Itadori gritted his teeth and charged forward again, pushing past the pain.
He understood now that there was no talking his way through this. Until Choso was stopped, communication was impossible, and getting deeper into the station would remain out of reach.
The fight had fully ignited.
Drawing on his physical ability, cursed energy reinforcement, and combat instincts sharpened through observation of Gojo Satoru and Sol, Itadori absorbed and dodged the relentless blood attacks, narrowly escaping each lethal exchange while constantly searching for a way inside Choso's range.
Choso's Blood Manipulation was remarkably versatile. Offense and defense wove together seamlessly; his long-range harassment transitioned without a gap into close-quarters violence, and the precision with which he controlled blood, both in force and direction, was genuinely startling.
His hatred for Itadori had become fuel, shaping every technique into something aimed specifically at ending his life.
They clashed across the ruined street in a sustained, grinding exchange. Cursed energy collided and split the air; blood hissed against stone and pavement without pause.
Itadori's wounds kept mounting, but his eyes sharpened with each exchange. He was adapting, absorbing the rhythm of the fight, recognizing the edges of what Choso was doing.
The opponent was powerful. He wasn't untouchable.
It was only the sheer wall of Choso's hatred that made reaching him feel impossible. That had to come down first.
Itadori caught a sliver of an opening after one of Choso's attacks overextended. He exhaled, pushed his cursed energy down into his right foot, and drove it into the ground.
Boom.
The earth buckled. Shattered stone erupted upward, filling the space between them with dust and debris.
Itadori moved through it without hesitating, threading past the blood's outer perimeter like a shadow cutting through smoke, and drove his fist squarely into Choso's chest with everything he had left.
The impact landed clean and heavy. Choso staggered backward several steps, and blood spilled from the corner of his mouth.
He looked up slowly. The hatred in his eyes hadn't dimmed, but beneath it, buried and almost invisible, was something that might have been surprise. His opponent had broken through further than expected.
"Very good." Choso wiped the blood from his mouth. The pool around him surged and churned. "Killing you like this will honor my brothers properly."
Fresh cursed energy rolled off him in a heavier wave than before.
Itadori steadied his breathing, reset his stance, and braced for what was coming.
But Choso's next technique never launched.
His movements stopped. A small distortion crossed his face, subtle and involuntary, not the expression of someone preparing to strike but of someone pulled sideways by something internal. The blood around him shivered with a brief, unstable flicker.
Itadori noticed it immediately and held his ground, watching.
Choso pressed a hand to his forehead, brow tightening, his eyes shifting through something that looked like confusion, like two forces pressing against each other from the inside. Whatever it was, it had nothing to do with the fight.
It lasted only a moment.
The hatred resurfaced and swallowed everything else. His eyes cooled back to their original edge, the blood around him steadied, and what replaced the brief crack in his focus was something darker and more controlled than before.
"Die," he said, and the blood began to gather in volume.
---
Sol's figure appeared without announcement at the edge of the street.
He stood at the periphery of the exchange and took it in quietly. His dark red eyes tracked Choso's technique, the currents of hatred driving it, then moved to Itadori, who was holding his ground through ragged breathing and sheer will.
Sol did not move immediately. He watched.
Then Choso's blood began to mass into something larger, pulling together with clear intent to finish it.
Sol stepped forward.
There was no spectacle to the movement; it was simply a single step. But in the space that followed, he was standing between the two of them as though he had always been there.
Itadori, mid-charge, ran into something that stopped him without force, a resistance that neutralized his momentum so completely and so gently that it took him a moment to understand he was no longer moving.
Choso's gathered blood reached Sol and dissolved. It didn't deflect or scatter; it simply ceased, absorbed into something invisible, leaving no ripple behind.
The silence that followed was total.
"Sol?!" Itadori stared at the back now positioned in front of him, his thoughts tangling over themselves. Sol had sealed Gojo Sensei. And now Sol had stepped between him and a killing blow.
Choso's eyes narrowed, fixed on the figure that had materialized between them. He had no idea how this person had arrived, and no framework for understanding how his technique had been erased so cleanly. Every nerve in his body drew tight against the weight of the presence now in front of him.
"Who are you?" he demanded, the blood around him restless and unsteady, though he made no move to attack.
Sol didn't answer. He didn't even look at Choso.
He turned his head toward Itadori and said simply, "Let's go."
He didn't wait for a response. His hand found Itadori's shoulder, and the street was gone.
Choso stood alone in the wreckage, posture still guarded, expression empty of everything except disorientation. His target and the stranger had vanished without transition, without sound, without any trace he could follow or understand. He couldn't perceive where they had gone or how.
---
Itadori's vision blurred and snapped back in the same instant.
The roar of the street, the hissing blood, the weight of the fight, all of it cut away and was replaced by something entirely different.
Heat pressed in from every direction. The air was dense and sulfurous, thick with the stench of curses, and each breath sat heavy in the chest. The sounds around him were quieter but wrong, distant battle tremors and the low, warped howling of Cursed Spirits echoing through walls he couldn't see clearly.
He was somewhere deep inside Shibuya Station, in what might once have been a central hub, though nothing about it was recognizable anymore. The floor and walls were blackened with scorch marks; sections of the ceiling had buckled inward; heat distorted the air in slow, rippling waves above the ruined ground.