Sou keeps his eyes locked onto Reino's lifeless body. He mutters softly, "It was a good fight. Pity it ends here."
He turns around and begins to walk away from Reino's corpse, adding, "Now I have to find someone else to fill the void you're leaving behind... ahh, and that is the boring part."
Suddenly, he glances to his right. Row blindsides him, launching a fierce punch straight at him. Sou dodges backward just in time to avoid the brunt of the strike.
Sou whispers, "Good punch... it cracked my bone." With a sickening click, he snaps his bone back into place. Turning his eyes toward Row, he asks, "And who might you be? Hmm... oh, I remember now. You're Row, the fourth leader of ALPHA."
Row, his eyes burning with fury, barks back, "Don't you dare utter my name with those murderous lips of yours!" I will tear you apart for every single drop of blood you spilled today!"
Sou responds mockingly, "Quiet down. Your screams are defiling the silence left behind by a man who fell with honor. If you wish to follow in his footsteps, step forward. But do not expect me to respect you the way I respected your leader."
Row suddenly takes a deep, sharp breath. Instantly, the ground beneath them begins to slick over, making everything slide uncontrollably. Sou stands his ground, watching closely to see how far this will go; he places his hand on a nearby car to stabilize his weight.
Sou: "Good, good... I like this. Fine technique."
Row charges him, delivering a punch cloaked in vibrant yellow energy. He drives his fist straight into Sou's abdomen, blasting him 10 meters backward. Sou catches his balance on the slippery surface; despite sliding, he doesn't fall. Instead, he looks Row dead in the eye and smiles—a smile dripping with pure irony.
Row takes another deep breath. This time, the structures, the cars, and the debris themselves begin to slide, shifting backward along with Sou. Row closes the distance and fires a five-punch combination at Sou's torso. Sou blocks each strike, shouting at the top of his lungs, "Good punches! I'm actually starting to enjoy myself with you, hahaha!"
With blur-like agility, Row scales a nearby building. He quickly maneuvers, leaping to the adjacent structure on the right, maintaining a frantic pace.
Sou, tracking Row's rapid movements as he darts left, right, and behind him, scoffs: "Trying to make me dizzy? How ridiculous..."
But before he can even register the trajectory, Row blitzes him, landing a devastating, energy-clad kick directly to his stomach. Sou is launched violently into a storefront, losing his balance entirely as he crashes through the window glass, tumbling hard back onto the asphalt below.
Sou stands up and mutters, "Good... very good." He tracks Row, who is already closing the distance with a flurry of punches. Row aims a strike at his stomach, but Sou catches it with his right hand. Row instantly fires a left hook toward his face, but Sou deflects it with his left, forcing a brutal headbutt square onto Row's forehead.
Row stumbles back, snapping in frustration: "Did you think you were done with us just because you took down one leader? You are so naive! No matter how hard you try, you cannot dismantle ALPHA. You failed in the 'War of Slash,' and you will fail now!"
Sou smiles calmly. "I don't want to dismantle ALPHA..." Row freezes, staring at him in utter shock, failing to grasp his meaning.
Sou continues, his expression turning deathly serious and incredibly creepy: "I want to slaughter every last one of you."
Before Row can move, Sou drives an energy-infused fist straight into the center of Row's abdomen. The orange plasma aura erupts around his frame, blasting the kinetic force outward. Row coughs up a spray of blood and is sent hurtling backward at a violent velocity, crashing hard into a concrete wall.
(Lighter Flash Ninjutsu Technique)
Sou slips his hands into his pockets and casually walks over to Row, who lies on the ground, drifting out of consciousness. Leaning down, Sou grabs him by the hair and whispers, "Good effort. You know, I figured out how your ability works. Whenever you take a breath, you swallow the ground's latent energy and convert the surface to frictionless space. Clever."
"I heard you screaming about my failure," Sou sneers. "It was just a loud, desperate attempt to mask your own incompetence. Look at you: your leader is broken on the floor, and you're right beside him. In the end, your history isn't written with victories—it's written with failures. How utterly ridiculous you all are."
"Row slowly opens his eyes, locking them straight into Sou's." He swings his legs to deliver a low kick, but the strike is so weak that Sou doesn't even budge.
Sou sneers, "I can't bear to look at weaklings like you any longer..."
Row responds, "You're right, you can't bear to see how weak I am... and I can't bear to watch how you're about to die right now!"
Surging with sudden movement, Row grabs Sou's leg and instantaneously activates opposite pain. Reversing the flow, he transfers all of his own agonizing pain directly into Sou's leg. Sou shifts in pure shock, attempting to break free, but Row drives a sharp kick right into the pain-loaded leg, sending Sou crashing to the ground, buckling under the sheer intensity of the agony.
As Sou struggles to stand, Row cuts him off, snarling: "Apologies for not mentioning that my ultimate strategic weapon is the Lighter Flash!"
