Chapter 162 - Daytime Tiger

His hands slammed together in front of his chest. The air let out a groaning, overloaded crack. The entire intersection, every current of air, in that single second, was forcibly evacuated and compressed by an act of absolute physical violence, with Toji Fushiguro at its center. Toji felt his heart slamming wildly inside his chest. Blood and qi surged through his meridians like boiling magma.

The extreme load of the Gate of Wonder made every muscle in his body shriek and tear, but what followed was that euphoric, all-shattering rush. Deep blue steam gathered in a frenzy around him.

"Daytime Tiger!"

Both fists drove forward. The hyper-compressed air cannon erupted the instant it left his hands. The visible shockwave took the shape of a roaring white tiger, claws and fangs bared, lunging straight ahead. Charging to meet it: Sukuna's all-encompassing invisible slashing attack, and golden flames that could incinerate everything.

Sukuna stood atop his shrine, all four eyes locked on that mass of white pressure, a cruel and contemptuous smirk at the corner of his mouth.

A mere wind blast, and you think you can challenge my rules?

The slashing strike landed on the tip of the white tiger's nose.

Clang! Clang! Clang!

A sharp metallic ringing pierced the eardrums. The smirk at the corner of Sukuna's mouth went rigid. It didn't cut through. That Sure-Hit slashing attack, the one capable of shredding skyscrapers and bypassing all defenses, was physically deflected the moment it contacted the wall of hyper-compressed air.

Like a dull blade hacking into a steel plate. The slash itself shattered on the spot, unable to breach the physical limit.

Impossible.

Before Sukuna could react, the raging white tiger had already opened its jaws and devoured the entire composite golden sea of fire whole. In an instant, the Daytime Tiger's vacuum stripped out every last molecule of oxygen.

Those Sure-Hit flames, said to burn through all things, didn't even get the chance to struggle. Like a chicken seized by the throat, they let out a soft pfft and snuffed out on the spot.

"What?!"

The word tore out of Sukuna's throat. For the first time in a thousand years, his face wore something close to terror. It was beyond his comprehension. No Cursed Energy. No technique. Purely the muscular contraction of a body and the air pressure of a thrown punch, and it had crushed his Domain's rules?!

What kind of unreasonable monster was this?!

The white tiger roared. It crushed the flames, ripped through the slashing net, and carrying kinetic force capable of annihilating heaven and earth, swallowed Sukuna whole along with that shrine built from countless bones.

BOOM!

The entire ground of Shibuya heaved violently. Blinding white light swallowed all visibility. The howling wind swept up shattered stone and rebar, rolling outward in every direction like a tsunami. Megumi Fushiguro pressed himself flat behind the wreck of a car, both hands clamped hard over his ears. His internal organs felt like they were shifting with every shockwave.

Suguru Geto planted himself between the students and the blast and rapidly summoned a defensive Special Grade Cursed Spirit to use as a physical shield.

Crack.

The instant the airwave swept past, the Special Grade Cursed Spirit's shell, the one said to withstand a direct missile strike, split open a massive fissure across its surface.

This man is genuinely insane.

Suguru Geto registered the thought in silence and swallowed a mouthful of saliva mixed with dust. At the absolute center of the storm. Sukuna's body began to fall apart the very first second it made contact with the white tiger's pressure.

Bones snapped inch by inch. His chest caved in as if a hydraulic press had rolled over it. The gale shredded his flesh into countless wounds so deep they exposed bone, the blood didn't even have time to spray before the pressure vaporized it. Reverse Cursed Technique ran at full tilt, desperately trying to repair the ruined body.

But the speed of regeneration couldn't come close to keeping pace with the Daytime Tiger's destruction.

"Damn you..."

Sukuna ground every tooth in his mouth to fragments. All four eyes blazed with absolute fury and humiliation. He tried to swing a fist back. Tried to form hand signs again. But that utterly unreasonable physical force interrupted every single movement before it could begin. Then his entire body was sent flying.

The massive frame punched through a signal tower at a street corner, snapped the support pillars of an overpass, tore through the buildings of three city blocks in succession, and was finally driven into the bottom of a deep crater hundreds of meters away.

Behind him, that ominous Malevolent Shrine let out a wretched, piercing wail, collapsed with a crash, and dissolved into a sky full of scattering points of Cursed Energy light. The slashing stopped. The Domain shattered. The smoke and dust gradually cleared. Moonlight fell once again upon Dogenzaka, now reduced entirely to rubble. The world went suddenly quiet. So quiet it was almost grating.

Toji Fushiguro still held his punching stance, standing at the origin point of a trench of destruction hundreds of meters long and bottomless in depth.

That felt good.

Toji broke into a grin, casually wiped the blood off his face with the back of his hand, and straightened up.

"Is that all you've got? Out of a hundred points, that answer sheet of yours barely scrapes a twenty!" He shouted toward the distant crater. "You didn't sweat nearly enough!"

He dusted off his trousers, turned around, and looked toward his son crouching behind the barricade. Megumi Fushiguro hauled himself up from the ground with great difficulty. He looked at the massive fissure at his feet, as if some god had cleaved it open with a giant axe, then looked at the crater in the rubble far away, from which nothing moved. His head was buzzing.

"Dad..." Megumi's voice cracked from how parched his throat was.

