The pressure in the air crystallized into a physical weight. On one side stood Kamo Itsuki, a stark figure in black and red, his gaze a scalpel dissecting Kenjaku's every twitch. On the other, Gojo Satoru was a study in casual, blinding power, silver hair and Six Eyes drinking in the moonlight and the desperation before him. Between them, completing the triangle, was Geto Suguru, a silent, immovable wall.
"You two took your sweet time," Geto chided, though his focus never left Kenjaku.
"My bad! There was a line at the crepe stand," Gojo chirped, entirely unrepentant.
"Where's my crepe, then?"
"Ate it. It was calling to me." Gojo waved a dismissive hand, his smile never fading as he turned his unnerving attention fully onto Kenjaku. "So! You're the mastermind causing all the fuss. Special Grade strength, hiding in the shadows… what a waste. We're short on manpower, you know. Surrender nicely, and we can talk."
The offer was a transparent probe, a verbal feint to gauge reaction.
Kamo Itsuki's cold voice cut through the night. "Spare the act. Your energy signature confirms it. You're the puppet master behind the higher-ups' corruption. Surrender isn't on the menu."
Kenjaku's mind raced, even as he maintained a mask of calculated calm. They know. But how much? He played the wounded party. "A higher-up betrayed me, didn't they? Tell me who, and I'll come quietly."
The sentence was a distraction. The moment the last word left his lips, he erupted into motion, not toward any sorcerer, but toward the weakest-looking seam in the triangular formation—a desperate, explosive dash fueled by a millennium of survival instinct.
He didn't make it three meters.
Gojo Satoru simply appeared in front of him, as if he'd always been there, teleportation seamless. At the same instant, Kamo Itsuki and Geto Suguru closed the other angles, the triangle tightening into an inescapable cage.
Despair, cold and final, curdled in Kenjaku's gut, but it was swiftly burned away by a sharper, older emotion: a furious, millennia-old will to survive. His eyes hardened, the genial facade crumbling to reveal the ancient predator beneath.
"Don't," he hissed, the word laden with a threat that spanned centuries, "push me."
His brain was a supercomputer of cursed technique analysis. Three Special Grades. Youth means explosive power, possibly incomplete mastery, but also unpredictability. Domain Expansion… a possibility for each. The risk is catastrophic.
A domain clash with even one could be devastating. Against three? It would be mutual annihilation, a guaranteed end for him. Domain was off the table. He needed a different gambit, something they wouldn't expect, a technique buried so deep in his arsenal it was almost forgotten.
He had one card left. Not to win, but to create chaos. To sow a single, catastrophic seed of discord in this flawless trap.
As Gojo took a leisurely step forward, Infinity humming imperceptibly around him, Kenjaku's hands moved—not in an attack, but in a rapid, archaic series of seals, his chanted words not Japanese, but a guttural, forgotten tongue. He wasn't aiming at their bodies.
He was aiming at their bond.
"Cursed Technique: Soul Resonance Amplification," he whispered, the final incantation vanishing into the night air as he poured his remaining cursed energy not into defense, but into a subtle, insidious wave aimed squarely at the emotional and psychic links between the three friends.
The technique wouldn't control them. It would magnify. It would take any hidden doubt, any sliver of resentment, any subconscious friction between them—Gojo's flippancy, Itsuki's secretiveness, Geto's burdened idealism—and amplify it a hundredfold in a critical moment.
The trap was perfect. Their coordination was impeccable. So he would sabotage it from within. He would turn their greatest strength—their trust—into their momentary weakness.
The invisible wave pulsed out. Kenjaku sagged, his energy nearly spent, a grim smile on his stitched lips. The battle was lost. But if his final play worked, the war within them was just beginning. He looked at the three young gods encircling him, waiting for the fissure to appear.
A Domain clash was a mutual suicide pact. Kenjaku needed chaos, not a glorious end. As the three predators closed their final step, a look of feral resolve settled on his face. He had one last, catastrophic gambit.
"Even if I burn through every stolen technique I have left," he snarled, his voice a guttural rasp, "I will make you remember this night! Gravity Manipulation: Extreme Technique—Asteroid!"
The incantation tore from his throat, and the sky above Iwate Prefecture ripped. A colossal meteor, wreathed in burning atmosphere, screeched into existence, hurtling downward with apocalyptic intent. The ground trembled; the very air screamed in protest.
"Act now if you dare!" Kenjaku's voice, laced with venomous mockery, cut through the chaos. "Will your precious 'justice' let an entire city burn to catch one man?"
While the meteor dominated all senses, Kamo Itsuki moved with surgical precision. His focus wasn't on the sky, but on the momentarily vulnerable curse user below. "Blood Manipulation: Parasitic Worm."
A thread of blood so fine it was almost invisible shot forth, piercing Kenjaku's defenses in his moment of exerted weakness. The worm burrowed deep, not to injure, but to mark. A tracking beacon now pulsed silently within Kenjaku's stolen flesh.
"Tch. Annoying!" Gojo Satoru's complaint was almost breezy, but his action was anything but. In a flash of impossible speed, he was airborne, a silver streak against the fire-lit sky. "Cursed Technique Reversal: Red!"
A sphere of destructive repulsion bloomed from his palm, crashing into the meteor's face with a sound like shattering mountains. The celestial rock shuddered, its descent visibly slowing.
Geto Suguru acted in concert. A swarm of winged curses erupted from the shadows around him, a living, shrieking net that flung itself at the meteor. They splattered against its surface, each impact a tiny sacrifice that further bled the rock's momentum.
Kamo Itsuki, his tracker planted, joined the aerial effort. Across the meteor's new, angled trajectory, he conjured vast, floating pools of his own blood—crimson, gelatinous lakes suspended in the air. As the meteor plowed through them, the blood acted as a miraculous ablative shield, absorbing kinetic energy and dissipating heat with a furious hiss, preventing atmospheric ignition.
It was a symphony of overwhelming power applied with breathtaking control. Together, they didn't stop the unstoppable; they steered it. They wrestled the world-ending projectile like unruly gods, bending its path away from land, bleeding its speed with every technique at their disposal.
With a final, earth-subduing thoom, the meteor, now little more than a large, steaming boulder, plunged harmlessly into the open sea. A geyser of water erupted, and the sea level permanently ticked upward a fraction, claiming a sliver of coastline in exchange for a city's survival.
Geto Suguru, hovering beside the others, let out a breathless, slightly hysterical laugh as he watched the steam rise over the ocean. "You know, if we'd been just a bit more precise with the angle, we could've used that thing for land reclamation. Added a few square meters to Japan."
The moment of dark humor passed as quickly as it came. All three sets of eyes snapped back to the ruined hospital grounds below. The meteor had been a distraction, a final, desperate spectacle.
But the beacon in Kamo Itsuki's senses pulsed steadily.
Kenjaku was on the run. And now, he was tagged. The hunt had merely entered its next phase.
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