The golden text blazed in Ren's eyes.
He never reached the first letter.
A crack — not a sound, more like reality tearing along a seam — and where the scarred man had been standing, purple ash curled into nothing.
Then Toji was in his face.
Ren's wrists came up on pure instinct. Nightfall's blade caught the fist flat, and the sound wasn't a clang — it was a boom, a cannon going off in the enclosed station. The shockwave hit like a wall. Ren's boots screamed across tile, two long trenches carving through concrete before his back heel found the ground.
He held.
"Get back!" Not a look over his shoulder. Not even a blink.
Toji dropped his weight and swept low, leg swinging at Ren's knees with enough force to fold them backward. Ren left the ground by an inch — clearing it — twisted in the air, and drove his boot at Toji's jaw. A forearm came up. The impact shuddered through the nearest support pillar.
Then fingers closed around his ankle. Steel. No give.
The world spun. Toji twisted and threw, and Ren was airborne, hurtling toward the exit in one brutal spinning arc. He tucked his chin. Braced.
He hit the subway doors and punched straight through. Glass exploded around him in a glittering curtain. The stairs came up fast — fingers biting into cement, body curling through a backward roll on pure muscle memory — and then he was standing upright on cold Shibuya pavement.
Silent street. Overhead, that black veil swallowed everything.
The remaining glass downstairs gave way. Toji came up the stairwell in a single leap and cracked the asphalt when he landed.
Ren studied him across the broken street. Toji's chest moved. Steady. Not even winded.
He's a corpse running on reflex.
If this ground down into a war of attrition, they'd reduce half of Shibuya to rubble. He would have to get it finished quickly.
He dropped into a low Zen'in stance, blade leveled at the ghost's chest.
"Alright," he said. "Let's see who hits harder."
Kento Nanami felt the next shockwave before he heard it — a deep compression in his chest, then a boom that rattled his molars.
He couldn't see them.
He was a seasoned Grade 1 sorcerer. He'd spent years learning to read the fastest, most lethal curses alive — the residual trails, the buildups, the tells. There was nothing here. No cursed energy. No signatures. Both combatants registered as empty space to his senses, and that empty space was currently turning the station's support pillars into craters.
Megumi turned to look at him. The kid's face was a mess of blood and grit, but the question in his eyes was the same one rattling around Nanami's skull: what the hell are we even watching?
Neither had an answer.
"Stop gawking."
Naobito pushed forward. The clan head was a ruin — breathing in ragged pulls, blood still sheeting from the stump where his right arm ended — but his eyes were sharp and completely without sentiment as he watched the asphalt tear itself apart.
"The boy holds that Ghost," he grunted, spitting blood onto the cracked tiles. "We step into that crossfire, we die. Instantly. We are a burden to him here."
Nanami's jaw tightened. He knew the old man was right.
"Gojo is still sealed," Naobito continued, already turning his back on the carnage. "Leave the ghost to the kid. Lets move."
Nanami took one last look — the blur of two impossible bodies hitting absolute limits — and let out a long breath. The migraine was already forming behind his eyes.
"Understood," he said, and turned away.
Megumi fell in close behind him, wiping blood from his chin. Naobito took the lead, pace unsettlingly steady for a man hemorrhaging through a severed arm.
They didn't make it three steps.
The air didn't warm up. It became an oven — instantly, completely — and the cracked concrete beneath Nanami's shoes hissed like wet iron on a fire.
Megumi choked. Nanami stopped breathing for a second, lungs scorched by a single sharp inhale.
Through the settling dust, a new shape stood motionless over the scatter of purple ash where Ren had vaporized the water curse. Short. Black clothes. A spotted yellow shawl. A white scarf.
Jogo didn't look at them. His single massive eye was fixed on what remained of his comrade.