Maximum Technique: The Namers of All Things

Two months earlier, when Dio had heard Suguru Geto explain the intricacies of Satoru Gojo's Cursed Technique, he had already decided to add it to his Copy list-the techniques of the four modern Special Grades were bound to have something extraordinary about them.

With three memory slots still free, copying these top-tier abilities was a winning investment no matter how he looked at it.

And now, he held this space-controlling technique, a power that practically amounted to cheating, in his hands.

Reality proved that Geto's warning had been right on the mark: merely copying a technique's "form" and "name" meant nothing.

With less than three months of experience in the cursed energy system, Dio's precision and skill at manipulating cursed energy made mastering a power as intricate, complex, and profoundly counterintuitive as Limitless like asking a child who had just learned to hold a pen to decipher the equations of relativity.

But that was fine!

The foundation for Copy was already in place. "Understanding" and "control" were only a matter of time. Dio had never feared tackling intricate problems, just as he had never doubted that he would eventually reach the summit.

Besides, who said he couldn't use it right now?

"Not necessarily!"

Dio spoke to the Geto in his memories, and eyes identical to Gojo's Six Eyes suddenly manifested in his own!

With Concept Bestowal: Maximum Technique: The Namers of All Things, the range of valid targets had expanded. As long as he had seen an ability with his own eyes, he could bestow its concept upon the corresponding organ by "naming" it!

This state should have demanded a terrifying amount of cursed energy, but the supernatural power of the Six Eyes themselves could raise cursed energy efficiency to a theoretical limit of nearly one hundred percent.

As a result, despite still being a beginner at fine cursed energy manipulation, Dio could use The Namers of All Things to bestow the concept of the Six Eyes upon himself without unexpectedly crippling his combat endurance.

At maximum cursed energy output, Dio had originally been able to sustain roughly thirty minutes of intense combat.

After activating the concept of the Six Eyes, he could still maintain full output for ten whole minutes-and during that time, his combat power increased by far more than double!

The only real constraint was that, while the Six Eyes were active, his brain had to process a surging torrent of complex information every instant. It was as though he had voluntarily subjected himself to a weakened version of Unlimited Void, enduring a constant, intense mental burden.

If he could overcome or even adapt to this information overload, the duration of his Six Eyes mode might extend to twenty minutes.

As Dio copied his ocular ability, Gojo moved.

He held his loosely curled left hand beside his face and extended his right arm forward, palm up. His ring and little fingers pointed ahead, while his thumb, index finger, and middle finger came together, then-flicked apart!

"Hollow Purple!"

Gojo compressed the chant to the utmost, narrowing the attack's range to its absolute limit in exchange for a charge and firing speed with virtually no windup!

The forward rotation of Blue and the reversal of Red-the red and blue masses of cursed energy-fused and collapsed in an instant, making two concepts that represented infinity collide.

This generated imaginary mass, forming a purple sphere half a person's height that radiated ominous fluctuations, before firing it as a projectile of destruction!

In theory, this strike could pierce any defense constructed from physical matter!

But faced with the attack, Dio merely raised his right hand and pressed it against the purple sphere. After touching him, Hollow Purple gradually dissipated, as though the world itself were rejecting it.

Finally, Dio raised his right arm, pointed at the annihilated hole in his sleeve, and said:

"Unfortunately, that probing attack of yours didn't even leave a wound. Were you gently stroking me? What a waste of a sleeve."

"How did you do that?" Gojo's pupils contracted slightly. There was more curiosity than shock in his voice.

"To defend against spatial attacks like this, simple Absolute Defense is meaningless. Even if it could be achieved, the cost would be enormous.

"A defense specifically targeting spatial abilities would be more precise, but still costly. So-"

Dio raised a finger and lightly tapped the center of his forehead.

"I bestowed the concept of Paradox Negation upon myself.

"Paradoxes don't exist in a world governed by ordinary logic, so this concept not only costs very little, but also has an absurdly high priority!"

After he finished revealing his technique, the cursed energy cost of Concept Bestowal dropped further.

The complex concepts of the Six Eyes and Paradox Negation, which had originally required fine control and careful cursed energy allocation to maintain, could now be sustained more steadily and for longer.

The cursed energy he "saved" did not vanish into thin air. Instead, it became a reserve he could draw upon flexibly.

In other words, the total effective cursed energy Dio could now devote to combat had genuinely increased.

