Frieren — Chapter 215 - The Unfired Spatial Slash
Everyone in the livestream could see the signs of Domain Destruction coming.
Outside their Closed Domain, the Perfect Sphere waited, said to crush anything. But the Perfect Sphere's power came from its shell, that absolute, flawless sphere of an exterior. Not from what was inside.
Two maximums collided. The energies intertwined, merged, then detonated outward.
Sukuna had pushed Open to its peak through temporary Binding Vows, curse marks, incantations, and the natural amplification of his domain's innate techniques.
Himmel had answered with the strongest Flash Sky Strike he had ever thrown, drawing on the Special Grade Cursed Tool Playful Cloud, its rotational attribute boosts, and every stacked bonus from every mode running at once.
Heat and impact force, together. If that had come down on open ground, it would have leveled most of Tokyo.
The Perfect Sphere could not hold it.
For an instant...
It held.
Then it didn't.
BOOM,—!——!.
Fire surged outward like living serpents. Every last remnant of Uraume's ice vanished in the same breath. The ground at the epicenter melted to something waxy, glowing red-white, sinking in on itself.
The domain's inner shell had absorbed most of it. Without that, this wouldn't have ended so cleanly.
The heat was too intense for the crows to approach. From a distance, through the warped air at that temperature, nothing was visible. No silhouettes. No movement.
The camera descended. Descended again. Kept going.
In a crevice that could only be called an abyss, Sukuna's arms hung at his sides.
3 of his 4 hands were charred black. White smoke curled from the stumps where Reverse Cursed Technique was trying and failing to take hold. No sign of further recovery. None at all.
Even flesh conditioned by Immortality could not absorb this.
It was over.
Himmel had won.
Himmel, just as battered, was certain of it.
"You are strong."
"The me who was alive could never have beaten you. Without Gojo and Okkotsu, I wouldn't have been your match either."
"But unfortunately—"
He stepped forward.
"This is where it ends."
[Priest]
[Goddess Magic]
[Maximum Output.]
"Ngh!."
[Purification]
Colossal sacred light swallowed Sukuna whole. With only one arm remaining, the King of Curses could not even invoke Domain Amplification.
"Jacob's. Uaaagh!"
Sourced from a certain Goddess of Water's blessing and fused with Heiter's technique, a pillar of light even larger than Jacob's Ladder consumed him.
"AAAGH!"
The King of Curses tried to counter with the Angel's technique, whose nature ran closest to this. It failed.
The technique was a curse. It was nullified the instant it touched the sacred light.
Incarnation itself existed as a technique. So it, too, began to be stripped away.
First, the souls of millions of people Sukuna had taken in.
Their bond to him was the most tenuous of all. Under this, they began to come apart.
[Priest] could nullify a technique at its root. So those millions of souls, ordinary people, every one, would return to an un-assimilated state. Return to where they should have gone.
Their bodies and souls began to disperse. Sukuna's cursed energy plummeted.
He curled inward as much as he could. It made no difference.
After several seconds, the pillar of light slowly faded from the sky.
Sukuna was flat on the ground. Face down. Completely still.
He had taken the full force of Goddess Magic in his most weakened state. The majority of those millions of absorbed souls had been torn from him.
"Ah..... ah....."
The once-untouchable King of Curses, reduced to this.
Blood pooled in a ring around him. His body gaunt, withered. Of his 4 arms, only one remained.
He had nothing left to fight with.
Even Himmel thought so.
Once the technique's cooldown ended, he would use a second Goddess Magic.
This time, to strip the curse from Tengen as well.
It was over.
.
Over?
Am I finished?
No.
Face buried in the earth, Sukuna had not stopped. He was grinding whatever remained of his mind against the problem, searching for any crack, any angle, any path to victory still open to him.
After exhausting everything, what remained. His absolute last card.
That was....
[Binding Vow]
(Feel it.)
He told himself this, quietly, somewhere beneath the surface.
(The ground as a fulcrum. One last strike, still possible from here.)
(But before Himmel, I cannot skip the incantation. Not and have anything capable of reaching him.)
(However. I still have that.)
(So,, )
[.]
[Dragon Scale]
A field of pure black.
Ink-dark text cutting through it without warning.
That voice did not come from Sukuna's body.
It did not reach the Hero's ears.
It was....
[Recoil]
"Itadori!"
That voice came from the operations room. Outside the Culling Game.
