When those words fell, the light in Sukuna's eyes intensified.
How many years had passed…? No! Never had anyone dared to speak to him that way!
"HAHAHAHA! Good!" His laughter thundered again among the rubble. "Let me see what you're made of!"
"Fūga!"
He clapped his palms together with a sharp crack, and violent flames compressed at the center. The air hissed as it burned under the extreme heat, while the fire twisted and took shape in his hands.
His left hand imitated the figure of a sword, straight, with his index and middle fingers extended forward, while his right hand drew back as if pulling the string of a bow.
Then, in the very next instant… a colossal bow of flames emerged, its string constantly vibrating.
Resting on it was an incandescent crimson arrow, spitting fire and twisting the space wherever its tip aimed.
"Take it as a welcome gift, bastard!" Sukuna grinned with delight and released the string.
BOOOM
The shot thundered out.
The arrow vanished in an instant, leaving behind only a crimson line that cut through the air. As it passed, the space twisted and the oxygen burned, opening a black tunnel of void.
0.0 seconds later—
BOOOM
Above, right where Damian floated, the clouds sank inward, sucked by the void the arrow had left in its path, and a second later they exploded outward, unable to withstand the accumulated pressure.
A hole of fire, hundreds of meters wide, opened in a single heartbeat, with incandescent edges boiling like magma, born of air and moisture consumed by the extreme heat.
The shockwave detonated afterward, traveling with delay, and its roar descended upon Shibuya.
Sukuna stared into the crimson center, his red eyes gleaming with hunger, expecting to see his prey reduced to ashes or fleeing in disgrace.
However—
Nothing!
The core was empty. The figure had disappeared.
His smile twisted in an instant. Then, a cutting chill slid down his nape, piercing without warning through the scorching heat of his energy.
His eyes turned rigidly. And there he was, less than a meter away, unscathed.
That damned bastard…!
Damian remained intact, not even a speck of dust staining his clothes.
He didn't even bother to look at Sukuna's petrified face.
Thud
With a careless gesture, he tossed Jogo aside. The battered body of the cursed spirit flew through the air and crashed against Panda.
!
The gigantic body of Panda staggered, and unable to avoid it, ended up hugging against his chest that burning, repulsive mass.
"..."
His eyes opened wide, confusion and horror leaving him completely blank.
Damian looked at them calmly, first at Kusakabe, paralyzed, and then at Panda, who was still holding Jogo with a lost expression.
"Are you still here?"
Bzz
With a faint buzz, in the blink of an eye the figures of Panda and Kusakabe distorted, like drawings erased from paper.
In an instant, the place was empty.
And just when they disappeared—
PffPff
Two dry slashes, so fine they sounded like paper being cut.
To the side, the two sorcerers who were still immobilized by Sukuna's pressure barely had time to open their eyes.
The confusion on their faces mixed with relief, believing they had been saved.
In a single instant, bodies, clothes, weapons, and everything they carried were pierced by threads, aligned and sharp.
"..."
There was no blood, no screams. Only their bodies breaking apart into hundreds of perfect blocks, with edges so clean they looked like freshly polished mirrors.
Flesh, bones, metal, everything had been cut without leaving a trace, only precision.
The calm of such a precise and silent death contrasted with the distant roar of the explosion that still shook the sky and made Shibuya tremble.
"..."
It was then that Damian turned. This time he did it completely, facing Sukuna directly.
The red eyes of the latter followed him, wavering between rage and surprise, unable to look away from him.
Damian's right hand rested on the hilt of Yamato, and with a slight push of his thumb, the guard gave way with a "click," and the blade peeked out just a centimeter, a cold glint that cut through the noise of the sky.
The rigidity on Sukuna's face cracked.
His lips slowly parted, revealing his teeth in a grimace that mixed disbelief with anxious fury. His eyes first fixed on that blade and then on the piled remains of the sorcerers, cut with a precision that seemed straight out of a perfect mold.
"A… slash?!" he muttered to himself, feeling how the cursed energy boiled inside him until it pressed against the flesh of Itadori's body.
This man… was he using slashes?
Was he daring, in front of the King of Curses, the one who mastered slashes at their peak, the one who had engraved "Dismantle" and "Cleave" into the very essence of jujutsu… TO PLAY WITH SLASHES?!
The muscles on Sukuna's face tightened and immediately stretched into an ever-widening grimace, nearly tearing up to his ears.
