Directly after the order was handed down to the Assassin,
the Foreigner moved with blinding speed.
Kenjaku was a monster who could pluck a sniper's bullet out of the air with his bare hands.
They had to restrain him completely.
Of course, much of that feat had likely been due to his possession of Geto Suguru's body in other timelines... but the tactical intuition was his own. The veteran experience of a thousand years remained intact.
"Who on earth are you people?"
The man tilted his head in a curious arc.
As they had surmised, the entity within was undeniably Kenjaku.
'What is this?'
Though perplexed, Kenjaku's nerves were coiled like high-tension wires. He flooded his nervous system with Cursed Energy, bracing for the inevitable collision.
It was a fine, sunny afternoon. He had not expected an overt assault in broad daylight.
"Oh?"
Kenjaku's eyes widened slightly.
His refined senses picked up the vibration of a projectile tearing through the air. Still bound by the Foreigner's whip, he lunged forward with a explosive burst of speed.
Anything to evade the trajectory of the sniper.
The ground shattered where he had been standing an instant before. The bullet missed.
'Let's see... I suppose it's time to buff my physical specs first.'
While in motion, Kenjaku sifted through his mental deck of stolen techniques. He was caught in a pincer: a sniper behind him and an obstacle blocking the path ahead. Neutralizing the sniper was the priority.
To do that, he needed to use the enemies in front of him as human shields. And for that, he needed raw martial prowess.
—Flowing Red Scale.
The blood within his veins accelerated into a violent torrent. His strength, agility, and reaction time spiked to superhuman levels.
Flowing Red Scale—the cornerstone technique of the Kamo clan's Blood Manipulation.
'A woman and a child. I can't feel a single drop of Cursed Energy from either of them. Yet the woman pulled that whip out of thin air to bind me... She must be using a tool to mask her presence. A Cursed Tool, perhaps?'
His thoughts were cold, analytical. He threw a punch with clinical precision.
His target wasn't Koyanskaya of Darkness. It was the boy standing beside her.
Both felt like empty voids in the jujutsu sense, but Kenjaku's instincts roared. The sniper, the woman with the whip—they all revolved around the child. The boy was the heart of this operation.
Powered by the doping effect of Flowing Red Scale, his fist, backed by a resolve that knew no hesitation, aimed to crush the boy's skull. Success was likely, but the possibility of failure existed. He didn't rely on luck.
He had a safety net prepared within the strike itself.
As his fist flew, he compressed his blood within his palm. He unleashed it as a lethal, high-velocity jet—the Piercing Blood technique.
When perfected, Piercing Blood surpassed the speed of sound. At this range, it was unavoidable.
—Piercing Blood.
He fired the blood arrow while still mid-lunge, confident in its lethality. It was a gap no wider than a single fist.
However.
Before the jet could reach the boy's flesh, it simply popped. The compressed blood vanished like a soap bubble, erased so cleanly it was as if it had never existed.
'What in the...?'
Panic flickered in Kenjaku's eyes as he vaulted through the air. This wasn't a case of one Cursed Technique being countered by another. The boy hadn't even moved. There was no trace of a technique being activated.
So how?
It defied logic.
'What is—Wait.'
Kenjaku's gaze fell upon the boy's hand. Specifically, the ring on his finger. A faint, cerulean light pulsed from the gem.
'Is it that ring?'
If there was a cause, it had to be the jewelry. There were no other variables. Kenjaku reached the conclusion in a heartbeat as he landed in a stable crouch.
The ring, too, gave off no Cursed Energy. Yet it had nullified Piercing Blood instantly.
'A Cursed Tool that conceals its power and neutralizes techniques? They've brought something incredibly troublesome to this fight. Where did they find such a rarity?'
Greed momentarily sparked in his eyes. He wanted it. But he was too seasoned to let avarice dictate his movements. Escape was the priority.
It was deeply unsettling that they knew his true identity, but it was better to retreat than to die trying to claim a prize.
'One boy who neutralizes energy. One woman with a monstrous aura. One sniper. Roughly three enemies.'
He knew that "concealment" didn't mean they were powerless; it just meant their energy was hidden. Which meant a Sure-Hit effect would still find its mark.
'Shall we test them?'
Kenjaku pressed the backs of his hands together, intertwining his fingers. His hands formed the Half-Crossed Palms mudra.
Under normal circumstances, his Innate Technique would burn out after a Domain Expansion, leaving him to fight using only raw energy manipulation. But he was an exception to the rule. By applying high-level barrier techniques to his stolen archives, he could cycle through his arsenal.
—Domain Expansion: Womb Profusion.
A grotesque tree erupted from the ground behind Kenjaku. Roots surged out, encasing bizarre, humanoid shapes. The trunk was a nightmare of agonizing, screaming faces.
It was a visual manifestation of Kenjaku's twisted existence—a life spent usurping the bodies of others over a millennium.
The Master grimaced at the sight of the tree. He had seen depictions of it before, but the reality was far more repulsive.
'Disgusting.'
Something that wretched deserved to be torn apart as quickly as possible. Its very presence was an insult to the senses.
"Heavens, watch out!"
Kenjaku rolled to evade two incoming sniper rounds and immediately triggered the Domain's effect.
The Sure-Hit technique was the Anti-Gravity System—the power he had stolen from Kaori Itadori's corpse just before his current host.
A crushing weight of gravity slammed into the Master and the Foreigner.
He didn't give them a second to breathe or neutralize it. They hadn't expanded their own Domains to counter him, and even if they could, he was confident he could crush them. Kenjaku's Domain was a rare "open" type—it lacked a closed barrier. It was a divine feat, like painting a masterpiece on empty air.
