Naobito spun on his heel and sprinted! —Projection Sorcery!
He pushed himself to the absolute limit. Immersed deep within the 'Zone' of the Black Flash, everything in his environment felt as if it were actively assisting him. His sensory perception expanded to its absolute maximum; he could even sense the terrified screams echoing from the underground training facility. It was supposed to be an impenetrable safe haven, impervious to any surface destruction, but the massive tectonic shifts had triggered a chain reaction. The underground bunker was on the verge of collapsing.
*I can't fight him here!* Naobito realized instantly.
His feet moved like the wind, pushing Projection Sorcery to an entirely new echelon. As he sprinted, he lowered his center of gravity to the extreme, his forehead nearly grazing the earth. The violent swinging of his arms generated gale-force winds. He had never run this fast in his entire life; he was effectively a bolt of living lightning.
A bolt of lightning tore across the sky, followed by a deafening roar of thunder. The dragon materialized in the airspace above him.
The dragon pulled its lower half free from the earth. Defying gravity, the mythological beast ascended into the heavens, casting a shadow deeper than the night itself. When the lightning flashed, it should have illuminated the myriad things of the world, but the dragon's colossal silhouette swallowed the light, making the night sky pitch black, deepening the abyss, and plunging the world into a state of absolute, suffocating darkness.
The dragon's claws lightly grazed the earth. Accompanied by a roar that shook the heavens, the entire landscape seemed to upend itself. The formerly flat Zen'in estate behind Naobito was instantly reduced to apocalyptic ruins. Massive boulders floated wildly into the air. Decorative rock gardens and ancient trees were swept up like torn rags. A traditional shishi-odoshi bamboo fountain hung suspended in anti-gravity, gently tapping due to the atmospheric pressure changes, though its elegant sound would never be heard again—for heaven and earth were currently roaring with the dragon's fury.
The King of Cursed Spirits, born of a millennium of malice, was asserting his dominion over the world with absolute sovereignty.
Naobito sprinted with everything he had. Faster, and faster, and faster! In the past, whenever his velocity breached a certain threshold, he would be forced to disengage Projection Sorcery because his reflex nerves and processing speed could no longer keep up with the acceleration. But right now, he handled it with effortless mastery. The transcendent state granted by the Black Flashes allowed him to push Projection Sorcery to summits he had never dared to scale.
He was a lone sprinter outrunning a natural disaster. The cataclysm trailing behind him simply couldn't catch up to his god-speed. In the blink of an eye, he had put a massive distance between himself and the Zen'in estate. Now, Naobito had only one concern—
—*At my current speed, even in its divine dragon form, it can't catch me. Will it change tactics and use the weak and elderly in the underground bunker as hostages, forcing me to fight with my hands tied?*
Harboring this anxiety, he deliberately programmed a backwards-glancing motion into his 24-frame sequence to monitor the dragon's movements, preventing a scenario where he failed to react if the dragon suddenly doubled back.
And then, he saw them: a pair of colossal, heterochromatic eyes glowing fiercely amidst the torrential night rain. Those eyes were locked dead onto him. A hyper-dense sphere of pure Cursed Energy was coalescing deep within the dragon's throat. It was a breath attack. Even though the blinding light was already flaring in the back of its maw, the dragon held its fire: it was predicting Naobito's pre-planned trajectory. The instant the dragon calculated his endpoint, the breath would rain down from the sky, instantly annihilating him with a wide-area bombardment.
There wasn't a trace of cowardice in those heterochromatic eyes. Using the weak as hostages to shackle him? Don't make him laugh! What radiated from those eyes was pure, unadulterated hegemony—the absolute arrogance of a ruler commanding heaven and earth! The concept of 'hostages' didn't even exist in Mahito's mind, because to a being of such supreme majesty, the very idea of a 'threat' was an admission of weakness!
*Of course. How could a creature this magnificent harbor such pathetic thoughts?* Naobito's blood and Cursed Energy simultaneously boiled over. Had the dragon come here solely to exterminate the Zen'in clan? No. This was a trial. It was a declaration. A trial to conquer oneself, a declaration of a monumental birth, demanding the subjugation of the entire world upon its arrival.
Never before had Naobito understood the dragon so perfectly. He understood its mindset, its boundless pride, its terrifying majesty, and its lethal divinity.
Naobito's heart began to hammer violently against his ribs. He unconsciously exhaled a breath, and a wave of blistering heat escaped his lips. No, it wasn't just heat—it was raw Cursed Energy. Because his Cursed Energy was circulating through his veins at such a hyper-accelerated rate, his core temperature skyrocketed, practically igniting a visible aura of flame around him. His blood and his Cursed Energy were simultaneously combusting.
