The sorcerers gathered around the pit watched that battle.

Their expressions moved in stages, shock, then bloodless terror, then blank numbness.

Every punch. Every kick. Every slash.

Any single one of those strikes could shatter a passing Grade 1 sorcerer outright.

If not for this pit, if Himmel hadn't bottled Mahoraga inside it... forget Ikebukuro. Shibuya, Shinjuku, all of Tokyo would probably have no one left standing by now.

But...

The battle itself had started doing something to the watching sorcerers. Something cold.

Mahoraga's level kept climbing. From being dismantled one-sidedly by Himmel, to landing counterattacks, to coordinating well enough to actually put damage on him.

And now it had already,

Shrrrk,

Himmel walked with his sword hanging low, the tip dragging across the ground and kicking up thin trails of sparks. Before him, the two Mahoraga ran shoulder-to-shoulder, bearing down fast.

One cut sideways, looping ahead to block his path, then swung its blade down in the same motion.

BOOM!—!—!—

The speed. The angle. The force. Nothing like what came before.

The already sunken basin cratered even deeper, but at the smoke-choked edge, Himmel slipped out sideways.

His footwork was sharp. His expression was not.

BANG!

The smoke was punched open from the inside, and Mahoraga Number Two burst through the hole.

Shoulders down, chest forward, stride wide, fist locked.

Muscles pulled taut.

It swung.

Horizontal. Uppercut. Downward hammer.

Afterimage trails lashed through the air, every punch landing. Himmel locked his focus and blocked each one as it came.

But the more it swung, the faster it got. The wind pressure from each strike was heavy enough to lift the back of Himmel's coat.

BOOM!

It found the opening and threw a hook; Himmel dropped his elbow and took it, but his body still went flying.

Mahoraga didn't wait. It ran.

Thud. Thud.

Feet driving into the ground, hamstrings pumping, it closed the gap to Himmel in the air in seconds. Then it jumped, one leg chambered and thrusting forward, every ounce of force loaded into the top of that foot.

A Rider Kick.

BOOM!—!—

It caught him at the landing point. Cracks detonated across the ground, debris blew out on both sides, and the shockwave launched Himmel skyward again.

Slap.

One of the Mahoraga reached up, grabbed his cape mid-air, and drove him back into the earth with no ceremony at all.

BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!

Mushroom clouds of dirt punched up one after another as Mahoraga pinned the Hero's body with one hand and sprinted at full speed, dragging him across the ground in a straight line. Rocks scattered sideways at angles. Dust chased at their heels.

The Hero was not interested in dying.

(The time... it's built up enough by now.)

From the start of the fight until now,

[Nine Minutes]

[For the Hero Himmel, that number has a very specific meaning.]

Astraeum Crus · Passive Rotation

4 random rotations. No active operations permitted between them. Endure [Hero] mode the entire time, the one that carries no bonuses of any kind.

Total duration: 9 minutes and 56 seconds.

After which, the Hero Himmel would receive every companion's attribute bonuses.

Every [Skill].

[Reaching the Apex]

He snapped his legs up and wrapped them around Mahoraga's thick arm.

Hum!, Shing!

Two zigzagging arcs of blade-light streaked across the shoulder and elbow. The flesh and bone came off the severed limb like a mountain collapsing.

BANG!

Himmel rolled, and came up with the Sword of Demon Exorcism from the severed arm in his hand.

[Tausend Forms]

The limb and sword together began to shift with a rushing sound, reshaping into the form of the Hero's Sword. Himmel launched himself upward, body parallel to the ground, spinning at speed.

His cape spread open like a lone butterfly beating against the wind. In the instant of the turn, a long leg ripped through the air.

A spinning kick drove into Mahoraga's face.

BANG!

The impact rolled across the sky and ground in one dull, crushing wave. No one watching had any doubt that kick could snap a skyscraper in half.

Mahoraga's head dipped.

But...

Even the kick Himmel threw with his post-enhancement Strength...

To a Mahoraga that had almost completely adapted to physical attacks, it did not feel heavy.

Swish.

Mahoraga Number Two regrew the severed arm with barely a pause.

And Mahoraga Number One's massive frame materialized behind Himmel in the same breath, its body pressing down like a mountain range.

The wind around them was wrenched and coiled tight against that enormous frame.

Both attacked at once.

BOOM!

Rock waves surged up from the earth like a flash flood. The sorcerers watching from outside the pit had stopped breathing entirely. Their faces had gone ashen blue.

