The battlefield twists out of shape as a whole.
As if wringing out a wet mop with both hands, the surrounding space coils and coils again, folding in on itself until it takes on the shape of a twisted bread roll.
Using that as the midpoint.
Green and yellow.
The two incomprehensible powers glow with strange light as they push against each other at a single point.
“Ugh... uuuugh...!”
“Grrrraaaah...!!”
The tug-of-war continues without the slightest concession.
Tatsumaki has the advantage in raw output, while Geryuganshoop has the edge in precision.
Whenever Tatsumaki tries to raise her output to the maximum and crush him, Geryuganshoop catches the tiny opening in between.
And when Geryuganshoop sharply drives into the gaps between the torrents of power, Tatsumaki somehow shoves him back and returns things to square one.
In the end, their abilities are so evenly matched that they fall into a stalemate.
But if this kept up.
...In terms of stamina, this side was at a disadvantage.
For Tatsumaki, who had always been able to use overwhelming psychic power until now, there had never been a time when her abilities felt limited.
Not once. Never.
Even when she dragged down a meteor flying around near Earth, even when she bundled up monsters and blew them apart in one shot.
Far from reaching her limit, she had been more than comfortable, just as she herself said.
Even if it sounded like exaggerated boasting, she had never lied about her own abilities.
And above all, that had usually been enough to end things in a single blow, so there had never been any need to push further.
So.
She had never once considered the possibility that she might lose.
Unless it was Blast or King, she had never even thought there could be an opponent capable of fighting her on equal footing.
But now.
With a battle against a comparable opponent finally taking shape.
Tatsumaki was, for the first time, beginning to feel her own limit.
A limit placed somewhere far, far away in the distance.
She still hadn’t even used a full tenth of her power properly.
And yet, its existence had become unmistakably clear.
Naturally, impatience began to creep in, and the relaxed expression she had worn from the start started to distort little by little.
Meanwhile.
“There’s no opening to break through! What is this guy!”
Geryuganshoop was also facing his own limit.
Only, there was one difference.
“But... I’m used to this!”
Considering who led the space pirate band Dark Matter that Geryuganshoop belonged to, it was almost obvious.
The conqueror of the universe.
A being so unmatched that he had instead begun to lose his vitality from having no one to challenge him.
The strongest life-form, who had reached this place according to a prophecy he heard twenty years ago, seeking only an equal fight.
Boros was his boss.
Though Geryuganshoop handled the practical work and operations as Dark Matter’s chief strategist by using telepathy, that was only because Boros had no interest in running the organization. If he wanted to, he could do it without any trouble.
That was the kind of being he was.
No one in Dark Matter could reach him.
Even if the top three warriors, including Geryuganshoop himself, rushed him together, they would all be knocked away in a single blow.
That was an unchanging fact, even during sparring.
And because of that, Geryuganshoop had already experienced his own limits many times over by repeatedly clashing with him in earnest during practice.
Of course, he had never even managed to leave a proper scratch.
Thanks to that, it was humiliating that he, who prided himself on being the universe’s greatest psychokinetic, was being outmatched in output by another psychokinetic—but he forced himself to endure it.
His precision and versatility were definitely superior.
If he could defeat his opponent here, his pride would return.
So would the title of greatest psychokinetic.
Unlike Tatsumaki, whose mind was increasingly drawn toward the possibility of defeat as she began to sense it for the first time, Geryuganshoop started focusing a little more on his own victory.
After a little more of the power struggle, Geryuganshoop cut the tug-of-war short and went on the offensive.
“Take this! [Psychokinetic Crushing Fist]!!”
If they had been inside the ship, he would have used pebbles and the like to pierce an enemy’s forehead like bullets, but this was outside.
There was no need to hold back.
So.
He lifted up the shattered wreckage of the surrounding buildings all at once.
No, not just that.
Parts of a broken bridge, half-destroyed cars, even helicopters passing through the area.
He drew them all in and lifted them up.
Then he gathered everything in the falling dust, compressed it into one mass, and split it into three, reshaping them into sharp drills.
In less than two seconds, weapons capable of pulverizing most living things in a single hit had been created.
Tatsumaki immediately answered the incoming giant drills.
She tore up the half-destroyed road beneath her and raised it to block them.
No.
She failed to block them.
Realizing that it wasn’t enough, she poured out more power.
