In truth, when Mahiru had first arrived in this world, she had never imagined the scene before her now.
When she first met Kenjaku, upon realizing how hard it would be to escape, she had never truly thought she would one day face him in a decisive battle like this.
Nor had she ever imagined that she would, as she was doing now, slam her fist into Kenjaku's body.
—Black lightning erupted.
The blue-haired girl had unleashed a Black Flash.
Kenjaku's pupils contracted, his blood armor shattering.
Just as before, he had focused his defense on Mahiru's attacks—but that damned Todo had once again swapped the positions of Mahiru and Itadori, letting Mahiru bypass his defense and strike him directly.
Bang—Kenjaku was sent flying, his blood armor smashed apart, blood spraying from his mouth.
With no time to react, the next second he was forcibly swapped with Itadori again, meeting Mahiru's attack at close range once more.
—There was no escaping it at all.
After Todo activated his Eighteen-Arm Mode, it became even harder for Kenjaku to tell whether Todo was using his Technique, and harder still to anticipate when a swap would occur. The current Todo clapped dozens of times per second, and Kenjaku had no way of knowing which of those claps was the swap that concerned him.
Endure! Kenjaku could only grit his teeth and tank it!
He had already seen through it: Todo's Eighteen-Arm Mode was, in essence, the same as Jogo's Magical Girl Mode—both were modes that required a binding vow to activate. Since Todo had shown no obvious weakening before activating Eighteen-Arm Mode, Kenjaku concluded that the price Todo paid must come after activating it!
In other words, his Eighteen-Arm Mode could not be maintained indefinitely.
There absolutely had to be a time limit!
As long as he kept mobilizing his blood armor and turtled up in defense, he just had to hold out through this stretch of time!
Bang! And then, the very next second, Kenjaku's blood-armored head was struck again by Mahiru's Meteor Hammer, sending it spinning away through the air.
His facial bones nearly cracked apart.
It was utterly unbearable!
Having unleashed a Black Flash, Mahiru had already entered a battle state of "Selflessness," raising her hand to summon countless Darting Hares, kicking up white waves across the blood pool. The girl rode the surf forward, launching a barrage of combos at Kenjaku—blindingly fast and immensely powerful—crushing and suppressing him single-handedly.
Itadori was stunned; Todo was astonished.
Mahiru's onslaught in this state was so dense and ferocious that Todo and Itadori couldn't even intervene at all—any single swap would only break the continuity of Mahiru's offensive.
BOOM!!—
Mahiru raised her hand and scattered the white waves, pure white arm armor wrapping around her right hand. With a swing of her arm, Cursed Energy condensed into a cannon in her palm, blasting out Jogo's Cursed Technique Burnout and engulfing Kenjaku.
The girl was smiling, her eyes reflecting the crimson of the flames, shining radiantly.
She still remembered how Kenjaku, back at the hotel, had brought Ishiryuu and the others to corner her—alone—into a hopeless situation. She also remembered that, in the original work, the Mahito of another timeline had been devoured and absorbed by Kenjaku during the incident that sealed Satoru Gojo.
Back then, Kenjaku's name had, without a doubt, been the sword of Damocles hanging over her head.
Who could have imagined that, today, the Mahiru who was no longer alone—and whose power had completely surpassed her former self—was now snapping that sword of Damocles with her own hands.
The fate of the original work? Kenjaku's schemes? Tilting her head to dodge the blood blade Kenjaku flung at her, Mahiru swung her arm and slammed a scorching wave of fire heavily into his body.
—All of it can go to hell!
The awakening of the Selfless state sent the girl's excitement surging even higher.
Her heart pounded violently, her blood roared—the girl felt that the workings of her Technique and the output of her Cursed Energy, every step of it, was as simple as breathing.
Yet even with her heartbeat racing to its limit, the girl remained perfectly calm throughout.
She couldn't let her guard down.
No matter how bad his condition got, Kenjaku was still an extremely dangerous and powerful foe.
Any single mistake could give him an opening to exploit. Any slip in focus could completely reverse the situation.
And so, in this moment, the girl's mind was instead like a calm and precise machine, sinking completely into a state of flow.
In her field of vision, there remained only the enemy before her, and nothing else.
