Chapter 176: Yang, WIN! (Patreon)

Hearing Yang's words, Katahara Sayaka blinked, then nodded with a bright smile.

"Ha ha! So that's how it is! Relaxing with music before a match is a fine method indeed! But since there's no problem, let's all get into position. The match is about to begin!"

Yang nodded at Sayaka's words, but he didn't leave right away. Instead, he turned to Akoya Seishu.

"Don't hold back. Come at me with everything you've got."

Akoya fell silent for a moment, then asked coldly, "You know what that means... Or do you think it'll make me weaker?"

"A bit of both. Drowning in the urge to kill does cost you your rational judgment," Yang said calmly. "But it's the only way I can pin down your reaction speed and prepare."

Akoya Seishu froze for a moment, then quickly grasped Yang's goal. He meant to use Akoya's reflex speed to rehearse the fight against Cammy in advance.

Ordinary people, even ordinary martial artists, couldn't sense anything unusual about Cammy's reaction speed. Or rather, they fixated on her 46 kg frame, which should have been nothing but skin and bone, and on the tremendous impact she could unleash. Even an 80 kg body couldn't necessarily produce that kind of force, let alone one of 46 kg.

But Akoya Seishu wasn't ordinary.

The limit of human reaction speed is roughly 0.1 seconds. Akoya's reflexes had been measured at an astonishing 0.075.

It was precisely this reflex speed that let him, with his sense of self completely abandoned, mesh with Hiyama Shunka and fight in a way that looked almost precognitive.

Because he knew it firsthand, Akoya could tell that the Shadaloo operative called Cammy White had nerve reflexes just as abnormal as his own.

And now... Yang meant to use him to work out, ahead of time, a way to fight Cammy White?

Or maybe it wasn't only about beating Cammy White. Maybe Yang meant to take things a step further and do something more.

The realization brought back everything he had seen of the plan Yang had provided: its proposals, its purpose, its countermeasures against Shadaloo's spiritual power brainwashing...

In the end, Akoya Seishu nodded without a word, then said quietly:

"I understand."

Nearby, Tokita Ohma and the others watched Yang and Akoya murmuring to each other, tilting their heads in mild curiosity.

"Are those two that close?"

Before anyone could say more, Katahara Sayaka had already raised her arm.

As her hand came down, a cry of "Begin!" split the air.

The instant the word fell, Akoya Seishu shot forward at astonishing speed like an arrow off the string. His hulking body blurred into a black afterimage, and his right arm swung, a vicious gale aimed at Yang's throat.

Yang merely raised his right arm slightly and blocked it with ease. But in the next moment, before everyone's eyes, two sprays of blood burst from his shoulder.

"Razor's Edge?!" Yamashita Kazuo cried out. He remembered that was Lihito's signature move.

Lihito clicked his tongue.

"It's nothing alike. My Razor's Edge is done with pure finger strength. That guy must be twisting his arm on impact and cutting with the finger-bone knuckles along the edge of his fist."

"But... bloodletting tactics are completely useless against Yang." A trace of wry helplessness crossed Lihito's face.

He had fought Yang before, and in the two weeks before the Kengan Annihilation Tournament he had been a regular at Yang's restaurant. More precisely, he'd been supplying it. After all, Lihito was still nominally the president of Super Frozen Cold Storage.

And once Nogi Hideki heard that Lihito had connected with Yang, he was more than happy to do some money-losing business.

Yang didn't make much of it, but the daily bento for the lonely elderly, widows and orphans around Old City got a lot more generous.

Because of those weeks, Lihito knew very well that Yang's strength was far more comprehensive than what he'd shown in their fight, or later in the Kengan Annihilation Tournament qualifier.

Just like now. The moment his skin was cut open, the bleeding stopped.

Not only that, an injury of this degree didn't distract Yang in the slightest. On the contrary, his body shuddered and burst out a ring of vital energy.

