Chapter 182

The aspiring mangaka Charles Bernard has sunk into despair as the Culling Game swallows his world, and now he wants to draw Hakari's blood as much as his manga. To keep Charles from chasing selfish excuses to lash out, Hakari sets out to break his spirit entirely.

Charles conjures G Warstaff, a pen-shaped spear tied to his innate technique, and bursts through their Ferris wheel pod, driving Hakari onto the ride's exterior. He jabs at Hakari's head while reciting what he calls a poem, which Hakari recognizes as a quoted creator's comment from Katsura Hoshino rather than verse. The fight drops onto a building, where Charles explains that mangaka retreat into a limitless fictitious headspace because reality disappoints; with jujutsu now overrunning his reality, he has lost his drive to read and create. Hakari calls that feeling boredom, but Charles, his spirit flaring, names it despair. A hard strike scratches Hakari's cheek, putting blood on the pen's tip and satisfying the technique's condition, which marks Hakari with a glowing square.

Charles reveals the square is a manga panel that lets him preview his opponent's next move, currently a single second ahead, with the range growing as the pen drinks more blood. Testing it, Hakari rushes in with a near-perfect right hook that Charles dodges thanks to the foresight, then counters with the blunt end of the spear. Unimpressed, Hakari vanishes from Charles's sightline and strikes his back, noting the foresight still requires Charles to actually see him, so he hammers the blind spots relentlessly. He explains he cannot go easy, since a despairing Charles would simply attack someone else, and resolves to shatter him completely.

Charles recovers enough to clip Hakari's forehead from a blind spot and declares his heart's vessel broken, now only spilling out in floods of emotion; he boasts he can see two seconds ahead and will be waiting where Hakari cannot watch. Puzzled that Hakari looks unworried and is striking a pose, Charles watches him form the hand sign for his Domain Expansion, Idle Death Gamble, whose guaranteed effect instantly transmits its rules straight into Charles's brain. Akutami's note mentions a craving for shark movies and looking forward to the sequel of The Meg.