Chapter 86: Final Ultimate Technique, Calamitous Moonlight and Purification
The three Special Grade Cursed Spirits screamed at once.
Faced with the cold sword intent pouring from Yami like moonlight over a grave, they finally understood something their twisted instincts had resisted until now.
They were going to die.
Their immortal horde had been erased.
Their gravity had been cut apart.
Their folded space had been torn open.
Even the endless tide of proliferating curses that should have drowned any opponent in sheer attrition had been suppressed by a storm of slashes even more ruthless and unreasonable than their Domain.
They could not escape.
The human standing before them, black blade in hand and a broken moon turning inside his eyes, had become something worse than a predator.
He was an execution.
The Space Curse let out a shrill, broken cry.
Half its body was already gone, carved away by Moon Breathing. The wound still writhed, trying to regenerate, but the eerie lunar energy clinging to it kept gnawing at its cursed flesh, refusing to let the damage close.
If this continued, they would all be slaughtered here.
And so, in the last instant before fear turned into collapse, the three Special Grades reached the same conclusion.
If they could not win, then they would drag him into death with them.
The Sea of Ten Thousand Cursed Corpses began to convulse.
The flesh covering the walls, ceiling, and floor of the Domain started writhing violently, as if the entire space itself were having a seizure. The sea of corpse matter collapsed inward. Every remaining fragment of cursed energy was being drawn toward the center.
Not just the Domain.
Their rules.
Their life force.
Their existence.
All of it was being condensed into one final attack.
A pitch black sphere formed above the shattered heart of the battlefield.
It looked small at first.
Then the pressure hit.
Space around it began to crack and cave inward, unable to bear the density of cursed energy packed into its core. Thin black fractures appeared in the air like wounds exposing pure void.
This was no desperate attack.
This was an annihilation strike.
One that would erase the nuclear plant.
One that would erase the barrier.
One that would erase Yami.
In the monitoring room far away, the elders straightened in their seats, eyes wide with greed and vindictive delight.
One of them nearly laughed himself breathless.
"Yes. That's it."
"Kill him with the Domain itself."
"Turn him into dust."
Another clenched both hands so tightly his knuckles whitened.
"Even if he survives the slash, let him die to the collapse."
"At that point, there won't even be enough left to identify."
Their voices overlapped with ugly eagerness.
No one there believed he could endure this.
Not even Yami seemed to move at first.
He simply stood beneath that black sphere, moonlit aura curling around him like a frost covered tide.
Then he lifted Shiranui.
Slowly.
Calmly.
His face remained expressionless.
"If you want to take me down with you," he said, voice quiet enough to make the line feel even colder, "then let me teach you something."
The moon in his eyes seemed to deepen.
"What real despair looks like."
The blade moved.
The swing was not fast.
Not in appearance.
It felt ancient instead, as though the cut had already existed and time was merely catching up to it.
And from that single slash, the night exploded.
[Moon Breathing, Fourteenth Form: Catastrophe, Calamitous Moonlight.]
Countless enormous crescent blades burst into existence.
They were not the smaller shards of moonlight he had used before. These were vast, terrible crescents, each one dozens of meters long, layered over one another in endless overlapping arcs. They filled the entire sky of the Domain and turned it into a storm of descending moons.
Then they fell.
Not like rain.
Like judgment.
The first waves struck the black sphere.
There was no clash.
No equal struggle.
The condensed final attack of the three Special Grades was carved apart the instant it met that moonlight. The surface split, then split again, then again, until the entire mass unraveled under the constant flood of crescent slashes.
The sphere collapsed into streaks of black light and dissolved into drifting particles before it could release even a fraction of what it held.
Then the storm continued.
Onto the curses.
The three Special Grades looked enormous moments ago.
Now, against the descending calamity, they looked pitifully small.
Shells split.
Tentacles were severed.
Stone like flesh burst apart.
Mouths, eyes, and regenerating organs were all shredded under the relentless rain of moon blades.
No defense mattered.
No regeneration mattered.
No Domain mattered.
Every direction was death.
Every angle was cut.
