"You've got to be joking." Archer's voice cracked, disbelief bleeding through the rage. "Just how strong is this kid?"
He swept the cracked Sea Crown across in a wide arc the moment Ash's strike connected. Ash flipped backward out of range before the blow could land, putting clean distance between them.
He landed light and studied Archer's chest wound with a flicker of recognition.
His healing's slowed. The damage is compounding faster than his cells can divide to compensate.
"Good," Ash murmured. "One more."
The Four-Finger Hell Stab had three strikes spent. The fourth, the strongest of the technique, was still loaded. Better still, Archer's last instinctive block told him exactly what the man expected.
He thinks I'm going for him again.
Lightning surged violently around Ash's frame, crackling loud enough to drown the wind. His hair stood on end, and loose debris on the rooftop began drifting upward, drawn by the sheer density of the gathering Chakra.
Archer's expression went rigid. Whatever immortality the Crown had granted him, it hadn't dulled his instincts. He could feel exactly how dangerous this next strike was, and every nerve in him screamed to disappear.
A beat of silence. Then Ash vanished.
Archer reacted on reflex, sweeping the Crown up and wrapping a black energy shield around himself in the same motion he'd used to block before.
"Rinnegan."
Ash reappeared at Archer's left flank in the same instant, Mangekyō spinning hard, locking a spatial vortex directly onto the black shield.
"Strongest spear."
The vortex tore the barrier open like wet paper.
"Not good." Archer felt the shield fail and threw the Crown up instinctively to block, exactly as Ash had anticipated.
"BOOM."
"CRACK."
The Four-Finger strike landed dead center on the scepter's already-weakened fracture line. The Crown split clean down the middle.
"What!" Archer stared at the two halves in his grip, stunned.
Ash wasn't finished. The same motion carried through, driving Raikiri's afterimage straight through Archer's barely-healed chest wound a second time.
"GAAAAH!"
The pain on top of the broken Crown and the still-raw wound was too much even for whatever was left of Archer's resolve. Ash's foot lashed out and kicked the half of the Crown still holding the Soul Dew clean out of his hand.
"No." Archer felt the connection sever and forced himself through the agony, swinging the remaining half of the scepter wildly with his left hand.
"BOOM."
Ash caught the blind swing on one forearm without flinching, then drove a clean right hook into Archer's jaw and sent him crashing into a nearby wall.
"Without the full Crown that's nothing." Ash turned, palm extended toward the discarded half lying several meters away. "Banshō Ten'in."
The fragment shot into his hand.
He looked at the splintered remains for a moment, weighing it, frustrated by his own unfamiliarity with it. "Useless if I can't even figure out how to activate it."
[System: The Sea Crown is an artifact of pure destruction. Only those aligned with creation laws can seal or destroy it. Those carrying vitality-based power can never wield its opposing function.]
The explanation clicked instantly. Ash understood now why the Crown had resisted him from the start, it wasn't a strength issue. It was a fundamental incompatibility. Creation and destruction sat at opposite poles of the same axis, same as space and time. He could access Sage Chakra under the Cursed Seal precisely because that state ran on ninjutsu as its operative law rather than vitality.
So the fix was simple.
He let the seal recede, the black tomoe markings withdrawing slowly back to their resting position at the base of his neck.
The moment the Cursed Seal fully receded, the fragment in his hand began to hum, vibrating with a low resonant frequency, and raw power flooded into him through the cracked shaft.
There it is.
Without the Sage Chakra running the show, his vitality-based abilities were back in the driver's seat, and that was exactly the kind of power the Crown answered to. The two laws, life and destruction, were natural enemies but not in the way space and time were. Life sprang from destruction constantly, but destruction needed something living first to have anything to destroy. Endlessly opposed. Endlessly bound together.
If they really do have a god behind this kind of system, Ash thought, turning the fragment over once, they probably can't switch states the way I can.
"Guess my luck's holding," he muttered, and raised the broken Crown.