Brutal.

Monstrous.

That thing... is a Divine General from another world.

Even Himmel at his peak, alone against two fully-developed Mahoraga, was looking at something close to impossible.

A blank-slate Mahoraga could only be measured against Sukuna at ten fingers. The one that had fought and sharpened itself through honest, repeated clashes had already reached Phase Two, a terrifying existence on par with fifteen fingers.

And the one in front of him now...

Was [Phase Three]

Swordsmanship.

Martial arts.

And, evolved gradually in the process of adapting to [defeat Himmel]...

[A physique approaching, and beginning to surpass, Himmel's own]

...............

"Teacher..."

Itadori had gotten his thoughts back. He watched from a distance, body wound tight, expression pained.

Mahoraga was so much stronger than what he'd fought. There was no comparison.

No way to step in.

Just watching from this far away made his cells want to run.

In that moment.

[The Monster Without an Upper Limit]

[A grown Mahoraga... could genuinely threaten Himmel]

Would he lose?

The question formed in everyone watching.

And the same question surfaced in Himmel's mind.

"Hah."

He took a knee. Drove his sword into the ground to anchor himself.

Himmel settled his breathing and looked at the two massive silhouettes ahead of him, his expression even.

Thud. Thud.

He wiped the blood from the corner of his mouth.

(Nostalgic...)

Since the Demon King battle, since arriving in this world, the hardest fight he'd had was the one with Geto Suguru. And that one, for all its seriousness, had never touched the line that threatened his life.

What stood in front of him now was different.

Forget threatening.

[Mahoraga already had the ability to kill Himmel.]

(Almost there.)

(My attacks are too easy to read. Mahoraga's wheel has been turning fast, and the gains show. That's the bad news.)

(The good news: 9 minutes are up. [Passive Rotation] is complete.)

In the Passive Rotation state, Himmel's raw numbers alone were no less than Gojo Satoru's.

But the bad news was that his basic attacks, slashes, punches, kicks, had been almost entirely adapted to.

So. Should he use Frieren's magic?

(...Would that be enough to win?)

He watched the Mahoraga closing the distance, and the corner of his mouth moved, just barely.

No. Probably not.

In pure offensive output, Eisen and Himmel had more raw advantage than Frieren. A mage's magic was mostly built to kill enemies, not demolish terrain. Zoltraak itself was specifically engineered against living things.

Frieren did carry high-destructive spells in her memory, [Judrasium] and [Volzanbell], but they were never her focus. Even cast by Frieren herself, they wouldn't be enough to kill Mahoraga.

And beyond that.

[~]

The white giant pulled back its lips in a savage grin.

[The current Mahoraga's physical level is continuously closing in on Himmel's]

That wholesome smile.

No room for doubt.

Magic alone could not kill it.

"But... a Hero can't be seen making a sorry face."

He stood.

"Right, Frieren."

Himmel made a different call.

[, Why is it always me.]

Her figure rose behind him.

The familiar voice settled something in him, the restlessness the fighting had worked into him went quiet.

"Help me out."

[Even so...]

Frieren's phantom seemed to exhale.

[Just as you guessed, I don't have a single spell that finishes this thing in one shot.]

"So?"

[....I have a plan.]

"Then we do that."

Not a moment of hesitation.

The Hero trusted his party without condition.

Himmel shouted toward the edge of the battlefield.

"Itadori! Get everyone out of here!"

"Teacher?!" Itadori's voice came back immediately. "Out — out to where?!"

"Outside Ikebukuro!"

"Huh?!"

That said, Himmel drew a slow breath in, and let it out.

His feet left the ground.

[BANG!]

The floating Hero snapped into motion and drove straight at Mahoraga.

The air around them was wrenched along in his wake; wind pressure crashed down over both creatures and pinned them in place for a moment.

Mahoraga started to fight free, and the magic circles formed beneath their feet.

Bands of energy locked around them and held.

[Binding Magic]

Heiter's magic.

Binding complete. Himmel at his attribute peak — Agility A++ — was already behind them.

Slap. Slap.

One hand each, he seized their Dharma Wheels.

Then,

Crack... crack... BOOM!

Every sinew and bone in his body pulled to the limit. He drove his foot into the ground, borrowed the force, and launched.

The wind shrieked and split. Himmel, took off.

