The sea is usually a place of quiet serenity, but today, the waters surrounding Nagasaki were anything but. The rhythm of the tides, which had washed against the coastline for millennia, had been violently disrupted.
The surface of the water rose in towering walls that refused to fall. Beneath them, the seabed—unseen for centuries—lay exposed in all its muddy, hidden glory. Countless fish and shrimp, once safe in the deep, now lay dead on the ocean floor, their bodies crushed by the sudden, catastrophic change in pressure as the water vanished.
The culprit wasn't the brilliant blue sphere of Cursed Technique Lapse: Blue hanging in the sky like a crescent moon, even though it continued to drag seawater and debris into its crushing center.
Six hours had passed since the two Special Grade Cursed Spirits manifested. It was painfully clear that neither Hasegumo nor Satoru Gojo had found a way to truly put them down.
Worse yet, Satoru Gojo now lay motionless on the exposed seabed.
In the hours leading up to this, Gojo had attempted to incinerate the Little Boy using maximum output versions of Red and Hollow Purple, but neither had any lasting effect.
As the fight dragged on, the air grew thick with a suffocating density of Cursed Energy. Between the environmental pressure and the constant drain of running the Reverse Cursed Technique to counteract the radiation, Gojo began to realize he was in trouble.
Time was the most critical factor in this battle. The sorcerers had exactly one win condition: kill the curses before the Curtains failed.
The curses, however, only had to exist. Once their Cursed Energy leaked out, it wouldn't matter if they were eventually killed; by then, the surrounding civilian population would have already mutated into horrors under the influence of the nuclear-tainted energy.
"What a pain," Gojo muttered, having just used a Hollow Technique to atomize the boy's body again. He watched, he analyzed, and he thought. "That abnormal Cursed Energy signature... it's coming from the direction of Hiroshima."
As a native of Japan, Gojo had a solid grasp of geography—unlike Hasegumo, who tended to lose his bearings the moment he left his usual haunts. While Hasegumo was likely elsewhere fuming in fruitless fury, Gojo had already deduced the secret to killing them.
"Decades of being sealed together caused the roots of their Cursed Energy to entwine. Whenever one dies, the other releases energy to establish a link, and thanks to their infinite reserves, they can force a resurrection," Lord Tengen observed.
Watching from the monitoring room, the thousand-year-old sorcerer's eyes were as sharp as ever. Even through Mei Mei's crow broadcast, he had arrived at the same conclusion as Gojo.
"The problem is that Gojo set a rule for his Curtain forbidding any living being from entering or exiting to increase its durability. He can't use long-range teleportation to sync this info with Hasegumo."
"It's lucky Satoru's technique is powerful enough to keep that thing contained for now," Mei Mei noted. "If he had gone all-out from the start like Hasegumo, I wouldn't have even had the chance to boost my Black Bird Manipulation. But at this point, watching seems almost meaningless. If those two can't kill them..." She trailed off, struggling to find the words.
Tengen cut her off. "The worst-case scenario: the Curtains break, millions of civilians are mutated by radiation, and the existence of curses is made public. The Age of Curses returns in full force."
As they spoke, a sudden change occurred on the battlefield.
Everything the observers feared, Gojo had already considered. But the solution was a Gordian knot. They could only kill the curses simultaneously if the Curtains were down, but if the Curtains went down, the massive concentration of Cursed Energy inside would cause an irreversible catastrophe.
Should I do it? Purposely break the Curtains and move them together as fast as possible?
But if they get too close, will a new, even worse mutation occur?
A thousand possible outcomes flashed through Gojo's mind. For the first time, a crushing weight of pressure sat on his shoulders. Even with his legendary ego, he felt a flicker of hesitation.
One last try with Blue. If that fails... I'll take the responsibility myself.
Gojo made his decision. Even if the consequences were irreversible, he would shoulder the burden. He flicked his right hand, sending a blue orb of gravity skyward to crush the Little Boy's body into nothingness once more.
However, in his haste, Gojo had become impatient. He had made this final attempt immediately after his Domain had collapsed, without first using RCT to heal his Cursed Technique Burnout.
The boy's body manifested again instantly. This time, the stun from Unlimited Void had been completely cleared.
The curse didn't hesitate.
"Aaaaagh!"
With a primal roar, the Little Boy exploded with a titanic surge of Cursed Energy, pushing everything in his vicinity outward with indiscriminate force.
It was a literal nuclear pulse. The seabed beneath him was hammered down by a massive, invisible sphere of force, driving the ocean further back and exposing more of the sea floor.
