Toji moved first.
The opening move was always his.
One must strike before the opponent can verify with their eyes, process with their head, and react with their body. That was how a man without a lick of Cursed Energy triumphed over sorcerers.
It was how he survived, and how he killed.
The stone floor let out a shallow tremor.
Toji Fushiguro's body vanished, only to reappear not directly in front of where he stood, but within the shadow of the left pillar.
Precisely at the blind spot that drew the eye, banking on Gojo Satoru being the one to intercept the first blow.
In his right hand, he gripped a short, jagged blade.
The Inverted Spear of Heaven.
A Special Grade Cursed Tool that, on the surface, looked like nothing more than a short dagger.
However, the moment it made contact with an active Cursed Technique, it would pierce the technique's formula and force its cancellation.
It was one of the few exceptions capable of bypassing the Limitless.
Toji's initial strike was aimed at Gojo.
Gojo let out a startled laugh.
"Bypassing my Limitless...?"
He didn't get to finish the sentence.
Just before the tip of Toji's blade could graze Gojo's throat, the Limitless activated. An invisible layer of spatial distance manifested before the steel, creating a gap that could never be closed.
Yet in the very next heartbeat, the edge of the Inverted Spear of Heaven lightly brushed that gap.
The Limitless didn't shatter.
Instead, like a finger pressing into the surface of water, a thin indentation formed at that single point.
Toji did not miss that microscopic opening. The blade sank an inch deeper. Gojo's pupils quivered ever so slightly.
His reaction was swift enough. He twisted his upper body, slipping out of the Spear's path.
The blade grazed his cheek, leaving a thin, crimson line across his pale skin.
Just as the blood began to bead, Gojo's grin widened with genuine irritation.
"Fine. You're the truly annoying type."
Toji didn't bother responding.
Gojo Satoru hadn't been his real target from the start.
The moment the Inverted Spear of Heaven poked a hole in the Limitless, every sorcerer's gaze would naturally be sucked toward that focal point. Toji exploited that reflexive response.
After the blade passed Gojo's face, Toji's wrist snapped with a speed that defied the eye. The short sword vanished from sight, and in the next instant, the chain coiled around his other arm unraveled.
The Chain of a Thousand Miles.
An endless flow of iron wound around the pillars, altering its trajectory to strike at Itadori Yuji from the flank rather than the front.
A sound judgment.
While the Inverted Spear of Heaven was lethal to Gojo, Toji had already decided that the other boy was the one who needed to die first.
Toji was reading the structure of the battle with clinical precision. But Yuji didn't even look at the chain head-on. His body responded before his eyes could.
His left foot slid half an inch to the side, his waist pivoted, and two fingers on his right hand moved minutely inside his pocket.
A single drop of blood.
That was truly all it took.
Before his fingers even fully emerged, the skin on his fingertips split open, ejecting a droplet of crimson liquid into the air.
The blood was no longer a liquid the moment it touched the void. It compressed, elongated, and shifted its form along the ley lines of Cursed Energy.
Blood Manipulation——Blood Thread.
A scarlet wire unfurled, intersecting perfectly with the trajectory of the chain.
At the moment of impact between metal and blood, a sound erupted that was neither the cutting of iron nor the tearing of fluid.
The tip of the chain split down the middle, and the deflected iron links embedded themselves into the adjacent wall.
Toji's eyes narrowed slightly.
'This much power?'
That wasn't just a simple interception.
Standard Blood Manipulation usually struggled with the speed and piercing force required for such a feat; splitting a high-speed metal trajectory mid-air demanded a level of precision that bordered on the impossible.
It wasn't possible just because the Cursed Energy was vast. It was possible because it was vast while being handled without a single shred of waste.
Yuji didn't step back.
Instead, he stepped forward, closing the distance.
Toji understood almost instinctively.
This brat was far more troublesome than the boy with the Limitless. Gojo was annoying because you couldn't touch him, but once you found a way, his method was straightforward.
Itadori Yuji, however, was already reading him before the contact was even made.
The corners of Toji's mouth curled up just a fraction.
It was entertaining.
And at the same time, it left a foul taste in his mouth.
At that moment, Gojo dove in.
"My feelings are hurt when you only look at the other guy in front of me."
The words were playful, but his movements were anything but.
Gojo deliberately tightened the distance of his Limitless, sealing off Toji's right side. Even with the Spear, Toji couldn't create the exact same opening every time. In the end, Toji had to rely on his physique and timing, but Gojo was pressuring that very timing.
