Unrestricted imaginary mass instantly swept everything nearby into a vortex of annihilation.
The enormous "meteor" of earth and timber abruptly vanished from sight as though rubbed out by an eraser, leaving not even wreckage behind.
Immediately afterward, the detonation wave became a visible, blazing-white torrent, roaring across the entire sky and swallowing both figures once more in the destructive glare.
In the instant the blast winds raged, Dio had a flash of inspiration.
Rather than retreat or defend, he temporarily bestowed upon himself the concept of "no smoke, no damage," so common in film and television. Drawing on the extreme mobility granted by "three times faster with red horns," he surged forward, attempting to force his way through the heart of the explosion!
But concepts could not be stacked without limit.
To reduce potential conflicts and overload between different concepts, Dio chose something other than himself as the next target.
Despite the tearing agony in his brain, blood seeping faintly from his eyes, ears, nose, and mouth, and a soul that seemed to tremble under the strain, he simultaneously maintained the four concepts of "Six Eyes," "Paradox negation," "Three times faster with red horns," and "no smoke, no damage," bestowing a fifth upon the weapon he had yet to use!
An eerie, fathomless glow abruptly rippled across the Soul Liberation Blade, and its edge gave a delighted hum.
Concept bestowed-cursed energy defense negation!
A martial artist for the sheer enjoyment of it, Dio finally, for the first time in this battle at the pinnacle, truly took up his blade!
Distance manipulation activated.
Leaving a slowly fading afterimage behind, Dio tore through the explosion's flames and smoke, instantly closing on Satoru Gojo as he adjusted his posture amid the blast winds.
His waist twisted violently like a taut bowstring. Power rose from the soles of his feet, traveled through his spine, and poured entirely into his right arm.
The blade's direction aligned perfectly with that irresistible force, effortlessly cleaving the dense, turbulent air as though slicing through flowing water.
A vicious flash of steel slashed diagonally upward from the lower left, tracing a deadly arc through the gloom!
Satoru Gojo's Six Eyes had already warned him. Instinctively, he compressed an immense volume of cursed energy into his right arm, intending to block with cursed energy reinforcement.
Yet-
Like a hot knife through butter.
That concentrated cursed energy defense, strong enough to withstand a nuclear blast wave, might as well not have existed before this slash.
Satoru Gojo's right arm was severed in a single stroke!
Blood mingled with severed cursed energy, splashing a gruesomely beautiful trail through the air.
As agony struck, Satoru Gojo's combat instincts immediately kicked in. He leaned back in a tactical maneuver, intending to activate distance manipulation and pull away.
But Dio was already pressing his advantage.
Following his body's existing clockwise rotation, he raised his left leg like a battle-axe and drove his heel toward Satoru Gojo's head, now difficult to protect with his arm severed!
Bone cracked sharply under the crushing pressure.
With his stance completely broken, Satoru Gojo failed to block this time. The vicious flying kick slammed into the side of his face, sending blood spilling from his mouth and nose as his body flew backward once more like a kite with its string cut!
The burden of maintaining five concepts at once was simply too great, preventing him from fully concentrating the power of that kick.
Had "cursed energy defense negation" been applied directly to the kick, it would have been enough to deform Satoru Gojo's skull and grievously wound him on the spot!
Enduring the skull-splitting agony and soul-deep dizziness, Dio activated distance manipulation again, overtaking Satoru Gojo as he flew backward. Reverse cursed technique had already begun rapidly regenerating Gojo's right arm, and Dio closed in to deliver the decisive slash.
The blade flashed again, descending straight toward his head-
But it missed!
In the instant before the blade touched him, the icy-blue light in Satoru Gojo's Six Eyes blazed brighter than ever!
He completely released his acceleration limits!
Rather than flee in a straight line, Satoru Gojo instantly became a blurred phantom and began accelerating in frenzied, irregular circles around Dio!
One circuit, two, ten, a hundred...
In an instant, his speed left the sound barrier far behind, reaching tens, then hundreds of times the speed of sound-and still climbing wildly!
It continued rising until it reached the godlike speed of Mach one thousand!
