The air didn't scream. It tore.
Jintarō Kobayashi's thrown body didn't fly—it carved a black, instantly smoke-filled trench through space. The sound came later: a deafening, layered roar, as if a skyscraper were falling sideways through a forest. Stone spires, fragments of long-dead Colony structures, entire layers of distorted soil—all turned to dust and steam, scattered by his body. He punched through four layers of half-destroyed barriers, passed through a sparking arch of non-existent metal, and slammed into an earthen embankment at the edge of a plateau, raising a fountain of mud and stones a hundred meters high.
And right behind him, not a millisecond behind, came He.
Raiden Inazuma didn't use techniques. He didn't draw his katana. He simply moved. His body, shrouded in a bluish glow of ionized air, was a living projectile breaking physics in its wake. He walked through the same corridor of destruction Jintarō had just carved, and his gaze, full of ancient, jaded fury, was fixed on the impact site.
This pest is annoyingly resilient. Should I just smite him with lightning? Burn his nervous system to ash?
The thought was calm, methodical. For him, this wasn't a battle, but a process of removing an obstacle.
He descended to the edge of the fresh crater now gaping where Kobayashi had landed. Dust still billowed. And from its center, with the quiet rustle of crumbling stones, Jintarō rose.
He was mutilated. His burgundy haori hung in tatters, revealing a chest with an unnatural indentation—the mark of a blow that would have knocked the spirit out of any mortal. His left arm hung limp, clearly with multiple fractures. Blood covered half his face, flowing from a split brow. He breathed raggedly, with a wheeze.
And he smiled.
It wasn't a grimace of pain, not a mask of despair. It was a pure, insane, gambler's smile of a player who had bet everything and watched the roulette wheel make its final turn. In his eyes, usually mocking, now burned two sparks—scarlet and pitch-black, twisting into an infinite spiral like symbols on a gaming table.
Inazuma, seeing this, smirked back. Arrogantly, condescendingly. Very well. Let the pathetic showman perform his final trick. He, who had lived through eras, was curious.
Jintarō, not taking his spiraling gaze off him, reached up with a trembling but tenacious right hand to his neck. Tore something off. Clenched it in his fist. His fingers squeezed so tight his knuckles turned white.
It was a coin. Old, worn, with a hole in the middle through which a string had probably once been threaded. Its gold was dull, almost coppery with age.
The air around Jintarō trembled and hummed. The smell changed—now it smelled of ozone after a lightning strike, of old ink from ledgers, and the dust of centuries. Magical energy, wild and unstructured, erupted from him not in a flash but in a heavy, pulsating eruption. It didn't attack. It proclaimed.
Jintarō's voice, hoarse from damaged lungs, cut through the hum:
"Casino of Heaven's Retribution. Credit Immortality Contract. Account open."
He paused, and the spiral in his eyes spun faster.
"I, Kobayashi Jintarō, purchase four minutes. Four minutes of absolute, indisputable viability. The price will be paid later. The bet is accepted."
The energy condensed around him into a shimmering, translucent cocoon of interwoven glowing lines—the contract's terms written in a language forgotten even before the era of clans.
Inazuma watched, arms crossed. Logic clicked coldly in his head.
Immortal? What nonsense... A Majutsushi's brain generates techniques. So if I chop his head off with my katana right into the brain right now, he'll burn out and kick the bucket... But...
But that's what everyone thought. All those weaklings who fell before him four hundred years before his long sleep. They looked for loopholes, weaknesses, played tactics. And they all lost. Because true power needed no tricks.
That's how weaklings and losers think. Let him do what he wants—I'll finish him off!
Inazuma's smirk widened, turning cunning. He didn't wait. He vanished.
This time—with a katana.
The blue glow concentrated in the blade he drew faster than the eye could see movement. He appeared before Jintarō, and his strike was simple as a law of nature—a vertical cleaving blow from crown to groin.
The blade, moving at a speed followed by a thunderclap, met the cocoon of glowing lines.
And stopped.
