Tokunosuke, who had been at the epicenter of the explosion, was sent flying by the blast.
A momentary blankness filled his thoughts. To bridge that gap, his honed senses jolted his fading consciousness back to life. He woke up just as he was about to tumble off the deck, managing to cling to the floor.
If all the Nen Bird Bombs had detonated at once, even fortifying himself with full-power KEN would not have saved him from death. Just before the explosion, he had drained the aura from the paper models to suppress the power of the Nen Bird Bombs.
Even so, he couldn't completely kill the momentum. The aura drainage hadn't been fast enough, and the explosion couldn't be stopped. He had sustained heavy injuries across his entire body; it was easier to search for parts of him that were unharmed than those that were wounded.
His aura alone was excessively abundant, but that wasn't exactly a good thing. It was the side effect of draining too much aura at once.
The human body has a vessel for storing aura. The maximum amount of aura that can fit into that vessel is called the MAX AURA POINT, or MOP. In Tokunosuke's case, trying to take in an amount of aura exceeding his MOP from his paper models would usually be pointless, as it would simply leak out of his body. Under normal circumstances, he would never do such a thing, but he had been forced into a situation where he had no choice.
As aura levels several times higher than his MOP surged through his body, he fell into a state of over-supply, causing his physical condition to deteriorate. Suppressing the nausea that felt as though he might vomit up his very internal organs, he glared at his enemy.
"Damn it! Damn it, damn it, damn it, damn it all! How dare you... my arms! I'll never forgive you...!"
The rage of Tsukuteku, whose arms—the lifeblood of a craftsman—had been severed, was immeasurable. Between that emotion and the intense pain, his aura was wildly turbulent. With his aura refined in such a way, his output was unstable and hardly suitable for combat, but his fighting style relied on DIVINE SCRIPT techniques. As long as the formula itself was not flawed, the effect remained constant. And no matter how much he was consumed by rage, his skill in carving the formulas remained perfect.
His severed arms were held in place by air splints and the bleeding had been stopped. To an onlooker, they appeared attached, but they were merely fixed in place and far from being functional. Even so, his hands moved with fluid grace to draw characters. By flowing aura into pre-carved formulas, he could execute programs with the precision of a robot.
As he flicked his fingers like an orchestral conductor, the air vibrated in synchronization. A mass of howling wind condensed into a single point.
"FLY!"
The pressure of the condensed air was released all at once. That energy surged toward Tokunosuke. What Tsukuteku had created was a 'Cannon.' An air cannon firing an air shell. Driven by atmospheric pressure, the projectile lunged forward, but Tokunosuke managed to dodge it at the last second.
However, the shell did not simply pass Tokunosuke; it exploded right before him. The shell itself was packed with compressed air. Battered by the raging storm, Tokunosuke's body was tossed into the air. He desperately hooked his fingers onto the edge of the deck, halting his fall. He gripped the precipice with enough force to peel off his fingernails. If he hadn't, he would have been swept away by the wind.
Tsukuteku moved his hands as if stroking the air. With a flicking motion, the air cannon formula he had drawn earlier split into several copies. The copy-pasted formulas lined up in a row. In an instant, ten cannons were constructed.
Though Tsukuteku was driven by rage, he was even more wary of his enemy's combat prowess. He would no longer approach recklessly, nor did he need to. He would toy with him and kill him with long-range attacks. Or simply blow him away and knock him off the ship. It was obvious even to Tsukuteku's eyes that Tokunosuke was in no condition to recover from a fall.
For Tokunosuke, who was at his limit just standing there, it was impossible to dodge every single shell in that barrage. If he fell from the deck, he would die. He acted solely to avoid that worst-case scenario. He was tossed about like a leaf in a winter gale, slammed against the floor again and again.
Tokunosuke, battered and bloodied, had only one means of counterattack left. It was a single paper model clutched in his hand. Just before Tsukuteku had caused his formulas to run wild, he had managed to grip one and regain control.
However, looking at it from another perspective, the fact that he could only recover one was proof of the gap in skill between the two. All the other paper models had been caught in the explosion and destroyed. There were far too many obstacles standing in the way of delivering this final Nen Bird Bomb to the enemy.
"Good! Hold on tighter! It'd be boring if you fell too easily!"
While the shells produced blasts, the aura within them dissipated, so the damage wasn't fatal unless it was a direct hit. If Tokunosuke had been in perfect condition, dodging them wouldn't have been a problem.
