Frieren — Chapter 214 - Even If It's a God, I'll Kill It Right Before Your Eyes
That instant.
Even the Hasaba Sisters, watching from beyond the livestream screen, couldn't have read Himmel's current stats.
Because there was nothing to display.
In Jujutsu Kaisen, soul and body are integrated by nature. The priority order shifts from person to person, but there is always some degree of reciprocal nourishment between the two.
Take Himmel's Passive Rotation: once he completes a cycle, and Frieren inhabits his body, Frieren's soul automatically begins remodeling his flesh, pushing his Mana level a little higher.
And now all three companions were inside him at once.
Every bonus, absorbed by him alone.
Add Domain Expansion on top of that.
This was his.
Prime.
"Himmel!"
Inside the domain, the King of Curses' eyes bulged, veins threading through the whites, pupils locked dead onto Himmel.
So this group had insisted on forming a four-man party for exactly this purpose?!
Anger. Impatience. And beneath both, a trace of... delight that Sukuna couldn't hold back.
[Have you ever eaten stuffed yellow croaker soup?]
[A whole yellow croaker on a white plate, golden all over, looking like nothing more than an ordinary steamed fish.]
[But the dish itself requires leaving the belly completely intact. A specially made knife is inserted through only the mouth, cleanly removing every bone and organ while the outer skin stays unbroken.]
[The filling: crab roe, dried scallop, shrimp, and fish maw, simmered down and frozen into a rich, dense chilled broth. The mouth sealed shut with shrimp paste. Then steamed.]
[When the dish is placed before you, you bite into the fish with low expectations. The sealed, scalding broth erupts inside your mouth.]
[That delight.......]
"You've truly made me fall for you! Himmel!"
Sukuna grinned. Wide. A rare sight.
Though Himmel's domain had been deployed second, it had still carved an opening inside Sukuna's. Not generating a small sphere inside a larger one, but using someone else's domain as the boundary itself and excavating the rudimentary shape of his own from within. That is an extremely high-level application of Barrier Technique. Normal for Gojo Satoru and Sukuna, but not something Himmel could achieve on his own.
Frieren could.
The Innate Domain took shape.
The scenery inside a person's domain is generally bound to the person themselves.
Take Kenjaku's domain.
[Womb Profusion]
Womb, drawn from the Womb Realm, one of the two great mandalas of Esoteric Buddhism. It symbolizes the mother's womb nurturing and containing all sentient beings.
In practice, though, this man has spent his entire existence conducting inhumane experiments on himself. The domain that emerged from that history looks about as horrifying as you'd expect.
The Four Calamities' domains need even less comment.
Sukuna's domain, Malevolent Shrine, is exactly what it sounds like: because he slaughtered vast numbers of humans, it is filled with pools of blood and white bones.
But at the same time, after the war that shook the entire jujutsu world, Sukuna was venerated as something close to a deity, receiving worship from the people.
Sukuna doesn't care about the lives and deaths of others. But by that same token, he doesn't reject allegiance from others either.
The strong receiving offerings is simply the natural order.
If someone doesn't demand of Sukuna but beseeches him, Sukuna will actually, depending on his mood, answer that prayer.
The fact that he could be enshrined as a Sokushinbutsu and venerated as an object of worship only proves further that in the waning years of the Heian era, Sukuna had chosen ascetic practice.
He kills humans and Cursed Spirits. He cooks them. Hence the name Malevolent Shrine.
Literally translated: the Chef Who Subdues Demons.
And Frieren's domain: [Demon Burial Star Pivot]
Demon Burial mirrors Sukuna's Subduing Demons, marking Frieren's own achievement of slaying and burying countless demons across a thousand years.
Star Pivot refers to Celestial Pivot, the first star of the Big Dipper, the core axis around which the constellation revolves.
Frieren had briefly studied the domains of this world and noticed they seemed closely tied to Japanese Esoteric Buddhism. This name comes from the Taisho Tripitaka, Volume 21: The Homa Ritual of the Seven Stars of the Big Dipper. Dispelling calamity, driving away curses, severing the karmic suffering of all beings. A compassionate salvation mudra where slaughter and protection coexist.
........It also comes from something else. Somewhere in Frieren's thousand years of memory: the meteor shower she witnessed alongside the Hero's party. That night had never left her.
So when Frieren's domain deployed, its innate landscape formed a contrast with Malevolent Shrine.