Not with a clang. Not with resistance. It simply… ceased moving forward. As if the very concept of "penetration" at that point in space was canceled. Light ripples spread across the cocoon's surface, but it didn't crack.
Inazuma wasn't surprised. He immediately switched attacks. His body became a blur. Dozens, hundreds of blows rained down on Jintarō from all sides—slashing, stabbing, cutting. Each blow was lethal. Each blow should have severed bone, torn flesh, destroyed an organ.
And each time, the blade stopped a centimeter from the target. Jintarō's clothes flapped in the wind, his hair streamed, but not a single new scratch appeared on his skin. His broken arm didn't even twitch. He stood, smiling, inside his bubble of absurd invulnerability, his spiral eyes asking a silent question: Well, ancient one, had enough of the stress test?
The fury smoldering in Inazuma's chest flared. Not from failure. From audacity. From this cheap trick challenging his power.
He leaped back twenty meters, sheathing his katana. His patience had snapped.
And in that moment, Jintarō, as if waiting for his turn, raised his hand clutching the coin. The spiral in his eyes spun at a furious speed.
"Kokurō: Winning Round. The bet is placed. The stake—speed."
He exhaled, and the words sounded like dice clattering on a table:
"'For the next thirty seconds... Inazuma cannot exceed the speed barrier of thirty Mach.' The bet... is on."
The air closed around Inazuma. Not like a chain, but like a change in the very law. He felt it instantly—space became viscous, resistant. His body, accustomed to breaking the sound barrier with the ease of a sigh, now met an invisible, inexorable wall. He could still move with monstrous, inhuman speed—faster than almost any modern Majutsushi. But for him, the Lightning God, it was like being stuck in tar.
For the first time in the entire fight, the smirk vanished from his face. Something else appeared. Deep, chilling irritation. And... a spark of interest.
It was at that moment that Jintarō attacked.
He didn't cast spells. He simply moved. And was in front of Inazuma.
Inazuma, whose reflexes were honed over centuries, instinctively dodged. But he dodged at the speed to which he was now condemned. And Jintarō, whose bet had changed the rules for only one player, moved on his own terms. He was faster.
Jintarō's fist, clenched around the coin, whistled past Inazuma's temple by a centimeter. The ancient Majutsushi felt a breeze on his skin—an insulting, humiliating breeze from a blow he almost missed.
No one... has ever done that before.
The thought flashed through his consciousness, pure and fierce. No one in the four hundred years before his sleep, no one in this pathetic modern world. No one was faster than him. No one.
Fury turned into cold, focused rage. Fine. Let him be faster. But speed isn't skill.
Jintarō lunged in a new attack, his movements sharp, unpredictable, dictated not by a school of swordsmanship but by the instincts of a street gambler and the flow of luck. He swung his arm for a punch.
Inazuma didn't retreat. He took a microscopic, barely noticeable step to the side, letting the fist pass by. In the moment Jintarō was exposed, Inazuma drove his elbow, wrapped in a clump of kinetic energy, into his neck, just below the base of the skull.
A dull, bony crunch sounded. Jintarō's eyes rolled back. His body went limp and collapsed to the ground. Knockout.
Inazuma was already turning away, expecting the stupid contract to dissipate along with its owner's life.
One second later, Jintarō gasped as if surfacing from icy water and jumped to his feet. His neck was straight, his gaze clear again. The "Credit Immortality" technique simply… canceled the consequences. Restored the status quo.
"Whoa, almost lost in the first seconds!" he shouted, his voice holding no pain, only excitement.
The remaining time of the speed restriction turned into a nightmare sparring session for Inazuma. Jintarō darted around him, using his speed advantage, landing blows Inazuma was forced to parry, not evade. But he parried with absolute, inhuman mastery. Every block was perfect, every counterstrike precise.
Nine seconds before the end, Inazuma caught the rhythm. He let a wide swing pass, slipped inside the defense perimeter, knocked Jintarō's arm off balance with a deft wrist movement, and delivered a short, explosive strike with the heel of his palm to the solar plexus, followed by the same elbow to the jaw.
