maximum firepower

Unprotected

Almost point-blank direct hit

...It should work, right?

The boy withdrew his hands and slowly landed on the ground, but he didn't let down his guard.

...That guy is too strong. Can't let my guard down.

Just as Bakugo touched the ground, a tiny white light appeared in the center of the smoke, right in front of everyone's worried gaze.

Then, in the same way, a hurricane-like vortex sprang from the white light, spiraling outward and sweeping away all the black smoke with overwhelming force. The gale blew everyone back into their seats.

Those who managed to pry their eyes open in the violent, suffocating wind all saw the blood-red characters floating in the sky.

The red light flashed for only an instant.

[Blood Combat Art]

[Blade God]

[Blade Body Ninety-Nine]

[Absolute—]

"Stay Away Shield!!!"

As the smoke cleared, the girl at the storm's center held a sword in each hand, with another clenched between her teeth.

"No, no, no—I'm never using this again..."

Never having tried the legendary Three-Sword Style before, Kirisame, with Otenta in her left hand, Okurikara in her right, and Yamabukikiri in her mouth, mumbled her regrets incoherently.

Drool dripped down her chin.

A deep sense of world-weariness radiated from her, and at that moment, the girl's face clearly said, "Leave me alone."

"..."

"Pfft—"

No one knew who started it, but laughter erupted sporadically in the stadium, eventually swelling into a chorus.

Uraraka had nearly been scared to tears moments ago, and her expression now perfectly showed tears turning to laughter: "Kirisame really is something!!"

...I knew this guy wouldn't go down so easily—

Bakugo, who had almost been blown off the stage, gritted his teeth so hard they almost cracked. He flipped back to create distance between them, crouching cautiously, cradling his hand, now too painful to clench.

Kirisame's arms were trembling as well.

The new move she had used for the first time had nearly drained her of blood. Her wrist, caught in the close-range explosion, was charred and severely sprained. But even so—

He charged again.

The girl clenched her teeth, a ferocious smile, identical to Bakugo's, spread across her face—

The flame burning in her heart suddenly flared up.

—What was I missing?

The answer that had been vague all along now came into focus in the expression of the boy—bruised, battered, on the verge of collapse, yet gritting his teeth and charging forward.

...It was a certain passion.

A pure, reckless hunger for victory!

"Most of my swords truly can't exist away from me," the girl answered, out of breath, her voice coming in gasps as she leaped to dodge Bakugo's habitual "right hook" that he unconsciously used in desperation. "But sometimes there are exceptions—"

Another explosion rang out!

For two people with such fast reflexes, the smoke didn't really pose an obstacle. But this time, in the smoke, Katsuki Bakugo found that he had lost sight of Aizawa Kirisame.

Another flash pierced the smoke—a katana, Oshigiri Hasebe, spinning past Bakugo.

The boy dodged, then realized something was off.

—She's created distance!

Why is she creating distance?! What is she planning?!

The boy propelled himself forward with an explosion, ready to charge—

A hail of bullets stopped him, thunderous and scattered yet precise, landing at his feet.

A katana, Okurikara Yoshimitsu—a very peculiar blade. Whenever Kirisame wielded it, she could produce a gun.

...But it never hit, as if the bullets deliberately avoided anyone.

That didn't matter, though.

With one hand disabled, operating a weapon with one hand always takes a little time, and the sound of bullets hitting the ground successfully blocked him for a second.

—Under the ironclad rule that almost all blades "must be in contact to exist," there were a few exceptions.

Consider Hasebe and Kikkō, for example. And also this one, now held high by the girl in her single hand.

—When wielding the tachi Ichigo Hitofuri:

The wind swept past, and the boy's silhouette, frozen in the smoke, gradually became clear.

One katana, two wakizashi, and twelve tanto.

Fifteen blades of varying lengths now float at his side, almost all aimed at his vital points, their tips gleaming with a cold light.

—All fifteen blades from the Awataguchi clan, awaiting orders.

"I win."