"Nine Ropes."
The words snapped through the air, echoing in the brittle silence just before chaos unfurled.
High above Shinjuku's night skyline, where the city's neon freckles scattered across black velvet darkness, something unnatural shimmered—a brief, haunting ripple.
Traffic below was a distant hush, the lives of millions pressing on in ignorance of the titanic contest looming overhead.
"Polarised light."
A pulse of energy, so dense the air itself seemed to bend, distorting the electric signs and glass towers into surreal shapes on the edge of dissolution.
There were no clouds tonight, just a bruised purple band scintillating above, refracting light like a diamond suspended midair.
"Crow and declaration."
A single black crow, silhouetted against the glassy moon, shrieked and wheeled away from the epicentre—a place, for this moment, between worlds and wars. Voices did not carry here, but power always did.
"Between front and back."
Space twisted, as if folding paper, while at the border of vision, a new colour bled into the world: perfect, uncanny, threatening.
It was neither front nor back—it was all perspectives folded into one, each angle revealing potential violence.
"Hollow technique: Purple."
The city's heart skipped a collective beat as the attack materialised—not with thunder, but with a cold, clinical inevitability.
From nowhere, a fracture in reality bloomed, and within its wound, energy pooled and coalesced.
Hollow Purple was perfection—neither light nor darkness, but a paradox, a sphere swirling in purplish hues, orbiting closer and closer to absolute devastation.
Its edge was sharp, glimmering with an inner light—violet, indigo—each tone saturating the air as if painting a new world over the old.
The sphere burned with an intensity that crushed oxygen itself, suspended motionless for a heartbeat, then launched.
The Hollow Purple was not a simple projectile.
It spun as it tore through reality, radiating destructive force along its surface.
Like the tire of a racing car, skidding at full torque in a burnout, the sphere twisted burning trails of power into the air.
The tire analogy fell short; this was not rubber carving into ground but a metaphysical engine laying tracks through the fabric of existence.
Edges spooled off and curled, violet energy licking the ether behind it, devouring everything in its path.
The city shrank away in fear. Windows shattered from proximity alone.
Concrete flaked from distant buildings, buckling beneath the pressure wave that preceded the sphere.
Hollow Purple was beautiful—the kind of beauty that made you want to turn away for fear of blindness.
No mere explosion; rather, an event horizon, collapsing matter and meaning itself into possibility—then into nothingness.
On the opposite rooftop, two figures stood amid the fractured silver moonlight.
The endless city heights behind them glowed, eerily undisturbed by what was about to unfold. One—a tall, regal silhouette—bore the manner of royalty laced with malevolence.
The other, hunched but focused, radiated tension and readiness.
"So he has arrived," murmured the first, voice low.
The other figure nodded, posture barely betraying excitement or fear.
"Hai, Sukuna-sama. Gojo is here."
For a moment, their eyes tracked the sphere—Hollow Purple—bearing down on their rooftop like judgment incarnate.
The shape expanded, light warping around its edges, distorting the faces of the figures into grotesque masks.
The domain walls of the Jujutsu world itself trembled.
Sukuna, the King of Curses, no longer wore his customary grin. Instead, his eyes narrowed, reading the shape and substance of the attack.
He had known Gojo's technique—had even relished the challenge. But this was no ordinary Hollow Purple. Its arc was wrong, its power thrumming at far above known capacity.
He realised, with a jolt, that he'd been tricked. Gojo had boosted the energy output; this was 500% beyond anything previously faced.
Sukuna's arms rose, fingers flexing in intricate sigils—old, dark, beautiful in their way, calculated to catch and redirect force.
The sphere descended, its outer shell rippling with the effort to contain power. Purple lightning braided the core, humming with violence, seeking release.
Yet as the Hollow Purple barrelled toward Sukuna, something happened.
The sphere did not erupt, did not obliterate everything in its path as expected. Instead, it halted—midair, abrupt, against an unseen barrier.
Still, it did not lose energy; instead, it spun, rolling in place like the tire of a car during burnout, rubber shrieking against asphalt, heat radiating outward, power leeching into the air, but not losing forward motion.
The sphere's energy laced outward, violet arcs sketching spirals across the sky, dragging ozone and static with them.
The city felt this moment as an instant of suffocation—a pressure without reason, a hush so deep its silence roared.
But the blast never struck. The Hollow Purple's churning shell slowed, rolling as if pressed against a wall that could neither break nor yield.
Each rotation scorched a new layer into thin air, painting spiralling blue-purple ghosts where reality once stood. Just as the last coil seemed ready to snap, the sphere blinked from existence—one instant there, the next simply gone, the ozone echo of its passage lingering behind like perfume after a storm.
Sukuna's surprise was total—a rare lapse in composure for the King of Curses.
His arms remained outstretched, the old sigils faded. His gaze darted toward the epicentre where the sphere vanished, wary calculation replacing his earlier confidence.
On the other side of this tableau, Gojo Satoru—the one who launched the Hollow Purple—hovered in disbelief.
He could feel its loss, the sudden emptiness as his purest attack was simply…stopped.
There was no blast, no thundering detonation, no cascade of destruction. Just a void reshaped by unnatural power.
Gojo's mind raced. Was Sukuna truly strong enough to halt the Hollow Purple?
What happened to conservation of energy, to technique and counter-technique? For someone like Gojo—whose very strength was measured by technique—this interruption was nothing short of blasphemy.
He inhaled, voice low.
"What the hell just happened?"
Focusing, he scanned the battlefield through his Six Eyes—ancient lenses that refracted truth from illusion.
What he saw disturbed him even more: figures, indistinct at first, standing at the epicentre where Hollow Purple had been snuffed out.
Details blurred by the blast's residue twisted into focus: shimmering, spectral shapes, cloaked in mystery, standing where raw power had faded.
Their presences were distinct, palpable even from a distance.
Gojo's senses screamed a warning—the world had changed, and new arrivals had entered its stage.
[A/N: hehe]