With a deafening crack like shattering glass, Sukuna’s overwhelming closed Domain collapsed completely.
Black remnants of cursed energy drifted through the air like dead ash, scattering across the flattened forest of Jujutsu High.
Amid the dust and raging wind, the enormous pale figure slowly straightened its back.
Mahoraga.
Only seconds earlier, Sukuna’s Domain had carved it apart like a meat grinder.
Yet now, as Mahoraga rose from the ruins of Malevolent Shrine after the wheel above its head turned, there wasn’t a single wound left on its body.
“The Furube incantation and that wheel-shaped formation represent perfect cycles and harmony.”
The violent pressure of compressed cursed energy whipped Atsushi’s naturally messy black hair around his face.
Standing behind Mahoraga, he raised his voice loudly enough for everyone present to hear.
“This shikigami’s true ability is adaptation to any and all phenomena.”
“It’s basically like rock-paper-scissors where whoever moves second is guaranteed to win.”
Yet Atsushi showed none of the fear or hesitation a normal person would have.
Instead, he did something so reckless that everyone present was caught completely off guard.
With a harsh metallic scrape, Atsushi reached behind himself and ripped Dragon-Bone from its sheath.
The vicious-looking Special Grade Cursed Tool immediately filled the air with the scent of blood.
Fresh blood burst from Atsushi’s wrist and spread across the weapon, coating nearly the entire blade in crimson.
The opening would last less than an instant.
Mahoraga had just forced its body to regenerate after adapting to Sukuna’s relentless slashing attacks.
For less than a tenth of a second, its movements stalled.
Atsushi attacked.
His figure vanished.
The next instant, he appeared directly above Mahoraga.
Dragon-Bone screamed through the air as it came down vertically, tracing a perfectly straight line across Mahoraga’s grotesque yet almost divine pale head.
There was no clang of metal.
No resistance whatsoever.
Wrapped in Atsushi’s blood and infused with cursed energy, Dragon-Bone passed through Mahoraga as smoothly as a knife through soft butter.
From head to toe, the shikigami that even Ryomen Sukuna’s Domain had failed to completely destroy was split into two perfectly symmetrical halves.
The Hextech System gave Atsushi the ability to see the names of recognized entities.
Even with Sukuna’s Domain separating them, Atsushi could still see the labels if he focused.
[Special Grade Incarnated Entity, Ryomen Sukuna]
[Special Grade Shikigami, Eight-Handled Sword Divergent Sila Divine General Mahoraga]
And if Atsushi opened a target’s detailed information, the system also displayed the EXP and gold he could earn from defeating or killing it.
Even before Sukuna’s Domain collapsed, Atsushi had been able to track both targets through the system.
That was how he had accurately predicted the exact moment Mahoraga would emerge.
It was also how he managed to strike during the tiny opening immediately after Mahoraga regenerated.
But timing wasn’t the only reason the attack succeeded.
There was still an overwhelming gulf between Atsushi and Mahoraga in raw cursed energy.
[Glass Cannon], however, had traded thirty percent of Atsushi’s maximum health for fifteen percent bonus true damage.
That true damage allowed his strike to ignore Mahoraga’s monstrous cursed energy reinforcement entirely.
With a single slash, Atsushi cut the strongest shikigami of the Ten Shadows Technique, a being whose strength surpassed ordinary Special Grades, completely in half.
Slick.
An unpleasant tearing sound cut through the air.
Under Nobara’s disbelieving stare, Mahoraga’s vertically bisected body began tilting apart.
It looked as though both halves were about to collapse.
Then the impossible happened again.
Mahoraga didn’t die.
Its left half raised one enormous pale hand and grabbed the severed right half of its own head.
Then, with a movement that looked completely unnatural, it slammed both halves of its body back together.
Atsushi’s pupils contracted.
The line running down the center of Mahoraga’s body, which his true damage had completely severed, began healing at a horrifying speed visible to the naked eye.
Atsushi didn’t hesitate.
He didn’t retreat either.