Gojo hadn't expected the boy to act so swiftly. He needed less than a minute to repair his burnout, but the enemy didn't give him even a second. Lacking the protection of his Infinity, Gojo was slammed by the force of the "nuclear blast," hurled from the sky and smashed into the ocean floor.
He hit the mud with bone-shattering force. His eyes rolled back; the sheer impact of the pressure had knocked the strongest sorcerer unconscious.
Seeing him fall, a twisted smile finally spread across the boy's angry face. In the brief intervals between Gojo's control, he'd had less than a second at a time to think, but he had finally seized his opening.
Then, he felt something was wrong. The Cursed Energy wasn't spreading as fast as it should. A strange gravitational pull from above was still trying to drag him in.
"Nani?" The boy looked up. Blue, which should have vanished when Gojo lost consciousness, was still hanging there, shining brightly as it sucked in everything around it.
"What a persistent pest." With a wave of his hand, the boy fired a shockwave of Cursed Energy that rivaled Blue in intensity. A flash of cyan and blue light crossed the sky, and Blue was finally neutralized.
But the Little Boy didn't stop there. Gojo's Domain had filled him with a profound sense of unease. In his extreme, twisted state of mind, he came to a decision.
"I'll just destroy this whole world!" he screamed, dropping into a horse stance in mid-air. He pushed his Cursed Energy output to its absolute limit.
There was no one left to stop him. The energy radiated from him like a physical tsunami, surging outward in all directions. The reinforced Curtain held for less than five seconds before it shattered like an eggshell under the tide of energy.
The Cursed Energy drove the seawater upward and outward. Five kilometers, ten kilometers... everything in the path of this invisible, titanic force was obliterated. It was a power without a ceiling, and it continued to grow as it traveled. No matter how far it spread, its momentum showed no sign of slowing.
If no one stepped up to stop him at this very moment, he would completely annihilate the Earth's ecosystem. Destroying the planet itself was simply a matter of time.
This was true Infinity.
One hour ago, Hiroshima Battlefield.
The thickening Cursed Energy in the air had begun to hamper Hasegumo's movements. It was like fighting underwater; every action required significantly more effort than before. The Fat Man, as the source of the energy, was completely unaffected.
Even so, the Fat Man had no room to fight back. Once Hasegumo realized his movements were being slowed, he stopped using pure Cursed Energy to destroy the curse's body. Instead, he relied on pure physical strength to batter the creature, forcing the Fat Man to expend his own energy constantly repairing his form.
Ideally, the Fat Man could have ignored the damage, given his infinite resurrections, but he was a cowardly curse at heart. He preferred not to die if he could help it.
And so, they were at a stalemate. Hasegumo had been punching for nearly four hours, yet he hadn't found a solution within his knowledge of jujutsu to end the threat.
But time was running out. Even with Hasegumo suppressing the curse's output, the Fat Man was still leaking energy every second.
Hasegumo saw that the Cursed Energy in the air was beginning to flow like a liquid. He couldn't gamble on how much longer the Curtain would hold. He shifted his tactics. With a lightning-fast straight punch to the Fat Man's twenty-centimeter-thick belly, he sent the curse trembling like a piece of soft rubber before leaping back to create distance.
The curse exploded into a red mist, but moments later, the CE pulled the blood back together, reforming the Fat Man's body.
"I told you, it's useless," the Fat Man said, his face still half-formed, a mess of overlapping flesh and purple-black blood. His mouth moved clumsily. "Why not give up? I might even let you live."
"Shut up. I'm going to see if you're actually immortal or just a loudmouth."
Hasegumo didn't know that the Curtain in Nagasaki had already been destroyed. To prevent the civilians outside his own barrier from being affected, he decided to make a bet. He would bet that Gojo had found the secret to killing them and was on his way to help.
He pressed his palms together in prayer.
A vast expanse of golden Cursed Energy condensed instantly.
But the figure didn't manifest beside Hasegumo.
"This is..." The Fat Man slowly turned his head. A towering, gentle, yet majestic statue of Guanyin stood directly behind him.
Whether the curse accepted it or not, the massive golden hands reached out with maternal tenderness, softly enveloping the Fat Man's body.
The Reverse Cursed Energy, which usually brought instant death, felt as warm as a mother's embrace. But the curse didn't sink into that warmth; instead, a bone-deep chill washed over him. He could only whisper to himself, "It's fine... I... I'm immortal."
The Guanyin's head bowed slightly. The once benevolent expression turned into a terrifying snarl. Its mouth opened wide.
Hasegumo focused every ounce of the Reverse Cursed Energy he had accumulated through the unification of mind and body. It poured out in a beam of light as blinding as a newborn star, incinerating the enveloped enemy.
"Domain Expansion: 100-Type Guanyin Bodhisattva."
"Zero Hand."