"Ha… hahaha… HAHAHAHA! You're more interesting than I thought, bastard!"
The laughter hadn't even finished echoing when his madness hit the limit.
"Dismantle!"
Without warning, he extended his right hand toward Damian, who was less than five meters away, and swung it down as if tearing fabric apart.
With an almost imperceptible vibration, from that tension burst forth a slash with no visible form, a plane of pure intent that traveled in a straight line, ready to sever Damian along with the ground beneath his feet.
Fast and Absolute!
That was Sukuna's Dismantle. The root of jujutsu.
A slash that needed no body to kill.
However, Damian did not follow its trajectory nor try to gauge it with his eyes. A half-step sideways was enough, a minimal movement that left the slash grazing his clothes.
Swish
The Dismantle continued its course and, dozens of meters away, struck the skeleton of an office building already wounded by battle.
!
The glass facade split in a perfect line, the steel and concrete, tense at first, began to yield with a low groan, and the structure slid over itself until it split in two.
A vertical fissure, completely smooth.
Boom
The roar came afterward, raising a cloud of dust that swept across the avenue.
Damian barely turned his head, just enough to make it clear he had seen the result, then refocused his eyes on Sukuna, whose expression had momentarily stiffened.
The message was clear, as if engraved on Sukuna's retina:
Is that all?
"…" The wide grimace of the King of Curses froze for a fraction of a second, and like oil on red-hot iron, shattered into an outburst of rage.
His cursed energy exploded like an out-of-control volcano, bursting from his skin under pressure and turning the ground into shrapnel, tiles lifting, stones flying.
"Interesting! Too interesting!" roared Sukuna, his voice cracking between fury and excitement. "THEN LET'S TRY AGAIN!"
Immediately, his body became a turret of "Dismantle." His hands swung nonstop, so fast that his movements merged with the moonlight.
First one slash… then another… then ten, and within seconds they multiplied into dozens, into hundreds!
The "Dismantle" streaked across space like soundless lightning, overlapping until they formed a net of slashes that filled the entire view and, when closing, sought to pulverize everything within.
This was the true slash of the King of Curses: a relentless, inevitable attack that allowed no room for evasion or defense.
In front of that storm, Damian moved.
There was no roar nor burst of energy; only the calm sound of his steps.
His left foot barely brushed the ground and his body turned just enough to let three intersecting slashes meet in empty air.
His right foot pulled back a span, and seven invisible lines passed by his face, close enough to stir his white hair, exploding against the pavement behind him.
When he inclined his torso to the side, several slashes traced the line of his abdomen and nose, but touched nothing more than air.
The rest continued forward, splitting the body of a bus at the end of the street into perfect pieces.
It was a calm stroll.
Sukuna unleashed a power designed to cut everything, and Damian responded with movements as precise as breathing, as fluid as a walk.
SwishSwish Swish
All of Shibuya became a canvas for Sukuna's slashes.
Each "Dismantle" was a wild stroke, a signature of death etched into the city.
The apartment building to the left split in two, and the upper half tilted down against the ground.
To the right, the facade of the shopping center opened into hundreds of lines at once, glass and concrete collapsing in a cascade.
Ahead, the entrance to the abandoned subway station was cut from top to bottom, revealing the dark tunnel.
And behind, the Tower gave way diagonally, its giant screen crashing down amid sparks and a devastating roar.
Smoke rose without pause, explosions followed one after another, and fragments of concrete, twisted rebar, and burning cars rained down.
And in the middle of that devastation, only a small strip remained untouched: the space where Damian stood, the unmoving eye in the storm.
The ground beneath his feet was unscathed, not even a speck of dust stirred.
Thus, among the storm of slashes capable of razing half the district, Damian moved with calm. Each of his movements was exact, naturally avoiding slashes that for anyone else would mean instant death.
The rain of cuts continued without rest for ten eternal seconds.
When the last "Dismantle" slashed diagonally through a low building and brought it down, Sukuna finally stopped the movement of his fingers.
His chest rose and fell slightly, not from fatigue, but from the surge of energy wasted in the savage attack.
His pupils then fixed on the haze. Fury, euphoria… and, this time, a spark of bewilderment shone in them.
The dust slowly settled, revealing once again the silhouette of Damian.
He was still there, in the same spot where he had begun, standing as if he had never moved.
His clothes were intact, and his icy gaze pierced through to sink directly into Sukuna's twisted face.
"Is that all?"
