The location of the Scarlet Eyes was already in hand. In Ronin's eyes the Fourth Prince had outlived his usefulness.
Anything that had outlived its usefulness and still carried the potential for disaster was better removed.
Whether killing him triggered some hidden ability no longer mattered. Ending him before the Nen beast fully formed offered the highest chance of making the creature vanish or transfer away with its host.
The fist connected.
The impact did not feel like a human skull. Even the Sharingan's perception failed to catch what happened in that fraction of a second. The nearly complete Nen beast now stood where the prince had been. Tserriednich himself had shifted several meters to the side.
Ronin did not waste time trying to understand the mechanism. The tomoe of his Sharingan spun and locked into the Mangekyō pattern. Amenotokotachi sealed the space around the prince's new position at once.
The beast that had taken the punch had its left half obliterated. The damage did not last. Within a single breath the missing flesh began to reknit. A vertical maw of jagged teeth opened across what roughly corresponded to a chest and abdomen. The overall shape resembled a manta ray more than anything human, with long, branching tendrils extending from its edges. Each tendril ended in a staring eyeball.
While Amenotokotachi held the prince locked, Ronin gathered an enormous mass of chakra in his palm. The energy spun tighter and tighter until it formed a Super Great Ball Rasengan.
Inside the sealed space he felt the chains of Kurapika's middle finger tightening. Kurapika had decided to simply bisect the prince with Chain Jail.
Blood ran from Tserriednich's mouth and nose. In that same instant the Nen beast finished solidifying. The eye-tipped tendrils lashed toward the frozen space, not to attack but to protect. Right now the prince needed protection more than anything else.
Ronin felt the drain on his ocular power increase. The Super Great Ball Rasengan reached completion.
He kept Amenotokotachi active. His suspicion was simple: whatever ability had let the prince evade the first punch involved either time or space. Both would be nullified inside the sealed zone. The Rasengan's only job was to annihilate the sealed space and everything trapped inside it.
The cost to himself might be high. Against a threat as troublesome as Tserriednich, the price was acceptable.
He drove the Super Great Ball Rasengan forward.
It struck the Nen beast first. The creature's body disintegrated on contact, yet the Rasengan itself visibly shrank. A heartbeat later the reduced sphere slammed into the boundary of Amenotokotachi and began forcing its way inside.
Tserriednich's body, already crushed by the tightening chains, showed deep fissures and collapsing sections of bone. As the Rasengan closed in, the chains shattered one link at a time—not from the attack, but because Kurapika deliberately withdrew the ability.
The Super Great Ball Rasengan struck the prince.
Exactly as it had done to the beast, the sphere began erasing Tserriednich's body on contact.
In that final moment intricate curse script flared across the vanishing flesh. The marks were not Ronin's. He recognized the style at once; it did not match the curses Beyond Netero had left in the original timeline.
Was the Fourth Prince not Beyond's son after all?
The question formed and was set aside. Ronin's contingency was already moving. He had never relied on a single layer of seals. The Four Symbols Seal prepared specifically against external interference activated the moment the foreign script appeared.
New curse marks—his own—surfaced on the disintegrating body and began dragging the unknown script inward.
The Nen beast started to reform, larger than before.
Energy absorption?
Ronin's mouth curved slightly.
He did not need to act. A powerful suction bloomed beside him, locked onto the reforming creature. Shizuku had been waiting. She did not charge in with Blinky as a blunt weapon; she simply activated its ability. To her the half-formed Nen beast registered as non-living refuse.
The massive shape stretched and elongated under the vacuum's pull, dragged away from the prince's position.
The Four Symbols Seal finished its work, pulling every scrap of the foreign curse script into the prince's remaining body. The Super Great Ball Rasengan continued until half of Tserriednich had been completely erased.
Only when the prince was gone and Blinky had swallowed the last of the Nen beast did Ronin finally release Amenotokotachi and close his bleeding left eye.
"Is he dead?" Shizuku asked, curious.
"There's one way to be sure." Ronin took a small vial from his coat. Inside lay a severed finger—cut from the prince earlier.
Tserriednich had carried too many secrets. The simplest confirmation of death, in Ronin's view, was Impure World Reincarnation. If the technique succeeded, they would know the prince was truly gone, and the reincarnated soul could be forced to lead them straight to the Scarlet Eyes.
Killing him had always been the backup plan. That was why Ronin had spent the energy to read the memories first. Double insurance.