Above Sendai City, the pink residual glow of Cursed Energy had not yet completely dissipated.
That Granite Blast, powerful enough to pierce through a skyscraper, was smoothly split in two by a single sword strike, roaring past Yamada's side toward the rear, exploding into a towering pillar of fire and smoke.
Standing on the edge of the rooftop, Ishigori Ryu looked at the unharmed black-haired youth. His eyes held no trace of fear, but instead burned with a madness like someone starving to the extreme finally seeing a peerless delicacy.
"Fantastic! Fantastic!"
He laughed loudly, the pompadour on his forehead trembling slightly due to the excessive overflow of Cursed Energy.
"For four hundred years, I've felt that the battles in this world were dull and tasteless, like a coarse meal that couldn't fill one's stomach! But you're different! You, this 'dessert,' can definitely satisfy me!"
Boom!
The rooftop beneath Ryu's feet shattered with a bang. He abandoned his high-ground long-range bombardment, diving straight down toward Yamada from a hundred meters up like a pink meteor.
Mid-air, his entire body's Cursed Energy had already converged into his right fist. As the being with the highest Cursed Energy output in the history of the Jujutsu World, every one of his melee attacks was comparable to a point-blank explosion of a large-caliber artillery piece.
Facing this thunderous high-altitude dive, Yamada didn't even draw his Kusanagi Sword. He stood on the roof of a scrapped bus, left hand in his trench coat pocket, while the five fingers of his right hand slowly spread open.
Six Paths Lightning Release Chakra rapidly compressed and condensed in his palm, turning into a ball of lightning that emitted a piercing screech.
"You want to eat dessert? I'm afraid your teeth won't be able to handle it."
Yamada's right knee bent slightly, facing the falling Ryu.
Bang!
Two figures, one large and one small, collided violently in mid-air without any trickery.
Ryu's fist, wrapped in extreme pink Cursed Energy, clashed head-on with Yamada's Six Paths Chidori.
The moment the two distinct destructive energies made contact, the surrounding air was forcibly pushed aside, forming a visible white vacuum fault.
The stalemate didn't even last for a tenth of a second.
Crack!
The sound of bones shattering echoed through the night sky.
The fanaticism on Ryu's face froze instantly. His confident Cursed Energy output was instantly and ruthlessly torn apart the moment it touched that lightning.
High-voltage electricity poured back frantically along his fist. His right arm twisted and snapped in an instant, pale bone shards pierced through the skin, and blood was vaporized by the high temperature before it could even splatter.
"Ugh!"
Ryu let out a muffled groan, his body flying backward several times faster than he had come, smashing into the interior of an abandoned shopping mall, stopping only after crashing through five floors.
At the very moment Yamada sent Ryu flying with a punch, the night sky above his head underwent a bizarre change. The originally flat space became like a crumpled blue curtain, emitting a piercing friction sound.
A fair arm reached out from a distorted spatial rift, tightly grasping the spatial boundary around Yamada.
"Die! Arrogant modern person!"
The ancient assassin hidden in the clouds, Uro Takako, had finally found what she considered the perfect moment for a sneak attack.
Her innate Cursed Technique, Sky Manipulation, could pull and fold three-dimensional space as easily as two-dimensional cloth.
At this moment, she was trying to twist and snap the space where Yamada was located, intending to crush his body alive.
As she exerted force, the light around Yamada became distorted and surreal, and the air was squeezed into a suffocating pressure.
Yuta, standing at a safe distance below, had a sudden change in expression. "Yamada-san! That's a spatial Cursed Technique, be careful!"
"A spatial technique?"
Yamada, at the center of the distortion, didn't even sway his shoulders. He raised his head slightly, his deep, pitch-black eyes looking at Uro Takako hidden behind the spatial curtain.
Within his right eye, a crimson hexagram totem burst into a blinding light without warning.
"To use such a two-dimensional origami trick against me, you really are pathetically stupid."
Kamui!
A pitch-black spatial vortex burst open above Yamada's head.
The moment Uro Takako's Sky Manipulation touched the Kamui vortex, it was like a piece of fragile rag being sucked into a high-speed industrial shredder.
The force she used to pull space was cut off by Kamui's extremely high-dimensional gravity. Not only that, but the terrifying spatial devouring force followed the trajectory of her technique and suddenly pulled back on her arms.
"This... what is this?! My technique is being devoured?!"
Uro Takako was pale with fright, desperately trying to let go and cut off her Cursed Energy, but Kamui's suction was completely unreasonable.
"Aaaaaah!"
Amidst a shrill scream, Uro Takako's arms were brutally twisted off and swallowed into the separate dimension by the Kamui vortex.
The spatial technique she used to conceal her body completely collapsed, and she lost her balance, falling from mid-air.
Bang!
Uro Takako fell onto the rubble-strewn street, blood gushing from her severed arms, her face as pale as paper.
Boom!
On the other side, the ruins of the shopping mall were blown open by a violent surge of pink Cursed Energy.
Ryu dragged his broken right arm, stepping out from the billowing dust one step at a time.
He gasped for breath, staring fixedly at Yamada who had landed unharmed on the bus roof. The fire of battle in his eyes had not only failed to go out but burned even brighter.
"Fantastic... this absolute gap, this is a true feast!"
Ryu spat out a mouthful of bloody saliva, turned to look at Uro Takako lying on the ground, and roared, "Uro! Stop lying there playing dead! This guy is an out-and-out monster, we don't even have the right to touch him in a one-on-one! Let's go together!"
Uro Takako gritted her teeth, enduring the intense pain of her severed arms as she climbed up from the ground.
As a top assassin from a thousand years ago, she felt an unprecedented shadow of death.
"I don't need you to tell me!"
Uro Takako took a deep breath, the Cursed Energy in her body operating at overload, her mangled shoulders frantically squeezing out the last of her spatial manipulation power.
Thin Ice Breaker!
She compressed the space for dozens of meters around her into an extremely dense sphere, which shot toward Yamada with unstoppable destructive power.
At the same time, Ryu's pompadour erupted with an unprecedented blinding light, as he concentrated all his remaining life force and Cursed Energy into it.
Granite Blast: Maximum Output!
A pink pillar of destruction twice as thick as before, along with Uro Takako's spatial compression bullet, formed a perfect pincer attack, roaring to seal off all of Yamada's escape routes.
Facing the life-risking strikes of these two top experts from four hundred years ago, the hexagram and the six tomoe in Yamada's eyes spun simultaneously.
"Since you are so eager to witness true power I shall grant your wish."
Boom!!!
A vast, abyss-like Chakra, filled with an aura of absolute destruction, erupted from Yamada's body.
The earth trembled, and the air wailed. That was not a simple release of Cursed Energy, but a divine power that transcended the rules of this world.
The Chakra rapidly constructed massive bones and interwoven meridians in mid-air, covering them with a layer of armor.
A half-body Susanoo, dozens of meters tall, rose from the ground the moment the light beam and spatial bullet were about to hit.
Bang!!!
Ryu's maximum output and Uro Takako's spatial bullet slammed against the Susanoo's armor. However, besides causing ripples on the energy shell, they couldn't advance even a fraction of an inch.