Itadori's fist, wreathed in black lightning, came smashing down at Kenjaku.
Kenjaku gritted his teeth—Mahiru's Piercing Blood, and Itadori's Black Flash; of these two, he had to choose one to take.
He could only choose the latter.
So he layered blood armor over his entire body, coat after coat, and braced himself to take Itadori's punch head-on.
Bang! Piercing Blood collided with Piercing Blood, the two blood-lines canceling each other out in midair; the blood armor took the Black Flash head-on, and in an instant cracks spread all across it. Kenjaku was sent flying, tumbling endlessly across the ground.
He had just barely steadied himself—
only to slam, face-first, into Mahiru's Heavy-Armed Darting Hare mecha.
The cannon cores of both arms lined up side by side, and the artillery roared out once more, blasting Kenjaku away. That blood armor's defense was practically a tortoise shell, yet even so, Kenjaku suffered grievous damage, crashing through several walls in a row before finally landing dead center in a stadium.
"Damn it!"
Landing again, Kenjaku clenched his teeth—because he heard, from a blind spot neither far nor near, the sound of applause ringing out once more.
Another swap!
Something else had been swapped into his blind spot!
Damn it, that Todo Aoi's technique... was unbelievably troublesome too!
With no other choice, Kenjaku's cursed energy erupted completely.
A sea of blood surged beneath his feet, raising towering waves of blood in all directions.
Itadori, who had just been swapped behind Kenjaku, was caught off guard. He could only pull back his fist, cross his arms, and brace against the impact of that blood wave—he was blown away, slamming hard into the stadium's spectator stands.
He flipped back up, about to charge again, when a hand pressed down on his shoulder.
He turned to look—it was Mahiru who had stopped him.
Crack crack crack crack crack—
Then, the next second, right in front of him, several spikes formed from Cursed Spirits suddenly burst out of the blood on the ground. This was a trap Kenjaku had set by muscle memory amid the fierce battle.
Thanks to Mahiru pulling him back in time, Itadori was left unharmed.
"Be more careful." Mahiru gazed from afar at Kenjaku in the center of the blood sea, speaking softly.
Itadori took two rapid breaths, and only then did he reflect and calm down.
He really had been getting too hasty.
By now, Kenjaku had spread blood across the entire floor of the stadium, turning the place into a pool of blood.
Mahiru and Itadori were standing on the higher spectator stands, which was the only reason they hadn't been submerged.
Kenjaku's condition was actually terrible—half of it dealt by Mahiru, half by Satoru Gojo. Mahiru's pursuit bit too tightly, never giving him the chance to free up a hand to heal his wounds with Reverse Cursed Technique.
But as long as he could drag the time out long enough, he would eventually recover, bit by bit.
That was why Itadori was so eager to attack—he wanted to inflict wounds on his opponent.
And right in the center of the blood pool, Kenjaku seemed to sense something, and suddenly broke into a smile: "They're here."
Finally, here.
On the other side of the stadium, many different yet similar auras of cursed energy appeared.
Kenjaku smiled. "It's not as if you're the only one with helpers."
Mahiru tilted her head.
She saw that, on the spectator stands across the stadium, two rows of people had appeared at some unknown point—each clad in white robes, faces covered with white cloth masks painted with crimson symbols.
"...The Kamo Family?" Todo, wearing a loose black windbreaker, had also appeared behind Mahiru at some point, frowning as he spoke.
That was the Kamo Family's secret unit.
In the original work, the Kamo Family was only infiltrated and replaced during the Culling Game; now, however, it had already fallen ahead of schedule.
The two rows of secret-unit members standing on the stands had long since become nothing but walking corpses. They had been controlled, remodeled, and used by Kenjaku as vessels for Spirit Descent. As for the material of the Spirit Descent, it was naturally the remains of those sorcerers buried in the Kamo Family's ancestral graves across the generations.
This special unit had originally been dispatched by Kenjaku to various parts of Tokyo to massacre civilians. But now, with the situation turned drastically against him by Mahiru's scheme, he had no choice but to urgently summon a portion of them back.
And now—they had arrived in time.
"You know what?" Kenjaku grinned. "I made far more preparations than you imagine."
