Frieren: — Chapter 86 - Limitless Cursed Spirit
While Okkotsu and the others fought Jogo.
Himmel was not idle.
He spotted Hanami, and 3 seconds after meeting, the fight began.
And unsurprisingly, there is a fundamental logic to the world of Jujutsu Kaisen.
It doesn't matter who you are.
It doesn't matter what Cursed Technique you possess.
You throw hands first.
So. The Special Grade Cursed Spirit born from humanity's primal fear of the forest engaged Himmel in combat.
Twenty seconds later.
She was utterly broken.
A completely one-sided fight. Speed, power, no comparison whatsoever.
Hanami, please stop trying to block Sir Himmel's shoe with your face.
He hadn't even activated [Astraeum Crus].
Humiliated, staring down overwhelming force, Hanami made the same choice as her comrade inside the Curtain.
Domain Expansion.
(According to intelligence, the Special Grade Jujutsu Sorcerer named Himmel possesses combat power rivaling Gojo Satoru under specific conditions, but lacks Barrier Techniques.)
Hanami thought this, and in the same breath, recalled Kenjaku's words from three days prior.
Yes, Hanami, you're quite durable. And Himmel only activates his [Cursed Technique] when facing enemies strong enough to warrant it. Technique completion time: 956 seconds.
I don't believe he'll use it against you.
So all you need to do is stall until Jogo finishes inside, then run.
Damn that Kenjaku...
The intelligence wasn't wrong. But this gap in raw parameters is way too massive!
Still... fortunately. There was still Domain Expansion.
"Human!"
Hanami's voice resonated directly inside his mind.
"Stop this meaningless battle. Even through the Curtain, you should have felt it — the violent surge of Cursed Energy outside."
"Jogo has already expanded his Domain. You have no chance of victory."
"So—"
"Shh."
Himmel's reply was a single gesture. One hand behind his back. The other's index finger raised to his lips.
And what made it even more humiliating, Hanami actually shut her mouth on reflex.
"I can more or less guess why Kenjaku sent you here."
Himmel spoke as if he could see straight through two nested Domains and two Curtains, peering into the battlefield inside.
"If he wants to show his hand, I don't mind at all."
"Coincidentally — just like what Hakari's Cursed Technique says. Let's make a bet."
For him, this fight... could you even call it a fight?
He cared more about watching the two kids inside grow.
He knew Kenjaku had dispatched these Cursed Spirits to test them. He was perfectly happy to be tested.
Just as Gojo Satoru had said.
They couldn't protect Okkotsu forever.
As the eye of the storm, Okkotsu's own growth was the deciding factor for both sides. That was what mattered.
"That said—"
Himmel smiled.
"My students will seize their own luck through strength."
"...Foolish beyond measure."
Hanami let go of any thought of persuasion. She could not comprehend what Himmel was saying right now.
"Regardless — as their teacher, you have already entered my Domain. What chance of victory do you have left?"
"Is that so?"
She unleashed the Domain's sure-hit technique. Pushed her strongest form into a full assault.
But,
"I'd say it's you who've been driven into a corner."
White light flashed.
Inside the paradise garden, colossal trees coiled and churned, as if granted life, erupting from the earth like pythons, converging on Himmel's position to crush and strangle.
BANG!
Still too slow.
A foot planted on a trunk. His figure detonated away from it. Pure leg speed, no tricks, soaring, weaving, tearing through the surrounding air as he evaded everything at once.
WHAM!
He casually snapped off a branch.
[Tausend Forms]
Cold light erupted. Horizontal slash, vertical cleave. The biting blade-wind carved through every vine within a fifty-meter radius.
The colossal trees shattered. Massive branches came crashing down.
[!]
Hanami watched in disbelief.
The Domain's sure-hit had unquestionably triggered.
And yet the opponent had already completed his counter the instant before it landed.
A Simple Domain.
She understood.
He was using a technique similar to Simple Domain. Kenjaku's intelligence was already outdated.
Even without [Astraeum Crus], Himmel could contest a Domain!
The tree trunks surged and writhed like earthbound serpents, but the blade-light remained impenetrably dense. Slash after slash came down, and the forest that had formed an encirclement around him was finally cleaved apart entirely.
Chaos. Fragmentation. Collapse.
Hanami could only stare until, in that instant, Himmel arrived before her.
"Well then — that's that."
