"I love... the taste of iron!!!"
Kurourushi immediately waved a hand, and as cockroaches swarmed Okkotsu from every direction, Okkotsu stopped holding back.
"Rika..."
"Urghhh!!!"
Clutching the Festering Life Sword, Kurourushi had barely taken flight before it fell to the ground as though suffocating, looking exactly like a poisoned cockroach.
Okkotsu had already readied his hand sign, only for Kurourushi to drop out just like that?
"Was that you?" Okkotsu looked at Kinoshita.
Kinoshita swept his hair aside. "That's right!"
"Okkotsu-chan, do you know anything about cockroach habits?"
Okkotsu watched the mass of cockroaches scatter after Kurourushi collapsed. "You mean... they live in groups?"
"No, no, no..." Kinoshita smiled.
"Cockroaches are disgusting creatures, but they're also unbelievably resilient. When food is scarce, they'll eat the corpses of their own kind to fill their stomachs."
"And there really aren't many living creatures or much food in the Sendai Colony. Most of the ordinary people are still under my protection."
"For the past ten days, I've been using the Construction Technique to make cockroach poison and potatoes. Some of the poisons act quickly, others slowly, but in the end, the dead cockroaches get eaten by other cockroaches..."
Okkotsu understood now. The cockroaches' cannibalistic habits had allowed Kinoshita's poison to spread through their entire population.
But why had Kurourushi been poisoned?
"Kurourushi can use cursed energy cockroaches to restore its body. That move is pretty similar to the Reverse Cursed Technique."
"But obviously, the Reverse Cursed Technique is far more advanced," Kinoshita continued explaining. "Poisons counter the Reverse Cursed Technique to some extent, and every time Kurourushi uses cursed energy cockroaches, it's effectively accumulating poison."
When toxins in nature couldn't be broken down, they kept accumulating farther up the food chain.
Clearly, as the ultimate destination of all these cursed energy cockroaches, Kurourushi had accelerated that process enormously.
On the surface, Kurourushi merely had its eyes rolled back and foam spilling from its mouth, wearing an ahegao expression.
In reality, the concentration of toxins inside its body had already reached an absurd level.
"That's amazing!" Okkotsu praised Kinoshita sincerely.
Even Ryu Ishigori and Takako Uro, watching from a distance, couldn't figure out what had happened to Kurourushi or why it had suddenly collapsed.
Kinoshita picked up the Festering Life Sword. Honestly, as a proper power-scaling debater, his blunt assessment of Kurourushi was that it was nothing more than a sword stand.
Throughout the entire battle in Sendai, it had only injured Okkotsu twice with the Festering Life Sword. Beyond that, its only advantage was being somewhat hard to kill.
But now, Kinoshita had poisoned every cockroach in the Sendai Colony using the Construction Technique. Even if Kurourushi revived ten thousand times, the outcome would be the same.
Crack.
The moment Kinoshita finished Kurourushi off, Okkotsu sensed the sky twitch.
"Finally couldn't hold back anymore?" Kinoshita backflipped away from the center of the battlefield.
In truth, by Kinoshita's own assessment, he was just some roadside nobody.
Because of his cursed energy limitations, Kinoshita couldn't even cover his entire body with the Construction Technique. He could only add an exoskeleton to his legs and a liquid-metal blade to his right arm.
That had nearly gotten him instantly killed by one of Mahito's underlings.
Fortunately, having the Reverse Cursed Technique made him a little harder to kill.
Now that he also had a powerful cursed tool, the Festering Life Sword, he wouldn't be completely helpless against Sendai's remaining two fighters.
"You're...!" Okkotsu slashed at Takako Uro, only for his blade to bend immediately.
This was Takako Uro's cursed technique, the Sky Manipulation Technique, which distorted space to divert her enemies' attacks.
But this Okkotsu wasn't the ordinary Sendai Okkotsu.
He was Concept · Kinoshita · Intel · Okkotsu!!
"Rika!"
Okkotsu had already known a frontal attack wouldn't work, so he had deliberately positioned his shikigami Rika to ambush Takako Uro from her blind spot.
"Yuta~"
Rika's enormous fist hurtled toward Takako Uro. Unable to activate her cursed technique in time, she had no choice but to block the blow with her arms.
Watching Takako Uro get caught out and punched away, Kinoshita stood smugly off to the side.
"Out of the way, brat!"
A voice came from behind Kinoshita. Unlike Takako Uro, who simply wanted to eliminate powerful opponents and claim their points, Ryu Ishigori was an outright battle maniac!
"Oh?"
Kinoshita sneered.
"Fine, I'll move!!!"
Although Ryu Ishigori was a little surprised to see Kinoshita obediently step aside, he didn't say anything more.
After all, Kinoshita had barely shown anything during the earlier fight.
That was why Takako Uro had chosen to attack Okkotsu.
"I've always been searching for something that could satisfy this hunger. Yuta Okkotsu, was it?" Ryu Ishigori looked at Okkotsu with a smile.
Okkotsu looked at his exaggerated pompadour. According to Kinoshita, this man not only had immense cursed energy output, but was formidable in close combat as well.
He's a total monster!
"Leave Takako Uro to me, Okkotsu-chan!!" Kinoshita pointed the Festering Life Sword at Takako Uro.
Takako Uro shook out her hand.
Her physical toughness and close-combat ability were both impressive, even reaching the level of a strong grade-one sorcerer.
Her powerful cursed technique even let her control the sky, making her truly troublesome.
"Are you looking down on me, you bastard!?"
Takako Uro pulled at the space beside her and flew into the air menacingly.
"My cursed technique captures 'space' as a 'surface'!"
Kinoshita nodded. She was boosting her technique's power by explaining how it worked.
He knew that trick too!
"My cursed technique creates 'shit,' then covers the enemy from every angle, a full three hundred and sixty degrees!!"
At those words, Takako Uro's expression instantly froze.
"What is this guy talking about?!"
"Is he trying to fake me out?"
"Are modern sorcerers all this shameless and vulgar?"
"He really is looking down on me..." Takako Uro stopped holding back.
She looked at Kurourushi's Festering Life Sword with disgust. Cockroaches were the embodiment of filth, and Takako Uro didn't even want to touch its weapon.
"Thin Ice Breaker!!"
Takako Uro tore away a large handful of space, preparing to layer it together to attack Kinoshita.
But Kinoshita threw a spherical object, pressed his palms together, and shouted, "Piercing Blood!!!"
Takako Uro was shocked. She might have been an ancient sorcerer, but who hadn't heard of the Kamo clan's Blood Manipulation?
"This brat is from the Kamo clan!"
Piercing Blood was faster than sound, a cursed technique that her space manipulation couldn't match for speed.
She immediately changed tactics, tearing away a stretch of space to bend Piercing Blood's trajectory.
Yet the red liquid shooting from Kinoshita's hands, while fast, was aimed slightly above Takako Uro.
"Of course this isn't Piercing Blood. It's just high-speed water with edible red dye mixed in!"
When the Construction Technique created matter, it could also manipulate its physical state to a certain extent.
For example, when Yorozu fought Sukuna, she had directly created a perfect "sphere" that couldn't exist in reality.
But without Convergence to compress the blood, even a high-speed stream of water couldn't do much damage to a sorcerer.
The red liquid pierced the sphere in the air, which was actually a round, inflated balloon.
Soon, the contents of the balloon scattered gracefully over Takako Uro's head like blossoms strewn by a celestial maiden.
Takako Uro's face instantly twisted in horror as she screamed, "Shit! Shit!! This is actually fucking shit!!!"
Before you continue