The idea hadn't come to him all at once. It had come from three fights that still sat uncomfortably in the back of his mind, months apart, all ending the same unsatisfying way.
First was the fight against the Three-Tails, Isobu. Three tails of solid coral and shell, chakra packed so densely into that hide that Dismantle's invisible cuts had done nothing but scratch the surface, and Cleave hadn't fared any better against a body with no real seams to split apart.
If not for that guy's own attack, Sukuna doubted he could have taken him down that easily. Basically speaking, he was really lucky in that fight.
The second match was, of course, against the Raikage. None of his attacks actually worked against that man's Lightning Armor.
Sukuna knew that Cleave would have worked, but his proficiency with that technique was far too low back then, mostly because he hardly used it since Dismantle was just a convenient long-range technique. Not to mention, the Raikage was way too fast for him to actually catch him to use Cleave in the first place.
If the Raikage hadn't already been infected by those poisonous insects, that match wouldn't have ended that well for him. Sukuna knew that very well.
Once again, he was lucky that time.
And the last battle was against Gyūki and Killer Bee, the Eight-Tails Jinchūriki.
It had taught him the same lesson once again. His techniques weren't built for taking down Kaiju. At least not Cleave and Dismantle.
Bee had survived that fight, to no small trouble for Sukuna. Kami only knows what Killer Bee had stated back in the Cloud Village and now how many people would know about his powers.
The only relief was that they didn't know his real face, arguably the only reason the Cloud hadn't demanded his head under the assumption that he killed their Raikage.
Sukuna couldn't help but snort. 'Those Cloud-nin are way too full of themselves.'
It was still his own shortcoming, though. That much was true.
Even at full commitment, even combining Dismantle, Cleave, and Baku's fire into one overwhelming assault, he still hadn't been entirely certain he could put something that size down cleanly. He'd needed the wildfire, the scale, the sheer accumulated force of everything he had. That wasn't precision. That was just throwing enough at the problem until something worked.
Fun fact, it didn't work.
It had bothered him more than he let on. Even more than letting Killer Bee walk away alive that way. Sooner or later, his technique would be known by others anyway; he couldn't keep it under wraps even if he tried.
No, that wasn't what bothered him. What did bother him was that he was reaching a limit with the normal, direct use of his technique, and it was starting to show.
Even overloading the techniques with raw power didn't work. Because that was Ryōmen Sukuna's way of doing things, not his.
Perhaps if the original had done it, he might have been successful. Though Sukuna doubted even he would have been able to pull it off without his domain. Perhaps with the World-Cutting Slash, but that was endgame stuff.
The original wielder of Shrine had never needed subtlety — overwhelming cutting power paired with fire that erased whatever it touched, brute force elevated to an art form, a bazooka aimed at anything unfortunate enough to stand in front of it.
By no means did that mean Ryōmen was just a brute. Far from it. He was the most efficient user of jujutsu, second only to someone like Gojo Satoru himself, and Gojo had those magic eyes to help him.
It was simply his philosophy: throw enough firepower at the problem until the problem disappeared. And surprisingly enough, it worked for him for the most part.
It didn't work for Sukuna, though. He was not Ryōmen Sukuna after all. He was Haruno Sukuna.
Sukuna had inherited that same technique, that same base, and for a long time he'd simply assumed that meant inheriting the same philosophy along with it. Copy the original. Hit harder. Cut cleaner. Burn hotter.
Copying the original Ryōmen Sukuna could only take him so far. If he wished to grow further, then he needed to find his own path. His own way.
It took him an uncomfortably long time to realize that it wasn't actually working for him — not because he lacked the power, but because it wasn't him. He didn't fight like Ryōmen. He never had.
Where the original tore through problems with overwhelming force, Sukuna solved them with precision, with efficiency, with the fewest possible motions required to end something permanently.
A sniper's instinct wearing a bazooka's inheritance. That's what he was.
The mismatch had been sitting in front of him the entire time, and Isobu, the Raikage, and Gyūki had simply made it impossible to keep ignoring.
