The landscape flew past beneath me, changing from buildings with red slanted roofs and courtyards with multiple people training, till it shifted to a grassy hill, then a forest.
The wind ruffled my wings, the appendages fluttering to the sensation of flying across the landscape.
A new flutter of my right upper wing, and I caught sight of her, or more accurately, I'd caught sight of the path she'd taken. I'd not been kind with my throw, and the trench carved through the hill and into the forest was the greatest sign of that.
I angled my jump, twisting my hulking mass and folding into a ball as I aimed for where the trench was carved. Gravity took hold of me as my momentum was spent, ending my parabolic arc. Then, with the wind a terrifying whistle in my ears, I slammed into the ground hard.
The force of my fall was an explosion of energy that detonated in a wide circle, creating a crater to match the trench she had made. Then, with the dust curtain as a shield, I took my first steps out, my feet digging into the wet forest floor, toes spreading out for better traction as I moved forward till I had escaped the crater.
I let out a single steaming breath as I caught sight of her. Considering she wasn't hiding, and despite my ambush and throw, Yoruzu looked remarkably unscathed, which was not a big surprise.
I shifted my attention to my palm. I remembered the feeling when I gripped her leg with the intention of crushing the limb. It had been rigid, like I was gripping a steel-plated greave instead of flesh and blood.
Her insect armor? A partial manifestation?
Yet despite how quick she had been to save the limb, the same could not be said for the rest of her body, because judging by the mud, leaves, and branches that littered her hair, face, and dug into her clothes, she had borne the fall with her body. An attempt to hide her actual insect armor, or had she been too slow to deploy it this time?
I had more questions than answers when it came to the strange incarnated sorcerer.
Yoruzu stared me down with an annoyed look on her face as she shook out her hair, sending mud, leaves, and a stubborn branch falling to the ground beside her.
"You know, right from the moment I met you, I knew you were going to be annoying," Yoruzu said. With the guise up, she had given up on faking the way she sounded. There was none of the naivety. Instead, there was an aloofness in her tone, a lack of care and worry.
"I knew I should've killed the boy earlier, but I was having so much fun. Anyway, how did you know?" she asked. She had shaken off the dirt and leaves and had quickly styled her hair back into something more familiar for her. She slipped off the jacket she had been given, leaving her with a tank top and joggers as she kicked off the shoes she had on her feet. "How did you know I was not the girl? You've known from the beginning, haven't you?"
Despite her questions, she was not focused on me. In fact, I could almost see the thought going through her head as she looked down at the joggers with contemplation on if she should leave them on or not. Yoruzu was not a fan of clothes, last I remembered.
Yet interest or not, in my silence, she looked up to face me with a raised brow.
"Don't act mute. I know you can talk. I heard enough about it while with that cute manager I was left with. So I know you're sapient at least, which is strange for a Shikigami, but you're not exactly the first I've seen. So talk to me, Shikigami. Entertain me at least until I've had my fill... I'll be meeting an important person soon, and I don't want to be too rusty, ya know?"
I ignored her words.
Instead, I looked at her.
She was buying time. I could feel her cursed energy fluctuating. She was doing something, but she was not the only one buying time, because while she was trying to distract me, I was searching for something else.
My focus was on her, and my wings twitched, searching. Not her physical body, but her soul, and finally I found it.
I found Tsumiki Fushiguro submerged in a murky sea. Her eyes flickered beneath closed lids, like she was having a nightmare, and above that sea, standing ankle-deep, was an unfamiliar woman, naked, with long black hair that hid her breasts.
I'd found Tsumiki.
Now all I needed to do was save her without killing her body.
This was not going to be clean or easy.
Every sorcerer had an instinctive ability to defend their soul from attack, as shown by Nanami, and as I had learned during my fight with the unnamed monk and Uraume. Which meant I needed to beat her enough to weaken her first.
Yoruzu sensed my gaze, because in her soul, the representation of the Heian-era sorcerer turned, porcelain-beautiful features twisting in confusion as they felt my heavy gaze.
Then the ground exploded beneath my feet, giving birth to multiple tentacles.
She underestimated me.
Even after catching her off guard, figuring out her deception, and throwing her farther than the length of two football fields, Yoruzu underestimated me, because if she hadn't, she would've launched more than five spikes from beneath my feet.