*Good. Fantastic. This is exactly how it should be. This is the only way it can be!* Naobito thought. *This is... the real rush!*
*Wait, did I just scream that out loud?*
Suddenly, an authoritative, blinding light pierced the pitch-black night. The Dragon's Breath! The hyper-dense artillery shell of Cursed Energy erupted from the dragon's throat. The torrential downpour was instantly vaporized the millisecond it touched the light. The brilliance of the lightning in the sky was rendered dull and pathetic in comparison. The apocalyptic beam descended directly toward Naobito's path and violently impacted the earth!
"—"
For an infinitesimal fraction of a second, all sound ceased to exist.
A boundless, all-consuming light filled the entire world. The concussive shockwave generated by the beam aggressively expanded outward without end. A colossal, hemispherical dome of light slowly rose from the scorched earth. Because the payload was so absurdly excessive, a secondary halo of pressurized air detonated above the rising dome, looking exactly like a halo resting atop a fallen angel, bestowing a terrifying sanctity upon the ruined landscape.
The dragon had successfully predicted Naobito's trajectory via Projection Sorcery and unhesitatingly unleashed the fully charged breath attack. This bombardment was magnitudes more devastating than the one used during the fight against Kinji Hakari. Over two kilometers of terrain suffered permanent topological alteration, and the lethal radius of the shockwave extended a full ten kilometers. It was as if a thousand suns had simultaneously detonated on the surface of the earth, forcing even the gods to bow their heads.
But the dragon did not believe Naobito Zen'in had died just like that!
The dragon believed in Naobito's survival even more fiercely than Naobito himself did. How could a man who had chained four consecutive Black Flashes die here? How could a man hailed as the fastest sorcerer alive—second only to Satoru Gojo—fail to dodge it?
So, where was he? Where was Naobito Zen'in?
"I'M RIGHT HERE!" a furious roar detonated in the sky, positioned even higher than the dragon itself. The dragon snapped its head up. There, amidst the storm clouds, was Naobito. He was plummeting from the stratosphere, descending alongside the howling wind, the torrential rain, the lightning, and an utterly catastrophic mass of Cursed Energy.
He had executed a massive, explosive leap *before* the breath attack even fired, vaulting hundreds of meters into the air! Under normal circumstances, he could never achieve such a feat, but right now, he didn't even pause to question if his body could handle it. Projection Sorcery had already locked in the sequence, and he executed the movements as effortlessly as breathing, arriving high above the clouds.
And then, a terminal dive! —Projection Sorcery!
Even with the dragon's kinetic vision, he was barely a blur. This wasn't merely velocity generated by gravitational freefall; it was the compounded acceleration of Projection Sorcery layering 24 frames of downward momentum per second. The continuously stacking velocity transformed Naobito into a literal beam of light, a meteor of Cursed Energy violently crashing down!
The dragon whipped its massive body, snapping its tail forward. The titanic wind pressure violently vacuumed up the rain, creating a hyper-speed waterspout that threatened to shred everything in its path. But Naobito, mid-dive, pulled his fist back to his waist. Right before the colossal tail smashed into him, the chambered fist violently exploded forward—
—Naturally, it was a Black Flash! The fifth strike!
*BANG!*
The Black Flash-infused fist blew a massive, ten-meter-wide tunnel straight through the waterspout. At the end of that tunnel was the dragon's tail. The Black Flash and the tail collided head-on. Amidst the apocalyptic kinetic impact, jagged black lightning fractured the sky, visually manifesting the spatial distortion. The resulting shockwave from their clash violently rippled outward. Layer after layer of sonic booms atomized the raindrops, and rings of concussive acoustic force relentlessly expanded across the heavens.
Incredibly, the tail wasn't obliterated! Dragon scales showered down like shrapnel, and boiling dragon blood sprayed across Naobito's half-naked torso, seeping between his rippling muscles and staining the remaining half of his kimono. His eyes went bloodshot. He watched in horror as fresh scales rapidly regenerated over the exposed muscle beneath the shattered armor. He had merely blasted away the scales; he had utterly failed to inflict any true structural damage to the dragon's flesh.
Without a microsecond of hesitation, he reactivated Projection Sorcery!
The dragon danced wildly through the sky, and the man sprinted directly across the dragon's colossal body. Naobito was betting his absolute life! The core rule of Projection Sorcery was pre-planning and execution. The fatal caveat: he *must* perform the exact movements he visualized. If he failed to match the sequence, the technique's backlash would freeze him in a frame for one second. In a hyper-speed battle of this caliber, one second was enough time to die a hundred times over.
But every single one of his calculations was flawless!
