The dust storm generated by the catastrophic impact slowly began to settle over the ruined mountain ridge.
Deep within the tangled wreckage of pulverized cedar trees and splintered bamboo, a massive silhouette stirred.
A heavy, jagged chunk of bedrock was suddenly tossed aside, smashing into the dirt.
Ryu Ishigori stepped out of the debris.
His clothes were torn, and a faint trail of blood trickled down his cheek from a superficial scrape, but his eyes were wide, burning with an unholy, ecstatic fire. He raised his massive right hand and touched his ribs, where a faint patch of scorched fabric still smoked from the residual heat of the spatial distortion.
A wild, manic grin split across his rugged face.
"Incredible!" Ryu shouted, his voice booming across the entire mountain sector, vibrating with pure, unadulterated euphoria. "That is it! That is the rich, heavy flavor I have been begging to taste for centuries! That wasn't just some cheap, sugary snack! That was a masterfully prepared dish!"
He threw his head back, his massive gravity-defying pompadour crackling with a sudden, spontaneous overflow of sparks.
"The bitterness! The absolute density of that strike! Brat, your seasoning just went through the roof!"
A few yards away, Aoi Todo was standing perfectly still.
Tears.
Massive, heavy tears of pure, unbridled joy were streaming openly down Todo's scarred cheeks, splashing onto the front of his uniform. His chest was heaving, his entire body trembling as if he had just witnessed a divine miracle unfold in the middle of the dirt. He slammed his heavy fists against his own thighs, letting out a loud, emotional wail of complete satisfaction.
"Beautiful... absolutely magnificent, my brother!" Todo cried out, his voice cracking with intense emotion. "You did it! You felt the rhythm of the universe! You grasped the tail of the divine dragon and pulled it down to earth!"
Oden stood a few paces back, casually rolling his left shoulder. He tilted his blindfolded face slightly toward Todo, a look of profound, silent confusion crossing his features beneath the white cloth.
'Why in the world is he infinitely more emotional about this than I am?' Oden thought to himself, completely baffled by the display. 'I am the one who actually landed the hit.'
Todo suddenly stopped crying, his expression shifting instantly from hysterical joy to a look of deep, profound academic seriousness. He stepped closer to Oden, his massive shadow completely enveloping the younger prodigy as the wind whistled through the ruined clearing.
"Tell me, Oden," Todo said, his tone dropping into a low, resonant register that brooked no distraction. "Now that the black sparks have danced across your skin... do you feel it? Do you feel a deeper, more intimate connection to the core of Jujutsu? Do you understand the flowing blood of our cursed energy not as a tool, but as an extension of the soul itself?"
Oden paused, his mind reflecting on the strange, hyper-focused state he had just exited. The way the cursed energy pools inside his body were currently moving felt entirely different. The chaotic, wasteful waves had quieted down, replaced by a tight, hyper-efficient hum that vibrated right down to his bones.
"Yeah," Oden said, a small, confident smirk returning to his lips. "I do. Even if it is just a little bit... the world feels a lot clearer now."
Todo's eyes flared with immense pride. He reached out, his massive hands grabbing the collar of his own school jacket and violently ripping it down the center. Buttons flew into the grass as he threw the uniform piece aside, exposing his heavily muscled, bare torso to the rushing mountain air. He dropped into a perfectly balanced, low martial arts stance, his flat palms raised in a classic combat posture.
"Splendid!" Todo bellowed, a dangerous, eager grin stretching across his face. "Then the tedious prelude is officially over! The kitchen is fully heated, and the ingredients are set! Let us show this ancient relic exactly how the modern era cooks a masterpiece!"
Ryu Ishigori laughed fiercely, his feet tearing up the vitrified dirt as he braced his towering frame.
"Two of you now?! Excellent! Bring the whole damn menu!" Ryu roared.
BOOM!
The ground beneath Ryu's boots completely disintegrated as he detonated forward like a launched missile.
He closed the distance in a fraction of a microsecond, his massive fist enveloped in a dense, roaring sun of pure, unadulterated output aimed directly at Todo's head.
Clap!
The sharp, echoing sound of a single handclap resonated through the trees.
In an absolute blink of an eye, Todo's physical position was violently swapped with Oden, who was already hovering in mid-air with his legs coiled tightly beneath him.
'Lethal Rabbit.' Oden thought.
Using the instantaneous spatial momentum of the swap, Oden unleashed a vicious, hyper-accelerated spinning heel kick aimed straight at Ryu's jaw. Ryu's eyes widened slightly at the sudden alteration of his target, but his battle reflexes were flawless. He raised his massive left forearm, absorbing the brutal kinetic impact of the kick with a loud, metallic-sounding thud.
The shockwave of the block blew the surrounding grass flat.
"Too light, brat!" Ryu shouted, his grin widening as he prepared to counter-attack.
But before Ryu could swing his heavy arm to grab Oden's leg, another sharp sound sliced through the chaos.
Clap!
Oden was instantly replaced by Todo.
