I was only slightly surprised that, despite Naoya's words, he was not the first person to attack. That privilege went to Jinichi and the massive, cursed energy-formed fist that turned the room into debris in a split second, which meant one thing.
He had attacked before Naoya even said, "Now." He had hoped to kill Megumi in his opening blow. Futile, as long as I was with him.
I gripped Megumi's shoulder the moment his cursed technique activated, and by the time it was fully formed, my calves had tensed enough to send us exploding out of the room, with time to see the destruction that followed.
The arc of my jump sent us flying before I crashed into a wide-open courtyard filled with different men of varying ages, dressed in black and white matching kimonos, wielding katanas and swinging them at each other.
The Hei members training?
They froze at our entrance, then I turned my massive head to look at them, and they scrambled out of sight, falling over each other to give space, which was something of a surprise. After all, when they fought Maki, there was some belief, some hope that they could win against her. Against me? They knew their death was as certain as the sun rising from the east and setting in the west. The thought brought a rumbling chuckle out from my throat as i focused on one of the slower ones.
"L-leave them," Megumi managed to cough out as he waved away the smoke and dust that had followed our flight. I released my grip on him, and he landed on his feet, prepared this time. He glanced at where the Hei were fleeing before he continued. "They won't join this fight, and they have no reason to die today."
I didn't bother with a nod, but I acknowledged him either way. This was not the path Maki had taken. Maki had exterminated the clan, right down to the women, and had even gone as far as to hunt down members of the clan who had not been present during the slaughter. This was a different fight, a fight to cement Megumi's place as the clan head, which meant I had to hold back from killing them in the most brutal ways possible.
There was also the case of the Kamo Clan. If Kenjaku takes over the Kamo like he does in the original timeline, then having the Zenin as a counterpoint makes sense. I didn't know what was happening with the Gojo.
I glanced down at Megumi. I also had to protect him in the same breath. Megumi was a known Shikigami user. I was his Shikigami. Anyone with a lick of sense would know to attack him first. Compared to Maki's fight, I had two handicaps holding me back, while my enemies supposedly had none.
A massive, uncaring smile that showed teeth tore across my features. It did not matter. They would need that much to actually prove a challenge.
Naoya came out of the smoke like a wraith, and the speed was genuinely something to behold. Not because it was faster than anything I had encountered. Sukuna had been faster, but Naoya's speed had a quality to it that was different from raw velocity. It was in the flavor of his cursed technique itself.
The economy of motion.
Every movement was stripped bare of everything that made it superfluous. It was deprived of anything that was not the movement itself. No wind-up, no tell, no wasted energy in the transition between positions. His cursed technique was what made Naobito the second fastest sorcerer in the world, and Naoya was not so far off from the skill his father had shown. Yet despite his speed, the peculiarities of his cursed technique.
I could see him because i knew what to look for. 24 frames.
He came for Megumi first. Of course he did. His target was clear, which made luring him into a predetermined position easy.
I was already moving before he committed to the angle, my hand closing around the back of Megumi's collar and hauling him sideways hard enough that his feet left the ground. Naoya's fist blurred through the space where Megumi's throat had been a half second prior, the displaced air from the strike sharp enough to sting.
Naoya did not stop. He ended his motion with that same economy, like he had expected it. He came around low and faster this time, marginally so, but fast enough to note. His technique reactivated seamlessly in the transition, the whole sequence one continuous thing with no seam between the end of the first and the beginning of the second.
Power was weight multiplied by speed.
My left foot shot out in a straight kick aimed at the side of his head. It should have ended the exchange there. But unlike when he fought Maki, Naoya had not walked in underestimating me, and the difference showed. In the fraction of a second before my foot arrived, he deactivated and reactivated his technique, resetting his predetermined path entirely rather than trying to force a redirect that would have frozen him in place long enough for the kick to cave his skull in.
Smart. Genuinely smart.
He slipped beneath my outstretched leg and came up at my unguarded back, which was exactly where I had wanted him.
I dropped Megumi directly onto him.
Naoya's hands came up on instinct, catching Megumi, and the moment contact was made, the rules of his technique locked in. Megumi froze. It was a split second, harmless in itself, but I had already spun around with a backhand that would have taken Naoya's head off his shoulders if he had followed through on the obvious target. He caught the motion in his peripheral vision and juked backward instead, the backhand missing him by an inch, close enough that the wind from it ruffled his hair.