In the operations room, Itadori Yuji went blank. An incantation had sounded directly in his ear, and for a moment he couldn't separate it, was it coming through the screen, or from somewhere beside him?
Then he realized.
And everyone around him, at different speeds, froze or went rigid with alarm. Their eyes landed on the same thing.
The mouth growing from the side of Itadori's face.
[Sukuna can freely choose where his soul resides.]
[Just as he escaped from Itadori's body into Tengen, Sukuna can transfer back into Itadori's body, so long as he has a finger as a medium.]
"What?!?"
Itadori moved immediately. He slapped his hand against his face. It did nothing. He could not stop the mouth from nearly opening.
And then, without warning, his entire body went weak.
"It's Assimilation!" Kenjaku's composure broke. "Sukuna is running Assimilation on Itadori!"
They had kept their trump cards from each other precisely because of this. Precisely because of the Sukuna finger inside Itadori's body.
And Kenjaku had gone further, setting up a double-layered Curtain around the livestream room to block Sukuna from sensing Itadori at all. To prevent him from forcing Assimilation even if he tried.
How had he sensed this place?
This bastard.
Unless.
(Jacob's Ladder!)
Kenjaku caught up all at once.
Near the end of the fight with Himmel. Sukuna had used Jacob's Ladder.
That Jacob's Ladder, it wasn't only a counter to Himmel's technique. It was to punch a hole in the side of the Culling Game's barrier.
A breach in the barrier meant a leak in Tengen's concept. A gap.
To actually destroy the Culling Game barrier with Jacob's Ladder, you'd need to locate its core and hit it with everything you had. Sukuna couldn't do that. The hole he'd torn would be repaired quickly.
But in that window, Sukuna could assimilate millions of people. Or.
[Concentrate all attention....]
Target.
One person.
[Through Assimilation, Sukuna forced Itadori to pour his cursed energy and willpower entirely into resisting, and pulled every sorcerer's eyes in the room along with it.]
[Under normal conditions, Sukuna can only hold one consciousness at a time. But just as Okkotsu Yuta learned to invert a domain's inner and outer dimensions through Rika, something that should be contradictory, Sukuna, after his soul was struck by Infinite Void, had learned it from the inside. What it felt like to have another consciousness moving his body.]
[He imitated Tengen and Kenjaku. Used barrier techniques to divide himself into two. One fragment needed only simple commands, the way an innate technique can be baked into a domain's outer shell. The main consciousness went into Itadori's body and began chanting.]
[In that moment, Sukuna abandoned the body in front of Himmel.]
[He arrived in Itadori's body. And he chanted, ]
"Twin Meteors."
Pure black filled the frame. Radial lines converged on a single point at the center. Splattered blood reduced to dot-pattern halftone, the only detail the surrounding void left visible.
[Because Sukuna had no arms.]
[He paid the price he would normally spend on hand signs, incantation, and a one-handed point to execute a spatial slash in the future, ]
[For the right to skip the hand signs. For this one strike. Only this one.]
.
CRACK!
The shockwave of that heat rolled outward from its central crater and flattened the rest of Shinjuku. What had been the living city was gone. Tokyo, that modern sprawl with all its light and noise, was nothing now but ruin in every direction.
Lava where the pavement had been.
Mountains of debris where the towers had stood.
Ice and fire and cursed energy, all spent. All still.
And on that apocalyptic wreckage,
The King of Curses stood.
"The sky's cleared up."
Sukuna looked at Himmel. His face was charred. His eyes held something he hadn't expected to find there, acknowledgment. Joy. And something else. An attachment so deep even Sukuna himself couldn't name it.
The way Himmel had died was beautiful in a way that made something ache.
Himmel lay on the ground, his hair fanned upward, blood dried at the corner of his mouth, his skin drawn tight and hollow. His eyes were open, staring at nothing, somewhere far away.
"I probably won't forget you for the rest of my life."
Sukuna looked at the Hero he had cut in two, and smiled. A hollow, wretched thing.
Finally. Won.
Now to deal with the sorcerers still,
"Clap. Clap. Clap. Clap."
He heard it before he understood it.
Sukuna's head snapped around.
Kenjaku.
"....Kenjaku?"
His expression stayed easy. But the confusion underneath was real.
"Did you get lost?!"
"No, no."
Kenjaku had been clapping. When Sukuna turned, he lowered his hands and tilted his head, mouth quirking to one side.
"Well... he just wanted to see you."
"What?"
Kenjaku stepped aside.
The person he'd been standing in front of came into view.
