BAM! BAM! BAM!
With no intention of stopping, Zin rained blows down on Adam again and again, inflicting increasingly severe injuries.
As long as the next attack didn't threaten Adam's life, Leerna wouldn't intervene in the fight, so Zin could keep attacking as long as necessary.
Whooooooooosh!
Suddenly, Zin's fist stopped right in front of Adam's blood-covered face. It wasn't that Zin had decided to spare Adam and not kill him.
No, the answer was a smirk on his face as he watched the blood flowing down Adam's chest and heading toward the ground.
"This is it!" Zin exclaid inwardly with excitent.
Now, he could clearly hear the difference between Adam's blood flow and sothing else, sothing unique he had never encountered before.
Sure, Zin knew that the blood of Queen Elisa was now flowing through Adam. Es'aha had told him about it. But he wanted to feel it, to hear her blood flowing.
Zin had only one way to be sure of this.
"Sorry, Adam, but I just can't help myself!" Zin's eyes flashed as he raised his hand.
The sound wave enveloped his palm, just as before, becoming a sharp, invisible blade. However, unlike last ti, Zin didn't make the blade large enough to cut through half the arena with a single swing.
No, he needed a short but extrely sharp blade, like a scalpel. He had to make one precise cut to finally get what he had set out to achieve when he first decided to participate in the Grim Court.
"Agh? What is he going to do?" the girl muttered, fear filling her eyes.
"He's going to kill him!" her friend exclaid at the top of his voice. "The judge has to stop the fight right now!"
"Yes! One swing and it'll all be over!"
The spectators might have been right, since even Leerna gripped the arms of her stone throne more tightly. However, despite the spectators' pleas, she did not rush.
A fraction of a second would be enough for her to stop Zin if he actually decided to kill Adam with his next move. But the main reason Leerna didn't act was that she didn't believe Zin wanted to kill Adam, at least not now.
"He ca here for a different reason than everyone else participating in the Grim Courts," she thought, staring intently at Zin. "Could it be that Es'aha told him sothing? Hmm… What could it be?"
While the tension among the spectators grew as they waited for the judge to act, Zin took a deep breath.
"Gha…"
His hand trembled slightly, for this was a crucial mont for him. He couldn't rember the last ti he'd felt such excitent as he did now.
'Alright, no panic. I have to do this flawlessly!' He pulled himself together as his hand beca as steady as that of a skilled surgeon.
Slowly, he brought the sound blade to Adam's chest before making a deep but precise incision.
Neither Adam's flesh nor his ribs could protect him from the sound blade, for which even the arena barrier was no obstacle.
When Zin moved the sound blade aside, his breath caught in his throat.
Thump! Thump! Thump!
Adam's heart, exposed to the outside world, beat vigorously, trying to keep him alive despite the heavy bleeding and nurous wounds.
Because Adam's heartbeat was so strong, Zin could clearly hear two distinct rhythms separated by his blood.
All he had left to do was focus on one of them, and he would finally hear Queen Elisa's blood flow.
"This is going to look strange, but what choice do I have, right?" Zin smiled bitterly before tilting his head toward Adam's chest.
His face hovered before the bloody edges as he closed his eyes, shutting out all senses except his hearing.
Thump! Thump. Thump…
The heartbeat beca the only thing Zin could hear. The vibrations traveled through his golden headphones, filling his mind with an unusual lody.
His consciousness seed to flow with the current, following the source of this blood, straight to the majestic being who now resided on the mysterious island hovering above the great Citadel.
Zin's breath caught in his throat when, amidst the darkness, he saw the figure of a girl who seed to have descended from the heavens. Her heart continued to beat, but extrely slowly, as if she had long since accepted her fate of existing between life and death to save the lives of millions of her kind ti and ti again.
"Is that her…?" Zin muttered inwardly, his voice trembling. "Is that Queen Elisa?"
The mont Zin realized this, sothing changed in his senses. He felt as though several days were passing in a single second, that a single glance at Queen Elisa took him several hours instead of a mont.
At the sa ti, he realized that although it seed to him that he had already been here for several days, barely three seconds had passed. His perception of ti was distorted, yet it didn't feel foreign to him.
'It's the effect of her blood… The sound is both new and old…'
Es'aha was right. Zin had never heard anything like it. In this world, there were no sounds that could exist simultaneously in the past and the future, except for Queen Elisa's beating heart.
But sothing else was even more surprising to Zin: he wasn't bored.
'Usually, when I find new, unusual sounds, it only takes a few seconds to understand them. But… even though little ti has passed in the real world, it feels like I've been here for over a week. Still… I'm ready to keep listening to her heartbeat. I can't get used to this.'
Most people would find it hard to understand what Zin was experiencing right now, but his situation was like that of a gourt who had previously tasted every dish in the world. Then, this gourt found a single dish that was constantly changing and filling him with flavors new to him. It was practically heaven for his palate, and the sa was true for Zin's ears.
Thump!
Suddenly, sothing interrupted Zin's silence, a dull thud that montarily shattered the lody of the blood.
Zin spun around sharply as his eyes widened.
'What the hell…?'
In the distance, he saw the massive blood bubble hovering in the darkness, before which stood a figure with black hair like his own, but blue eyes.
'A-Adam?' Zin's voice faltered as he realized who he was looking at.
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