You Guys Carry On, I Won't Bother You. I'll Be Going Now!

After putting on the Cursed Tool gauntlet, Yuta Okkotsu slowly raised his head:

"All right... let's begin!"

As his words fell, the Shikigami Rika soared into the air and lunged at Takako Uro, who was hovering overhead.

"Don't underestimate me!" Uro grabbed the space around her with both hands and was about to counterattack. Then, in the shadow cast by Rika, she saw something appear at the corners of Okkotsu's mouth and on his tongue...

"Don't move!"

The words, carrying surging cursed energy, crashed into her mind. Her body instantly went rigid, and she could no longer maintain her Cursed Technique. She plunged straight toward the ground.

I can't move! Snake eyes and fangs... damn it, Cursed Speech!

The next moment, Okkotsu and Rika's fists rained down on her.

Unable to move or fight back, Uro could only do her best to channel cursed energy to reinforce her body's defenses and avoid being beaten to death.

"Hey, hey, Okkotsu!" Ryu Ishigori jumped down from the high wall, cursed energy surging through the "cannon barrel" on his head, and leaped into the fight. "You're just too sweet!"

With that, he fired a cursed energy blast, forcibly interrupting Okkotsu's assault on Uro.

"Rika!" Okkotsu seized the opportunity and called for Rika. She instantly understood and flung him toward Ishigori.

"Bring it on!" Ishigori fired again.

Okkotsu neither dodged nor evaded. He poured cursed energy into his Cursed Tool gauntlet and smashed through the blast. Without losing momentum, he drove a heavy punch into Ishigori's chest, knocking him back more than ten meters.

"What a tough Cursed Tool!" Ishigori leaped high into the air before Okkotsu could follow up, escaping just in time. "That was close!"

By then, Takako Uro had also recovered from the Cursed Speech's control.

She grabbed the space at ground level with both hands and gave it a violent heave:

"Don't celebrate too soon!"

"Waves" immediately rolled across the ground, flinging everything nearby that wasn't fixed in place into the air. Even the surrounding apartment buildings surged up and down with the waves.

"Awesome!" Watching from a rooftop over two hundred meters away, Shiratori Gotsu was absolutely thrilled.

He had only arrived about a minute ago.

"I can't believe I got here just in time to start watching from this part. It's a feeling I could never get from reading the manga before I transmigrated. This is so awesome!"

"Now, even if I die, I'll have gotten my money's worth!" Shiratori Gotsu's bloodthirsty spectator persona was kicking in, and he was already beside himself with excitement.

The battlefield below descended into chaos for a time.

After Uro used Sky Manipulation to reflect Ishigori's cursed energy blast and send him flying, Okkotsu changed targets again and joined Rika in attacking Uro.

But whatever attack they used, Uro could deflect it by twisting space, preventing it from landing effectively.

Rika threw a heavy punch, only for Uro to deflect it with warped space, sending Okkotsu flying.

Rika froze for a moment, then her expression visibly turned ferocious. "You... unforgivable!"

A storm of fists came at Uro in an instant. Unable to dodge in time, she was caught by the left leg, slammed hard into the ground, then violently flung almost a hundred meters away.

Even after throwing her, Rika refused to let up and flew after her again.

After glancing at what was happening with Rika, Okkotsu quickly got to his feet and resumed fighting Ishigori.

The battle grew fiercer and fiercer.

Just then, with a bang, Rika was slammed into the ground between Okkotsu and Ishigori.

As the dust cleared, both men looked up at the sky.

Everything was warped.

Uro hovered in the air, gripping a corner of the sky with both hands and pulling with all her strength, pushing Sky Manipulation to its limit.

"Haah...!"

With a sharp crack like shattering glass, spiderweb-like fractures spread through the space above the battlefield.

At the center of the "web" were Takako Uro's hands.

"Thin Ice Breaker!"

The impact produced an earth-shaking boom. Even Shiratori Gotsu, watching from a rooftop two hundred meters away, felt the ground tremble.

The ground in the center of the parking lot caved in instantly, and Okkotsu and Ishigori were both crushed to the ground.

Dust rose, blanketing the entire parking lot.

Uro landed on the railing at the edge of the neighboring building's roof and looked down at the dust, undisguised disgust and anger on her face.

The Sun, Moon, and Stars Squad, an assassination unit directly under the Fujiwara clan.

Putting duty before self, living in the shadows, not even allowed to have a name...

But those people gave me a name and made me take their place on death row, taking the blame for his crime of slaughtering his own kin...

Yuta Okkotsu burst through the dust and charged at Takako Uro again.

"Tch..." Takako Uro stared at Yuta Okkotsu's face, the anger in her heart reaching its peak. "Fujiwara...!"

"My appetite's still going strong!" Ryu Ishigori also climbed out of the crater right after Okkotsu and attacked Rika head-on. "Let's keep eating, mouthful after mouthful!"

"This scene..." Shiratori Gotsu suddenly realized how far the battle had progressed. "That means, that's coming...!"

"I don't know what my ancestors did to you..." Yuta Okkotsu responded to Takako Uro's fury. "But if a person only ever lives for themselves, they'll eventually reach their limit..."

