The sound of the distant, mountain-shaking explosions grew louder with every passing second, but as Maki Zenin tore through the thick underbrush of the northern forest, she was suddenly forced to dig her boots deep into the dirt to bring herself to a screeching halt.
Directly in front of her, cutting through the ancient cedar trees like a wall of solid midnight, was a towering, pitch-black barrier. The dark, oily liquid of the veil rippled slowly under the canopy, absorbing the midday sunlight and radiating a cold, unnatural pressure that made the hair on the back of Panda's neck stand completely on end.
"What the hell is this?" Maki snarled, her hand tightening around her cursed tool as she stepped up to the edge of the perimeter. She reached out a hand, pressing her palm against the surface of the barrier, only to feel a rigid, unyielding rejection of her physical presence. "A curtain? Nobody said anything about deploying a localized barrier during the competition layout. What are those idiots from Kyoto playing at?"
Panda caught up to her, his heavy paws thudding against the earth as he skidded to a stop, his black-and-white face twisting into a look of deep, analytical skepticism. He sniffed the air near the black veil, his brow furrowing deeply.
"This isn't a standard tournament barrier to contain the designated target curses, Maki," Panda muttered, his voice dropping into a heavy, serious register. "The structural script of this barrier is incredibly dense. It's designed to completely isolate the southern valley from the rest of the school grounds. They aren't trying to keep a curse inside... they're trying to keep us out."
Toge Inumaki emerged from the foliage right behind them, his violet eyes wide with immediate concern as he looked at the black wall. He pulled his collar down slightly, his voice tense.
"Takana," Inumaki murmured, shaking his head.
"Yeah, I know," Maki said, her teeth baring in a frustrated scowl as she struck the barrier with the butt of her spear, resulting in a dull, vibrating ring that echoed uselessly through the trees. 'They think they can use a standard school competition as a perfect smokescreen to corner Oden and jump him without any interference from the main faculty. They probably figured that if they could completely eliminate our strongest asset under the cover of a chaotic accident, the rest of the tournament would be an easy sweep for them. Idiots. They completely underestimated the kind of monsters they're dealing with.'
---
Deep within the isolated perimeter of the black curtain, the air inside the shattered valley was boiling hot.
Ryu Ishigori stood firmly at the center of the smoking trench, his massive right fist still radiating a thick, beautiful trail of dark energy from the devastating Black Flash that had just buried Todo beneath a mountain of collapsed bedrock. He turned his predatory, ecstatic gaze back toward Oden, his massive pompadour crackling with an unbroken sequence of sparks.
"Now then, Oden!" Ryu shouted, his deep voice vibrating with absolute combat euphoria. "The fat one is temporarily out of the kitchen, which means it's just you and me left at the table! Show me what else you're hiding under that hood! I'm still starving!"
Oden stood thirty paces away, his dark Tokyo hoodie slightly torn at the shoulder, but his posture remained entirely relaxed. He let out a short, quiet chuckle, his hands slowly reaching up toward the back of his head.
"You're pretty good, old-timer," Oden said smoothly, his fingers catching the loose knot of his white cloth blindfold. "Matching Todo's spatial rhythm and landing a precise counter-strike like that... you've got a hell of an appetite. I guess it would be pretty disrespectful of me to keep playing around with a blindfold on."
With a single, fluid motion, Oden untied the cloth, letting the long white strip of fabric slip from his fingers to float down into the ash-covered grass.
For the first time in the entire tournament, Oden's bare eyes were fully revealed to the world.
The Serpent Eyes mutation was a terrifying, breathtaking sight. His pupils were narrowed into razor-thin, vertical slits that vibrated with a constant, hyper-calculating rhythm, surrounded by brilliant, shimmering golden-green irises that seemed to glow with an ancient, predatory authority. The moment the blindfold fell, the ambient cursed energy around Oden's frame didn't just expand. It completely crystallized, the massive reserves tightening around his body like a perfectly tailored, invisible armor of pure, diamond-hard force.
'Wow,' Oden thought to himself, his vertical pupils rapidly contracting as the entire battlefield was instantly rendered in a hyper-detailed, multi-dimensional grid within his mind. 'Without the restriction, the world is completely bare. I can see the literal heat signatures of his muscle fibers twitching. I can see the exact micro-second his internal engine begins to compress his reserves before a discharge.'
Ryu's smile widened to an almost maniacal degree as he felt the sudden, crushing shift in the atmosphere. "Oh? Oh! Beautiful! Those eyes... that is exactly the kind of premium presentation I've been waiting for!"
BOOM!