The whole sequence had taken all of a second.
Megumi landed in a crouch, confused, looking between us as steam rolled off my body in thin white threads, peeling from my skin in waves from the sheer strain of forcing my body to move at speeds meant to match Naoya. Muscle ground against muscle, flesh pushed hard enough that heat bled from me like smoke from an overheated engine.
Across the courtyard, Naoya stood with his breathing slightly elevated, which was the only physical concession he was going to give, his technique having done the heavy lifting while my body had been forced to match him through sheer will and the particular advantage of having senses that could follow him even without knowledge of his technique, and a body that could act on those senses.
I had not simply exploited a gap the way Maki had. I had followed his complete movement, read the technique from the inside of it, and countered him three times in the space of a breath. The fact that none of those counters had landed spoke of how careful he was being. His ability to deactivate and reactivate his technique mid-motion to bypass the locked-in movement was not something he had shown either. It was an overpowered addition, considering it would've saved him from Maki in the original timeline.
Was it a binding vow he made before the fight? Or was it just pure skill?
Naoya clapped once, slowly, the sound flat in the open courtyard.
"Using yourself as bait, Fushiguro." His eyes were on me, not Megumi. They had not left me since the sequence ended. "I almost respect you for that."
Megumi blinked in surprise at his words, but that was the extent of it. His poker face remained as he stood up, dusting his clothes. "You need to do that much as a sorcerer at least."
Naoya glanced at Megumi with a strange look, then his eyes drifted upward to my hulking form behind him.
I straightened up, then I cracked my neck to the side, observing Naoya, who had a thoughtful look on his face as he watched us. If I did not have three-sixty vision, I would've mistaken his look for interest and not for what it truly was.
A distraction.
Completely silent footsteps came from behind me. So silent that I could not pick them up even if I had ears. Unfortunately for Ogi Zenin, I had more than ears. He came into range. His sword was still in its sheath, his stance low to avoid air drag, but it didn't matter because he was in my range; I was not in his.
The corner of my lips twitched upward in restrained humor. Naoya's eyes widened, and his lips parted to call out to the other Zenin, but without his technique active, I held the initiative.
I spun, my speed blistering, the ground turning to mud beneath my feet from the friction as I shifted my focus to Ogi Zenin. My fist blurred into motion in a straight blow, then the impossible happened.
Ogi deflected my fist upward with a counter that broke his katana in half. He deflected a blow faster than anything his eyes could follow. The cut it left behind was shallow. I had adapted enough to slashing attacks to make such a blow redundant, and it healed a second later.
My wings twitched, and I noted the way his two feet were pressed against the ground and the circular energy that had surrounded him a heartbeat before I had moved. I realized what he had done.
Falling Blossom Emotion.
He used the anti-domain countermeasure on his katana, which allowed the blade to automatically strike and counter anything that came within range.
A smart tactic. Why were the Zenin so smart all of a sudden? Had their deeply ingrained misogyny, disgust, and underestimation of Maki truly been that bad? If they were fighting with half as much focus and Ingenuity against her as they were against me, it would've taken her at least a few minutes longer to wipe out the entire clan.
Ogi smirked, delighted in his counter.
I wiped the smirk away with a single movement. My free hand snapped upward and caught the broken half of the katana, then, in one continuous movement, I buried it into his thigh, and with a twist, I turned the wound jagged. Let me see you use Falling Blossom Emotion now when you can't balance correctly with your two feet on the ground. His eyes widened in shock, yet there was no pain yet. It would come in time.
My foot shot out in a blow aimed to cave his chest inward, but Naoya was there before the appendage could kiss his flowing white kimono. The blond-haired Zenin grabbed the older man by his arm and pulled his frozen body out of my range. My leg tore the air apart as I missed.
Naoya came to a furious stop at the other end of the courtyard, and Ogi Zenin looked at him in complete surprise the moment the freeze ended.
"You saved me?"
Naoya scowled back at him in annoyance before staring at me. "Only because not a single one of us can win alone. He's fast enough to catch up to me, and Megumi is ruthless enough to lay traps using himself as bait." A brief pause. "And he hits hard enough that Ogi's counter broke his own blade."