Deep crimson cursed energy surged beneath his skin like molten lava.
His heart began pounding like a war drum.
His body temperature spiked.
Without hesitation, he activated the Blood Manipulation technique that enhanced his physical ability.
Flowing Red Scale.
Dragon-Bone was already nearly weightless in Atsushi’s hands because of Blood Manipulation controlling the blood wrapped around it.
And now, with the explosive physical boost from Flowing Red Scale.
The blood-soaked weapon became a crimson blur too fast for the naked eye to follow.
“RAAAAGH!”
Slash after slash overlapped into a net of death.
Mahoraga’s body had only just forced itself back together.
It had no chance to dodge.
A storm of strikes tore through it instantly, reducing its body into hundreds, then thousands, of pieces.
Pale flesh rained across the battlefield.
Fast.
Far too fast.
The entire sequence had taken less than half a second.
From Atsushi’s first surprise attack to the moment he activated Flowing Red Scale and butchered Mahoraga into fragments, every strike had landed during the tiny recovery window created by Mahoraga emerging from the Domain and regenerating.
Atsushi’s animalistic combat instincts had timed everything perfectly.
“Ryomen Sukuna just used Domain Expansion, so his cursed technique is temporarily burned out!”
After finishing the barrage, Atsushi shouted toward Todo and Nobara in the distance.
“If you don’t stop Mahoraga here, both Itadori Yuji and Fushiguro Megumi are going to die!”
Atsushi knew perfectly well that his attacks weren’t enough to permanently kill Mahoraga.
But he had two theories about how his true damage would interact with Mahoraga’s adaptation.
And in the next second, both were answered by two completely different sounds.
The first came from the system.
[Mahoraga after one adaptation has been defeated.]
[600 EXP absorbed.
200 gold obtained.]
[Level increased to Lv.5.]
[Current EXP: 2,053.
Current gold: 261.
347 EXP required to reach the next level.]
[Please select the attribute you wish to upgrade.
Current level: Lv.5.
Attribute Points available: 1.]
[Available options: Physical Enhancement, Total Cursed Energy, Cursed Energy Manipulation Precision, Cursed Technique Effect Enhancement.]
The second sound came from reality.
From the center of the scattered chunks of pale flesh.
From the manifestation of the Furube ritual itself.
From the wheel symbolizing Mahoraga’s existence.
Click.
A crisp metallic sound, like gears locking into place, echoed across the battlefield.
After Atsushi had completely reduced Mahoraga to pieces, the enormous wheel floating above the remains, apparently without any physical substance of its own, turned again under everyone’s gaze.
Impossible.
Even Mahoraga shouldn’t adapt this quickly.
Wait.
That’s it.
Mahoraga adapts faster each time it’s exposed to the same category of attack.
Both Sukuna’s attacks and mine are fundamentally cursed-energy-infused slashing attacks.
The methods are different, but they’re still the same basic category.
So I accelerated an adaptation that Sukuna had already started.
Because Mahoraga had already partially adapted to Sukuna’s slashes, when it received mine, it skipped most of the analysis.
It recognized the attack as something it already understood and immediately advanced to the next stage of adaptation.
Which means my theory was right.
Mahoraga isn’t adapting to “true damage.”
It’s adapting to “slashing attacks.”
Atsushi’s theory was confirmed in the very next instant.
Mahoraga’s wheel had now turned twice.
And its regeneration speed broke through another limit.
The pile of shredded flesh scattered across the ground moved as though time itself had reversed.
Within a tenth of a second, the fragments flowed together like liquid metal.
Mahoraga returned to perfect condition.
Then it moved.
No unnecessary motion.
No furious roar.
Its enormous body lowered slightly.
A massive fist containing enough force to pulverize a mountain tore through the sound barrier.
Within the same tenth of a second, it was directly in front of Atsushi’s face.
The pressure from the punch alone cut open his cheek before the fist even landed.
This attack wasn’t remotely comparable to the blows Atsushi had taken from Ko-Guy.
