In this world, the power of Satoru Gojo and Sukuna stood in a class entirely of its own. The gap between them and everyone else was not a difference of size, but a difference of magnitude.
If everyone else were cars, then they were bullet trains.
If everyone else were bombs, then they were both nuclear warheads.
When the mushroom cloud burst out of the sea and rose into the heavens, everyone was stunned, doubting for a moment the very meaning of their own fighting.
Could their fighting like this really decide the outcome of the war? Objectively speaking, the result of every single person's struggle would fundamentally influence the final outcome—yet faced with such a sight, it was truly hard not to feel powerless.
"...Gojo-sensei..." Itadori stood beside Mahiru, protecting the girl as she recovered her condition.
He had witnessed the explosion too.
He was anxious for Satoru Gojo.
"If only I were strong enough to take part in sensei's fight..."
But how could that be possible?
Satoru Gojo and Sukuna were the ceiling, and the next step down was Mahoraga. Whether by its mechanics or its raw stats, Mahoraga could be called a monster that annihilated everything—and only an existence with power like Mahoraga's was qualified to intrude upon the battle between Gojo and Sukuna.
The Cursed Energy fluctuations around Mahiru suddenly grew smooth.
The girl had recovered her condition a little... Still in bad shape, but at least she could rejoin the fight.
"Our battle is just as important, Itadori—I'm not saying this to comfort you." Mahiru's expression was grave, without a trace of relaxation. "If even one enemy gets the chance to slaughter ordinary civilians, then Satoru Gojo loses."
Itadori's gaze flickered. "I know..."
Mahiru meant to say more, but suddenly froze as a chill rose up her spine.
Her hair stood on end, every strand trembling, as though she were being watched by an abyss, as though Death itself had already locked onto her.
At this very moment, alarm bells were blaring in Mahiru's mind.
So the girl jerked her head up and looked toward the sky above.
Cursed Energy was weaving together in the air—that was most likely the thing Kenjaku had summoned with the last of his strength before death: some ritual unrelated to the Culling Game, opening in this very moment.
Everyone else felt it too.
That feeling of being marked by something, of being on the brink of death... descended equally upon every single person.
"What is that...?" Suspicion flickered in Mahiru's eyes. "Don't tell me..."
BOOM!! —Once again, an earth-shaking explosion came from far away.
Over where Satoru Gojo and Sukuna were, the sun that had risen above the sea shattered from the second expansion of Cursed Energy.
The clash of Domains had reached a result—only no one had yet been able to see it clearly.
By rights, in the Domain confrontation between Satoru Gojo and Sukuna, Satoru Gojo held an absolute "disadvantage"—because Sukuna's Domain was an Open Domain, with a range far greater than Satoru Gojo's Domain.
If the two unfolded their Domains at the same time, Sukuna's "Malevolent Shrine" would envelop the outer shell of Satoru Gojo's Domain, allowing it to slash at the outer wall of "Unlimited Void" and forcibly destroy it.
But against this, in the original work Satoru Gojo had once worked out a countermeasure during his attempts in the final battle, and this time, Mahiru had told Satoru Gojo of that countermeasure in advance—namely, to invert the outer and inner shells of the Domain.
A normal Domain has its Technique carved onto the inner wall, but this time Satoru Gojo did the exact opposite. In this way, the originally fragile outer shell became hard instead, was not easily destroyed by Sukuna, and gave Sukuna a great shock.
With a crash, the black spherical barrier shattered.
Unlimited Void collapsed, but at the very same time, so did the Malevolent Shrine.
The clash of Satoru Gojo's and Sukuna's Domains ended in a draw, and at this moment the two of them were both in a state of Technique Burnout, extremely close to each other, each once again calling up the Cursed Energy in their bodies.
At close range, fist met fist!
After Technique Burnout came a contest of pure hand-to-hand combat. And in the realm of hand-to-hand, the current Satoru Gojo was stronger than Sukuna!
"I never imagined you'd have a strategy like this!" Sukuna laughed loudly. "Did that blue-haired Cursed Spirit teach you that?!"
Satoru Gojo couldn't use an Open Domain, so he could never have devised such a strategy! Which meant it could only have been that blue-haired Cursed Spirit's idea!
Satoru Gojo said nothing, the light in his eyes blazing as he hurled out his next punch with an even greater output of Cursed Energy.
He held the advantage.
But he also felt that something was off.
Having lost his Technique, Sukuna ought to feel anxious or tense—yet right now Satoru Gojo could observe no such emotion on Sukuna's face.
Did he have another card to play?
Satoru Gojo was suddenly on guard.
But right after, he too felt some ritual beginning. "?"
The ritual was opening in the sky above the distant city. That was, without a doubt, Kenjaku's work. Unlike the ordinary Jujutsu Sorcerers who felt the threat of death, Satoru Gojo did not sense "death."
He only felt a "chill."
As if something he absolutely did not want to appear had appeared.