Both domains took demon-slaying as their origin. But where Sukuna's was blood and bone, the floor of Frieren's was blossoming flowers, and above them the paths of stars drifted and turned.
"Where did the demon element go?"
Sukuna even had the leisure to bring this up.
Himmel was happy to oblige.
"Demons leave behind neither bones nor blood when they die." Frieren briefly took control of Himmel's body and spoke, flat and unhurried. "But there are remains, something like ash. Isn't there that saying?"
"That corpses are buried beneath the flowers."
"What a romantic way to put it." Sukuna folded his arms.
Still.
The Innate Domain is the most inconsequential part of a domain battle. It doesn't decide the outcome.
Once the [Sure-Hit] effects cancel each other out, what matters is the domain's actual effect.
(Himmel's technique already includes [Sharing All Party Members' Abilities].)
(What would the Sure-Hit effect of his domain be? Simply forcing the technique to connect?... Lucky that [Priest]'s ability was nullified by my domain. Otherwise fighting at all would have been impossible... Well. None of it matters now.)
The [Warrior]'s body amplification.
The [Priest]'s purification technique.
The [Mage]'s composite magic.
And the [Hero]'s own martial skill and judgment.
(All of it.)
VMMM!
Slashing attacks carved open the space around Sukuna.
The King of Curses looked at Himmel. A fierce light flashed in both eyes.
(No problem at all!)
And Himmel, carrying the consciousness of his companions, looked back with a gaze that was just slightly cold.
"!"
[Wrongness]
Sukuna: "...Heh."
(Good.)
Sukuna roared, shaking with fervor.
"I'll kill you!"
Both hands held the seals. Spatial Cuts rained down like a storm!
Facing slashes that cut the world itself, Himmel lifted his foot.
BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!
The earth split. Rock strata collapsed into deep chasms along the blade scars.
Like cookies in a tin, shattering and tumbling in a sealed space, rattling and rolling without stop.
Blade-light followed blade-light, new slash marks crisscrossing and overlapping the old scars!
SHING SHING SHING SHING SHING SHING SHING SHING SHING SHING SHING SHING SHING SHING SHING SHING SHING SHING SHING SHING SHING SHING SHING SHING!
No one survives that kind of onslaught.
Except Himmel.
He dodged every single slash. Amidst the exploding dust and shockwaves, even he could barely believe what he was doing.
(So fast...)
He had admitted it long ago.
He is not the [Strongest].
A hero needs to be strong, but strength alone is not the measure. Without Passive Rotation, Himmel is no match for Okkotsu Yuta and Gojo Satoru. Even using it, he can only match them.
Those two have already walked further ahead.
And about that...he has said it many times already.
He doesn't mind.
For those who come after to grow strong, to grow reliable: for a hero, there is nothing more worth celebrating than that.
[The future! The future you carved out! The era of peace!]
[Someone will witness it on my behalf.]
Gojo Satoru, Okkotsu Yuta, and after them, perhaps Itadori and the others will carry that weight too.
The conversation with the Goddess had already said everything about who Himmel is.
But now.
(For that future. One last, final effort.)
BANG!
"Ha!"
He burst through the smoke. In his peripheral vision, a shape was charging at him.
Sukuna. But his entire body was wrapped in a pitch-black fluid now, all four arms turned the deep color of obsidian.
[Construction Technique]
Yorozu's technique, criticized for its poor Cursed Energy efficiency.
But the flip side of that:
[With enough Cursed Energy, this technique can do almost anything.]
Crafting Special Grade Cursed Tools by hand. No problem.
What Sukuna wore now was an armament like insect armor, boosting strength, speed, and hardness.
Even with four arms, Sukuna had still concluded:
[To fight the current Himmel on equal footing,]
[He needed to give everything.]
BANG!
Heavy blades clashed.
Firelight lit up both of them.
Sukuna was wielding Kamutoke. The cracks Gojo Satoru had put in it had already been repaired. Kamutoke, which had cost Yorozu her life to create, Sukuna could produce in his normal state and make even harder.
It was only a vajra, but Sukuna turned out to be surprisingly skilled with a blade.
Countless silver-white blade-lights stacked between them, too fast to tell who was attacking and who was blocking. The space around them was nothing but crisscrossing, flickering blade-shadows.
Himmel had 4 layers of amplification running. His base stats were explosive.