He raised his hand. The blade caught the white light.
[The Hero's blade is, without question, sufficient to take the head of a Special Grade Cursed Spirit.]
[However, at that moment.]
[Something arrived that no one had anticipated.]
"Heh~ So this is the guy?"
CLANG!
[At the boundary of the Domain, an unforeseen variable appeared.]
"!"
[!]
Neither Hanami nor Himmel registered it immediately, a fissure had split open in the sky above the Domain.
CRASH!
Like glass struck by a hard blow.
The dome cracked. Fragments of black debris scattered through the air, and a silhouette dropped through the gap, body loose, posture easy.
"I've come to rescue you, Hanami~"
The figure was tall. Long blue-gray hair. Heterochromatic eyes, left blue, right gray.
Black suture lines traced across his face and down his body. He looked to be around twenty.
Hanami was stunned.
Himmel was caught off guard as well.
The level of Cursed Energy was unmistakable.
Another Special Grade Cursed Spirit.
Special Grade Cursed Spirits appearing together...
Kenjaku, just how many trump cards does that bastard have?
"So this guy is Himmel?"
After landing, the Cursed Spirit with a human face first checked Hanami's condition, then looked over at Himmel.
"Hey! You're Himmel? I'm Mahito~ A Cursed Spirit."
When he laughed, his smile actually carried a hint of brightness.
The moment he landed, he put on a pitiful expression, almost comically so. His face was so expressive that he genuinely managed to look a little pathetic.
But... this guy...
"Let's stop fighting. Can't humans and Cursed Spirits just coexist in peace?"
Mahito pressed a hand over his chest the moment he touched down, voice low, movements earnest.
"Are we Cursed Spirits fated to be hunted down by humans from the moment we're born?"
He furrowed his brow, expression twisted with pain.
"Can't we try to get along—"
"Hey."
Himmel cut him off.
"That's about enough."
The Hero was frowning now.
If he didn't have that near-cheating intuition of his, he might actually have been taken in.
But Himmel, the man who would normally chat with Cursed Spirits just to entertain himself...
"Ugh..."
The usual warmth drained from his face. He looked like he'd just bitten into something rotten.
For reasons he couldn't quite name, he felt a visceral, physical revulsion toward the man standing in front of him.
Meanwhile, Mahito dropped the act entirely and looked Himmel over from head to toe. After a moment, the corner of his mouth twitched.
"Hey~ Pity play failed~"
"Wow... you look like real trouble~ Hanami, at this rate, I can't guarantee I'll be able to bring both you and Jogo out."
"It's fine... I've already grasped the gap between us. Just keep yourself safe."
"Ah... even so, if Hanami actually died, I'd still be sad, you know~"
What are these two talking about?
Well. Whatever.
Himmel didn't dwell on it.
He was no Frieren. If it were him,
WHAM!,!.
The opponent's silhouette suddenly filled his vision. A shockwave of wind detonated outward, and Himmel was in front of both Mahito and Hanami in an instant.
He would strike first. Talk later.
Arm raised. Sword swung.
Heavy, crushing pressure materialized from nothing. White light flashed, and a diagonal cut carved along the line of both their necks, no hesitation, no pause.
SPLURT!,,
Hanami barely managed to react with the Domain's amplification behind her, generating a layer of proliferated matter across her throat.
Her head flew off anyway.
Himmel at full output, even now in his base state, moved at speeds that left both Hanami and Mahito completely behind.
One hit.
And compared to Hanami, Mahito showed no sign of reacting at all. His head parted from his body without the slightest resistance.
"Eh?"
That's it?
Himmel watched Mahito's severed head spinning through the air with genuine surprise.
There'd been solid feedback on impact. Blood had sprayed.
Was his strength really only at this level?
No. If that were all... why would he dare come here...
From Himmel's perspective: Hanami falling back. Mahito's head rotating in the air above. And in that brief fraction of a second when the face turned toward him,
"Bleh~"
The eyeballs snapped sideways and locked onto him. The corners of the mouth wrenched into a savage grin.
Himmel startled, and a cold chill ran through him.
His body held the taut stillness of the post-swing stance, muscles locked, neck fixed. Only his eyes shifted.
His peripheral vision caught it.
Mahito's headless torso was already hurtling straight for him.
"!"
A Cursed Spirit that could move freely without its head?