And that's when he realized what he was missing, what he was good at.
It wasn't raw destruction but precision strikes.
He wasn't Ryōmen. In every sense, he would put himself as a modern sorcerer, so he had to apply modern solutions.
If raw force wasn't his answer, precision would have to be. And precision, taken to its absolute limit, meant something much smaller than cutting flesh or burning skin.
The very space between atoms itself — the impossibly narrow gaps that held matter together in the first place, invisible bonds of attraction that most techniques never bothered acknowledging because most techniques didn't need to look that closely.
Cutting could sever that connection. Heat could force the gap wide enough that the attraction could never reassert itself. Combined, applied with enough precision, the result wasn't damage in any conventional sense — it was disassembly.
Total, spreading, irreversible disassembly, one severed bond at a time, moving faster than the eye could track once it started.
Even the original couldn't do this, because he didn't have something which Sukuna did.
Precision provided by the Mangekyō Sharingan.
He would never have found that level of precision without his Sharingan — the ability to perceive that granularly, that exactly, wasn't something Shrine had ever offered on its own.
And he would never have had the raw output to apply that precision across something the size of a Tailed Beast without the Curse Mark's Sage Mode.
Another thing he had perfected over the course of the last month. A bunch of binding vows to fix the entire Curse Mark Transformation into a state between the First and Second Stages.
His body itself didn't change. No four arms, unfortunately, no matter how cool they looked or how useful those arms and an extra mouth could be for a sorcerer. However, he did get extra eyes beneath his original ones, something he deliberately left in for reasons untold.
And markings running all over his body like the OG Sukuna. He literally looked like a thirteen-year-old version of Yujikuna from the Shibuya Arc.
And all this to pull off the technique he had been mastering over the last month.
He called it...
"Curse Technique Maximum...
...Inter-Molecular Disruption."
Standing across from Shukaku's towering form, Sukuna raised one hand and pressed his fingers into the domain sign, then thrust his hand toward Shukaku while the hand sign remained intact, taking the famous Blood Piercing stance. However, instead of his palms being joined, they were still in the Enmaten hand sign, just tilted toward the enemy.
Nothing happened at first, the same gesture that always preceded Dismantle or Cleave, invisible to anyone who didn't already know to look for it.
Then, in the space of a single heartbeat, Shukaku's body began to vanish.
It started exactly where Sukuna's technique had struck, the sand at the center of its chest simply ceasing to exist as anything solid, crumbling away into nothing faster than dust could even fall.
From that point it spread outward in every direction at once — down through the torso, out along both arms, up through the neck — an eraser dragged across reality at a speed that shouldn't have been possible, the front giving way before the middle had even finished, the middle giving way before the tail had a chance to react.
"What th—"
Shukaku barely had time to register what was happening to it. Its roar cut off mid-breath, confusion and fury tangled together in the half-second it had left to feel anything at all, and then there was simply less of it than there had been, and then far less, and then almost none.
Through all of it, deep inside the vanishing mass of sand, Gaara's body remained precisely where it was — untouched, whole, deliberately excluded from the technique's reach with the same exacting precision that had made the disintegration possible in the first place.
All made possible due to the immense control the Sharingan had given him.
Sukuna had never once let his aim drift toward the boy inside. Only the sand had ever been the target.
And just like that... he did exactly what he said he'd do.
End the fight in a single move.
Shukaku completely vanished, as if evaporated into thin air, and what remained was a stunned Gaara, who looked like he had seen a real monster.
The boy stumbled back in half fright and half confusion.
"W-what did you do? How is this possible?"
Sukuna himself, though, felt like his head had been struck by a hammer. The technique was incredibly taxing on his mind.
He could feel it. His technique, while still not completely on cooldown, would need some time before it returned to working at its maximum.
But still, he finally did it. Something that even the original Ryōmen Sukuna couldn't.
"NICE...."
xXx
A/N : Ah.. like the technique, I just didn't wish to give him something too far fetch from the original technique. This argubly the best one for him. Of course if you have any better idea, do tell me.
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