Toji Fushiguro watched Suguru Geto's retreating figure but made no move to stop him.
Shouldering his long sword, he looked at Satoru Gojo, who was slowly pushing himself up, with a look of amusement.
"You're certainly confident, kid."
Toji scoffed.
"Do you really think that 'Limitless' of yours is enough to stop me in the state you're in?"
"Shut up."
Satoru Gojo took a deep breath, forcing his remaining cursed energy to constrict the blood vessels in his chest, stemming the flow of blood.
*Clang!*
Weaving a hand sign, Gojo used his Limitless technique to block the standard katana Toji swung at him. The sheer force of the impact caused the stone slabs beneath his feet to shatter.
"Nice speed, old man."
Gojo gritted his teeth, a wild grin spreading across his face despite the agonizing, tearing pain radiating from his chest wound with every movement.
"But as long as Limitless is active, a physical attack without cursed energy like yours will never reach me!"
"Is that so?"
Toji Fushiguro sneered. Instead of retreating, he leaned into the gravitational pull that warped the space around Gojo, weaving through the tight gap with impossibly eerie footwork.
Toji was fast—unbelievably fast.
He moved so quickly that even Gojo's vaunted Six Eyes could only track a blurring sequence of afterimages.
His body, devoid of even a trace of cursed energy, had cast aside all restrictions to unleash an explosive power that not even a Special Grade cursed spirit could hope to match.
*Bam! Bam! Bam!*
Using the fallen trees and crumbling ruins as springboards, Toji became a bolt of black lightning, zigzagging through the air to launch a torrential rain of slashes from every conceivable angle.
Gojo was forced to crank the output of his Limitless to its absolute maximum, manifesting an impenetrable barrier around himself.
Every time the blade collided with the barrier, a piercing sonic boom erupted.
'Dammit... does this guy have infinite stamina?'
Beads of cold sweat covered Gojo's forehead. His brain was beginning to reel from the dizzying strain of being overclocked for too long.
He knew he couldn't stay on the defensive forever.
Raising his right hand with his index and middle fingers pressed together, a terrifying, heart-stopping surge of blue cursed energy began to coalesce at his fingertips.
"Since you don't have any cursed energy, I'll just use pure power to grind you into a pulp!"
Cursed Technique Lapse: Blue!
*BOOM!*
With a roar from Gojo, a sphere of brilliant blue light possessing an absolute gravitational pull materialized instantly, hurtling toward Toji Fushiguro with devastating force.
The intense gravity warped the surrounding space, ripping up slabs of stone and shredding nearby trees and buildings into splinters in an instant.
However...
Facing an attack that could easily obliterate a Special Grade cursed spirit, Toji Fushiguro didn't show even a flicker of panic.
"Too slow."
Toji spat the words out coldly.
His legs coiled and snapped. His monstrous physique, honed to the absolute limit by his Heavenly Restriction, exploded into a burst of speed that defied human comprehension.
*Crash!*
A deep crater was gouged into the earth where he had stood, but the man himself had vanished from Gojo's sight as if he had teleported.
"What?!"
Gojo's pupils constricted.
Not only had his Blue missed, but even his Six Eyes failed to immediately track Toji's trajectory!
In that instant, a dense swarm of low-level Fly Head cursed spirits surged from all directions like a black cloud, instantly blotting out Gojo's entire field of vision.
"This is your master plan? Using these runts to obstruct my vision?"
Gojo let out a cold snort, intending to use his cursed energy to blow the Fly Heads away.
But in the next heartbeat, a lethal sense of impending doom coiled around his heart like a venomous serpent.
Toji appeared in Gojo's blind spot like a vengeful ghost.
"Open wide, Ushibao."
Toji commanded calmly while moving at high speed.
The storage cursed spirit that usually hid within his stomach surged out from his mouth, spitting out a uniquely shaped short sword.
Special Grade Cursed Tool—Inverted Spear of Heaven!
Gripping the Inverted Spear of Heaven in a reverse hold, Toji used his terrifying physical momentum to thrust the blade straight at Gojo's throat.
At the very last microsecond, Gojo sensed the danger.
He instinctively activated his Limitless technique, attempting to erect that insurmountable wall of absolute defense between them.
However...
The moment the oddly forked dagger, radiating a sinister aura, touched the Limitless field...
*Crack.*
The crisp sound of shattering glass exploded in Gojo's mind.
The absolute defense that could halt space itself was torn through like wet tissue paper by the Inverted Spear of Heaven's forced cancellation effect.
"This... is impossible..."
For the first time in his life, genuine horror dawned in Gojo's eyes.
*Slash!*
Blood sprayed everywhere.
The razor-sharp edge of the Inverted Spear of Heaven pierced Gojo's throat without resistance.
Toji's eyes were cold as iron; his movements didn't falter for a single second.
He yanked the dagger out and followed up with a brutal backhand slash, carving a horrific, bone-deep gash from Gojo's right shoulder down across his chest.
*Thud!*
Finally, Toji delivered a savage kick to Gojo's abdomen, sending the Divine Child hailed as the strongest of the modern era flying like a discarded rag doll.
Gojo's body tumbled across the ground a dozen times before slamming into a large tree and coming to a dead stop.
Blood pooled beneath him, staining the earth crimson.
His Six Eyes stared wide but unfocused, a wheezing hiss escaping his throat as his consciousness rapidly plummeted into the dark abyss.
The Strongest had collapsed.
In that brutal instant, Gojo hadn't even had the chance to launch a counterattack before being unilaterally crushed with extreme prejudice by a man who possessed no cursed energy at all.
Toji walked slowly to Gojo's side.
He raised his foot and casually ground it down onto Gojo's noble head.
The mud and blood on his sole matted Gojo's snow-white hair into a filthy mess.
Looming over the dying Divine Child, Toji curled his lip into a sneer of pure contempt.
"Didn't I tell you?"
"Don't get cocky, kid."
"I am... the Sorcerer Killer."
Toji retracted the Inverted Spear of Heaven, not even bothering to give the body on the ground another glance.
He turned away, fixing his gaze on the dark passage leading to the Tombs of the Star Corridor.
The hunt had only just begun.
The Star Plasma Vessel. Suguru Geto.
No one was getting away.
And what of that red figure, racing like a thunderclap dozens of kilometers away?
The trajectory of fate had veered completely out of control.
An unprecedented storm was about to reach its peak in the deepest depths of the Tombs of the Star Corridor!