Outside the parking garage entrance, the sound rolled in first.
Boom.
Boom.
Every tremor felt like a building rolling over against the ground. Dust fell from the concrete ceiling, and the alarms of wrecked cars sounded in broken bursts before quickly falling silent again.
Long Xi stood in the shadow of the entrance, flames igniting against the skin of his palm.
The low-level cursed spirits that had chased him here no longer charged inside.
Like stray dogs that had caught the scent of a natural predator, they crowded along the edges of the passage, their bodies twisting as they shrank back, yet none dared truly scatter.
Something was driving them forward.
And something was frightening them.
Long Xi looked up and saw four eyes slowly emerge at the far end of the collapsed street outside.
A massive gray-black head pushed through a broken wall, its rough, wrinkled skin scraping against rebar with a teeth-grating screech.
The creature stood over ten meters tall, its body even longer. Its four feet planted on the rubble, it looked like a moving mountain of flesh.
Sharp fangs jutted from its mouth in overlapping rows. Its long tail dragged across the ground, casually sweeping a small car aside.
It wasn't a cursed spirit.
It was a shikigami.
Dhruv Lakdawalla's Giant Rodent Shikigami.
Long Xi had known from the original story that this thing was dangerous, but seeing it on a screen and seeing it in person were two completely different experiences.
That oppressive presence wasn't as simple as being "strong."
It rewrote the rules of the map.
The giant shikigami wasn't moving its four feet at random.
It circled some distant, unseen center along a massive arc. Every step left a ring of distorted cursed energy tracks on the ground.
Those tracks were hard to catch with the naked eye, but a faint tremor from Long Xi's Emperor Bell conveyed the sharp boundaries hidden within them.
Its tracks were its domain.
Anything that touched them would be sliced apart.
No deployment, no barrier, no flashy windup.
Wherever it walked became a blade.
[Here it comes! Dhruv's Naked Mole-Rat Daddy!]
[This isn't about whether you can fight it. One touch and you're sliced up.]
[Back off, streamer! Ordinary flames will barely tickle this thing.]
[Don't let it into the garage! Once it starts circling, everyone inside becomes sliced meat.]
Of course Long Xi knew.
So he didn't turn around. He only tossed an order over his shoulder.
"Everyone, get as far inside as you can."
Kawahara opened his mouth to ask something, but the sight of the giant shikigami lodged the words in his throat.
Takayanagi reacted faster, immediately pushing everyone toward the second basement level.
"Move! Don't stop! Don't look back!"
This time, Long Xi no longer cared whether they were lined up, or who fell, or who cried.
He couldn't.
He really couldn't.
With something on this level bearing down on them, a single second of distraction would turn the parking garage into a sushi platter.
The giant shikigami planted a forefoot on the ramp outside the entrance.
Boom!
Half the concrete ramp collapsed on the spot.
Worse still, the track left by its foot curved around the edge of the ramp and cut into a concrete pillar at the entrance.
The pillar didn't burst apart. A thin seam simply shifted out of alignment, and its upper half slowly slid off.
Kawahara went white at the sight.
Long Xi had already charged outside.
He didn't open with flames to test it.
There was no point.
Hitting this thing with an ordinary fireball would probably be like holding a lighter against a rhino. At most, it would think you were rather polite for offering it a warm compress.
Long Xi stepped onto an overturned truck and used its roof to leap into the air. The Emperor Bell trembled lightly on his wrist.
Its chime swept across the tracks, briefly outlining several dangerous arcs.
He couldn't land on the left.
He couldn't step on the right.
There was a half-meter gap straight ahead.
He twisted at the waist in midair, forcing his landing point a foot to the side, and planted his feet between two tracks.
The next second, the giant shikigami's tail swept toward him.
Long Xi leaned backward. The tail whipped past his chest, its wind pressure scraping painfully against his skin.
That wasn't merely a physical attack. The route swept by its tail also formed a new domain track, carving silent fractures through the air.
He retreated half a step, and the edge of a track sliced a piece off his hem.
"Fuck, wasn't this thing treated like roadside trash in the original?!"
"How the hell did someone just stroll past it?!"
[Stop complaining! You're about to become 2.5 Long Xis!]
[These tracks are disgusting. They've sealed off all the space.]
[Go for the eyes! Cripple its senses first!]
Long Xi kept moving.
He stepped across wrecked cars and circled toward its flank, drawing the flames in his palm into slender fiery spikes. He fired four in succession, all aimed at the two eyes on the shikigami's right side.
The giant shikigami turned its head.
The movement wasn't fast, but it was precise.
The fiery spikes only blasted away a small patch of flesh on the side of its face. Dark cursed energy seeped from beneath its gray-black skin.
He had injured it, but the wounds were too shallow.
Its defenses were absurdly thick.
Long Xi landed, flames spreading along his arm as he tried to close in and attack a joint. But the giant shikigami lifted a forefoot and stamped down hard. Arcing tracks spread beneath its foot, forcing him straight back.
The ground cracked.
A cutting line skimmed past the tips of his shoes.
The ground gave way beneath Long Xi as a severed section sank. He rolled sideways, slamming his shoulder into a wrecked car and denting its door.
The pain made him wish he were dead.
But it wasn't actually lethal.
He had barely regained his footing when the shikigami had already completed another half-circle.
It wasn't even interested in chasing him?
It was just carrying out its duty, continuing its circuit?!
Its orbit around Dhruv wouldn't stop completely because of Long Xi, but it would layer its attacks into that route.