High-grade Cursed Spirits had body structures close to humans. He'd assumed this one was the same. It appeared to be something very different.
Human appearance, human structure, even solid physical feedback, and yet it could operate with the head and body completely separated?
An ordinary person might have fallen for it.
But Himmel's body moved before conscious thought. He twisted his waist, flipped cleanly to the side, his cloak whipping upward in the erupting gust, and his blade was already redirected, cutting down into Mahito's torso.
Dozens of slashes in under a second. Mahito's flesh came apart in pieces.
But...
SQUELCH!
It was reconnecting.
SLAP!
In an instant, the scattered flesh oozed thick fluid from every severed edge and snapped back together like magnetized pieces, dragged by some invisible force. The headless torso that had just been carved into fragments was nearly whole again before Himmel could finish processing what he'd seen.
He hadn't even had time to be surprised by the regeneration.
The healed abdomen suddenly bulged grotesquely outward. The flesh around the navel peeled back.
"Gah! Surprise!"
A brand-new Mahito head thrust up from the depths of the abdominal cavity, eyes gleaming with mockery, tongue out, lunging toward Himmel.
"!"
This guy's fighting style is genuinely revolting.
Himmel's expression got worse.
Mahito seemed not to notice. He unhinged his jaw wide.
HISSS,!
Fleshy tendrils resembling snakes surged out in a torrent, rapidly spreading into a surrounding net, hurtling straight at Himmel.
Himmel ducked immediately and kept thinking as he moved.
This opponent's ability was something else entirely. Hanami had already surprised him, but this one was a different kind of freak.
Losing his head. Being cut to pieces. All of it, restored in an instant.
That head in the air wasn't a real "head" at all. It wasn't carrying thought. The consciousness itself was dispersed throughout the entire body?
And the ability to reshape his own flesh...
Kill him outright?
Or...
Hm?
[In that instant.]
[Hero Himmel's Intuition misfired for the first time. Regarding the action the Hero was about to take, it simultaneously returned both Approval and Denial.]
[This had barely happened since the Hero fully mastered Combat at the age of fourteen.]
At the same time, the swarm of snakes Mahito had expelled missed Himmel and immediately shifted.
"You're this close! There's no way you can dodge this!"
Mahito bellowed through a garbled, savage laugh, jaw still hanging open.
BANG!
The swarm detonated all at once, every piece driving toward a different point on Himmel's body like porcupine quills shot point-blank.
In this dead-end,
Himmel found a way through.
But he didn't dodge everything. Wrist spinning through a tight flourish, he swept and chopped in rapid succession, knocking the bulk of the attack away.
And then,
One snake slipped past the blade.
It touched Himmel's right arm.
TZZ!
In that instant.
A long-absent sensation detonated across his arm.
"!"
Pain.
The first time Himmel had felt real, distinct pain since arriving in the world of Jujutsu Kaisen was during his fight with Geto Suguru. The Maximum Technique had dealt him genuine damage.
The most recent instance before this was a slap from an enraged Rika. Even when blocked, it still registered.
But this was different.
Brief contact. A fraction of a second. And Himmel knew with total clarity,
The damage from this opponent exceeded Rika's attack. Not because of raw physical force. Because something deeper had been hurt. The layers underneath.
That was...
"A soul attack?"
For the first time, Himmel felt his own soul.
The first time taking a hit like this...
(In my previous life, mental magic existed, but this kind of thing as well...)
This guy might actually be a problem,
"Guhah!"
Right as that thought formed,
"Mahito!"
Hanami, now reduced to just a head, still had enough to speak. She called for Mahito to press the advantage.
But the only one shaken on this battlefield was not Himmel.
"You... did you take that on purpose?"
Mahito, who had been laughing viciously a moment ago, stood there after restoring his human appearance, and didn't celebrate. Not even close.
His face had gone pale. His hand came up to cover the lower half of his face.
Blood seeped through his fingers almost immediately.
He was injured.
(Even though the Idle Transfiguration was launched against Himmel... his soul actually struck back?!)
(This guy... the strength of his soul is not normal!)
And furthermore,
HISSS!.
That searing sound again.
But this time, a radiance bloomed behind Himmel for the first time.
[Astraeum Crus]
[Rear Position. Priest]
CLANK!
Heavy rotation. Gears locking into place.
The faint bloodstains on Himmel's arm dissolved instantly, gone without a trace.
