Frieren: Himmel — Chapter 177 - Whoa, It's Intel Toji! Everyone Fall Back!
Wan.
As the undisputed powerhouse of a thousand years ago, her innate technique was [Construction].
Similar to the modern sorcerer Zenin Mai, but the gap between their respective mastery of that technique was not even remotely comparable.
Unlike Mai, who could produce only a single bullet per day, Wan could reproduce and deploy any substance within her cognition.
In the Heian Period, she was an unquestioned [Warrior].
But right now,
For the first time in a thousand years.
She felt nervous.
(Alright, so I let anger cloud my judgment earlier, but this pretty boy does have something going for him besides his face and his body, I'll give him that.)
With the exception of the Zen'in Family's nearsighted fools, most powerful individuals could read Toji's abnormal presence at a glance.
(A Binding Vow?)
(A body completely stripped of cursed energy, traded for overwhelming physical capability?)
(No. It's not just 'physical capability.' It's something more.)
To understand his true nature, there was only one way,
(Anyway.)
Wan licked her lips. Her battle hunger, the hunger of a warrior, was rising.
"Let's test the waters~"
One arm swung. A black sickle poured forth and swept from the side toward Fushiguro Toji's thigh.
The liquid metal that dominated mid-range combat let Wan stay composed even against the most elite sorcerers.
But against the Tyrant?
How would it fare?
WHOOSH,
Toji moved first. Not to evade, he dropped into a backbend.
The defined muscles across his back swelled like a feline's, emitting a sound like heavy machinery venting steam, and his whole body surged forward into a full-speed charge.
His face distorted at the velocity. By the time Toji reached her, Wan had barely reacted.
A crack exploded from beneath his feet. Toji raised his leg and side-kicked.
WHOOSH,
Wan bent her knees to dodge, pointed a finger right, and swept it sideways. Liquid metal coalesced into a hexagonal shield and drove itself at Toji.
"Hah."
He didn't dodge. Didn't even flinch.
Wind tore through his wolf-tail hair. Only when the metal closed on his skin did Toji unhurriedly extend his hand.
His palm landed flat on the shield's surface, touch, then pull.
Material.
Hardness.
Velocity.
In one instant, all of it flooded from his palm into his brain.
And then,
WHOOSH,!.
His entire body spun across the shield's surface like a top.
Force redirection. Executed at an absurdly high level.
Not a scratch on him. He even used it to accelerate, reversed his grip on the blade, and drove a downward cone-thrust straight at Wan's skull.
Wan: "!"
She raised her hand. The residual black current streamed in from every direction, forming slender metal arms to block the blade's tip.
"Hey!"
Wan's reaction was fast, abnormally so.
She was a battle-hardened sorcerer of the Heian Period. Her combat experience was terrifying.
SLAP!
But fighting the 'Heavenly Tyrant'?
That was a first.
CRACK!
Under Wan's stunned gaze, the blade tip locked in her liquid metal was snapped off by Toji. Deliberately. By hand.
The broken handle drove into Wan's abdomen, 7 stabs in an instant, every one aimed at a vital point. In the final moment before his inertia gave out, he smoothly pivoted his body.
Leg tensed. Knee-level flat kick, fully extended.
An old Beijing cloth shoe drove into Wan's injured abdomen. It blew the wound open and launched her into the air.
WHOOSH!. BOOM!
An aerial shockwave cracked the sky. Wan blew through several low-rise buildings. Her body, tumbling wildly through the air, clipped a street sign, smashed a parked car, and took out a fire hydrant on the way down.
BANG!
The hydrant burst. Water erupted upward. Wan finally rolled to a stop.
"Cough — cough! Cough!"
What the hell is this guy?!
She scrambled to her feet and wiped the blood from the corner of her mouth.
From the exchange just now, the intelligence she'd gathered was as follows:
[The Heavenly Tyrant's raw physique and combat skill alone is no less than a top-tier powerhouse enhanced by cursed energy. He likely ranks second only to Sukuna, Gojo Satoru, and anomalies like Himmel.]
[And because his organs are so extraordinarily developed, he requires zero divided attention for technique control, meaning his ability to read battlefield information may be second only to Himmel.]
[Beyond that, they can push their own bodies to the absolute limit.]
(That body has innate resistance to curses. So even when my metal merely touches him, I can feel the sluggishness, the drag in my control.)
Wan ignored the wound on her abdomen. For a warrior of her caliber, a broken-blade stab was too shallow to matter.
The problem was her trembling hand.
"Tsumiki — does this guy have something to do with you, too?"
How do you know so many people? I haven't been dragged into someone's bizarre family drama, have I, Wan thought.
Her body was 'disconnecting' intermittently. It was hampering her close-quarters fight.
