“This is a delivery.” Himmel tossed a head to Geto Suguru without looking.
Geto caught it.
Looked at it.
The remains of the Smallpox Deity.
That’s right.
While Geto had been locked in a brutal stalemate with Kuroi Shinu, the Hero Himmel had already finished his side of the fight.
The Special Grade Cursed Spirit, the Smallpox Deity.
Withered?
“How — how exactly did you handle it?
That curse had a Domain, didn’t it?” Geto stepped forward to stand shoulder to shoulder with Himmel.
His gaze swept over and caught the wounds still visible across Himmel’s body.
Whatever had happened over there, it hadn’t been clean.
“Ah…
did you use that?” “Yeah.” That?
What the hell is that?!
…….
….
Time rewound a few minutes.
BOOM!
Another Tombstone crashed down.
Himmel took less than 0.1 seconds to complete the sequence , shatter the coffin, pierce the ground, smash the tombstone.
This was the 31st time.
BOOM.
BOOM.
BOOM.
The blue-haired Hero kept dodging, but the guaranteed-hit technique always caught him in the end.
The surrounding forest had been torn apart by the technique’s effects.
Even the brief windows to breathe had completely disappeared.
Over those 31 attempts, he had tried everything.
Charging straight at the caster before the coffin or tombstone could fully materialize , using his terrifying speed to catch the startup frames and cut the technique off at the source.
Every attempt failed.
The guaranteed-hit priority was higher than he’d estimated.
Without a Domain of his own, the ideal play was a two-on-one: exorcise the Cursed Spirit the moment its technique locked onto someone else.
In a straight one-on-one, he was at a disadvantage.
That said.
Himmel wasn’t panicking.
Not even close.
He had three reasons for holding his ground.
First: he wanted to learn everything he could about how Domains worked in this world, test his current limits, and get a proper read on this Cursed Spirit’s strength.
Second: he was hoping Geto Suguru would arrive.
Since Geto’s technique was Cursed Spirit Manipulation, Himmel wanted to leave the spirit intact for him to absorb.
Stalling a little longer was worth it.
Third…
The [Eye].
The culprit behind this large-scale viral outbreak was unquestionably the Smallpox Deity in front of him.
A Cursed Spirit born from humanity’s fear of disease was naturally powerful , an infection of this scale wasn’t surprising on its own.
But it had spread too fast.
From what Himmel had observed, Special Grade Cursed Spirits were intelligent.
And precisely because they were intelligent, they wouldn’t deliberately flood a single area with curses.
That kind of concentrated activity attracted Jujutsu Sorcerers.
Cursed Spirits hunted humans out of pure instinct , they had no reason to run a coordinated campaign.
They didn’t do things this planned.
He had reached the same conclusion as Geto Suguru.
There was a puppeteer behind this.
The evidence was sitting right in front of him: he had stalled deliberately, long enough for Geto to have arrived twice over, and Geto still hadn’t come.
Himmel didn’t doubt Geto for a second , one look was all he needed to read a person, and Geto was absolutely the type to throw himself into danger for a comrade’s sake.
If he wasn’t here, someone had held him up.
Something capable of pinning down a Special Grade Jujutsu Sorcerer didn’t just wander onto the scene by accident.
Which meant that puppeteer was watching this fight right now.
Himmel had no interest in showing them his hand.
[What Himmel was thinking was exactly the same as Geto Suguru.] But.
It was like a prisoner’s dilemma — running in reverse.
Himmel could keep stalling.
He just had no idea what state Geto was in.
And Geto had no idea what state Himmel was in.
Both of them were quietly worried the other was being pushed too hard.
If both chose to keep their cards hidden, they risked letting their partner get hurt by moving too slowly.
What a pain.
BOOM.
BOOM.
Another tombstone shattered.
Himmel slipped free with practiced ease.
Mid-sprint, he made his decision.
Enough thinking.
If stalling for time was already factored into the enemy’s plan, then the worst-case scenario wasn’t losing cards , it was the patients in that hospital becoming the actual target.
He needed to move now.
Himmel, whose decisiveness had never failed him, came to a full stop.
BOOM!
The coffin closed around him.
[THUD] Sealed in the dark, he ran through the technique calmly.
One.
Coffin.
Two.
Tombstone.
Three.
Burial.