Mahiru once again called upon Jogo's Technique.
Just like when she'd dealt with those dummies in the fire station before. The high temperature would evaporate the moisture from the blood, rendering Blood Manipulation completely useless.
This time, Mahiru summoned a full ring of rabbits, and together with herself, they spewed raging flames toward Kenjaku at the center—stirring up a sky-piercing tornado of fire within the blood pool.
Steam rose from the surface of Kenjaku's blood armor, rapidly solidifying into scabs of dried blood.
Mahiru seized this momentary opening—white light flashed at her fingertips, and another [Husk] blasted out, striking Kenjaku dead-on and sending him flying once more.
"Pfft—" Kenjaku spat out a second mouthful of blood.
The wounds he had only just managed to repair with Reverse Cursed Technique were, once again, brutally beaten back into grievous injuries.
In this moment, he could scarcely believe it.
He truly had never expected to be driven into such a hopeless corner by Mahiru.
Earlier, when this girl had laid a trap with her cunning and forced him into an utterly wretched position, he had already been taken aback once.
And now, the power the girl displayed with her own hands shocked him to his very core all over again.
He had no choice but to take back all of his arrogance, all of his contempt.
From the way this battle was unfolding, he caught the scent of danger. It was as if he had already glimpsed the future of his own death.
Would he die?
If this kept up—yes, he would!
Kenjaku couldn't help recalling the scene of when he'd first laid eyes on Mahiru, recalling how he'd once thought to himself that no matter how much stronger Mahiru became, she could never threaten him…
He had been wrong. His Cursed Energy was heavily depleted, his body gravely wounded, his most powerful combat asset—Cursed Spirit Manipulation—countered by Mahiru and impossible to deploy. Mahiru's pursuit was relentless, and he had not a single moment to catch his breath.
Kenjaku suddenly grew dazed, his mind drifting.
After all his effortless composure had crumbled, the most primal tension rose within his heart.
His heartbeat began to take on an unusual rhythm.
Ha… hahahaha... He had almost forgotten—forgotten what kind of person he was.
The beating of his heart, the trembling of his soul... The reason he did so many things was for the sake of amusement, for the sake of curiosity.
To see the ultimate form of the jujutsu world, he had spared no effort, spending a thousand years scheming—and yet this blue-haired Cursed Spirit before him, who time and again exceeded his understanding, surpassed the limits a Cursed Spirit ought to have, and accomplished the nearly impossible—wasn't she precisely the kind of existence he had wanted to explore?
"Hahaha, hahahaha..."
And so, Kenjaku laughed. He threw back his head and laughed aloud.
He finally understood why, from the very beginning, he had felt such intense interest in Mahiru; and he finally saw clearly just what it was he now faced.
Exhilaration, release, tension, and even a feeling close to bliss all welled up in his heart at once. His mind achieved perfect clarity.
In an instant, the Cursed Energy in his body suddenly surged up. The jujutsu that should have already been showing signs of fatigue inexplicably grew turbulent once more.
Mahiru froze for a split second.
Kenjaku had already swung a fist crashing toward her—and upon that fist, black lightning crackled and flashed. —A Black Flash!
No one could produce a Black Flash deliberately.
Yet in this moment, Kenjaku—having entered his most lucid state—had pulled off this impossible feat, one he had achieved only a countable handful of times in his entire existence.
Mahiru's gaze sharpened, and her body instantly dispersed into a sky full of butterflies, evading the punch.
But the Black Flash had already been struck.
Kenjaku stepped into the realm of Selflessness.
Laughing heartily, the intensity of his Reverse Cursed Technique abruptly recovered, his wounds rapidly reversing and healing. At the same time, the casting of his jujutsu became as smooth as breathing.
Snap! Kenjaku sharply snapped his fingers.
The droplet of Piercing Blood that had just condensed at his fingertip instantly burst, firing out red rays in all directions—
Unlike the ordinary "Piercing Blood" from before, these rays no longer flew dead straight as they once had, but instead traced curving arcs, converging from all directions toward Mahiru and Itadori.
The Piercing Blood was actually curving!
