The rain was falling lightly outside, dripping down the fogged windows of the small, cheap hotel in the city center. The sheets were clean but old, and the room smelled of damp wood and cheap soap. The orange light from the lamp above the bed barely illuminated the pale faces of the two young men.
Shirou sat in a chair next to the bed, his arms crossed, his face tired but alert. His coat was hanging on the doorknob, still dripping. The day had been longer than he had expected.
In bed, Tachie slept soundly, her hair spread out on the pillow and her shield leaning against the wall beside the bed. Even in her rest, her face still bore the marks of the fury that had nearly boiled over hours before. She had been on the verge of collapse, overcome by memories and feelings that Shirou barely understood. Those words echoed in his mind:
"Why didn't you save me?"
It was as if an old shadow had clung to her, and for a moment, she wasn't the same Tachie she'd always been, determined, brave, loyal. She was someone in pain. Someone who had returned from the brink of darkness.
Shirou slowly got up and walked to the window, pulling the curtain a little to see the lights of the distant city, the cars passing by in the distance, life going on as normal while they were hidden, dealing with burdens invisible to the common eye.
He sighed.
"You've always been stronger than I imagined..." he murmured to himself. "But this time, I felt fear. Fear of losing you."
His gaze returned to her. She was still asleep, but her face now seemed more serene. Perhaps fatigue had overcome the demons for now. He knew she needed to rest... but he also knew they couldn't stay here for long.
He pulled an extra blanket and carefully arranged it over her body. "Just a little longer. I'll protect you, Tachie. Even if it costs me everything."
Outside, the sound of the rain grew louder. And for a moment, the world seemed to breathe with them in silence.
Shirou finally allowed himself to lie down. The mattress was hard and uncomfortable, but exhaustion enveloped him like a heavy cloak, pulling him into sleep without resistance. His eyes closed... and he began to dream.
In the dream, everything was shrouded in a blue haze, as if he were looking through a thin membrane between worlds.
He saw a battlefield, not the one he had now, but an old one. There, Tachie's body lay motionless among the rubble, her broken shield beside her, her scythe lying like a broken mirror. Blood stained the earth around her, slowly dripping down the stones. It broke Shirou's heart.
Then, figures appeared. Men and women in black, with cross marks and impassive faces. The Funeral Home.
They collected Tachie's body with cold, mechanical respect. One of them muttered something in Latin. A cross glowed in their hands as they passed a white cloth over the girl's face. She was taken to a hidden place, a dark temple beneath the ground, where the dead were not laid to rest, but...prepared.
The dream changed. Now, he saw a room lit by blue stained glass windows. Someone was watching Tachie's body lying on a stone table. It was a woman.
Her name was Ciel.
Her eyes were as deep as the starless night. She touched Tachie's chest with the palm of her hand and murmured words that Shirou didn't understand. Ancient rituals. Magic he had never felt.
Tachie opened her eyes.
At first, slowly...then, as if emerging from a nightmare. Her eyes were different. There was pain. There was confusion. But there was also a new strength. Something sealed there. Something that shouldn't exist, but was now part of her.
Ciel gave her a choice. "You can stay dead... or carry the weight of something greater."
Tachie didn't hesitate. She gripped the handle of a new scythe, its blade as red as a tragic sunset. Her body trembled... but she was alive. And transformed.
Shirou, in the dream, tried to call out to her. He tried to run to her. But his feet were stuck to the ground. Everything around him began to crumble like cracked glass. The image of Tachie walking away with Ciel shattered before his eyes.
"Tachie!" he shouted.
But she didn't turn around.
The world around Tachie was hazy and unstable, as if reality were shaping itself from the fragments of memory and pain. She lay on an old bed, covered in rough sheets. The smell of incense and old wood filled the air. The ceiling above was stone, curved, like that of an underground chapel.
Tachie's body felt heavy. Every muscle, every bone ached as if it had been forcibly remade. It was a pain that went beyond the physical, as if her soul had been ripped out and put back together. Her eyes slowly opened, and she saw a figure sitting next to the bed.
Dark blue hair, deep, cold eyes, and a gaze that hid compassion beneath layers of pragmatism.
"You are alive. But this second life is not a gift... it is a penance." She said, her voice firm and gentle.
Tachie tried to sit up, but her body did not respond immediately. She gritted her teeth, enduring the pain as Ciel held her by the shoulder and helped her stand up.
It was then that everything began to become clearer.
The memory of the battlefield...
The moment of death...
The darkness...
And the blue light that came after.
"I was saved from death. Not because I deserved it, but because there was a use in me. That is how I entered the Holy Church... Not as someone pure or holy, but as a tool. A weapon that bears the name of God while bleeding in silence."
