[There was only a deafening boom, a blast so violent the air itself seemed to burst under the pressure.]

[The wooden floorboards of the corridor shattered beneath your feet, splinter by splinter, while Yuki Tsukumo took the punch head-on. Her body blurred and shot straight down the hall.]

[Suguru Geto and Yu Haibara stood off to the side, their faces beyond shock. What settled over them was a kind of blankness, the look of people whose understanding of the world had been struck hard enough to crack.]

[As a Special Grade Jujutsu Sorcerer, Geto could at least barely follow your impossible shift between Cursed Techniques and the speed of the exchange, thanks to his excellent dynamic vision and reflexes. Haibara, on the other hand, had not even caught an afterimage.]

[He could not track that terrifying speed at all. It broke too cleanly past common sense. To him, you had vanished from one spot, and then Yuki Tsukumo had gone flying.]

[Whether it was Geto, who had always carried himself with no small amount of pride, or Haibara, both reached the same conclusion with absolute certainty. This had already left the realm of ordinary Jujutsu Sorcerer combat. This was a collision between monsters, a clash fought on the level of rules themselves.]

[Geto swallowed. A thin line of cold sweat gathered on his brow.]

[He replayed that instant in his mind. If you had been his enemy, he believed he could have used Cursed Spirit Manipulation defensively and barely managed to respond to such a high-speed assault.]

[But that was all it would be. A passive response. There would be no room to think, no chance to counter with care, no time to choose the best answer.]

[If an entire battle had to be fought under that kind of pressure, at that speed, while the opponent’s Cursed Technique shifted without warning, Geto understood with perfect clarity that his current close-quarters reflexes had not reached that level.]

[Only now did something click into place for him.]

[He finally understood, at least a little, why Satoru Gojo, proud to the point of arrogance, had once felt such crushing frustration when facing you.]

[Because the gap was not only technical. Across the entire scope of battle, in the understanding of Cursed Techniques and the ability to make instant decisions, there was a real chasm.]

[It was not entirely Geto’s fault. In this simulated world altered by you, aside from facing the two outliers that were you and Satoru Gojo, he had never been truly suppressed in battle or suffered a serious loss during any mission or against any Cursed Spirit.]

[A smooth path had never forced him to train his hand-to-hand combat under the assumption that he would need to survive this level of life-or-death melee.]

[As for Haibara, who stood rigid with his hand on his sword hilt, the fight before him had already crossed into a realm his abilities could not enter.]

[Even with New Shadow Style: Simple Domain deployed, even with the trump card, a deep powerlessness sank through him. He did not believe his blade could be faster than that punch.]

[Ever since you had privately taught him and Kento Nanami, he had known Touma was strong.]

[But that strength had always been gentle, restrained. He had never felt it this directly.]

[Only now, staring at the corridor blasted into ruins, did he wake from that vague impression. The power you possessed was something that could stand against a legendary Special Grade Jujutsu Sorcerer without strain, even press them down from every angle. In the boy’s simple understanding, casually suppressing a Special Grade seemed, in some ways, even more difficult and unreal than becoming a Special Grade Jujutsu Sorcerer yourself.]

[You calmly felt the feedback and aftershock running through the bones of your hand.]

[This was the first time you had truly replicated and used Star Rage.]

[At the far end of the corridor, amid drifting smoke and dust, Yuki Tsukumo staggered back to her feet.]

[She looked wretched. Half of her fine-featured face had been mangled by the terrifying mass carried in your punch, and blood kept dripping from her chin.]

[What made the sight chilling was that she cared far less about the pain in her body than about you. Her uninjured eye burned with a frightening light.]

[She was caught in a fever of shock and obsession, stunned by the ridiculous strength you had shown and by the fact that you could instantly turn around and use her personal Cursed Technique.]

["Miss Tsukumo, that punch was my answer to your rude little test. This ends here. I don’t want the situation getting any louder."]

[Tsukumo listened, and instead of pulling back, she pressed a finger roughly against one bleeding nostril and blew out a thick clot of blood.]

[At the same time, a gentle but highly efficient wave of Cursed Energy rose from within her.]

[The ruined half of her face rapidly healed in a curl of white steam, closing, scabbing, flaking away, and returning to its original smoothness at a visible speed. It was Reverse Cursed Technique of an extremely high level.]

["I haven’t said we’re done yet!"]

[Seeing her wounds heal in an instant, your pupils narrowed slightly.]

[You noticed the detail of Yuki Tsukumo using Reverse Cursed Technique to heal herself, but it did not especially surprise you.]

[Compared with juniors like Satoru Gojo and Suguru Geto, she had become a Special Grade Jujutsu Sorcerer much earlier. She had survived countless brushes with death across many long years. It made sense that she had mastered Reverse Cursed Technique.]

