Angel

"Jacob's Ladder."

Blinding white light fell from the cloud-choked sky into the center of the wreckage-strewn battlefield, as though it would dissolve everything.

The light spread rapidly outward like ripples, until the world before them shone a brilliant white.

Within the hazy glow, a beautiful girl with a halo above her head floated in the center of the battlefield, her feet suspended in the air.

Severed limbs lay heaped haphazardly throughout the village center. A blood-scented wind blew past, and Angel glared toward Ryomen Sukuna as she looked at her fellow humans, reduced to feed.

"The Fallen! I'll kill you!"

"Back for another beating?"

Ryomen Sukuna tore away his cumbersome white kimono, exposing a muscular body marked with black curse patterns.

Unlike an ordinary person, he had another pair of arms growing beneath his armpits, as well as a pair of grotesque, enormous mouths where his abdominal muscles should have been.

To ordinary people, Ryomen Sukuna's appearance might have seemed abnormal, but to jujutsu sorcerers, he was perfection itself. The mouths on his abdomen could chant incantations simultaneously to increase his cursed technique's output, achieving something ordinary people could not.

Behind Angel stood not only the Abe Clan's elite, but also the Neeshi Suppression Squad, reformed from the remnants of the Sugawara Clan. Unlike the Fujiwara Clan's two elite units, these two clans had arrived a little later. In that short interval, Ryomen Sukuna had slaughtered nearly all the Fujiwara Clan's jujutsu sorcerers.

Angel had been sent to challenge Ryomen Sukuna a few days earlier. Gravely wounded, she had mustered all her strength to escape.

Ever since then, Angel had hated Ryomen Sukuna with every fiber of her being. After recovering, she had returned to kill this "demon" whose existence defied God's ideals.

Before coming, she had gone so far as to enter into a binding vow with that evil monk. If she fell here today, she would be made into a cursed object, resurrected a thousand years later to carry on the resolve she held today.

"Heh..."

At some point, two cursed tools had appeared in Ryomen Sukuna's hands. He had seized them a few days earlier.

Hiten resembled Guanyin's sacred halberd, with a white banner hanging from it, while Kamutoke was a vajra-shaped ritual implement capable of changing the properties of cursed energy. The moment he gripped it, his cursed energy took on the properties of lightning.

Angel stared at Sukuna and the cursed tools in his hands, momentarily stunned.

She had assumed Sukuna would engage her in a domain clash. Then, when his cursed technique burned out, the other jujutsu sorcerers would swarm him and kill him while he could not use it. Yet this monster intended to withstand her domain with his flesh alone?

"Nothing special."

Ryomen Sukuna gave a mocking smile and shot forward like a meteor, like an arrow. With the aid of Hiten's cursed technique, he reached Angel's position in the air in just a few breaths. He swung his right arm, driving cursed energy charged with surging lightning toward her back.

Angel froze for an instant.

She was now so close to Sukuna that she could make out every strand of his pale pink hair. She swiftly changed direction, bending low.

Sukuna's attack missed, and the lightning cracked explosively through the air above her head.

Just as Angel breathed a small sigh of relief, Sukuna moved as though he had foreseen her trajectory. After his strike missed, an arm beneath his armpit shifted into a grabbing motion and seized one of the white wings on her back.

"Let go!!!"

Angel twisted around and kicked hard at Sukuna's abdomen with both feet.

The two separated as soon as they clashed, each retreating a few paces to hover beneath the dark sky. Just then, the Sugawara and Abe clans' jujutsu sorcerers charged in together.

The many jujutsu sorcerers moved so swiftly that they became streaks of afterimages at the center of the battlefield. Flying rubble and the radiance of their varied cursed techniques lit the dusk as brightly as day.

Nearly every jujutsu sorcerer fighting there could deploy a domain, though most focused on sure-hit effects. Even outnumbered, Ryomen Sukuna did not deign to deploy his own.

When the fighting briefly slowed, the combatants' forms gradually became visible to the naked eye.

What emerged was a scene of despair worthy of the world's end. The village houses, the distant forest, and the jujutsu sorcerers on the battlefield had all been crushed to the ground by Ryomen Sukuna, amid anguished cries of unbearable pain.

The scattered cursed energy blasted the entire area into an enormous crater.

When everything stopped, only the two-faced, four-armed figure remained standing. Sukuna had battered everyone else into the rubble with his cursed tools, leaving their fates unknown.

"A magnificent victory, Lord Sukuna."

Seeing that the battle was decided, Uraume appeared from somewhere and offered a perfectly timed, utterly sincere compliment.

"Let's go."

Sukuna cast a casual glance at the sky behind him.

Apart from the jujutsu sorcerers he had brutalized and left for dead, one little insect had actually slipped away amid the chaos.

That insect was pitifully insignificant, like the ripples of a raindrop falling onto a lake, and left not the slightest impression on him.