"You think the likes of you are enough?"
A cold, mocking smile tugged at Kaede's mouth. His long fingers rested on the hilt of the blade shaped like Mikazuki Munechika, and his thumb nudged the guard loose.
"New Shadow Style: Simple Domain."
The instant the words fell, a pale blue spherical field exploded outward from him, hugging the ground as it spread.
The air shrieked with a sound harsh enough to set teeth on edge. Three heavy bolts fired from blind angles struck the edge of the domain and instantly crumpled, as if they had slammed into an invisible steel wall. Their tips shattered, their momentum died, and they dropped uselessly to the floor.
The explosive tags tied to their shafts were stripped of cursed energy by force and fluttered down as nothing more than scraps of paper.
At the same time, the concrete under Kaede's feet, which had been bubbling like a swamp a second earlier, returned at once to its original hard, icy solidity beneath the absolute neutralization of the Simple Domain.
Behind one of the main support pillars, the semi-Grade 1 curse user who had manipulated the terrain coughed up a mouthful of blood. The backlash from having his technique forcibly severed drained all color from his face.
"Simple Domain?!" He clutched his chest, pupils shaking violently as he shouted in terror.
"Fall back! That's an anti-technique draw style, an absolute defense zone!"
"Good. Then I'll use you to warm up."
"New Shadow Style: Draw."
Silver-white sword light flashed through the dark hall like lightning splitting a sealed room in two.
Kaede vanished from where he stood, launching forward with brutal momentum and crossing more than thirty feet in an instant, arriving atop the abandoned iron catwalk on the second floor.
Shhk.
Three grisly sounds of flesh opening came almost at once.
The three Grade 2 curse users who had just begun reloading their crossbows had no time to react. They only felt a sudden coldness in their middles.
Dazed, they looked down just as blood burst from the smooth horizontal cuts across their abdomens like crimson fountains, and all three bodies folded like torn sacks, collapsing onto the catwalk.
"Don't get cocky, brat!"
The Grade 1 curse user Kuroda seized the tiny opening left after Kaede's slash.
Every muscle in his body swelled, and the bandages wrapped around his arms, soaked in dark red cursed energy, hardened instantly into a pair of high-speed heavy drills. With a savage roar of displaced air, he brought them crashing down from behind and to the side, straight for Kaede's skull.
It was a full-powered blow from a Grade 1 curse user, enough to smash a solid support column apart in one strike.
Kaede did not even turn his head.
He only raised his left hand, compressing dense, pure cursed energy into his palm in an instant.
Bang!
Fist and palm met with a dull, explosive crack.
The fury on Kuroda's face froze. His all-out attack felt as if it had struck an immovable mountain, all its force swallowed whole.
Crack!
The sound of bone breaking came sharp and clear along the catwalk.
Kaede's five fingers, reinforced only with raw cursed energy, clenched shut and crushed Kuroda's prized "steel" fist through the bandages as though it were glass.
Kuroda had only just begun to scream when the blade flashed again and buried itself in his abdomen.
With a flick of the wrist, Kaede sent the big man's body flying in an arc, smashing down through a ruined control console on the floor below and throwing up a cloud of dust.
The female curse user reacted fast.
She ignored Kuroda completely and used the instant after Kaede flung him aside to unleash both hands.
Dozens of poisoned senbon, drawn by invisible threads of cursed energy, formed a huge web in midair, glinting with sickly green light and sealing off every route Kaede could possibly land on.
"His close combat isn't normal! I never saw a technique activation!"
She kept retreating even as she shouted, sweat gathering on her forehead while she analyzed the battle at frantic speed.
"Still trying to struggle? I'm not exactly known for being gentle. At best, I'll let you live. But it won't feel merciful."
Kaede's body moved with a weightless grace that bordered on impossible, twisting in midair with a flexibility no human frame should have possessed.
He slipped through the tiny openings between the poisoned needles, brushing past them without taking a single hit, and landed cleanly in front of her.
"Lie down and you won't die."
The blade swept upward.
A violent spray of blood arced through the air.
Her leather outfit split from the side of her torso up through her shoulder, and a wound deep enough to show bone tore across nearly half her body.
Worse still, a crescent-shaped residue began spreading from the wound, something unnatural and alive-looking, chewing its way through the flesh around it. She let out a shriek and collapsed, writhing on the floor in agony.
"Monster... what kind of joke is this?!"
The remaining three semi-Grade 1 curse users finally looked truly desperate as they watched their strongest members collapse almost instantly.
Backing into the edge of the hall shoulder to shoulder, they wrung out every scrap of cursed energy left in their bodies and formed three huge bursts of power, each a different color, a final all-or-nothing attack.
Kaede remained where he was and did not even bother to raise his sword again.
Moisture from the air rushed toward his left arm and compressed, wrapping it in a layer of hardened water armor dense with cursed energy.
The three blasts, strong enough to tear the factory apart, slammed into the armor. They made only a wet, muffled series of impacts before the flowing water stripped all force from them and scattered them into spray.
Kaede's eyes stayed cold. He flicked the armored arm casually forward.
Dozens of highly compressed water needles shot out like bullets from a gun.