The terrifyingly fast drills pierced clean through the road she had ripped up and came barreling toward her, only to be stopped at the last possible moment right in front of her face.
“Heh-heh. Surprised? This is my specialty, using the precision of my psychokinesis! I remove friction from thrown objects and send them flying at near-light speed! A flimsy obstacle like that won’t stop them!”
...A flimsy obstacle won’t stop them, huh.
“...Hah. Then let’s see how hard the things on your side are.”
That kind of insane precision—sub-light-speed throwing while eliminating friction—was impossible for her.
She could throw things at sub-light speed, but she couldn’t remove friction, so the thrown objects would simply evaporate from the friction.
It was enough to make her tongue click in admiration.
By now, Tatsumaki had admitted to herself that she could never win in that area.
But.
She had an advantage of her own, too.
Immediately, she applied her overwhelming output in a different way.
She gathered up all the surrounding building wreckage and anything else of any size, just as he had.
Only, she raised the amount to two or three times his.
And split them into drills in the same way.
The difference was that they were not only thicker, but numbered in the dozens.
Where he had used precision to fire quickly, she hurled hers by brute force.
“Tch?! What is this...!”
Geryuganshoop instantly formed a barrier around himself.
Dozens of drills, each carrying overwhelming power.
He blocked most of them, but in the end two broke through, and he barely stopped them in front of his face as well.
At this point, Geryuganshoop also instinctively realized that he couldn’t beat her in raw output.
“...Fine. Let’s really do this.”
Once again, torrents of power burst from both of them, and the surrounding earth began to tremble and heave.
Dozens, no.
Hundreds of spheres floated into the air, were shaped into drills, and shot toward both sides.
A fierce exchange broke out between each and every drill.
Geryuganshoop launched psychokinetic shockwaves, precisely woven together.
Tatsumaki canceled them out with even greater psychic output, then pulled a giant hand made of wreckage up from underground and thrust it forward from the ground.
She drove a single drill compressed to maximum density into the center of the hand rising from below and shattered it.
Immediately, more hands were shaped and burst out from within.
She shot them all down with precise aim and fire, only for a huge boulder to come flying at her next.
Using [Psychokinetic Crushing Fist], she changed its trajectory and made it veer past her.
When she forced it to fall uselessly downward, five more boulders of the same size came flying in.
He gathered huge drills from underground and pulled them up.
The drills, stripped of friction and rising at near-light speed, pierced the boulders with perfect accuracy.
He immediately reshaped the drills that had pierced the rocks into massive blunt weapons and swung them at Tatsumaki.
In response, she concentrated an enormous amount of psychokinesis and destroyed the drills and rocks all at once.
But the follow-up came immediately.
Blades hidden among the destroyed giant drills burst out.
In that short span of time, he had separated out rebar and other random metal scraps, even scissors and the like hidden in the wreckage, and forged them into blades.
Even though they had been improvised, the sharp, razor-edged blades showed off Geryuganshoop’s extraordinary precision.
Tatsumaki met that absurd power head-on.
Because she had absurd power of her own.
Even while doing so, she stopped producing the drills she had been firing and lifted all the wreckage at once, creating a gigantic tornado that reached the sky.
She gathered the blades being ground apart by that immense rock tornado, compressed them, and shaped them into a single slender spear.
Then, without hesitation, she fired it from somewhere within the tornado.
Despite the spear’s small, thin form, Geryuganshoop lifted a single piece of rebar and blocked it precisely.
After that, to counter the tornado that allowed both offense and defense at once, he applied his power to the spaceship floating in the sky.
He forcibly opened the gun ports on its underside.
He gathered all the shells inside, removed the friction, and fired them straight into the tornado.
Shells powerful enough to blow away City A with just a few dozen rounds.
Under normal circumstances, they would have been stopped in the middle of the tornado.
But now that friction was gone.
Launched at tremendous speed, their destructive power multiplied several times over.
KWA-KWA-KWA-KWA-KWA-KWA-KWAAANG!!!
“Guh...!”
The tornado vanished in an instant, replaced by pillars of fire from the massive explosions.
In the midst of it, Tatsumaki emerged, barely holding off the shelling amid the deafening blasts.
She had blocked them, but some had still grazed her, leaving her arm burned.
The throbbing pain reached her, but Tatsumaki ignored it and focused on stopping the bombardment.
Then, when the shelling finally stopped, a huge shadow fell over her body.
Just as she had done before, it was made of wreckage.
