Buchikome High Kick- -final- -aokumashii- Direct

He walked out of the cage. No one stopped him. The bruise-colored sky was beginning to lighten at the edges—a thin line of gold, like the first clean strike of dawn. The next morning, Kenji visited Akari in the hospital. She was awake for the first time in three weeks. Her eyes, still swollen, found his face. She saw the cuts, the bruises, the broken hand.

He sat beside her bed and took her unbroken hand. Outside, the sky over Buchikome Ward was finally, impossibly, blue.

"You always were a better kicker than me," she lied. Buchikome High kick- -Final- -Aokumashii-

For seventeen-year-old Kenji "The Iron Anvil" Todoroki, it was the color of his own heart.

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. He walked out of the cage

"The Final Buchikome High Kick. No audience. No referees. No ambulances. The Pulverizer vs. The Ghost of Akari. Warehouse 13, Docks. Midnight. Come to die."

By the ten-minute mark, Kenji’s ribs were cracked (three of them). His left eyebrow was split open, blood flooding his vision. His right hand was broken from a blocked punch. Goro was bleeding from a cut above his eye, and his left arm hung at a wrong angle—Kenji had snapped his ulna with a downward axe kick. The next morning, Kenji visited Akari in the hospital

The word again. The bruise-colored finality. The first exchange lasted 0.8 seconds.

And above the ruined dojo, the aokumashii sky gave way to a clear, hard, honest blue. The bruise had healed.

Goro’s foot began its descent.

Not away. Not to the side. Into the kick.