And above the ruined dojo, the aokumashii sky gave way to a clear, hard, honest blue. The bruise had healed.
His heel connected with Goro’s larynx. The sound was a wet, hollow crack—like stepping on a rotted gourd. Goro’s eyes went wide. His mouth opened, but no sound came out. He stumbled backward, clawing at his neck, then collapsed against the cage. He slid down, leaving a smear of blood on the chain-link. His chest rose once. Twice. Then stopped.
"No rules," a Kurokawa lieutenant announced from a high chair. "No time limit. No knockout—only submission, unconsciousness, or death. Final. Aokumashii."
For seventeen-year-old Kenji "The Iron Anvil" Todoroki, it was the color of his own heart. Buchikome High kick- -Final- -Aokumashii-
But then he saw Akari’s face again. Not broken. Whole. Smiling. And she said something else—something she’d whispered to him the night before the original final, when no one else was listening.
Pain. White-hot, electric. But Kenji had trained for this. Every day since Akari fell, he had kicked a steel-reinforced tire wrapped in sandpaper until his shins bled, then kept kicking until the blood turned to callus, and the callus turned to bone.
He answered with his own weapon: the Buchikome High Kick —a jumping, 360-degree roundhouse aimed at the temple. Goro raised an arm. The kick connected with his forearm instead. The sound was a gunshot. Goro’s arm went numb. He grinned. And above the ruined dojo, the aokumashii sky
Kenji stepped into the cage. The door slammed behind him with a clang that echoed like a funeral bell.
Not away. Not to the side. Into the kick.
He sat beside her bed and took her unbroken hand. Outside, the sky over Buchikome Ward was finally, impossibly, blue. The sound was a wet, hollow crack—like stepping
Goro just grunted and kept coming.
Kenji smiled. It was the first time he’d smiled in three weeks. It didn’t reach his eyes.