Struck by the vital energy, the blood shot straight toward Akoya Seishu's eyes: Blinding the Eyes with Blood.

But just as the blood was about to cover his eyes, Akoya twisted sharply aside, then lunged at Yang's thigh like an Abnormal.

A savage gleam flashed in his eyes. His hands clamped around Yang's thigh, ten fingers driving into the muscle, his knuckles creaking from the overexertion.

Using the momentum of his charge, he spun toward Yang's flank, lowered his head, and bit down hard on the outside of Yang's thigh.

It was a vicious bite. As his jaws closed, a beastlike snarl rose from Akoya's throat and blood sprayed everywhere. The sight alone made countless spectators at ringside gasp.

Yet Yang's face showed no pain at all. If anything, it showed only surprise.

Truly the fastest-reacting fighter in Kengan Ashura, wasn't he?

From the moment Yang stopped the bleeding and shook the blood loose in Blinding the Eyes with Blood, through Akoya twisting away, diving in, and tearing with his teeth, Akoya had less than a second to react.

And in that sub-second window, Akoya had acted purely on instinct. He dodged the blood, seized the opening, closed the distance, grappled, and bit.

The pity was that Yang had completed his kiai the moment Akoya pounced. The bite looked bloody, but a closer look revealed that after the initial tearing of the skin, Akoya's teeth couldn't sink a hair deeper into the flesh.

"It's useless," Yang said in a low voice.

With his muscles taut, the skin and fascia of Yang's thigh turned extremely tough and thick under the Golden Flame, like cowhide scorched by a blazing fire. Akoya felt as if he weren't biting human flesh at all, but a slab of hard leather soaked in gelatin.

Neither his hard molars nor his sharp canines could get any purchase. No matter how hard his jaw muscles clenched, he couldn't go in even slightly. The pressure only made the roots of his teeth ache and sent a dull pain through his jawbone.

With that thought, Akoya immediately released his bite and leaned back, dodging a heavy punch smashing down from above. Using the momentum of the backward lean, he twisted and slashed his left arm across Yang's throat.

But this time his luck ran out. Yang's fingers closed around his wrist.

Feeling his wrist caught, Akoya instinctively tried to clench his fist and withdraw. But no luck. Those five fingers were only flesh and blood, yet with the vital energy surging through them, what clamped his wrist didn't feel like a human hand at all. It felt like something harder, like steel.

And that hard touch stirred an odd familiarity in Akoya's mind.

Handcuffs.

As a member of the Violent Martial Arts Riot Squad, Akoya knew this feeling well.

It was the feeling of cuffing one of a criminal's hands, then locking the other to a pillar or railing to restrict his movement and keep himself free to keep fighting.

But this time was clearly different.

Before, Akoya had always been the one cuffing others. This time, he could feel that he was the one being cuffed.

He looked up at Yang. What met his eyes was Yang's dark, cold face.

Then came a plain, unadorned punch. It was so fast that Akoya didn't even register it. Only when the vital energy at the fist's edge touched his skin did his body twist in a nerve-reflex jerk, driven purely by instinct.

The next instant, Yang's fist grazed past Akoya's shoulder, and Akoya abruptly dropped his upper body and wrenched his shoulder blade.

A flash of blood appeared, and Yang drew back his arm.

Not far away, Iori Ichika, who had come along to watch, scratched his head in utter confusion.

"...What just happened? Senior didn't seem to attack, but Yang's body is the one spraying blood?"

A hint of complexity showed on Ichika's face as he spoke.

Akoya Seishu was exactly the Violent Martial Arts Riot Squad senior Ichika worshipped. That ruthless fighting style against evil, that pure violence, was just what he dreamed of becoming someday.

Unfortunately, now his idolized senior was fighting Yang, his good buddy and boss. So Ichika watched with a calm mind.

Hearing Ichika's question, Tenma Nozomi fell silent for a moment, then said gravely:

"No, your senior did attack... It's sabaki."