"Shut up!" Uro grabbed the space around her with both hands. "'You have to live for others,' 'you don't need to stand on your own'..."

"The people who can say things like that without shame are always the ones who are already standing on their own!"

Bang! Ishigori broke through the floor and arrived on the building's rooftop as well.

He blasted Rika away, then landed not far from the other two and raised his right arm to pound his chest.

Surging cursed energy began to stir...

"Here it comes!" Shiratori Gotsu rubbed his hands together on the rooftop over two hundred meters away, his excitement written all over his face.

"I'm sick of all this endless chatter!" Ishigori looked at Uro and Okkotsu. "Now that things have come this far..."

"Let's stop trying to settle this with words!"

Sensing the cursed energy surging from Ishigori, Okkotsu and Uro both raised their hands to form seals-

"Domain Expansion!"

"Domain Expansion!"

"Domain Expansion!"

"Gwah! This is what I came to see!"

The pitch-black barriers of the three domains intertwined, and as Shiratori Gotsu's excitement reached its peak, a glimmer flashed through his mind.

Perhaps he was driven by the widely circulated line from his previous life: "Watching this makes me want to jump in and use Domain Expansion too." At that moment, Shiratori Gotsu desperately wished he could expand a domain of his own.

He keenly sensed that this might be his opportunity to master Domain Expansion.

If he could just experience the structure of a domain up close...

Without the slightest hesitation, Shiratori Gotsu set off for the battlefield as fast as he could.

Meanwhile, the modern black demon Kurourushi... was flying through the barrier.

"I like the taste of iron!"

Long before Shiratori Gotsu exorcised him, Kurourushi had already completed parthenogenesis.

Though Kurourushi the player had died, Kurourushi the Cursed Spirit was still alive and well.

He charged toward the barrier where the three domains intertwined, accompanied by a sky-filling swarm of cockroaches.

Just then, a javelin glowing white with Reverse Cursed Technique tore through the air.

"Coming through, you're in the way!"

A familiar javelin, a familiar Kurourushi, a familiar headshot.

Kurourushi had once again been impaled and blown apart by Shiratori Gotsu.

With Kurourushi's death, the sky-filling swarm of Shikigami cockroaches also crumbled into dust and dispersed.

"I can't let someone I've already beaten ruin this for me." Shiratori Gotsu picked up the javelin Cursed Tool, which had already exhausted its uses for the day, and turned to look at the enormous spherical domain barrier before him.

He slowly raised a hand and placed it against the barrier's outer wall, carefully sensing the structure of the cursed energy circuits within.

"I see... I think I'm starting to understand how a domain is constructed. In that case..." Shiratori Gotsu withdrew his hand and studied the enormous spherical barrier again.

"I can't let them actually fight inside the domains... It'd be bad if some accident caused the plot to go too far off course."

"After all, I'm still a dog, so I'd better play it safe."

He looked at the javelin Cursed Tool in his hand and smiled, at peace with the decision. "I'll miss you. Goodbye, my 'save the nation by an indirect route via another indirect route' Cursed Tool."

"I establish a Binding Vow: in exchange for the Cursed Tool in my hand breaking immediately after its next use and becoming impossible to repair, I gain one additional use today."

Once the Binding Vow was established, Shiratori Gotsu immediately poured nearly half his cursed energy into the javelin and thrust it hard into the domain barrier before him.

The intricate domains of the three fighters canceled one another out, leaving the barrier extremely unstable.

The invasion of cursed energy from outside broke the delicate balance, and the barrier collapsed.

The black sphere of the barrier burst apart with a boom.

Yuta Okkotsu, Ryu Ishigori, and Takako Uro reappeared on the rooftop. All three turned their gazes toward the fourth person on the roof.

"Who the hell are you?!" Ishigori looked as though he'd just eaten shit.

Inside the domain just now, he had been imagining himself enjoying a full meal, but this man who had suddenly appeared, with a strange green bar hovering over his head, had broken the domain from outside.

How was that any different from running over and flipping the table while someone else was eating their New Year's Eve dinner?

Shiratori Gotsu looked at the javelin Cursed Tool gradually crumbling to pieces in his hand, then gave the three before him a sincere, cheerful smile:

"Well, I was just passing by. You guys carry on, I won't bother you. I'll be going now! Oh, and..."

Yuta Okkotsu's Kogane suddenly popped out. "Eighteen points transferred by player Shiratori Gotsu have been received!"

"See you around!" With that, Shiratori Gotsu bolted, reinforcing his body with cursed energy and jumping straight off the rooftop. He fled without looking back.

"...What a load of shit!" Ishigori watched Shiratori Gotsu disappear around the street corner and spat on the ground.

"Is there something wrong with that guy's head?" Uro looked utterly baffled.

Even Okkotsu wore an expression that said, "What was that supposed to mean?"

"Forget it. There's no need to pay him any mind. Let's continue, Okkotsu!"

Whatever happened in the rest of the fight was no longer Shiratori Gotsu's concern.

All he wanted now was to return to his temporary residence and throw himself into studying his own Domain Expansion.