With [A++] Strength behind the jump, Himmel could clear a kilometer from a dead standstill. And then, riding the momentum,

[Flight Magic]

In Frieren's memory, this was a relatively recent spell, reverse-engineered from demonkind's techniques. It couldn't carry objects that were too heavy, and it couldn't sustain high speeds. The core reason was the absurd mana cost.

But when you thought about it: mana capacity was never a concern for Frieren. Why hadn't she refined [Flight Magic] the way she refined Zoltraak into a demon-killing weapon?

The answer was simple: no reason to.

Even if Flight Magic could handle heavier loads, the mana cost would scale beyond anything practical. It couldn't be taught or spread. And Frieren herself had [Levitation Magic] as a cleaner, superior option for her own movement.

Boosting Flight Magic's speed was even less worth the effort. A mage could never outrun a warrior. If you pushed hard enough to break the sound barrier, the mage's body would give out first.

So Frieren had never touched it.

Until Himmel's [Astraeum Crus].

Because it stacked all four party members' attributes, what existed now was something that had never existed before: a mage with a warrior's body. The mana reserves, barely, held.

Which meant Flight Magic's limitations...

Could be fully unlocked.

BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!

He broke the sound barrier instantly. Perfect spherical vapor rings bloomed one after another in his wake.

At that velocity, the air around him bent slightly. Under the gaze of Itadori and the others, a streak of light tore across the sky, dragging rolling dust and threads of flame, threw off gravity, and kept accelerating, straight up, without end.

Only then did Himmel have time to ask Frieren what the plan actually was.

Frieren was quiet for a moment.

[Himmel, you've been watching a lot of movies these past 10 years, haven't you?]

Yeah.

[Then do you remember 'Avengers: Age of Ultron'?]

Accelerate. Accelerate. Accelerate.

With the limiter gone, [Flight Magic] came completely off the leash.

An ordinary mage would black out the instant this much gravitational acceleration hit them. Then the blood in their body would start going haywire. Then, somewhere up in the sky, they would simply come apart, a messy red burst, nothing more.

But Himmel's body was, at this moment, essentially flawless. He held.

1 times... 5 times... 15 times... 30 times the speed of sound... still climbing, still pushing higher.

The Mahoraga dragged along by their wheels began to warp. Wind howled into their open mouths and swelled their stomachs into round balls.

[BOOM.]

The world below shrank fast. Low clouds burned scarlet in the setting sun. The wisps of cloud caught the golden light and went hazy and soft.

A thousand layers of clouds rushed past, and the earth below began to show its curvature.

And at last.

They arrived at the edge of the atmosphere.

Dusk stretched across the surface of the planet. The sun was just a bright point on the horizon now.

Half the sky was the planet's natural colors. The other half was dim, colorless. The concept of color itself was thinning out.

Slap. Slap.

And finally.

The Hero stopped.

This was the boundary between the atmosphere and outer space.

[The Kármán Line]

Total time elapsed:

[9.71 Seconds]

And that amount of time...

Was enough for Mahoraga, to adapt again.

[Gong]

Both Mahoraga broke free of the [Binding Magic] at the same moment and drove their fists upward, charging straight at Himmel.

The synchronization was perfect. The tension in both bodies was absolute. It could have been a cover spread from an American superhero comic or a Hong Kong manga.

But they hadn't adapted flight yet. That left them at Himmel's mercy.

He tilted his head, let both punches go by, and brought his arms up.

Both fists locked together.

Clasped. A hammer.

And drove down hard.

BANG!

A white ring of sonic boom cloud detonated. Both Mahoraga, stacked together, were launched toward the ground.

Gravity took hold.

They flailed in the weightlessness, limbs swinging uselessly, trying to find a posture that didn't exist.

[Gong!]

The flailing didn't last long. Mahoraga surged again, and from the shoulder blades, abnormally massive wings tore open, less an adaptation than a structure that had always been there, waiting.

BOOM!

The wings spread wide, pushing back against gravity, trying to stabilize.

But in that instant,

[Ding]

In Mahoraga's eye.

There, at the line where the atmosphere ended and space began, something flickered.

A light.

And that beam of light...

Grew larger.

In the next instant, it swallowed them whole.

[!]

BOOM!

[Black Attack Magic], fired at point-blank range.

Not Zoltraak. Something closer to a prototype, the raw, original form of the thing.

Frieren's own mana restrictions dropped entirely. Maximum output.

It hit Mahoraga dead center.

