The three initial arrows, their cursed energy spent, fizzled out. Seizing the opening, the Blood God drew and fired again—nine arrows this time, streaking through the air. Gojo, learning fast, didn't bother with Infinity. He became a phantom, flickering in and out of existence with precise, short-range teleports, the tracking projectiles always a half-beat behind.
But pure evasion was beneath him. As he danced through the lethal rain, power coalesced in his raised hand, a roiling orb of violent rejection.
"Three heads and six arms, huh?" Gojo's voice was a low growl of focused wrath. "Let's see how you handle being taken apart."
Cursed Technique Reversal: Red.
A sphere of devastating repulsive force shot forth, not as a beam, but as a compressed bullet of reality-warping energy. It crossed the distance in an eye-blink and struck the Blood God square in the center head's forehead.
The impact wasn't an explosion; it was an anchor. Gojo maintained the torrential output, stretching the Red into a searing, crimson blade of pure negation. With a sharp downward slash of his fingers, the Red-Sword cleaved through the divine form.
Schlick.
A clean, vertical bisection, from crown to base.
Gojo wasn't done. His fingers became a conductor's baton, the Red-Sword an extension of his will. Horizontal slashes followed in rapid succession, severing all six massive arms at their shoulders. In seconds, the titanic Blood God was quartered, then octated, its eight pieces tumbling through the air. The relentless tracking arrows were shredded in the crossfire.
A moment of grim satisfaction flickered across Gojo's face—until he saw it.
No blood. No dissipating cursed energy. Instead, the eight severed chunks of the divine body convulsed, shrunk, and reconfigured.
Each piece morphed into a perfect copy of Kamo Itsuki.
Eight clones, plus the original standing calmly in the distance. Nine identical smirks faced him.
Gojo's Six Eyes scanned furiously, trying to pierce the veil, to find the unique core signature of the main body. Nothing. The clarity he'd had against the unstable, conglomerate form of the "Blood God" was gone. Now, each copy presented the same perfect, impenetrable obscurity.
'It was never a Shikigami… it was a cluster of clones from the start. An unstable mass I could see through. Now stabilized…' The realization was as infuriating as it was brilliant. His vaunted eyes were once again neutralized.
"Planning to win by numbers?" Gojo's voice was flat, dangerous.
"That's right," nine voices answered in eerie unison. "The team battle round begins. Let's move on."
As one, the nine Kamos ignited with the crimson aura of Flowing Red Scale, their power skyrocketing. They moved, not as individuals, but as a coordinated pack, closing in from all vectors.
Gojo reacted instantly, warping space to gain distance—only to slam into an invisible, elastic wall. He looked up. While he was distracted with the dissection, countless blood threads had woven a vast, hemispherical net above the battlefield, which had now solidified into a glowing, crimson Barrier. Four of the Kamo clones stood at its cardinal points, their hands raised, maintaining the seal.
'No teleportation in or out. No spatial distortion inside. A cage.'
"So this is the team battle," Gojo muttered, forced to land on the ravaged earth. The loss of aerial and teleportation mobility was a tangible weight.
"But you've narrowed it down for me. The real one… is among these five." He grinned, a hunter's smile. The four maintaining the barrier were out. The hunt was now contained.
The five remaining Kamos charged. Gojo didn't retreat. He met them head-on, a blur of white against a crimson tide. He needed to find the core—the one whose reactions, whose power differential, would betray it as the original.
Four clones converged on him from all sides. Above his head, a pinpoint Blue manifested, its crushing gravity yanking the four attackers off their feet and towards a central point above him. Using their own clustered momentum as a springboard, Gojo shot himself like a projectile past them, aiming straight for the fifth Kamo—the one who had held back, the potential conductor.
The four entangled clones didn't collapse. In a display of preternatural synergy, they braced against each other in mid-air, using the opposing forces to halt their convergence. Then, like cells dividing in reverse, they pushed off one another, changing trajectory in a split second to become four crimson lances shooting back down at Gojo from above, even as he closed in on the fifth.
The cage had become a blender, and Gojo Satoru was at its center.
The fifth Kamo, seeing Gojo's blitz, didn't retreat. Crimson cursed energy solidified in his grasp, forming a long, sleek tachi. He stepped into the slash, aiming to sever Gojo's head from his shoulders.
Gojo's body blurred, a micro-shift that let the blade whisper past his neck. In the same motion, his leg pistoned upward, a brutal kick aimed for the clone's midsection.
But the hive-mind was faster. A clone from behind capitalized on Gojo's committed strike, its own blood-forged katana arcing toward his spine. Gojo bent backward into an impossible arch, the blade passing over his chest. As he flipped back to his feet, his palm snapped out.
Blue.
A point of infinite attraction erupted against the attacking clone's chest, yanking it off its feet and hurling it like a cannonball into a distant rock formation with a sickening crunch.
Another clone fired—not a blade, but a volley of hyper-velocity blood bullets, too dense and widespread to fully evade. Gojo crossed his forearms, reinforcing them with cursed energy. The impacts landed with the force of high-caliber rounds, numbing his arms and driving him back several steps.
He used the momentum to create space, only to have two more clones close the gap from his flanks. A dagger aimed for his kidney, a katana for his thigh. Gojo dropped into a low slide, passing between them, and triggered another Blue from each hand. The twin repulsive bursts shoved the clones apart, buying him a fractional second.
But the coordination was seamless. As he regained his footing, attacks came from new angles: blood threads, sharp as monofilament, snaked toward his ankles to trip him, while a swarm of spinning blood shuriken filled the air above.
Gojo launched himself upward, evading the threads, and met the shuriken storm with a sweeping, one-handed Red. The repulsive wave shattered the projectiles into harmless mist.
Back and forth they went—a blinding, high-stakes dance. Every parry was a calculation, every dodge a millimeter from dismemberment. Shockwaves of colliding energies pulverized the already devastated landscape, turning rubble into powder and churning the earth. The forest was gone; in its place was a swirling arena of dust and destruction.
Despite his transcendent skill, Gojo was pressed. Kamo's physicality, enhanced by Flowing Red Scale, had always been superior in close quarters. Facing five such fighters, amplified by a hive-mind's coordination, forced him into constant, reactive defense.
Yet, within the storm of crimson, his Six Eyes worked furiously. He wasn't just fighting; he was filtering. Analyzing micro-expressions, the subtle efficiency of cursed energy distribution, the minute lead one clone had over the others in initiating complex maneuvers.
Amid the whirlwind of blades and blood, his gaze finally locked onto one figure—the one whose movements held a fraction more weight, whose energy flow, though still obscured, seemed a hair more dense, more central to the network.
Found you.
The real Kamo Itsuki. The hive's queen. Now, he just needed to create an opening to strike.
Patreon Seasay for 50 advanced chapters