Round after round of fighting, and the most critical piece was this: the two Mahoraga had been layering off each other.

Neither could beat the other, so they kept driving their base stats higher and higher. A Mahoraga that couldn't even track Himmel at the start had climbed to an entirely different level. And after fighting Himmel, they'd adapted to his rhythm fast, each one sharpening the other, two bodies pushing their physical output in tandem.

What unfolded was a battle that defied imagination.

Mahoraga No. 2 shattered the ground under its feet, charging in low. Fist bone swinging upward.

Slap.

Himmel's palm folded over the fist, one twist, one wrench, the attack dissolved. His other arm swung the blade spine up into a guard.

CLANG!

Metal shrieked.

A blade gleam came slashing down in a spinning arc, landing square on Himmel's guarded flat. He gripped the hilt and let his weight sink, feet driving into the ground, whole body rotating, and both Mahoraga left the ground at once, flung clockwise.

BOOM!

Both stabbed their feet down before the landing and held.

Mahoraga No. 2 twisted its head back around. Vision panned over,

Black filled its pupil.

A fist.

No time. Himmel's heavy punch blasted into its face full force. Skin caved in. The entire skull snapped back under the impact, neck wrenched into a horrifying arc.

BOOM!

Knee up. Elbow down.

CRACK!

Elbow drove into the back of the skull. Knee drove into the face.

Like a sledgehammer meeting a watermelon, Mahoraga's head,

POP!

Exploded.

Himmel didn't flinch at the blood and flesh across his body. He reached forward. Fingertips punched into the chest cavity, hooked inward, lifted, and flung Mahoraga No. 2 behind his own back.

SPLAT!

The blade gleam Mahoraga No. 1 had aimed at Himmel's spine caught No. 2's body instead. Blood and gore splattered across No. 1's face.

Whether Mahoraga even had anything like 'vision' was anyone's guess. It still shook its head to clear the mess.

It got two shakes in before it realized that was pointless.

THUD!

Both knees screamed with pain. Mahoraga's entire body locked up.

It looked down.

Both knees were pinned by the Hero's Sword. The blades were buried to the hilt in the ground.

With Mahoraga's body fixed in place, Himmel took a deep breath.

"Heave-ho!"

Both arms became a storm.

"Ora ora ora!"

BOOM! BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM!

Both fists cycling in alternation, an endless barrage at maximum speed.

Fist shadows overlapped and surged. Wind pressure detonated with every strike, each blow landing on the last. From the side, the punching speed was so extreme that Mahoraga's upper body lost all recognizable shape — only the waist visible, bending back, bending back, bending back, and then —

POP!

Like a balloon bursting.

BOOM BOOM BOOM!

The fist wind punched clean through Mahoraga and tore the earth open behind it.

And Mahoraga itself,

From the waist up: gone.

(Seize the oppor,)

Himmel's fist was already rising for the follow-up when he felt the gale at his side.

To be precise: he'd felt it 0.0003 seconds ago. Mahoraga No. 2, flesh fully regenerated, had already thrown the punch. The fist face was only now arriving.

Duck. Reverse elbow.

BOOM!

Mahoraga hit the ground hard and stayed there.

Then almost immediately its abdomen heaved. It launched off the ground like a spring, and came at Himmel again.

[CLANG]

This time, faster.

Both fists danced with afterimages, just like Himmel's had moments before. Heavy fist winds tore the air in shreds. Every punch carried solid, ugly, brutish force.

Himmel answered in kind.

BOOM! BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM, BOOM!

And again, Mahoraga was the one sent flying. Launched like it hit a spring, arcing away into the distance.

He really wanted to chase it down.

Really wanted to...

"You two are so damn annoying."

Himmel let out a long, tired sigh.

Mahoraga No. 1, fully restored, stood at his side.

Right.

This was Mahoraga.

As long as you couldn't kill it in one shot, it would regenerate — unconditionally, endlessly, and come back stronger every single time. If there'd been just one, Himmel could have driven it into the ground at full efficiency. But two meant there would always be a gap. Some window where one recovered while he was dealing with the other.

