"Hmm... not out yet?"
Hasegumo sat cross-legged on the ground, his right hand shielding his eyes as he peered into the distance. "Looks like it's going to rain."
He was stationed on the coastline of Hiroshima. Inky black clouds had already swallowed the sky, leaving only a few lone crows struggling to flap their wings against the oppressive air. The atmosphere was thick and humid, clinging to his skin with the stifling stickiness of a southern midsummer.
As he muttered to himself, a bolt of lightning ripped through the sky. Suddenly, a white figure manifested over the sea a short distance away, flickering in and out of existence.
Bzzzt... Bzzzt...
The sound of electrical static hummed in the air. At first, the silhouette was blurry—pixelated like a sprite from the 8-bit era. Then, Hasegumo noticed a surge of blue-black Cursed Energy streaming from the distance, funneling into the figure.
"Finally." Hasegumo stood up and brushed off his pants. He brought his hands together, forming the Yin (Tiger) seal.
Normally, at his level, he could cast a Curtain without the aid of hand signs. However, considering the sheer power of his opponent, he chose not to skip any steps, ensuring the barrier would be at its absolute maximum strength.
"Emerge from darkness, blacker than black. Purify that which is unclean."
As the incantation finished, a Curtain as dark as ink descended from the sky. Hasegumo launched off his right foot, his body hurtling toward the flickering figure like a cannonball.
Just as he reached the enemy, the white figure stopped flickering. Before Hasegumo could even get a good look at its face, his right fist came crashing down onto the crown of its head.
BOOM!
A sound like a localized explosion rocked the area—the sound of flesh colliding with the ocean's surface at terminal velocity. The impact instantly hammered the entity deep into the water. Like a depth charge, a massive plume of water erupted into the air before surging back into the central void.
"Huh?" Hasegumo blinked. The "feel" of the hit wasn't quite right. He didn't have time to dwell on it, though; lacking the ability to fly, he had to act quickly.
He mobilized his Cursed Energy, leaping back toward the shore by stepping on the golden palms of Reverse Cursed Energy he manifested beneath his feet.
"Where'd it go?" He stood at the water's edge and waited for a full ten minutes, watching the waves rhythmically batter the shore.
Just as he began to think Tengen might have been exaggerating, a small white dot appeared at the edge of his vision. It was moving toward him with agonizing slowness.
"A corpse?"
"No, when a curse dies, it turns into pure Cursed Energy. It doesn't leave a physical body," Hasegumo muttered, dismissing the thought. "But this guy is just... drifting. Like a bloated floater."
As the figure drifted closer, Hasegumo finally saw its face. It was a pale, obese man, roughly two adults wide and two meters tall. Despite its size, the first thing that struck Hasegumo was its skin: a deathly, chalky white, completely devoid of blood or life.
"I wonder if this guy is afraid of glutinous rice and sunlight..." Hasegumo mused, referencing old vampire lore. He didn't rush to attack again; he wanted to see what game the fat man was playing. If the curse turned out to be somewhat reasonable, he might even consider sparing it.
"Hey, listen—" Hasegumo started to walk toward it, but before he could finish his sentence—
"Uwaaaaah!" The fat man's first act upon reaching the shore was to scramble to his feet and begin frantically wiping away tears. "I surrender! I give up! Just don't put me back in that place!"
"Wait... wasn't the seal supposed to keep them unconscious?" Hasegumo scratched his head, confused.
The curse's voice matched its appearance—muffled and seemingly honest. Combined with its look of utter innocence, it made Hasegumo feel a distinct sense of "cringe."
Still, if he didn't have to fight, all the better. He stepped forward, reaching out a hand to pat the curse's shoulder in a gesture of consolation. "Relax. I'm not the type who thinks every curse has to die—"
Before his hand could land, the fat man blurred with a speed that defied his massive frame.
CRACK.
The sound of shattering bone echoed. The two now stood back to back.
The curse's voice shifted. The "honest, bumbling fat man" was gone, replaced by a tone of oily, sinister cunning. "Heh... people always believe the 'impossible' when it's right in front of them."
The fat man slowly turned around. "You never would have guessed, would you? A sealed curse, an innocent-looking face... faking a surrender just to land a cheap shot? It's disgraceful, isn't it? Well, unfortunately for you, that's exactly who I—the curse—am."
...
"Hey, maybe you should look at your own body before you keep talking," Hasegumo said, turning around with a perfectly relaxed expression.
Silence.jpg
The smug fat man, who had been savoring his perceived victory, suddenly looked as if someone had choked him. He slowly looked down. From his left shoulder across to his chest, a massive chunk of his body had completely vanished.
He looked back up, his eyes wide with disbelief. Such a wound was meaningless to him, but he had no idea how the man had done it.
Cursed Energy surged, and the void in his chest and arm filled in instantly, returning him to a pristine state.
"I see. You were just pretending to believe me. You used some kind of damage-reflecting technique to bait me into attacking, didn't you?" The fat man reconstructed his reality in a single second. "You're a crafty one."
"...Are you even listening to yourself?" Hasegumo sighed. He had simply punched a hole through the curse the moment it tried to sneak-attack him. "Whatever. Think what you want. So, you actually remember being sealed?"
The fat man's expression shifted to one of pure, lingering terror. "That man's technique... it was horrifying. My consciousness remained active the whole time, but my body and energy were completely frozen." His voice began to rise, escalating into a roar: "Seventy years!"
"Do you have any idea what those seventy years were like?! Looking at you, you haven't even lived for thirty!"
"Ever since I was locked in that barrier, I could see nothing. Feel nothing. I could only rot in my own thoughts within that void. It was enough to drive anyone insane!"
Tears streamed down his face—this time, they seemed genuine. As he wailed his grievances, snot actually flew from his nose, making him look like a truly pathetic, disheveled mess.
Slurp.
"It was only because my mind was resilient enough that I lasted until the 'Boy' arrived. Only then did that feeling of madness begin to fade."
"Since the moment he joined me, I have counted every second, every minute, every hour, and every day!"
"Until today..." The fat man began to laugh, even though the tears hadn't dried. With his eyes squinted shut, he looked like a genuine psychiatric patient. "We made a pact. We will kill every last human."
"We will never go back to that place. That despair... that void."
"As the first person I've seen since coming out, I shall grant you a dignified death."
The curse's ranting flowed right past Hasegumo's ears without sparking a hint of sympathy. However, the mention of "death" acted as a trigger. The moment the words fell, Hasegumo realized the air around them had suddenly become incredibly heavy.
"Are you serious? Can pure Cursed Energy actually be condensed to this level?"
It wasn't an illusion. In a single heartbeat, the curse had flooded the entire Curtain with so much Cursed Energy that the atmosphere began to compress. The "heaviness" was the sign that the energy was on the verge of manifesting into a physical, solid state.
Facing such raw power, Hasegumo finally turned serious. He wasn't worried about himself dying here.
He was worried about the other side—wondering if Gojo and the others could actually handle an opponent like this.
In a darkened monitoring room, several sorcerers were observing the two separate battlefields simultaneously. On the left monitor, they had just seen Hasegumo encounter the "Fat Man."
"Why did the feed go black?"
Tengen glanced over and saw that Mei Mei's expression had completely changed. Her long bangs couldn't hide the way her brows were knitted in tension.
"Lord Tengen... my crows... they were all crushed."
Tengen paused, then asked calmly, "Are there other enemies?"
"No," Mei Mei whispered. "They were ground to pieces... by the sheer pressure of that thing's Cursed Energy."