Chapter 160 - It Is Your Honor to Become My Teaching Material

The moment those words fell. All things went silent. Then everything was cut apart. An invisible storm of slashing strikes materialized from thin air, turning the space within a hundred meters of Sukuna into an absolute domain of death. The asphalt was stripped away and pulverized in an instant. The reinforced concrete of the surrounding rubble was sliced into powder.

This was not an attack. This was erasure at the level of natural law.

"Dad!"

Megumi Fushiguro's shout was swallowed by the shriek of air torn apart by the slashes. The devastating Cursed Energy shockwaves forced him back step after step, just standing at the edge of the battle circle sent waves of stinging pain across his skin. And his father, Toji Fushiguro, stood at the very center of that storm. Toji hadn't moved. No, he was moving.

His body was making micro-adjustments at a frequency that exceeded the limits of visual perception. Shoulders dropping one centimeter. The heel of his right foot rotating half an inch. His core tightening and releasing in a single instant. The deep-green steam of the Gate of View pulsed violently around him, forming a layer of distorted airflow that served as a shield.

Countless invisible blades grazed his skin, his hair, sweeping past in a frenzy, leaving trails of fleeting cuts across his bronze muscle. Blood barely surfaced before the heat from his hyper-accelerated metabolism evaporated it. He was being wounded. He was healing. Both at the same time.

"Watch closely, Megumi."

Toji's voice cut through the piercing shriek of the storm, carrying a thread of unhinged amusement.

"Lesson three of the Physical Arts of Youth! Don't watch with your eyes, listen with your body! The killing intent, the flow of Cursed Energy, the cry of the air... those are the test points your teacher is putting on the exam!"

He was teaching. In the middle of a technique storm powered by fifteen fingers of the King of Curses, he was conducting a live lesson.

"You piece of trash..."

In Sukuna's four blood-red eyes, fury had nearly solidified into something physical. This humiliation, being used as a teaching aid, was more unbearable than any wound. Last time it was six fingers. He had accepted that. This time, it was fifteen.

"Die!"

The density and speed of the slashing strikes doubled in an instant. The air that had merely been shrieking now groaned under the unbearable strain. The entire space felt like it had been fed into an invisible meat grinder, the light itself bending and warping.

"Fall back!" Suguru Geto's expression shifted. He grabbed Megumi and the others and retreated explosively another several hundred meters.

Even the aftershock alone was enough to tear any sorcerer below Special Grade apart in an instant. At the center of it all, the cuts on Toji's body were appearing faster and faster. The deep-green steam was being consumed at a visibly accelerated rate.

"Your attacks are still so straightforward — nothing but rage, no technique!"

Genuine impatience crept into Toji's voice, as if he was disappointed in his teaching aid's performance.

"Power and speed alone won't ignite the flames of youth! For this question, failing grade!"

The words had barely left his mouth before the ground beneath his feet collapsed with a thunderous roar. The deep-green steam exploded outward like a charge of dynamite. Toji's figure, wreathed in flying debris, did not retreat, he advanced, driving himself directly into the densest part of the slashing storm.

"What?!"

In Sukuna's field of vision, that green figure tore through his web of slashes along a trajectory that completely defied the laws of physics. A sense of pure, absolute physical pressure materialized behind him in an instant. Sukuna roared and spun around, his fist wrapped in ominous Cursed Energy slamming out with full force.

BOOM!

Toji's fist met his head-on. No Cursed Energy. Only the physical strength of a body wrung to its absolute limit by the opening of the Sixth Gate. A terrifying shockwave exploded outward from the point where their fists collided, hurling the already-shattered ground skyward again, forming a visible ring-shaped pressure wave.

"You little monkey!" Sukuna's fury erupted from his chest. "All you do is dart around like a fly!"

His other hand turned to a claw and raked toward Toji's face. Toji sidestepped with ease, knee driving upward like a cannonball, straight into Sukuna's flank. Sukuna blocked with his forearm. CLANG! a tremendous metallic ring, nothing like flesh meeting flesh. It was the sound of two pieces of high-velocity metal smashing into each other.

"Dodging? No, this is dynamic instruction!" Toji's strike missed and he followed through with a hand-blade chop toward Sukuna's neck. "So that you, the struggling student, can see more clearly!"

