The intense light gradually faded, but the dust had yet to settle.
Satoru Gojo narrowed his Six Eyes slightly, his gaze piercing the lingering turbulence of energy and locking unblinkingly onto the immense source of cursed energy ahead, which had not diminished in the slightest and still blazed like the sun.
The wounds all over his body rapidly healed with the faint sizzling peculiar to flesh knitting itself back together at high speed. Wisps of thin vapor rose from him, produced by Reverse Cursed Technique and laden with excess positive energy.
Although he had precisely set the technique's direction when releasing it, he had simply been too close.
The two equally matched "Hollow Purples" had collided and interfered with each other, producing an indiscriminate annihilation effect that inevitably caught Gojo himself.
It was the first time in his life that his own signature move had injured him.
"Hollow Purple" truly deserved its reputation as a killing move capable of piercing "Inviolability."
Gojo's automatically operating "Limitless" distance manipulation had indeed failed to fully defend against this peculiar imaginary mass.
As for the subsequent high-temperature, high-pressure detonation wave, powerful enough to reshape the terrain and melt layers of rock, "Inviolability" had completely blocked it.
To him, it was no more than a scorching, dry gust against his face, barely stirring the tips of his silver-white hair.
Meanwhile, deep within the dust, Dio's silhouette slowly emerged like a reef.
His red-and-black pilot jacket had been completely torn apart wherever it had faced "Hollow Purple" head-on, exposing the shirt beneath.
Soft wisps of vapor from high-speed regeneration likewise escaped through the tears in his clothes, though it was difficult to judge the severity of his injuries from the outside.
But through his Six Eyes, Gojo could see:
Dio's skin looked as though it had been instantly scalded by superheated steam. A single layer of skin had peeled evenly from the entire front of his body-and that was all.
That was because, aside from "Six Eyes" and "Paradox Negation," Dio had also temporarily bestowed upon his clothes the protective concept of "Phase-Shift Armor," drawn from science fiction.
Its principle was to use specific damped vibrations in the material's microscopic units to convert the immense kinetic energy of incoming mechanical impacts into heat and disperse it, providing extremely powerful absorption and defense against physical impacts.
Precisely because he was still unaccustomed to the counterintuitive distance manipulation of "Inviolability" within "Limitless," his brain had lacked the time to perform such intricate real-time calculations in that critical moment.
Dio had simply abandoned complex dynamic defenses, instantly cranked the power of "Concept Bestowal" reinforcing himself to its limit, and chosen the most direct approach-tank it!
The annihilation effect caused by the imaginary mass had been forcibly canceled by the concept of "Paradox Negation" and treated as invalid.
The vast majority of the physical impact and kinetic energy from the ensuing explosion had then been completely absorbed and converted by "Phase-Shift Armor," at the cost of its own structure being utterly destroyed and reduced to ash.
In the end, all Dio's body had actually endured was the tremendous residual heat that could not be fully absorbed.
And with his body reinforced to the utmost by cursed energy, he had weathered that damage through sheer toughness.
Although he had been slightly at a disadvantage in that clash of energy, the damage he had actually suffered was lighter!
"Was that your ultimate move?" Dio slowly stretched his body, his torn jacket flapping in the still-raging hot wind.
He spoke with undisguised provocation and eagerness in his voice. "Have you got anything... more powerful?"
Even as he spoke, his body burst into motion without warning, like an electromagnetic cannon.
He drove his right leg hard against the ground and lightly tapped down with his left, neatly bringing both legs together in midair to adjust his center of gravity. Like lightning racing just above the ground, he flashed to Gojo's side with a sharp whoosh.
Dio slammed the five fingers of his left hand into the ground like steel spikes. Pivoting on his left foot, he carried the rotation of his entire body into his right leg, turning it into a blur almost too fast to see as it swept viciously at Gojo's legs with an air-rending shriek.
Gojo reacted like lightning. His hips tucked inward, his knees braced outward, and his center of gravity sank slightly. As though his feet had taken root in the earth, he firmly withstood the devastating sweep.
Dio's assault surged on without pause.
Pivoting through his waist and hips, he sharply contracted his abdomen and twisted, alternately slapping his hands against the ground before pushing off hard.
His entire body curled like a bow with the momentum, his legs drawing sharply inward as he gathered power to the utmost, like a spring compressed to its breaking point.
Then, with a crisp crack of sinew and bone, Dio's legs shot out with thunderous force!
At almost the same instant, his right hand had already curled slightly into a claw and darted toward Dio's still-extended ankle like a venomous snake flicking its tongue.
Dio had anticipated it. Using the recoil from his kick, he abruptly tightened his core muscles like steel cables and exerted himself.