His brain felt as if it were literally combusting. Chaining five consecutive Black Flashes had elevated him to an unprecedented state of omnipotence. He could perceive every single one of the dragon's breaths, the twitch of every muscle fiber, the surge of its boiling blood, the flow of its Cursed Energy, and the rhythmic shifting of its scales. He instantly deduced *why* the dragon scales could tank a Black Flash.
There was an invisible buffer zone of Cursed Energy between the scales and the flesh. The scales weren't flush against the skin like a fish's; they sat slightly elevated, much like the carapace of a massive insect, creating a shock-absorbing crumple zone.
This physiological design provided a secondary advantage: if subjected to an attack possessing an unmitigable, catastrophic force, the scales would violently detach and blow outward. Even against the spatial-warping payload of a Black Flash, the destruction of the buffer zone successfully prevented the kinetic force from transferring into a lethal, severing blow to the core body. It resulted in a flesh wound, but entirely prevented amputation.
However, even a buffered scale defense had limits, evidenced by the Black Flash shattering through the armor anyway. It was just that the payload of that specific strike hadn't breached the ultimate damage threshold.
Realizing this, Naobito immediately discarded any notion of targeting the armored sections. Given the dragon's terrifying regeneration rate, it didn't matter how many times he wounded its flesh. The speed at which the scales regrew and the flesh knit back together meant that endless volleys of Black Flashes would ultimately achieve nothing. If this turned into an endurance match, Naobito would be the first to bleed out.
He had to surgically calculate their respective Cursed Energy pools, minimize his own expenditure, and violently force the dragon to hemorrhage its reserves. This was the only path to executing his original strategy: exhausting the great beast to death.
*A lethal blow! I need a single, instantly lethal blow!*
Targeting the scales was useless. He had to strike the completely unarmored vital points. The dragon's entire body was clad in impenetrable armor, save for two distinct areas: the eyes and the nasal cavities. But naturally, both the eyes and the nostrils would be heavily guarded. Approaching them wouldn't be easy.
No, given the sheer evolutionary brilliance of the scale defense, it was practically guaranteed that the eyes and nasal cavities harbored secondary countermeasures. They were likely biological bait, exposed deliberately to lure arrogant, overconfident hunters into a fatal trap.
But wait... besides the eyes and the nose, wasn't there one other direct entry point to the dragon's internal organs?
Naobito was momentarily terrified by the sheer suicidal insanity of his own idea, but before his rational mind could abort the sequence, his body moved.
*Are you kidding me?! After pushing it this far, does the Head of the Zen'in Clan even have the luxury of retreat?! To slaughter the King of Cursed Spirits, to wash away the clan's humiliation in blood... the time to transcend my limits is right here, right now!*
Naobito couldn't stop a wild, euphoric roar from tearing from his throat, fueled by the boiling blood in his chest. He used his field of vision to chart his final, desperate sprint. Accelerating continuously, he felt as though he were leaving the physical laws of the world behind. His brain was sustaining severe trauma from the sheer overclocking of his cognitive processing. He couldn't use Reverse Cursed Technique; if he kept this up, he would suffer permanent brain damage. But he didn't give a damn. Driven by sheer, psychotic willpower, he had never felt such absolute, terrifying euphoria.
The final sequence of Projection Sorcery!
Time seemed to dilate, slowing to a crawl. The dragon continued its chaotic, violent dance, its scales flaring out rigidly like thousands of massive broadswords. Naobito's preset sequence was locked in. Now, the final charge commenced.
The dragon barrel-rolled; Naobito shifted his footing laterally, surfing the momentum of the beast's rotation. The dragon flared its scales; Naobito leaped, violently hurdling over the razor-sharp edges.
The dragon coiled like a monstrous serpent; Naobito sprinted straight along the curvature of its spine. Finally, the colossal draconic head loomed directly in front of him.
Those heterochromatic eyes glared like twin, blinding searchlights. Naobito felt their crushing weight, exactly like an escaping prisoner suddenly pinned by the blinding spotlights of a prison watchtower. A suffocating, apocalyptic sense of dread aggressively metastasized from the deepest pits of his soul. Ice shot down his spine, and his heart threatened to hammer its way out of his ribcage. His throat was bone-dry; even swallowing felt agonizingly difficult.
Every survival instinct he possessed screamed at him in unison: *Run! Run! RUN!*
But he didn't run. He smiled.
Following his preset sequence, he launched himself high into the air. He had entirely tapped out the biological limits of his mortal vessel, yet Cursed Energy continued to flood into his system, as if all the ambient Cursed Energy in the world was magnetically drawn to him. He was growing exponentially stronger by the millisecond.
