Naobito Zenin's eyes, slightly clouded from years of drinking, had widened so far that their corners almost seemed about to tear.
Everything that had just happened before him had been far too fast-so fast that even his brain, steeped for years in "twenty-four frames per second" and earning him the title of Jujutsu Society's Fastest Sorcerer, experienced a powerful wave of dizziness and disconnection.
From Naoya Zenin losing all reason in his fury, vast cursed energy erupting around him as Projection Sorcery accelerated him to the limit and he charged at you in a blur with his fist raised; to you simply standing there as casually as if strolling through a courtyard, without forming a hand sign, chanting an incantation, or making even a single unnecessary movement, merely changing the physical form of the shadow beneath your feet to turn the darkness supporting Naoya's center of gravity into a bottomless void, exquisitely disrupting the twenty-four-frame trajectory he had rigidly predetermined in his mind; to Naoya suffering the backlash of violating his technique's rules, his entire body brutally reduced in dimension and sealed inside that absurd two-dimensional plane...
Finally came your seemingly light palm strike, which actually contained enough terrifying power to make space tremble. It shattered that plane outright and sent Naoya Zenin himself flying like a battered kite with its string cut, blasting him through the sturdy wooden wall in an utterly humiliating and gruesome fashion before he crashed into the courtyard's dry landscape garden like a dead dog.
The occurrence, progression, and ultimate conclusion of all this had been compressed into a span of less than a single second.
One second.
For an ordinary person, that might have been no more than a heartbeat or the blink of an eye.
But for Naobito Zenin, who had engraved Projection