Todo was already in the middle of a devastating, full-force spinning back fist. The hard, calloused knuckles of the Kyoto beast slammed violently into the exact same spot on Ryu's defensive forearm, the combined, overlapping momentum of the two consecutive attacks finally forcing the historical giant to stagger back a full three paces.
"Brilliant!" Ryu cheered, his blood pumping with wild excitement as he stabilized his footing. "The synergy is completely seamless! It is like being served a multi-course meal all at once!"
Ryu didn't give them a single moment to breathe. He threw both palms forward, his massive reserves bubbling to the surface as his output hit its standard, terrifying baseline.
"Granite Blast!" Ryu roared.
A massive, roaring twin beam of incandescent, white-hot cursed energy erupted from his hair, tearing across the clearing like a pair of hungry dragons, vaporizing the very air in their path.
Oden stepped right in front of Todo, his chest expanding to an unnatural degree as he pulled the absolute authority of the Dragon into his lungs. He snapped his jaw open.
"Cursed Energy Breath!" Oden shouted.
A colossal, spiraling torrent of highly compressed, razor-sharp cursed energy blasted straight from Oden's mouth. The output was vastly superior to his previous attempts, the efficiency gained from his recent Black Flash allowing him to compress the beam into a dense, laser-like column of pure destruction.
CRASH!
The two colossal energy beams collided directly in the center of the ruined clearing.
The light generated by the clashing powers was so blindingly intense that it turned the entire forest sector white. The sheer sound of the struggle was deafening, a constant, low-frequency roar that shattered the remaining windows of the distant school buildings.
Ryu's Granite Blast possessed a fundamentally superior raw output, the ancient sorcerer pushing his numbers to the absolute max as he laughed through the glare. But Oden's Cursed Energy Breath was infinitely tighter now, drilling directly into the core of the white-hot beam like a diamond-tipped drill bit.
Clap!
Mid-way through the beam struggle, Todo claps his hands.
Instantly, Ryu's physical body was swapped with a falling piece of charred wood located directly behind Oden's position, completely severing his connection to the ongoing Granite Blast. The massive white beam disintegrated into harmless ambient sparks, but Ryu found himself instantly airborne, completely disoriented for a fraction of a second.
"Right here!" Todo roared, appearing directly above Ryu in the air after a secondary swap.
Todo drove both of his heavy elbows downward into Ryu's shoulders, using his full body weight to slam the giant directly down into the vitrified dirt with a bone-shattering crunch.
Ryu hit the ground so hard a new crater formed, but before the dust could even rise, Oden was already closing in from the flank. Oden utilized the Stalking Tiger authority, an ethereal, roaring feline manifestation wrapping around his right arm to multiply his physical tearing power.
'Keep the compression tight. Don't let the energy leak,' Oden reminded himself, his focus absolute.
Ryu, lying flat in the crater, simply smiled up at the descending prodigy. He raised his right leg, unleashing a massive, omnidirectional pulse of raw energy directly from his boots to create a localized explosion that forced Oden to cross his arms and slide backward across the dirt.
Ryu scrambled back to his feet, his chest heaving, his face covered in dirt and minor abrasions, but his spirit was completely unquenched. He was completely ecstatic, his hands trembling with a wild, intoxicating rush of adrenaline.
"Fantastic! Modern sorcerers are absolutely fantastic!" Ryu screamed, his voice echoing with pure joy. "The tactical flavor! The constant shifting of the plate! It is a non-stop buffet of pure combat!"
He adjusted his massive pompadour, which was now sparking violently as his internal engine reached an entirely new level of heat.
"But I am still the chef here! Homing Granite Blast!"
Ryu swung his arms in a wide, sweeping motion. Five separate, highly concentrated beams of pure energy erupted from his hair, splitting apart in the air and twisting through the shattered treeline like intelligent, heat-seeking missiles. They curved around the boulders, tracking Oden and Todo's exact cursed energy signatures with terrifying precision.
Oden didn't retreat. He sprinted directly toward the incoming tracking beams, his face completely calm.
"Cursed Energy Breath!" Oden commanded, unleashing a rapid-fire succession of three smaller, hyper-compressed wind blasts directly from his mouth.
The precise, high-pressure wind strikes intercepted three of the incoming Granite Blasts mid-air, detonating them in a spectacular series of concussive explosions that rained fire down upon the brush.
Meanwhile, the remaining two tracking beams zeroed in directly on Todo's position. Todo ran horizontally along a ruined stone wall, his eyes tracking the light.
Clap!
Todo swapped himself with one of the homing beams' own localized explosion debris, causing the tracking energy to violently collide with its own residual smoke and detonate uselessly.
Through the thick curtain of smoke and fire, Oden and Todo moved in perfect, unspoken harmony. They didn't need to look at each other; their cursed energy signatures danced around the battlefield like a perfectly rehearsed duet.
Todo claped his hands once more.
Clap!
Ryu, who was preparing to launch a secondary massive barrage, was suddenly yanked out of his stable footing and pulled directly into the space between the two modern sorcerers.
Oden appeared on his left. Todo appeared on his right.
