[CLANG!]

[His hand struck from beneath his jacket, a short blade slicked with toxin driving straight for your throat. You drew Asakirimaru in the same heartbeat, the short sword clearing its hiding place just in time.]

[Credit where it was due. The man’s combat experience ran deep. The vicious angle of his attack and reaction speed rivaling a Grade 1 Jujutsu Sorcerer.]

[Under the crushing differential in raw power and speed, your blade deflected his poisoned edge at a wicked angle, and in the same motion, the pommel of your sword hammered into his carotid artery.]

[The impact launched him like a ragdoll. His body slammed into the stainless steel wall hard enough to make the entire elevator shudder and sway on its cables.]

["P-please... spare me! I... I didn’t want this! I only took this assassination contract because I needed money for my mother’s medical bills! She’s dying! Please, I’m begging you..."]

[You looked down at him. There was nothing in your eyes. Not anger, not pity. The gaze of someone examining a corpse.]

[Not only because of what he’d said moments ago, that chilling dismissal of human life. The real tell was physical. The feedback from the blade. The volume of blood. Something was deeply, fundamentally wrong.]

[But when Asakirimaru’s edge bit into his neck, the sensation transmitted back through the handle was grotesque in its wrongness. It felt not like cleaving flesh, but like striking the face of a mountain. The force had been absorbed. Negated by something invisible.]

[Only one thing could produce results that defied physics this thoroughly: his Innate Technique, whatever it was, had shielded him.]

[And you were right.]

He’d realized with sickening clarity that the baby-faced student standing over him had just overwhelmed him through pure physical force and martial technique alone, without activating a single Cursed Technique. In this cramped space, a contest of close combat would destroy him.]

[So he’d chosen deception. Bait the righteous little sorcerer with a sob story, and the moment sympathy cracked the armor, the second poisoned blade hidden in his sleeve would punch through your chest, clean and silent.]

[The compassion and warmth you carried were reserved, jealously and exclusively, for the innocent.]

[You’d already deduced that his Innate Technique was responsible. But your cold patience had no interest in waiting for Phantom Night Parade to fully decode his Cursed Energy circuits, map the technique’s mechanics, and strip it away. Too slow.]

[You turned your right hand palm-down and opened your fingers. Asakirimaru slipped free with a soft clink, but instead of clattering to the floor, the blade sank straight into the black shadow pooling at your feet and vanished.]

[Behind those downcast eyes, a flash of cunning and murderous elation sparked to life.]

[He screamed with laughter on the inside, convinced you’d swallowed his wretched performance whole.]

[He continued pouring out his pitiful fraud...]

[From the shadow pooling in your right palm, the hand that should have been empty, a weapon materialized.]

[What... is THAT?!]

[Because in the tenth of a second he’d spent frozen, the killing intent behind your black eyes erupted like a dam breaking. You gripped the weapon called the Inverted Spear of Heaven and brought it down in a savage overhead arc, driving through him with the ferocity of a predator that would not stop until its prey was torn apart.]

[Shhhk.]

[His eyes blew wide, bulging from their sockets.]

Disbelief and shock consumed his face.

The technique he’d staked his life on, the absolute defense that had never once failed him, had crumbled like soap foam the instant it touched that grotesque blade.]

[His mouth opened. Blood frothed and poured from his lips in a dark tide.]

[Blood fanned across the elevator in a wide arc. His body seized once, then crumpled to the floor like a rag doll with its strings cut. Dead before he settled.]

[A clear set of data flooded your consciousness. At last, you understood the truth of the technique that had nearly fooled you.]

[While active, it forcibly rewrote the physical and Cursed Energy laws governing any attack directed at his body, imposing an absolute rule of inverted force. The stronger and more lethal an incoming strike, the weaker its actual effect became upon conversion, reduced to little more than a scratch. Conversely, a gentle shove, something with negligible initial force, would be amplified into a blow capable of shattering bones.]

[A deeply deceptive technique. Purpose-built to counter overwhelming force.]

[A shame, then, that today it had run into the Inverted Spear of Heaven, which didn’t care about rules at all.]

[The chime rang out, bright and pleasant. The elevator settled smoothly at the twentieth floor, indicator light glowing.]

You stepped over the spreading pool of crimson and the body sprawled in its center, shoe soles pressing silently into carpet, eyes fixed on the doors as they slid open.]

[You straightened your collar and walked out of the elevator, stride unhurried, heading for the room where the Star Plasma Vessel waited.]