Wan was, after all, a top-tier powerhouse. Even falling short of Gojo Satoru or Sukuna, with cursed energy reinforcement she should at least have been able to trade blows with the Tyrant.
Being completely steamrolled seemed to be Tsumiki's doing.
Though, her cursed energy output hadn't dropped. Nothing like what happened with Fushiguro Megumi.
In other words, Tsumiki's instincts were protesting, but they weren't truly opposed to hurting the man in front of her.
"Ha! You really are hated, aren't you!"
Wan kept her eyes fixed on Fushiguro Toji as he walked toward her, step by deliberate step, and curled her mouth into a smirk.
"Thanks for the compliment. They say there's a fine line between love and hate —" Fushiguro Toji drew the blade from his waist. His stance this time was altogether more brutal.
"Words of wisdom from a pretty boy?" Wan kept the trash talk coming, but her attention had already quietly shifted to the blade in Toji's hand.
[Because of Wan's [Construction] technique, she had always been sensitive to cursed tools.]
(I can't pinpoint the effect, but I'll keep my guard up.)
Wan thought.
(If that's how it is,)
"I never thought I'd bother pulling this out against someone like you."
Wan's entire body went loose.
Both hands clasped together.
The liquid metal began crawling over her like something alive.
This was Wan's trump card.
[As a user of Construction, Wan had struggled, just as Zenin Mai once did, with the technique's brutal cursed energy cost.]
[Her solution was elegant.]
[Reference known living organisms. Engineer high-performance substances that, once created, sustain themselves without continuous consumption.]
[The butterfly and the bee, crossing vast oceans on wings that never stop.]
[The beetle, lifting hundreds of times its own body weight without strain.]
Fusing the essence of these creatures, she had built a battle armor powerful enough to single-handedly repel the [Five Void Generals], a squad rivaling Uro Takako's own [Sun Moon Stars Squad].
Once it came out, she would turn the tide and crush Fushiguro Toji. No question.
But,
"Hm?"
Wan's smile froze.
Fushiguro Toji had vanished from where he was standing.
In the instant before the armor finished forming and sealed around her,
Fushiguro Toji was already at her side. Moving at a speed that had no business existing.
"I don't know what you're planning, but before that armor is complete, your visual feed can't fully synchronize, right? So there's a blind spot."
Toji's voice was flat.
"You didn't think I was like you sorcerers — fond of so-called honorable, stand-up combat, did you?"
He raised his blade.
SQUELCH,!.
One strike. Straight into the shoulder gap where the armor had not yet closed.
"Ngh — aaaahh!"
Wan screamed in fury and agony. Toji answered with a savage grin and twisted his wrist.
The blade churned through flesh. Blood sprayed.
"!"
What a vile, underhanded man!
Aren't we sorcerers supposed to stand there and WATCH while the opponent sets up their technique?! Who in their right mind interrupts a startup?!
Modern people have absolutely no class!
"Kah!"
Sharp metal spikes burst from the cracks in the ground and forced Toji back. But in that last parting stab, he had already noticed something, a subtle wrongness in the feedback from the blade.
(Hm? She flowed the liquid metal into her own body to block secondary damage?)
Fushiguro Toji gave ground, then gave more, successfully opening the distance.
"Troublesome."
As if the fight itself was confirming his words.
Wan completed the construction.
[Insect Armor]
An overwhelmingly oppressive silhouette. The exoskeleton bristled with sharp angular ridges, like the shell of a colossal arthropod, hard, cold lines carrying the unique, predatory menace of insects.
Wings. Exoskeleton.
Flight capability. Endurance. Hardness. And arm strength that far exceeded what the frame suggested.
The problem, for anyone facing it, was this: the armor was sealed airtight. Without a focused, extreme single-point impact, it simply could not be breached.
[Once before, it was this armor that allowed Wan to repel the [Five Void Generals] and stake her claim among the strongest of the Heian Period.]
So,
"My turn!"
A muffled, buzzing roar. Wan launched the Insect Armor directly at Toji, carving through the air at extreme speed.
WHOOSH!
She looped through the air in a sweeping arc, massive frame, utterly agile. Even Toji was fooled for a fraction of a second. The Insect Armor hit a second burst of speed and came around behind him.
"Ha!"
A wide arcing sweep. Even Toji could only throw up his blade in a hasty block.
The sweeping blow struck the Soul Liberation Blade square on. The sheer force drove Toji backward.
"That's it! I'll grind you into nothing!"
BOOM! BOOM!
Wings hammering at her back, Wan in the Insect Armor bulldozed Toji straight into the building behind him.
CRACK!
From the side, the building's face bulged outward.
Swelled. Expanded. Spread,
EXPLODED!
BANG! BANG! BANG!
