The Fifth Calamity That Shouldn't Exist (Part Two)

Chúgǒu weathered an entire round of the Slit-Mouthed Woman's cursed technique attacks through the sheer strength of her cursed energy.

Unfortunately, by the time the Simple Domain was forcibly dispelled, nearly all her Shadow Wolves had been killed.

But compared with Kano and Geto, who had assumed fighting stances and were watching her like hawks, or Shoko Ieiri, who had taken shelter somewhere safe under the protection of the Spider Puppets-with the wounded Rainbow Dragon even circling slowly overhead to prevent another ambush-Chúgǒu still considered this fellow cursed spirit before her the greater threat!

Since the Slit-Mouthed Woman's Forced Q&A Simple Domain wasn't a complete Innate Domain, it lacked the component of a "mental landscape." It was simply an Innate Cursed Technique combined with a Barrier Technique, so there was no cursed technique burnout.

She only needed to gather some cursed energy and wait out the skill's cooldown before she could activate her Simple Domain again.

Thump! Chúgǒu stamped her clawed foot hard against the grass. Sharp nails sprang from her half-bestial hands, and she shot straight toward the Slit-Mouthed Woman like a cannonball.

Bang! The Slit-Mouthed Woman calmly held the Wrongful Death Blade across her body, blocking the pounce with the shaft of her long-handled scythe. Still, the impact forced her back several steps before she barely regained her footing.

The two cursed spirits entered a contest of brute strength.

"Power born from human rules as childish as playing house," Chúgǒu said, hoping a little trash talk would shake the Slit-Mouthed Woman's resolve, "could never compare to fangs and claws honed since the age of savagery!"

"A wild dog who only knows how to wag her tail should stop running her mouth!"

The two cursed spirits fought at close quarters, claw marks and flashes of steel flying.

After watching for a while, Kano and Geto tried to find a suitable opening to join the fight.

"Kano, any good ideas?" More chips had appeared along the edge of Suguru Geto's katana. "Let's figure out how to help... your mother, Ms. Miyano?"

"No..." Kano studied them for a while. "They're practically tangled together. If we want to attack, we'll have to find a way to separate them first."

"If you ask me, we should just have Ieiri figure out how to touch that Mother Werewolf," Kano suggested. "She was using Cursed Technique Reversal: Output against those Shadow Wolves, right?"

"As long as she can touch her, she should be able to hurt Chúgǒu. Exorcising her outright isn't impossible, either."

"Isn't there another way?" Suguru Geto's fingers tightened around his sword hilt.

"I can't think of anything better right now."

"If you can buy me time to charge up," Suguru Geto suggested, "maybe I can seriously wound her with Maximum: Uzumaki."

Apparently worried Kano wouldn't understand, he briefly explained what Cursed Spirit Manipulation's Maximum: Uzumaki was. Put simply, it gathered the power of a whole lot of cursed spirits, compressed it into a huge mass of energy, then blasted it out to deal tremendous damage.

Of course, in theory, this move could also extract the Innate Cursed Techniques of cursed spirits ranked Semi-Grade 1 or above. But Suguru Geto hadn't figured that application out yet; for now, he only knew it was theoretically possible.

"In that case, lend me a blade. I'll see what I can do while you charge up. Just give us a heads-up before you fire."

Suguru Geto summoned the Frog Cursed Spirit he used to store his cursed tools again, picked a random telescopic baton from inside, and tossed it to Kano.

Then he brought out a small cursed spirit that looked like a cicada and stuck it to Kano's shoulder. "This cursed spirit lets us talk inside our heads. I'll use it to signal you when it's time."

Click! Kano nodded, flicked the baton out to its full length, and charged in, swinging it to join the elbow jujutsu brawl.

Chúgǒu's hand-to-hand technique seemed to carry the rough aesthetic of Mongolian wrestling. Her movements were all straightforward, and paired with her appearance, they truly gave her the wild air of a wolf king of the plains. The Slit-Mouthed Woman's close-combat skills were somewhat inferior by comparison. Without a cursed tool that suited her, she would have been reduced almost entirely to blocking.