Cutting them in half: useless.

Blowing the head off: useless.

Destroying the upper body entirely: useless.

Even if he reduced one to a sliver of flesh, it came back.

Like an increasingly indestructible roly-poly toy.

Really...

"So damn troublesome."

[CLANG]

Himmel's cross and Mahoraga's Dharma Wheel spun in sync.

Both sides vanished from their positions at the same instant.

Blade gleams, sword shadows.

Dense cutting rang out like a rainstorm hammering banana leaves. Shoulders, thighs, waist, abdomen, deep wounds opened across Mahoraga's body, bone flashing white at the bottom of each one.

What Himmel was using now was [Passive Rotation].

And the mode he'd auto-switched into was,

[Monk]

Physical amplification: minimal. Goddess Magic worked well against Jujutsu and could exorcise Cursed Spirits directly, but it had no way to kill Mahoraga. Mahoraga was a Shikigami, and that was a different problem entirely.

If Himmel could get eyes on Sukuna, on Fushiguro Megumi's body, he might be able to forcibly break the subjugation by casting [Goddess Magic] directly on the sorcerer wielding the technique. But using it on Mahoraga alone accomplished nothing.

So Himmel switched styles.

Side stance. Sword pulled back. Tip pointing straight forward. Arms shifting from lateral swing to forward-backward thrust.

Mahoraga had adapted to the concept of 'slashing.' It had not adapted to the 'sword.'

Switch from slash to thrust, and its adaptation weakened.

Air currents converged. The sword tip in Himmel's grip became a streak of light.

Swish swish swish swish,!.

Rings of compressed air bloomed and scattered from behind Himmel's shoulder blades.

Dozens of holes punched through Mahoraga's body simultaneously. Like a sponge with all the air driven out of it, it was pushed steadily backward.

The edges of its form blurred and stretched. Himmel accelerated. Dozens, then hundreds of consecutive thrusts, both Mahoraga strung up on the attack, convulsing in the air like characters caught in a fighting game's infinite combo, no ground under them, no escape.

But.

(Can't kill them.)

Himmel's brow creased.

Didn't matter how fast he moved. Against Mahoraga at this stage, thrust damage had a ceiling, and he was hitting it. These two had been stat-padding off each other this whole time, and Himmel was starting to suspect that even a direct hit from Gojo Satoru's Hollow Purple might not finish them now. Every attack he landed was just knockback. The moment they started adapting to this too,

[CLANG]

"!"

Himmel's eyes went wide.

(That's fast!)

Right then, Mahoraga revealed another trait.

[Pure physical attacks.......]

Swoosh, SPLAT.

[For Mahoraga.]

The damaged muscle twitched and contracted on its own. One hole sealed. Then another. Then another. In an instant,

Restored.

[Are the easiest type to adapt to.]

HUM!.

An faint diagonal line swept across Himmel's body.

He hadn't caught it. Not even for a moment.

The two Mahoraga figures overlapped. The one behind had used the one in front as a human shield. And having adapted to Himmel's continuous thrusts, it launched a slash.

And that slash,

The blade edge made contact.

Himmel's feet lifted slightly off the ground.

(A bit... bad... need to use Reverse Cursed Technique...)

In the slowed-down frame: Himmel's figure, momentarily still. The wound ran diagonally from shoulder to abdomen. The skin at its edges peeled open, slowly.

"!"

He noticed immediately.

This was no graze.

Mahoraga had mapped his fighting style. It knew he could use Reverse Cursed Technique. So it had loaded this strike with something deliberate. Targeted. It had reached back into its accumulated experience and struck with the one method that had reached Himmel before.

(The wound... isn't closing?)

That was,

[A slash that wounds the soul]

SPLURT,!

Crimson burst forth.

This blade,

[~]

Accompanied by that otherworldly god's brilliant smile.

[Reached the Hero.]

➤ Next: Frieren: Beyond Journey's End