Chapter 177

Yuta is forced to handle Uro and Ryu together now. Although Ryu left his first life carrying no regrets, a fathomless craving still gnaws at him, and faced with so striking a fighter he wonders if Yuta might at last be the dessert he has hunted for so long.

Lighting a cigarette, Ryu speaks of a first life rich with worthy rivals and a good woman, untroubled by serious regret, yet haunted by a hazy thirst nobody understands. Tobacco, he says, leaves a sweet finish his own life has never offered, the dessert he keeps chasing. Yuta hears him out calmly, but the word dessert warns him an attack is on the way. The pair trade punches to take each other's measure, and Yuta clocks Ryu's eruptive output married to crisp, fast motion, judging that even his own durability would suffer from a clean hit. They each go for a shoulder charge, and Ryu wins the exchange, hurling Yuta away.

Yuta smashes through a building, rights himself, and bats aside an oncoming Granite Blast with bare hands before the two land on a rooftop. He rushes in to drive Ryu into the roof, only for another beam to launch him off the edge as Ryu gleefully asks whether he is the dessert. Seizing on his airborne plight, Uro aims not at Yuta but at the very surface of the sky, fracturing it like thin ice so the shattering force pours onto him; her refined extension, Thin Ice Breaker, slams him down into a building.

Furious at the meddling, Ryu fires a wave at Uro and snaps that she is in his way, but she bends his own beam straight back at him. The reflected blast staggers him, a thing he has never once felt in his entire life, and he concedes it carries real bite. A wounded Yuta returns to the field, and Uro vows to play with him. Ryu observes that Yuta keeps pouring his near-bottomless cursed energy into reverse cursed technique to heal, likening him to a cake shop that disappoints every time it shuts, and decides Yuta may not be the dessert he craves after all. Knowing neither Ryu nor Uro hunts civilians yet cannot be trusted to spare them, and unable to drag the fight farther from the stadium, Yuta resolves to give it all, sliding on his ring, summoning Rika, and asking her for everything. Akutami's note thanks the passion he felt week after week and congratulates Inagaki Sensei and Boichi Sensei.