She wore black clothes, holding a grimoire with the symbol of the cross.
Exhaustive training with swords, daggers, prayers and rituals.
People fearing her... and some admiring her as some kind of dark angel.
Ciel accompanied her like a mentor, cold but present. And Tachie, even in silence, felt a growing respect for her. It was the first time in a long time that someone believed in her as more than a victim or a memory of the past.
"I became an Apostle, not through faith, but through pain. My scythe, now part of me, feels the sins of those who cross my path. My mission is not to save. It is to punish. Even if it destroys me."
At the end, Tachie was standing in front of a stained glass window with the image of a saint wielding a spear. She wore the uniform of the Church. Her look was no longer one of confusion, but of bitter acceptance.
"I died… but I did not rest. And now… now I belong to something greater. Something that burns and illuminates at the same time. The Holy Church took me, and I accepted it."
The dream faded into white.
And even sleeping in the cheap hotel room, a tear ran down Tachie's eye.
Changing perspective...
The morning mist still hung thick over the open field where Uraume and Yorozu were. Their gazes met, cold and calculating, but with very different stories behind each pupil. No words were spoken in the first few moments. The silence was heavy, like the harbinger of a storm.
Uraume's clothes were torn in some places, marks from the previous fight still visible on her pale body. Even so, she maintained an elegant and proud posture, with her silver hair fluttering in the icy wind. In her hand, ice formed naturally, thin thorns dancing between her fingers.
Yorozu, on the other hand, exuded contained madness. Her smile was enigmatic, almost mocking. She twirled a small black orb with one finger, a manifestation of her unstable and creative Cursed Technique. Her eyes seemed to glow with anticipation of the fight.
"Have you always been this cold, Uraume?" Yorozu said with disdain, breaking the silence with a voice full of sarcasm. "Or is this just a pose to hide the void Sukuna left when he discarded you?"
Uraume was unfazed. She took a deep breath, freezing even the air that entered her lungs.
"He never discarded me!... You talk too much for someone who is about to die..." she replied with a cutting tone, like a blade of ice. "I am not like the other reincarnated... I chose my purpose. And even though Sukuna is gone... I am still loyal to his legacy after everything he did for me."
Yorozu gave a dry, melancholic laugh. "You still live for someone who never cared about you... How sad."
She threw the orb into the air and snapped her fingers. The orb exploded into several black, undulating tendril-like streams, spreading across the ground and twisting the landscape around it. "I, on the other hand, am free."
Uraume advanced first. With one step, the ground froze in a straight line, forming a trail of jagged spikes. Yorozu dodged lightly, dancing between the frozen spears, as if it were just a game.
"You think you are free..." Uraume said as she attacked. "But you are a prisoner of your own obsession."
Yorozu growled. "You speak of obsession as if it were not equal. You too live for someone who is no longer here."
The two cursed techniques collided with brutal force, the ice and shadows exploding into shards and black fragments. The mist quickly dissipated under the pressure of the energy.
The field became a stage for something greater than a simple duel.
It was a struggle between two extremes: Absolute loyalty versus uncontrollable desire.
Rational coldness versus emotional instability.
Both were weapons shaped over eons... but only one would come out whole.
And neither was willing to back down.
Yorozu smiled broadly, and then her Cursed Technique manifested in its fullness.
"Construction..." She muttered, her eyes glowing with an insane golden hue.
At the next moment, the land below Uraume trembled. As obeying the pure will of Yorozu, pillars of living flesh began to emerge from the ground. Grotesque shapes, arms, blades, mouths are twisted in chaotic spirals. It was the perfect materialization of his ability: construction of cursed organic matter. A pulsating chaos, an abomination born of the delirium of his mind.
"You'll see, Uraume ..." said Yorozu with a psychotic smile "The art of creation is more beautiful when it is made to kill."
Uraume did not move immediately. Just lifted one hand. An ice flower formed in the air, perfectly symmetrical, and then shattered, the sign of his answer.
From the floor, an ice wave sprang under his feet and advanced against the meat tentacles, freezing everything along the way. The screams of the mouths of Yorozu's cursed buildings echoed as they were disintegrated by frost.
But it was not enough.
Yorozu snapped her fingers, and the pillars of meat were reconstructed, stronger and more aggressive. A spear made of bone and veins emerged in her hand, the symbol of the divine aberration she imagined being. She launched her against Uraume as if she launched her own heart.
Uraume narrowly deflected, the ice crackling under her feet. A deep cut emerged on her arm, the blood began to drain.
She looked at the wound with serenity. "Interesting ... so you are not just delirium. You have evolved."
