Is anyone reading?

It was like Diavolo successfully obtaining the Stand Arrow, or Satoru Gojo finally grasping reverse cursed technique.

The exhilaration was enough to send him straight to heaven.

But that last strike still hadn't killed the creature. The Giant Shikigami pulled its head out of the collapsed building, half its face charred black, both eyes on its right side reduced to empty sockets.

It didn't scream in pain, but when that low, rasping cry forced its way out of its chest, even the distant parking garage entrance shook.

Its orbit had gone awry.

The once-steady, wide circular route began to falter.

Long Xi watched its four legs.

Its left hind leg was injured, and both right eyes had been destroyed. Its judgment and ability to support its weight had both suffered.

But that wasn't enough. As long as it could keep circling Dhruv Lakdawalla, the Orbit Domain would remain.

The area outside the parking garage would be sliced into ever smaller pieces, and sooner or later, he would be cornered to death.

And there was still no movement in the sky.

That was what unsettled Long Xi most.

Dhruv Lakdawalla's Second Shikigami was a swarm of pterosaurs.

Once a few pterosaur shikigami flew over, their aerial orbits would cut off his escape routes above. At that point, his current strategy of jumping, pushing off surfaces, and rolling to dodge the orbits would instantly become useless.

Then he would be like the heroine in a TV show with five black men, in trouble from the front, back, and both sides.

Two hours of enhancement sounded like a long time.

Long Xi pushed himself upright against the bus and rolled his numb right shoulder.

In a real fight, even three minutes felt like an eternity.

[Don't get reckless, streamer. That's not how you calculate the time.]

[With your revealed cursed technique + Binding Vow, your damage can break through its defenses now...]

[Hit its legs! Make it stop!]

[No, attack the summoner! Work backward to find Dhruv Lakdawalla!]

Long Xi glanced at the last chat message, and an idea struck him.

The Giant Shikigami moved around Dhruv Lakdawalla.

Its orbit was a circle.

And Dhruv Lakdawalla was its center.

If he could use the curve of its route to work out where the center lay, perhaps he could find Dhruv Lakdawalla himself.

But a second later, he suppressed that thought.

Finding the summoner was useless right now.

He couldn't get through.

The Giant Shikigami stood before him, with the Orbit Domain spanning the space between them.

If he really abandoned this shikigami to hunt down the old man, the people in the parking garage would be cut into jigsaw pieces first.

He didn't know reverse cursed technique, either. What was he supposed to say? "Guess I'll have to put you back together myself after all"?

They'd become human jigsaw puzzles.

He had to cripple this thing first.

Long Xi stomped down on the flames beneath his feet and shot forward again.

This time, he didn't head upward.

The Giant Shikigami had lost the vision on its right side, leaving a blind spot in its perception.

He approached low from its front right, crouching so far down that he almost skimmed through the gaps between the ground-level orbits.

The Emperor Bell gave short rattles around his wrist. Each vibration seemed to mark the narrow gap where he could place his next step.

But the orbits were too dense.

Halfway through his charge, a new trajectory suddenly appeared ahead.

It was a line traced by the shikigami's dragging tail.

Its angle was vicious, positioned precisely where he would land after jumping.

Long Xi was already airborne and couldn't force himself to change direction.

He immediately raised a hand, flames bursting from his palm. He aimed not at the shikigami, but at the ground diagonally ahead of him.

The explosion tossed up a slab of concrete.

Long Xi planted a foot on the slab, using its explosive momentum to change direction again. The orbit sliced past his heel, taking half his shoe's sole with it.

"Another shoe ruined."

[Is this really the time to worry about your shoes?!]

Long Xi landed beside the shikigami's right foreleg.

White Flame swept along the ground, burning the pavement first, then the joint.

This wasn't meant to hurt it.

It was meant to force it to lift its foot.

Sure enough, the Giant Shikigami instinctively raised its right foreleg, trying to avoid the fire burrowing into the gaps in its joint.

That was exactly the movement Long Xi had been waiting for! He charged beneath its foot, wrapped his right fist in cursed energy, and slammed it into the softest part of its sole!

He was fighting without any scruples. Luckily, this thing was sexless, or he would have given it a little neutering operation!

The cursed energy blast erupted first, followed immediately by White Flame!

A deep crater was blasted into the flesh of its sole.

When the Giant Shikigami's right foreleg came down, it failed to find solid footing.

Its enormous body pitched forward.

Instead of fleeing, Long Xi followed the direction of its fall and charged to its left, toward the left hind-leg joint he had burned earlier.

With its foreleg off balance, its hind legs would have to exert force to compensate.

The instant they compensated, the joints would tense.

And when they tensed, they would expose the nodes where cursed energy flowed most densely.

The medical knowledge he'd picked up as a child actually came in handy now. Life really did make you marvel.

Like a streak of fire hugging the giant beast's shadow, Long Xi rushed to the side of its left hind leg. The Giant Shikigami tried to sweep him away with its tail.

