Everyone knew the balance was fragile, but whoever broke it first might become the target of all, enduring unpredictable chain attacks.
"Heh..."
An undisguised sneer full of boredom drifted down from the sky, shattering the suffocating silence.
Sukuna's posture with four arms crossed over his chest relaxed. His four crimson eyes swept over the crowd below, who were on guard and harboring their own hidden agendas, before finally settling on Satoru.
"Hey, Six Eyes brat." Sukuna's voice was lazy, as if discussing what to have for dinner.
"Standing around like this is just too boring. I just got a new body and my hands are itching."
He extended two fingers and beckoned casually toward Satoru.
"How about this? I will warm up with these noisy insects first and stretch my limbs. Once I've finished them off, we'll have a proper play. How's that? You don't mind, do you?"
He spoke nonchalantly, as if the four Special Grade Cursed Spirits were just flies to be swatted at will, while the "play" with Satoru was the main course.
Hearing this, Satoru's eyebrows twitched behind his sunglasses. He instantly understood Sukuna's intention—this old monster found the scene insufficiently exciting and wanted to personally enter the fray to break the deadlock and clear out the "noise" while he was at it.
Moreover, Sukuna's choice to strike the Cursed Spirits first was undoubtedly to temporarily remove the most uncontrollable "chaos variables," simplifying the situation slightly, even if the simplified version might be more dangerous.
"Me?"
Satoru pointed to himself, that cynical smile returning to his face as he shrugged. "What objection could I have? It's not like I'd ever team up with these things."
He glanced at the four Cursed Spirits with a disdainful tone. "Standing next to them feels beneath me. If you want to play, go ahead. It just so happens that I'm tired too, so I'll take a break and watch the show."
As he spoke, he actually leaned back against some broken rebar, resting his hands behind his head and crossing his legs in a leisurely "be my guest, I'm just watching" manner.
But the hidden, surging Cursed Energy around him and his state of full insight with the Six Eyes showed he was far from truly relaxed.
He needed to seize this precious time to quickly recover from the consumption of the previous continuous battles—especially the deployment of the 0.2-second Domain—while also carefully observing Sukuna's fighting style, power characteristics, and the limits of this new body. This would be crucial intelligence for a future showdown with this monster.
Sukuna seemed somewhat satisfied with Satoru's "compliance." His four eyes crinkled into a cruel smile.
"Very well. Then open your eyes wide and watch closely."
Before his voice even faded—
Sukuna's figure in the sky vanished.
It wasn't the afterimage of high-speed movement, but a true disappearance, as if he had never existed in that spot. There was no sound of breaking wind, no sign of a Cursed Energy burst, not even a ripple of spatial distortion (at least none that most present could perceive).
"What?!" Jogo's lone eye widened abruptly, his lava-like pupil shrinking violently.
The plants around Hanami instantly turned, pointing toward the empty sky.
The smile on Mahito's face froze, his eyes beneath the stitches darting rapidly.
Even Dagon, who had just completed his evolution and was poised to strike, had a flash of bewilderment in his crimson lone eye.
However, this bewilderment lasted only a thousandth of a second.
In the next instant, all four Cursed Spirits simultaneously felt a cold hand, covered in black cursed markings, gently rest atop their heads.
Jogo felt the hand press against the side of his volcanic head.
Hanami felt the hand stroke the "hair tips" made of flowers.
Mahito felt the hand pat his blue-haired head.
Dagon felt the hand grab the dorsal fin of his newly formed bone-armored skull.
Four Cursed Spirits, four positions, yet touched simultaneously. It was as if Sukuna had split into four at the same moment, appearing beside each of them. Extreme speed brought a terrifying experience akin to spatial dislocation.
A malicious, multi-tonal voice echoed in their consciousnesses simultaneously, as if branded directly onto their souls.
"Alright, alright, stop dazing off."
"The game has begun."
"You'd better make me happy."
BOOM!!!
The moment the words fell, four sounds overlapped into one—a dull, deafening roar loud enough to tear eardrums.
Sukuna's four arms, each resting on a Cursed Spirit's head, simultaneously and without any flair, threw straight punches. The punch speed was so extreme that it even left brief spatial depressions along the trajectory.
At the very instant the fists hit the Cursed Spirits' heads, within that infinitesimal, negligible time gap where the fist's edge met the Cursed spirit's surface, a miraculous and ominous resonance occurred between the unfathomably massive Cursed Energy condensed on Sukuna's fists and the physical kinetic energy of the swing.
Four pitch-black, twisted shockwaves, like spatial cracks in the shape of lightning, exploded from the contact points between the fists and the Cursed Spirits' bodies.
Black Flash!
A spatial distortion produced when the error between a physical strike and a Cursed Energy impact is within 0.000001 seconds. Its power is, on average, the 2.5th power of a normal hit.
In the common sense of the Jujutsu World, no Jujutsu Sorcerer can intentionally perform a Black Flash.
But just now, Sukuna landed a Black Flash.
And it was four in a row!
Four Black Flashes delivered by Sukuna at the same time, with four arms, against four Special Grade targets.
"Argh!!!"
"Ugh!!!"
"Gurgle... Pfft!"
"Roar!!!"
The four Cursed Spirits couldn't even manage a full scream before their bodies violently twisted, deformed, and disintegrated within that destructive Black Flash.
Jogo's volcanic head was caved in by a punch, magma and flames spraying backward, his hard shell covered in cracks.
Hanami's body was smashed to pieces, flower vines snapping inch by inch, and fluid spraying wildly.
Mahito's seemingly soft body was pierced by a punch, a large hole exploding in his chest, countless stitches snapping as blue Cursed Energy gushed out like blood.
Dagon, who had just evolved and possessed the hardest bone armor, had his entire head and upper body nearly flattened by this punch.
The terrifying impact didn't fully release within their bodies. Instead, it carried their twisted and broken forms like four ragged dolls thrown with full force, hurtling away from the center of Shibuya in four distinct directions at terrifying speeds exceeding several times the speed of sound.
Whoosh....
Boom!!!
From Sukuna's disappearance to the four palms on heads, to the simultaneous explosion of four Black Flashes blowing the four Special Grade Cursed Spirits to the horizon—the entire process took less than half a second.
The ruins in the center of Shibuya suddenly became much "cleaner."
Only Sukuna remained, floating in mid-air and slowly withdrawing his four arms with wisps of black lightning still lingering on his fists.
Satoru, leaning against the ruins "watching the show" and Kenjaku, whose face was incredibly grim, eyes filled with wariness and shock.
***
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