Toji immediately shifted tactics.
He thrust the Spear forward as a feint, and while Gojo reacted, he drew another blade with his left hand.
The Soul Splitter Katana.
It ignored the hardness of all matter to cut the soul directly. A blade designed to wound deeper than the physical flesh.
Yuji's gaze stalled briefly on the edge of the blade.
He knew what that was.
He couldn't afford to take a direct hit from that.
As someone who could perceive the contours of the soul, Yuji's recovery potential was far higher than a normal sorcerer's. However, the ability to recover was entirely different from the permission to get hit. Damage to the soul during combat could derail the entire flow of the fight with a single strike.
Toji smiled as if he had read that realization on Yuji's face.
"You look like you recognize this one."
Before the sentence could even finish, the Soul Splitter Katana swung upward from a low angle.
The sword wasn't fast.
It was precise.
Throat, jaw, heart, abdomen. It deliberately skimmed the vital lines that any human would instinctively move to protect, only to twist its trajectory at the final moment toward the biggest opening.
This wasn't a sword that won through speed; it was a sword that severed the opponent's response half a beat ahead of time.
Yuji pulled his hand out of his pocket for the first time.
It was his right hand.
He didn't form a fist, nor did he sharpen his palm into a blade.
He simply overlapped his palm diagonally against the trajectory of the Soul Splitter Katana.
Toji's brow furrowed slightly.
Touching it meant getting cut.
The brat wasn't someone who wouldn't know that.
In the next instant, a thinner sound mixed between the friction of metal and air.
Cleave.
There was no incantation.
The technique was already finished.
The moment Yuji's fingertips grazed the flat of the Soul Splitter Katana, an invisible slashing force swept along the center line of the sword.
The blade didn't break. Instead, its momentum died.
Only the minute angle and directional force Toji had set to carve the soul were accurately dismantled.
The edge of the Soul Splitter Katana failed to rend Yuji's body, sliding harmlessly into the empty air.
'He cut the trajectory right before contact?'
'What a monster!'
The light in Toji's eyes changed. His toes dug into the floor, launching him back.
It wasn't a retreat, but a repositioning. When you don't understand what the opponent has done, you widen the gap and observe again. That was the habit of a man who survived.
Gojo didn't let that gap go to waste.
"You sure are fast at running away."
He raised his right hand.
The density of blue Cursed Energy condensed into a single point, causing the surrounding air to tremble. This was Gojo before he mastered Reverse Cursed Technique. There was no Hollow Purple. However, the mere application of the Limitless he already possessed made the very space scream.
It wasn't quite Red yet.
The step before that—an application that layered pressure while pushing space itself—pounced on Toji's landing point.
Toji held the Inverted Spear of Heaven horizontally, punching a hole through that pressure.
He couldn't shatter it completely, but it was enough for him to slip through.
Except in that fleeting second, Yuji moved.
This time, he was undeniably fast.
One step. It was just one step.
And yet, a thin red line bloomed across the corridor floor. The blood he had flicked from his fingertips earlier split into one, then two, then ten strands, flowing through the cracks in the stone floor.
The blood wasn't just spreading; it was establishing coordinates.
Toji looked down at his feet the moment he landed.
He was too late.
The scarlet lines surged upward simultaneously.
Blood Manipulation——Crimson Binding.
It wasn't an overwhelming volume of blood.
Regardless, the compressed blood coiled around his ankles and knees like shackles. It wasn't a sharp, severing force, but rather something designed to disrupt the timing of his muscle contractions.
Toji immediately twisted his leg strength to tear through the binding, but that single lost beat was already fatal.
Gojo's hand reached out, and Yuji's gaze overlapped with it.
Gojo charged in with a smirk.
Yuji did not smile.
As Gojo's linear strike, reinforced by the Limitless, bore down from the front, Toji was forced to focus his instincts on Gojo.
And in that opening, Yuji raised his right index finger.
"Dismantle."
Again, it was small. So small that it was arguably more dangerous. This wasn't a wide-range slash. Nor was it a world-severing Dismantle.
Compared to the slashes Yuji could produce that could split the entire hallway in half, what he released now was a line as narrow as a toy.
Yet that single line grazed Toji's left shoulder.
No—it only appeared to graze him.
In the next moment, the shoulder area of Toji's shirt split apart without a sound.
The blood erupted a beat later.
This was because the flesh, muscle, fabric, and air were not cut in the same sequence. The slash cut through his tilted posture first, then followed through his anatomy.