It wasn’t comparable to Todo’s heavy punch either.
The instant Mahoraga’s fist entered striking distance, Atsushi’s combat instincts gave him the answer with perfect clarity.
Even if he used everything he had to block with Dragon-Bone…
With [Glass Cannon] making his already fragile body even more vulnerable…
Mahoraga would smash straight through him and the weapon together.
He would become a smear of flesh.
Boom!
An impossibly heavy impact exploded through the forest.
The shockwave created a miniature tornado, ripping already-fallen trees from the ground and sending debris flying.
But Mahoraga’s punch, powerful enough to kill a Grade 1 sorcerer instantly, did not hit Atsushi.
It hit an ordinary gray rock lying among the rubble.
The stone disintegrated into powder the instant Mahoraga’s fist touched it.
Dozens of meters away…
The real Atsushi had already switched positions with the rock.
A single clap still echoed through the air.
Todo Aoi’s Boogie Woogie.
Todo separated his hands and looked at Atsushi.
“You’re a curse user.”
“So why are you risking your life to save Jujutsu High students?”
“Save them?”
Atsushi shook his head.
There was no relief on his face after narrowly escaping death.
Only the expression of someone watching events unfold exactly as expected.
“If I hadn’t said that, you wouldn’t have swapped me out at the critical moment.”
Excitement burned openly in Atsushi’s eyes.
“You asked me earlier what my real objective was, didn’t you?”
He raised his thumb and wiped away the blood from the cut Mahoraga’s punch had opened across his cheek.
“Obviously…”
“It’s to fight that thing.”
Atsushi stared at Mahoraga’s system label in the distance.
The glaring [Special Grade] classification looked less like a warning and more like a ripe piece of fruit waiting to be picked.
Atsushi had discovered something important long ago.
Anything marked with a system name was an entity he could gain EXP and gold from by defeating or killing it.
Ordinary civilians were different.
While searching through Shibuya Station for Mechamaru’s communicator, he had noticed that random pedestrians had no system labels above them at all.
Originally, Atsushi’s plan had only been to use Mahoraga to eliminate the Special Grade cursed spirit Hanami and force Ryomen Sukuna to enter the battle.
At the same time, that would destabilize the alliance between Kenjaku and the four Disaster Curses.
It would also create friction between Sukuna and the cursed spirits because of Hanami’s actions, potentially shifting any future version of the Shibuya Incident in a direction more favorable to Atsushi.
But the moment he saw Mahoraga’s system information, his plan changed.
When Atsushi opened Mahoraga’s detailed entry, he discovered something unique.
Unlike normal cursed spirits and sorcerers, who only awarded EXP and gold once they were defeated or killed, Mahoraga had a special mechanic.
Every time Atsushi destroyed Mahoraga’s body strongly enough to make the wheel turn and trigger another adaptation, the system awarded him 600 EXP and 200 gold.
And if Mahoraga was eventually destroyed completely, the final reward would scale with the number of adaptations it had accumulated.
Each layer of adaptation would add another 600 EXP and 200 gold.
Which meant the current situation was the best possible outcome.
Sukuna was operating under restrictions because control of Itadori Yuji’s body ultimately still belonged to Yuji.
Even the self-proclaimed King of Curses wasn’t strong enough in his current state to defeat Mahoraga outright.
And because Sukuna wanted Megumi alive, he had been forced into becoming the perfect target to keep Mahoraga occupied.
Todo, a Grade 1 sorcerer with exactly the right cursed technique for this situation, could continuously swap anything possessing cursed energy.
Even against a monster beyond ordinary Special Grade level, Boogie Woogie gave him the ability to protect himself and others.
And most importantly…
There was Mahoraga.
A Special Grade shikigami whose wheel rewarded Atsushi with enormous amounts of EXP and gold every time he broke through another adaptation.
I’ll destroy Mahoraga one more time.
Another 600 EXP.
Then I’ll unlock Domain Expansion.
And take my first real step into Special Grade territory.
(To be continued.)