The fragile hope ignited by the little girl's words was a lifeline. Gojo acted with blistering efficiency, teleporting the wounded civilians outside the barrier in quick succession. Their survival now hinged on Shoko's. He reappeared beside Geto, the air crackling with his impatience. "Status?"
"My curses have found many… victims. Not them," Geto reported, his voice grim. The underground was a graveyard, the dead crushed by immense pressure. The absence of their friends' bodies was the only good news in a scene of horror.
"No news is good news. But we're running out of time," Gojo stated, the usual levity gone from his voice.
Geto poured every ounce of his will into the search, his curses becoming frantic extensions of his anxiety. Then—a jolt.
"*Found them!*"
Thirty meters down, in a pocket of hell, his curses relayed the scene: a monstrous, catfish-like curse coiled lazily around its prize—a crushed filing cabinet. Inside, Shoko was a human shield, her body curled around the unconscious forms of Nanako and Mimiko. Her Reverse Cursed Technique was a desperate, flickering flame, healing her own crushed bones and ruptured organs only for the earth to crush them again. She was a machine of pure will, running on fumes, battling suffocation and unimaginable pressure to keep a pocket of life intact around the two girls.
Geto's mind split into two streams of absolute focus. One swarm of curses descended on the catfish spirit with vicious, coordinated fury, preventing its escape deeper into the earth. The other swarm became surgical tools, meticulously, agonizingly slowly carving away the compacted earth and rock around the cabinet, millimeter by agonizing millimeter, relieving the pressure.
With infinite care, they peeled the crumpled metal back. The sight inside made Geto's blood run cold—Shoko's body was visibly misshapen, the girls pale and lifeless. But a pulse, faint and thready, beat under his searching fingers. Alive.
A wave of relief so profound it was dizzying washed over him. They were alive. Itsuki could fix this.
That relief immediately crystallized into a cold, murderous rage. His focus snapped back to the catfish curse. His remaining curses became an engine of torment. They herded it, harried it, blocked every attempt to burrow to safety. They didn't kill it; they evicted it.
With a final, concerted heave, the swarm of curses forced the subterranean horror up through the soil it had dominated, ejecting it violently into the open air. The creature, born and bred in crushing darkness, now writhed under the naked sky, exposed and utterly vulnerable—a fish out of water, delivered to the surface for judgment.
Geto Suguru stood over the broken forms of his family, his gaze lifting from them to the squirming curse in the air. His expression was no longer that of a rescuer, but of an executioner. The debt for this suffering would be paid in full.
The monstrous catfish curse thrashed in the open air, its scarred, pale flesh a blasphemy against the sky. Its terror was a palpable, squirming thing.
"Satoru!" Geto's roar was less a request and more a demand for cosmic retribution.
"I know!" Gojo's reply was a snarl of pure, unadulterated fury.
He didn't gesture. He didn't chant. He simply unleashed. A pillar of concentrated Red—the force of repulsion, of absolute negation—erupted from his outstretched hand. It wasn't a beam; it was a biblical scourge, a cylinder of annihilating light so dense it seemed to warp reality around it. The air screamed, boiled, and peeled away. For ten full seconds, the world was nothing but that howling, crimson void, centered on the squirming form of the curse.
When the light died, the air itself felt cauterized. There was no ash, no residue. The catfish curse had been unwritten from existence, atomized by a force that brooked no resistance, no history, no memory.
Silence, heavy and stunned, followed the cataclysm.
Into that silence, Kamo Itsuki arrived, his expression grim. He went to work with clinical efficiency, the green glow of his Reverse Cursed Technique washing over Shoko, Nanako, and Mimiko, pulling them back from the brink. Then he moved to the other survivors, his hands a blur of life-giving light.
The rescue was a success, but the victory was pyrrhic. The hospital grounds had become a mass grave. In the days that followed, under a somber sky, the survivors held a silent vigil amidst the ruins, their black clothes and white flowers a stark monument to the lives the curse had stolen.
Later, in the quiet of recovery, Ieiri Shoko, her voice still hoarse, pieced together the horror for them. Exhausted from healing, she'd been ambushed. In that split second, she'd seen Mimiko's beloved plushie, Yuki Mai, and made a brutal calculation. She'd ordered the puppet to intercept, buying a single, crucial moment. That moment allowed her to see the curse's technique—the subterranean pull—and react. She'd shoved the girls into a filing cabinet, using its structure to distribute the crushing force, and then became their living shield, her Reverse Cursed Technique a flickering dam against the relentless pressure of the earth.
She had gambled, using a child's toy as a sacrificial pawn, and then used her own body as the final barricade. It was a story of cold, desperate calculus and ferocious, selfless love.
The crisis was over. The catfish curse was gone. But the scars—on the land, on the people, and on the souls of the rescuers—ran deep. The theoretical battle Gojo had craved felt like a distant, childish dream, overshadowed by the brutal, real-world cost of the power they wielded and the horrors they failed to prevent.
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