Chúgǒu, meanwhile, could not only chain punches and kicks together, but even find time to spit out more trash talk.

"What's wrong? What's wrong?" A slash of light from the Slit-Mouthed Woman severed Chúgǒu's right arm, but almost immediately, her newly grown arm curled its claws into a fist and slammed hard into the scythe's shaft. The Slit-Mouthed Woman grunted, nearly losing her footing. "Is that all your curse amounts to?"

That punch had actually been aimed at her forehead. If the Slit-Mouthed Woman hadn't blocked in time, her head might have burst like a watermelon.

Shoichi Kano quietly crept closer, even teaching himself a little trick: bouncing his cursed energy signature between the Spider Puppets to conceal his actual position.

On top of that, Chúgǒu's eyes were fixed firmly on the Slit-Mouthed Woman, so cursed energy perception alone couldn't pinpoint Kano as he sneaked toward her.

Clang! Shoichi Kano swung his arm in a full arc and brought the baton down on her wolf head. The recoil jolted the web of his hand, leaving his palm numb.

Kano was stunned. That had felt completely wrong-like hitting a fucking steel plate with a stick.

"You wretched human!!!" Chúgǒu twisted her head a full hundred and eighty degrees and opened her mouth to bite Kano's arm to pieces.

Crunch! But Kano pulled his hand back fast enough that she only bit the cursed tool baton. Sparks flew as her fangs scraped against the metal.

The Slit-Mouthed Woman didn't let the opportunity slip. She twisted slightly at the waist, sidestepped Chúgǒu's punch, and brought her scythe down from above, chopping off half her arm.

Chúgǒu hopped half a step back and squared up against both Kano and the Slit-Mouthed Woman.

"Why did you come over?" the Slit-Mouthed Woman asked quietly, frowning.

"I couldn't just watch you get beaten up, Mom, could I?" As Shoichi Kano spoke, he tilted his head and leaned close with an affectionate air.

At first, the Slit-Mouthed Woman didn't understand his intention and thought he was simply being clingy, until she saw the boy's lips move several times, silently forming a few words.

"Geto... big move... time." She read his lips.

The Slit-Mouthed Woman gripped the scythe's long shaft firmly with both hands. "Understood."

"What are you two chattering about?!" Having just spent cursed energy to heal herself, Chúgǒu swung both claws, unleashing a dense shower of black claw shadows in an attempt to overwhelm Kano and the Slit-Mouthed Woman with an area attack.

The Slit-Mouthed Woman calmly deflected the first few flying claw marks with the Wrongful Death Blade. Then Shoichi Kano clenched the middle of his baton between his teeth and wrapped both arms around her lower back. Surging cursed energy threads tore through the back of his clothes, and a pair of transparent insect wings appeared behind him.

He had woven a pair of wings from threads, lifting himself and the Slit-Mouthed Woman into the air to avoid the rest of the AOE attack.

Not a single patch of this grassland remained intact. The aftershocks of their battle had torn out and destroyed even the grass roots, leaving nothing but bare yellow earth.

Meanwhile, Suguru Geto stood in front of Shoko, continuously reciting the accompanying incantation. A pitch-black mass of energy churned and surged above his hand-the nascent form of Maximum: Uzumaki.

Charging this full-powered ultimate move clearly placed a considerable burden on him. Fine beads of sweat even appeared on his forehead, and that lock of bangs stuck to his face.

As soon as Kano and the Slit-Mouthed Woman landed, they resumed their close-quarters fight with Chúgǒu.

But after exchanging a couple of moves with them, Chúgǒu sensed cursed energy gathering in Suguru Geto's direction. She could even see him drawing his army of cursed spirits back into his body, kneading some of the badly injured ones into the vortex as casting material.

She had to interrupt the process!

With a flurry of punches and kicks, she shook off Kano and the Slit-Mouthed Woman, then ran toward Suguru Geto, almost on all fours!

