Todo Aoi Won, Then!

"Clap!"

Another crisp clap rang out.

The air in the arena seemed to be repeatedly kneaded and folded by an invisible hand. Todo Aoi's figure flickered like a ghost; amid aizo's frantic, distorted beat, he instantly appeared behind me, his massive palm—powerful enough to shatter granite—sweeping in with a sonic boom.

Yet, under the horrified gazes of everyone from Kyoto Jujutsu High, Mizuki Makoto, who had just been "weakly" clutching his waist, slid half a meter sideways along an utterly bizarre right-angle path, like light refracted through rippling water. Todo's killing blow grazed past my hair, whipping up nothing but a gale.

"A waist injury?" Todo Aoi missed, but rather than getting angry, he revealed a savage, feverish grin. "Mizuki Makoto, you really are a hopeless liar! That burst just now—your spine was moving more healthily than mine!"

The liar came to an elegant stop and unhurriedly removed the hand he had kept pressed to his waist. The bandages fell away layer by layer. He rolled his neck, producing a faint series of cracking joints.

"Oh dear, you saw through me. As an artist, after all, the 'frail and sickly' persona always makes people lower their guard, doesn't it?"

In truth, thanks to Yuta's cheat-like Reverse Cursed Technique, Mizuki Makoto's waist injury had long since healed completely. His earlier act had merely been meant to bury a delayed-action bomb in the fight.

"What kind of reaction speed was that?"

In the stands, Utahime Iori's pupils abruptly contracted. "That just now... it was as if he already knew how the space would shift before Todo activated his technique."

"Not speed. It's 'perception,' Utahime."

Gojo Satoru, who had been sprawled in the observation room, unexpectedly lifted his blindfold. His Six Eyes, as deep as a polar ice field, stared fixedly at the screen, while a playful curve touched his lips.

"That kid found another way to forcibly compress space when he tried to imitate my Limitless. Manipulating space at such a high frequency somehow gave him something like an extension of his sense of touch: [Spatial Perception]."

From Gojo Satoru's perspective, the space around the arena was no longer empty. It was covered in countless tiny "sensing threads" made of Mizuki Makoto's cursed energy.

For ordinary people, instantaneous spatial shifts were extremely difficult to adapt to. But for someone who had repeatedly used [Ushura Bullet] and Limitless, the ripples of spatial disturbance caused by each of Todo's claps would touch my "sense of touch" first.

"Again!!!"

Todo Aoi clapped madly. "Clap! Clap! Clap!"

Teleport! Swap! Reverse!

To the other students, this had become a visual catastrophe: dozens of positional shifts within ten seconds, a relentless assault on their retinas.

Todo darted left and right, even swapping chunks of rubble at the edge of the arena with his opponent in an attempt to disrupt Mizuki Makoto's balance.

But in Mizuki Makoto's mind, it was more like an extraordinarily dazzling waltz.

Whenever Todo's fist was about to touch him, Mizuki Makoto twisted his wrist, and the space distorted by [Ushura Bullet] precisely caught that impact. A punch that should have traveled straight would inexplicably bend a few centimeters from his body, as though it had entered a funhouse mirror.

"Useless, Todo." Keeping time with aizo, Mizuki Makoto used [Ushura Bullet] to turn space into cloth, repeatedly [bouncing] himself away as he fired a [Blue] at Todo.

"Your Boogie Woogie has become Loyal Woogie!"

However, Todo Aoi was Kyoto Jujutsu High's trump card not merely because of his bizarre technique and powerful body.

"An interesting argument! But do you think you're the only one who can perceive space?!"

If [Ushura Bullet] controlled the planes of space, then Boogie Woogie controlled its points!

Todo Aoi roared. During the next clap and exchange, he did not throw a punch right away. Instead, he accurately predicted the fluctuations of [Ushura Bullet] and, while charging forward, used the momentum of Boogie Woogie's displacement to forcibly smash through the layers of folded space around Mizuki Makoto!

He possessed Spatial Perception too—an instinct honed to an extreme through countless life-and-death battles with Yuki Tsukumo!

The planes of space Mizuki Makoto had distorted were breached layer after layer by Todo Aoi's point-to-point displacement through Boogie Woogie.

In barely ten seconds, they exchanged over a hundred blows. The explosions of compressed air became a dense continuous roar, and even the hard stone floor was shaken into powder by the cursed energy leaking from the two of them.

"So this is... the strength of a first-year from Tokyo Jujutsu High?"

Miwa Kasumi stared blankly at the two flickering afterimages in the arena. A battle at this level had entirely surpassed the bounds of the Exchange Event. It looked more like two long-established Grade 1 sorcerers, Kusakabe and Kento Nanami, fighting to the death.

In the observation room, old principal Gakuganji pressed his hand hard against his thigh, trembling violently.

"That brat... not only is he imitating the Gojo Clan's Infinity, he has even carved out another, exceptionally sinister path of his own in his understanding of spatial control?"

"Of course he has."

Gojo Satoru put his blindfold back on, unable to hide the pride in his voice. "Just because the teacher is the strongest doesn't mean the student has to be inferior to the teacher."

At the center of the arena, as aizo's final chorus erupted, Mizuki Makoto and Todo Aoi stopped at the same time.

The shameless liar, panting heavily, pushed up the monocle that had somehow still not shattered. Todo laughed wildly as he wiped the sweat from his face. At that moment, both their cursed energies surged to their peak.

"Clap! Clap! Clap!"

The clapping formed an eerie symphony throughout the hundred-meter martial arts arena.

Amid aizo's sickly, twisted melody, Todo and Mizuki had already exchanged coordinates more than two hundred times.

Whenever deep azure light gathered at Mizuki Makoto's fingertips and he tried to seal off Todo's retreat with a long-range [Blue], Todo would always use the fraction of a second available to swap a crow or a piece of rubble, turning the attack's trajectory back toward Mizuki Makoto himself.

"Useless, brother!"

Todo Aoi's tower-like body pierced through the layers of space once more as he closed in with a savage grin. "Before Boogie Woogie, every long-range attack is just digging your own grave! If you want to win, use those hands that hold paintbrushes to take my fists!"

Boom—!

A dull collision of flesh erupted at the center of the arena.

Though Mizuki Makoto had used Spatial Perception to predict it in advance, crossing his arms before his chest and instantly pushing his cursed energy reinforcement to the limit, that monstrous force, like an avalanche of mountains and seas, still numbed both his arms. He slid backward more than ten meters, leaving two long scorched tracks across the stone floor.

"Tch, what a pain."

Mizuki Makoto shook his aching wrists, his breathing beginning to grow uneven.

Just as awful as expected. This is why I didn't want to fight Todo.

Since neither could ambush the other through teleportation, and long-range attacks were also rendered ineffective by Boogie Woogie, the battle was forced into the most primitive and bloody form of close-quarters combat.

For a born fighting maniac like Todo, this was practically his home field. His naturally gifted body had already been tempered to terrifying strength by Yuki Tsukumo, and cursed energy reinforcement cost him very little. Mizuki Makoto, meanwhile, not only had to devote more cursed energy to reinforcing his body so he would not be punched through in one blow, but also had to maintain high-frequency [Ushura Bullet] usage to distort space for defense.

My cursed energy reserves aren't exactly low now, but if this keeps up, compared to Todo's bottomless energy bar, I'll really have to say, "Don't get it wrong. I'm the challenger here."

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