My body moved because I had been expecting it.
My perception and senses were something that surprised me even now. It was not something the anime or manga had explicitly paid attention to, but Mahoraga's senses were... unique, and the moment Yoruzu had constructed liquid metal and slipped it beneath the ground, making it dig a tunnel toward me, I had felt it.
In the vibrations beneath my feet, my wings twitched like the star nose of a mole.
I dodged to the left just as a serrated spike lunged out of the ground where my right foot used to be. Then I twisted to the right as a spiral lance jutted out from the ground, aiming for my nonexistent heart.
The third and fourth spikes came out at the same time from opposing angles, and my hands lashed out, tapping them gently enough that their momentum and speed twisted the angles they came from.
The last one came from behind, faster than the others, aiming for a supposed blind spot, the nape of my neck.
It got as far as six inches from my nape when the serpentine tail behind me moved. It curled around the black lance of liquid metal, powerful muscles gripping it tight enough to halt its momentum as well as form cracks across the construct, cracks that sealed back up.
I grinned at her.
"Oh?" Yoruzu exclaimed in surprise. "I didn't expect you to survive that." Then she raised her hands up to either side of her. "Although, I'm not sure you're going to survive this!"
Her cursed energy pulsed, and the solid constructs that surrounded me lost cohesion. Rigid serrated and spiral lances of metal shifted to something with the viscosity of liquid before growing out like a bramble, a sea of thorns sharp enough to turn anybody unfortunate into Swiss cheese.
I was learning with every encounter. Yoruzu could control her liquid metal without gestures, but it was a crude manipulation. She needed gestures and focus for finer control and constructs, which meant I could not give her a single breathing room. I took note of that tidbit as my body reacted.
The moment her technique came to life and the spears lost cohesion, I was ready for it.
My feet dug into the ground, toes wide for increased traction, and the moment I saw my chance, I exploded forward, appearing in front of Yoruzu just as she created the sea of thorns behind me.
Her eyes widened, surprise filling them at my explosive speed, explosive speed that had been enough to shock even Sukuna.
My fist buried itself into her left ribcage like a sledgehammer, forcing her mouth to slip open as she coughed up blood and bile.
Then she was launched back, right as my left hand shot out, caught her by the leg, and dragged her back into an elbow that broke her dainty nose and snapped her head to the side.
A sword came for the hand holding onto her leg, and if I had not faced Sukuna previously, I would've let the limb go.
Instead, I ignored it even as the blade dug in, only to cut three inches into the limb and stop at bone.
I had adapted to Malevolent Shrine, which was essentially the peak of cutting techniques, and while it was not a blanket immunity to being cut in general, it meant that my body had been altered enough that it would take more than a single swing from an uncomfortable angle to relieve me of my hand.
The dull gold of the wheel on my head hummed and groaned at the attack.
I slammed Yoruzu back into the ground for the second time in as many hours, creating another crater and throwing up a fresh curtain of mud and dust enough to blind, but I didn't need to see her to know where she was, not when I still held onto her leg.
My grip tightened on her limb, fingers digging deep into her leg as my muscles swelled, applying pressure till I heard the satisfying crunch of bone as her tibia and fibula broke, the pale white bone sticking out of flesh.
"Ah!" Yoruzu screamed in pain, and suddenly, where before I had been holding a human limb of flesh, muscle, bone, and blood, now something else covered it.
A carapace, like the outer shell of a particularly annoying bug.
I squeezed harder, trying to break it, but Yoruzu was not going to give me the chance.
The armored carapace came to life. Multiple spikes exploded from it to pierce my hand, forcing my fingers open. Then she rolled backward and launched herself away, and this time she did not fall back to the earth.
Insectoid butterfly wings beat behind her, and when I looked back at her, she had a snarl on her face as she glared at me.
"You fucker! Sukuna is not going to like me if I'm crippled damnit!" she yelled at me with a snarl on her face.
My wings twitched to focus on my hand and the multiple holes in it before moving back to Yoruzu, and where before a woman hovered, now a behemoth the same size as me hovered.
Insect armor.
"I'm going to kill you and hand your head over to him as a welcome-back gift!" Yoruzu growled, her voice deepening and twisting from inside her armor. The same moment, the wheel on my head finally made a much-awaited sound.
A slow, ponderous thud rang out as the wheel made its first turn.
