A full week had passed since that day. Suzuki had dedicated every waking hour to relentlessly refining his new innate technique, mastering advanced martial arts, and diving deep into the grueling academic studies of physics and high-level mathematics.
"So, are you absolutely sure you want to go back to the estate now?" Mai asked curtly, though the tight lines around her eyes betrayed a deep worry she couldn't completely hide.
Maki remained silent, sitting in the corner steadily polishing the blade of her cursed tool. Her silence spoke volumes; wherever Suzuki decided to go, she would follow.
"I do," Suzuki nodded firmly. "You've seen my power, right?"
His resolve was unshakable. He knew that to truly dismantle the rotten foundation of the Zenin clan, he had to take the head's seat. Remaining a mere clan member—even as the son of the current Head—was functionally useless. It was impossible to enact change from the bottom.
The Zenin clan operated on a brutally simple dogma: the strong devoured the weak. It was a harsh, archaic system, but ironically, it made his path to reform incredibly straightforward. The bigger his fist was, the more his words became absolute law.
Suzuki had many grand ambitions he wanted to achieve in this world, and he absolutely refused to be treated like an outcast anomaly or forced to live by ancient, outdated traditions in a modern society. To rewrite the rules, he had to become the king.
This was his first step. Yet, he was highly aware that his pseudo-King Crimson ability—which he called Frame Deletion—wasn't enough on its own.
Yes, Frame Deletion was terrifyingly powerful. It allowed him to instantly shift from Point A to Point B, deleting the time and space between his movements as if he were teleporting. However, upon arrival, he perfectly retained the physical momentum of his acceleration, allowing him to deliver a strike with the kinetic force of a ballistic missile.
How did that work? It came down to fundamental physics.
F=ma
The basic principle was undeniable: the net force on a body is equal to its mass multiplied by its acceleration. The greater the acceleration, the more devastating the force, even if his mass remained constant. A small pebble lightly tossed by a toddler is harmless, but that exact same pebble hurled by a major league pitcher becomes a lethal weapon.
The true horror of Frame Deletion was that by skipping the process of travel, Suzuki entirely bypassed the physical drawbacks of extreme speed: air resistance and friction.
The primary enemy of any speedster-type fighter is aerodynamic drag. The faster an object moves, the more violently the atmosphere resists it. If a human accelerates too quickly, friction will literally incinerate them like a meteor burning up upon atmospheric reentry.
This was the exact biological limitation his father, Naobito, and his older brother, Naoya, faced with their Projection Sorcery. They could accelerate endlessly in theory, but they didn't dare cross a certain speed threshold, lest the air friction burn their flesh to ash. In fact, in the original timeline, Naoya literally had to die and mutate into a Cursed Spirit shaped like a jet-turbine just to survive the aerodynamic drag of his own top speed.
Suzuki's Frame Deletion bypassed this hurdle entirely. Since the physical process of moving was deleted, friction didn't exist during transit. He simply manifested at his destination, instantly carrying the momentum of moving at Mach speeds.
However, Newton's Third Law remained a harsh reality. His fist, which he used to deliver these supersonic strikes, was still made of mortal bone, skin, and muscle. Even when heavily reinforced with Cursed Energy, the physical blowback of a Mach-speed impact would instantly shatter his arm into a bloody mist.
A standard shounen protagonist would just scream, rely on "guts," and magically force the world to bend to their willpower. But Suzuki was a man of cold logic. Fighting the laws of physics was exhausting and self-destructive. It simply didn't suit his style.
Instead of breaking the rules, he wanted to harness, control, and manipulate them—just as Satoru Gojo manipulated the mathematical concept of Zeno's Paradox ("Achilles and the Tortoise") to create his impenetrable Infinity.
Well, that's enough theory for now, Suzuki thought.
While he possessed the intellect to easily earn a PhD in physics from Tokyo University, he was highly aware of his own biological limits. Unlike Gojo, who possessed the Six Eyes—a genetic cheat code that allowed his brain to process atomic-level calculations with zero mental fatigue—Suzuki had regular human eyes. Manually calculating hyper-advanced physics equations mid-combat was a migraine-inducing nightmare.
That was exactly why the Manager was his ultimate trump card. The AI perfectly automated all the complex, high-level calculations in the background. All Suzuki had to do was issue a mental command, and the Manager flawlessly executed the math, allowing him to effortlessly spam his technique.
Still, Frame Deletion was ultimately a mobility and utility technique. His body wasn't forged from carbon-carbon composites, graphite-epoxy, or aerospace ceramics like an actual military missile. (Wait, humans are carbon-based too, right? Well, a missile's carbon matrix is vastly different from human bone, obviously.)
Regardless of the physics, Maki and Mai couldn't help but worry. Taking over the Zenin clan meant a single teenager going up against an entire army of elite, ruthless sorcerers. Could one man really topple the strongest Sorcerer Clan in the country alone?
Maki stood up in silence, gripping her cursed tool tightly.
Mai stepped forward, handing him the specific item he had asked her to forge using her Construction cursed technique. "Here. The weapon you asked for."
"Thanks, Mai," Suzuki smiled, accepting the heavy object.
Since his fragile human hands couldn't survive delivering a Mach-speed punch, he needed an intermediary conductor to absorb and transfer the kinetic force. He looked down at his new weapon: a dense, perfectly forged Tungsten spike.