Chapter 129 - Malevolent Shrine vs Morning Peacock

Their gazes met across the distance. Six fingers. Ryomen Sukuna stared at the shirtless man before him, humiliation burning deep in his soul. The battle erupted instantly. No wasted words. Sukuna's four crimson eyes seethed with murderous intent, the corner of his mouth splitting into a grin of sheer, savage pleasure. He raised one hand and swung it casually toward Toji Fushiguro. Shhk! Shhk! Shhk!

The air was torn apart by something invisible. A vast net of slashing attacks wove itself shut, sealing off every possible escape route around Toji. Megumi Fushiguro lay collapsed dozens of meters away. He couldn't see the attacks. But he could hear them, the mournful cry of wind sliced open, the wail of space rent apart. His father stood at the dead center of that invisible blade net.

One second more and he'd be diced into pieces. Yet Toji didn't move. No. He did move. Inside that slashing storm no human eye could track, he simply tilted his head. Twisted his waist. Lifted a leg. Each motion impossibly small. Each one precise to the millimeter. One slash grazed past his ear, shearing off a few strands of black hair.

Another skimmed along his ribs, leaving a faint white line across bronze skin. The Heavenly Restriction body had pushed survival instinct to its absolute limit. Before his brain could register the threat, his body had already found the one path through ten thousand killing strokes. Just like that, he walked through a blade net that could have dismembered a building in an instant.

"You've gotta be kidding me..."

Aoi Todo, bare-chested and slumped against a shattered tree, stared with his mouth hanging open. That kind of evasion had gone beyond taijutsu entirely. It was a miracle.

"Old man... he didn't even open the Gates..." Megumi Fushiguro's pupils locked in place.

Strolling through a domain of absolute death like he had somewhere better to be. That bearing. Elegant. Too damn elegant. The instant Toji cleared the blade net, he vanished. Every scrap of kinetic energy he'd built up dodging, he converted all of it into explosive forward momentum at once. A shallow crater blew open in the ground beneath his feet.

Then he was already in front of Ryomen Sukuna. A whip kick churned up a gale, carrying a shriek that cleared everything in its path, lashing straight for Sukuna's neck. Fast. Too fast. A flash of genuine surprise crossed Sukuna's eyes. His body responded anyway, not a beat slower. He'd already taken one hit from pure physical force. He wouldn't make that mistake again.

"Heh."

Sukuna's lip curled into a vicious grin. His left arm snapped up to block. Jet-black Cursed Energy coated the arm like scales, hardening it past the threshold of any Special Grade Cursed Tool.

BOOM!

A concussive impact so dense it barely registered as sound. At the point of collision, the air was punched out entirely, forming a vacuum three meters wide. Then the shockwave detonated. The topsoil across a fifty-meter radius was stripped clean off the earth. Dirt and gravel blasted skyward, then the pressure wave ground them to powder on the way back down.

The forest floor looked like an invisible giant had just stomped it flat. The ground under Sukuna's feet fractured apart as he was shoved back half a meter by sheer brute force. A sharp pain shot up his blocking arm. Tremendous strength. Sukuna felt no anger. He felt more alive than he had in centuries.

This physical body was a miracle of creation. He swore on the spot he would carve this man into the finest sashimi and enjoy every single piece.

"Tsk."

Toji Fushiguro clicked his tongue in open disgust. Six fingers' worth of power and that was it? Not enough kick. He pulled his leg back, flipped his body in midair, and brought his other leg down like a battle axe aimed at the crown of Sukuna's head. Sukuna raised his hand and blocked again.

BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!

Both dropped all pretense of technique and went straight to the most primal exchange possible, just hitting each other as hard as they could. Fists and feet crashing together, producing muffled concussive thuds like sledgehammers slamming into steel plate. Every impact kicked up a ring of white shockwave.

The ground beneath their feet fractured and sank, and kept fracturing and sinking, until they had hammered a crater twenty meters across into the earth. The trees still standing nearby snapped and toppled all at once as the stray gale-force winds swept through them.

Megumi Fushiguro, Aoi Todo, and the others could only keep falling back, watching in stunned horror as the two monsters tried to take each other apart. This was real combat. Compared to this, the earlier gang-up on the Horned Cursed Spirit had been child's play.

"Don't get cocky, monkey."

After one more exchange of fists, Ryomen Sukuna used the impact to leap backward, opening a gap of over a dozen meters. He shook out his numb wrist. The smile on his face had gone cold and cruel. In a pure physical brawl, he held no advantage. So there was no reason to keep playing this low-level game.

Sukuna slowly raised both hands and formed an ancient, elaborate hand seal before his chest. In an instant, his aura changed completely. The tyrant king became the abyss itself. Megumi Fushiguro felt a shudder move through him from deeper than bone. Sukuna looked down at Toji in the crater below, the way a man examines an insect.

"Domain Expansion —"

"Malevolent Shrine!"

