The lightning struck before the sound could reach.
Kashimo Hajime's technique was simple in theory, devastating in practice. He separated the charge of his cursed energy—positive charges transferring to his target with every strike, negative charges accumulating within his own body. The negative charges, rather than discharging into the ground, were guided toward the positive charges like a compass needle finding north.
Guaranteed hit. No Domain needed. Just physics weaponized.
He raised both hands. Lightning gathered between them—thicker, brighter, more concentrated than anything he had thrown before. It roared across the distance between them, an enraged dragon of pure destruction.
Okkotsu Yuta had already absorbed the negative charges Kashimo had left on him. The lightning had lost its guaranteed hit. But it was already in motion, and there was no better conductor nearby.
It still came for him.
Yuta's tachi moved.
The blade became a silver flash, deflecting the deadly current at the last possible instant. Lightning screamed past him, tearing a trench through the earth, shattering windows, setting the air itself on fire.
He was still standing. Still holding his sword. Still breathing.
Now.
Cursed energy surged through his body, gathering at the blade's tip. The tachi sang—a sound like wind through ice—and a massive slash extended from the steel, aimed directly at Kashimo's chest.
The ancient sorcerer's eyes flickered. Astonishment. Recognition. And something else.
Cunning.
His hand waved. Not at the slash bearing down on him—but at the iron rod Cursed Tool he had thrown earlier, now lying in the rubble behind Yuta. Charge accumulated there. Connected. Ready.
The electric shock came from behind, faster than any physical attack could travel.
It tore through Yuta's left kidney.
The pain was blinding. His vision whited out. His lungs seized. Every nerve in his body screamed at once.
But his hand did not stop falling.
The slash carved through the air, through the lightning's afterimage, through Kashimo's raised guard—and through his right wrist.
The hand, still crackling with residual electricity, fell to the ground. Kashimo stared at the stump. Blood pulsed. Bone showed. But the wound did not close.
"How is this possible?"
He had faced death before. Had shrugged off wounds that should have killed lesser men. But this blade—this spirit-slaying sword—carried a curse that even his body could not overcome.
Behind him, Yuta staggered but did not fall. Reverse Cursed Technique flared, desperate, determined, closing.
Kashimo watched the boy's wound knit itself together, watched him straighten, watched him raise his sword again.
And felt something he had not felt in centuries.
Doubt.
He had one move left. One technique, held in reserve for four hundred years, saved for the opponent who would finally make him feel alive. Mythical Beast Amber. The transformation that would elevate him beyond human limits, granting him speed beyond sound, power beyond reason.
At the cost of his own collapse.
He had wanted to use it against Sukuna. Against the strongest. Against a worthy end.
Now he stood, one-handed, bleeding, facing a boy who should have fallen twice over.
'If I retreat now, if I heal, if I wait—'
He looked at his severed hand. The wound refused to close. The spirit-slaying sword's curse ran deeper than flesh.
'Then even if I meet Sukuna, I will not be worthy to face him.'
Kashimo Hajime's decision crystallized.
He smiled.
"You." His voice was calm, almost gentle. "What's your name again?"
"Okkotsu Yuta."
"Okkotsu Yuta." Kashimo tasted the name. "Remember it. Remember the man who forced me to use this."
Cursed energy erupted from him—not the scattered lightning of before, but something denser, older, deeper. His body began to change. His skin took on an amber glow. His remaining hand crackled with power that made the air itself scream.
*「呪術解放・幻獣琥珀」
Cursed Technique Release: Mythical Beast Amber. *
The transformation was not subtle. Kashimo's form blurred, dissolved, ascended. He became something that was no longer quite human—a figure of living lightning, of impossible speed, of power that bent the world around it.
He looked at Okkotsu Yuta, and for a moment, his eyes held something almost like regret.
"You wanted an equal fight." His voice echoed from everywhere and nowhere. "This isn't it."
He moved.
Or rather, he was movement. There was no distance between his decision and his arrival. His fist—still crackling with enough voltage to vaporize steel—descended toward Yuta's chest.
And met empty air.
Yuta had moved. Not faster than Kashimo—that was impossible. But before him. Anticipating. His sword rose in an arc that should not have been possible, aimed at the space Kashimo was about to occupy.
Kashimo's eyes widened.
The blade found its mark.
Kashimo Hajime's transformation was complete.
His body no longer resembled anything human. Amber light pulsed beneath translucent skin, each heartbeat sending waves of electricity cascading across his form. The hand he had lost—the hand the spirit-slaying sword had claimed—had regrown, crackling with power that made the air around it sizzle.
He was no longer a man. He was a Mythical Beast.
And in his peripheral vision, beyond Okkotsu Yuta's straining form, beyond the smoking battlefield, stood the guardian barrier. Untouched. Implacable.
'His first strike had done nothing. The iron rod Cursed Tool, thrown with enough force to shatter buildings, had barely made the barrier flicker.'
At the time, he had dismissed it. Sukuna was resurrecting. There were more important matters.
But now, watching the boy who had taken his hand stand firm before him, the question that had been buried beneath four hundred years of battle-lust finally surfaced.
"Okkotsu Yuta." His voice echoed strangely, layered with harmonics that shouldn't exist. "I want to ask you something."