He buries a heavy fist into Sou's abdomen, unleashing a burst of yellow energy. Within the same second, a second brutal Lighter Flash connects, followed immediately by a third, aimed straight at Sou's heart. Channeling every ounce of his remaining energy into his leg, Row drives a devastating kick into Sou's right leg—a strike so savage it tears through skin, snaps the bone, and severs the nerves completely.
Just as Sou thinks the onslaught is over, Row delivers his final, most catastrophic blow. Operating at a blistering speed exceeding 900 km per minute, he drives a colossal punch right into the center of Sou's face, fracturing his skull and sending him hurtling meters away through the air.
GROUND SLAM Technique (From Row's innate ability: SLICK DRAIN)
Sou, having taken such a catastrophic hit, can barely move. He mutters in sheer disbelief, "How is this possible? How could he deploy the Lighter Flash technique so many times? "I've never seen anything like this... not even the most powerful sorcerer has ever achieved it."
He turns his head toward the spot where Reino's corpse should have been, intending to transfer his pain onto it. But he freezes dead in his tracks. He stares at the empty ground. "How... how? Where did he go?"
Suddenly, a massive wave of raw energy erupts throughout the area, paralyzing Sou instantly. A crushing pressure and primal fear grip his soul. Before he can react, a colossal punch from Reino connects, a voice whispering to him in that exact fraction of a second: "How?" Sou is blasted away, crashing violently onto the asphalt.
Reino lets out a chilling, maniacal laugh driven by absolute will. Spreading his arms wide beneath the moon, he screams in total madness, "I have reached the limit! Limits that no human has ever touched before! This is the ultimate power that no one else could reach!"
Sou is paralyzed with shock; his leg has completely given up on him. Row stands frozen as well, utterly stunned by the spectacle.
Sou: "Impossible... you're dead!" Reino responds with an expression of pure insanity, "Yes, I was dead!" He snaps his fingers, and the Devil of Existence instantly manifests, unleashing a violent gale of kinetic energy.
Sou screams, "Shut your mouth!" Every word you speak is like a nail driven into my skull!"
Reino laughs wildly. "The Devil of Existence saved me! He used the Refresh Soul ability to pull my soul right out of my dying flesh! He claimed it!" He begins to laugh even harder, barking like a lunatic as he shouts at the top of his lungs: "But I took control of the Devil of Existence himself! I AM THE DEVIL OF EXISTENCE!"
Sou Lisou remains completely frozen, the very blood in his veins turning to ice under the sheer pressure of Reino's energy.
Reino whispers with a sinister smile:
"Universe Zone: THE EXISTENCE LIFE OF SPREAD SPACE! "
Instantly, all the lights snap out. A catastrophic gale sweeps across the entire city of Tokyo. A 200-meter radius around them is plunged into pitch-black darkness.
From deep within the distance, Lisou's voice echoed like thunder:
"UNIVERSE ZONE: THE TURBO TIMELINE OF PLANET WARP!"
A catastrophic shockwave strikes the area across a 1000-meter radius, shattering every glass window in sight. Faction members freeze instantly; not a soul can budge beneath the crushing pressure. Miles away, Clara gazes at the city center, which has been completely plunged into darkness. She snorts mockingly. "I hope you don't die, Tasaku... Time for me to go find that white-haired idiot who vanished."
High above the skyline, two cosmic dimensions violently clash, generating two massive, surging waves of energy that collide head-on. As the boundaries of the two spaces touch, the very fabric of the air tears open. A piercing, deafening screech erupts from the epicenters. The entire battlefield transforms into a blinding display of white and orange light. Neither opponent yields, the pressure growing so savage and immense that everything grinds to a halt.
Reino's pristine white wave of energy pierces deep inside the enemy's orange tide. Even though the orange plasma encircles it, Reino's white energy inflicts devastating internal damage, destabilizing the core structure of the enemy's dimension, while the orange wave retaliates, tearing frantically to the left and right.
Reino screams through the tempest at Lisou, "You're the one who wanted us to take it this far!"
Lisou shouts back from across the void, "Don't you dare think we're done yet!"
The clash begins with the violent friction of two opposing worlds struggling to occupy the exact same coordinate at the exact same time. On one side, absolute pressure erupts, filling the field with crashing buildings, cars, and consuming flora that swallow everything in their path. On the other, a blinding white beam pierces the dark, forging a massive energy crest with a 400-meter radius. The right flank turns pure white, while the left bleeds entirely orange.
The violent contact between the two UNIVERSE triggers absolute devastation as their foundational structures collide. A profound WHITE light crashes against the intense ORANGE energy.
Reino roars, his voice cutting through the raging gales. "Look around you! The world is fracturing just because we are flexing our power! Isn't it beautiful? I almost feel guilty for not letting you die sooner, just so you could live to witness this sight!"
Lisou fires back, "Guilt? Save it for yourself! Where we stand now, logic is already dead!" With those words, he completely vanishes from sight.
The pressure spikes to such an extreme that space itself visibly warps and distorts. The earth trembles, ears ring from the deafening frequency of the energy, and the entire environment—trees, flowers, concrete streets, skyscrapers, everything—shatters into a thousand fragments from the continuous shockwaves.