Kenji smiled. It was the first time he’d smiled in three weeks. It didn’t reach his eyes.

"No rules," a Kurokawa lieutenant announced from a high chair. "No time limit. No knockout—only submission, unconsciousness, or death. Final. Aokumashii."

"Little brother of the broken doll," Goro rumbled, his voice like gravel in a blender. "I was hoping you'd come. I need a warm-up before I visit Akari's hospital room."

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

"Good," he said. "You hurt me. That makes this fun."

And in the center of the cage, Goro Mutō waited.

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 launched the Buchikome High Kick one last time.

Kenji stood over Goro’s body, his own shadow pooling like spilled ink. He was weeping. Not from joy. Not from grief. From the sheer, unbearable weight of having ended something.

That night, he wore his sister’s torn headband—the same one she’d worn in the original final, now stained with her blood. He tied it tight around his forehead. He didn’t bring a weapon. He was the weapon.

What followed was not a fight. It was a storm in a cage.

"Final," he whispered to the aokumashii sky. "This is the final." The rematch wasn't announced. There was no flyer, no social media hype. The Kurokawa-gumi didn't do publicity for failures. Instead, a single black envelope was slid under the door of Kenji’s makeshift shelter—a laundromat he’d been sleeping in.