"You're definitely not just trading punches with me, are you?" Sukuna said with a smile. "But neither am I."
The two had already exchanged several rounds of hand-to-hand combat. Both were using the fistfight to cover up something else.
"Before he died, Kenjaku did two things."
Satoru Gojo's pupils contracted.
He saw Sukuna once again produce the Prison Realm.
Right after, he felt an abnormal fluctuation of Cursed Energy appear behind him. The man glanced back over his shoulder, and was shocked to find a chaotic black sphere had appeared at his back.
—A [Singularity]?!
It was a new "Singularity"—similar to the singularity of the Black Hole created by Yuki Tsukumo!
"What's going on...?"
The thing occupying Suguru Geto's body had actually conjured up a [Singularity] right before its death?
After personally enduring the baptism of Yuki Tsukumo's Black Hole, Kenjaku had actually learned how to use his own Anti-Gravity Technique to "conjure" a singularity with his own hands.
And since his Domain had collapsed just before his death, the lingering force had once spread to cover the entire city—so for Kenjaku, setting the [Singularity]'s point of generation right at the edge of the battlefield where Satoru Gojo and Sukuna fought was entirely achievable.
And as it happened, just then Satoru Gojo had been clashing Domains with Sukuna, his whole self wrapped within his own Domain.
And so the [Singularity] formed in silence, and he was utterly unaware of it.
"Ha..." The white-haired man grinned, letting slip an excited sound.
A sense of danger rose in his heart; he understood what Sukuna meant to do.
This singularity was not meant to kill him.
It was meant to seal him!
Kenjaku's Technique, after all, differed from Yuki Tsukumo's. The [Singularity] he conjured did not possess the world-shattering might of a Black Hole—yet upon it, a distortion of space-time had already begun to emerge.
A space-time distortion of this degree could at most slightly speed up or slow down the flow of time; it couldn't produce any qualitative change.
The real problem, in fact, still came from the Prison Realm—because it didn't care about power, didn't care about defense, only about time.
The [Singularity] behind Satoru Gojo instantly enveloped him within a region of turbulent, chaotic space-time.
Within this region where the flow of time was thrown into disorder, the Prison Realm's loading bar would be drastically accelerated—a bar that originally needed a full five minutes to fill might now take only a dozen seconds or so.
The sealing bar, normally almost impossible to complete in the middle of battle, had at this moment become extraordinarily simple.
Satoru Gojo's situation was clearly extremely dangerous.
But...
"Not bad at all, this approach." Satoru Gojo revealed an excited smile and lifted his head, as if looking down on Sukuna. "In that case, I'll return the favor in kind!"
"Hm?" Sukuna's gaze trembled, and he whipped his head around.
Behind him, too, gravity was distorting.
Behind him, too, a pitch-black chaos had appeared.
—A Black Hole!! That was, astonishingly, also a Black Hole.
And unlike that [Singularity]—this was a genuine, small-scale imaginary Black Hole.
Long ago, Mahiru had predicted it—Satoru Gojo's Technique, which could manipulate imaginary mass, was extremely similar to Yuki Tsukumo's, so in theory Satoru Gojo could likewise use his Limitless technique to conjure a Black Hole.
And as it turned out, he truly had done it.
By carving the Unlimited Void Technique onto the outer surface of the barrier, he not only withstood the bite of the Malevolent Shrine, but also seized the opportunity to create a Black Hole outside the barrier.
Satoru Gojo and Sukuna, at the very same moment, had adopted the very same strategy.
And clearly, the destructive power of Satoru Gojo's Black Hole was far more threatening than the combination of the [Singularity] and the Prison Realm.
After all, even if Satoru Gojo were sealed, he wouldn't die; as long as Kenjaku and Sukuna died, undoing the seal would be a trivial matter.
But once Sukuna was caught by the Black Hole behind him, mired as he was in Technique Burnout, he could only be devoured by it.
Trade his own life to get Satoru Gojo sealed?
That was an absolutely unprofitable bargain.
Sukuna gritted his teeth, the urge to retreat already rising in his heart, irritation welling up along with it. "Recovering his original body" could still preserve for him one chance at resurrection. But once devoured by the Black Hole, even that final trump card would never get the chance to be played.
He had to flee.
The Black Hole behind him from Satoru Gojo was still small, not yet fully unfolded. Fleeing would be a simple matter. Thinking this, Sukuna's Cursed Energy abruptly erupted, and with a powerful beat of the pair of pure-white wings on his back, he made to escape.
But who could have known—at that very moment—
"Now, Nobara." Atop the skyscraper, Mahiru watched the distant scene, her face grave. "Hammer the bastard!"
Squelch!!
Sukuna's pupils suddenly dilated.
He saw a massive, nail-shaped thorn burst straight out from his chest, blood spraying everywhere.
Before the trace of panic just surfacing in his eyes could even settle, in the next second—the tearing of a chainsaw, the searing of flames... all manner of attacks, all manner of wounds, burst open densely all over Sukuna's body in an instant.