With that low, resonant declaration, a shrine of bleached and ghastly bones erupted from the ruins and thrust toward the sky. The shrine had no barrier walls. Centered on itself, it pulled everything within a two-hundred-meter radius into the guaranteed-hit, guaranteed-kill reach of its slashing attacks. The green spandex on Toji Fushiguro's body didn't last a second. It disintegrated into scraps of fluttering fabric.

Then came his flesh. Countless fine cuts burst open across his bronze skin all at once. Blood sprayed in fountains.

"Old man!"

Megumi Fushiguro's voice came out hoarse and broken. The manic excitement on Aoi Todo's face froze solid. But Toji Fushiguro, standing at the absolute center of the slashing storm, made a completely different sound.

"Haha..."

"HAHAHAHAHAHA!"

He laughed. Wild and full-throated, he laughed, letting the agony of a thousand simultaneous cuts tear through his entire body. Every inch of skin. Every bundle of muscle. Every bone. All of it flayed by invisible blades, endlessly, without pause. This was the ultimate pain, the kind that walks the razor edge between life and death. The crushing pressure was enough to tear a soul apart.

"Youth... this is exactly how it's supposed to burn!"

Toji threw his head back and roared at the sky, and the blood in his entire body ignited.

"Eight Gates Released Formation, Sixth Gate — Gate of View: OPEN!"

BOOM!

Deep green steam erupted from his body like a volcano going off, blasting skyward in a colossal pillar that punched through the clouds. The berserk airflow tore through the surrounding blood mist and slashing attacks, carving a brief vacuum around him.

His wounds squirmed and closed at a rate visible to the naked eye, the Gate of View's ultra-high-speed cellular activation knitting flesh back together in real time. And then something even more outrageous: his muscle fibers, dense and hard as cast steel, under extreme tension physically clamped down on the invisible blades trying to cut through to his bone marrow and held them there.

Ryomen Sukuna's four crimson eyes widened. A mere monkey. No Cursed Energy. No Cursed Technique. Using nothing but raw flesh to endure Malevolent Shrine head-on. This was a desecration of the fundamental rules of jujutsu itself. The mockery drained from Sukuna's face entirely. His killing intent shot straight to its peak, pure and absolute.

"You reckless piece of filth..."

He raised his hand and brought his arm down through empty air. Slashing attacks poured out without reservation.

"Let's see you take this one. I refuse to believe you can hold against it!"

"Dismantle!"

A terrifying invisible blade net instantly warped the air around it, carrying a sharpness that tore through space, hurtling straight for Toji Fushiguro's face. Facing that certain-kill strike —

"It's only polite to return the favor!"

Toji Fushiguro bared his teeth in a ferocious, blood-soaked grin. He squared his feet and settled into a punching stance, facing directly into the slashing storm that could disintegrate a Special Grade Cursed Spirit on contact.

"Come get some, King of Curses!"

"Taijutsu Secret Art —"

The green steam around his body began to spin. Crimson flames ignited across his fist. That color, that was the air itself catching fire, friction between fist and atmosphere pushed past every limit.

"Morning Peacock!"

And then countless fist silhouettes wreathed in roaring flame, a meteor shower made of pure burning force, surged out in a sky-blotting wave and crashed straight into the colossal blade net bearing down to mince him. With overwhelming, crushing momentum, they smashed it apart, and without losing a single step, kept thundering forward toward Ryomen Sukuna atop the bone shrine.

BOOM! BOOM! BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!

Every punch carried the berserk power of the open Gate of View. Every punch was enough to shatter a mountain.

ORA! ORA! ORA!

The explosions merged into one continuous, unbroken roar. The entire mountaintop shook under the relentless bombardment, trembling like it wanted to come apart at the seams. Sukuna's four eyes went wide. Impossible. The bone shrine beneath his feet was pummeled apart, splinters scattering in every direction. Even he was forced to throw both arms up, hardening them with Cursed Energy to absorb the blows.

Flames and slashes. Brute violence and sorcerous law. Two fundamentally different forms of ultimate power, colliding in the most savage possible way inside the domain. ··· At the same time. Kyoto Jujutsu High. Deepest interior. The Cursed Warehouse. A bewitching monk with a line of sutures running across his forehead walked through a long, shadowed corridor.

The high-level barriers laid by Tengen parted before him on their own as he passed, like obedient pets stepping aside for their master. Kenjaku was smiling. He raised one hand and pushed open the Cursed Warehouse's heavy door, carved from a single massive slab of aged dark wood.

CREAAAK!

Inside: total darkness. At the center of the room, on a stone platform, sat a wooden box sealed under layer upon layer of runic chains. The malevolent energy radiating from it was enough to make the chest clench. Kenjaku looked at the wooden box. The smile at the corner of his mouth grew a little warmer, a little wider. Fight on, fight on, you brainless brutes.

Everything is under my control.

➤ Next: That Man Is Too Strong!