"Rainbow Dragon!" Suguru Geto didn't want his charge interrupted.

Shoko Ieiri also deployed every Spider Puppet Kano had given her.

Chúgǒu was first entangled by the Spider Puppets, then rammed hard by the white dragon cursed spirit as it accelerated into a charge. She was forced back into the area where she had been fighting Kano and the Slit-Mouthed Woman.

Panting heavily, Kano rested the baton on his shoulder. "We're not done fighting yet, Ms. Werewolf."

The Slit-Mouthed Woman silently circled behind Chúgǒu, cutting off her retreat.

"Damn it..." Chúgǒu bared her teeth in a low growl and resumed fighting Kano and the others.

A moment later, Suguru Geto pointed one hand toward the sky. Above his fingertip churned a black orb of light as large as three or four adults. It rolled and spun, with the bizarre limbs of cursed spirits faintly visible inside, like clothes in a washing machine.

Beside him, the four-eyed, kimono-clad Tamamo-no-Mae Incarnate continuously applied support techniques to strengthen his Maximum Technique.

Suguru Geto had truly gone all in this time. Not only had he fused every wounded member of his cursed spirit army into it, but he had also used all the insect cursed spirits he currently possessed, along with the Special Grade 1 Imaginary Cursed Spirit born from the earlier village cult incident.

In terms of sheer numbers, the vortex already contained over nine hundred cursed spirits-nearly a thousand!

"Get out of the way when I finish counting down from five!" The Cicada Cursed Spirit clinging to Kano's clothes activated its cursed technique, sending Suguru Geto's voice into his mind. "Five, four, three..."

"Get out of the way!!!!" Shoichi Kano shouted straight at the Slit-Mouthed Woman, who stood diagonally behind Chúgǒu. At the same time, he flung his arms about and fled as though panicking, taking the opportunity to stick some adhesive Spider Silk onto Chúgǒu.

"Cursed Spirit Manipulation-Maximum: Uzumaki." Suguru Geto chanted the skill's name. With a thought, the black mass of energy gathered above his fingertip shot out, aimed straight at the female werewolf cursed spirit in the distance!

The black orb flew amid the wails of countless cursed spirits. These creatures born from negative emotions seemed unwilling to lose themselves in this fusion, but the domineering power of Cursed Spirit Manipulation left them no choice but to obediently become fuel for the caster.

From the perspective of a traditional Chinese cultivator, an art that absorbed evil spirits, commanded them, and even attempted to fuse them together was unquestionably an evil art.

"You damned human!!!!!" Naturally, Chúgǒu tried to dodge when she saw that enormously powerful Uzumaki blast. But by then, Kano had remotely commanded the Spider Silk to take root in the ground, gluing her clawed feet firmly in place like superglue.

Boom!!!! Just before the Uzumaki energy mass struck Chúgǒu, she managed to wrench her clawed feet free through brute force and tried to pull away. But the energy mass still hit the right half of her body, vaporizing it on the spot.

A powerful shock wave swept across the entire area enclosed by the Curtain. Had this not been a composite Curtain lowered by three jujutsu sorcerers together, that tremendous impact would have been more than enough to send all five of them flying.

Even so, none of them had an easy time of it. Kano's eyes even rolled back from the explosion and shock wave; his head rang, and his vision doubled.

As for Chúgǒu, who had taken almost the entire blast, she now looked a little like the Apple logo-the right half of her body was nearly gone. Dark purple cursed spirit blood poured freely from her wounds, soaking a patch of dirt.

That went double for the jewelry and feather ornaments she had simulated with cursed energy... they had long since vanished under the devastation of that Uzumaki blast.

Now, even standing still was difficult for her. She could only stare blankly at everyone present with red eyes that were already losing focus.

Before Suguru Geto had even caught his breath, he sprinted forward, a suction force gathering in his right hand as he tried to compress her into a Cursed Spirit Orb and swallow her. "Nobody take her from me!!!!"