Frieren: — Chapter 102
Amid the chaotic, shattered ruins, the battle continued.
"Hm?"
Far from Sendai, in the underground railway of Shibuya, Mahito, locked in continuous combat, suddenly froze. His eyes drifted involuntarily toward the distance.
(It's already started over there... that brat... was this within Himmel's expectations too?)
(If it is, then that guy Kenjaku, )
"You have time to be distracted?"
BZZT!
Before Mahito could finish the thought, a streak of light punched through his body. What looked like a single bright line erupted in an instant into a geometrically intersecting grid, slicing him into no fewer than 17 pieces.
"Whoa! That startled me~"
By the time the words left his mouth, his body had already been cut apart. Fortunately, his Simple Domain's Reverse Reflection had activated just in time, splitting his own body open before the cuts could land cleanly.
Two of the strikes still connected. The damage was tolerable.
Mahito stared at the Hero, wary and genuinely astonished.
The space around them was absolute chaos. The tremors had the torn-open underground railway teetering on the edge of collapse, 30 meters above the waterway below. Bricks peeled from the walls and crashed down. Marsh gas had caught from the battle's shockwaves. If Himmel hadn't been running the Priest's Goddess technique to regulate the explosions, this whole place would have gone up long ago.
Even so, it was a sea of raging fire.
Their silhouettes flickered and vanished within that inferno, clashing again and again.
As established: in Kenjaku's plan, the key to the Cursed Spirit faction's victory was simple. Mahito didn't just need to hold Himmel in place. He needed to close the gap, using his terrifying learning ability to match the Hero's level.
Such a hot-blooded shonen manga setup. Mahito was loving every second of it.
(As long as my strength, speed, and reaction time can match Himmel's, I can use the hostages to create an opening to kill him.)
But...
(This guy...)
A slick, sticky grin spread across Mahito's face. He couldn't stop it if he tried.
He watched Himmel, still in that white cloak over blue, a figure like a pillar of reflected light, leaping and rebounding through the black smoke and roaring fire without pause.
"So fast, so fast~"
"But you haven't managed to finish me off in all this time — maybe my comrades have already succeeded on their end~"
Mahito tried to make conversation. Stalling.
[Rescue the hostages]
[Purify the Transfigured Humans]
[Slash Mahito to temporarily deprive him of mobility]
[Monitor the environment to prevent total collapse]
Those were every task Himmel had to complete within a single frame.
He couldn't miss a single one. He couldn't prioritize one over the others. One slip, one instant of wrong sequencing, and someone died, or the whole structure caved in.
Mahito was absolutely using this environment, built entirely in his own favor, to evolve.
As revolting as Mahito was, there was one thing he hadn't lied about.
His talent was genuinely rare. After Kenjaku's unreserved tutelage and enhancement through barrier techniques, his combat power had already pulled even with Hanami, a curse born long before him.
But to truly grow stronger, a Jujutsu Sorcerer still needed pressure.
And Mahito knew exactly who his natural enemy was.
Himmel.
A Hero who carried goodwill and patience toward every human being, the exact opposite of Mahito's absolute contempt for the species.
Just his existence made Mahito feel,
"Truly sickening~"
He mimed gagging, waving a hand away from his mouth.
"Possessing all that power and choosing to limit yourself. How boring."
"Cursed Spirits and humans aren't even that different, really~ When you get down to it, isn't that little girl Rika a Cursed Spirit~ Why do you treat her so well?"
Himmel didn't respond. He didn't bother masking his contempt.
But that contempt, that open hostility, it was precisely what drew out the most from Mahito's talent.
He was getting stronger. He could feel it.
The first time he'd encountered Himmel, he'd mastered Simple Domain and Domain Expansion.
This time, he felt like he was about to touch the very core of his soul.
Close. So close.
But...
Why was the rate at which Himmel was cutting him...
Going up?
FWOOOOOSH!
[What does the world look like from a first-person view when a human moves at supersonic speed?]
The surroundings lose their clean shapes. Everything stretches and smears into afterimages. Objects straight ahead collapse inward, rushing toward you. Blurs of color stream past on either side. Your ears go dead quiet. Light bends at the surface and hazes everything ahead into a pale wash. And the air isn't the icy rushing wind you'd imagine. It's thick, almost solid, scraping against you like slabs of stone.
Himmel was already used to all of it.
(Faster.)
He lunged forward, body nearly parallel to the ground.
BZZT—,!
The raging wind couldn't catch up to him. His cloak shredded slightly at the edges, distorted by the force.
Exposed rock. Jagged rebar stumps. The underside of train cars. He cycled through footholds, executing compound accelerations, bleeding off speed before he reached the civilians so the wake from his movement didn't hit them, then rebuilding to speeds that outpaced what Mahito's Simple Domain could auto-reflect when he closed back in.
It was difficult.
But Himmel could do it.
[While Mahito pushed himself to evolve under crushing pressure...]
[Himmel, too, was rapidly optimizing his routes and accelerating, drawing on his combat experience as a Hero.]
Finally,
"Ugh!"
Another spray of blood. Himmel drew his blade, dropped low, swung upward, and sliced most of Mahito's chest open.
Mahito's face went ugly. He retreated fast.
(Redirecting and reusing a single strike vector, surpassing the response ceiling of Simple Domain?)
This bastard.
(How are you also getting stronger?!)
Or rather...
Compared to getting stronger, Himmel was more like...