A coordinated, high-speed pincer assault began. Todo unleashed a brutal sequence of traditional martial arts strikes, his heavy palms striking Ryu's ribs and shoulders, while Oden utilized the hyper-velocity of the Lethal Rabbit to deliver a storm of precise, curse-infused open-hand strikes to Ryu's blind spots.
Ryu blocked, parried, and absorbed the immense physical punishment, his dense reinforcement keeping him from collapsing, but the sheer predictability of his massive output was being completely picked apart by the erratic, high-IQ nature of Boogie Woogie.
'He's adapting to Todo's claps,' Oden noticed, his Serpent Eyes capturing the minute adjustments Ryu was making to his weight distribution every time Todo's palms moved close together. 'He's waiting for the next swap to unleash a full-body discharge.'
Oden decided to completely alter the rhythm.
As Todo raised his hands to clap once more, Ryu braced his entire frame, preparing to detonate his energy the moment the spatial shift occurred.
But Todo didn't clap. It was a feint. His hands stopped just an inch apart.
Ryu's timing flickered for a single, fatal microsecond.
In that exact, microscopic window of hesitation, Oden slid completely inside Ryu's guard. He drew his left fist back, his entire consciousness dropping into that silent, hyper-efficient void he had discovered moments prior.
The vast, endless ocean of his reserves was violently, mercilessly compressed into a single, microscopic point at the absolute center of his knuckles.
One millionth of a second.
The physical impact and the absolute peak of his energy flow met in perfect, cosmic alignment.
BOOM!
The entire mountain sector completely lost its color. The air turned a stark, absolute pitch-black as a massive, violent crown of jagged crimson and black lightning erupted from Ryu's torso with a deafening, apocalyptic crack.
A second Black Flash.
The sheer, concentrated efficiency of the strike tore completely through Ryu's historical defenses, sending the massive titan skipping violently across the vitrified ground like a stone over water. He crashed through three massive concrete retaining walls before finally coming to a halt buried deep within a pile of shattered rock.
Silence descended on the valley once more.
A few seconds passed before the pile of rocks violently exploded outward.
Ryu Ishigori rose from the rubble, his uniform completely shredded, his chest bearing a massive, smoking black bruise from the impact. He coughed up a small splatter of blood, but his face... his face was completely transcendent with pure, unadulterated ecstasy.
"A second one?!" Ryu screamed, his voice shaking with a wild, terrifying mix of laughter and bloodlust. "Splendid! Absolutely magnificent! Brat, you are the greatest dessert a man could ever ask for! Now... now I have to land my own Black Flash just to level this playing field! Let's keep eating until we burn this whole world down!"
---
Meanwhile, far away from the smoking craters of the southern forest sector, inside the sterile, air-conditioned confines of the Jujutsu High monitoring room, the atmosphere was entirely different.
The massive bank of plasma screens lining the front wall was currently displaying a completely different section of the tournament grounds. On the main monitors, Maki Zenin's group was shown calmly moving through a quiet thicket, casually dispatching a handful of weak, low-level grade four cursed spirits with routine efficiency. The combat was slow, methodical, and thoroughly unexciting.
Satoru Gojo was leaning heavily back in his executive chair at the rear of the room, his long legs crossed casually over the edge of a side table. His hands were clasped loosely behind his head, his dark fabric blindfold pointed directly toward the central control console where Mei Mei sat.
"Hey, Mei Mei," Gojo said, his voice carrying a light, breezy tone that somehow managed to make the entire room feel incredibly cold. "Be a dear and switch the main feed over to Oden and Todo already. This little bug-catching stream you've got running right now is completely putting me to sleep. I want to see the real show."
Mei Mei sat perfectly poised in her leather chair, her fingers lightly resting on the master controls of the security crows. She offered a small, thoroughly composed smile, casually adjusting a stray strand of her silver braided hair as she looked at the boring monitors.
"Now, now, Gojo," Mei Mei replied, her voice smooth and entirely professional. "As the one currently managing the contractual distribution of the primary crow feeds, I hold the exclusive tactical right to decide which scenes to display to the faculty and when. Pacing is everything when it comes to proper entertainment value, you know."
Gojo slowly lowered his legs from the table. He leaned forward, his blindfolded face turning directly toward the back of Mei Mei's head. The lazy, carefree demeanor vanished in an instant, replaced by a subtle, suffocating pressure that made the air conditioning units in the walls begin to rattle.
"Is that so?" Gojo said, his tone dropping into a smooth, terrifyingly level whisper. "Hopefully... this isn't something being done on purpose because you and the rest of the wrinkled old fossils back at headquarters want to do something sneaky to my student while the cameras are turned away."
Mei Mei's smile remained absolutely flawless, her hands never trembling as she kept her gaze locked onto the screens.
"Of course not, Gojo," Mei Mei murmured smoothly, her voice completely steady. "I only care about the clean, financial valuation of the event. There are no personal biases in business."
But behind her neck, completely hidden from view by the heavy layers of her silver braided hair, a single, cold bead of sweat slowly traced its way down her neck.