The sky began to darken.
Uraume stepped forward and raised both hands. Behind her, pillars of ice -shaped ice pillars began to emerge, four in all with crystal clear eyes and sharp prey. "But you are not the only one you can create, Yorozu."
Ice creatures advanced at the same time as Yorozu's meat tentacles. The shock was colossal: meat, ice, blood and curse crossing in a collision of opposite concepts.
Yorozu laughed loudly, even as part of her cloak was torn by one of the dragons. She created a shield of bone signs around her, a makeshift armor made of her living construction. "Creation of chaos! And chaos is beauty!"
Uraume, with unchanged expression, replied: "Creation without order is just self -destruction."
The two forces continued to collide, each most grotesque Yorozu attack, more organic and unpredictable. But Uraume maintained coldness and control, freezing each new attempt, shaping the field as a mirror of the silent death of winter.
The battle was just beginning and both knew that the next movement could be fatal.
Yorozu raised her right hand, and with an almost ecstatic smile, she declared with fervor: "Perfect form of creation. Changeable, fluid, eternal ... liquid metal."
From the center of her palm, he began to drain a silver, sparkling substance as mercury, but with a much larger density, almost alive. It was as if the concept itself was being dissolved in something beyond the physical. The substance began to orbit around it, floating and shaping itself as dancing tentacles.
Uraume, without hesitation, advanced. The floor froze at each step, columns of ice rose to wrap it as protective thorns. She slid over the icy surface, the speed of her onslaught cutting the air.
But the liquid metal answered.
Yorozu extended both hands forward, and the metal began to rotate quickly in high rotation, forming a floating sphere in front of her. It didn't seem aggressive ... yet.
Uraume fired an ice spear directly at her, piercing the air like a divine arrow.
The spear frozen by touching the surface of the sphere. But at the next moment ... it melted. The substance absorbed the impact and, as if he had learned from the attack, defiled and replied the spear, returning it at speed three times higher. Uraume deflected by a thread, the copy of the spear dug on the floor and exploded in crystals.
Yorozu began to laugh. "Everything you play, everything you feel ... The net sphere learns, adapts, transcends. Do you understand now, uraume?"
The metal then stopped, floating in the air before her, and Yorozu pressed her fingers against her chest. "And when it reaches your peak ... it is no longer just matter ..."
Metal began to contract on itself, as if it were a black hole being formed.
Yorozu opened her arms, as she presented her masterpiece to the universe. "... and becomes the true sphere."
The pressure on the battlefield changed instantly.
It was as if the reality itself around the sphere was being distorted, the sound was muffled, the severity altered, the refracted light. It wasn't just a gun ... it was an entity.
Uraume felt it immediately. Her feet sank into the ice she had created herself, as if pulled into the gravitational presence of that thing. Her skin tingled, her bones hurt.
But she didn't go back.
With a swift movement, Uraume slit her wrist, letting her blood fall onto her palm, ancient, sacred blood frozen within. "If this is your perfect creation, I will erase it with my final winter."
She recited an incantation in a forgotten language and the ground shook. A colossal ice flower opened beneath her feet, the skies began to snow even without clouds. Her breath became visible and the drops of blood solidified in the air.
The liquid sphere trembled slightly.
Yorozu only whispered:
"Try."
And then, the two collided.
The True Sphere, pulsing, alive and untamed, against Uraume's Final Winter, cold and inexorable.
The sound that echoed was not an explosion, it was a silent, sharp noise, like glass being cracked in the vacuum of space.
And in that instant, the world stopped spinning for a brief moment.
As the battlefield trembled around the True Sphere, unchanging and suspended like a divine heart, Yorozu smiled, her eyes shining with ecstasy. Without hesitation, she raised her arms, and from her back sprouted thin, shimmering wings, similar to those of a gigantic dragonfly. The wings vibrated at an absurd speed, creating a shrill, high-pitched sound as if the air itself were being cut into a thousand pieces every second.
Yorozu took flight with unnatural grace, her feet leaving the ground with a soft hum. She moved upward with dizzying speed, soaring in circles around the liquid sphere. From above, she watched Uraume with a look somewhere between fascination and contempt, like someone studying a statue about to crack. "You are so predictable, Uraume... always trying to freeze the world, when what I create does not belong to this plane."
Uraume, on the other hand, maintained her composure.
She raised both hands, and the ice around her began to form into crystalline serpents. Her every step froze the air, snow particles gathering around her body like a veil. With a single bound, she leapt off the ground, gliding through the air with ice spikes that appeared with her every move. It was like running on bridges formed the instant she stepped.
Uraume roared, "Your tricks do not impress me, Yorozu!"
