Zaraki had repeatedly proved he could hurt Nusjuro.
The problem was making any of that damage matter.
Every slash that would have finished another opponent left only a temporary injury.
Severed flesh reformed, broken bones rebuilt themselves, and even wounds that should have destroyed vital organs disappeared before Zaraki could capitalize on them.
He had no such luxury.
With Creation Rebirth still sealed, his body continued accumulating damage while Nozarashi greedily consumed his Reiatsu.
Nusjuro understood the difference perfectly.
By the time his body had completely reformed inside the crater, his earlier calm had returned.
"You finally understand," he said as he rose. "You cannot win."
"You keep saying that." Zaraki rested Nozarashi against one shoulder, blood running from the corner of his mouth.
"It's starting to get repetitive."
Nusjuro vanished, and the next exchange nearly took Zaraki's head.
Future Sight showed him the blade coming, but exhaustion was creating a slight delay between what he saw and how quickly his body could respond.
He leaned back as Shodai Kitetsu passed across his face, opening a shallow cut beneath one golden eye.
Nusjuro immediately followed with a kick, and although Zaraki blocked it with his left arm, his forearm fractured with an audible crack.
The impact sent him skidding across the island's remains until he stopped near the edge, his arm hanging at an ugly angle.
"You are deteriorating," Nusjuro said as he approached.
"Yeah." Zaraki glanced at his arm.
"And you continue refusing to use whatever healing ability you possess."
That caught Zaraki's attention, though he supposed he should not have been surprised.
The old bastard had lived long enough to recognize when an opponent was deliberately keeping something in reserve.
"You are waiting for a decisive moment, but there will be no such moment." Nusjuro's voice grew colder as he raised Shodai Kitetsu, frost spreading across the blade.
"I can continue until your body fails."
Zaraki's grin slowly disappeared.
The irritating part was that Nusjuro was right: if the fight continued this way, a battle of attrition overwhelmingly favored the Elder.
Creation Rebirth could repair Zaraki once, perhaps more, depending on how much chakra remained.
It could not replenish his Reiatsu or replace lost blood indefinitely, much less give him Nusjuro's absurd regeneration.
Dragging this out would be stupid.
He looked at Nozarashi.
The huge chipped blade hummed faintly, its hunger undiminished; if anything, it seemed irritated that he was still holding back.
'Yeah. I know.'
Zaraki breathed out and shifted his grip, drawing a narrow-eyed look from Nusjuro as the dark-gold Reiatsu around him changed.
Until now, enormous amounts of spiritual pressure had constantly spilled into the air as Nozarashi violently consumed it during release.
Zaraki pulled it all inward, abruptly clearing the pressure from the reef.
Nusjuro paused. Zaraki had not become weaker; all that power had gone somewhere else.
Dark-gold light compressed along Nozarashi's chipped edge, growing thinner, denser, and sharper.
It was the fundamental lesson Mihawk had beaten into him on Kuraigana: power meant nothing if he wasted it everywhere except the edge meant to cut.
His broken left arm twitched as Creation Rebirth finally activated.
Warm chakra spilled from the Strength of a Hundred Seal and flooded through his shoulder, shifting the bone back into position and knitting the fracture together.
Several of the worst cuts across his torso began closing as well.
The diamond mark on his forehead dimmed noticeably as a large portion of its stored reserve was spent.
"So that is your final preparation," Nusjuro said, noticing the change.
"No. This is me getting my arm back." Zaraki rolled his restored wrist, then closed his right hand around Nozarashi.
"Now comes the final preparation."
The cleaver began trembling, and Nusjuro's expression changed.
Even he could no longer ignore the Reiatsu concentrated along its edge.
There was no vast explosion, supernatural distortion of space, or new transformation.
Zaraki was simply compressing an absurd amount of cutting power into a single blade.
For the first time in the fight, Nusjuro prepared solely to defend.
He lowered his stance as frost spread across his transformed body and Armament Haki darkened Shodai Kitetsu, his skeletal hooves digging deep into the remaining reef.
"You believe one stronger slash changes the result?"
"No." Zaraki smiled and bent his knees. "I want to see how much of you it takes off."
