Everyone stared in disbelief at the burning figure. The scorching waves of heat and blazing light stood out starkly against the winter night.
"Impossible!"
Jogo cried out, staring incredulously at Kamo Xu as cursed energy gathered around him again within the flames.
Had this guy actually withstood his cursed technique and clung to life amid the still-burning inferno?
No, his vital functions hadn't been damaged at all!
"It's [Reverse Cursed Technique]!"
Hanami had the keenest senses and watched Kamo Xu's body repeatedly burn and regenerate in the flames. He even slowly raised a hand within the blaze, extending his index finger toward the ground.
"[Calamity Barrier]..."
The words rang out from the flames like the tolling of a heavy bell.
With every word he uttered, his surging cursed energy rose another notch.
Jogo was alarmed. This guy was chanting incantations!
"Stop him!" he roared, immediately bringing his hands together. A fireball formed between them. This was his strongest move, and once fully condensed, it could become even more powerful than his Maximum Technique.
The completed fireball instantly erupted with searing flames, hurtling straight toward the still-burning Kamo Xu!
(The cursed technique he used when clashing with Sukuna's Open.)
"[Mound Channel]..."
Hanami likewise stopped holding back and tore away the white cloth stitched onto its body, exposing its pitch-black arm and the vivid, bewitching red flower perched on its shoulder.
A strange flower bud sprouted behind it, its roots thrusting outward like flailing tentacles. Inside the bud were bizarre seeds bearing fangs.
But those seeds were anything but ordinary. The flow of cursed energy alone revealed their sinister nature: they grew by feeding on cursed energy!
Hanami intended to drain Kamo Xu's cursed energy and thereby weaken his attack!
(See Hanami's invasion during the Kyoto Sister-School Goodwill Event.)
"[Between Blood and Flesh]..."
"Multiple Souls: Body Extraction!" Mahito had far fewer means of unleashing raw power. Even his strongest killing move, Idle Transfiguration, couldn't completely eradicate the soul parasitizing his own body.
He could only knead together two-thirds of all his current transfigured humans and spit them out at once!
Countless spikes covered in distorted human faces spewed from the cursed spirit's mouth, howling as they hurtled toward Kamo Xu.
The attack combined the physical strength of over a hundred people, forcibly fusing every soul together regardless of how strongly or weakly they rejected one another.
The resulting distortion made the attack extremely unstable. In his desperation, Mahito had chosen what amounted to a gamble.
Although most of the souls died on the spot, the attack still launched successfully!
And so... blazing fire, cursed-energy-devouring seeds, and spikes all surged toward Kamo Xu while he was still gathering cursed energy.
If he took this barrage head-on, even running Reverse Cursed Technique at full capacity might not let him escape unscathed!
But Incantation's chanting...
Had ended.
"[Heart's Deficiency]!"
Light shone from Kamo Xu's hand, pale blue and dazzling, like a lustrous piece of jade.
That light pierced the orange-red flames and shone into everyone's hearts.
200% cursed energy output, at maximum power...
"[Maximum Technique-Red Emperor Blue Star]!"
The jade left his finger and slowly dropped toward the ground beneath everyone's terrified gazes.
Before any of the attacks could arrive...
The night sky lit up completely!
Like a sun rising from the ground, it instantly swept away all the darkness.
The illusory mass of energy formed from countless layers of churning, compressed blood ruptured on the spot, hotter than flames, mightier than the stars, and more dazzling than moonlight!
Everything fell utterly silent.
The three special grade cursed spirits turned and fled, but the attack's range was absurdly vast. Like melting snow, the surrounding buildings turned to ash the instant the heat wave touched them.
A hundred meters...
The light engulfed a hundred-meter stretch of Jujutsu High, even alerting Satoru Gojo, who was fooling around with the students on the far side of the school.
He saw the light and felt the wave of cursed energy rushing toward him.
Satoru Gojo was instantly startled. Without sparing another thought for the students, he left the mess behind and swiftly headed toward the center of the attack.
The light faded, and sound gradually returned.
Dust and debris pattered against the ground, but the worst of it was the explosion's roar, which had left their ears aching.
For a while, they couldn't make out any sounds at all...
Amid the ruins, Kenjaku pushed aside the collapsed wall that had pinned him down. The thing had actually saved his life.
His mouth had mostly recovered through Reverse Cursed Technique. Holding his jaw and barely managing to open and close it, he climbed to his feet and looked around...
"Is he even human?"
The surroundings were empty.
Empty in the truest sense of the word...
Everything within a hundred-meter diameter had been instantly vaporized. Aside from rocks and loose soil, all organic matter and wood had been reduced to scorched earth.
Kamo Xu stood at the very center of the explosion, having taken his own ultimate attack head-on.
The fire was out, and half his body had been blown away too.
He had hurt himself almost as badly as his enemies...
Kenjaku's heart gradually sank. He hadn't expected that, aside from Satoru Gojo, the man before him would also pose a threat he couldn't afford to underestimate.
Among the cursed spirits, apart from Mahito, who was immune to physical damage, only the similarly fire-aligned Jogo was still in passable condition.
Even so, his left arm and right leg had been completely vaporized, reduced to char.
And that was only because he had already started running!
If he hadn't run and had instead faced that Maximum Technique head-on, who knew what would have happened to him!
Hanami, by contrast, was already unconscious.
The slowest of them, it had lost its entire lower body to ash, and even its remaining flesh bore the marks of intense burns.
It had still been in midair while fleeing. Now, with the attack over, it was blasted away and crashed to the ground, landing in a sorry heap amid the dust.
It even rolled several times before coming to a stop!
Mahito darted out and grabbed Hanami's mangled remains. At the same time, he turned his other hand into a long whip. Without caring whether Jogo liked it or not, he lashed it out, wrapped it around Jogo's neck, and dragged him away.
He could stay behind and wear Kamo Xu down himself, but the other two couldn't withstand this monster.
He made the decision immediately, fleeing while Kamo Xu was still healing his grievous wounds.
Meanwhile, an octopus-shaped cursed spirit quietly emerged from the ground, stuffed Suguru Geto's mangled body into its mouth, then burrowed back underground and escaped.
Kamo Xu's attention was entirely on Mahito. Fury rose in him when he saw Mahito trying to escape, and he drove his Reverse Cursed Technique at full power, prioritizing the parts that affected his movement.
But he had barely taken two running steps when a small box of flesh and blood suddenly blocked his path...
Kenjaku had thrown it. It looked like an oversized die, except its pips weren't the familiar red dots Kamo Xu knew.
Instead, they were eyes arranged in neat rows?
Kenjaku had used the Prison Realm ahead of time!
The instant the Prison Realm hit the ground, it split into four cubes, their separated sections still connected by strands of flesh and skin. Most unsettling of all was the eye growing on that skin, which was as thin as a cicada's wing.
The eye was opened impossibly wide. A closer look revealed that four iron hooks had forcibly stretched it open. Bloodshot and shedding bloody tears, it stared fixedly at Kamo Xu.
Once this thing locked onto a target, it would seal them without fail if they remained within its sight for a certain length of time!
Together with space and time, they would be completely sealed inside that tiny die.
Kenjaku had no time to bother with the box either. He threw it and ran.
What a joke. He could leave Satoru Gojo unsealed, but if he died here, he wouldn't even have a chance to carry out his plan!
Now Kamo Xu found himself in a bind instead. The thing before him was like a schoolmate who hated him holding a shit-covered mop in his face: he could neither step forward to hit him nor retreat and leave.
In the end, he gritted his teeth hard and had no choice but to back away...
Before you continue