Crunch.
Jintarō collapsed again. And again, a second later, jumped up, shaking himself off like a wet dog. His face was already beaten beyond recognition, but the smile didn't leave his lips.
Inazuma took a step back. Sighed irritably, almost theatrically. He'd had enough of this clowning. Game time was over. Time to end the show.
He took a stance. Not as a fencer, but as a conductor of the elements. His whole body trembled. The blue glow, which had merely enveloped him, thickened, became dense, furious. Living discharges crawled along his arms, neck, face—not just flashes, but structured chains of violet-white electricity tearing the air around him with a quiet, malicious hiss. The smell of ozone grew sharp, acrid.
Inazuma's brain didn't just generate magical energy. It was a control room managing the very nature of electric charge. He could separate, direct, concentrate. At this moment, he made his body an absolute positive pole, concentrating all negative potential at a point before his outstretched palm. The earth, air, matter itself around him strove to restore balance, creating a monstrous potential difference. He didn't need to throw lightning. He simply pointed at the target, and the universe itself rushed to discharge this unnatural polarization through the indicated point. It wasn't a shot. It was an invitation for natural force to strike.
"Enough," Inazuma uttered, and his voice hummed like a taut wire. "Principle of Lightning's Being!"
He extended a hand towards Jintarō, still smiling in his cocoon of invulnerability.
The air between them folded. Then, with a deafening, ear-drum-rupturing CR-A-A-ACK, lightning was born. A thin but monstrously powerful zigzag flash. It struck not at the cocoon. It struck the point where Jintarō stood, swallowing him whole.
The light was so bright it turned everything around into a negative for a moment. The roar shook the Colony's foundations. The earth under Inazuma's feet vaporized, and he now hovered over a growing hemisphere of molten glass and plasma. For several kilometers around, ruins of ancient structures, already damaged, were swept away by the shockwave, turned to dust and slag.
Inazuma slowly lowered his hand. Smoke and steam billowed before him. No cocoon. No body. Only a glowing crater.
39 seconds left on his stupid immortality. But my strike was calculated to annihilate matter. Even if his soul is alive, not an atom remains in this hell to hold it.
But he miscalculated in a way unrelated to magic or power.
The lightning, whose power was meant to vaporize a titan, didn't stop at the target. Passing through the point where Jintarō stood and not meeting sufficient resistance, it continued its path deeper. It burned through the earth, found voids—remnants of an ancient water supply or irrigation system, pipes and channels slumbering under centuries of dust. And tore them open.
First, a strange, gurgling sound came from underground. Then the ground heaved. And water gushed forth. Not a stream, not a flow—an entire underground river, released in an instant, erupted to the surface as a monstrous geyser, which immediately collapsed, turning the scorched plateau into a boiling, rapidly expanding lake of scalding water and steam.
Water.
A conductor. A direct path for residual energy. A direct threat to him, whose power was pure electricity.
For the first time, something besides rage or boredom flickered on Inazuma's face—a momentary, instinctive revulsion towards an opposing element. He wasn't afraid. He simply leaped away. Dozens of meters back, onto a still-intact rocky outcrop now washed by raging waves.
And from this boiling, steam-filled water, onto the opposite shore of the newly formed lake, something charred, smoking, but intact, crawled out.
Jintarō Kobayashi. His cocoon was extinguished, his clothes and part of his skin scorched black. He coughed desperately, spitting out water and soot, his lungs wheezing as they drew in air. Water filling his lungs momentarily overrode even magical stabilization and jolted him out of shock. He was alive. Monstrously maimed, but alive. And "Credit Immortality" still ticked in his eyes—38 seconds.
He raised his head, his burned face contorted into a new, wild grimace—a mix of pain, triumph, and purest, incredible luck. He looked across the boiling water at Inazuma, who stood on the rock like an angry thunder god.
The game wasn't over. It had just shifted to a new, unpredictable level. And both players understood that.