Jujutsu Kaisen: Megumi — Chapter 37 - How Will You Receive the Second One?
"Savor it well, little monk!"
Megumi Fushiguro was completely overwhelmed, four limbs pressed flat against the ground, broken and wretched. Mouthful after mouthful of blood surged from his lips, fragments of internal organs mixed in, pooling beneath him into a horrifying crimson lake.
Against that backdrop, Ryomen Sukuna's figure, holding the lift aloft, stood like a pillar between heaven and earth.
"Do you see it?! This is the absolute gap between us, a chasm as vast as the heavens itself!"
Ryomen Sukuna looked down from on high, his gaze fixed on the boy sprawled in the blood.
All four crimson eyes were filled with a victor's contempt and arrogance.
"No matter what era you're born in, no matter whose body you borrow, trash will ultimately only ever be trash!"
The King of Curses, in this contest of the lift.
Had stood to the very last...
And yet.
In a deadlock where all things had gone silent, where even the wind seemed to have stopped,
"Who said I have no trump card left."
Those familiar words were squeezed out from Megumi's throat, low and unhurried, despite everything.
Ryomen Sukuna's pupils contracted sharply.
Megumi had clearly been crushed under the pressure until he was level with the ground itself, four limbs flat, barely able to squirm. Devastated by the mass of those dozens of skyscrapers until he couldn't even stand, his physical functions nearly completely destroyed.
And yet the King of Curses' battle instincts were still screaming at him.
Megumi's condition hadn't been extinguished. If anything, it had entered an extremely dangerous state.
Like a cornered beast driven to the edge of despair, on the verge of drawing its last breath, at the threshold of death, launching its final charge.
When the shadow-trash is roused to fury.
Blood stains the ground five paces in every direction.
Ryomen Sukuna snapped his gaze downward, his eyes boring straight through the thick crimson mist.
And then he saw it.
Behind Megumi's eyes, criss-crossed with threads of blood, a lion still lurked.
"Have you forgotten something..."
Seeing Sukuna's wary expression, Megumi was seized by excitement instead. He flashed a provocative grin.
Provoked, all four of Sukuna's eyes snapped wide open, every line of sight sweeping ceaselessly over Megumi's body.
At last, Sukuna's gaze locked dead still, on Megumi's two hands. Those same hands that had hung limp and powerless were now, in the pool of blood, painstakingly clasped back together, all ten fingers interlocked.
"The meltdown — it's already over, isn't it!"
Megumi wrenched his head up. His face was twisted savage, like a demonic war god.
He erupted with his final, feverish intensity.
He pressed the absolute pinnacle of the Ten Shadows Technique hard against his chest and soldered it there.
"Domain Expansion!"
"Chimera Shadow Garden!"
The terrifying black tide of shadows that had been confined to the ground's surface, like a pitch-black monster with a world-annihilating will suddenly awakened, boiled over and ran wild in an instant. Like countless outstretching hands reaching and grasping, it surged madly upward, scaling toward the sky!
Megumi was going to reclaim the sky with his shadow formation!
"This guy — he's still coming?!"
Sensing the familiar surge of cursed energy,
Ryomen Sukuna had no moves left.
Not because he was weary of Megumi's Domain Expansion.
He truly had no moves left.
Even throwing open an Open Domain to counter it, Sukuna still had confidence he could achieve neutralization and cancel out the effects.
But after experiencing that first wave of the 0.2-Second Domain Expansion, Sukuna had come to a stark realization.
This kid's domain held nothing but amplification for himself.
Inside this Chimera Shadow Garden, there was simply no effect that could be neutralized or offset.
Every single rule within it was poured entirely into the absolute amplification of the caster's own environment.
Short of shattering this barrier from the outside with even more violent output,
There was nothing he could do.
And right now, Sukuna's palms were still locked within the lift. Those two massive arms, his shoulders, his spine, were pinned completely under Piercing Elephant, that creature bearing tens of millions of tons, crushing down from overhead.
The King of Curses could only watch as the domain covered his head.
"Come then — let me see what tricks you have left!"
Sukuna's eyes split wide with fury. He let out a roar.
The shadow tide blotted out the sky.
The entire Shinjuku battlefield fell once again under Megumi Fushiguro's absolute control, the control of a god of creation.
The Domain Expansion was not Megumi's desperate last gamble with his back against the wall. Every ultimate tactic constructed around it was not hypothetical. All of it could be verified at the origins of the lift, and had been successfully practiced in the contest against Reggie Star.
And the first absolute property that this Chimera Shadow Garden could confer upon the battle:
Megumi, empowered by the domain's rules, could grant the Piercing Elephant already crashing down on Sukuna's head one hundred percent of its true weight, and then push beyond even that limit.
"My Piercing Elephant hasn't reached its limit yet!"
"Come on, Piercing Elephant, all of it!"
The domain's first layer of amplification for Ten Shadows creations: it could further materialize the shikigami themselves.
In the instant his shout pierced through space,
Megumi, prone in the pool of blood, filled his eyes with absolute resolve. Cursed energy condensed to its extreme and surged into Piercing Elephant's body.
"Re-contract, "
"Elephant!"
BOOM!
Its form erupted with a metallic sheen. Muscle density, skeletal mass, a second straight-line explosion that defied all reason.
Ryomen Sukuna, who had been gritting his teeth this entire time to maintain his perfect lifting posture,
Finally let out the most broken, most despairing cry he had unleashed since the battle began.
The crushing weight drove the King of Curses down to his knees.
A world-shaking genuflection.
THUD THUD.
The indomitable King of Curses, Ryomen Sukuna.
Stared in disbelief at his two knees, sunk into the ground, pointing squarely toward Megumi.
Megumi caught the moment with gleaming satisfaction, raised an eyebrow, and kept taunting him.
"It's nothing but added weight, I can still hold it!"
Sukuna gnashed his teeth, doing everything he could to preserve the dignity of a thousand-year King of Curses.
He didn't know that the Megumi before him had long since witnessed every form Sukuna's so-called power could take, countless times over.
"You can still hold it... is that so?"
Megumi let out a quiet laugh. His cursed energy shifted.
No preamble.
Megumi unhesitatingly activated, within this absolute home turf of the Chimera Shadow Garden, the second layer ultimate amplification rule.
Within this shadow formation completely sealed off by the Chimera Shadow Garden, it was possible to produce shadow creations unique to the domain itself. And as the master of Ten Shadows, Megumi could simulate those shadow creations, which bore no signs of life whatsoever, into the exact form of any shikigami he had contracted, with perfect fidelity.
Shadow doubles.
"If you think you can still just barely handle the weight of this one Piercing Elephant..."
"Then how will you receive the second?"
➤ Next: True Form Activation