The air behind Yuta shuddered. Then Olivia Margaret's Rika rose from it, vast and white and terrible, a mountain of grief wearing the shape of something that once loved a boy very much.
SPECIAL-GRADE CURSED APPARITION -
ORIMOTO RIKA
FULLY MANIFESTED A SECOND TIME.
"I'll start with quantity over quality?" Robert Sterling's Geto surveyed the courtyard with the detached curiosity of a researcher observing a new specimen. "What's your move, Queen of Curses?"
He flicked his wrist. Hundreds of blue, infant-like spirits poured from the shadows and swarmed forward like a living tide.
Finn didn't flinch. He and Rika moved through them as a single unit, his katana and her colossal hands carving a path through the swarm until they reached the three bodies crumpled against the far wall.
He knelt beside them. His hands began to glow with a soft, restorative light.
"All three are critical." His voice was barely above a whisper. His eyes settled on Jade Lane. "Especially Maki."
Then Rika's voice split the air, sharp, distorted, and suddenly very loud.
"NO FAIR! NO FAIR!"
Her massive hands shot forward and snatched Jade Lane from the ground, the claws trembling not with aggression but with something rawer than that. Something wounded.
"You took all the love! You took all of it!"
"Rika, stop!" Finn's head snapped up. "She's my friend. Put her down." His voice was firm, but underneath it was a desperate tenderness. "Gently. More gently than butterflies and flowers."
The Queen of Curses froze. That colossal, eyeless face tilted to one side like a child caught doing something wrong. The menace drained out of her posture entirely, replaced by a shrinking, almost sheepish guilt. With exaggerated, painstaking care, she lowered Jade Lane back to the cracked stone.
"I'm sorry... I'm sorry... don't be angry..."
White tears ran from her hollow sockets.
In theaters across every time zone currently showing the film, the audience had a moment of collective confusion and then something shifted. The horror hadn't disappeared, but it had been joined by something else. Something that ached.
"I'm not angry," Finn said quietly. He straightened, turned, and looked across the ruined courtyard toward the man still standing at its center. He raised one hand and pointed. "Our enemy is him."
Rika's head swiveled slowly toward Robert Sterling.
"Yuta... do you hate him?"
"Yes," Finn said. "More than anything."
"Then Rika hates him too."
The theater sat with that for a moment. No live-chat comment could quite match it.
"Why did you stop attacking?" Finn asked, his grip settling on his katana hilt.
Robert Sterling's Geto clasped his hands behind his back, the picture of academic patience. "Using cursed energy to heal requires a precise Reversal Technique. Letting you exhaust yourself on your dying friends is simply more efficient." He tilted his head. "But the lesson's over. Let's continue."
A wave of his hand. Seven massive crimson centipedes erupted from the concrete, each one dozens of meters long, filling the courtyard with the sound of grinding chitin.
Finn reached into the space beside him. "Rika, give me that."
A megaphone materialized from Rika's palm and dropped into his hand. Robert's gaze sharpened immediately.
"Snake eyes and fangs. The Inumaki clan's seal." His voice held genuine, unsettling interest. "You've inscribed it onto a vessel."
The centipedes lunged.
Finn raised the megaphone to his lips.
"DIE."
The word left his mouth as a wall of white light. It didn't push the spirits back. It atomized them, a clean, total erasure that left nothing but settling dust in the courtyard.
Robert's expression opened into something approaching delight. "Magnificent! Cursed Speech is a technique refined across generations of a single bloodline, and this young man pulled it off with less than a year of studying."
Finn looked at the megaphone as it crumbled to ash in his hand. "The energy diffuses too fast when the vessel breaks down. It's harder to control than it looks."
[Finn Blake just deleted seven building-sized centipedes with one word. One. Word.]
[The megaphone detail is so creative, using Inumaki's technique through a physical amplifier. The world-building in this film is something else.]
