That curiosity was the only reason he hadn't killed it outright, opting to probe its abilities first.
"If you get careless and can't handle it, don't come crying to Betty for help." She sniffed, chin tilted upward.
"Relax." His smile turned inward, private and anticipatory. "This is a good chance to test something I've been thinking about for a while. A technique so rare that even within the Gojo Family, almost no one knows it exists. Let's hope it doesn't disappoint."
The moment the words left his mouth, his hands came together. Ten fingers interlocked.
Pressure crashed down like a physical weight.
Nothing like Blue. Nothing like Red. This was something else entirely, something that dwarfed both so completely they might as well have been parlor tricks.
The White Whale, one of the Three Great Mabeasts, flinched. Betty, a Great Spirit with centuries of power behind her, felt her heart lurch.
The haughty edge vanished from her face. Her wide eyes shrank to pinpoints, all playfulness replaced by a gravity she rarely showed.
In four hundred years of existence, she had witnessed Echidna's forbidden magic. She had felt the peak of Roswaal's combat power firsthand. She herself stood at the pinnacle of Yin Attribute sorcery. None of it compared.
This wasn't a question of raw strength. The nature of this energy was what set her nerves on fire. Something about it screamed danger on a level she had never encountered.
If it rattled Betty this badly, Subaru didn't stand a chance. Even though the pressure was aimed squarely at the White Whale, even though what reached him was the barest fraction of a fraction, it felt like an invisible boulder had settled on his chest. Breathing turned into a conscious effort.
Above, the whale had it a thousand times worse.
All three bodies stiffened mid-flight. Their movements turned sluggish, mechanical. The crimson terror in those massive eyes deepened into something beyond fear.
Despair.
The whale only used its cloning ability when it sensed mortal danger. The copies could fight, yes, but their real purpose was misdirection, creating confusion so the original could escape. Yet even with two decoys flanking it, the creature felt no safer. The enemy hadn't even attacked yet, and the sensation of being locked in place, pinned by an invisible gaze, was driving it to the edge of madness.
Gojo's lips curved. Behind his sunglasses, blue eyes churned with Cursed Energy colliding and interweaving at a rate that defied comprehension.
"Cursed Technique Lapse: Blue."
His voice was calm, unhurried, and carried to every ear on the ground below with crystalline clarity.
Azure light blazed to life on his left.
"Cursed Technique Reversal: Red."
Searing crimson ignited on his right.
Two opposing forces, two colors of annihilation, painted him in a glow that made him look less like a man and more like something that had stepped out of myth. Blue condensed into a singularity of pure attraction, a black point that swallowed everything it touched. Red erupted outward in waves of obliterating repulsion. Two diametrically opposed energies collided at his interlocked fingertips, annihilating each other, yet held together under the Limitless Cursed Technique's control, compressed and fused into something new. Something that transcended understanding.
The resulting energy blazed with violet light, wild and furious as a captured sun.
This was the ultimate secret passed down through generations of the Gojo Family.
"Hollow Technique: Purple."
Three syllables, spoken with the weight of divine judgment.
His fingers snapped.
A sphere of purple light materialized at his fingertip. The instant it appeared, the surrounding space warped. Air ceased to exist, annihilated into vacuum. Light itself seemed to fracture and dim, as if reality couldn't quite hold together in the sphere's presence.
For one suspended heartbeat, the world went silent. No wind. No roaring whale. Only the low, tearing hum of space being ripped apart.
Then Purple launched.
The moment it left his hand, the sphere shed every constraint, expanding as it rocketed forward at a speed that made "fast" an absurd understatement. It had barely vanished from in front of him before it was already through the first clone.
No explosion. No shower of gore. The whale, dozens of meters of bone and muscle and hide, dissolved the way snow meets a furnace. Skeleton, flesh, skin, every last worm-like hair, all of it deconstructed into its most fundamental particles and erased from existence.
Before the second clone could so much as twitch, Purple punched through it too. The same scene repeated. That enormous body, helpless before absolute force, didn't even have time to scream before it scattered into nothing.
Two clones, gone.
And the violet light hadn't dimmed at all.
It bore down on the last whale. The original.
Staring down annihilation, the creature threw everything it had into survival. The pink halo on its back shuddered violently. Every hair on its body stood rigid. Its jaws gaped wide, condensing the densest fog it had ever produced, firing it in a desperate attempt to blunt even a fraction of the incoming force.
All of it might as well have been a paper wall.
Purple ignored the fog. Ignored the hide. Ignored the bone. It entered through the skull and exited through the tail fin in a single, unbroken line.
Pinned against the sky like an insect on a board, the whale had no room to struggle.
Its final roar tore from its throat and cut off halfway.
Where the creature's mountain-sized head had been, a void now gaped, consuming nearly everything. Half the body was gone, erased as thoroughly as the clones.
Gojo had adjusted his angle at the last second. Without that correction, the original would have been atomized just like its copies.
What remained of the White Whale could no longer fly. Could no longer do anything at all.
The carcass plummeted like a severed kite, slamming into the earth with enough force to shake the ground like an earthquake. Subaru stumbled, fighting to keep his footing. Dust billowed outward in a storm that swallowed everything.
