Black Flash!

Long Xi vaulted onto the Giant Shikigami's back. The instant his feet settled, he felt the muscles beneath him tense.

The beast began rolling over, trying to throw him off. The movement was small, but its consequences were terrifying.

One roll from that towering, ten-meter-plus monstrosity could flatten Long Xi and half the street into pancakes.

That was right!

Dhruv Lakdawalla's Cursed Technique was powerful because its Orbit Domain ignored ordinary defenses!

But those orbits weren't blades he could wield at will.

They depended on the Shikigami maintaining stable movement.

The larger the Shikigami, the stronger the orbits.

Likewise, the larger the Shikigami, the harder it was to recover once thrown off balance.

Long Xi had never planned to kill it "the normal way."

He intended to destroy its eyes, cripple its legs, and burn its nodes, forcing the beast to trample its own orbits into chaos.

The Giant Shikigami seemed to sense the threat to the node on its back. Its enormous body slammed toward the building beside it.

That trick again!

Long Xi was ready.

A second before it hit the wall, he released his grip and slid from its back toward its shoulder, leaving a strand of White Flame inside the wounded node.

"Delayed detonation!"

Boom!

As the Shikigami smashed through the building, the White Flame on its back exploded from within. The blast wasn't large, but it struck the Cursed Energy node dead-on.

The Giant Shikigami's front half lurched sideways. The force that should have struck the entire building veered off course. Its head scraped along the structure, and half its body crashed into the street.

The ground collapsed.

The Orbit Domain broke apart again.

Long Xi used the instant it fell to land on a ruined wall, his chest heaving.

The two-hour enhancement was still active.

But his body was almost unable to keep up.

The boosts from revealing his Cursed Technique and making a Binding Vow weren't free. His Cursed Energy flowed too quickly, and his wounds kept tearing open.

That was the drawback of not knowing Reverse Cursed Technique. Although his Cursed Energy was steadily recovering, he couldn't use it to heal his wounds.

He could only cover them with a little Cursed Energy to stop the bleeding.

Without any systematic training, he had only reached this point by figuring everything out himself.

The advantages and disadvantages came together.

If he had to say which was better...

Either could be. That was the answer!

Now the wounds on Long Xi's left shoulder, back, waist, and calf were all seeping blood.

His right hand was the biggest problem. The backlash from forcing his way into the node had injured it, and he was already losing control of his fingertips.

The middle finger, right in the center, was thoroughly broken.

Long Xi clenched his fist.

It really hurt, and not just a little.

The fight had felt so good that I didn't even notice the pain. Now that things have slowed down, it hurts like hell.

Pain is what I'm most afraid of in this life. Isn't there anything that reduces it? You can't seriously expect me to be some veteran soldier from the Qing dynasty, can you?!

Still... it hurt, but he could fight.

Then he would keep going!

The Giant Shikigami struggled to rise.

Its left hind leg was almost useless, both eyes on its right side were destroyed, and one of the nodes on its back had been burned through.

It no longer had the mountain-like stability it possessed at the start of the fight. Its movements had become sluggish, and it had to adjust its center of gravity before every turn.

But it wasn't dead.

A Special Grade Shikigami had an infuriating amount of vitality.

"Something like you should run out of life like fried rice in front of a competitive eater! Or disappear already, like that shiny jelly thing I spent three thousand balls catching!"

Long Xi looked at its chest and abdomen again.

That was the next point where its Cursed Energy converged, and also the most dangerous spot. He still couldn't figure out what the thing was or how it worked.

But to kill it now, he had to get the flames inside.

Just then, a piercing whistle cut through the sky.

Long Xi snapped his head up.

Black winged silhouettes swept between distant high-rises.

One, two, then more.

A swarm of Pteranodon-shaped Shikigami was approaching. Their compound eyes glowed dark red, their membranous wings slicing through the wind. Rather than flying straight toward him, they traced arcs of different radii through the air.

Aerial orbits.

Were there this many in the original story?

Or was this just because it was a dungeon?

Long Xi's expression darkened. The worst-case scenario had arrived.

Although it looked as though he was about to win against this enormous creature, Long Xi knew the truth.

He no longer had the strength. He couldn't hold out much longer...

[The pterosaur swarm! They're really here!]

[The one on the ground isn't finished, and the aerial domain is about to form a net.]

[Kill it now, streamer! You can't drag this out!]

"I know."

Long Xi fastened the Emperor Bell back onto his wrist. White Flame crept between his fingers.

The Giant Shikigami seemed to sense its companions approaching too. It abandoned precise attacks and instead dragged its ruined body onward to keep its orbits running.

It didn't need to win. It only needed to last until the pterosaur swarm sealed off the airspace.

Then the aerial orbits would cut off every route Long Xi could take with a leap.

Even the three Special Grades in Sendai could be wounded before they had time to react, and even Sukuna couldn't withstand the barrier's Inviolability.

If Long Xi took a single hit, he would be sliced in half.

The beast was stalling.

"You even know to wait for your teammates."

Long Xi exhaled a bloody breath.

"Exactly what I'd expect from an ancient bastard's pet. Better manners than my ranked teammates."

He stopped holding back.

At that moment, he pushed the two-hour enhancement granted by his Binding Vow to its limit, compressing those two hours into three minutes.