"So that's Priest Mode..."
The mode that Hanami was supposed to have forced out, it had finally appeared now.
If this was what that ability could do...
Mahito's eyes narrowed. Then he suddenly lashed out.
WHOOSH!.
His arm stretched into a chain-whip dozens of meters long, slashing at Himmel, who blocked it without effort.
POP!
The whip that could shear through steel was knocked apart sideways, pieces scattering across the ground.
"As I thought..."
(Even Idle Transfiguration can't break through the purification of [Priest].)
(Idle Transfiguration countered by [Priest]... that's an indisputable fact.)
"Heh."
(But...)
"Sorry, Hanami... Looks like I can't fight this one normally..."
"But don't worry. I'll find a way to at least bring Jogo out. And next time..."
Mahito looked at Himmel. Blood still running steadily through his fingers. His cheek muscles pulled upward, forcing a twisted, blood-streaked grin, battered, vicious, and cold.
"Next time, I'll have a way to kill this guy."
"Did I say you could leave?"
Himmel stepped forward.
Kill you.
It wouldn't take even half a second.
[Half a second.]
The moment he moved, Hanami and Mahito reacted together.
First, Hanami's Cursed Technique. The Domain's sure-hit struck at zero delay directly beneath Himmel's feet. Out of nowhere, a field of flowers bloomed.
"!"
This isn't catering to my tastes... No, wait. This affects emotions?
[Zero point four seconds.]
Himmel was surprised such a technique existed, but he tore free in a single moment. He drove power into his legs and tracked Mahito's movement.
Even factoring in the time to load his legs, Himmel could cover over thirty-four meters in 0.1 seconds.
[Zero point three seconds.]
But, with Hanami's interference buying the time, Mahito's technique deployed within that same 0.1 seconds.
"Blargh..."
His throat convulsed violently. He vomited several fingertip-sized deformed shapes, then flung them all directly into the line of Himmel's sprint.
(Clones?)
The grotesque shapes expanded and split rapidly in mid-air, bones and flesh writhing outward, splitting their outer skin as they bloomed into complete Cursed Spirit forms.
With Himmel's swordsmanship, even without actively blocking, he could cut through all of them without slowing down.
His distance from Mahito was now under twenty meters.
A blade reinforced by [Priest]'s purification would likely deal true damage to that guy.
Zero point three seconds. More than enough.
.
[It should have been so.]
[Zero point two seconds.]
[Hero Himmel's Intuition forced his sword arm to stop. At the very last moment, he looked, really looked, at those clumps of flesh hurtling toward him.]
Those were not Mahito's clones.
Those were...
(Humans...?)
Products of souls twisted by Idle Transfiguration. They had already departed from the category of human.
Not Cursed Spirits. Not humans.
Just...
Aggregates of meat.
Himmel was a deeply traditional man. Whether it was someone he admired or someone he needed to protect, even if they were already dead, he would do what he could to preserve the integrity of their remains rather than leave them to be trampled under demonic feet.
But in moments where lives hung in the balance, he could make that call in an instant. He had done it before. Lives and safety of many, that precedent was clear.
Except.
[The premise was that those clumps of flesh could not be saved.]
[In that instant, Hero Himmel understood Mahito's Cursed Technique. In the same moment, he understood the contradictory Intuition he'd felt earlier.]
Mahito's ability operated on souls. The process systematically destroyed the human body's structure, causing damage that was near-impossible to reverse, turning people into aggressive aberrations.
Under normal circumstances, there was no coming back.
...
[Those were normal circumstances.]
[For a Hero carrying the blessing of the Water Goddess, and his companion, the highest-ranking Priest...]
[This damage was not irreversible.]
And that, precisely, was the problem.
[His Cursed Technique countered by Himmel, Mahito knew that Himmel was one of the vanishingly rare beings capable of actually touching his soul.]
[Himmel, whose ability countered Mahito's, he knew that he was one of the vanishingly rare, perhaps the only person in the entire world, capable of healing the transfigured humans Mahito had created.]
[That "counter", in turn, reshaped the choices of both sides.]
[Yes. In that instant.]
[Himmel and Mahito's judgment of each other converged on the same conclusion.]
Strength had nothing to do with it.
Their eyes met. Both could see, buried at the very bottom of each other's gaze, a mutual, visceral disgust.
...The compatibility between them.
[Was absolute zero.]
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