"Crown. Give me more."
Archer's hand clutched at the ruined cavity in his chest as he shouted the words, and the blackened canal water around them responded immediately, columns of dark mist rising and twisting toward him.
"What now," Ash muttered, Sharingan and Rinnegan both tracking the gathering smoke with sharp suspicion.
The mist coiled around Archer like a slow tornado, swallowing him from view entirely.
"Hahaha. This is it." Archer's voice came from somewhere inside the vortex, distorted, gleeful. "I'm immortal. This world belongs to me now."
The mist tore apart.
What stood in its place wasn't quite Archer anymore. His skin had darkened to a mottled grey-black, his eyes hollow sockets emitting a faint, wrong red light, veins standing out across his arms like something underneath was trying to escape outward.
Ash's Sharingan spun, tracking the cellular structure beneath the skin.
His cells are dividing. Constantly. Way past any natural rate.
Human cells had a hard ceiling on division count. Without something like Ash's own vitality techniques actively resetting that ceiling, forcing division past it didn't grant strength. It burned the body down from the inside, trading lifespan for raw output in real time.
He's killing himself faster with every second that thing stays active.
If I had wind affinity I could end this clean with a Rasenshuriken, Ash thought grimly. Cell-shredding, no recovery possible. But I've only got the three.
Lightning, fire, water. No wind.
Fine. Brute force it is. Keep dealing damage faster than whatever's fueling his regeneration can keep up.
His hands moved through seals again.
"Don't." Archer's forehead bulged with strained veins. "I won't go through that again."
"Fwoosh!"
A condensed sphere of black water shot from the Crown at point-blank range, aimed to interrupt the seal sequence.
"Rinnegan." Ash's eye opened wider, a vortex spinning open directly in the projectile's path. The water sphere vanished into another dimension without ever reaching him.
His seals finished a half-second later.
White light detonated outward from his position, lightning crackling through it in jagged branches.
"MY EYES!"
"HELP!"
"ROARRR!"
Every living thing caught in the blast radius without warning, Rocket grunts, summoned puppets, civilians too far to have heeded earlier warnings, screamed in unison. Ash's own team had been positioned outside the technique's range from the start.
"And now it's yours."
The instant Archer's hands flew up to cover his ruined eyes, Ash's Mangekyō opened fully. A vortex bloomed beside Archer, the same black water sphere reappearing from the dimension it had been banished to, and slammed directly into his abdomen.
The whole exchange had taken under three seconds.
Archer's stomach blew open. Something dark and wrong spilled out before the wound began stitching itself shut, visibly, rapidly, flesh knitting closed in real time.
"Not that easy." Ash's right hand crackled, lightning condensing tight around four fingers. "Lightning Style. Four-Finger Hell Stab."
He vanished.
"Shk."
"GAAAAH!"
Four small punctures opened across Archer's left shoulder before he even registered the movement. One finger of lightning, spent.
Three remained.
Ash was already gone again, reappearing behind the still-recovering heart wound and driving a second strike straight through it.
"GAAAAH!"
The pain alone should have dropped most fighters. Archer wasn't most fighters anymore, not really, but the part of him that was still human screamed regardless.
"Two left."
Ash blinked out a third time, reappearing directly above Archer's skull, two fingers crackling with condensed lightning aimed straight down.
This was the finishing strike.
"Clang!"
The Sea Crown snapped up and caught the blow point-blank, Ash's fingers driving directly into the scepter's shaft instead of Archer's head.
A spiderweb of cracks split across the golden surface on impact.