Present Day: 11:56 P.M., May 1, 2008
Cyclone Nargis stands as one of the deadliest and most catastrophic natural disasters in recorded history. In the world of Jujutsu, an event of such terrifying magnitude does more than just destroy infrastructure; it generates a concentrated miasma of fear and grief. This emotional fallout was more than enough to manifest and empower a Special Grade Vengeful Spirit—a disaster-grade entity with a raw power output likely rivaling that of Jogo or Hanami.
The meteorology of the event was a nightmare. The cyclone was slated to make landfall on May 2, 2008, in the Ayeyarwady Division of Myanmar. While the winds were devastating, the storm surge was the true executioner: a thirteen-foot wall of water destined to sweep nearly forty kilometers inland. Officially, the death toll would be recorded at 138,000, but Ethan knew the reality was far grimmer. Thousands would simply vanish into the churning brown depths of the sea, their bodies never recovered, their final moments fueling the birth of a monster. Labutta Township was the epicenter of this tragedy, where eighty percent of its structures were fated to be leveled.
This was the data Ethan carried in his mind—a heavy burden of foreknowledge that he could not ignore.
Ethan and Wong walked in grim silence toward the crest of a jagged hill where the cursed signature had been localized. Behind them, Master Mordo and Master Kaecilius followed, their eyes scanning the horizon. The air had become eerily still, and the atmospheric pressure had dropped so sharply it made their eardrums pop. It was the classic "calm before the storm," yet the cursed signature remained stationary, pulsing with a bloated, sickly energy.
Ethan tightened his grip on his resolve. He would not make the same mistake he had during the Dalgour incident. He wouldn't wait for the spirit to reach its peak or risk it entering a suicide pact to take the region down with it.
"You three haven't seen me deploy my Domain Expansion yet, have you?" Ethan shouted, his voice carrying over the rising whistle of the wind to reach Kaecilius and Mordo. "Well, consider today your lucky day."
Wong, sensing the shift in the atmosphere, immediately signaled for the other two masters to move back. Mordo looked baffled. He had seen Ethan exorcise Grade 1 spirits with terrifying efficiency and viewed him as a pillar of sorcerer society, but "Domain Expansion" was a term he had never encountered in the Kamar-Taj archives.
"What is a Domain Expansion?" Mordo whispered, eyeing Wong for an explanation. Even Kaecilius leaned in, his usual arrogance replaced by an eager curiosity for this new form of high-level magic.
Wong watched Ethan's silhouette against the darkening sky. "It is a supreme art used by the Jujutsu Sorcerers of the Golden Era," he answered quietly. "Agamotto himself called it the pinnacle of Jujutsu in his personal records. It is the realization of one's inner world brought into physical reality."
Ethan slammed his hands together into the Sovereign's Seal.
"Domain Expansion: Chimera Sovereign Garden."
Out of consideration for his fellow sorcerers, Ethan constrained the barrier's boundary to a mere ten-meter radius. He didn't need a massive field for a duel; he needed the domain's guaranteed hit and its infinite resource pool to mass-produce his newest creation.
As the viscous shadows of the garden claimed the hilltop, Ethan began to weave a complex thread of cursed energy. He used Tora as the foundational base, grafting the ethereal, lightning-charged wings of Nue onto the tiger's frame and infusing the entire entity with the Round Deer's Reverse Cursed Technique (RCT).
The result was Tora-Kannon.
Hundreds of these glowing, winged chimeras began to emerge from the roiling ink of Ethan's shadow. They took flight, their white-and-gold fur illuminated by the emerald light of the Deer's healing energy.
"Go," Ethan commanded. "Spread out across the coastline of Labutta. Your orders are simple: do whatever is necessary to keep as many people alive as possible."
The Kannons shrieked in acknowledgment, their Nue-derived wings sparking with stabilizing currents as they dove toward the delta. Because Nargis hit a delta region, the floodwaters were already beginning to churn with thick mud and debris, creating a biological hazard of massive proportions.
Ethan lowered the domain barrier to 0.000001 meters, shrinking the shell to a microscopic layer around his skin. This allowed him to maintain his legion of Shikigami while remaining mobile for combat; if he needed to fully redeploy the domain, he could do so instantly without the need for regular chanting. While he maintained his Partial Summoning of other Shikigami 24/7, he could not yet sustain this specific, high-intensity state perpetually.
Ethan knew the primary disaster was only the beginning; Nargis would be followed by a secondary wave of suffering—hunger, disease, and a lack of aid. This lingering despair was exactly what the Cyclone Spirit would feed upon to transcend its limits. By deploying a legion of healers and fighters before the storm even reached its peak, Ethan was creating a countermeasure in case the cyclone hit regardless.
In the lore of Curses, spirits like Hanami represented the fear of nature's wrath. But as Ethan looked up at the halo of Mahoraga's wheel resting above his head, he knew that the "Wrath of the Sky" had finally met its match.
The Masters all felt it simultaneously—a sudden, suffocating surge of cursed energy that seemed to pull the oxygen right out of their lungs. It was the unmistakable, jagged signature of a Special Grade Cursed Spirit. However, something felt fundamentally wrong. Cursed spirits of such high caliber were typically expected to be mountain-sized monstrosities or grotesque amalgamations of flesh and teeth.
