The air in the cramped stone passage grew thick. Fushiguro Toji's attack was not a technique, but pure physics refined to a killing art—a straight-line lunge that ignored wind resistance and wasted motion, the point of his tachi aimed at the space between Kamo Itsuki's eyes. Speed was his argument; efficiency, his doctrine.
Kamo didn't try to match the speed. He didn't need to.
Before the blade had crossed half the distance, the ground at Toji's feet erupted. Not in an explosion of force, but in a sudden, grasping growth of crimson tendrils—hyper-coagulated blood that had been lying in wait, seeped into the stone's pores. They wrapped around his ankles, his calves, hardening instantly into shackles of bio-ceramic strength.
Toji's charge didn't falter; it transformed. His forward momentum became a controlled fall, using the anchored resistance to pivot his entire body. The tachi swept in a wide, devastating arc, severing the tendrils at their base. He landed in a crouch, already analyzing. Pre-placed traps. He was waiting.
"I said, your mission is over," Kamo repeated, standing his ground. His voice was calm, a stark contrast to the violent economy of Toji's movements. "The vessel Tengen will use is not the girl. It's a construct. Your employers' goal—to stop the merger by killing her—is already irrelevant."
Toji rose slowly, his expression unchanging. Information was a tool like any other, and he filed this away. It changed nothing about the immediate obstacle. "Then I'll kill the construct," he stated, as if discussing crushing a bug. "And the girl for good measure. A thorough job."
He discarded the direct approach. This opponent was a planner, a controller of the battlefield. Toji's next move was to deny him that control. He shot forward again, but this time he moved along the walls and ceiling, his enhanced senses mapping the microscopic imperfections in the stone, using them as purchase to run at a blistering pace perpendicular to gravity. He became an unpredictable ricochet, a human bullet changing angles with every step, denying Kamo a fixed target.
Kamo's eyes tracked him, not with the energy-sight of the Six Eyes, but with the heightened perception of his own refined biology—the shift in air pressure, the faint scent of sweat and blood, the subsonic vibration of footfalls. He didn't try to catch the pattern. He saturated the space.
From his pores, a fine, aerosolized mist of his own blood sprayed into the passage. It was invisible, odorless to normal senses, but to Kamo, it was a three-dimensional web. He could feel the disturbance as Toji moved through it.
The assassin sensed the change, the slight tackiness in the air. Poison? Neurotoxin? He didn't gamble. Halting his dizzying sprint, he landed silently and took a shallow breath, analyzing. No immediate effect. A tracer, then.
It didn't matter. He had closed the distance. He feinted low with the tachi, then used the movement to flick a small, cylindrical object from his sleeve with his other hand—a simple flashbang, devoid of cursed energy, utterly mundane.
It detonated with a concussive CRACK and a searing white light that would blind and deafen any normal opponent.
Kamo was not normal. The moment the object left Toji's sleeve, Kamo's eyelids had already snapped shut, a milky, protective nictitating membrane sliding over his eyes. His eardrums slackened on command, dampening the sound to a dull thump. He 'saw' through the afterimage not with light, but with the reverberations in his blood-mist web.
He saw Toji's true attack coming—not from the front, but from above, where the assassin had used the flash as cover to leap and drive the tachi straight down in a killing plunge.
Kamo didn't block. He shifted. The blade sheared through his left shoulder instead of his skull, a grievous wound that sprayed blood but missed everything vital. At the same time, his right hand shot up, fingers elongating into needle-like points.
He didn't aim for Toji's body. He aimed for the weapon.
The needle-fingers struck the flat of the tachi's blade, not to break it, but to sample. A microscopic shaving of the special-grade metal, a fleck of the blood and sweat on its hilt—and most crucially, a few skin cells from Toji's hand, scraped off by the violent impact.
Toji landed, wrenching his blade free. He saw the bloody furrows on Kamo's shoulder begin to steam and close, flesh knitting back together at a visible rate. Reverse Cursed Technique.
Kamo took a step back, cradling his already-healing arm. A thin, cold smile touched his lips. "Thank you," he said, his voice a little rough from pain but laced with triumph. "The physical sample is one thing. But the data on how you move, how you think in a fight… and now, a sample of your weapon and your cells? That's the true prize."
Toji stared, his first flicker of something beyond cold calculation entering his eyes: a dawning understanding. This wasn't a sorcerer trying to stop him. This was a collector. And Toji had just handed him another piece for his collection.
The mission was indeed compromised. But the nature of the fight had changed. It was no longer just about a target. It was about being dissected by a man who saw him not as a person, nor even just an enemy, but as a set of unique, desirable components.
Toji made a decision. He wasn't being paid for this. With a final, inscrutable look at Kamo, he turned and fled back down the passage, moving even faster than before, not towards the hall, but towards an exit. He would live to fight another day, on his own terms.