But its missing vision on the right delayed its judgment by half a beat. Its tail struck empty space first, and the orbit sliced through a row of road barriers.

Long Xi was already there.

He compressed the White Flame in his right hand into a cone, aiming not to pierce intact skin, but the charred wound he had burned open before.

"Round two of construction."

He drove the flame cone inside and poured cursed energy through the spinning fire drill. It must have felt like the suffocating coils of a python, and surely couldn't have been pleasant.

Boom!

The left hind-leg joint exploded from within.

This time, it wasn't merely scorched. It broke!

Half the Giant Shikigami's hind leg collapsed on the spot, and its massive body fell to its knees on the left.

It crushed a deep pit into the ground dozens of times larger than the bus, making the entire street sink.

Long Xi had forcibly punched a gap into the Giant Shikigami's circular orbit.

At that same moment, the invisible cutting lines outside the parking garage suddenly scattered for half a beat.

Were they gone? No...

The steady arcs had become warped. They were still lethal, certainly, but under the present circumstances, that change was a lifesaver.

Long Xi didn't stop.

White Flame burst beneath his feet. Using the rubble thrown up as the shikigami knelt, he rushed upward, clinging close as he climbed its left flank.

Its gray-black skin was as rough as a grinding wheel. His palms bled the instant he pressed them against it, but he didn't pause.

After being injured, the Giant Shikigami began guarding its hind legs with its tail.

That thick tail swept toward him, carrying an orbit with it. It wasn't fast, but its reach was absurdly wide.

Long Xi hung in midair, the giant beast's body ahead, the tail's trajectory behind, and the shredded street below.

Three paths, two fatal.

He was already being turned into a sandwich cookie.

Even the remaining path led up onto its back.

In other words, this was already a dead end.

Dhruv Lakdawalla's beast design had won!

But events took a sharp turn, nothing like the expected outcome! Long Xi gritted his teeth and pressed the White Flame in his palm into the Giant Shikigami's flank.

Boom!

The flames weren't meant to hurt the enemy, but to blast him upward.

The blast swept against his skin, propelling him toward the shikigami's back. The tail's orbit passed beneath him, severing the section of wall where he had just been.

The wall slid apart soundlessly, only crashing with a thunderous boom when it fell.

[King of Hell: Who installed these multicolored neon lights for me?]

[Watch the sky! Where are the pterosaurs? Please don't come! Where's Mr. Pure Love? Help him out!]

Long Xi was worried about the sky, too.

From the start of the battle until now, Dhruv Lakdawalla's Pterosaur Shikigami Swarm hadn't appeared once.

That was very abnormal.

It felt as out of character as the King Kong Armor not gambling, or the Black Rhino Armor not putting pressure on his teammates.

The Giant Rodent Shikigami handled the ground-level orbits, while the Pterosaur Shikigami Swarm sealed off the airspace.

Logically, once Dhruv Lakdawalla realized he could evade the orbits by jumping and exploiting differences in height, the aerial shikigami should have descended on him long ago.

There were only two explanations for their absence.

First, the pterosaur swarm was pursuing another target.

Second, they were on their way.

The second possibility was the worst, and Long Xi had no time left to gamble.

Now, he could only give it everything he had!

Kill it!

"Won't let me stand?"

Long Xi pulled the Emperor Bell from his wrist and flicked it with a fingertip.

A clear chime spread along the giant beast's back.

The sound could do little damage to a special grade shikigami, but it could briefly disrupt the flow of cursed energy along its surface.

Beneath its gray-black skin, the cursed energy nodes that maintained its orbit stalled for a moment amid the ringing.

Long Xi seized that opening and pressed both hands against the center of the shikigami's spine.

White Flame contracted into a long, thin cone and pierced downward through a gap in its skin.

The shikigami's back was more heavily defended than its belly. The flame cone burrowed less than half a foot before its cursed energy blocked it.

Long Xi's wrists went numb, and his finger bones felt as though the recoil had shattered them.

With his physical capabilities and current condition, forcing his way inside was nothing but a pipe dream.

He could only try another approach!

The cursed energy around Long Xi first retreated half an inch. The shikigami's cursed energy instinctively pushed outward after it, trying to squeeze the flames out.

Now.

Long Xi abruptly split White Flame into three streams, bypassing the frontal barrier to cut inside simultaneously from the left, right, and below.

An apt comparison would be picking a lock.

Instead of smashing the door with a sledgehammer, he inserted a needle into the lock cylinder and snapped the teeth inside one by one.

A less apt comparison would be feline mating season, with that barbed sensation.

For the first time, the Giant Shikigami reacted violently.

Something beneath the flesh of its back had burned through.

It abruptly threw its head back and stamped wildly, its orbit around Dhruv Lakdawalla shifting even farther off course.

Several cutting trajectories along the street collided as they strayed into safe areas. Even its own foreleg was grazed by an orbit's edge, leaving a deep gash.

Long Xi's eyes lit up. It was just as he had suspected.

"Your own rules can trip you up, too!"