"It's... it's over."
The words came out shaky, more exhale than speech. The pressure from moments ago had been suffocating.
"No. It isn't."
Betty's gaze hadn't so much as flickered toward the whale. Not once. From start to finish, her eyes had been fixed on the deep night sky above.
Because Purple hadn't stopped.
After tearing through the whale's true body, the sphere had continued upward, its remaining energy still surging, its speed undiminished. Subaru followed Betty's stare and looked up.
Against the dark canvas of the night, a full moon hung high and pale.
And beside it, a second celestial body had appeared, burning with eerie purple radiance.
How far it had climbed was impossible to say. But at some unknowable altitude, the sphere finally detonated.
The shockwave ripped through the upper atmosphere. Clouds that had hung thick and heavy were scoured away in an instant, revealing the naked night sky and a sea of stars. Not natural clarity. Forced clarity, the sky power-washed clean by raw energy.
The blast wave rolled earthward like a tsunami.
Sound hit first. A wall of noise so enormous Subaru clapped his hands over his ears. Betty, more experienced, blocked hers while simultaneously raising a barrier of Mana in front of them both.
Then came the wind. A howling gale born from the detonation, hurling stones and dust against Betty's shield in a rattling barrage that sounded like hail on a tin roof.
It lasted a long time before it finally died.
When the two of them looked around, the area beneath the Flugel Tree was unrecognizable. The cozy merchant camp had been reduced to scattered wreckage. Lucky for them, the merchants had fled long ago and were nowhere in sight. Otherwise, the aftershock alone would have left casualties.
Betty turned her gaze upward, to the figure descending slowly from the sky with that same irreverent grin plastered across his face.
Her understanding of him deepened by another degree.
Her contractor was a monster. One that rivaled the Witches themselves.
"Sorry, sorry." Gojo landed beside them and surveyed the devastation with a cheerful shrug. "Might've gone a little overboard."
He said it the way someone might comment on the weather, not like a man who'd obliterated a legendary beast that had terrorized the world for centuries.
"Gojo, you got even stronger!" Subaru blurted out.
Pride for his friend mingled with something sharper underneath. Envy. If he'd had this kind of power in the last loop, none of it would have happened.
"Wouldn't say stronger." Gojo waved the praise off. "I've been wanting to try that for a while, but never had the right target or the right setting. Today checked both boxes. Shame, though. I was hoping to play around a bit more, but the big guy couldn't take a hit. Kind of a letdown."
Betty rolled her eyes and punched him in the arm. It didn't hurt. It wasn't meant to.
"You... next time you use something that destructive, warn us first. Were you trying to blow us away too?"
"Please. Something this minor is no problem for you at all. You're my contracted Spirit, remember? Ridiculously strong."
The compliment earned two small huffs, but the smile tugging at Betty's lips said she wasn't immune to flattery.
"So what do we do about that?" She pointed at the White Whale's remains, still smoldering in its crater.
"Are we still going after the Witch Cult? That whale's worth a fortune, you know."
The observation pulled Gojo into thought.
"Subaru. The Witch Cult's attack was supposed to come a bit later, right?"
"That's right." Subaru nodded with certainty.
"Then let's deal with the whale first?"
He phrased it as a question, looking to Subaru. All the talk about crusading against the Witch Cult aside, this entire operation was about giving Subaru his revenge. The man himself should have the final say.
"Works for me." No hesitation. He'd asked Gojo and the others for help in the first place. If the Witch Cult hadn't shown up yet, handling the whale in the meantime was hardly an inconvenience.
"Great." Gojo rubbed his forehead and sighed. "Of all the timing. The whale had to show up right after I'd sent everyone else ahead. Now I have to make the trip all over again."
A beat.
"Whatever. If Felt doesn't show some proper gratitude after all this running around, I'm going to have words."
"Want Betty to help?"
Betty lifted her chin, a hint of smugness playing across her features.
"Help how?"
"High-level Yin Attribute magic includes teleportation, remember?"
Gojo smacked his own forehead. "Right. I completely forgot."
"Can you bring everyone back at once?"
"Not from that distance. It would take... two jumps, probably."
"And you didn't mention this earlier because...?"
He grabbed her and went straight for the ribs.
"Ahaha, stop, let go! You never asked!" Betty squirmed, laughter spilling out despite her best efforts to look indignant. "I thought... hahaha... I thought you were doing it that way because you enjoyed it!"
His fingers moved faster.
He hadn't asked. Fine. But "thought he enjoyed it"? The trips hadn't cost him much Cursed Energy, sure, but they'd been a hassle. She'd been slacking on purpose, sitting back and watching the show.
"You're getting properly punished today."
"No... no more, ahahaha... Felt... Felt and the others are still waiting!"
He didn't let up until tears of laughter were streaming down her cheeks.
"Hmph!"
Freed at last, Betty puffed out her cheeks and turned away, radiating wounded dignity. But she still opened a Gate in the air without being asked twice, pulling Gojo and Subaru through as they warped toward Felt and the others.
Betty's teleportation covered more ground per jump than his warping, but it activated slower and consumed more Mana. Two transfers later, they emerged in the forest where Felt and the rest had been waiting for what must have felt like an eternity.
...
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