Kamo Itsuki let him go. He stood in the dim passage, the sounds of the retreating footsteps fading. He looked at the droplets of Toji's blood and cells now circulating within his own system, and at the microscopic metallic fragment being analyzed by his technique. The blueprint of Heavenly Restriction was now exponentially more complete.
He had protected the hall. He had secured the future of the real Amanai Riko. And he had obtained the rarest sample of all.
A good day's work.
The shallow punctures were nothing to Toji—mere pinpricks compared to the damage his body could endure. But each one was a violation, a proof that his opponent's control was omnipresent. The blood mist, the needles—this wasn't a duel; it was a systematic dissection of his combat options.
Toji's mind, a calculator of violence, ran a new equation. Close-quarters was a stalemate against this unnaturally reinforced body. Ranged tactics were nullified by the opponent's own superior area control. Deception had failed.
There was only one variable left: sheer, overwhelming kinetic force.
He discarded all finesse. With a guttural roar that was utterly devoid of cursed energy but thick with raw power, he vanished from his spot. Not with speed, but with a explosive leap that shattered the stone beneath his feet. He didn't try to outmaneuver the blood mist; he burst straight through it, becoming a human cannonball aimed at Kamo.
The Inverted Spear was held low, not to stab, but to serve as a lance tip, a wedge to split any defense. The Soul Liberation Blade in his other hand was held back, a hidden threat.
Kamo's eyes widened a fraction. He couldn't dodge this. The passage was too narrow, the acceleration too sudden. He crossed his blood-gauntleted arms in a guard, reinforcing them with layers of condensed platelets and chitinous density.
The impact was not a clash, but a detonation.
The spear-tip met the guard. The nullification field didn't just erase Kamo's cursed reinforcement; it created a momentary dead zone in the biological structure of the guard itself. The super-dense blood-ceramic shattered under the following physical impact.
Kamo was thrown backward like a doll, skidding across the stone floor, his arms numb, the constructs on them dissolving into useless slurry. Toji landed, already in motion, not allowing a millisecond of recovery. The Soul Liberation Blade came around in a horizontal slash aimed to bisect Kamo at the waist.
Kamo, still sliding, didn't try to block. He spat. A single, dense globule of his blood, infused with a paralytic neuro-toxin of his own design, shot towards Toji's face—a point-blank, unavoidable shot.
Toji jerked his head aside. The globule grazed his cheek, and instantly a wave of cold numbness spread from the point of contact. His left eye blurred. His coordination faltered for a critical half-second.
The slash missed by inches, carving a deep gouge in the wall instead.
Kamo used the opening. He didn't rise. He slammed his palms onto the floor. *"Domain Expansion: Crimson Catacomb."*
The world did not darken with a barrier. Instead, the very substance of the passage changed. The stone walls, the floor, the ceiling—they flushed a deep, venous red. They became porous, organic. From every surface, thousands of hair-thin capillaries of blood erupted, weaving into a vast, three-dimensional lattice that filled the entire space. It was not a separate domain, but a co-opting of the environment itself.
This was Kamo Itsuki's incomplete Domain: not a guaranteed-hit spiritual battleground, but an absolute biological takeover of a defined space. Within it, the air became a medium he controlled. Gravity became a suggestion.
Toji's enhanced senses were overwhelmed. He couldn't smell anything but copper and salt. He couldn't hear anything but the low hum of circulating fluid. The numb side of his face was now a liability, distorting his spatial awareness.
He was trapped inside a giant, living organ.
Kamo stood slowly within his own creation, his wounds already sealing. He looked at Toji, who stood motionless, assessing the new, horrific rules of engagement.
"You see," Kamo said, his voice echoing weirdly in the fluid-filled space. "You are a masterpiece of physicality. But here, physics are mine to write."
Tendrils of blood, moving with the viscosity of syrup but the strength of steel cables, began to lazily coil towards Toji from all directions. They were not attacking; they were constricting, claiming territory.
Toji knew, with the cold certainty of a survivor, that he could not win this. Not here. Not now. His mission was to kill, not to die in a glorified bloodstream.
With a final, furious slash of the Inverted Spear, he cut a swath through the encroaching tendrils. The nullification created a temporary tunnel in the organic mesh. It wouldn't last.
He didn't look back. He turned and fled down the tunnel he had carved, his form a blur of desperate motion, retreating from the crimson labyrinth that had sought to claim him.
Kamo Itsuki let the Domain dissipate, the blood receding back into the stone, leaving no trace. He watched the empty passage, breathing heavily. The strain of the Domain was significant.
He had not captured Toji. But he had driven him off, protected the sanctum, and more importantly, he had forced the specimen to reveal another layer of its capabilities under extreme duress. The data was invaluable.
Wiping a smear of blood from his lip, Kamo Itsuki turned and walked back toward the main hall. The immediate threat was over. The hunt, however, was far from finished.
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