Zero Coffin: Disintegration!

Satoru Gojo leaned against a tree ten meters away, his arms crossed.

Morning light filtered through the layers of leaves, scattering flecks of gold across his shoulders.

His stance had not changed since the first swipe sent Rihito flying. He looked as though he were waiting for dessert to be served.

But beneath his blindfold, his gaze had never left the boy.

The Six Eyes could see another picture.

The cursed energy inside Rihito had been flowing all along, never stopping even as he took a beating.

It was a restrained flow, its rhythm forcibly held in check.

Every time he was knocked back, every time interference with his heart interrupted his cursed energy, that energy found its way back onto its course as quickly as possible.

Now, that cursed energy was changing.

It split into two streams in Rihito's chest and began circulating along a route Gojo had never seen this boy use before.

One cold, one hot, like two intertwined snakes, chasing and evading each other as they traced an irregular circle through his cursed energy pathways.

He was certain no one had ever taught Rihito to use it this way.

At the sight, the corner of Satoru Gojo's mouth curled upward.

"Pretty impressive. Even faster than when Yuji learned Divergent Fist."

His voice was soft, like one fallen leaf landing on another. Neither of the two creatures present heard him.

Ahead of him, Rihito had his eyes closed.

His right hand was still trembling, and a trace of bloody froth remained at the corner of his mouth.

The spot in his chest where the cursed spirit had interfered still ached faintly. Every heartbeat tugged at that lingering, dull pain, like a thorn lodged in his flesh.

His back, where he had struck the tree trunk, was beginning to go numb too. Pain crawled up his spine, all the way to the back of his head.

Despite the pain, his mind was quieter than ever.

Back at the steelworks, ice had sealed Tanaka's right arm.

The ice covered the bone spikes on his skin, but fresh spikes growing from within had pierced it.

Why?

Because the bone spikes grew out of flesh at normal body temperature.

The ice only froze the surface. Inside, it was still warm.

Bone thrust out of warm flesh, and the ice cracked on the outside.

The temperature difference wasn't large enough. The cold didn't reach deep enough, fast enough.

It was the same against Mahito. Zero Coffin's frost covered his skin, but he regenerated too quickly. His new flesh still carried body heat and pushed the ice apart from within.

It wasn't that the ice wasn't cold enough. The cold was coming from the wrong direction.

Freezing from the outside in was always a beat slower than freezing from the inside out.

That one beat was enough for a cursed spirit to regenerate, counterattack, and send me flying.

As the cursed spirit drew closer, Rihito's heart gave a sudden thump, but his mind kept racing.

Freezing alone wasn't enough, because it only worked in one direction, from the outside in, like constantly pushing inward with one hand.

Heat Blast alone wasn't enough either. It was also one-directional, erupting outward from my palm, only to be stopped by the skin. The heat couldn't penetrate.

What if I did both at once?

Freeze from the inside out, burn from the outside in.

Or reverse it, and make cold and heat collide at the same point.

Unleash them in an instant, with extreme contraction and extreme expansion happening at the exact same moment.

What would happen?

The thought cut like lightning through a fog Rihito had never even realized was there.

The uncertainty finally left his eyes, and he murmured to himself:

"Zero Coffin was never fundamentally about freezing or Heat Blast. It's about controlling heat."

"Freezing takes heat away. Heat Blast pours heat in. I've been using two hands to do two things all along, without ever thinking to do both at the same point, at the same time."

With that thought, he raised his right hand.

Satoru Gojo saw the point in the center of Rihito's palm too.

It was something the size of a glass marble, condensed from pure cursed energy.

Inside it, flame and frost intertwined, canceling each other out while feeding each other, spinning unstably with a faint, thin hum.

Rihito's cursed energy was surging toward that point at an astonishing rate, pouring into the tiny vortex and being released from its other side.

As time passed, the humming grew louder and louder.

It spread from a point into a line, and from a line into a patch of vibrating air.

The fallen leaves around Rihito's hand began to tremble, first in tiny hops, then rising from the ground one after another to hang quivering in midair.

"Kakakakaka-" The cursed spirit's shriek pierced the woods.

The dark green core of light in its chest pulsed frantically, and the two clouds of black smoke in its eye sockets flared into two dark green flames.

It had sensed the danger!

In an instant, dirt exploded outward as the cursed spirit charged, its body towering over three meters tall. Every step stamped a basin-sized crater into the ground.

The hard earth collapsed under its feet like wet cardboard. Fallen leaves whipped up in the rushing wind, swirling into a black curtain in the air.

Ten meters away, the glowing core began to pulse, and Rihito's heart clenched sharply.

Eight meters away, his heart clenched again, harder than before.

Six meters away, the massive claw rose, five black nails slicing through the air with a piercing screech.

The next instant, Rihito opened his eyes.

"Zero Coffin: Disintegration!"

The marble-sized sphere flew silently from Rihito's palm.

It was tiny, no bigger than a speck of dust before the cursed spirit's enormous body.

But along its path, a transparent ripple tore through the air. The instant fallen leaves touched its edge, they turned to powder.

Then it struck the cursed spirit's chest, dead center in the pulsing dark green core.

Extreme cold and extreme heat erupted simultaneously, at the same instant, from the same point.

The cursed spirit's chest neither burned nor froze. It simply... disintegrated without a sound.

Its wooden torso, like a stump pulverized from within, silently turned to powder, starting at the core.

The powder was swept into the air currents created by the clashing heat and cold, whirling into a fist-sized hole in the cursed spirit's chest.

Then the hole expanded.

From the size of a fist to a basin, then from a basin to a wheel.

The cursed spirit lowered its head. The two dark green flames in its eye sockets trembled wildly, and the human faces embedded in the grain of its bark all let out piercing wails.

Every sound cut off abruptly.

BOOM!

Its torso snapped apart at the chest. Its upper body toppled backward and slammed into the ground, sending fallen leaves flying.

The remains continued to crumble, powder sifting down like a silent gray snowfall.

Rihito stood where he was, his right hand still held out.

By now, the humming had faded, and the leaves suspended in the air drifted back to the ground one by one.

He slowly drew his hand back and glanced down at his faintly reddened palm. The corners of his mouth rose of their own accord.

"Rihito, what do you think we should call that move?"

Satoru Gojo straightened away from the tree trunk and, with a light hop, landed beside Rihito.

He glanced at the pile of remains on the ground, now crumbling completely to powder, then at Rihito's still-raised right hand, and smiled faintly.

"Zero Coffin: Disintegration!" Rihito repeated.

"Disintegration, huh..." Satoru Gojo rolled the word around in his mouth, his smile deepening.

"Not bad. Pretty cool."