Sukuna had answered with more refined Cursed Energy output and precision, combined with the armor the Construction Technique had built him, and had forcibly hauled his own physical ceiling much higher as well.
Of course.
CLANG!.
Their figures collided. Both blades bit into each other and ground together, locked.
Sukuna gritted his teeth, threw in a third hand, and barely held.
In [Swordsmanship] and [Strength], Himmel still had the edge.
Good thing Sukuna had four hands.
In close quarters, when both sides were at this level of skill and power, four hands made all the difference.
But it wasn't only that.
[Dragon Scale]
[Recoil]
Even mid-exchange, Sukuna completed his incantation.
[Paired Falling Stars]
He couldn't form hand seals while fighting Himmel at this range, but by reinforcing his ordinary Dismantle output through incantation and coating it across Kamutoke and his own body, he could spike all of his base stats and add mid-to-long-range offensive options on top.
Haha.
Hahaha!
CLANG!
The entire frame was nothing but crisscrossing afterimages: swings, parries, every motion collapsed into the same instant.
Sukuna was genuinely enjoying himself.
Gojo Satoru was a traditional sorcerer too, and he could suppress Sukuna, but that was purely down to how broken and restrictive his technique was, forcing Sukuna to fall back on Spatial Slash and Domain Expansion just to stay in the fight. And Hollow Purple and Neutral Limitless were a headache and a half.
This. This pure collision. This pure exchange of blows.
"Ha!"
Truly, this was exhilarating!
Sukuna was in his element.
After Himmel slashed through his sternum yet again, Sukuna simultaneously landed several Soul Dismantle strikes across Himmel's shoulder.
The phantom silhouette behind Himmel shifted.
Then Sukuna realized he was airborne.
BANG!
Himmel stomped down, blasting Sukuna and the ground beneath him both into the air, then kicked him away.
And then Himmel followed. [Flight Magic], instant acceleration.
Through the fight with Mahoraga, Himmel had learned to treat Flight Magic as a pure speed booster. He pulled his velocity up to nearly 100 times the speed of sound and slammed into Sukuna mid-air.
BANG!
"GUHAK!"
Fist into the large mouth on Sukuna's abdomen.
The tongue was pulverized instantly. Cracks spread from behind Sukuna at speed, crawling across the rock face in a web.
BOOM!.
A thunderous explosion. Shattered stone sprayed across every corner of the domain.
Sukuna's eyes rolled back. The upper mouth was coughing blood. The lower mouth was outright wrecked.
[Incantation] forcibly interrupted.
The next moment, his eyes snapped back to normal. The fighting spirit that filled them was more intense than before.
"Not bad! Not bad!"
"First time someone has made me feel completely overwhelmed!"
Himmel's stats sat entirely above Sukuna's right now.
But don't forget.
Sukuna is not a game boss with fixed mechanics and locked numbers.
He is a living, breathing person, the same as Gojo Satoru and Okkotsu Yuta.
(Magic amplifies combat ability. Himmel's martial skill surpasses mine outright.)
(Most importantly: the Goddess's Blessing nullified Jacob's Ladder. My ace is gone.)
(Can't kill Himmel directly with technique anymore. So what's left......)
(Hit him head-on. Break him.)
As his emotions surged.
(It's fine.)
As his fighting spirit rolled like a tide.
(Even if it's a god.....)
He—
Reclaimed—
[KRRK]
"I'll kill you all the same!"
BANG!
Sukuna launched both fists at once, slamming them into the center of Himmel's raised guard.
It should have been enough to hold.
The force that followed was not what Himmel had prepared for.
That was—
[Black Flash]!
Black and white intertwined. Lightning cracked across the dark.
After a thousand years, Sukuna felt it again. The omen of defeat.
Stronger than before.
He had played every card he had and still couldn't secure the win. He was being suppressed.
Haha.
Hahahaha!
Black Flash blasted Himmel back, and at the same time Sukuna's Cursed Energy efficiency surged to 120%.
He stretched his mouth into a feral grin, teeth bared white. He seized his recovered output. His brain boiled with fighting will.
(Flight is a problem.)
(Either find a way to cancel it, or—)
"[Hiten]!"
Sukuna sneered, one hand extended. Black metal coalesced in his grip.
A massive trident materialized.
[Once,]
[in the golden age of Jujutsu, Sukuna had relied on these 2 Cursed Tools: [Kamutoke] and [Hiten].....]