"Hm? What is it, Megumi?" Toji immediately switched on a radiant smile and thrust out a gleaming thumbs-up. "Did the old man's youthful heroics just now move you to tears? Don't hold it in — feel free to praise me out loud!"

Megumi's eye twitched violently. He pointed at the distant crater and swallowed.

"You didn't... actually kill Itadori, did you?!"

That was Yuji Itadori's body. Even if Sukuna had taken it over right now, the physical body was still that body. After beating Sukuna into that kind of state, could Itadori even survive?!

"Huh?"

Toji was briefly taken aback, then waved one large fan-like hand without a care.

"Relax, relax. As a teacher, how could I not know where to draw the line?"

He walked over, slung an arm around his son's shoulder, and gave it a firm slap. "I held back!"

Megumi felt like his shoulder was about to be knocked out of its socket. He stared at the terrifying trench that had literally rewritten the map of Shibuya.

"You call that holding back?!" He finally couldn't hold it in. "That level of destruction — I'd believe it if someone told me a missile had been airdropped! Do you have some kind of misunderstanding about what 'holding back' means?!"

"Of course I held back." Toji widened his eyes with perfect self-assurance. "Itadori's physical constitution can take a hit like that and survive."

He rubbed his chin, making a genuinely serious assessment.

"At most, about eighty percent of the bones in his body are broken, and his internal organs have ruptured in a few places. Go back, have Shoko take a look, rest for ten days or half a month, and he'll be back to being a lively young man in the prime of his youth!"

Megumi squeezed his eyes shut in anguish and buried his face in both hands. Saddled with a clueless, hotheaded idiot of a father who had absolutely zero common sense, he was certain he was going to die of a heart attack someday.

"All right, the father-son heart-to-heart ends here."

Toji suddenly released the arm he had wrapped around Megumi. He took a stride forward, stepped over a pile of rubble, and his gaze cut through the drifting smoke to lock onto the top of a wrecked building a hundred meters away. Three people stood there.

Kenjaku in his kesa robes. Uraume with white hair and a bone-deep chill radiating off their body. Chikage with a short blade in hand.

"You've been watching a free open lesson for this long, don't you think it's time to pay tuition?"

Toji rolled his neck. The killing intent in his eyes was entirely undisguised.

"Now it's your turn to hand in your homework."

Caught in the sights of those beast-like eyes, Uraume instinctively stepped back half a step. Sharp ice spikes crystallized at their fingertips in an instant. Even that monster Sukuna had been dropped with a single punch. The man called Toji Fushiguro could no longer be measured by any normal standard. Charging in right now would be no different from walking into a grave.

But Kenjaku, standing at the front, showed not the slightest trace of panic. On the contrary, he studied Toji with keen fascination, as if admiring a priceless, one-of-a-kind treasure.

"This is truly magnificent." Kenjaku began to clap slowly. The smile at the corner of his mouth edged toward something almost fanatical. "With Cursed Energy stripped out entirely, the physical body can still explode with a force that completely defies the laws of physics... Toji Fushiguro, you are nothing short of a miracle of human evolution, the most perfect anomaly to have transcended this entire cycle of cause and effect."

"Cut the flattery." Toji spat a mouthful of blood. "What exactly are you after?"

Suguru Geto walked up from behind and took his place at Toji's side, his gaze dark and fixed on the stitched-together creature who had stolen someone else's body. Kenjaku spread his arms wide, letting the night wind billow through his kesa.

"Haven't I already said so? I am seeking the limits of human possibility."

His voice echoed across the vast expanse of rubble, carrying a bone-chilling sense of prophecy.

"The human vessel is too fragile. Cursed Energy is the key to a higher dimension. Only by driving all of humanity into the deepest possible assimilation with Cursed Energy — forcing the entire population of over a hundred million in Japan across the threshold into the transcendent Domain — can the most perfect individuals be sifted out through the violence of that reaction!"

Kenjaku pointed at Sukuna lying unconscious in the crater, then pointed at Toji.

"Just like the former King of Curses. Just like you, right now. I want this dead, stagnant world to boil with life once more."

"Speak plainly." Toji dug a finger in his ear, his expression thick with impatience.

"I am going to initiate the Culling Game."

Kenjaku dropped that deranged smile. His eyes turned utterly cold and fathomlessly deep.

"An endless killing game covering all of Japan, for sorcerers, ancient reincarnated bodies, and modern awakened individuals alike. Winners live, losers die. Barriers will strip away every route of retreat, and only through the most extreme death-matches can the deepest potential within humanity be wrung out. That will be a golden age more brilliant than any era in the past thousand years."

Toji curled his lip. Not remotely interested in this terminal case of adolescent delusion. He had to find a way to go straight over there and twist this bastard's skull off. Toji quietly calculated the distance. The muscles in his calves began to tense in secret.

"With all this grand setup — where is Satoru Gojo?"

At that name, the arc of Kenjaku's mouth widened again.

"Satoru Gojo?"

"Guess."

Toji narrowed his eyes. The paving stones beneath his feet exploded with a crack. Toji turned into a blur and launched himself straight toward Kenjaku on the high platform.

Whatever your stupid box scheme is, first you take one of the old man's fists, full of youthful fire, and then we'll talk!

➤ Next: Yuji's Big Brother, and the Sleeping Daughter