"Why?"
Hasegumo lunged forward, his feet kicking off the ground with explosive force. He reached out and casually rested his right hand on the curse's shoulder.
In the next heartbeat, the "Fat Man" imploded as if crushed by a steamroller, his body instantly shattering into a million pieces.
He's way slower than me, Hasegumo thought, sidestepping a few paces to ensure no cursed residue splattered onto his clothes. He cracked his neck, finally finding a spare second to reply. "Why what?"
"Why aren't you affected by the radiation?" The Fat Man's voice rang out, as steady and deceptive as ever. Despite suffering wounds that would have sent any ordinary curse to the grave, he sounded like a perfectly healthy, three-hundred-pound con artist.
Hasegumo looked up. In the blink of an eye, the curse had fully regenerated.
The Fat Man wore a look of mild confusion. Although Hasegumo had just obliterated him with a single palm strike, the curse felt no sense of threat; to him, physical trauma—no matter how severe—was irrelevant. What truly baffled him was the fact that Hasegumo's body showed no signs of radiation sickness or mutation.
"So that's how it is..." Hasegumo muttered to himself. As a competent sorcerer, he knew better than to blindly rely on intel provided by others.
Idiots like Yuki Tsukumo had failed because they put too much faith in Tengen's word, choosing to let a barrier dismantle a domain instead of clashing with their own. Hasegumo wouldn't make that mistake. He needed to observe the enemy's behavior and cursed energy manipulation for himself.
As expected, the curse's close-quarters combat skills were abysmal—worse even than Gojo's. The only real headache was that bottomless well of cursed energy and the instantaneous recovery that came with it.
Still, a flicker of worry crossed his mind. The radiation levels are even higher than Tengen estimated. I hope Satoru is holding up okay on his end...
Beep. Beep. Beep—
The portable Geiger counter on his right wrist was screaming in a frenzied alarm. With a sharp snap, Hasegumo unbuckled the strap with his left hand and crushed the device into scrap metal.
Just as the lightning-quick Kashimo Hajime from four hundred years ago possessed cursed energy with the properties of electricity, the radiation emitted by "Little Boy" and "Fat Man" was a byproduct of the nature of their cursed energy. Because their reserves were infinite, they could radiate energy indefinitely, contaminating every living thing in their vicinity.
As mentioned before, this "cursed radiation" differed from the real thing in that its mutations could be repaired via the Reverse Cursed Technique. Thus, according to Tengen, mastering RCT was a prerequisite for facing these two.
However, after making contact, Hasegumo realized the properties of the enemy's cursed energy couldn't seem to touch him at all.
"Oh, you mean that? A little bit of radiation is hardly going to affect a body as finely tempered as mine."
Nagasaki Battlefield, Above the Sea.
"Domain Expansion: Unlimited Void."
A pitch-black spherical domain manifested for a split second before collapsing. Hovering silently over the ocean, Satoru Gojo rested his chin on his hand, his Six Eyes scanning the "Little Boy" in front of him. The boy appeared to be seven or eight years old with a black buzz cut. His eyes were vacant and unfocused, clearly paralyzed by the sensory overload of Unlimited Void.
As for why Gojo opened with his domain? To him, a Domain Expansion wasn't a "once-per-day" ultimate with a massive cooldown. While he typically needed a moment to recover, in a life-or-death situation, he could not only restore his burnt-out technique but expand his domain multiple times in succession.
Unlike Hasegumo, who was a martial arts specialist, Gojo focused on the fundamental development of cursed energy and innate techniques. Blessed with unparalleled talent, he had mastered a "madman's maneuver" that most sorcerers wouldn't even dare to imagine: using the Reverse Cursed Technique to heal Cursed Technique Burnout.
To the uninitiated, "Technique" and "Domain" are easy enough to grasp, but "Burnout" is a more abstract concept.
In simple terms, a sorcerer's innate technique is engraved into the prefrontal cortex of the brain. A Domain Expansion uses a massive surge of cursed energy to construct a space where that technique is granted a "sure-hit" factor. It is a total overclocking of the technique's performance.
Once the domain ends—whether the sorcerer closes it or it's shattered by external force—the brain suffers from burnout.
Think of the brain as a CPU. Opening a domain is like extreme overclocking. The CPU and RAM temperatures skyrocket. The longer you overclock, the hotter they get, and the longer they need to cool down. During this "cooling period," the motherboard's safety protocols—your body's self-preservation instinct—prevent you from using the technique until the temperature drops.
In short, after a domain, your main skills are on cooldown, though you can still use basic cursed energy manipulation and healing.
Normally, "burnout" isn't physical damage, so RCT shouldn't be able to "fix" it. But Gojo found a workaround: since the part of the brain where the technique is engraved is "overheated," he simply uses cursed energy to destroy that specific section of his brain, then immediately regrows it with high-precision RCT.
It was a terrifyingly dangerous gamble. One slip-up in regrowing the most complex organ in the body, and he'd end up a vegetable or dead. That Gojo used this as a standard tactic was a testament to the hidden insanity lurking beneath his arrogant exterior.