[Robert Sterling's face when Finn pulled it off. That wasn't villain rage. That was a professor realizing his student grew up.]
The same moment.
In a different theater of war entirely, Leo Vance's Gojo Satoru was not having a particularly difficult evening.
He delivered a flying kick that sent Will Smith's Miguel through the front window of a storefront and halfway through the wall behind it. Miguel rolled to his feet with the practiced resilience of a veteran, the bundle of black rope already swinging back into position.
"So troublesome," Leo muttered, deflecting the cursed threads with a casual wave. His brow furrowed fractionally. "That weave is interfering with the Limitless. It's a rare technique."
"I have less than half of it left!" Will's Miguel was sweating now, the composure of his opening challenge long since burned away. "My country's sorcerers spent decades weaving a single meter of that rope!"
Leo considered this for approximately one second.
"My one second is worth more than your decades."
A massive red spirit dropped from above, aimed squarely at the back of Leo's head. He didn't turn. He raised his right hand, a small, vibrant red orb already spinning at his fingertip.
"Red."
The detonation vaporized the spirit's upper body. The remaining energy punched straight through the facade of a nearby tower, glass raining down across the block in a glittering cascade.
[Gojo-sensei is absolute cinema.]
[Will Smith is fighting for his life. Leo looks like he's trying to remember if he left the stove on.]
[The way he just... points. And things stop existing. That's it. That's the Honored One.]
A few blocks away, Natalie G.'s Shoko Ieiri was working without pause, white coat, hair pulled back, moving between the wounded with the efficient calm of someone who had given up on being surprised by what sorcerers did to each other. The camera caught her face in a quiet moment between patients, and what it showed there was old and very tired.
"Geto," she said, to no one. "You dumped a heap of trouble on us this time."
Jujutsu High. Courtyard.
"Your physical output is spiking beyond what a normal vessel should sustain," Robert Sterling observed, drawing his Special Grade weapon, the three-section red staff, Playful Cloud. For the first time in the scene, he looked like he was paying full attention. "You're beginning to feel it, aren't you? That sense of invincibility?"
He spun the staff once. "The rabble couldn't touch you. I suppose I'll have to handle this personally."
Finn moved first. The clash of katana against Playful Cloud sent a shockwave through the courtyard that cracked the remaining intact stone.
"Monkeys refuse to acknowledge beings superior to themselves!" Robert's voice carried a preacher's conviction as he drove Finn back with a combination that would have ended a lesser opponent. "They fear what they cannot understand! They bury the chosen among the mediocre and call it fairness!"
"You want to be a god?" Yuta parried the next strike and came back hard. "That's just childish."
"Childish?" Robert caught his blade and redirected it. "My ideal isn't divinity, Yuta. It's preservation. Of the chosen. Of the worthy." A massive octopus-like spirit wrapped around Finn's leg and was shredded before it fully closed, Rika's hands tearing it apart with casual violence. "Monkeys are shameless. They are a plague on those born to stand above them!"
"YUTA! YUTA!" Rika cheered from the periphery of the fight, her enormous hands clasped together like a child at a sports match.
Despite everything, the theater laughed.
"It's okay," Finn said, a wry edge in his voice as he repositioned. "I'm getting used to the commentary."
He accelerated.
Not by a step. Not by a margin. He doubled, a sudden, jarring gear-shift that left Robert Sterling momentarily wrong-footed for the first time in the fight.
"Faster?!" The shock in Robert's voice was unfeigned. "Channeling that much raw energy through a human vessel in one burst your body shouldn't be able to hold it. Didn't Gojo teach you the limits?"
Finn didn't answer. He didn't need to.
Because it wasn't just his skill. Rika was feeding him, pouring the raw, boundless power of her curse directly into his veins, closing the gap between what a boy could do and what the Queen of Curses could do when she chose a champion.
"Pure Love" as a fighting technique. The audience hadn't expected to believe in it. They believed in it now.
Plz Drop Some Power Stones.
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