Chapter 126 - A Desperate Battle

An iron fist drove into the monster's jaw. The three-meter giant was knocked clean off its axis, its thick neck wrenching hard to the left. The horned monster screamed. Its left claw swept upward from below, going for the gut. Yuji Itadori didn't bother dodging.

SLAP!

A crisp crack rang out. The steel claw raked through empty air. A thick dead tree, still crusted with bird droppings, had taken Itadori's place. Claws that could shred iron tore it to splinters in an instant. Green steam trailed ghostly afterimages. Itadori had already swapped through, appearing at the monster's completely unguarded right flank. Gate of Rest, pushed to its absolute limit.

He turned his right leg into a battering rod, twisted with his full core, and whipped it out. The roundhouse landed like a sledgehammer on the Special Grade Cursed Spirit's lower back. A dull crack of bone. The giant was driven straight to its knees. Its forehead smashed two deep craters into the mud.

SLAP. SLAP. SLAP.

The clapping became a continuous roar, rapid as beans popping in a hot pan. A relentless, logic-defying chain of pure physical destruction exploded across the forest clearing. Above. Directly behind. From the flanks.

Itadori flickered through the air in a blur of afterimages. Every time the monster raised its claws to retaliate, the boy in front of it turned into a rotting log. Every time it whipped around in rage, an iron fist already wrapped in green steam was crashing into its left shoulder.

"Magnificent, best friend! That's the rhythm! Keep going, don't stop!"

Aoi Todo was rooted in a deep horse stance, both hands clapping like a man possessed. His eyes burned with pure, feverish battle lust. Itadori flipped through the air, riding the momentum of his drop, and brought his heel down like a battle axe.

CRACK!

The thick, bone-white horn jutting from the back of the monster's skull split open with a long, jagged fracture. These two taijutsu lunatics hadn't even glanced at each other once during the entire fight. Aoi Todo had thrown out visual observation entirely. He was running on pure animal instinct, reading the precise angle and landing point of every one of Itadori's strikes before they came.

And Itadori had zero defensive posture. He'd handed his back over to that clapping muscle-brained lunatic. No dodging. No blocking. Nothing but absolute, relentless violence. The Special Grade Mutant Cursed Spirit — the one that had tanked Blood Manipulation and Cursed Energy artillery — was being slapped around like a ragdoll in a washing machine. It couldn't even find an opening to stand up and fight back.

Dozens of meters away, Noritoshi Kamo's longbow hung slack at his side. His mind was blank. How? How was this savage, graceless, completely artless brawl completely suppressing a calamity-tier Special Grade Cursed Spirit? This shattered every principle the Three Great Families had ever drilled into him.

Megumi Fushiguro wiped cold sweat from his forehead. The suffocating weight of death that had been pressing down on him moments ago had been blasted clean away by the absurd gang-beating playing out in front of him.

"Those two brainless muscle idiots." Megumi Fushiguro's brow knitted hard. "They've known each other for less than two hours. What the hell kind of sync is that?"

ROOOAR!

The Special Grade Cursed Spirit let out a shriek of pure, venomous hatred. Its Cursed Energy erupted in a shockwave, hammering the surrounding green steam out of the air. The thick neck that had been bent ninety degrees the wrong way was snapping back into alignment at a sickening speed.

CLUNK!

The broken vertebrae forced themselves back together. Not enough. Megumi Fushiguro's chest tightened. Every blow had been massive, crushing. Raw physical force couldn't deal fatal damage to this thing. The power of the Gate of Rest slammed into its body and was absorbed, eaten, digested by its own flesh. Aoi Todo's raised hands froze in midair. The fervor on his face went stone cold.

The enormous tumor on the monster's back cracked open.

SHLICK!

Thousands of thick black tentacles burst out of the wound, driving with precision into every scrap of Cursed Spirit remains scattered across the ground. Shredded Grade 3 meat. The blood Noritoshi Kamo had spilled. Every drop, every scrap drained completely dry within seconds. The corpse chunks on the ground crumbled into black powder and scattered.