His body traced a smooth backward arc through the air, flipping 270 degrees like an agile swift before both feet landed lightly and steadily on the ground, barely stirring any dust.
Seizing the instant when Dio had just landed and his balance had yet to settle, Gojo, who had gained the initiative through his successful counter, drove both feet against the ground without hesitation. He shot forward like an arrow loosed from a bow, already beginning a low, rapid chant:
"Phase."
He first feinted a hard rush to the right. The instant his Six Eyes precisely caught Dio turning sideways and drawing his left foot slightly back, he changed direction to the left and threw a probing feint with his left jab.
"Paramita."
Dio likewise saw through the trajectory of Gojo's movements with the predictive ability of "Six Eyes."
He raised his right hand into a standard boxing guard and swept it outward with apparent nonchalance, easily brushing aside the weak feint. Then his left arm snapped out, his jab lunging straight at Gojo's face like a venomous dragon bursting from its lair.
Gojo instantly drew his left arm inward to his chest, turning his palm outward just in time to cover the vital points of his face.
Following his forward momentum, his entire body smoothly tilted to the left, narrowly evading the lightning-fast jab. He was almost reclining at a 45-degree angle to the ground, yet his center of gravity remained eerily balanced.
And his right hand, which had remained hidden at his side, poised to strike, now slipped quietly upward from below-
A red orb of cursed energy radiating ominous fluctuations rapidly coalesced at Gojo's fingertips, driving straight toward Dio's seemingly unguarded abdomen!
"Pillar of Light!"
It was not that Dio had failed to notice.
"Red" was a Cursed Technique Reversal and required an infusion of reversed, positive energy.
The instant the nature of Gojo's cursed energy changed, Six Eyes had already conveyed the information clearly and unmistakably to his mind: his opponent was about to release "Red" by defining a positively infinite distance.
In that split second, an almost mad idea cleaved through Dio's racing thoughts like a bolt of white-hot lightning:
Tank this hit with conceptual defense and cursed energy reinforcement, then blast Gojo into the earth, arrogance and all!
It was already too late to pull his left hand back to block. A vicious glint flashed in Dio's eyes. Rather than retreat, he leaned forward into the destructive red light about to erupt and brazenly swung his right fist!
"I told you, I negate para-"
But "Red" erupted early!
A straight blast of red air burst forth like a pillar of destructive light. The terrifying impact spread forward in a cone, violently launching Dio hundreds of meters into the air!
"Oh? Ohhh!"
It was established that Dio could negate "Hollow Purple," which was itself a "paradox."
But when the converged and diverged "Limitless" met empty space, the pure shock wave generated by "Red"-this tangible momentum that had already been released-might very well fall outside the scope of a "paradox"!
Through bold hypothesis and careful verification, Gojo had seized this fleeting theoretical flaw with his genius combat intuition!
"Nine Outlines, Polarization, Black and White Declaration, Between Surface and Core—Hollow Purple!"
He cupped his hands together at his waist and briefly gathered power. While Dio hung momentarily stunned in the air from the hit, he finished the lengthy incantation in a single second, like divine words spoken at high speed, and unleashed a fully chanted "Hollow Purple" once more!
Through Gojo's exquisitely fine cursed energy control, which could only be called an art, the dangerously fluctuating, highly unstable purple-black sphere of imaginary mass did not strike Dio himself. Instead, it was precisely detonated ahead of time in the air before him!
To bypass the conceptual defense of "Paradox Negation," he had deliberately unleashed an unrestricted "Hollow Purple" without setting its direction, catching even himself within it!
The detonation wave roared like a colossal god beating a drum, shaking the entire forest once again.
The blinding light of annihilation and the raging shock wave instantly swallowed Gojo's position completely.
Beneath his feet, the ground fractured inch by inch under the irresistible rampage of energy, disintegrating and collapsing downward.
When the dust that blotted out the sky slowly dispersed once more, Dio appeared beyond the blast radius looking somewhat battered, dense vapor from Reverse Cursed Technique rising from his entire body.
His striking outfit, so distinctly styled after mecha combat gear, was now almost completely destroyed.
His jacket had long since turned to ash in the energy maelstrom. Even the specially made shirt beneath it had been torn to shreds, barely hanging from his body like a ruined battle flag.
Only the red, single-horned helmet remained firmly secured to his head, reflecting a dim, stubborn gleam amid the drifting dust.
He had not relied on the already-defunct "Phase-Shift Armor." Instead, he had used refined martial footwork and body control to continually adjust his posture in midair and dissipate as much force as possible, while accelerating away from the epicenter with the concept of "Three Times Faster with Red Horns." Through sheer toughness, he had weathered this point-blank explosion-an impact even greater than the last!
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