Her right fist was held high over her shoulder, her torso slightly tilted to focus all her strength into a single point. Her target was Sū ěr head. Yet, even now, Sū ěr made no unnecessary movements. From Yūka's professional perspective, his muscles remained relaxed, without a single sign of tensing up.
She could almost see the male's skull deforming, cracking, and bursting under her fist... Just like the countless times before, the prospect of imminent blood made her pupils contract with excitement, her smile growing more monstrous.
Thump!
It was a sound like striking glass—not the sharp shatter of glass breaking, but a dull thud of a failed blow. Yūka's heavy, powerful strike was completely blocked by a luminous green barrier that had appeared out of nowhere between her and Sū ěr.
Even for a race born to defy common logic like yōkai, the strike that now hurtled toward Yūka's ribs was nearly beyond the limit of what a yōkai could react to. Along with it came a violent sense of crisis thrumming through her blood, screaming a warning.
She forcibly altered her movement, ignoring the internal damage such an abrupt shift caused. Yūka twisted backward in a bizarre contortion, such that the attack aimed at her right ribs merely brushed lightly across her chest and abdomen.
Unexpectedly, it carried very little force, like a leaf dipped in seasoning being brushed over grilled meat. Yet, it was precisely this soft, "limp" attack that caused Yūka's predatory expression to shift violently.
Unable to tolerate a guaranteed strike yielding no results, Yūka used her yōki to force her body into balance, twisting away from the translucent soul body that had suddenly appeared. She had expected this soul's presence.
Having avoided the soul's strike, Yūka had truly broken through to Sū ěr front. With no further obstacles, she transformed her left fist into a hand-blade. Deep green yōki flickered atop it like the sharpest of edges; a mere touch would cleave the male before her in two.
But the world changed.
It felt as though she were under the deep sea, or perhaps as if the entire world had been dropped onto her back. It was a sensation Yūka had never experienced. There were no techniques, no feints. The man simply changed his stance normally, clenched his fist normally, drew back normally, and normally—smashed a fist into her jaw.
An uppercut. The force was unexpectedly heavy. If Yūka's body weren't far tougher than a regular yōkai's, she suspected her skull would have been shattered right there, just like the other yōkai she had crushed with her own strength.
She couldn't parry, she couldn't dodge. It was as if everything around her was helping this man bind her. In that brief sliver of time, she tried every emergency measure she knew, but none could break the deadlock. Yūka could only watch as she was sent flying by the force originating from her chin, falling backward, paralyzed.
It came as fast as it went. The clash between the two lacked any grand sound. Aside from the sonic boom Yūka had made when she first lunged, which hadn't even fully dissipated, the concentrated war was over. They touched and separated.
It wasn't until her flying body slammed into the ground, kicking up dust, that Yūka felt the sensation of being suppressed by the world finally leave her. But compared to that unknown mystery, what made her face pale as she climbed back up was the gruesome state of her abdomen.
Her dark clothes, stained with blood that could never be washed out, had become a nauseating mess around her midsection. What should have been ordinary, inanimate fabric had fused into a single mass, inseparable from the flesh beneath.
It looked like a rotting swamp after days of heavy rain, or like large globs of oil paint thrown onto a palette and stirred with the intensity of a cement mixer—that was the tragedy of Yūka's right side. A strange power had fused her flesh and the clothes she wore without a seam. Flesh took on the colors of the fabric, and the fabric writhed like flesh, even sprouting ghastly buds of meat that rose and fell with the green-haired yōkai's every breath.
Even though she had taken the damage by forcibly changing her movement, the attack from the soul—which had blocked her first strike and countered from a blind spot—had only lightly brushed her at the end of its range. Yet, the damage she had sustained was beyond Yūka's imagination.
At the very least, if she had chosen to ignore the warning bells in her heart and continued her original attack in that flash of a second, her internal organs would likely have been twisted into a lump of meat by now... And then there was that punch...
"...This isn't what that Yakumo Yukari person said..." Yūka wiped the blood from the corner of her mouth, her jaw still throbbing. Her voice was slightly raspy. "Didn't she say there was only one soul body protecting him? That he himself didn't have much power..."
Her question would not be answered. In fact, Sū ěr and Think weren't even listening to her. Like a dual-natured ghost, Sū ěr had already appeared before Yūka like a phantom.
No matter how many ways to respond flashed through her mind in that instant, no matter how many stress instincts her body had cultivated through years of non-stop combat, the moment the man materialized before her, Yūka felt that same crushing weight of the world settle on her again, annihilating any possibility of a counterattack.
Crack—Thump—
The sound of bones shattering, followed by the dull thud of flesh being pierced.
"Ah... it seems there's no core?"
Yūka vision was beginning to fade to black. She could still hear the man's puzzled voice.
"...Whatever. Anyway, things like 'yōkai crystals' or 'yōkai cores' are just tropes from novels. If there isn't one, there isn't one."
With those words, Yūka felt the palm that had pierced through her chest and reached into her body ruthlessly crush her heart before pulling out.
"This is a bit gross, isn't it?" Sū ěr frowned as he looked at his bloody arm, then at the green-haired yōkai whose chest had been punched clean through. Her eyes hadn't fully closed yet. "I won't play like this next time. Do you want to use her corpse for experiments?"
"Not particularly interested~," Think said, even letting out a bored yawn. "Since she had a hobby in farming just like you, why not just throw her in to fertilize the field?"
"Hmm... sounds like a plan?"
Sū ěr had no objections to tossing the green-haired yōkai's corpse into the dirt.