KLNK.
My hand healed.
I had absolutely manhandled Yoruzu in close combat. I was faster, stronger, more durable, and more ruthless up close, but that was Yoruzu the simple sorcerer.
In that suit of exoskeleton?
For the first time, I felt a certain pressure on me as I stared up at the behemoth of carapace. A body as huge as mine, packed with muscles like bands of iron hidden beneath the shell of liquid metal. Hands and feet that ended in curved and wicked talons, and an insectoid head with jaws that looked ready to rip flesh and flense bone.
I remembered what Yoruzu did to Sukuna while in this form and realized that, for the first time, I would be meeting what was perhaps my physical match, and in response to this I let out a forest-vibrating growl before launching forward with bared teeth that no one could tell was a snarl or a smile.
__
Megumi
His hand instinctively formed the shape he wanted, his cursed energy came to life almost on its own, and before he finished clearing the hole in the wall Mahoraga had created using his sister, Megumi had already summoned Nue.
The red-feathered masked owl came out of his shadow mid-jump, and Megumi caught its leg on the way down. The jolt of the bird's giant wingspan catching air yanked him sideways and then upward, but he held on, fingers locked around the ankle, and he let Nue's flight pull him over the courtyard where a cluster of Hei members stood looking up at him with confusion.
He did not have the time to explain.
The landscape opened up beneath him as the bird sped forward, forcing his stomach to curl in on itself.
He could hear them before he could see them.
There was something about the sound of such impacts that he had grown familiar with in the weeks since Mahoraga had come into his life. The sound of overwhelming destruction, the rumble of titanic force slamming into each other. It was a far cry from the kind of fights Megumi had found himself in before the Shikigami.
The question was why, and how was Tsumiki fighting back?
Nue's wings beat hard, as if the bird sensed his unease.
It was fast. Genuinely fast.
But Mahoraga had thrown Tsumiki the length of the horizon, and the explosive jump that followed had turned it into a shooting star that had trailed after her. Megumi was left behind, seeing the damage the fight had caused instead of the fight itself because they didn't have the decency to stay in one place.
The forest bordering the Zenin Clan had been destroyed.
Vast swathes of it were ripped up, centuries-old trees broken and lying on their sides. Megumi was left arriving at the aftermath, and the sight of it...
Nue sped up, and they followed the clear trail of destruction until the bridge came into view.
What was left of it, at least...
The stone structure had proven its durability by surviving where the hill and forest it had passed through had not. It was a broken mess. The railing on the left side was gone, and the surface was cratered at multiple spots, while the structure itself swayed enough that when he released Nue and sent the bird back to his shadow, his fall onto the bridge was enough to make it sway.
He didn't think the bridge was going to survive past this fight.
Then he turned his attention to them.
He had arrived at a lull in the fight.
He recognized Mahoraga easily enough. The Divine General's pale skin was marked with shallow cuts, and blood dripped from multiple places where he had been spiked through, and yet the Shikigami didn't look bothered. It still stood hunched, stance low, arms down, and body slightly tilted like it was getting ready to lunge forward. Then there was that ever-present grin, like it was daring the world to hit him so it would have a reason to hit back twice as hard.
And opposite Mahoraga was a thing.
It was roughly the size of Mahoraga, packed into a carapace armor that twitched and acted like it was alive. The left half of the faceplate had shattered, broken inward by something that had hit hard enough to crack the shell, and through the gap Tsumiki's face looked back at him.
Tsumiki's face. Fear and worry. A cocktail of emotions that twisted at his heart.
"Megumi!"
The voice that came from inside the armor was Tsumiki's voice. The cadence of it was Tsumiki's cadence. He could not mistake it for anything else, and yet...
"Megumi, please, help me, he's going to kill me, please—"
He froze, his face twisting into anger, confusion, and worry. Why?! Why him? Why was this happening to him? What was this? What was wrong with his sister?
Even in the depths of his confusion, he was aware of Mahoraga, who had not moved either, whose grin had not changed, who was watching him patiently, as if it were waiting for him to make a decision and receive the judgment that followed.
Megumi stood on the broken bridge and looked at Tsumiki's face in the broken armor, and he could not make his body do anything at all, fear filling him because he was not sure he could take disappointing the Shikigami, yet he did not see a path where he was not left broken.