His escape was forcibly cut short, his Cursed Energy thrown into disorder along with it.
Wave after wave of agony that reached straight to the soul made his movements abruptly stall. His gaze trembled, his eyes near splitting with rage; he opened his mouth to curse furiously—but what spewed out was a mouthful of blood.
—That blue-haired Cursed Spirit!!
That sinister wretch, that bastard!!
The several not-particularly-strong Jujutsu Sorcerers in the Kugisaki Squad were originally incapable of inflicting any real harm on Sukuna. These streams of blood, these wounds, even though every one of them was reflected upon his soul, were to Sukuna nothing but minor injuries he could easily recover from.
But the problem was, the pain was utterly real.
Caught off guard and brutally tormented by all eighteen kinds of instruments of torture, his movements stalled, Sukuna utterly lost that best window for escape.
By now, Sukuna was truly panicking inside.
Enraged to the extreme, he cursed that blue-haired Cursed Spirit over and over in his heart.
But the situation had already completely reversed.
Satoru Gojo smiled and seized Sukuna's arm in a tight grip.
The [Singularity] and the Black Hole behind them pulled at each other, and Sukuna and Satoru Gojo, pinned tightly in the very middle, drew closer and closer within that narrow gap.
Sukuna ground his teeth.
If things went on like this, Satoru Gojo would indeed be sealed—but he himself would be devoured by the Black Hole as well.
Technique Burnout... Now, he had to find a way to get his Technique running again.
Only by reclaiming his Technique could he escape this calamity.
Just how had Satoru Gojo avoided Technique Burnout earlier?
—It was thanks to the help of that blue-haired Cursed Spirit!
Damn it, why was it that blue-haired Cursed Spirit again?
Think, fast—what exactly had she done... Where, exactly, lay the root cause of Technique Burnout...?
Sukuna brainstormed frantically in his mind, desperately trying to find a way to break the deadlock.
It was as if he had already grasped that thread of inspiration.
But the Black Hole was about to swallow him, and whether time would still allow him to try out this inspiration... he had no way of knowing.
At that moment, the Cursed Energy fluctuations in the air abruptly shifted once more.
Satoru Gojo froze, while Sukuna broke into a smile of wild ecstasy.
Satoru Gojo jerked his head up.
And atop the distant skyscraper, Mahiru, gazing at the white ritual array emerging in the sky, felt her own gaze tremble as well.
"Hahahaha!—" Sukuna laughed wildly. "Satoru Gojo, this time, once again, it's my win!"
Do you remember?
Before his death, Kenjaku burned away all of his power and did [two] things.
One was conjuring that small [Singularity] capable of accelerating the sealing's progress.
And the other was this white array now hanging in the sky.
Kenjaku could use Spirit Descent. With Spirit Descent he had expanded the scale of the Culling Game, and with Spirit Descent he had also added Techniques to himself. Over a thousand years of accumulation, the materials for Spirit Descent in his hands were countless beyond measure.
But if one were to ask which among these materials could turn the tide of battle, or even annihilate everything... then Kenjaku would surely answer—
"Is it really Mahoraga...?" Mahiru gazed upward, gritting her teeth.
Yes.
It was none other than the Ten Shadows Technique's Divergent Sila Divine General—Mahoraga!!
The aftershock of Kenjaku's Domain collapsing had spread across the entire city.
And it was at that very instant that Kenjaku, using Spirit Descent as the foundation, the corpse of the Zenin estate's Ten Shadows Technique User as the material, and a complex Technique as the system, summoned Mahoraga with the Ten Shadows Technique and began Mahoraga's Exorcism Ritual—and, moreover, swept everyone in the entire city, apart from their own faction and Satoru Gojo, into this ritual.
Everyone swept into the ritual would become a target for Mahoraga to annihilate.
Was this an assault? Was this a curse?
No—this was a slaughter, the utter destruction aimed at everyone dragged into the ritual.
And so came slaughter, swath after swath.
Jogo and Hanami, with bodies that were Cursed Spirits, would die at a single touch from Mahoraga. And as for those students, not one could stand against this calamity-like existence.
What Mahoraga represented was unsolvable violence, and the leveling of all things.
As things stood, on Jujutsu High's side, only Satoru Gojo could now kill Mahoraga.
But if Satoru Gojo were to pull away right now to destroy Mahoraga—then he would be sealed by the Prison Realm, and Sukuna would seize the chance to escape the Black Hole.
If he were sealed and Sukuna still lived, then all of this would be finished.
But if he didn't deal with Mahoraga, then his students would all die, and everyone in all of Tokyo would die too.
Neither of these two outcomes could Satoru Gojo accept.
But if he were forced to pick one, then Satoru Gojo would surely choose to kill Mahoraga and save his students—at least... that choice could still give the students a sliver of a chance to flee for their lives.
So...
"You've already lost, Satoru Gojo!" Sukuna laughed loudly.
The situation, it seemed, had already become unsolvable.
____
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