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A bright flash cut through the sky, and just like that, two lives were severed.
“Well then, this leaves the two of us.”
“Yes.” The Special Grade raised his fists.
The tall, imposing man wore nothing but black leather pants and a black leather jacket, with a spiky fur collar around his neck. His muscles stretched to the utmost to show the statuesque form he had acquired through endless training, and Cursed Energy Reinforcement. Ishigori Ryu was a prideful champion.
Facing him was an unassuming young man wearing baggy clothes and purple-black eye bags. He looked perpetually deprived of energy, and his clothes made it hard to glean the true form of his body. He slouched a bit, though during attacks his form shifted to a perfect shape. It looked as if he didn't like to expend more energy than what was required. Okkotsu Yuuta was an efficient fighter.
“Drive me to my limit, Okkotsu.”
Within the silence of the aftermath of the destructive blast, Ryu’s soft and passionate voice danced in the air.
Ryu began to charge his next Granite Blast, a compressed sphere of Cursed Energy shot forward from his head. His hair was shaped with an excessive pompadour, which gave the impression of being the barrel of a cannon.
“Make me feel alive.”
Yuuta considered dodging the energy beam. Its trajectory was simple, and easy to predict provided that someone could register it at its high natural velocity. That was not an issue for Okkotsu Yuuta. But there was something… hard to place, in Ishigori Ryu’s penetrating gaze.
“C’mon, young man.”
Without thinking, Yuuta moved his arms to assume a pose compatible with copying that man’s technique. He held his left arm straight forward and his right arched behind it, and imagined loading a cannonball at the tip of his fingers.
Copy.
There began to glow a twin compressed sphere of Cursed Energy. It failed to grow into an identical imitation, because he could not match Ryu’s innate talent. Okkotsu’s near-bottomless reserve of Cursed Energy was still constrained by the size of his output, whereas Ryu's was immense. If they were both cannons, it could be said that Ryu's one had a bigger aperture.
“That's right! That's the spirit, Okkotsu!” Ryu proclaimed.
Yuuta looked again into that man’s eyes. He wondered what had pushed him to take such a suboptimal course of action. Of the many, sprawling options that appeared before his eyes, he had decided to stand proud and take him head on, a simplistic stance unbefitting of the jujutsu sorcerers of the modern era. This straight-forward and honest way of fighting belonged to the ancient era.
He was being foolish, taking head-on that Ishigori Ryu who was known to have the highest Cursed Energy output in recorded jujutsu history.
And yet. That man. There was something in his reckless style of fighting. Yuuta had no attachment to violence, and if he could have done away with it one day he would not have waited one day longer: he was a peaceful young man who had somehow inherited centuries of curses through his family line. And a single blessing.
“Ishigori. I'll meet your blast, just this once.”
“Good.”
That man loved fighting, loved imposing his gigantic ego onto others. He had been waiting for 400 years to find someone who could withstand the brunt of his full load.
“Let's go.” Both said in unison.
Two opposing rivers of infinite cursed energy rushed forward from the two monsters! It was on a level that the current jujutsu society would have ranked as Special Grade.
They met and crashed into each other. The air immediately warmed up, all traces of water droplets evaporating instantly— The concrete nearby became incandescent and glowed red, then orange, then white!
Sparks of runaway cursed energy flowed outward from the point where the two beams were fighting for dominance, each spark moving faster than the eye could see and boring deep holes in the concrete, in nearby rubble, and the walls of faraway buildings. Somewhere, a skyscraper collapsed under its own weight.
Ishigori’s beam was gaining ground, and this was not lost on Yuuta, who accepted graciously the outcome. Perhaps with this much, Ryu would have been finally satisfied. And then, he could have used Reverse Cursed Energy to heal himself and deal the decisive blow.
“That's good, Okkotsu!”
“Heh.”
The beam pushed into Yuuta’s body and blew him back into a wall, which instantly collapsed and made him fly back into another, and then another. He felt his head spinning, his point of view blurring and partially fading to black, before resetting back to zero.
Now, for his counterattack.