Their shrill tearing sound filled the hall.
The remaining curse users screamed as the needles pierced their limbs and shoulders with perfect accuracy. The sheer force pinned them to the concrete walls and floor behind them, locking them in place, unable to move.
Silence returned to the underground water treatment plant.
Only dripping blood and low groans of pain remained.
"It's over... For me, this really wasn't all that difficult..." Kaede thought, dark red eyes shifting faintly as he took stock.
Several miles away from the abandoned plant, atop an unfinished high-rise rooftop.
The hem of a five-striped monk's robe fluttered softly in the night wind.
A man with a grotesque line of stitches crossing his forehead kept both hands tucked into the wide sleeves of the robe as he looked down over the distant industrial district that had gone silent.
There was no wasted emotion in those narrow, deep-set eyes. Only cold, meticulous reason.
"A one-sided slaughter... So they weren't even good enough to force him to reveal more of his hand."
The man spoke quietly to himself, the curve of his mouth carrying no warmth at all.
For the grand design he had been weaving over a thousand years, Gojo Satoru being sealed inside the Prison Realm was an absolute prerequisite.
But this black-haired youth who had suddenly appeared in Tokyo was a dangerous variable that lay completely outside calculations spanning a millennium.
Piecing together fragments from scattered intelligence, this unregistered sorcerer, with his bizarre Heavenly Restriction-like constitution and domain capabilities, had somehow managed to fight on equal footing with a three-finger Sukuna.
"Gojo Satoru seems to have very high expectations for this anomaly.
If that power keeps growing unchecked, or if it intervenes at the sealing point in Shibuya, it will become an extremely irritating obstacle."
The man's gaze stayed fixed on the direction of the underground treatment plant as he slowly withdrew his right hand from his sleeve.
A black cursed energy, thick as ink, rolled and compressed in his palm, giving off a suffocating stench of something inherently wrong.
He was not acting on emotion. This was the result of a perfectly rational risk assessment. He had to determine the limits and mechanics of this variable while Gojo was out of the country. This window would not come again.
"If those pieces of trash can't even serve as a proper test stone, then I'll have to raise the standards of the test myself.
If you can't even swallow this appetizer, then you were never worth much to begin with."
With a violent surge of cursed energy, a huge writhing black shadow formed above the rooftop.
Then it dropped soundlessly into the night like a meteor, falling toward the outskirts near Harajuku.
Back in the abandoned underground hall, the smell of blood still hung in the air.
The curse users pinned to walls and floor by water needles were still groaning in broken, miserable breaths.
Then, in that brief dead silence, the temperature of the surrounding air plummeted to freezing.
The cursed residue in the air changed all at once. A suffocating reek poured into the sealed underground space like a flood bursting through a dam.
It smelled of rotting wood, rusted iron, and thick corpse-stink, nothing any human being could ever produce.
Skrrt... skrrt... skrrt-skrrt-skrrt-skrrt...
At first the noise was only a faint scraping.
But in two seconds it multiplied a thousandfold into a skin-crawling chorus.
Ventilation ducts in the ceiling burst apart. Drain covers blew from the floor. Cracks in the walls spilled out black waves.
They were countless carnivorous flies and roaches, hundreds of thousands of them, each carrying a faint trace of cursed energy.
They shoved, bit, and piled over one another in black waterfalls, pouring into the hall with ravenous hunger.
The wounded curse users on the floor, unable to move, did not even manage more than a few half-formed screams before the tide swallowed them.
The wet crunch of chewing and the snapping of bones sounded rapidly beneath the swarm, and any blood that spilled was consumed before it even had time to spread.
"What?!" Kaede's head snapped around.
At the center of that nauseating feast of insects, the concrete ceiling directly above the main hall collapsed.
A grotesque, towering special grade curse, shaped like a giant upright cockroach, smashed down into the middle of the sedimentation chamber amid a rain of stone.
Its compound eyes burned with savage red light, and in its hands it held a horrific cursed tool made of twisted flesh and clustered insect eggs: Festering Life Blade.
The special grade curse Kurourushi had arrived.
Note: In canon, Kurourushi is explicitly identified as a curse released from Kenjaku's Cursed Spirit Manipulation, which means Kenjaku had already captured it before the Culling Game.
There was no trace of human emotion in it, no taunt, no probing exchange. Its core was nothing but slaughter and hunger.
It did not even roar.
The battle began the instant its feet touched the ground.
The insect tide spread under the absolute command of special grade cursed energy.
Part of the swarm became two black cyclones more than ten feet across, flanking from left and right at the same time to wrap around the center of the hall, sealing off every line of retreat and every space for evasion with an airtight wall of living matter.
At the same time, Kurourushi pitched its massive body forward. Its powerful hind legs shattered the concrete floor and hurled it forward at a speed utterly disproportionate to its size.
It followed directly behind the cover of the insect storm, both hands gripping the Festering Life Sword as it brought it down with the force of a headsman's execution strike, straight for the still-standing black-haired figure ahead.
The edge had not even reached him yet, and already the cursed insect eggs clinging to the sword, ready to hatch and devour flesh instantly, came screaming in on the rancid wind.