Sabaki is akin to neutralizing jin (hua jin) and atemi-waza. They aren't identical, but at their core all point to an advanced defensive-counter skill of overcoming hardness with softness and turning an opponent's force against him. It usually means a precise defensive counter that, once successful, dissolves the enemy's attack and creates an opening to strike back.

Only what Akoya was using now wasn't the conventional soft-overcomes-hard. It was pure nerve-reflex work: dodging and absorbing the impact with ukemi at the instant of contact, then borrowing the force of Yang's strike for a counterattack when the chance came.

"If it's anticipation, that's fine..." Tenma Nozomi frowned. "But if it's a subconscious counter... then that instinct is a little too terrifying."

Chun-Li nodded in agreement beside her, and finally understood why Yang had insisted on fighting Akoya Seishu.

If Akoya's own nerve reflexes were enough for near-automatic counters like this, then Cammy White most likely had similar skills.

And unlike the counters A-Yang himself used, shockwaves of blood-energy and rebounding vital energy, this kind of counter, produced by twisting the limbs, could use the bone structure to inflict clear lacerations on the skin. In a fight, that meant continuous bloodletting and drained stamina.

The pity was that this sort of bloodletting attrition had almost no effect on Yang.

Sure enough, with a thought from Yang, the healing effect stopped the bleeding in its own rough fashion. New flesh grew over the severed wound. It wasn't as tough as the rest of him, but it was enough to halt any loss of stamina.

Seeing the familiar scene play out again, a grave look surfaced in Akoya's eyes. Without a word, he strained his upper body to break free of Yang's grip.

But before he could pull his arm loose, Yang yanked it hard and pressed it downward in the same motion.

With a sharp crack, a stab of agony tore through Akoya's shoulder, and the arm was wrenched out of its socket, leaving it without a trace of strength.

Akoya didn't pause. The moment Yang had seized his wrist, Yang's own movement had been restricted too.

As Yang exerted force, Akoya's right arm shot toward Yang's face, fingers spread like an iron net. Yang slipped aside to dodge it.

Undaunted, Akoya grabbed Yang's collar, hauled him close, and drove a ferocious headbutt at him without a word.

Akoya's headbutt came crashing in with a whistle of wind, his forehead gleaming cold and hard under the lights. Yang saw it clearly but did not dodge. Instead, with a surge of vital energy, he threw his own head forward in answer.

The two foreheads collided in midair with a dull boom, like a heavy hammer striking wet earth.

In that instant, Akoya felt as though he'd slammed into cast steel rather than a human skull. A ringing roared through his cranium, his ears filled with a hollow echo, his vision washed white, and a concussion spun out of control. His upper body tipped backward on its own.

Yang gave him no chance to recover.

He clamped down on Akoya's dislocated arm and yanked it hard toward himself.

Akoya's already unbalanced body was dragged in like a puppet on strings and toppled toward Yang. Before his pupils could even refocus, Yang's knee exploded upward.

Vital energy burst out, and a straight knee slammed into his abdomen. With his brain scrambled and his reactions dulled, Akoya had no way to disperse the force. He took the tiger knee head-on, and it lifted him off his feet. In the next instant, Yang released his grip, twisted, and swung his right leg out like a storm.

It was not one strike but a continuous tempest. Yang's right leg lashed out again and again. Before the afterimage of one blow faded, the next kick had already landed on target.

The storm sped up, faster and faster, until it became a fan-shaped blur. Within it, Yang's legs turned into whips, lashing Akoya like a broken boat tossed about on stormy seas. He couldn't block, and he couldn't even manage the most basic ukemi.

The impacts came one after another, like heavy drums pounding. Finally, Yang stomped forward and drew his right leg back to his side, his whole body wound like a fully drawn bow. The Golden Flame erupted, and the last kick left a blazing golden trail in the air like a beam cannon. It blasted Akoya off his feet like a cannonball, carving an arc through the air before he crashed heavily to the ground, eyes vacant, consciousness gone.

Yang, WIN!