Ryu detonated forward, throwing a massive straight right hand that carried enough raw output to shatter a concrete fortress.
But this time, Oden didn't use a defensive shikigami to absorb the blow. Through the absolute kinetic tracking of his *Serpent Eyes*, Ryu's hyper-accelerated movement looked like it was crawling through thick syrup. Oden tilted his torso by a fraction of a single inch, letting the roaring, white-hot fist graze past the fabric of his hood by the width of a single hair.
Using the momentum of the dodge, Oden drove a lightning-fast left palm strike directly into Ryu's exposed armpit, followed instantly by a sweeping low kick that targeted the titan's lead ankle. The precision of the strikes was flawless, hitting the exact structural weak points in Ryu's physical reinforcement at the precise millisecond his energy output shifted to his fist.
"Ugh!" Ryu grunted, his massive frame forced to pivot awkwardly as his balance was violently disrupted.
Oden didn't stop. He snapped his jaw open at point-blank range, his vertical pupils locking onto Ryu's face.
"Cursed Energy Breath!" Oden commanded.
A hyper-compressed, laser-thin column of razor-sharp energy blasted straight from his mouth, striking Ryu directly in the sternum. The concentrated velocity of the breath ability was so immense that it completely broke through Ryu's outer reinforcement, carving a fresh, bleeding line across his chest and throwing the giant backward through the smoke.
Yet, even as he skipped across the vitrified dirt, Ryu's tactical genius remained completely unquenched. He twisted his body mid-air, using his massive arms to slap the ground and stabilize his footing.
'The kid can see everything now,' Ryu analyzed, a fierce, competitive fire burning in his chest. 'Every single twitch, every single shift in my weight. In a straight physical exchange, those eyes give him a perfect script of the future. But a script is only useful if you have the space to read it!'
Ryu violently swung his hair outward, unleashing a wide-angle, multi-directional Homing Granite Blast. Five separate, screaming beams of white-hot light erupted from his canon, splitting apart to circle around the valley before zeroing in on Oden from every conceivable blind spot simultaneously.
At that exact micro-second, the mountain of rubble at the edge of the clearing violently exploded outward.
Aoi Todo erupted from the debris, his bare chest covered in deep purple bruises and lacerations from the previous Black Flash, but his eyes were burning with an unyielding, fanatical determination. He saw the five homing beams closing in on Oden's position.
Clap!
The sharp, echoing sound of Todo's palms slamming together rang through the valley.
Instantly, Oden was swapped with a falling stone twenty yards outside the blast radius, while Ryu was suddenly yanked straight into the center of his own incoming Homing Granite Blasts.
But Ryu didn't panic. He had completely expected the intervention. The moment his body materialized in the new spatial coordinates, he didn't try to dodge his own tracking energy. Instead, he simply unleashed an absolute, maximum-capacity full-body discharge, his raw output expanding outward like a massive, blinding dome of pure white light that completely neutralized the homing beams and forced Todo to cross his arms against the searing wind pressure.
"I already told you, fat boy!" Ryu roared through the white-hot glare, his eyes tracking Todo's silhouette through the smoke. "I've already completely memorized the flavor of your little claps!"
Before Todo could even reset his combat stance, Ryu appeared directly in front of him, his massive leg swinging around in a brutal, hyper-accelerated low sweep that caught Todo off-balance, sending the Kyoto beast crashing hard into the dirt.
Suddenly, an ancient, wicked voice croaked sharply through the spiritual binding of the Séance technique, echoing directly inside Ryu's mind like a cold iron chain tightening around his soul.
'Ryu Ishigori! Stop playing with your food this instant!' Granny Ogami's voice commanded from her distant hiding spot, her tone dripping with absolute, greedy panic. 'The strongest sorcerer from Tokyo is already moving toward your position! You are wasting precious time indulging in your ridiculous appetites! Deploy your domain right now and finish the execution before the entire operation is compromised!'
Ryu's massive frame suddenly stiffened, his towering shoulders slumping slightly as the absolute authority of the Séance technique physically forced his hands to move into a designated ritual formation. A look of deep, profound disappointment crossed his rugged features, his wild eyes turning toward Oden and Todo with a genuine sense of sorrowful regret.
"Tsk... what a complete and utter tragedy," Ryu muttered, his voice dropping into a low, somber register as the sparks around his pompadour began to dim. "I have absolutely no say in this matter, boys. My soul isn't the one holding the wallet in this era. I truly wished to have a pure, manly fight until the very end... to see which one of us would completely break first over a spectacular dessert."
He raised his heavy hands, his fingers slowly weaving together into a complex, traditional ritual sign.