Ogi, to his credit, had not made a sound when I buried the broken katana into his thigh. He made one now, a short exhale through his nose, as he shifted his weight off the injured leg and onto the good one, the pain just beginning to set in. His hands were already moving to address the wound, pressing cloth against it with practiced efficiency.
"If we win, we can decide who gets to be the next clan head amongst ourselves. But that is if we win, and alone, we lose."
The three men looked at each other until one person broke the silence.
"He's already crippled," Jinichi said from the roof above. He was looking at the leg, not at Ogi's face. "He's useless now. Discard him."
"I can still fight."
"You're standing on one leg."
"I have two hands, and my cursed technique." Ogi's voice was dry and flat, the voice of a man who had decided the discussion was over. His black eyes found me across the courtyard, and there was some grudging respect in them; then he turned back to his leg and his own blade still sticking out of it.
Naoya looked at Ogi, then upward at Jinichi. Something passed between them that did not require words, the specific communication of people who had trained alongside each other long enough that words were not needed. The teamwork that made the Hei such an effective unit.
Another Change. Naoya had been too prideful to fight alongside his uncles in canon.
Jinichi dropped from the roof, and they all moved together, but Ogi Zenin was slower and lagged behind.
Finally, I had almost gotten bored with waiting for them. I turned to Megumi, and he looked back at me. Then i pointed.
"Ogi."
I said. My first words since the council meeting. The older man was injured, with one good leg, and his primary weapon was broken. Yet he was still a special grade one sorcerer with decades of combat experience and his cursed technique to go with. His Injury was enough of a handicap.
I slid my thumb across my throat to Megumi's wide eyed surprise, and gave him a bloodthirsty grin.
"Kill"
He held my four-winged gaze for a moment before nodding in agreement. I had not trained and beaten him silly the past week just for him to hide in my shadow. He turned toward Ogi without another glance at me and moved.
I turned toward Naoya and Jinichi, who, seeing our plan, had drifted to the side to allow Ogi to fight Megumi alone.
Then the fight began anew.
__
Naoya came at me first, cursed energy pumping, his technique active, but this time he didn't run straight at me. Instead, he ran past in a blur of motion, then kept on going. I took me a second to realize what he was doing. He wanted to build up momentum. If he built up enough velocity, it would amplify his strength to the point that it might even hurt to take one of his blows, but that was only if I allowed him.
I turned to follow when the first gigantic fist hit me from the side with the strength of a grenade.
Boom.
The force of the explosion sent me back, but my feet were dug in, and I only staggered back two feet. Then I looked back up, turning to face Jinichi, and my grin widened. The older man frowned at the effect of his technique, or the nonexistent effect at least. Then his output surged and, with a yell, his fist shot out again, but this time in a barrage as, all of a sudden, seven massive fists appeared and shot at me.
I took a step forward and lashed out with a blow.
Fist to fist.
The first missile fist exploded as the cursed energy fueling it destabilized, creating a detonation that hit like a small earthquake. The shockwave alone from the two attacks hitting each other was enough to crater the stone against my feet and send my arm flying back from the recoil. I hit the second with a kick that rattled my internals, the third with an elbow that deepened the crater, the fourth with a knee strike that blasted everything around me, the fifth with an open palm that stopped it. I spun around the sixth, my feet dancing around the broken ground like it was ice, then I let the seventh slam into my chest, shaking the ornaments nailed to my pectorals and sending my head whipping back.
There was silence for all of a second as Jinichi stood to watch the effect of his attack.
Then...
KLNK
The heavy wheel above my head spun in one ponderous movement before coming to a stop, and every single bit of damage from taking Jinichi's attacks head-on healed, and I snapped my head upright once more, showing teeth, as understanding came through me.
Durability adjustment to blunt force trauma.
Then Naoya shot at my back, mistaking it for a blind spot, his lack of understanding of my ability to perceive everything around me coming to bite him, as he sped forward, only to come face to face with an open palm that was ready to grab his face and squish it like a grape. His eyes widened as he looked death in the face, just in time for a missile fist to shoot out and slam into my forearm, deflecting the limb as Naoya blurred away once more.
Annoyance.
That is what Jinichi was, the sum total of his existence towards me, I noted as I turned to face him. His technique, even before I adapted to it, was useless against an enemy so far out of his league. After a single adaptation? He shifted from an enemy to a nuisance.