Regaining his touch.
Eyes calm. Growing more focused with every exchange.
As mentioned: Himmel was powerful, but back in his world, he hadn't been invincible. Even in the final battle against the Demon King, the battle they won, none of the four of them had ever believed they were simply "stronger" than him.
In real combat, even the greatest fighter's performance rose and fell with their condition.
Like getting hot in a game. That kind of thing.
After the Demon King fell, no demon had dared challenge him again. After reincarnation, his most serious battle had been 9 years ago.
9 years.
And now he was entering that place again. That full seriousness.
The Hero's condition...
Was climbing an exponential curve, accelerating with every second.
"Ugh!"
Another slash. Cold sweat prickled across Mahito's cheeks. His grin had gone rigid and feral.
"Aaah! How annoying!"
(If this keeps up, once Himmel purifies every last Transfigured Human, I'll have no room to fight back!)
(In that case, )
"Heh!"
The corner of his mouth split open. His hair whipped up with the violence of his movement.
"Then let's just end it directly! HIMMEL!"
Mahito let out a wild, full-throated laugh and pressed his palms together.
[Domain Expansion]
Every speck of dust froze in midair. Thanks to the precise bodily control that Idle Transfiguration granted him, Mahito's Domain Expansion was far faster than any normal sorcerer's.
"Go ahead — let's see if you can still protect those humans!"
The wind died. Every trace of motion in the space around them went to zero.
The domain's black outer shell began eating into reality. A crushing, suffocating pressure rolled out in every direction. Countless pale hands materialized from nothing, fingers spread, postures varied, all converging inward toward the center,
[Self-Embodiment of Perfection]
Mahito's last card.
Inside his domain, the guaranteed-hit property meant Idle Transfiguration reached its target without fail. Sure-hit, sure-kill.
But it wasn't a clean winning move.
Even for Mahito, Domain Expansion drained a staggering amount of Cursed Energy. No back-to-back activations. The technique burnout afterward was its own headache.
And the domain itself was intricate barrier-craft. The sure-hit didn't target whoever the user pointed at. It targeted whoever the sorcerer had written into the barrier's rules.
Like writing code. Most sorcerers could only manage the simplest command, print, which meant the barrier attacked everything indiscriminately.
That wouldn't work.
If Mahito set all the hostages as Idle Transfiguration targets at once, Himmel couldn't save them all, but with no hostages left to protect, nothing would stop Himmel from closing the distance and cutting him down immediately.
Hostages only had value if they were half-dead.
(Write the domain's rules to focus the sure-hit on individual targets.)
(Adjust the range to attenuate the intensity, slow enough that the hostages won't die immediately, forcing Himmel to keep spending time on them.)
Range. Target selection. Intensity regulation.
All of it constructed in a single instant.
This level of technique required all three pieces: Kenjaku's instruction, Mahito's raw talent, and the lethal pressure Himmel had been grinding into him for the entire fight. Remove any one of them and it would have collapsed.
But right now,
He'd done it. He'd actually done it.
"Huh?"
Mahito froze.
Wait.
Idle Transfiguration hadn't affected the mortals?
Could it be,!,!.
"Who told you the Purification I placed on them was only instantaneous in effect?"
.Shnk!
Himmel flash-stepped, appearing directly before Mahito.
Faster than anything he'd shown before.
Just that single step, the pressure wave slammed Mahito's skin flat against his skull, warping his face.
So that was it.
The Priest's techniques didn't just eliminate existing curses. They could sustain a temporary purification ward.
All that prolonged stalling. All that careful, meticulous maneuvering. It had bought exactly enough time to move every last hostage into the safe zone.
And now.
He could face Mahito without restraint.
Under that enormous gap in power.
The outcome would be settled in a heartbeat.
I...
Lost?
Mahito opened his mouth. Closed it. His whole jaw was shaking.
Click. Click. Click.
His teeth knocked together.
I'm going to... die?
The blade was closing in. Death was certain.
Mahito knew this was an unfair fight.
The Jujutsu world had Gojo Satoru and Himmel. Either one of them, unconstrained, could wipe out all Four Disaster Curses without breaking a sweat.
To take either of them down, you had to exploit their pathetic sense of justice, their sense of responsibility, torment them, persecute them, grind them down until their psychological defenses finally crumbled.
Mahito was good at that.
But,
Something vicious crawled up from his throat. Mahito bared a feral grin.
[That is the thinking of trash.]
If I don't face death directly, my soul will never bloom.
Under a look that even Himmel couldn't quite hide his surprise at, Mahito charged forward instead of retreating.
"HIMMEL!"
He swung.
[Genuine death]
[Clear defeat]
[Fear]
Mahito had been waiting for this. Had always been waiting for this exact moment.
Squeezing his soul under that immense pressure until it secreted something new... riding an absolute surge of exaltation, he threw the punch.
Himmel cut through his fist without effort.
But in that instant, blade met flesh,
It was born. CRACKLE.
"Nye-hee!"
A black, blazing light erupted through the underground passage, electric current crackling and scattering in every direction!
[, The black spark does not choose the identity of those it favors.]
His arm split open down the center. Mahito threw his head back and screamed.
"I've grasped it!"
Through this battle with Himmel. Through the pressure crushing his survival instincts.
"—The core of Cursed Energy!"
The ugly soul clutched tight in his hand...
At this moment, blossomed and unfurled.
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