Sukuna's other hand flashed like lightning and seized Toji's wrist, all four eyes filled with savage violence.

"Die!"

Cursed Energy detonated. Another invisible slashing strike, Dismantle, the technique aimed specifically at those with power, took shape in his palm in an instant, cutting toward Toji's skull at zero range. This was a killing blow. This was an inescapable execution. Toji Fushiguro didn't even blink. He abandoned his hand-blade attack entirely. His other hand moved directly into the path of that invisible slash.

But he was not moving to catch it. In the instant before Dismantle made contact with his palm, the muscles of his hand began vibrating at a terrifying frequency.

"Control of force — zero points!"

Toji delivered his cold verdict. Then he drove his palm out with a sudden, violent thrust. His palm and that invisible blade of Cursed Energy met in a direct collision. No physical form. Yet the impact produced a sharp, ear-splitting crack.

CRACK!

That Dismantle, capable of severing Special Grade Cursed Tools, was forcibly shattered at the structural level by pure, high-frequency oscillating physical force. Fragments of Cursed Energy scattered in all directions. All four of Sukuna's pupils contracted violently at once. This is impossible. A technique... shattered by pure physical force... The next second.

"Pff."

Toji shook out his hand. Across his palm, a wound deep enough to see bone was slowly seeping blood. Cursed Energy residue that could not be immediately dispelled clung to the edges of the wound. The Gate of View's hyper-regeneration had been suppressed. Interesting. Seeing that the attack had landed, the corner of Sukuna's mouth finally curved upward.

"Hahaha, you damned green freak — still running your mouth..."

"I told you." Toji cut him off coldly, eyes on the wound in his palm. "Your attacks are too boring."

"With only this much, you dare call yourself 'King'?"

Sukuna was completely enraged. The ominous curse markings on his body blazed with an eerie red light, and the massive Cursed Energy accumulated from fifteen fingers erupted like a volcano.

"Insolent wretch! I am the King of Curses! Throughout heaven and earth, I alone am the honored one!"

Toji looked at him. The irreverent expression on his face slowly faded, replaced by a calm that bordered on pity.

"King? You're nothing but a frog at the bottom of a small puddle."

He paused. His voice was quiet, yet each word landed clearly in the heart of every powerful figure present.

"Compared to that man, you still have a long way to go."

That man? Who? Sukuna's fury froze for just a single instant. This was the first time in a thousand years he had heard an assessment like that. A sense of humiliation unlike anything he had known before pierced his dignity, more deeply than being beaten twice had. He, Ryomen Sukuna, had been fundamentally and completely denied by an ordinary man with no Cursed Energy.

"You... said... what..."

Sukuna forced those words out from between his teeth, one by one. The terrifying Cursed Energy around him made the surrounding space begin to twist ominously.

In the distance, Kenjaku's eyes gleamed with fanatical light. "Do you see it? This is another kind of human possibility! Forge the body to its absolute limit, and it can shake the rules themselves! And on the other side, the apex of Cursed Energy! What a sight, truly magnificent!"

Suguru Geto, meanwhile, had his brow furrowed, worried. In all these years, Toji, who had always been invincible, had been wounded for the first time. Sukuna with fifteen fingers was incomparably more powerful than the awakening at the Kyoto Sister-School Goodwill Event.

But who was this "man" Toji had mentioned?

"AAAAAAAAAAAAAH!"

Sukuna went completely berserk. He abandoned all probing. Both hands slammed together in front of his chest. That familiar, soul-crushing pressure descended once more. It was a Domain.

Megumi Fushiguro's heart hammered. "Dad! Watch out!"

He wanted to rush forward. He wanted to warn his father. But Toji only turned and glanced back at him, his gaze steady and calm.

"Watch closely, Megumi. When the enemy brings out his strongest question, a teacher must naturally answer it with the most passionate, full-marks response!"

He stepped forward. Alone. Directly into the path of the Malevolent Shrine taking shape before him, that symbol of absolute death. The deep-green steam of the Gate of View turned wild. Blue steam, boiling like blood, began forcing its way out through his pores. That was the harbinger of the Seventh Gate. The Gate of Wonder.

Toji Fushiguro broke into a grin, wilder, more ferocious, more exhilarated than anything Sukuna had shown.

"It is your honor to become my teaching material!"

"The final exam begins now!"

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