Their bodies shuddered violently in the hypersonic stream, bones and muscle warped and deformed under the sheer brutality of the force.

The dense energy from the spell crawled across the surface of their bodies, and the white of their skin turned the color of lava.

Flesh began to carbonize. The gale tore it away piece by piece, scattering it in all directions.

That was Frieren's design: a combined strike, [Physical] and [Magic] working together.

[Mahoraga's adaptation can only target one ability at a time.]

[That's why I needed you to buy me time to build up different spells, and even that isn't safe enough on its own. I needed the physical strikes to run alongside.]

[The adaptation has clear trigger conditions. If every action was classified as an attack, Mahoraga should have adapted to 'gravity' the moment it was summoned. That would have been the logical first priority.]

[But it didn't.]

[Mahoraga may carry flight capability inherently, but it does not adapt to the physical laws of this world. Its highest priority remains [Kill the other participant in the Subjugation Ritual]. Gravity, or rather, this planet itself, was never registered as an enemy. Even if it can build resistance to kinetic impacts, that resistance has a ceiling, because the concept being adapted to is too broad.]

The enormous wings Mahoraga had just grown caught fire. The flames spread along the wing bones and burned what little was left of their ravaged bodies to ash.

Disordered turbulence seized the falling forms. The fire rolled against the direction of descent, dragging out a trail of flame that went from thick to thin as it faded upward.

[The plan: use Flight Magic to carry Mahoraga into the sky. Let them fall naturally. While they fall, hit them with magic at full output.]

[Mahoraga's only choice will be to adapt to the magic. It won't have the capacity to also adapt to the kinetic impact of the fall.]

Crackling... crackling...

Below, on the ground.

Hum... hum...

Silver-white and cyan-blue twisted together into geometric rings.

[Normally this wouldn't be possible. But because we are two souls in one body right now, using multiple spells simultaneously becomes achievable.]

Frieren gave her instructions, calm and precise.

[The instant Mahoraga hits the ground, I'll fire different attack spells from the surface, coming up from the opposite direction.]

[I expect that once Mahoraga adapts to my magic, it will build some partial resistance to other spells as well. But different spells operate on fundamentally different principles. The gap between one spell and another is comparable to the gap between entirely different Cursed Techniques, Mahoraga cannot fully adapt to all of them.]

The method to kill Mahoraga was not, in truth, limited to a single overwhelming blow.

More precisely: Mahoraga could only complete its adaptation against one type of attack at a time.

When multiple attackers pressed it simultaneously, if the combined output exceeded Mahoraga's endurance threshold, it would be exorcised just the same.

Countless magic arrays appeared across the curved inner walls of the pit, vast beyond imagination, mana building and churning within them.

At the center of the pit, layer upon layer of metal gradually sealed over the rock face, preparing a 'comfortable landing point' for Mahoraga. And the stone that had been there...

Began rising into the sky.

Above, Mahoraga's massive bodies came apart in stages as they fell, raging with fire, shedding debris, plummeting toward the earth without slowing.

Frieren's reasoning was right on every count.

Mahoraga's logical choice at this moment was to adapt to Frieren's magic.

Only after neutralizing the attack spells could it escape the damage from slamming into the ground at terminal velocity.

For Mahoraga right now, a freefall of a mere hundred-odd kilometers meant nothing.

Air resistance would cause violent deceleration between 57 and 28 kilometers of altitude. Even with all four limbs burned off, reducing drag to some degree, a simple fall, on its own, still wouldn't be fatal.

The problem was the attack magic.

Frieren, Himmel, descended in sync with Mahoraga, and did not stop firing. Spell after spell, pressing down, compressing.

The spells were chipping away at Mahoraga's HP, making them more fragile, more vulnerable to something that would actually kill them. And the whole time, the speed was still building.

Mahoraga would hit the ground faster than it had left it.

All they needed to do was avoid one thing.

[A Hundred Kilometers]

[Starting from Himmel's strike, with attack magic assisting gravity through the acceleration, Mahoraga's time to impact would not exceed 7 seconds.]

[Magic, as an attack method from another world entirely, is something Mahoraga adapts to far more slowly than physical force.]

[In 7 seconds, it cannot adapt a second time.]

[.That, is how it should have gone.]

[Gong]

"!"

Something shifted in Himmel's expression.

Below him...

Mahoraga's Dharma Wheel...

Turned.

He understood within the same breath.