With his own two hands he had beaten down the entire goddamn jujutsu world.
Kamutoke's ability is to release lightning, designed for multi-target combat. In Sukuna's hands now, it served only as a short blade. The lightning couldn't catch Himmel's movements.
Hiten's ability is exactly what the name suggests.
Flight. The user's aerial mobility is determined entirely by their Cursed Energy output and precision.
VMMMM!.
For Sukuna and Gojo Satoru, the speed of sound is one step.
And Hiten's ceiling is set entirely by the user. In Sukuna's hands right now, his output blew past anything Projection Sorcery could produce.
He became a streak of light. Himmel was in front of him before the moment had time to pass.
Kamutoke in one hand. Hiten in the other.
Two peerless divine weapons bearing down.
Arcs of light stretched and dragged. The air screamed like shattering glass.
The 2 figures tore through the explosion clouds at extreme speed, crossing and recrossing, blade-light expanding between them in the span of a ten-thousandth of a second.
Circular sweeps. Parallel slashes. Blade-light climbing skyward.
Sukuna fought dual-wielding, one long, one short. The mismatched weapons in his hands came alive, reverse sweeps crossing over, thrusting advances driving downward.
They were like jet fighters performing aerial stunts, tangled together, trading fire, detonating blasts that looked somewhere between dust clouds and molten bursts.
[Exhilaration at becoming the Challenger.]
[A high flooding his brain.]
[Black Flash, Black Flash, Black Flash again!]
Pitch-black lightning tore the sky open.
BOOM!.
The collision threw them apart.
Sukuna was covered in bloody gashes. The grin hadn't moved, but he was panting.
2 eyes blinded. One arm gone. Sukuna held himself in the air with Hiten.
The injuries were worse than anything before. The momentum was higher than anything before.
And across from him stood Himmel, just as torn up.
A deep gash across the chest, bone faintly visible. But compared to Sukuna, Himmel smiled less. And his breathing was steadier.
"Heh."
Sukuna took a slow breath. Tilted his head back slightly. His eyes went a little hazy.
[Slashing Technique]
[Technique Amplification]
[Domain Expansion]
[Construction Technique]
[Jacob's Ladder]
[Cursed Tools, Cursed Objects]
[Barrier Technique]
[Assimilation]
[Incarnated Body Refresh]
[Binding Vow]
Everything. All of it, spent.
It was... one hell of a fight.
A gust swept his hair back. Flames moved between his fingertips.
Both palms pressed together. A searing fireball condensed between them.
He held the fire, then split his index and middle fingers from one hand, raised them against the fireball's side, and steadied his body with the other 2 arms.
Fingers drawn back, pulling the flame taut.
A longbow.
[Open]
No special intent behind using it.
Simply that it was the one trump card he had never shown Himmel.
The skill is devastating, but its charge time is long and its release slow. It's the attack Sukuna uses least.
There wasn't even enough accumulated dust in the domain right now to trigger an explosion.
But even so.
[Kamutoke] assisting [Open]. The highest output he had ever produced.
A gaze that still burned.
A hunger that had lasted a thousand years.
Hero.....
VMMMM!
Goddess's Blessing.
Warrior amplifies the body.
Magic amplifies the output.
This [Flash Sky Strike] was going to be something else.
Both of them pushed to the absolute limit.
One strike.
Winner takes all.
Both sets of eyes narrowed at the same moment.
The flame arrow left the bow. The air around Sukuna warped into visible waves.
The arrow trailed shards of brilliant gold.
The blade in Himmel's hand was the [Hero's Sword], forged from the shattered remains of [Cloud Play] that Sukuna had cut in half.
Strength times strength.
This old man is really going to brute-force a miracle here.
His waist twisted hard, pulling his shoulder and arm through.
SLASH!
White light scraped along the ground. Stone pillar cross-sections shaved smoother than mirrors.
The two forces met in the middle.
Sound was swallowed by light.
Arrow tip and light cannon wedged against each other. The contact point condensed to the size of a needle.
The dense energy pulsed like a heartbeat, violent and rapid, contracting sharply then bursting outward.
A spiraling pillar of light climbed upward.
BOOM!.
Two heavy bodies hit the ground.
The domain....
[CRACK—]
Shattered.
➤ Next: The Unfired Spatial Slash