This entity defied those expectations entirely. Standing amidst the wreckage was a woman with a lithe, athletic build and lightly tanned skin. Her most striking feature was her long, vibrant pink hair which jutted defiantly upward, staying in place as if her body were permanently suspended upside-down. Beneath thin, arched eyebrows, her eyes were haunting: vast black sclera framing irises of a deep, piercing pink. While her human-like appearance was unusual, it was not unprecedented—Mahito, after all, often draped himself in a human guise to better mock the species he despised.
Most disturbing was that she appeared to be naked, her modesty protected only by the distortion of her technique.
"Typhael."
Mahito had whispered that name to her while she was still a mere cursed womb, nestled in the shadows of the veil. "The Wrath of the Sky," he had called her. Her beloved, Mahito, was the sun around which her dark world orbited. The "love" she harbored for him was undeniably one-sided—a parasitic, obsessive devotion—but Typhael understood the hierarchy of their kind. To earn the affection of a being like Mahito, one had to be worthy.
She had a singular, bloody mission in life: to slaughter every human within her reach, to harvest their terror, and to ascend until she was powerful enough to stand at his side as an equal. Drawing upon her innate cursed technique, Typhael began to churn the atmosphere. Her goal was a catastrophe of historical proportions. She would manifest a Category 4 cyclone designed to strike the Irrawaddy Delta region on the 2nd of May.
She calculated the carnage with a cold, geometric precision. With every soul extinguished, her own pool of cursed energy would swell. She would feed on the mass expiration of lives until she was strong enough to deserve his "love."
The landscape of the Special Grades was shifting. Lately, the "weaker" spirits—those who had loitered in the shadows for decades—were being hunted down and exorcised at an alarming rate. Typhael had once been ranked among the top five strongest Special Grades. However, word had reached her that Hanami had fallen. The "Top Five" had been reduced to a "Top Three." To reach Mahito, she knew she only had to surpass that arrogant volcano-head, Jogo.
If her current gambit succeeded, the death toll would easily exceed 100,000. Humans loved to believe that cursed spirits were incapable of feeling love, but Typhael knew the truth: love is the most twisted, most enduring curse of all.
Typhael's black-sclera eyes scanned the horizon, tracking the rapid approach of three sorcerers. She tensed, ready to unleash the sky's fury, but her breath hitched as she spotted a fourth figure. It was a human boy, moving with a speed that defied his lack of presence. He possessed absolutely zero cursed energy.
The warning Mahito had hissed into her ear weeks ago echoed with newfound urgency: "If you ever encounter a human with zero cursed energy... do not engage. Flee immediately and report back."
A manic conflict tore through her mind. If she fled, she followed his orders. But if she stayed—if she brought Mahito the head of this anomaly—would he finally grant her the love she craved? He would, she told herself. He must.
Ethan didn't offer the luxury of a preamble. He ignited his movement, blasting toward the Cyclone Spirit with the force of a missile. His strategy was blunt and efficient: close the gap and exorcise the spirit within the first sixty seconds using a barrage of high-output, reinforced cursed energy strikes.
In a blur of speed, Ethan was inside Typhael's personal space. He threw a devastating lead hook intended to crush her neck and end the fight instantly. To his genuine shock, the spirit didn't just react—she parried. As his fist connected with the space in front of her, Ethan's arm appeared to warp and liquefy, deforming into an impossible shape.
He didn't panic. In the next heartbeat, Ethan vanished, reappearing atop a nearby light pole to create distance. He looked down at his arm; it was perfectly intact, the bone and muscle reset as if the distortion had never happened. There was no pain, only a lingering chill.
She blocked me, Ethan noted, his eyes narrowing. That's a first. Is it space manipulation? No... she didn't actually damage the limb. It felt like looking through a warped lens.
"My technique... it allows me to treat the 'sky' as a 'surface,'" Typhael began, her voice trembling with a mix of fear and newfound resolve. To illustrate, she reached out and grabbed the very air, pulling and folding it as if she were adjusting a heavy velvet curtain.
Ethan recognized the tactic immediately. This was a Binding Vow: "Revealing One's Hand." By explaining her mechanics, Typhael was sacrificing the element of surprise for a massive boost in cursed energy output. The realization struck Ethan like a lightning bolt; her appearance and her ability to manipulate the "thin air" as a tangible cloth were hauntingly similar to Takako Uro, the legendary sorcerer from the Heian Era.
The Wheel Turns.
Click.
The heavy, metallic sound of the Dharma Chakra rotating echoed in the air above Ethan's head. He felt the "weight" of adaptation settling into his mind. The information regarding the spatial distortion that had touched his hand moments ago was being processed and countered by Mahoraga's power.
Mahoraga's wheel allowed Ethan to adapt to any and all phenomena. Once the process was complete, the technique used against him would become ineffective. Ethan could instinctively feel the progress. He only needed one more rotation to achieve total adaptation to Sky Manipulation. He had already partially adapted.
"Behind you," Ethan spoke with a smile as he activated ECLIPSE. He knew that the next time she tried to warp the space around him, she would find his body as immovable as a mountain of stone.
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