Yuta's sword never wavered, but confusion flickered across his face. "Now? In the middle of a fight?"
"You said your Teacher Gojo went to deal with Sukuna."
"Yes."
"Is he the strongest sorcerer alive?"
Yuta considered the question, even now, even with lightning dancing at the edge of his vision. "If you're talking about the strongest... that would be Teacher Kamo."
Kashimo's eyes blazed. "There's someone stronger?"
"I'm not entirely sure." Yuta's voice was careful, measured. "Teacher Kamo defeated Teacher Gojo once. That's known. But it was years ago. Teacher Gojo has grown since then. They haven't fought again, so..."
"So you cannot say who is stronger now."
"If I had to choose..." Yuta hesitated. "Emotionally, I lean toward Teacher Gojo. But Teacher Kamo—he always brings surprises. I can see the gap between myself and Teacher Gojo. It's vast, but I can measure it. Teacher Kamo..." He shook his head. "I have no idea how strong he really is."
Kashimo's gaze shifted to the barrier. To the figure sitting atop it, watching the battle with calm, unhurried eyes.
"You said at the beginning. The barrier. It belongs to this Teacher Kamo."
"Yes. The person inside that barrier is Teacher Ka—"
Yuta never finished the sentence.
Kashimo moved.
He did not run. He became lightning. The distance between him and the barrier collapsed to nothing, the sound barrier shattered in his wake, the air itself ignited from his passage.
Behind him, Yuta's voice finally caught up.
"—mo's clone."
Kashimo did not hear. Did not care.
The Mythical Beast Amber was burning through his body, consuming him from within. Every second it lasted was borrowed time. Every second it lasted was a gift.
He would not waste it on the boy, however worthy. He would use it on the one who might actually be worthy.
He would use it on Kamo Itsuki.
The clone rose from the barrier's peak as Kashimo's lightning-form hurtled toward him. There was no time to think, only to act.
He could have let the barrier take the hit. It was strong—strong enough to withstand Kashimo's initial strike, strong enough to endure whatever this transformed form could throw at it.
But the people inside were not strong. They were ordinary. Fragile. If the barrier cracked, if the backlash reached them...
Kamo Itsuki's clone stepped outside the barrier.
The air between them compressed. Lightning and Cursed Energy warred for dominance. Kashimo's form had become something out of legend—his body a conduit for power that should not be contained in flesh, his mouth now a cannon's muzzle, charging an attack that could level a city block.
The clone's hands moved.
He had no grand technique for this. No Blood God to summon, no world-shaking power to call upon. He was a fragment, a shadow, a contingency.
But he had studied. He had learned. From the super barrier's collapse, from Kenjaku's corruption, from every failure and every success.
And from that study, he had created something.
Runes bloomed in the air before him—intricate, beautiful, impossible. They absorbed the light around them, drank the very air, hung in the void like prayers waiting to be answered.
They had no destructive power. They were not weapons.
They were mirrors.
Kashimo's lightning struck.
The world went white.
The runes lit slowly at first, each line tracing itself in amber light. Then faster. Brighter. The lightning that should have annihilated was instead drinking—absorbing, converting, becoming.
Kashimo poured everything into the attack. Every scrap of power the Mythical Beast Amber had given him. Every volt, every joule, every fragment of his borrowed existence.
The runes drank it all.
And when there was nothing left to give, when Kashimo's form flickered, when the amber light began to fade from his skin—
The runes answered.
The lightning returned. Amplified. Redirected. A shockwave of pure, concentrated power that tore through the space between them and engulfed Kashimo Hajime completely.
In that final moment, he did not scream. He did not rage.
He smiled.
"I am very happy," his voice carried through the light, fading, dissolving, "to have met an opponent like you in this lifetime..."
The light faded. The air stilled.
And Kashimo Hajime was gone.
Kamo Itsuki's clone lowered his hands. The runes dissolved into nothing. Behind him, the guardian barrier pulsed once, twice, then settled into its steady rhythm.
He turned to find Okkotsu Yuta staring at him, sword still raised, mouth slightly open.
"What?" the clone asked.
Yuta closed his mouth. Opened it again. Closed it.
"...Nothing."
Rika Orimoto, who had been hiding behind a rock for the entire exchange, emerged cautiously. "Is it... over?"
"It's over," Yuta said. Then, quieter: "I should have finished my sentence faster."
The clone settled back onto his perch, watching the horizon for new threats. "Probably."
"You're not going to say 'it's fine' or 'don't worry about it'?"
"You're alive. The barrier is intact. He's gone." The clone shrugged. "It's fine. Don't worry about it."
Yuta stared at him for a long moment, then let out a breath that might have been a laugh. He sheathed his sword and walked back to Rika, who was already unpacking the bento boxes again.
"Your food got cold," she said.
"It's fine."
"Are you just going to say that about everything now?"
"Probably."
Kamo Itsuki's clone watched them settle back onto their picnic blanket, two young sorcerers sharing cold rice and warm company. Above them, the sky was clearing. Around them, the battlefield was quiet.
The day was not over. There would be more threats, more battles, more moments that tested the limits of what they could endure.
But for now, the barrier held. The people inside were safe.
And somewhere in the distance, the real Kamo Itsuki was dealing with his own final battle.
The clone settled back to watch the sunset, and waited.
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