Chapter 45: You Can Make a Wooden Sword from the World Tree Too
While Ross reset his Secret Realm access and threw himself entirely into the work of grinding ability experience, sitting in quiet contentment, the outside world of Zevil Island had already broken into open hunting and counter-hunting at multiple points across its surface.
The YYH world patch had seeded Phase 4 with a substantial number of genuine, capable Nen users who had no business being in an ordinary Hunter Exam. Their presence had also shifted the badge draw results significantly from the original distribution, making the overall contest considerably more intense than it would have been.
And this was only the first day of the seven-day window.
Non-targets could not be taken lightly regardless: a non-target badge was worth one point, and for anyone confident in their combat ability, hunting down three non-targets while protecting their own badge was a perfectly clean path to the required six. No need to bother tracking the actual assigned prey.
In a field where most candidates were wary of everyone, the handful of candidates who trusted each other completely and had not drawn each other as targets held a real structural advantage.
Yusuke wasn't opposed to teaming up in principle. He just happened to have walked in the exact opposite direction from Kuwabara from the start and hadn't run into anyone he recognized.
Kuwabara, meanwhile, had followed his instincts to a good spot, waited there, and his target had come to him.
Badge 75: Musashi.
Predictably, Kuwabara had no interest in ambushing anyone.
"Hey! One-eye! Come fight a real man's fight!"
Standing with both legs planted wide on a thick tree branch, Kuwabara announced his presence at full volume.
Musashi's one eye sharpened. He stepped back half a pace, one hand already closing around the grip of the wooden sword at his side, a faint surprise on his face.
Not surprise at Kuwabara's loud entrance. Surprise that he had been found this easily.
Before his Nen awakening, Musashi had developed through personal discipline alone a method of suppressing his presence to a level approaching perfect Zetsu -- technically more refined than Gon's natural animal-like instinct, though similar in effect. After awakening, he had leaned further into that direction. Since landing on the island, he had maintained Zetsu continuously and moved with extreme care. Even the island's wildlife only reacted when he was almost on top of them.
And yet this ugly stranger had found him with no apparent effort.
That was evidence: the other party had already sensed him ahead of time.
Musashi ran through the logical chain quickly. The possibility that the other party was a Nen user now seemed overwhelmingly likely. What he didn't consider was that Kuwabara simply had extremely good instincts and had stumbled onto him by being in the right spot at the right time.
Musashi drew his wooden sword in silence. He knew this fight was unavoidable.
"I heard that sword of yours has some kind of thing going on. What's the story?"
Ross had specifically mentioned Musashi's wooden sword, so Kuwabara was genuinely curious.
"...You want to know?"
Rather than keeping it to himself, Musashi paused and asked the question seriously.
Kuwabara nodded.
"Then I'll tell you."
Perhaps because he was a master of the True Battojutsu school, or perhaps because he simply had a mild teacher's instinct, Musashi started explaining without much prompting.
"This wooden sword was crafted from a branch of a thousand-year-old World Tree, polished to shape with holy water. It is a demon-breaking blade that carries its own protective aura -- a sword for cutting down demons and purging evil.
No demon can walk away from this blade in one piece. And you... will be the first ordinary human to face it."
On those words, Musashi's killing intent and Ten erupted simultaneously across his entire body. He launched off the ground in one motion, wooden sword raised high, and drove a full-force overhead slash directly at Kuwabara still perched on the tree branch.
"Whoa WHOA WHOA WHOA!"
Pure reflex saved Kuwabara -- an extreme backward bend that took the slash just barely wide. The sword tip passed through the air somewhere below his center that made the cold sweat hit immediately. His posture coming down was not graceful.
Musashi had no intention of giving Kuwabara time to recover. As he descended, his aura was already flowing down through his arm into the wooden sword, pouring into a blade that already carried its own charge, amplifying it into something far more concentrated and intense.
From the outside, the technique clearly touched on the advanced applications of Nen -- a specific skill of wrapping aura around an external object to reinforce it, known as Shu.
What Musashi was actually doing, though, was closer to a shortcut: using the resonance with the World Tree sword itself, which was already a special object, to reach something like Shu without full technical mastery of it.
"True Battojutsu Style: Photon Sword!"
The wooden blade -- which carried a special bonus against demons and evil spirits though its enhancement against humans was less certain -- swung again with full force toward Kuwabara.
This time, Kuwabara was ready.
Under Musashi's one-eyed gaze, from the palm of Kuwabara lying flat on his back, a surge of aura erupted upward --
Hmmmm.
"SPIRIT! SWORD!!"
With a sound effect almost indistinguishable from a Jedi lightsaber, the aura sword that Ross had guided into its proper name materialized instantly and intercepted Musashi's strike, which had been aimed squarely at turning every one of Kuwabara's ribs into splinters.
The Spirit Sword was Transmutation type at its core but carried a partial Conjuration characteristic, making it an energy semi-solid. Visible to the naked eye without any advanced technique at all, it looked, when observed directly, like a somewhat rough lightsaber.
The ground behind Kuwabara's back bore a small but noticeable impact crater from the force of the blocked strike. Musashi's force had been real.
The shock on Musashi's face was clear.
The next second, Kuwabara's foot drove upward into Musashi's abdomen with full force, and a move resembling a sacrifice throw took shape. Musashi was launched upward and delivered a live and entirely undignified demonstration of involuntary flight.
He came down hard on his back. The impact shook him enough to pull a cough out.
The source of his sudden vulnerability: when Musashi channeled his aura into the wooden sword and leveraged the resonance to approximate Shu, the aura he would normally maintain wrapped around his own body as Ten had instead concentrated in the sword. He hadn't been able to pull it back easily. The result was a classic glass-cannon state: devastating attack, no defense worth mentioning.
"One-eye! Now you eat one from me!"
A sword-parry-into-sacrifice-throw and Kuwabara was already rolling upright, back on his feet first, pivoting and bringing the Spirit Sword down hard in a full overhead strike.
Kuwabara operated on a simple principle: courtesy for courtesy, fire for fire. Musashi had thrown out the rulebook, so Kuwabara had no reason to hold back.
Which gave him, without planning it, a nearly perfect window.
Musashi genuinely excelled at Zetsu. The downside was that his other technical skills were ordinary at best, and even his finishing move, the Photon Sword, was achieved through borrowed resonance rather than clean technique. The impact to his back had triggered an instinctive defensive impulse, and Nen -- life energy -- in the hands of someone without mature technique follows instinct first. Even though the pain was already past, the aura concentrated in the wooden sword was only now beginning to migrate back through his arm toward his back.
This instinctive redistribution happened at exactly the wrong moment.
Aura flowing back from the wooden sword meant less aura in the blade. Less aura in the blade meant one thing:
The sword lost structural strength.
With the sharp crack characteristic of breaking wood, Musashi's wooden sword -- shaped from a naturally fallen branch of a World Tree seedling and raised to block Kuwabara's furious strike -- snapped clean in two.
The Spirit Sword, still humming like a lightsaber, connected squarely with Musashi's forehead.
Musashi's one eye flared briefly, brilliantly white. Then everything went dark.