She launched three ice spears in succession, each charged with condensed cursed energy. The spears sliced through the air with a scream, but Yorozu, in midair, spun gracefully, dodging them at the last second with her wings humming at a high frequency.
From above, Yorozu began to release needle-like tendrils of liquid metal, which chased Uraume like flying serpents. Each one learned the trajectory of her movements, becoming harder to avoid.
Uraume, enraged, slammed her fists into the air and summoned a circular ice barrier, which spun rapidly around her, repelling the attacks.
But Yorozu, now in the sky, stretched out her right arm and pointed at the True Sphere, still suspended in the field. "You are fighting against time, my winter flower."
The sphere began to spin.
Uraume realized something: the sphere was not just a weapon, it was a catalyst. The more time she spent, the more she would learn. The more combat she witnessed, the closer she became to perfection. The reality around her was already bending at impossible angles, as if the fabric of the world could no longer support her existence. "Then I will destroy her before that happens!"
Uraume shot into the air, a whirlwind of ice in her wake, her legs creating platforms for her to launch herself higher and higher. Her hands glowed with pure icy energy; she would hit Yorozu directly, even if it cost her everything.
Yorozu, smiling even more, spread her arms and let her wings vibrate at maximum power, enveloping herself with the True Sphere like a guardian of a cursed sun. "Come then, avatar of winter."
And so, the two collided in the skies.
The impact shook the forest below, cutting gusts of wind and ice spreading for hundreds of meters. The Sphere, now spinning at extremely high speed, began to emit dimensional cracks around it, the confrontation was reaching a point of no return.
It was art against winter. Creation against stillness.
And the world watched in silence.
With the skies still turbulent from the previous confrontation, Uraume, with her expression cold as eternal snow, extended her arm towards nothingness and from the humid air, shaped a giant floating ice platform, supported by columns of frozen wind and cursed energy. The structure looked like a lotus flower carved from crystal, hovering above the forest, slowly rotating with the magic that supported it. "If you're going to use your Domain Expansion… then let it be here, where everyone can see your end."
In the center of the platform, Yorozu landed softly, like an insect on her own altar. Her eyes were vivid, shining with almost religious fervor. With a gesture, the liquid metal began to emanate from her skin, surrounding her body in a grotesque, organic armor, inspired by a sacred scarab. The wings were now more rigid, reinforced with black and gold plates, and curved claws appeared in the arms and legs.
She opened her arms and smiled with provocation: "An arena in the sky? I admire your sense of spectacle, Uraume. But now ... it's too late."
Uraume, seeing the brightness around Yorozu's body, the marks on the platform floor starting to align in concentric circles, a clear sign that the domain expansion was about to be activated, it came into action.
Without hesitation, she hit her foot against the platform and thousands of ice needles burst from the frozen ground. They were like arrows fired in all directions, trying to interrupt domain formation by attacking the magic anchor points on the ground. "It won't open a world here. I won't allow it."
Yorozu made an agile jump back, the needles crashing into their insectoid armor. Some broke, others ricocheted, but the invocation circles began to fail, distorting.
"Ahn ~ ... so hurried, so impatient! It just excites me more, uraume!"
Yorozu hit the claws in her chest, and a roar echoed inside the armor, as if there was an animal trapped inside him. She then bent and thrown with violence, leaving a trail of metallic energy and viscosity in the air.
Uraume responded with a whip of ice, which served like a living beast. The whip curled into Yorozu's arm, but the armor absorbed part of the impact.
Yorozu pulled Uraume tightly, trying to shorten the distance. Uraume, without hesitation, released a blast of frost directly from his feet, creating stakes around himself to prevent Yorozu from approaching.
Yorozu's insect armor was now covered with ice crystals that were beginning to spread slowly, like a white plague.
Uraume knew: the domain was still being prepared, even slower now. She needed to finish this before the process was completed.
She lifted her arms to the sky. "May the eternal cold fall ..."
And so, the clouds began to spiral. Black snow flakes began to fall. The temperature plummeted below an absolute zero. And the platform itself began to freeze from the inside out, trying to imprison Yorozu by its living metal armor.
Yorozu still smiled, but her skin was starting to crack under her armor, she couldn't keep the dominion and resist at the same time.
The fight was now on the thread of the blade: ice against transmutation, instinct against adaptation, absolute calm against creative chaos.
And neither intended to retreat.
The tension in the air was sharp, as cold and sharp as the ice blades surrounding the sky. The battlefield, suspended above the forest, shaved with the force of two powerful entities: on one side, Yorozu, dressed in her grotesque liquid metal armor, and on the other, Uraume, with her freezing and relentless aura.