To take the Piercing Blood, which was originally so hard to redirect, and manipulate it to curve and track flexibly—in the original work, this technique was an advanced application of Blood Manipulation that only Itadori, after becoming the strongest at the very end, had ever developed.
And now, simply because his control and mastery over Cursed Energy had climbed to its peak, Kenjaku had managed to achieve it too.
"Heh..." Perhaps it was because she was truly fighting to her heart's content... or perhaps she had been infected by Kenjaku's laughter and emotion... The smile on Mahiru's face grew wider as well.
The girl gave a tug with both hands in the empty air. From within the blood pool, countless vicious, winding branches instantly burst out of the water, scrambling over one another to emerge, all rising upward and spraying out a massive volume of combustible branch-mist.
Snap! Mahiru snapped her fingers too.
A single spark is enough to set the prairie ablaze.
In an instant, the entire sky was blanketed in flame, turning into a churning cloud of fire that swallowed up every last one of Kenjaku's curving Piercing Blood rays.
By now, the rhythm of the battle had climbed to its peak.
A scene like this was long past anything the Kamo Family's special forces—or even Itadori and Todo—could freely intervene in.
The figures of Kenjaku and Mahiru turned into two afterimages, colliding endlessly within the blood pool—blood waves flying, firelight soaring to the heavens.
How many times had Mahiru and Kenjaku clashed? Impossible to tell!
Suddenly, the entire central stadium—large enough to hold tens of thousands—shook violently.
A massive whale burst out from the blood pool, sending both Kenjaku and Mahiru flying as it opened its cavernous, bloody maw to swallow them both whole.
This whale was, astonishingly, yet another Special Grade Cursed Spirit.
Aooooh—— No. It was more than just a single Special Grade Cursed Spirit.
Within the giant whale's mouth were countless Low-grade Cursed Spirits, surging out in a torrent as its bloody maw gaped open.
It seemed Kenjaku was once again trying to drown Mahiru beneath a sea of Low-grade Cursed Spirits.
"But this move…" Itadori was stunned.
But… this move should have been useless by now.
Low-grade Cursed Spirits were the sort of thing Mahiru could refine away with a casual flick of the hand.
If she grabbed these Cursed Spirits by the fistful and condensed them into Cursed Energy, the girl could easily skip the wind-up of [Husk]—so by all logic, the more Cursed Spirits he released, the greater Kenjaku's disadvantage should become.
Was he just asking for trouble?
What… exactly was he trying to do right now?
Itadori didn't understand.
Ever since the battle between Mahiru and Kenjaku had reached its white-hot peak, the battlefield where Todo and the special forces fought had been steadily pushed all the way up onto the spectator stands. And at this moment, the confusion in Itadori's heart was thicker than ever.
He gazed off into the distance.
Mahiru, by contrast, didn't so much as change expression. As the Low-grade Cursed Spirits swarmed up in droves, she extended her hand as usual, using Idle Transfiguration to twist every last one of them, devouring them into her palm and turning them to her own use.
Then, Itadori's pupils trembled violently.
Because he saw that Kenjaku, too, was doing the exact same thing.
At this moment, both Kenjaku and Mahiru were being submerged beneath a sea of Cursed Spirits.
Mahiru was devouring the Cursed Spirits, and so too was Kenjaku—those Cursed Spirits, as if drawn by some unseen vortex, gathered one after another toward Kenjaku's palm.
"That is...!"
The Ultimate Form——[Maelstrom].
The Ultimate Form, as the name suggests, was the final secret art of a given Technique. The Ultimate Form of Cursed Spirit Manipulation was named [Maelstrom].
It was a skill that only the one who had walked furthest down the path of Cursed Spirit Manipulation could master.
Its principle was, in fact, extremely similar to Mahiru's [Husk]—fusing a large, vast, enormous quantity of Cursed Spirits into a single point, compressing them into the most concentrated Cursed Energy, then unleashing it all in one breath.
The more Cursed Spirits fused, the greater [Maelstrom]'s power—but the more time it took as well.
This was Cursed Spirit Manipulation's killing move.
Just now, Kenjaku had been unable to use this move, because Mahiru's attacks came in an unbroken stream, leaving him no time at all to gather [Maelstrom].
But now things were different.