3 consecutive residential buildings, caved in one after the other. Then Toji found his moment.
Behind him was a museum. The thick slabs of muscle across his back took the impact. The glass shattered around him and opened into a wide, empty interior space, room to breathe, room to move.
He tucked his core, planted both feet flat against the chest plate of Wan's armor, and shoved hard.
The moment he'd carved out a hair of distance, one hand shot out and grabbed at empty air.
"What?!"
Wan's face went slack.
She had no idea how. No idea why. But Toji had somehow managed to twist his body and complete a full rotation in midair, no surface, no leverage, and came out of it having dodged her attack clean.
Then his mouth pulled into a savage grin, and he slashed.
(Useless!)
(My Insect Armor's hardness is absolute,)
Splat.
"Huh?"
A straight line of blood, wide at the source and narrowing to nothing, cut clean through Wan's body.
Shattered fragments of the Insect Armor scattered into the air. Crimson mist drifted out and blurred her vision.
The world tilted. Her legs went numb. Every last trace of strength seemed to drain out of her at once.
"!......!"
What, happened?
That blade. It went through my armor like it wasn't even there.
Destroying the soul. Destroying the flesh along with it.
It ignored, hardness?
[Wan could sense the Soul Liberation Blade's soul-attack property. But the blade's hardness-ignoring property had never surfaced clearly enough in the exchange for her to identify it, because Toji had been deliberately hiding it the entire time.]
[Assassins are not sorcerers. They carry only one thing in their minds: complete the job. And Kenjaku had fully open-sourced Wan's intelligence to Toji, which sent her threat coefficient into free fall.]
[The gap in information sealed Wan's disadvantage before the fight was ever decided.]
What kind of demonic blade is that?!
That's broken! That's cheating!
(, I can't drag this out.)
Regret. Fury.
Both gone in an instant, swallowed whole.
Wan snapped backward and put distance between them. Both hands clasped together, middle fingers pressed forward and extended.
[Domain Expansion]
"Hm?"
Toji scanned the barrier shell sealing around him, then looked up at the black orb forming above Wan's head.
[Domain Expansion: Threefold Afflictions]
[Construction Technique: True Sphere]
[By granting the technique a sure-hit effect through the domain, the Construction technique realizes a geometrically perfect sphere, the True Sphere.]
[Because its contact area with any surface approaches zero, the pressure it generates is effectively infinite.]
[Once the True Sphere strikes an enemy within the domain, the two properties together execute a single, unambiguous command: certain death.]
(I didn't want to spend my domain before facing Sukuna. But there's no choice.)
A minor detail worth noting.
Not everyone can match Gojo Satoru or Sukuna's cursed energy efficiency. Wan's Construction technique was especially punishing on resources. Stack a Domain Expansion on top of that, plus her current wounds, and she'd need at least several days to recover to full strength.
She did not hesitate.
She would meet the enemy in front of her at full force.
But there was one more thing.
In the final instant before the domain snapped into place, Wan's combat experience flagged a problem.
(, The opponent is an [Anomaly]. No cursed energy.)
(After I expand the domain, there's no way to enforce the sure-hit through barrier technique directly. Not against him.)
Her brain ran the calculation at full speed.
(But,)
(What about cursed tools?)
(Cursed tools carry cursed energy. If I change the domain condition from [beings with cursed energy] to [all objects possessing cursed energy], I can reach him.)
(The True Sphere can only target one object at a time. So I target the one cursed tool inside this domain carrying the strongest cursed energy, the one that poses the greatest threat to me.)
The Soul Liberation Blade could ignore hardness.
But could it ignore the True Sphere?
By Wan's calculations:
Before the Soul Liberation Blade could touch it,
The Soul Liberation Blade would already be destroyed.
Which meant,
(I win.)
The domain finished constructing.
It was a strange domain.
Pure white in every direction, with only a few rough, desiccated-looking 'wombs' drifting around Wan. And above it all, the True Sphere she had built, alone, at the apex.
Victory would come in an instant,
"What?!"
The moment the domain completed.
Wan's mind went blank.
Because,
The domain,
Could not sense a single trace of cursed energy. Anywhere. Except from her.
Impossible.
Then,
"What you could think of, I've naturally thought of too."
Toji stepped out from behind one of the wombs floating inside the domain.
Without the Insect Armor, and with her cursed energy output bleeding steadily from her wounds,
Wan's speed,
"Once I knew you were going to expand your domain, I threw the Soul Liberation Blade away. And honestly — in the shape you're in right now, you can't even take one punch, can you?"
He'd turned her own play against her.
A hit she had no way to answer.
BANG!
Earth-shattering.
An uppercut.
DIRECT HIT.
➤ Next: Mahoraga, Descends