Because it was open, it didn't suffer from the structural fragility of standard Domains when attacked from the outside. It was a fortress with no walls to break.
'I was going to save this for later, but I have no choice.'
Simultaneously, Kenjaku channeled Piercing Blood into his left hand and used it to sever his bound right arm in a single stroke. He didn't flinch. Using the Reverse Cursed Technique, he regrew the limb in an instant and dashed backward to put distance between them.
He had gravity pinning his targets in front and suppressing the sniper rounds from behind. It was a perfect survival maneuver.
But his blood froze when he saw the Master and the Foreigner still standing perfectly upright.
'How is this possible?!'
Kenjaku reeled from the impossibility. A Domain's Sure-Hit effect was absolute. Even if one could neutralize it, there should be a delay before the effect subsided. Yet they looked as if they hadn't felt the gravity at all.
"I suppose I've underestimated you," the Foreigner remarked coldly.
Using Magecraft to unravel the logic of the Cursed Technique, she reached into the shadows and pulled out a massive wolf.
"From the shadows? No... Is that the Ten Shadows Technique?"
Kenjaku's eyes nearly popped out of his head. Ten Shadows was the hereditary technique of the Zenin clan. That would mean this woman was a Zenin.
'If the Sure-Hit fails, I'll just use manual manipulation.'
Pushing past his shock, Kenjaku directed the gravity downward with a manual command. The Master, the magical beast, and the woman finally buckled slightly.
Success. The path was open.
He seized that fleeting second of hesitation.
'Time to go.'
He burnt through his remaining Cursed Energy reserves. Before his technique could burn out, he sprinted sideways with everything he had. The Domain stayed anchored to the spot where he had cast it; it wouldn't follow him, but it served as a perfect decoy.
The sniper rounds flying his way were caught in the gravity field, their trajectories warping harmlessly into the dirt.
'Once the technique burns out and Flowing Red Scale fades, my speed will drop. I need to vanish into a crowd before that happens.'
He thought he was being clever. They had failed to cast a Curtain to trap him, so he assumed they had bungled their ambush.
Following a Domain Expansion, his stolen techniques would be temporarily locked, unusable for several minutes. He had used it as a desperate gambit because his instincts told him that this wasn't a fight he could win by degrees.
His instinct was correct, but his survival plan was flawed.
He had assumed his current host body was sufficient for concealment and escape. But three factors blocked his path.
One: The Foreigner was not human. She was not of this world at all.
Two: Kenjaku was utterly ignorant of the existence of Heroic Spirits. He could not factor their true parameters into his calculations.
Three: He had dismissed Tengen as a sedentary, plant-like being that wouldn't interfere in worldly affairs. He was wrong.
And four:
There weren't just three enemies.
"Hey, Master. We're done with the experiment, right?"
—Squelch.
Shuten-douji released her Astralized form. She manifested like a ghost behind him, her bare hand punching straight through Kenjaku's torso.
Ibuki-douji also blurred into view, having crossed the distance from the lake in a heartbeat. Including the Master, there were five of them in total.
"Cough—!"
Blood sprayed from Kenjaku's lips. This made no sense. He had run toward the area where he felt only the faint, background energy signatures of ordinary humans.
His eyes shook with unadulterated shock. He had failed to predict this—it was beyond his imagination.
"Those horns... are you a Cursed Spirit?" Kenjaku gasped, glancing down.
Only now did he notice the small, sharp horns protruding from Shuten-douji's forehead.
"Hmm? I'm an Oni, so of course I've got horns, yeah? Ah... I guess this neighborhood's a bit light on Oni, isn't it?"
Shuten giggled playfully as she reached inside his abdomen, her fingers tightening around his intestines. Then, she twisted.
"Gaaagh!"
The sound of internal organs snapping echoed through the quiet afternoon. Veins bulged in Kenjaku's eyes. These people weren't interested in interrogations or dialogue. They didn't give him an opening to negotiate.
They were here to end him. Following the brutal principle of efficient killing, they had destroyed his gut—the primary source of Cursed Energy in a sorcerer.
"Well, it all went exactly as you planned, Master," Shuten said.
"Seems so."
The boy approached slowly, catching his breath. They had encircled Kenjaku perfectly. He had even stationed Ibuki-douji by the lake just in case, but it hadn't been necessary. Kenjaku had chosen the path toward the crowd, exactly as they'd anticipated, and walked straight into the trap.
'To think it ends like this... so meaningless.'
A thousand years. A millennium of plotting, manipulating the world of sorcery and curses, only for it to end in such a futile, underwhelming struggle. His only solace as he looked death in the face was the encounter with this "Mystery" he had never seen before.
"Huff... huff..."
Kenjaku gasped, looking down at his blood-soaked lower half. The pain was already fading into numbness.
"What... who... are you?"
"I don't have to tell you anything. Just die."
The boy shook his head firmly. His gaze was glacial.
"Haha... not much of a child, are you?"
Kenjaku let out a hollow, defeated laugh and closed his eyes. Moments later, the last spark of his consciousness flickered out.
"He's dead."
Shuten pulled her hand out of the corpse with a bored mutter. Her hand was drenched in blood and visceral fluid.
"Foreigner. Use some magecraft to clean Shuten's hands..."
Before the Master could finish the order, he closed his eyes as a dizzying sensation washed over him. He felt an internal expansion, a sense of drifting upward into an infinite void. The sheer magnitude of it left him speechless.
'...Whoa.'
Kenjaku was a sorcerer who had lived for over a millennium. The Master had expected a significant jump in experience, but this was beyond calculation.
A massive surge of growth. In an instant, his Party Cost reached its absolute limit.