Yorozu, despite the previous blocks, still kept the true sphere, a pulsing mass of moldable energy hanging behind it, the heart of its future domain expansion. Each beat of that sphere seemed to lightly distort the reality around, as if the world was being folded by its will.
But Uraume would not allow.
With a cold, emotionless look, she slid down the frozen floor and raised both arms, gathering all the ice from the atmosphere around, condensing it in a single colossal, almost translucent crystal lamina with ancestral runes recorded on its surface. The surrounding air snapped with the absolute pressure and cold.
"This is the end of your insolence ..." she whispered, as if the wind itself carries her voice.
In a lightning movement, Uraume jumped into the air with unnatural lightness, turning the body with deadly elegance, and then descended with everything, the ice blade wrapped in cursed energy scratching the sky like a light blue comet.
Yorozu barely had time to react.
The blade did not directly hit Yorozu, hit the true sphere.
But at the exact moment of the impact, Yorozu was thrown backwards by the force of the explosion of energy generated, being thrown with brutality well within the true still unstable sphere before it became part of a domain.
And that's where everything collapsed.
The sphere, when penetrated abruptly by a physical body, collapsed. As if it were a fragile bubble, she cracked from the inside out. The edges began to shine with white light and then exploded in a silent implosion, as if the reality there had been withdrawn in pain.
Yorozu screamed, not in pain, but in frustration. The blow destroyed the formation of her domain expansion, her final technique, the pinnacle of the cursed art.
She fell to her knees on the fragments of the frozen platform, coughing up metallic blood.
"You… destroyed my chance…" she murmured, her eyes wide in disbelief.
Uraume landed softly in front of her, her feet on the cracked ice, the freezing aura still enveloping her pale hair and expressionless face.
"You never had a chance..." Uraume replied, cold as death.
Yorozu, even on her knees, still tried to raise a hand, but her armor was already shattering, the liquid metal becoming useless in the face of the cold that corroded her very soul.
Uraume's blow was not just physical, it was strategic, it was symbolic. Destroying the True Sphere with Yorozu inside it was like annihilating not only her technique, but her vanity, her absolute belief in her own creation.
And now, all that remained was the piercing silence of the frozen sky.
The silence after the destruction of the True Sphere was suffocating, as if the very air had been sucked out of the world. The ice platform floated above the void between the unstable clouds, cracked, like a mirror about to shatter. On it, Yorozu knelt, panting, her arms trembling, her body wrapped in brittle fragments of the liquid metal armor, now without form or power.
Uraume remained motionless for a few moments. Her cold eyes stared at her opponent with something that was not exactly contempt, but rather disinterest. As if she were already above that conflict.
Yorozu spat silver blood and tried to raise her head. Her eyes burned with anger, frustration… and a last flash of pride.
"If it were this Yuji guy, he would have tried… to save my body. To separate my soul… to give me a dignified end." she murmured, her tone weak and scathing. "But you're not him, are you? You're just a shadow of ice… a soulless servant…"
Uraume took a step forward. The sound of the ice beneath her feet echoed like glass cracking. The cold breeze began to intensify, as if the very atmosphere sensed the coming decision.
"You're right..." Uraume said, without blinking. "I'm not Yuji Itadori. I don't allow myself to hesitate… or to be sentimental."
Yorozu opened her mouth to say something, perhaps a final challenge, a final curse. But she didn't have time.
Uraume raised her hands and the air around her froze in an instant. The cold was so intense that ice crystals formed spirals in the air, converging on Yorozu's body. The liquid metal hardened on her skin, turning into opaque, frozen plates. Her flesh began to be covered by a veil of frost so dense that it erased any human trace.
In a matter of seconds, Yorozu became a grotesque and fragile ice statue, a twisted figure, frozen at the exact moment of her fall.
Uraume walked slowly towards her. Her eyes were empty, guiltless, emotionless. "You could have been spared… But your words sealed your fate."
And then, with a sharp movement, Uraume raised a single leg and stepped firmly on the statue's chest.
The sound that followed was sharp and final, an explosion of crystalline shards, flying like sharp needles in all directions. The fragments of the former Yorozu shone for an instant in the air, before falling and disappearing into nothingness.
No scream. No ceremony.
Just ice… and oblivion.
Uraume stood there for a few moments, letting the cold breeze carry away the last traces of Yorozu's existence. Then, she whispered to herself, more to fill the silence than out of any real emotion:
"The past is not worth preserving... when it chooses to live in arrogance."
She turned, and the freezing winds followed her steps.
The battle was over. And Uraume... left nothing behind, unless...
"Look... Another finger from Sukuna."
End of Chapter 19