The moment he landed a Black Flash, his control over jujutsu was elevated along with it, and his speed at condensing [Maelstrom] grew faster.
Not only that, he split the two actions of "releasing Cursed Spirits" and "compressing Cursed Spirits"—which should have been done in a single step—into two separate steps, so that he could condense the sea of Cursed Spirits into a single point even faster.
Yes—this was him laying his cards on the table. This was a contest.
Within the sea of Cursed Spirits, both Mahiru and Kenjaku could draw material from anywhere.
In this way, the elemental matchups and counters between their jujutsu would be greatly diminished.
Whoever could condense a stronger attack faster, and strike first before the other—that was who would win.
The giant whale bursting from the water and spewing forth Cursed Spirits was Kenjaku's invitation to a contest, extended to Mahiru.
And Mahiru, just now, had accepted this declaration of war without the slightest hesitation. Bring it on.
Low-grade Cursed Spirits continued to pour endlessly from the giant whale's mouth.
Within the chaotic, surging sea of Cursed Spirits, two enormous vortexes appeared.
The two of them, standing within the sea of Cursed Spirits, each on their own side, devoured Cursed Spirits like mad. On one side was the utterly dazzling white light. On the other was the [Maelstrom], deep as an abyss.
The two masses of light swelled larger and larger, each on its own side.
The next second, the girl and Kenjaku exchanged a smile and, almost simultaneously, raised their fingers, took aim at each other, and fired their Cursed Energy. BOOM!!—
In that instant, everyone from Jujutsu High, as well as Satoru Gojo and Sukuna locked in their distant struggle, had their attention seized by this tremendous explosion.
The two streams of Cursed Energy, black and white, detonated thunderously within the stadium—buildings pulverized, the blood pool collapsing, everything torn to shreds by the aftershock of the collision.
Nearby, Itadori and Todo were nearly blown away by the hurricane-force blast.
Bracing against the violent wind, Itadori barely steadied himself and looked toward the very center of the explosion.
After the black-and-white light dispersed—the Cursed Spirits were still pouring out in an endless stream, and two new [Maelstrom]s had already begun to form.
Before Itadori could even process the fact that "the first clash had ended in a draw," the second clash had already begun.
Black and white blasted against each other once more. Then a third time, a fourth, a fifth...
A draw, a draw, and still a draw——
City blocks caved in, the earth trembled, buildings were annihilated, and the sky was lit blindingly bright by blast after blast of explosive light.
There was no longer any need to worry about whether their Cursed Energy would run out, nor to fuss over any other differences between them.
Under conditions where Cursed Spirits flowed endlessly and both sides had landed Black Flashes and entered the optimal Selfless state—this clash between Mahiru and Kenjaku had become the purest duel of all, one about understanding of jujutsu and level of execution.
Clash upon clash. Then clash upon clash again.
This was the fairest of duels, and therefore the most exhilarating of battles.
Was it the tenth time? Or the eleventh?
Amid all that had been ground to utter ruin, amid the ocean of Cursed Spirits still ceaselessly pouring forth, Mahiru and Kenjaku once again met each other's gaze.
And in this moment—— both he and she read what was in the other's heart.
"Shall we?" Kenjaku smiled.
"Let's." Mahiru smiled too.
Snap. Snap. In unspoken accord, the two of them snuffed out the [Husk] and [Maelstrom] condensing at their hands, both at once.
Then, at the same moment, they formed hand signs while staring into each other's eyes.
A halo materialized out of thin air above Mahiru's head, while at the same time, a filthy great tree covered in vicious, ghastly faces surged up wildly behind Kenjaku.
Watching from afar, both Todo and Itadori widened their eyes in shock.
This—this is...
"Come—Domain Expansion!"
The two locked eyes, their wild battle intent colliding in midair, bursting into dazzling sparks. "—Womb Profusion!" "——Ten Thousand Sounds Harmonize the Heavens!"
____
👻🔥P-a-t-r-e-o-n: Walnut-chan🔥👻
🔥 New history: Zenless Zone Zero: Rewriting Fate in New Eridu — new on The_Mikudayo
📚 40 chapters ahead over at Walnut-chan — your support is what pays for the translations
Help us hit our targets:
🎯 100 Powerstones = +1 free chapter for all