The monster devoured that massive surge of Cursed Energy residue and swelled. Its bulk punched straight up through the dense canopy overhead. Crimson light ignited in its eye sockets. It rolled its clouded eyes downward, looking at the Jujutsu High students far below with the absolute indifference of something that had already decided they were food. Its mouth split open to the ears.

A single garbled syllable dragged itself out.

"Eat... you..."

Savage, malevolent Cursed Energy screamed toward the sky. The group pulled together, every muscle coiled.

"Watch out. It's gotten stronger." Megumi Fushiguro's voice was flat and hard.

"I wish Naoya were here." Itadori's voice dropped low. "His Projection Sorcery is faster. He could at least keep this thing moving."

Not false modesty. Naoya Zenin's technique layered on top of the Eight Gates — in the entire Jujutsu World, when it came to pure speed, only a handful of the absolute strongest could touch him. Megumi Fushiguro pressed a hand over his bleeding forearm and swallowed down the taste of blood.

"Nothing to be done. They left him out to keep the numbers balanced for the exchange event."

"The old man said if we screw this up, we're doing ten thousand frog jumps around the back mountain when we get home." Maki Zenin spat a mouthful of bloody saliva onto the mud, both hands locking back around the spear shaft.

Green steam curled from her body now too.

"Youth does not end in a mud pit like this."

The ground detonated before the words left her mouth. The Long-Horned Cursed Spirit's enormous body smashed across ten meters of open ground in an instant. The sonic boom hit like a physical blow.

"Scatter!" Megumi Fushiguro roared.

Maki Zenin didn't move back. She swung the great spear in a full overhead arc, the spearhead screaming as she brought it down straight onto the monster's skull.

BANG!

The shaft slammed into the Cursed Spirit's raised forearm and bent into a grotesque U-shape. Couldn't cut through. The evolved Horned Cursed Spirit was something else entirely now. That hide was harder than high-density alloy. The Cursed Spirit swung a backhand. The back of its hand caught Maki Zenin clean across the side.

Bone snapped sharply. Maki Zenin went airborne, spear still in hand, smashed through two dead trees one after the other, and crumpled into the mud without moving.

"Maki-senpai!" Itadori drove his legs down and blew a crater in the earth launching himself forward.

A fist loaded with every ounce of Eight Gates power drove straight for the Cursed Spirit's face. The Long-Horned Cursed Spirit didn't dodge. Didn't block. It took the punch on its face. Its cervical spine made a single dull click. Then it opened its fang-crammed maw and slapped Itadori across the chest.

A rapid chain of bone-snapping cracks. Itadori's entire ribcage caved inward. He flew backward more than ten meters and skidded to a stop.

"Divine Dogs!"

Megumi Fushiguro's hands flew through seals. Black and white blurs clamped onto the Cursed Spirit's ankles from either side. Above, Nue dropped from the sky. A purple lightning net crackled down and swallowed the monster whole. Nothing.

The Cursed Spirit lifted one leg and shook it. The Divine Dogs burst apart into scattered afterimages. The high-voltage lightning struck its body and didn't leave so much as a scorch mark. Nobara Kugisaki forced herself upright.

She never got the hammer swung. The Cursed Spirit's backhand sent out a concussive blast of air that picked her up and slammed her down unconscious before she could even set her feet. Aoi Todo clapped and swapped positions in a frantic rhythm, pulling and weaving. Noritoshi Kamo's Blood Manipulation worked the edges of the fight, blood arrows skimming off the monster's hide without leaving a scratch.

It was a complete and total rout. They went down one by one. Megumi Fushiguro dragged air into his lungs. His vision was starting to go dark at the edges. What is happening? What the hell are the teachers doing out there?

➤ Next: Megumi Fushiguro's Domain