Tsukuteku hurled mockery at Tokunosuke as he rolled around pathetically. Even as his life was slowly shaved away, Tokunosuke continued to stand. In his hand, he continued to protect the fledgling bird waiting to leave the nest.
And then, the last hope was released. A bird, materialized with the paper model as its core, flapped its wings into the sky. Tsukuteku did not miss it. He immediately aimed every cannon at the Nen Bird.
"Blow away, you insect!"
The Nen Bird attempted evasive maneuvers but could not escape the vortex of the blasts. However, the Nen Bird Bomb, imbued with a massive month's worth of aura, did not stop flapping its wings even as it was buffeted by the gale. It flew unsteadily, yielding to the wind rather than fighting it.
Tsukuteku clicked his tongue at the sight. But there was no problem. Tokunosuke had only released a single bird. He understood that this was merely a desperate final struggle.
Tsukuteku possessed the ultimate defense in which he held absolute confidence. The tattered coat he wore was his greatest masterpiece, a commemorative piece named 'Ranunculus.' Its lining was engraved with multiple layers of fabric containing nearly one hundred thousand DIVINE SCRIPT characters.
It formed fifty layers of air barriers in a hemispherical shape with no blind spots, and any destroyed barriers were instantly reconstructed from the inside, like skin regenerating through metabolism. While the barriers were fixed to the ground—meaning he couldn't move while using them—and there was a condition that it took about a second to flow aura into the vast circuit, once activated, this defense was impossible to breach.
Earlier, when Tokunosuke had sent dozens of Nen Bird Bombs at him, he had blocked them without a hint of danger. Before this individual fortress, an attack by a single Nen Bird Bomb was like a drop of water on a hot stone. The Nen Bird, having endured the storm of the air cannons, approached Tsukuteku at high speed, but the activation of Ranunculus was already complete.
"Too bad for you! Your attack is—"
At the moment death approaches, humans sometimes experience a sensation as if the flow of time has slowed down.
Tsukuteku witnessed it within that slowly flowing time. The moment the shining beak of the Nen Bird touched the air barrier, and without any resistance, its tip was thrust inside. The barriers were breached one after another. In that split second, his genius brain understood. This wasn't destroying the barriers.
The DIVINATION SCRIPT system, distinct from DIVINE SCRIPT, had developed based on Onmyodo in Japon. Within Onmyodo, there exists a technique known as SPELL REVERSAL. It is a defensive art used against an evil spirit sent by another practitioner, exorcising it and sending the curse back to the sender.
To explain that technique in terms of modern Nen knowledge, it was the rewriting of a program. Much like how Tsukuteku had interfered with Tokunosuke's Nen Birds to make them run wild, it was a technique to disrupt the control of an enemy's Nen beast. It was a skill that had flourished in a cultural sphere that focused heavily on Nen beast manipulation.
A high-level practitioner could seize control and send it back to the enemy. Since a technique of that level required the strength of a clan head, Tokunosuke couldn't use it, but he was capable of opening a hole in the enemy's formula.
Tokunosuke didn't have the skill to instantly rewrite an enemy's formula like Tsukuteku. Even creating a counter-formula took time. He had needed to buy time for that. While enduring the enemy's attacks, he had been writing the SPELL REVERSAL formula onto the paper model of the Nen Bird Bomb. If Tsukuteku hadn't tried to toy with him and had instead moved for a quick finish, it would have been dangerous.
Though he didn't reach Tsukuteku's level, he possessed extraordinary skill and knowledge regarding formulas. By leaving his home and experiencing Western culture, he had studied not just DIVINATION SCRIPT but also DIVINE SCRIPT. Through that study and training, he had devised several DIVINE DIVINATION FORMULAS that combined the two systems.
Tsukuteku looked at that redundant formula, full of patches and on the verge of causing an error. If it were him, he could have reproduced the same formula much more smartly and efficiently. He could state with certainty that it was a crude formula squeezed out through the wasted efforts of an amateur.
And yet, his undefeated armor, his masterpiece, was pierced by that filthy formula that looked like a child's scribbles. It was absolutely unforgivable. His craftsman's pride screamed. He could not accept this.
However, the irony was that because there were too many useless descriptions, his analysis and the construction of a counter-formula were delayed. The DIVINATION SCRIPT formulas, which used a logic as arbitrary and elusive as a song or a poem, were also a technique designed to deceive an enemy's analysis.
He could not seize the line where a split-second decision separated life from death.
The Nen Bird Bomb reached its target, and Tsukuteku's head burst apart.