[The moment Yuki Tsukumo’s battle-soaked words fell, the floorboards beneath her exploded.]

[She came at you like an enraged leopardess, carrying even more savage Cursed Energy than before. In the long corridor, she became a streak of lightning and charged straight for you.]

[She was holding nothing back now. She meant to use the most violent method possible to drag more of your hidden strength into the open.]

[Yet in the next second of her sprint, Yuki Tsukumo’s beastlike instincts caught something deeply wrong.]

[One second passed. Then two. Then three.]

[With the burst speed of a Special Grade Jujutsu Sorcerer, three seconds was enough for her to cross several hundred meters.]

[But to her horror, she was still sprinting down what looked like an ordinary corridor. The scenery around her rushed backward at incredible speed, yet the distance between her and you, standing quietly at the other end, had not closed at all. It was as though an uncrossable gulf lay between you.]

[This was no illusion. The instant she charged, you used Phantom Night Parade again, smoothly unloading the freshly replicated Star Rage and switching to another Cursed Technique: Flowing Corridor.]

[With extremely precise Cursed Energy control, you turned the long stretch of corridor before you into the medium for the technique, forcibly rewriting the spatial concept of the area so that it extended endlessly and connected end to end.]

[In one sense, this technique achieved an effect highly similar to Satoru Gojo’s Limitless when it came to stopping an enemy.]

[But Flowing Corridor had specific activation requirements, and its nature was the manipulation of an existing enclosed structure. Without the Six Eyes, maintaining this technique required far less Cursed Energy and mental calculation than forcibly sustaining Limitless.]

[It happened to fit this closed corridor perfectly.]

[You watched Yuki Tsukumo run in vain through the endlessly stretched space. For the first time, a trace of real severity and warning entered your voice.]

[You spoke to her with absolute seriousness.]

["Miss Tsukumo, if you insist on continuing this meaningless test, I will regard it as a provocation against Tokyo Jujutsu High. At the same time, speaking from my own position, I will make this perfectly clear one more time. I have no interest in you. Stop immediately."]

[Behind you, Suguru Geto had also shed his usual mildness completely.]

[He knew better than to underestimate a Special Grade by even the smallest margin. This time, he held nothing back and summoned several of the strongest high-grade Cursed Spirits under his command from a black vortex.]

[Among them, the Special Grade Imaginary Vengeful Spirit Kuchisake-Onna, who radiated a cold, eerie presence, stood quietly at his side.]

[If Yuki Tsukumo dared force her way through the limits of your technique, Kuchisake-Onna would instantly deploy her exclusive Simple Domain with its forced-lock rule and place absolute control over Yuki Tsukumo again.]

[Hearing your warning, Yuki Tsukumo finally slowed to a stop in the endlessly stretching corridor.]

[Not because she had been frightened by your talk of provoking the school. A free spirit who spent years wandering overseas had little interest in the stale rules laid down by the higher-ups of the jujutsu world. To her, they were no real restraint at all.]

[As for the hideous Cursed Spirits Geto had summoned with such vigilance, she cared even less about them.]

[In the eyes of someone with the virtual mass of Star Rage, those seemingly terrifying Cursed Spirits were not fundamentally different from fragile paper toys.]

[This was not arrogance. It was confidence grounded in power.]

[Right now, she did not even regard Suguru Geto, another Special Grade, as an equal opponent capable of threatening her.]

[From beginning to end, the only thing those burning eyes cared about, the only thing they locked onto, was you.]

[She truly had not expected that a teenager whose file listed him as barely more than a boy could have such unfathomable trump cards, or so many methods that it bordered on absurd. She felt as though she had dug into a treasure mine with no bottom.]

[The atmosphere tightened to its breaking point. Cursed Energy boiled around Yuki Tsukumo again, as if she were preparing to tear through the spatial corridor by brute force.]

[Then a voice, abrupt yet far too familiar, drifted lightly from the corridor window beside her.]

["Well, well. Looks like you’re all having a lot of fun over here. Why didn’t anyone invite me? Mind if I join in now?"]

[Everyone snapped their heads around. On the shattered windowsill of the corridor, Satoru Gojo was crouched there at some point.]

[Sunlight fell across his white hair. He wore his signature round black sunglasses, and a smile hung at the corner of his mouth, friendly, lazy, and even a little mischievous.]

[Yet the slightest attempt to sense him made it clear that things were nowhere near as light as his tone suggested.]

[Judging by the terrifying pressure of Cursed Energy surging from Satoru Gojo in violent waves and spilling outward... the true strongest was clearly in an extremely dangerous mood.]

[Behind those sunglasses, his Six Eyes watched everything in the corridor with cold precision.]

---

Join my Patreon for early access to Chapters: patreon.com/rivyura

Next Target 800PS :)