The reef exploded beneath him as he charged, and Nusjuro met him halfway. Nozarashi collided with Shodai Kitetsu in a clash that drowned out the ocean, leaving them motionless for a fraction of a second.
Then Nusjuro's eyes widened. One crack appeared in the frost around his blade, followed by another, as the force behind Nozarashi continued to build.
The dark-gold pressure tightened instead of bursting outward, and his arms began to tremble.
"You're regenerating before I can finish the job," Zaraki said, leaning forward as his grin widened and the muscles across his shoulders tightened.
"So I figured I'd cut more of you at once."
"HAAAH!" Nozarashi broke through, and Nusjuro tried to shift aside.
Future Sight had already shown Zaraki the movement, allowing him to adjust the cleaver's angle and cut beneath the Elder's raised sword, carving diagonally through his torso.
Zaraki stepped through the opening, turned, and swung Nozarashi around again with all that power still compressed along its edge.
Nusjuro saw the second slash and tried to block, but the chipped cleaver crossed his neck before he could stop it.
For a heartbeat, nothing happened.
Then his head separated, and his transformed body crashed onto the remaining reef, the Bakotsu form unraveling before it even hit the ground.
Skeletal limbs shrank as Nusjuro returned toward his human shape, his severed head rolling across the stone.
Zaraki stood behind him with Nozarashi still extended, dark-gold pressure slowly dissipating from its edge.
Beyond Nusjuro, the slash's residual force split the sea for hundreds of meters before the water collapsed inward again.
The blow had neither parted the ocean to its bed nor erased space, and no blood-red dragon had devoured the horizon.
It had simply been an extraordinarily powerful sword strike.
Zaraki exhaled, his arms feeling like lead.
Producing that attack with the released Nozarashi had taken an enormous amount out of him, but he had done it.
He looked toward Nusjuro, whose head lay several meters from his body.
Neither moved or responded, and Zaraki waited for three seconds before his smile vanished.
A dark, flame-like curl rose from the severed neck as flesh shifted and bone pushed outward.
The body was already rebuilding what he had removed, while the severed head began dissolving into the same unnatural darkness.
"You have got to be kidding me," Zaraki said, staring.
The regeneration was much slower this time.
Apparently, destroying so much of Nusjuro at once had finally forced whatever sustained his immortality to work harder, but it had not stopped it.
The severed head disappeared as a new one began growing from the neck.
Zaraki watched a skull take shape beneath forming flesh and skin, followed by the beginnings of those same infuriating spectacles.
"So even that isn't enough." A hoarse laugh escaped him.
Nusjuro's eyes had yet to reopen, and he remained incapacitated.
Zaraki could probably keep cutting him until his own Reiatsu ran dry, but what then?
The Elder would simply rebuild himself again.
For the first time since the battle began, Zaraki accepted that he had won the fight without finding a way to kill his opponent.
Those were two different things.
"Hah."
He lowered Nozarashi, and his knees almost buckled.
He caught himself as the world tilted slightly, the accumulated damage and Reiatsu expenditure finally catching up with him.
Creation Rebirth had repaired his broken arm and several dangerous wounds, but it had restored neither his stamina nor his spiritual pressure.
Meanwhile, the released Nozarashi continued draining what remained.
"Sorry, old man. I'd love to keep chopping you into pieces until something finally sticks." His breathing was rough as he forced Nozarashi back into its sealed state.
"But I'm starting to run low."
The huge cleaver contracted into the rough katana, and Nusjuro's fingers twitched as his regeneration accelerated.
Zaraki rested the sealed sword against his shoulder, grinning again.
"You can call this a draw if it makes you feel better. I won't."
Then his legs gave way, dropping him onto one knee as pain surged through his body.
Blood loss, torn muscles, cracked ribs, and internal injuries from repeated impacts had all taken their toll, along with the bone-deep exhaustion of pushing Nozarashi far beyond the output he had used against Noah.
He coughed blood onto the stone.
It was bad, though nothing like the Gate of Death; nothing inside him was burning away his lifespan.
Even so, he had suffered enough damage to kill an ordinary man several times over.
Fortunately, he had one more reserve, and warmth began gathering beneath the diamond mark on his forehead.
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