The Space Curse vanished first, its half destroyed body finally reduced to fragments too fine to even call flesh.
The Gravity Curse followed, its heavy form broken into layers and scattered across the collapsing Domain like debris from a demolished mountain.
The Proliferation Curse lasted the longest.
Not because it was stronger.
Only because there was more of it to erase.
Its countless mouths screamed together as its body was carved into threads, its offspring erased before they could even emerge, until at last the entire thing dissolved into nothing beneath the moon.
This was Moon Breathing at its highest murderous expression.
Its final calamity.
Its ultimate technique.
Against an omnidirectional torrent like this, resistance itself became laughable.
Then the Domain broke.
Rumble.
The flesh ceiling cracked. The corpse sea collapsed in on itself. The pressure pinning the world together vanished all at once, and the entire Sea of Ten Thousand Cursed Corpses crumbled like a nightmare losing its shape at dawn.
Moonlight from the real sky poured down through the rupturing shell.
The ruined nuclear plant reappeared beneath drifting dust and ash.
Where there had once been a grotesque hell, only devastation remained.
Broken concrete.
Collapsed steel.
A battlefield scrubbed clean by slaughter.
And at its center stood Yami, sword still in hand.
He slowly drew in a breath and sheathed the blade.
The movement was precise, though a little slower than before.
Sweat slid down his temple. His breathing was still uneven. Forcing Moon Breathing into existence at thirty percent synchronization, and then releasing a technique on that scale, had burdened his body far beyond what it should have been able to withstand.
But he remained standing.
If anything, he stood straighter.
His gaze fell across the ground.
The curses were gone, but the plant itself remained tainted. Radiation, death, and lingering cursed residue still clung to the ruins. If left alone, this place would only become another breeding ground.
Another nest.
Another cursed dead zone.
Yami exhaled once.
"Since I'm already here," he murmured, "I may as well finish the job."
The moonlight around him faded.
The chill retreated.
In the next breath, the atmosphere changed again.
The cold silence of Moon Breathing gave way to heat.
Real heat.
His chest expanded sharply. His heart pounded like a war drum. Blood surged through his veins with fierce, blazing force.
Breathing shift.
Moon to Sun.
[Total Concentration Breathing: Sun Breathing.]
He gripped Shiranui with both hands and drove it into the ground.
The blade pierced the cracked earth with a dull, final sound.
Though he still could not reach the perfect eternal cycle of the Thirteenth Form, he could still call upon the meaning of the sun itself.
Purification.
Illumination.
The fire that burned away filth and left only clarity behind.
His voice dropped.
[Sun Breathing, Third Form: Raging Sun, Purifying Flame.]
Golden red fire bloomed from the embedded blade.
It spread outward in a great circular wave, not violent, not explosive, but majestic. The flames rolled across the ruins like a lotus unfolding. Wherever they passed, the black cursed residue hissing through the cracks, the invisible radioactive dust, and the lingering contamination of death all began to burn away.
Not in ordinary fire.
In cleansing light.
Sizzle.
Blue smoke rose everywhere.
The filth that had saturated the plant for years peeled away layer by layer under the blaze. The ruins, which moments ago looked like the mouth of hell, slowly took on a different feeling.
Still broken.
Still scarred.
But no longer foul.
For a brief moment, the abandoned power plant felt almost solemn.
Sacred, even.
Then the flames receded.
The silence that followed was clean.
The blood stench was gone.
The dense curse residue was gone.
Even the clouds overhead had been scattered apart, leaving the night sky open and full of stars.
Yami bent down and picked three faintly glowing cursed cores from the rubble.
The last traces of the three mutated Special Grade Cursed Spirits.
His spoils.
He slipped them into his pocket without ceremony.
Then he looked up.
Far away.
Past the ruins.
Past the barriers.
Toward Tokyo.
Toward the corners where the rotten old men of the higher ups still hid behind rules, titles, and shadows.
A small smile touched his lips.
Cold enough to freeze bone.
"The prey's been cleaned up," he said quietly.
His fingers brushed the hilt of Shiranui once more.
"Next…"
The smile deepened just a little.
"It's the hunter's turn."
.....
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