When the twenty-fourth barrier shattered, Yaha changed tactics.
Wide-area grid slashes consumed too much cursed energy. Spreading Cursed Technique Eight once consumed three percent of his current vessel's capacity. Twenty-three slashes meant sixty-nine percentage points of peak output. His right hand was already completely ruined. The snap his left wrist's tendons had made on the twenty-third slash hadn't been a warning. It had been a notification.
If he kept hacking away like this, he would collapse before reaching that tatami room.
Yaha pulled up short.
He stood amid the wreckage of the twenty-fourth barrier, surrounded by cut surfaces still shedding spatial particles. Fragments churned beneath his feet. The dark purple castle writhed like a wounded living creature, trying to heal, but the lingering force of the laws pinned every severed edge in place.
He rotated his left wrist once. With a click, the bones slid back into place.
It hurt. It didn't matter.
He changed Cursed Technique Eight from "surface spread" to "blade coating."
Instead of swinging his blade to release a grid, he compressed every pattern of the laws onto the blade's three-millimeter cutting surface. The density increased fortyfold, while its range narrowed to a single line.
One slash would no longer cut through a wall.
It would cut through everything blocking his path for five hundred meters ahead.
Yaha stepped forward. The blade in his left hand swept horizontally from behind his right side to the front of his left, a motion so simple it had only two frames: the start and the finish.
The blade swept through.
For five hundred meters ahead, the corridors, walls, floors, ceilings, and every structure perpendicular to the blade's path slid neatly apart down the middle. The upper halves floated half an inch upward. The lower halves sank half an inch downward.