"I apologize to the both of you," Ryu said softly. "It seems the restaurant is closing early today."
A few yards away, lying broken and battered along the perimeter of the trench, the remaining Kyoto students watched the ritual sign form with an absolute, paralyzing sense of despair.
Noritoshi Kamo, his face covered in dried blood as he struggled to keep his eyes open, let out a ragged, trembling gasp. "A ritual sign... he's going to deploy an domain."
Miwa clutched her numbed hands against her chest, tears of sheer helplessness spilling down her cheeks. "No... Todo-san... Oden-kun... neither of them possess an innate domain of their own. If a historical monster of that caliber deploys a guaranteed-hit environment... they're completely done for. It's over."
Mai Zenin closed her eyes, turning her face away from the center of the valley as the sheer, suffocating weight of an impending domain expansion began to manifest in the air, turning the surrounding atmosphere entirely rigid.
Ryu Ishigori drew a deep breath, his voice echoing across the mountainside with a terrifying, absolute resonance.
"Domain Expansion."
A sudden, violent explosion of pitch-black, fluid cursed energy erupted from Ryu's frame, rapidly expanding outward in a massive, perfect sphere that threatened to completely swallow the entire clearing, trapping Oden and Todo inside an absolute world of guaranteed destruction.
In that final, desperate micro-second before the black barrier could fully close, Aoi Todo didn't hesitate for a single millisecond. He ignored the immense pain in his broken ribs, his eyes locking onto Oden's position.
Clap!
With a final, thunderous handclap, Todo violently swapped Oden's coordinates, pulling the younger prodigy directly to his side at the absolute center of the closing sphere. Todo instantly dropped into a low, rigid defensive stance, his right foot slamming heavily into the vitrified dirt as his hands formed a distinct, traditional counter-sign.
"New Shadow Style: Simple Domain!" Todo bellowed at the top of his lungs.
A small, elegant barrier of purified, pale cursed energy instantly erupted around Todo and Oden's feet, forming a localized, protective bubble that rushed outward to meet the crushing, suffocating walls of Ryu's expanding domain, desperately trying to buffer the guaranteed-hit factor before they could be vaporized.
Outside the black perimeter, the massive, ink-like sphere of the domain fully materialized, hanging silently between the shattered trees like a dark, miniature moon.
Maki, Panda, and Inumaki, who were still struggling to find a way through the external veil further up the trail, stopped in absolute horror as they felt the sudden, massive spike of domain-level energy radiating from the valley below.
"A domain?!" Panda yelled, his internal cores trembling under the sheer pressure. "Who the hell is deploying a domain down there?!"
Then, without a single warning, the sky above the southern valley completely tore open.
It didn't happen from the inside. The massive, reinforced black outer shell of Ryu's Domain Expansion was suddenly hit by an absolute, cataclysmic force originating entirely from the outside world.
CRAAAASH!
With a deafening, reality-shattering sound that resembled a mountain of solid glass being struck by a meteor, the entire outer barrier of the Domain Expansion was instantly, violently pulverized into millions of harmless, glittering ambient shards. The pitch-black sphere completely disintegrated in an absolute blink of an eye, the sudden spatial collapse throwing a wave of thick white smoke across the entire valley floor.
Ryu Ishigori's eyes snapped wide in absolute, unprecedented shock. His ritual hand sign violently broke apart as the backlash of his shattered domain caused a small trickle of blood to spill from his lips. He stumbled back three paces, his vertical pompadour bristling as his predatory instincts flashed a desperate, red-alert warning that completely eclipsed anything he had felt during the fight.
"What... what is this?!" Ryu gasped, his gaze spinning wildly toward the clearing through the rising screens of thick white mist.
As the smoke slowly cleared, a tall, incredibly slender figure was shown standing casually at the absolute apex of the shattered bedrock.
Satoru Gojo stood tall, his hands slid loosely into the pockets of his dark uniform trousers, his long white hair fluttering gently in the mountain breeze. His dark fabric blindfold remained securely tied across his eyes, yet the absolute, infinite pressure radiating from his casual, relaxed frame was so immensely vast that it completely froze every single living soul in the entire valley. The grass beneath his boots didn't just wither. It completely ceased to exist, the very space around his body bending in invisible, concentric ripples.
Gojo tilted his head slightly toward the resurrected historical titan, a small, thoroughly unhinged, and terrifyingly cold smile spreading across his lips.
"Hey there, old-timer," Gojo said, his voice carrying a light, breezy cadence that somehow managed to make the entire valley feel completely freezing. "Thanks for taking such good care of my precious students while I was away. I really appreciate the warmup you gave them."
---
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