Back in Nagasaki, Gojo didn't use the brain-reset method immediately. He had flooded the boy with enough information to keep him stunned long enough for the burnout to wear off naturally.
"What a pain." Even though the boy was incapacitated, his body was still leaking cursed energy into the surroundings.
Gojo couldn't just stand there idly. He didn't have Hasegumo's freakish physical resistance; the Geiger counter on his wrist reminded him that he had to run RCT constantly to counteract the radiation.
Hiroshima Coastline.
"Does this guy have a respawn cheat active?"
Hasegumo was starting to run out of patience. In the last three hours and forty-one minutes, he had opened his domain three times and "killed" the Fat Man more times than he could count.
And yet, the fight dragged on.
He had confirmed it: every time he used Reverse Cursed Energy to obliterate the curse, the body was completely erased. But like a fire that refuses to go out, cursed energy would simply manifest out of thin air, and the Fat Man would respawn on the spot.
"Useless, useless, useless~!"
After being killed dozens of times, the Fat Man had accepted the massive gap in their combat ability. Under Hasegumo's iron fists, he had zero room to resist. But he had infinite cursed energy—literally infinite. Combined with the unique immortality granted by his release, he wasn't even frustrated. He just kept mocking Hasegumo.
The scene was surreal: the one being beaten to a pulp was perfectly calm, while the one doing the beating was getting flushed with irritation.
"Your punches have the impact of a ten-year-old's."
"Are you trying to give me a massage?"
"My, my, why is your face so red?"
"Shut up, it's just hot out here," Hasegumo snapped back, refusing to lose the war of words. "I hope you keep that same energy when I actually exorcise you."
His fists continued to fly, golden palms of energy battering the Fat Man into the dirt. Even though he was currently in technique burnout, Hasegumo's unique fighting style allowed him to destroy the curse's body using pure Reverse Cursed Energy.
"Hehe... I hope you keep that tough-guy act up when I finally break your Curtain," the Fat Man sneered, bleeding out even as he continued to pump cursed energy into the environment.
Hasegumo's mind was racing. This is bad. I've contained his energy within this barrier, but Curtains have a limit. If he keeps dumping energy in, the pressure will keep rising until it exceeds what the barrier can hold.
If I can't kill him before then, the Curtain will pop like a water balloon. This radioactive energy will flood the entire world in an instant.
Everyone on Earth will turn into a mutated freak.
Wait... every time he dies, there's a strange thread of cursed energy connecting to the spot where he perished. What the hell is that?
"Yawn..."
In the monitoring room, Mei Mei stretched and got up to pour herself another cup of coffee. "What is he waiting for?"
Tengen looked up at the screen. Satoru Gojo was just standing there, staring blankly at the equally blank Little Boy. They looked like two dazed geese staring at each other, but everyone knew Gojo couldn't be affected by his own Unlimited Void. "He's likely waiting for his burnout to pass. I wonder how Hasegumo is doing."
"I'd love to check, but my crows can't penetrate his Curtain," Mei Mei said, blowing on her coffee before taking a sip. "The environment over there seems much harsher; even if I forced a crow in, it would die instantly. But judging by this battlefield, we should be fine. After all, he is the Strongest."
While Hasegumo was busy farming kills, Gojo was taking it easy. To be safe, he waited two full hours for the burnout from Unlimited Void to wear off naturally.
As some might notice, Gojo's natural recovery was slower than Hasegumo's. This is the downside of high-precision techniques: the more complex the spell, the more "heat" it generates, leading to a longer burnout. This necessity was exactly why he'd developed the insane RCT brain-repair method.
Regardless, his technique was back online. Gojo began an incantation with renewed confidence.
"Paramita, pillar of light." "Cursed Technique Reversal: Red."
A sphere of condensed energy shot from his fingertip. It expanded as it traveled, growing into a massive, crimson orb of destruction by the time it hit the boy. The explosion completely vaporized the curse's body.
The result, however, was identical to Hasegumo's experience. A moment later, the boy respawned on the spot—and this time, the stun from Unlimited Void had been cleared.
Gojo, the former "Strongest," wasn't too worried yet. His cursed energy reserves were deep. Expanding his domain a few more times a day was well within his limits.
He trapped the boy in another Unlimited Void. While he waited for his technique to return, he began to study the mechanics of how to actually kill the thing.
Unlike Hasegumo's fight, where the Fat Man remained conscious and was actively trying to break the Curtain, the Little Boy was a vegetable. He was leaking infinite energy as a biological reflex, but it was aimless. Because of this, neither Gojo nor the observers in the monitoring room realized the true magnitude of the threat.
A threat to the entire world.
Gojo was still mulling it over. The radiation isn't a huge deal; I can heal through it with RCT. Kumo should be fine, too.
But how do I kill it? Was the output of 'Red' too low? Did I leave a cell behind? No, my eyes confirmed it was a total exorcism... Maybe it's a property of the energy itself. I'll try 'Purple' next.