The White Flame drew back from his palm onto his knuckles. Its heat warped the air, and the edges of nearby broken glass began to soften.

By any reasonable standard, trading two days without his Cursed Technique for three hours of power was already the limit of what anyone could accept. Gambling his lifespan or future beyond that wasn't brave. It was stupid.

But to someone already lost in the thrill of battle, the only difference between those words and a fart was that a fart smelled worse.

The advancement reward for a hundred thousand followers-I'll have to bet on it giving me something better!

"In exchange for being unable to use my flame Cursed Technique for the rest of my time in this dungeon, I ask for..."

Long Xi stamped down hard.

"Five minutes of maximum output!"

He launched himself off the ruined wall.

The Giant Shikigami raised a foreleg, and an orbit sliced across the ground.

Long Xi didn't leap high, because the pterosaur orbits were already taking shape overhead.

He charged low along the ground, his body almost brushing the rubble. The Emperor Bell vibrated repeatedly, revealing the orbits ahead as thin lines.

The left was impassable. A new line closed off the right.

There was a gap in the middle, but it was only a shoulder wide.

Long Xi turned sideways and slipped through. The edge of an orbit sliced open his shoulder, sending blood and chunks of flesh flying, but he didn't stop.

A pterosaur Shikigami dived from above, its claws reaching for the back of his neck. Long Xi flung a White Flame spike behind him.

The spike didn't strike the pterosaur.

It struck the billboard support its flight path was about to pass.

The support exploded, and the entire billboard fell, blocking the pterosaur's dive.

The pterosaur instinctively swerved, shifting its aerial orbit half a meter.

Half a meter. Another path to survival.

Long Xi charged beneath the Giant Shikigami's chest and abdomen.

This time, the beast was prepared.

It neither lowered its head to bite nor swept its tail. Instead, it pressed its enormous body straight down. The orbits around all four legs contracted at once, closing toward the center like four invisible guillotines.

Long Xi was trapped inside.

Front, back, left, right-there were orbits everywhere.

Above him, a mountain of flesh descended.

[It's over. There's no way out!]

[Up means hitting the aerial orbits. Down means getting crushed.]

[Streamer!!]

"Who said I was getting out?"

He raised his right fist, gathering the White Flame onto his knuckles.

Cursed Energy reinforcement, physical impact, and the eruption of his Cursed Technique-all three were compressed into a single point at the same instant.

He didn't have the heaven-blessed conditions needed to trigger Black Flash, but he could do something even stupider: cram every bit of his output into this punch.

He tried to condense everything he understood into this one strike and fulfill the conditions for Black Flash.

Whether his body could withstand it was a question for afterward.

The Binding Vow preventing him from using his Cursed Technique for two days had increased his output efficiency by 30%, and the new Binding Vow had successfully doubled his output efficiency.

It had reached 80%!

And... the thirtyfold emotional enhancement he hadn't used since the battle began had also been held back as a Binding Vow.

This punch gathered all his Cursed Energy, then multiplied that value by thirty! The increase was terrifying!

Long Xi drove his fist into the node in the Giant Shikigami's chest and abdomen.

His fist struck first, Cursed Energy blasted in after it, and the White Flame bored inside last.

The three layers of power arrived so close together that they almost overlapped at the same point.

Boom-!

The surging flames erupted with all their might, and then, amid those flames...

Black lightning took shape!

"Black Flash!!!"

The Giant Shikigami's chest and abdomen caved in, then bulged outward from within. White fire spread through the cracks in the nodes he had already burned open, as though someone had ignited an enormous web inside its body.

Its descending body stopped. Not because it wanted to, but because its internal Cursed Energy flow had been burned through, briefly robbing its four legs of coordination.

Long Xi seized that opening of less than a second. He pressed both hands against its charred chest and abdomen, gritted his teeth, and kept pouring flames inside.

"Just die!"

The White Flame exploded inside the Giant Shikigami a second time.

This time, the blast tore through the chest-and-abdomen node.

An enormous hole was blown through the beast's front half. Its gray-black skin tore apart from within, spraying charred flesh that burned into black smoke before it could hit the ground.

The Giant Shikigami swayed.

Its two remaining eyes stared at Long Xi.

There was no emotion in them, only the final operating instincts of a Cursed Technique's creation.

It lifted a foreleg, seemingly trying to stamp out another orbit.

Long Xi was faster.

He stepped onto the edge of the blasted hole in its chest and surged beneath its head. The White Flame in his right hand formed a slender spear, which he thrust straight between its two remaining eyes.

"Die!!!"

The White Flame pierced its skull.

Black lightning appeared again, punching straight through its outer defenses!

The first explosion shattered his bones!

The second explosion shattered the internal nodes!

The third explosion blasted back out from deep within its skull!

The Giant Shikigami's head snapped backward, and its four legs buckled. Its enormous, ten-meter-plus body finally lost all support and toppled sideways into the street.

Crash!

Dust billowed more than ten meters high.

The Orbit Domain began collapsing the instant it fell.

The dangerous cutting lines across the ground vanished one after another, and the taut, razor-sharp pressure in the air finally eased.

Near the parking lot entrance, the ground remained sliced into fragments, but no new orbits formed.

Long Xi had battered the Giant Rodent Shikigami into ruin.

Or rather, killed it.