.Once before, Himmel had fired [Zoltraak] from a distance to stop Mahoraga, to save Itadori.

One shot. That was all.

The monster called Mahoraga, from nothing more than that single attack at the very start of the fight.

Had remembered, the 'taste' of [Magic].

The burning across its body began to diminish. Mahoraga began to pull free of the spell's momentum.

No good.

The moment it stopped accelerating, it would escape the kill threshold.

And a Mahoraga that had adapted to attack magic...

[Would be something no one could ever handle again.]

...........

...

Outside.

From where the other sorcerers stood, all they could see was a beam of light driving down from the sky to the earth. Within it, a blinding point of radiance, like a falling star, visibly accelerating toward the ground with every passing second.

"Teacher..."

Itadori strained to see what was happening inside it, and prayed.

And...

[The Hero will not betray the people waiting for him.]

..........

.....

[?!]

That moment.

If this were a manga, even Mahoraga would have [?!] floating above its head.

Because...

No deceleration?

BOOM!.

An unbroken torrent of light cascaded down the column; both Mahoraga, pressed together, dropped vertically at extreme speed, aimed straight at the surface.

And they realized,

Even though they had broken free of the attack magic, even though they had spread their wings,

They were not slowing down at all.

In this corridor of velocity where sound couldn't travel, Frieren's thoughts couldn't reach inside Mahoraga's head.

[Do you know the difference between 'Levitation Magic' and 'Flight Magic'?]

On the surface, both seem to resist gravity. So why can the former be widely learned, while the latter required stealing technology from demonkind?

Because Flight Magic doesn't just resist gravity. It carries a distinct concept inside it: acceleration. Once you're airborne, you can accelerate freely in any horizontal direction.

Because the underlying principle was never fully understood, it was always applied crudely. And because there was no compelling reason to dig deeper, even Frieren had never taken it apart.

But.

If you weren't trying to study it, if you threw safety out entirely and simply amplified the effect as far as it would go,

With Frieren's ability, that was possible.

And the same logic applied to something else.

[This magic doesn't have to be cast on yourself.]

Her palm turned toward Mahoraga.

[Flight Magic]

No.

[At this point, it's closer to... [Acceleration Magic], isn't it?]

BOOM!,!.

Already falling at dozens of times the speed of sound, Mahoraga hit this and went completely flat, not just the face, the entire body, like wet noodles with the tension pulled out.

Frieren did not let go.

"This part — call it copying that Cursed Spirit's technique."

[Magic to Manipulate Stone Like a Puppet]

The massive stones that Levitation Magic had been lifting from below gathered one by one and locked together, forming a seamless, elongated spike.

If Jogo's Maximum Technique was a strike built purely on mass.

Then this,

Was [Mass × Speed]

BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM...

The stones came down on Mahoraga. Two creatures that had every right to be called colossal were now helpless as children, huddled against each other, their forms bent into unrecognizable shapes.

From a hundred kilometers away, you couldn't make out their outlines anymore.

Wrapped in shockwaves. Falling, and falling, and falling.

[, ]

Mahoraga.

Hit the ground.

The instant they made contact, a ring of pale white light detonated outward in every direction.

The prepared magic arrays activated in the same moment.

[Volzanbell]

[Judrasium]

The charging time had been earned. The arrays began projecting into the impact zone.

The drifting energy overhead intertwined and pulled together.

Deep purple and dark crimson twisted into each other, compressing slowly into a dense, tight mass. Countless filaments crawled across the surface like living things.

The shockwave ring tore outward from the point of impact.

The storm that annihilated everything had arrived.

HUMMMMMM!,!,!.

Light columns rose. Gales tore through. Everything solid in the natural world dissolved into scattered particles. Anything within sight was run down by the light and consumed.

Everything became a pale, hollow void.

The blast arrived several seconds after the flash, rolling across the entire city in a low grinding roar.

Even the Dharma Wheel, symbol of cycles, symbol of harmony, was taken apart by that column of light that meant nothing but annihilation.

[Ikebukuro]

The heart of Tokyo's Toshima Ward. Named alongside Shinjuku and Shibuya as one of the three major hubs of the Yamanote Line. The transportation center of northern Tokyo.

To draw a boundary around the core blocks near Ikebukuro Station, you would need a circle with a radius of roughly 600 meters.

And now.

Ikebukuro. Under Himmel and Frieren's combined strike at maximum output.

[Gone]

➤ Next: I Have Mastered the Core of Incarnation!