I took a step toward him, only for Naoya to rush toward me again from another angle. The moment I shifted focus back to him, he made a curve around me, building up further momentum, while Jinichi shot another missile fist at me. Its effect was nonexistent. Still, they had something good going.
Jinichi to kite and distract. Naoya to act as the real danger by building up enough momentum to actually hurt me.
It was a sound plan, but if they had seen me fight against Sukuna, they would've known how useless it was. After all, the plan, like most plans, had a simple weakness.
Escalating with overwhelming violence.
Naoya got close again, this time with a short blade in hand while angling for my knee, and Jinichi activated his cursed technique in the same moment.
I didn't allow them to finish their plan.
I locked my fists together, raised them up, then brought both fists down into the ground in a hammer blow.
The impact was like a miniature atomic bomb had been dropped.
The stone beneath me did not crack so much as it simply gave up existing. A shockwave rolled outward from the point of impact in a perfect circle, and everything that had been loose, every fragment of broken stone and churned earth and pulverized courtyard material that our fight had produced, went up at once in a column of dust and debris that swallowed the immediate area completely.
Jinichi jumped back to give distance, then flipped to the roof he had stood on earlier, and from the roof position, Jinichi had nothing to aim at. The dust was too thick and too total, and putting a missile fist into it blind was as likely to hit Naoya as it was to hit me.
From inside the dust, Naoya's technique gave him speed but not sight.
I heard him make the calculation and act on it, the sound of his footsteps accelerating in a straight line away from my last known position. I didn't blame him. After all, unlike me, he could not see in the ever-growing cloud of dust and debris.
Jinichi scowled into the dust, black eyes searching for me. I didn't let him search further.
Without Naoya to check me, I appeared behind him in a blur of movement, a hulking pale shadow that dwarfed him and covered the sun.
He felt me, and credit where it was due, his reaction time was excellent. He pivoted with his whole body and threw a close-range missile fist directly at my chest. It was the right instinct, and if he had done it before I adapted, it might have moved me back a couple of feet.
Instead, I accepted the hit, stepped through it like it was a pebble thrown at me, then I got my hand around his head, before systematically introducing it to the roof of the building, collapsing it beneath us.
By the time we landed inside the building, he was barely conscious, so I smashed his head into the ground two more times just for the sake of it. He tried to shoot out another missile fist despite the awkward position, so my free hand caught the limb and I twisted, breaking it in two. He screamed, and I buried his face into the ground again, muffling his cry before my foot shot down into his back, addressing the structural integrity of his spine. The pain that shot through him was enough to finally knock him unconscious.
I walked out, dragging him alongside, while pulling him by his head. He was not dead, and he probably wished he was at this point, but he would live. If he got to a healer in time, he might even walk.
I flung his body to the side as Naoya made his way toward me, then he came to a sudden stop, deactivating and reactivating his technique in an instant and ducking out of the way. I frowned in confusion at what my senses perceived, but could not understand. The sonic boom that hit me a second later slammed into me like a brick wall, and if not for my adaptation to Jinichi's technique, it would've been enough to fling me away.
Did this motherfucker just weaponize a sonic boom?
I took a step forward, slamming my feet into the ground with enough force to disperse it, then I looked around, and everything in the vicinity had been destroyed and flattened. The courtyard was ruined. It was a good thing we were at the edge of the clan grounds, but the damage had drawn attention.
"What is this!" a boyish voice called out in surprise.
I didn't turn to look, but I saw him anyway and recognized him. Pale features, young, black hair tied into a ponytail.
Ranta Zenin.
He was followed by an old man. Older than the rest. His back stooped, his features withered, and he had an uncharacteristic mohawk on his head that did not fit his age.
Naoya came to a stop, and this time, he was panting. Sweat slicked past his brows and trailed down his face as he stared at me, unable to understand the fact that I looked completely undamaged.
"No time to explain," he barked out. Then he turned to me. "The deal was whoever wants to join in, wasn't it? Well, they want to."
I remained still for a moment before shrugging my shoulders in a very human motion that caused their eyes to widen in surprise.
One ant or three, what difference does it make?
"Come and Die."
I rumbled out, reaching out a hand with a come-here motion. By the end of today, I was going to cripple all of them. A kinder fate than the one they met in canon, but a painful one nonetheless.