He slowly raised his hand, beads of Piercing Blood gathering in his palm—
At the same time, the entire row of the special unit behind him uniformly replicated his motion, likewise raising their palms and assuming the stance to prepare Piercing Blood.
More than a dozen people.
More than a dozen first-grade sorcerers who had mastered Piercing Blood.
Kenjaku was rather smug.
The reinforcements he had brought in were truly considerable in number. Quantitative change brings about qualitative change.
Kenjaku felt relaxed—on one hand because these sorcerers were his helpers... and on the other, because when these people were too numerous, the effect of "Boogie Woogie" would be diluted.
Boogie Woogie could only swap the positions of two things at a time. Once there were too many enemies, too many places needing swaps, the speed at which he clapped to swap would fall somewhat behind the demand for it.
And right now, Mahiru of course understood what was going through Kenjaku's mind.
But... the girl couldn't help but smile.
"It's fine," she said. "I've made plenty of preparations too."
She had enhanced quite a few of the students. And Todo was, without a doubt, the one Mahiru had enhanced most earnestly.
Facing Kenjaku, Todo grinned and reached back to rip the black coat off his body in one motion.
In an instant, from his back, like a peacock spreading its tail, a full ring of arms suddenly unfurled.
"...?" Kenjaku stared at Todo's Thousand-Armed Guanyin, utterly dumbfounded.
Meanwhile, on the other side, Itadori—who hadn't been all that informed about Mahiru and Todo's plan beforehand—turned to look at Todo, who now resembled an eighteen-armed Arhat, and his mouth fell open in shock, utterly unable to close.
"No way..." The corner of Kenjaku's mouth twitched.
Todo, meanwhile, flexed the arms on his back and burst into excited, hearty laughter.
"Come on!"
Then he clenched his two main hands into fists before him, assuming a battle stance, while the sixteen arms behind him spread out to both sides like a peacock's display, transforming into two wings—imposing, even majestic.
"There's not a single problem anymore!"
Rumble—the sky abruptly exploded.
A skyscraper was caught in the aftershock of Satoru Gojo and Sukuna's clash, severed clean through the middle, its body collapsing with a thunderous roar.
As if hearing some sort of opening whistle of battle, both sides—Mahiru and Kenjaku—moved at the very same moment.
"Damn it!" Kenjaku gritted his teeth, manipulating himself and the special unit behind him to activate Piercing Blood all together.
But at that very moment, the ring of arms behind Todo began to applaud madly.
Todo's Boogie Woogie originally required hands to activate. But Mahiru's set of Idle Transfiguration soul-remodeling simply defied all reason. Every single one of the arms behind his back could independently trigger Boogie Woogie.
In an instant, seven swaps were completed simultaneously.
The enemy's formation was instantly smashed to pieces, more than a dozen streams of Piercing Blood firing wildly in all directions—and Mahiru was precisely swapped to Kenjaku's side.
Kenjaku reacted extremely fast, whipping his head around and flinging out a blood blade.
But the next second, applause rang out again—Mahiru's figure flickered, reappearing behind Kenjaku once more, while the spot where she had originally stood was now swapped in with Itadori.
One in front, one behind. Itadori and Mahiru pinned Kenjaku tightly in the middle.
These two swaps, completed almost simultaneously and in parallel, were something the original Todo could never have pulled off no matter what. But now, with Mahiru's modifications, he managed it with utter ease.
The applause kept going.
Clapping madly, swapping madly.
Kenjaku was pincered front and back by Mahiru and Itadori, and the members of the special unit had wanted to rush over to support him. But they utterly couldn't.
In the midst of their crowd, Todo was tilting his head back, laughing heartily, stretching out both arms. The ring of arms behind him, those two wings, were applauding madly as if they'd gone insane.
Swap, swap, swap...
At this moment, Todo didn't need to launch any attack at all.
He only needed to keep swapping endlessly, and that alone was enough to lock the dozen-odd special-unit members firmly in place.
Todo's swapping frequency reached as high as several dozen times per second.
Amid such high-frequency swapping, those dozen-odd people completely lost all sense of their own direction, and naturally, there was no way they could reach Kenjaku's side in time.
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