No, it was a giant fist made by tearing up part of the earth itself, and it was falling to smash down on her.
She answered by creating a similarly sized fist and thrusting it upward.
Even a single finger was as large as a building.
Two mountains of rock collided head-on.
Both collapsed at the same time, and an impact far beyond anything before erupted from the center, splitting both the ground and the sky.
The heat vaporized all the water nearby, and the wind born from the aftermath swept across the area.
“Tch!”
“Guh...!”
Both of them were blown back, rolling across the rough ground and getting covered in dust.
The sting from scraped skin rushed over them.
Agonizing pain surged through their whole bodies.
But both of them got back up and rose into the air again.
The area, repeatedly rebuilt after being swept by one natural disaster after another, had already become almost flat open ground.
There was almost no wreckage left to throw, either; most of it had turned to dust and vanished.
Both sides had poured out their power in a short span of time, and both were breathing hard.
“...No, this side has a slight advantage.”
Tatsumaki was the one suffering the greater physical damage.
But Geryuganshoop had consumed more power.
Seeing that, Tatsumaki rushed in to end things quickly.
She intended to create a powerful gravity field and crush him at close range.
She flew in while forming a barrier.
However.
Geryuganshoop had already anticipated that.
And so he had already predicted Tatsumaki’s next move.
He also sensed that he would need to use the move he had prepared from the start.
“Come... [Super Psychokinetic Adjustment Wave]!”
“Gravity manipulation? What’s the point now—”
Right after that.
The barrier she had formed began to press inward in an instant.
It was the result of Geryuganshoop reading her move.
“Kh...!”
“Hoo, finally took the bait.”
He spoke in a relaxed tone, but his power was being concentrated at the maximum.
At this point, he was so focused that he might not even notice if someone ambushed him from behind.
But the effect was certain.
Tatsumaki could not resist, and could only try to force the pressure back somehow.
The advantage had tilted toward Geryuganshoop, who had prepared and hidden this move from the beginning.
“Wondering what happened? It’s simple. I reversed the inside and outside of your barrier. Unlike your simple barrier, I wrap myself in a double barrier to block direct interference at all times. A simple barrier like yours is...”
“Kh...! Ugh... I, I can’t... do it!”
“Exactly. It’s vulnerable to being eroded until you can no longer control it as you please.”
He eroded the barrier surrounding her, preventing her from releasing it, and reversed the direction of the force he was applying so that it pressed inward instead.
Then he added his own power on top of it.
He squeezed tighter, and tighter.
Tatsumaki’s own tremendous power and the force Geryuganshoop was pouring in meshed together, and the internal pressure kept rising.
Even if she broke free now, she wouldn’t be able to stop the follow-up attack.
Geryuganshoop had already prepared dozens of drills that would pierce straight through her body in case of just such an emergency.
In the end, blood burst from Tatsumaki’s face as she staggered.
At this rate, she would die.
She would be crushed.
For the first time since that day in her childhood, she was facing a true death crisis.
Her survival instinct rang the alarm.
She struggled to regain the initiative and push him back, but it was useless.
The more power she poured in, the stronger the pressure became.
Just as her strength was finally running dry and her body began to twist under the strain—
“Hoo. Finally, I can breathe. So what are those guys doing? Merzalgard has withdrawn from the battle, and Gloribus is...”
That single moment.
“...Gloribus...”
That instant of shock and wavering.
“...dead?”
That was what decided victory and defeat, and Tatsumaki’s life and death.
She caught the opening that appeared in a split second.
Desperately executing a level of precision control she had never once experienced in her life, she lifted a single pebble lying behind Geryuganshoop.
And then.
With all her power poured into it.
She threw it as it was.
Pang!
Rather anticlimactically, Geryuganshoop’s head burst apart in one shot.
“...I, I was... beaten like this...?”
His body trembled, staggered.
Then gradually crumbled, turning to powder and disappearing into the wind.
“...Geryuganshoop...”
With those words, he finally vanished into a wisp of smoke.
“...Haaah! Hah, hahhh...!”
Only then, freed from the pressure, Tatsumaki gasped for breath.
Feeling the reality that she had escaped death in vivid detail, she calmed her pounding heart.
She was alive.
She had almost died.
But she was alive.
And then.
...Whoever it was, she was definitely going to thank the one who had taken down that bastard called Gloribus.
Wiping the blood from her face, Tatsumaki made that vow.
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