Four.
Countdown.
Five.
Infection.
Six.
Death.
The first three steps were guaranteed to hit.
Inescapable.
But they carried a window , roughly one second between each stage.
That was enough.
[Technique — Astral Cross] A cross formed behind him, adult-sized, crystallizing out of nothing.
It shuddered and shook as though straining toward a rotation, filling the darkness with a low, resonant clicking.
He had used [Left Seat.
Warrior: Strider] before.
In that state, his body scaled to monstrous levels , nearly immune to physical damage, speed and strength both pushed well past their natural ceiling.
The Holy Sword swung in Eisen-form was something that probably only Gojo Satoru, among every Jujutsu Sorcerer alive, could meet head-on without dying.
With that form, crashing through the Domain from the inside was worth considering.
And as established , if the raw numbers were high enough, a Domain could be broken from within.
But Himmel didn’t reach for it.
Instead, he turned the cross directly to the next position.
[CLANG] A heavy, reverberant toll.
An ancient bell’s final note.
[Rear Seat] Waters of the Rear.
[Priest.
Sacerdos] A phantom rose behind him.
A long, heavy robe.
A tall man with a slightly loose, easy smile.
The priest of Himmel’s Hero Party.
No exceptional combat ability to speak of.
And yet.
It was something Himmel had been turning over in his mind for a while now.
In this Jujutsu Kaisen world , He might actually be the strongest of them all.
“What do you think the role of a priest in the Hero Party is?” BOOM!
The coffin shattered.
Himmel burst into open air.
His hair swept upward with the momentum.
He looked at the Cursed Spirit in front of him, his expression open and anticipating, like he’d been waiting to see this reaction for a long time.
“I’ve always wondered about that myself.” “The Goddess’s Blessing.” Hmmm , , , , , , , , A thick book appeared in his palm, its cover edged in fine, careful binding.
The pages fell open on their own, turning without being touched.
The Goddess’s Tome.
Priests didn’t use conventional magic.
They drew from the Goddess’s magic instead.
And the Goddess’s magic ran toward two things: Support and Purification.
Support boosted the stats of party members.
Purification was exactly what it sounded like.
The ability to root out curses.
To burn away malignant things down to nothing.
Translated into the language of this world , “A curse really can’t compare to the Goddess’s Blessing, can it…” The air within three meters of him turned milky white, like someone had poured a glass of milk into clear water and watched it bloom outward.
The Domain , was being eaten from the inside.
“!!!!!” Emotion broke across the Smallpox Deity’s blank face for the first time.
It shook from head to foot, disbelief rattling through every motion.
It swung its head back and forth, releasing sounds that didn’t quite form into anything coherent.
Then it drove its foot into the ground and screamed at him.
It made no difference.
The guaranteed-hit technique hadn’t fired in some time now.
This wasn’t surprising.
A guaranteed-hit technique was, at its core, still a technique.
The “guaranteed-hit” effect existed because Barrier Techniques backed it up.
And a technique was a method for wielding Cursed Energy.
And Cursed Energy was, at its most fundamental level, the condensed weight of humanity’s negative emotions.
Its other name was [Curse].
No amount of dressing it up changed what it was.
This most primal form of [Evil] was absolutely helpless against the Purification magic of a high-ranking priest , a child who walked in the Goddess’s favor.
The technique was dispelled the instant it tried to deploy from its vessel.
And then , Like a fire that had burned down to its last embers, the charcoal going pale and grey and then scattering on the wind , with Himmel’s landing point as its center, white advanced steadily over black.
Visually, it looked like a [Simple Domain] expanding outward.
No.
Closer to a [Domain Clash].
The Goddess’s Blessing was, in its own right, a Domain.
A [Blessing] meant to shelter one person.
When it sensed curses in its vicinity, self-protection moved to the front of the line.
The Domain the Smallpox Deity held was crude work, even by the standards of Barrier Technique.
A Cursed Spirit’s Domain Expansion was always more primitive than a Jujutsu Sorcerer’s to begin with.
In other words , This Domain was too fragile.
Even the purification leaking off a [Blessing] focused purely on its own bearer was more than enough.
In less than half a second , The black shell of the Domain peeled away from the air around it, drifting apart in flakes like scorched plaster off a burning wall.
The Domain shattered.
The story is already written.