This was not a simple inflation of his cursed energy reserves, but a subtler liberation of power brought about by a deeper understanding of his technique.

It was like a craftsman who, having learned every property of his tools, could produce better work with less effort.

"To think a technique like Concept Bestowal exists..." Gojo murmured. "It counters Limitless."

"The surprises don't end there, you know. Now I can do this, too."

Polarized red and blue spheres of cursed energy gathered in Dio's palm as well.

"Even Geto figured it out. Haven't you noticed? This is unconditional Copy!"

By revealing his technique once again, he strengthened Copy's effects as well.

Imaginary mass condensed in his hand.

Yet ultimately, Dio failed to perfectly control the fusion of Blue and Red's violent, mutually repelling forces.

As soon as the two forms of cursed energy, utterly opposite in nature, began to mix, they spiraled completely out of control like a derailed train.

Like the annihilation triggered when matter touched antimatter, they failed to reach that delicate, dangerous point of equilibrium upon colliding. Instead, midway through fusion, they detonated prematurely and violently!

As a result, the half-finished Hollow Purple did not condense into the destructive, directed torrent he had envisioned. Instead, it "grew" outward crookedly and without direction, like a malformed tumor!

The sudden eruption of imaginary mass was like the gaping maw of an invisible beast, indiscriminately devouring and erasing all matter within twenty or thirty meters, leaving behind a huge, irregular ellipsoidal crater.

At the heart of the explosion, Dio used the conceptual defense of Paradox Negation to forcibly suppress and cancel out more than ninety-nine percent of the destructive energy released by the runaway burst.

Without that concept protecting him, his own mistake would probably have left him badly injured.

"Tch. It really is hard."

"Honestly, the fact that you barely managed to reach the stage of fusing Hollow Purple is surprising enough." Gojo applauded in praise.

Dio looked up, light shifting through his Six Eyes. "Here's something even more surprising-after seeing it with my own eyes and failing once in practice, I think I understand."

Gojo raised both hands level, his incantation flowing like a hymn.

"Nine Outlines. Polarization. Black and White Declaration. Between Surface and Core-Hollow Purple!"

Full chant, maximum power!

"Nine Outlines. Polarization. Black and White Declaration. Between Surface and Core-Hollow Purple!"

At the same time, like Kakashi in his first battle against Zabuza, Dio mirrored Gojo's chant, movements, and cursed energy flow.

The two imaginary-mass projectiles collided in midair, canceling each other out. The collision point shifted ten meters toward Dio, and each blossomed into a sphere of annihilating light a hundred meters across-

The spheres immediately expanded, and a terrifying explosion with a six-hundred-meter radius erupted!

Impacts and explosions involving cursed energy generally did not involve chemical reactions, except for thermobaric attacks like Sukuna's Furnace. Their initiation process was a shock-to-detonation transition, or SDT.

The detonation wave propagated through a medium already struck by cursed energy, forming an overdriven detonation. Its wavefront caught up to the initial shock wave and developed into a steady detonation.

The higher the cursed energy's grade, the stronger the impact and the faster the detonation wave, enough to disregard matter's physical limits and drive the impact's power toward its theoretical peak.

For wielders of anomalous cursed energy like Gojo and Dio, the detonation waves triggered by their cursed energy impacts traveled through air at nearly ten thousand meters per second, surpassing even the detonation velocity of high explosives!

Within the blast zone, raging energy swallowed everything in an instant.

Thick trees were uprooted, torn and twisted by an invisible, immense force, and finally reduced to carbonized fragments and dust that sprayed across the sky.

The earth shook violently. Soil and rock melted under unimaginable heat and pressure, then recrystallized as they rapidly cooled after the shock passed.

Through the roiling smoke, dust, and heat, an enormous glassy crater floor emerged in all its grim violence. Radial tears spread along its edges, like a fresh, brutal scar across the earth.

The Curtain barely holding three hundred meters away burst like a fragile soap bubble. Even though the spectators at the barrier's edge had prepared themselves, the terrifying remnants of the detonation still hurled them away.

Had they not been more than half the blast radius from its center, where they endured less than one percent of its power, the shock wave would probably have severely injured them.

If the two combatants unleashed this move in a city, it would be enough to flatten an entire neighborhood in an instant, wouldn't it? The gap between Special Grade and Grade One was even greater than the gap between Grade One and a Non-Sorcerer!