Toji reflexively widened the distance.
The moment he landed, he bent his knees to kill the impact and stood back up, gripping the Soul Splitter Katana in a reverse hold.
Blood trickled down his shoulder. The wound wasn't deep.
It wasn't deep, and that was exactly why it felt so disgusting. That wasn't a slash meant to kill.
More accurately, if it had been meant to kill, the fight would already be over.
Toji caught his breath for a brief second.
Gojo tried to move in again to exploit the gap, but Yuji raised his left hand to stop him.
"Wait."
Gojo's brow twitched.
"What now?"
"I'll handle this."
"I'm fine with that, but I'm in the middle of a fight too, you know?"
Instead of answering, Yuji looked at Toji. Toji met his gaze head-on.
And in that moment, he was certain.
'This brat... is going easy on me.'
It was no longer an illusion.
The blood wire that cut his chain, the Cleave that only severed the Soul Splitter's trajectory, and the Dismantle that just grazed his shoulder.
All of them could have been fatal.
Especially that last one. Had that slash been just a finger's width lower, his arm would have been gone.
No, had it been an inch deeper, his torso would have been halved. Toji didn't believe in that kind of margin of error. Someone fighting with that level of precision didn't just miss by accident.
Gojo seemed to have noticed as well, his eyes narrowing.
"What's the deal?"
The playfulness was gone from his voice.
"Why aren't you ending it?"
Yuji didn't answer.
Instead, he nonchalantly flicked his own blood from his fingertips.
Toji was the one to speak first.
"...You can kill me, can't you?"
It wasn't a question. It was a confirmation.
Yuji remained silent for a while. That silence was, in itself, the answer.
Toji gave a short, dry chuckle.
"Tch. This feels like shit."
He shook the hand gripping his blade once.
"It'd be easier if you just came at me with the intent to kill."
Yuji's voice was low.
"I have no intention of killing you."
"Why?"
A truly brief silence fell over them.
From the other side of the corridor, the path leading away from the main hall, the footsteps of Riko and Kuroi could no longer be heard.
Gojo went quiet, and the air of the Tombs of the Star Corridor settled into a thin, heavy stillness.
Yuji spoke.
"Because of Megumi."
For the first time, Toji's pupils quivered almost imperceptibly.
It was incredibly brief.
Brief enough that even Gojo or Toji himself might have missed it.
But Yuji saw it.
"...What?"
"Fushiguro Megumi."
Yuji continued, staring straight at Toji.
"He's your son, isn't he?"
The silence in the corridor deepened.
The smile completely vanished from Gojo's face.
Toji's expression barely changed, which made it all the more eerie. It was a face too accustomed to erasing any sign of being shaken.
Toji spoke in a low, almost mumble-like tone.
"You're one truly disgusting piece of work."
For the first time, there was genuine irritation in his words.
A man who wouldn't flinch before an assassin had lost his rhythm for a fleeting second at the mention of that name.
Yuji didn't miss it. But he didn't strike. He could have ended it if he moved now.
A single Dismantle would do it. No, even Dismantle wasn't necessary. He could cloud the vision with Blood Manipulation, break the joints with Cleave, and put him to sleep with martial arts.
But killing was easier. Subduing someone while keeping them alive was far more difficult.
Therefore, Yuji's battle was now becoming deliberately more complicated.
Toji licked a drop of blood from his lip. Even in that brief moment, his mind was racing.
Why did he know Megumi's name? Why wasn't he killing? Why was he intentionally leaving a margin even with that level of power?
It didn't make sense, and that only made it more unpleasant.
This man could kill him. Yet he wouldn't. That wasn't mercy.
It was an insult.
Toji had little faith in humans who made those kinds of choices.
He put away the Inverted Spear of Heaven and took up the Soul Splitter Katana once more.
This time, with the intent to truly stake his life.
"Fine."
He spoke low.
"Then let's see just how long you can keep 'looking after' me."
At the same time, the man's body vanished again. Gojo let out a laugh that sounded more like a curse.
"Whoa, he got even faster."
The light in Yuji's eyes sank deep.
The real fight started now.
The Sorcerer Killer would become far more dangerous once he realized he was being spared.
Whether for the sake of survival, pride, or simple instinct—Toji was now truly aiming to kill.
And Yuji had to stop him without taking his life.
In the middle of the corridor of the Tombs of the Star Corridor, the two monsters lowered their stances for their second collision.