He had shattered his own ceiling and ascended to a realm of the gods. He was going to—*deify himself!*
The dragon's heterochromatic eyes abruptly vanished. Instead, a colossal, world-devouring maw snapped open directly in front of Naobito. Deep within the abyssal throat, a hyper-dense artillery shell of Cursed Energy was churning—the Dragon's Breath, primed for point-blank execution.
*Ah, the head really was a trap after all,* Naobito thought.
And then, a second thought: *—Exactly as I predicted!*
Naobito consolidated a transcendent mass of Cursed Energy directly into his fist. He left only the absolute bare minimum required to keep himself from dying instantly in the high-altitude atmosphere; every other drop of power was funneled into his strike. His bones and tendons groaned and cracked under the strain, his physical body actively ripping itself apart because it couldn't handle the hyper-accelerated flow of his own energy. A thin line of blood ruptured from the corner of his eye, trailing a crimson ribbon through the sky.
*Pour everything into this single strike!*
BLACK—! FLASH—!
Could he use a Black Flash to forcefully punch a dragon's breath attack back down its throat? Was it even possible? The beam might detonate point-blank before he could redirect it, resulting in mutual annihilation. Or perhaps there was no breath attack at all; maybe the dragon would abort the beam and simply ram him with its horns. Even if he shattered the horns and caved in its skull, it would be utterly meaningless, because the dragon's terrifying regeneration would knit the fatal wounds closed in seconds.
Or worse, what if the dragon instantly stalled its momentum and dive-bombed back down to the earth?
If he miscalculated a single variable, the rigid, pre-planned sequence of Projection Sorcery would drag Naobito straight to hell.
But once again, he had won the gamble.
He had accurately calculated the dragon's boundless arrogance. Just as the dragon had refused to use hostages to shackle him, Naobito firmly believed the beast craved a final, glorious duel. When Naobito took the initiative to ascend into the sky, he knew the dragon would meet him there to settle the score.
He knew that when he reached the beast's face, the dragon would deploy its maximum-output breath attack to annihilate him, just as he believed the dragon had accurately predicted that Naobito would attempt to counter-kill it with a final Black Flash.
When two master samurai simultaneously drop their stances and rest their hands on the hilts of their blades, is there any possible outcome other than a mutual, simultaneous draw? No. There are no other variables left. This is the ultimate romance of warriors!
*So, it happens now. It ends right here!*
THE! FINAL! STRIKE!
Naobito's Black Flash and the Dragon's Breath fired simultaneously!
But Naobito was stunned. The hyper-dense artillery shell of Cursed Energy violently churning in the dragon's throat was the wrong color. The breath attack... was suddenly ignited with pitch-black flames.
Under any normal circumstance, Naobito would be completely incapable of processing this phenomenon. But in this omnipotent state, he instantly understood *why* a beam of pure Cursed Energy was burning with black fire.
A Black Flash is a phenomenon born from the simultaneous collision of physical mass and Cursed Energy. In other words, to trigger a Black Flash, there *must* be a physical vector carrying the energy. This is why a sorcerer can trigger a Black Flash while wielding a physical weapon, but a pure, unadulterated Cursed Energy blast can never achieve one.
A beam of pure energy cannot trigger a Black Flash. That was exactly why Naobito had completely dismissed the possibility of the dragon breathing one.
But... what if it wasn't a beam of pure energy? What if there was *air* inside it?
The fundamental requirement for a Black Flash is an application of Cursed Energy within 0.000001 seconds of a physical hit, distorting space. Meaning, as long as that precise condition is met, literally anything can trigger it.
By utilizing a specialized biological organ to fire a physical "air cannon," and intensely compressing a hyper-dense mass of Cursed Energy directly into that physical shockwave, the dragon perfectly fulfilled the prerequisite of combining physical impact with Cursed Energy! The rest was simple math—no different than Kento Nanami triggering a Black Flash with a blunt cleaver, or Nobara Kugisaki triggering one with a hammer and nails.
Right before firing the air cannon, the dragon violently concentrated the spatial distortion of a Black Flash at the very tip of its maw. Then, it exhaled the entire apocalyptic distortion in a single, sustained burst.
This was a catastrophic, unprecedented phenomenon in the entire history of Jujutsu Sorcery—
—A BLACK! FLASH! BREATH!
A pillar of absolute, light-devouring darkness erupted from the dragon's maw and carved a path straight into the heavens. The stormy black clouds were effortlessly violently atomized by the beam. It was as if the dragon had spat an infinitely extending blade of pure, black lightning. The jet-black pillar pierced the stratosphere, splitting the storm, erasing the rain, obliterating the thunder, and continuing to aggressively expand upward, stretching into infinity.
Finally—
—The black sword of light pierced the silver moon, cleaving its glow perfectly in half. The howling wind, the torrential rain, and the roaring thunder were all instantly, eternally silenced.