The atmosphere was mercilessly torn apart, and space itself hummed as though unable to bear the strain.
Satoru Gojo's body traced overlapping, intertwining spiral clouds of sonic booms through the air, their paths warped and blurred by his excessive speed.
The intense heat generated by friction with the air made his entire body begin to "burn," radiating a blinding light. A long, magnificent trail of high-temperature plasma streamed behind him, like a falling star from myth!
Dio's Six Eyes were not innate, after all. Naturally, he had yet to grow accustomed to the immense torrent of information pouring in without pause.
Now, confronted with Satoru Gojo's utterly absurd high-speed circling, Dio's sight and perception were instantly drowned in countless overlapping afterimages, raging energy turbulence, and dazzling plasma radiance.
For a moment, this "cage" of pure speed left him dizzy and caught off guard, robbing him of his lock on Satoru Gojo's true body!
To an ordinary person, three seconds were no more than a single breath.
To Satoru Gojo and Dio at that moment, they were as long as a century.
Within those three seconds, Satoru Gojo regenerated his right arm through the full-power output of reverse cursed technique. Though he had not completely returned to peak condition, it no longer hindered his ability to fight.
Then he abandoned every flashy trick and every complex application of his cursed technique. He pushed Blue's attraction-based acceleration to the utmost limit his body could withstand, pouring all his seething fighting spirit and cursed energy into a single, primal, violent collision!
This was no longer movement, but a "fall."
Satoru Gojo hurtled down toward Dio like a true meteor from beyond the heavens!
The air molecules ahead of him did not even have time to be "pushed aside."
Before this unimaginable speed, they were directly "crushed," atomic nuclei violently colliding with one another in an instant.
Along Satoru Gojo's path, before his body even struck Dio, the air had already been compressed into "relativistic plasma" at temperatures of millions of degrees, producing an immensely powerful "X-ray burst"!
At the "instant" this humanoid "meteor" made contact with Dio, the terrifying energy that had been accumulating, "pushed along" all the while, suddenly lost its restraint and erupted completely at a single point.
A miniature sun was born between them out of nothing.
The light was so fierce, so pure, that it stripped everything in sight of color and shape.
For dozens of kilometers, everything beneath heaven was mercilessly "bleached" by that instantaneous flash, as though time itself had frozen in the intense light.
Under the sweep of this impossibly hot radiation, the vast forest below was not "ignited." Instead, immense swaths were directly "carbonized" and "vaporized," becoming churning ash and flame before the detonation wave even reached them. A sea of fire sprang into existence, devouring the horizon.
Dust, rock fragments, and vaporized matter spread and rose wildly, as though kneaded by an invisible giant hand. Amid the soaring flames and pillars of smoke, they began to gather into the vague shape of a mushroom cloud!
The aftershocks of the collision had yet to fade, but their control over distance through Limitless had already been interrupted by their devastating injuries.
High in the air, two charred, broken figures fell straight out of the roiling smoke like birds with shattered wings, crashing heavily onto scorched earth littered with glass and lava.
Their eyes had already sublimated and vanished in the simulated solar storm of millions of degrees, leaving only two blackened, hollow sockets each.
Every bone in their bodies had been pulverized. The flesh on their surfaces was utterly charred, peeling away or missing entirely. Like two ruined bodies freshly dragged from the furnaces of hell, they lay on the brink of death, their vital signs nearly extinguished.
Yet there, at the edge of death, reverse cursed technique began operating furiously at an extreme output beyond any previous record, carrying out a brutal regeneration!
Across the two "skeletons" draped in charred flesh, bones reassembled from fragments. Networks of nerves and blood vessels wove themselves out of nothing, muscle fibers writhed and grew like living creatures, and skin covered the newborn flesh at a visible speed.
The structures of their bodies were materializing from nothing, defying the laws of physics!
As their newborn eyeballs formed again in their sockets and the outlines of pupils returned, they saw one another through the drifting smoke and rising steam of regeneration-equally wretched, yet stubbornly reborn.
Then, in unison, the two ruined bodies, still undergoing violent repair, pulled at their newly grown facial muscles and revealed twisted smiles filled with admiration and utter exhilaration!
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