It was, it was,
"Brat!?"
Itadori Yuji?!
This kid. How dare he just show up in front of me.
Sukuna stared.
At this distance, with Kenjaku's Curtain between them, Sukuna had no clean angle to sense Itadori's presence and force Assimilation. The Assimilation he had used before had only managed to split Itadori's attention long enough for the chant. That was all it was ever meant to do.
So why was Itadori here? On his own?
"I want to apologize to you, Sukuna."
Itadori stepped forward, his face dark.
"Trapping you in my body all this time, that was wrong of me..... You're too strong, I'm sorry, please forgive me!"
He dropped immediately into a full bow, forehead hitting the ground hard.
Sukuna:....
The smile left his face entirely.
Something was wrong.
This was impossible.
This was,,
"Also, this person wanted to see you too."
Kenjaku's voice again.
Sukuna looked. Someone else was stepping out from behind him.
Gojo Satoru.
[How is he...]
Gojo Satoru, who should have been sealed inside the Prison Realm, was standing here. Battle-worn, bandages and damage visible across his body. But he wasn't attacking. He wasn't moving at all. He was just standing there, perfectly upright, hands in his pockets.
He met Sukuna's eyes. Then he dropped his gaze.
"I'm called the strongest sorcerer of the modern era....."
[Why is this man here?]
"But that was never really true."
Gojo Satoru looked up. Met Sukuna directly.
"It's you."
[...........]
[Ah. So that's what this is.]
"....Heh."
Sukuna laughed.
His eyes closed, then opened, and they were everywhere. Okkotsu Yuta. Tsukumo Yuki. Ishigori Ryu. Uro Takako. Faces he recognized and faces he didn't, all standing in a ring around him. And in the crowd, Sukuna spotted the massive white shikigami, Mahoraga, smiling, clapping along with the rest.
They all clapped. They all smiled.
"Congratulations."
"Congratulations."
"Congratulations!"
[Ah. So that's what this is.]
The scenery around him receded. Faded. Washed out into white.
In the white space, only one figure remained behind him.
That was,,
"My apologies, Tengen."
Sukuna had his 4 arms back. He didn't know when that had happened.
2 hands on his hips. The other 2 hanging loose at his sides. He glanced sideways, the unhurried arrogance settled back into his smile like it had never left.
"Made you watch something embarrassing."
"......Is it really alright for you to say that?" Not her thumb-shaped vessel, her true form, a beautiful woman with long white hair, Tengen crossed her arms and answered calmly. "You are a curse."
"Yeah."
,!
Sukuna's eyes cut to one side. Something had appeared in his blind spot.
A white cloak. A blue bob.
Himmel's smile was gentle. Same as always.
Hero and King of Curses looked at each other. The Hero spoke first.
"Sukuna, you understood love. And then you turned away from it. You chose the path of the curse."
"Ah, that's enough." Sukuna tilted his chin up slightly. "You don't need to finish."
[To curse others freely, without restraint.]
[To destroy without reason, without care for what is lost.]
[If that is the path chosen, then no failure is permitted. Not once. Not ever.]
"I lost."
Sukuna's gaze was flat.
"The defeated have no right to speak in their own defense. That right is forfeit along with everything else."
"If there were a next time,—"
The King of Curses closed his eyes.
Maybe I would.....
.
In reality.
[Livestream Room]
Everyone had gone still. Those leaning against walls had drifted forward. Those sitting had half-risen from their chairs without noticing.
What they had watched, in the end, was this:
Sukuna had launched the final spatial slash. He had used Itadori's body to chant the incantation. One arm. One point.
But unlike in whatever version of this he had imagined,
Itadori did not fold. He gathered enough cursed energy and held. He pushed the Assimilation back.
And when Sukuna finished chanting, when he rose and pointed and sent the spatial slash screaming toward the Hero,
It never landed.
At the last possible instant, Himmel was faster. One slash. He took Sukuna's arm clean off.
Then he stepped in.
One punch. Straight into Sukuna's face.
Sukuna went backward. His face caved in around the shape of the fist. His head drove into the ground and stopped there.
His legs stretched rigid, like two blades, and stayed that way until consciousness left him entirely.
Long after.
Still.
That's right.
[2017]
[August 15th]
[The Strongest Sorcerer in History]
[The Most Wicked Curse User in History]
[The Fallen One]
[The King of Curses]
[Ryomen Sukuna.]
[Falls.]
➤ Next: Parting