Sukuna's breath stopped suddenly and the muscles in his face trembled as rage bubbled in his eyes.
Calmly, he raised his right hand and brought together his index and middle finger, also supporting his thumb, pointing toward Damian.
At the tip, a massive amount of cursed energy quickly began to condense.
"…Cleave!"
!
The space in front of Damian warped. What erupted from Sukuna was not a simple slash: it was law, a cut that expanded with the strength of the target's cursed energy, an inevitable execution.
The cold of death crawled through every inch of the air.
However—
Damian moved his thumb over the hilt of Yamato.
Clack
The guard of the sword gave a sharp click, and the blade slid from its sheath barely a centimeter.
!
An indescribable fissure materialized in front of the blade, as if even light itself had been cut. There was no flash or visible trajectory, only the absolute certainty that space had been divided.
Ting
Sukuna's "Cleave," powerful enough to annihilate a special-grade cursed spirit, disintegrated instantly, vanishing without leaving a single ripple.
For a moment, everything in Shibuya fell silent.
"Ha…?"
The expectation on Sukuna's face froze at once, and in his pupils the image of the extinguished "Cleave" was reflected clearly.
He did not feel fear, not the slightest trace. On the contrary, a burning wave of excitement surged through him. Logic collapsed before his eyes, but that contradiction only fanned his joy: at last, a rival worthy of his power.
"He blocked it?!" His shout came out distorted, vibrating with disbelief, and in the same instant broke under the weight of a frenzied laugh. "Hahahahahha!!! Beautiful! Truly sublime!"
Suddenly he opened his arms as if embracing the entire world, joy overflowing from every fiber of his being.
"For granting me this pleasure!!!" His voice roared like thunder. "Allow me to offer you my hospitality!!!"
His hands quickly came together, forming a seal!
A cursed energy far more concentrated than anything he had shown before burst from his body like a flood.
"Ryōiki Tenkai…!"
His fingers stopped in the exact form: three of the right hand interlaced, the index of the left bent, ring and pinky extended in unison, and the thumb pressed into the palm.
A seemingly simple mudra…
"…Fukuma Mizushi!"
The torrent of cursed energy exploded with him as the center, expanding with violence.
The entire field of vision was stained a heavy dark red, corrupted and coated by the unbearable stench of fresh blood.
Space no longer existed as before, it had been forcibly replaced.
Beneath their feet stretched what seemed like an endless sea of blood.
Behind Sukuna, a shrine made of bones rose from the crimson ocean, so colossal it blotted out the entire sky.
Its enormous gates slowly opened like the jaws of a monster. This opening was not a simple entrance, but the mouth of an abyss, ready to completely devour the tiny intruder within this profane domain:
Damian.
Within this domain, ruled solely by the will of the King of Curses, no law existed other than his own.
Every cut, every movement, was an inevitable sentence of death, written and dictated by his hands.
Standing atop the sea of blood, beneath the oppressive shadow of the shrine, Sukuna smiled with cruel delight.
"Enjoy it well!"
"…Alright."
Damian, without much emotion, fully accepted the gift.
His right foot slid half a step back, his body leaned forward, and the thumb of his left hand gently pushed against Yamato's guard.
And his right rested lightly on the hilt.
It was the purest and deadliest stance of iaijutsu.
"COME! Let me see what you're truly capable of!" Sukuna roared, and in that instant the entire domain was unleashed.
Countless "Dismantle" and "Cleave" materialized at the same time, surging from every direction, above and below, from the front and the back.
Every inch of space became a torrent of slashes destined to disintegrate anything that dared to breathe.
Damian lowered his gaze.
Clang
Yamato slid three inches out of the sheath.
In an instant, countless dark blue flashes erupted within the domain. Each flash intercepted a slash with perfect precision.
With that, the space itself began to crack, unable to withstand the collision.
"Absolute Cut…" he murmured, and Damian's figure turned blurry, fading into the storm of blades.
!
Sukuna's pupils contracted. He saw it… his domain, his perfect shrine, being pierced from the center by a dark blue slash that split everything in two.
The sea of blood opened, divided by a clean line.
His colossal shrine of bones fractured, revealing surfaces smooth as mirrors. All the slashes he had summoned vanished into an unbearable silence.
"…Impossible…"
His shrine… was collapsing.
Click
Damian appeared again, sheathing Yamato.
The entire domain began to shatter like a broken mirror.
"Sigh… boring…"