In other words, Long Xi had to contend not only with its claws, teeth, and tail, but also with the cutting domain it constantly wove.
This was an ancient monster's cursed technique.
It wasn't a duel. It turned an entire area into its own chessboard.
Even with his deeper understanding of his own cursed technique and the faint signs that he was approaching a breakthrough beyond Grade 2, something like this was still far too troublesome.
Long Xi's flames erupted again, slamming into the joint of its foreleg.
Boom!
The explosion left a patch of scorched flesh.
The giant shikigami's foreleg wobbled, its flesh splitting open, yet it still landed firmly. The backlash of cursed energy surged back along the flames, numbing Long Xi's wrist. He nearly lost his grip on the Emperor Bell.
He couldn't break through.
At least, not yet.
Ordinary output barely scratched this thing, and if he kept scratching long enough, he might end up scratching himself out of existence.
Long Xi stopped atop a broken wall, his chest heaving as his mind raced.
He had three problems right now.
First, his injuries hadn't healed.
Second, although the live comments replenished his cursed energy, his maximum output wasn't high enough.
Third, Dhruv had more than one kind of shikigami.
The Giant Rodent Shikigami handled the ground tracks, while the Pterosaur Shikigami Swarm sealed off the air.
The absence of those black pterosaurs overhead didn't mean they wouldn't come. Once they joined in, three-dimensional tracks would slice apart what little room he had to maneuver outside the parking garage.
So he couldn't drag this out.
Before the Pterosaur Shikigami Swarm arrived, he had to injure this giant shikigami badly enough to disrupt its movement.
Or even kill it.
Long Xi gritted his teeth.
"Fuck, I really didn't want to say this."
He raised his head and projected his voice for the first time.
"My cursed technique is called Furious Flame Mound. Broadly speaking, it controls flames, but it has more ways to be used."
As his words fell, the surrounding air trembled faintly.
Revealing his cursed technique.
He willingly exposed information about his cursed technique, gaining increased output through a binding vow.
Long Xi didn't stop.
"It's not just setting things on fire. I convert cursed energy into an extremely high-temperature flame stream, then drive it into the target through contact, compression, and explosions."
"Though this is just something I figured out through experimentation..."
"It's pretty obvious that this move is useful right now!"
"And through my own emotions and those of the people around me, I can bring a single attack up to 3,000 percent effectiveness."
"That's thirty times the effect!"
"Your hide's thick. I can't burn through it from outside."
"So I'll burn you from inside."
The flames abruptly surged higher. It wasn't an illusion.
With the boost from revealing his cursed technique added in, the flames in Long Xi's palm visibly brightened, and their temperature rose another notch.
Paint rapidly curled off the nearby wrecked cars, and the edges of their windows turned white from the heat.
The giant shikigami hadn't understood him.
It didn't need to.
An Autonomous Shikigami would only continue moving along its tracks, expanding its domain, and slicing apart every enemy that entered its path.
But Long Xi wasn't finished yet.
In a low voice, he established a second binding vow.
"In exchange for being unable to use my cursed technique during the final two days ahead..."
"I'll gain an overall increase in cursed technique output, cursed energy circulation, and physical reinforcement for the next two hours."
He had initially planned to pay with his lifespan, but ultimately abandoned that idea.
It wasn't that he lacked the nerve to risk it. He wasn't sure whether a binding vow made here would affect his real body in the real world.
Death in an instance might allow another attempt.
But binding vows might not care whether this was an instance.
Two days without his cursed technique was a steep price, but it wouldn't cut his future off in one stroke.
It was enough.
The instant the binding vow took hold, Long Xi felt as though a red-hot chunk of iron had been stuffed inside him.
His cursed energy circulation abruptly accelerated, sending pain through his wounds as his bones and muscles protested together.
Flames curled from his palm to his forearm, only for him to forcibly compress them back into his fingertips, forming a nearly white flame blade.
[He revealed his cursed technique!]
[Holy shit, the streamer's really paying a price now.]
[Wasn't it already a straight thirtyfold boost? What kind of underhanded shit is this?!]
[Attack now! Once the pterosaurs get here, there really won't be any room left.]
Long Xi stamped down.
The concrete shattered.
His speed had increased by far more than a little. He shot through the gaps between the tracks, his figure almost trailing a line of fire.
The giant shikigami's eyes shifted, and its foreleg swept sideways, attempting to seal off his route with its tracks.
Long Xi didn't retreat.
The Emperor Bell trembled, briefly revealing the tracks.
He stepped on a car door thrown into the air, launching himself a second time in midair and clearing the newly formed cutting line.
The instant he landed, his flame blade plunged into the joint of the giant shikigami's left hind leg.
This time, it wasn't a surface-level explosion.
The flames bored their way in.
A muffled boom came from beneath the shikigami's thick hide. The inside of its joint was scorched black, and the giant shikigami visibly lost its balance for the first time, its massive body dipping half a foot to the left.
Before Long Xi could follow up, its tail came crashing in from behind.
He could not block it with his raised arm, so he could only roll sideways with the force of the blow.
The tail grazed his back, and the edge of a track sliced through the flesh behind his shoulder. Blood gushed out.
Long Xi clenched his teeth in pain, yet gave a brief smile.
"As long as I can punch through."
He stood up, compressing the flames again.
The giant shikigami turned.
Outside the parking lot entrance, the tracks grew denser and denser.
Long Xi knew the real fight to the death had only just begun.
(Let's see if he'll say something? Or give me five stars or something. I feel like no one's been reading.)
Before you continue