Jujutsu Kaisen: Megumi — Chapter 32 - Piercing Elephant (Patreon)

After holding peak tension in Chimera Shadow Garden for 0.2 seconds.

The instant it shattered apart, inch by inch, through the air.

Two impossibly crisp, sudden, and distinct ratcheting clicks overlapped across the deathly silent battlefield!

Click—

Click,

The absolute Adaptation mechanism, the one that could overturn every law in existence, had officially begun its countdown into the first stage!

Two identical clicks converged in the ruins.

Megumi Fushiguro and the King of Curses, Ryomen Sukuna, occupying the original body's flesh, lifted their heads at the exact same moment.

Through a curtain of billowing smoke, their battle-wills locked onto each other!

"It seems my Adaptation to Furnace: Open has advanced to the first click!"

"It seems my Adaptation to Playful Cloud and the Split Soul Katana has advanced to the first click!"

The sound of Adaptation officially declared that this battle had entered its white-hot phase!

Both of them, at the exact same moment, turned toward each other and flashed the smile of someone who knew they were going to win.

"Every cursed tool you have has entered Adaptation range. Megumi Fushiguro — how exactly do you intend to match me now!"

Bloodthirsty joy rolled through all four of his crimson eyes.

Having secured Adaptation progress, Sukuna was utterly insufferable. He cast a sidelong glance at the sacred halo radiating behind his own head, its divine glow faint but steady.

His wariness toward Megumi remained arrogantly fixed on those extraordinary Special Grade cursed tools.

That lofty gaze couldn't even be bothered to glance up at the shadow-shrouded sky above.

He paid Max Elephant, currently plummeting from overhead, absolutely no attention.

"It's just Max Elephant stomping on my back."

"Like I haven't played around with Yorozu before."

Sukuna let out a scornful laugh.

He recalled the heavy stomp in the gymnasium, the one that had crushed straight through Yorozu's armor. With the King of Curses' sheer brute cursed energy output, a single fully powered strike thrown out at will was more than enough to instantly slice and melt her proudly forged liquid-metal Insect Armor into a meaningless heap of scrap in midair.

In his view, the Ten Shadows Technique was riddled with pathetic limitations.

Max Elephant still needed gravitational acceleration just to deal that much damage.

The Ten Shadows Technique had so many shortcomings.

Obviously.

Carrying that arrogance, the arrogance of a man looking down at ants, the King of Curses even found the time, in the midst of everything, to unhurriedly reach up one hand and comb back the stray hair the howling wind had blown across his forehead.

Just like that. Bold, unguarded. He turned to face the pitch-black shadow crashing madly down from the sky.

Those two thick arms thrust upward like pillars holding up the heavens.

Connecting precisely with the enormous body of Max Elephant as it plunged down at full speed.

BOOM!

That colossal weight crashing down like a mountain, the instant it contacted Sukuna's palms, unleashed its terrifying kinetic energy without a single drop held back.

The concrete ground beneath Sukuna's feet, already plowed flat countless times over, was struck once more by this unimaginable vertical impact force.

Gouged into even deeper craters. Shaking apart, inch by inch!

Tens of millions of tons of shattered rock and earth erupted into the air in an instant.

Then a super-high-pressure atmospheric shockwave, compressed by the purely physical collision, blasted all that airborne dust outward in a radiating explosion!

The entire ruined battlefield was swallowed whole by a terrifying sandstorm laced with debris and the stench of blood.

"Is that all?"

At the very center of the storm, the King of Curses did not move an inch.

Sukuna maintained the flow of cursed energy into both arms.

Undeniably, through the earlier close-range brawl and the all-out struggle, Megumi's relentless cursed tool barrage had already driven him to near one-cut range. But his overwhelming cursed energy reserves let him ignore this round of physical weakness entirely.

Letting him unleash that supremely domineering force without a single concern!

"I said you can't out-lift me!"

Sukuna shoved back with both arms.

His intent had already gone far beyond simply lifting Max Elephant.

He wanted to flip the massive shikigami entirely, throw it straight back and slam it hard into Megumi's face.

To make this reckless little brat witness in despair the unbridgeable gap between them!

However.

The moment his arms pressed further.

A crisp crack came from Sukuna's elbows.

CRACK!

A numbness never once experienced in this perfect divine body, not since he rampaged unchecked through the Heian era a thousand years ago, flooded through the King of Curses' entire body in an instant.

Sukuna's crimson pupils snapped tight.

In this contest of strength he had assumed was completely in his grasp, his bones had been shattered outright.

And that crisp crack announced the verdict.

In this lifting assault, the King of Curses had suffered utter defeat.

"You held your arms too high."

At the edge of the billowing dust and shockwave, watching it all unfold, Megumi laughed.

"No. Why?"

"Why can't I out-lift Max Elephant?!"

Unmistakable shock surfaced on Sukuna's tattooed face for the first time, impossible to conceal.

As if he couldn't accept his own defeat, Sukuna tried to forcibly activate Reverse Cursed Technique, attempting to repair his fractured bones while simultaneously forcing those arms, already on the verge of collapse, to push out one more burst of power and counterattack the crushing weight above!

His formidable cursed energy surged through both arms again and slammed into Max Elephant.

But the crack of shattering bone came back even more completely, even more catastrophically.

It rang across the battlefield again.

This time, the King of Curses' elbow bones dislocated entirely. Under the crushing weight, white bone punched clean through skin.

Exposed starkly to the murky air!

And that became the final straw.

"No—"

Sukuna could not accept that he had truly been defeated by Max Elephant.

With both arms gone, that enormous shadow, divine punishment given form, came crashing down with its absolute mass of tens of millions of tons!

"Haven't you noticed yet?"

"What's different about my Chimera Shadow Garden's Max Elephant compared to before?"

Megumi looked down from above at the broken divine monster pinned helplessly beneath the beast's belly, capable of nothing but impotent rage.

Under Megumi's reminder, delivered like a devil's whisper, Sukuna forced back the searing agony of his broken arms and raised his head slowly, with great effort.

The Max Elephant now was not just several times larger in volume.

In its overall animal features, the originally smooth elephant's head had grown a pair of massive horns, Piercing Ox's horns.

And on what had been flat elephant feet, there now appeared a hard keratinous hoof structure close to that of Piercing Ox.

"Although it was fused with more than just Piercing Ox, I've decided to call it Piercing Elephant."

Megumi gave this brand-new chimera beast its name.

Just like chimera beast agito, even when fused from multiple shikigami, one or two will always serve as the dominant force shaping the entire chimera's abilities.

And the chimera beast before them was dominated by Piercing Ox.

And Piercing Ox's ability was...

"You... could it be, that you sent Piercing Elephant plummeting from the sky using its speed and trajectory..."

Sukuna murmured, and Megumi gave a generous answer:

"Correct."

"I fused the treadmill properties of Piercing Ox into Max Elephant."

"This way, the gravitational acceleration of free fall no longer merely provided momentum alone."

Megumi raised two fingers and crossed them over each other.

"The descent itself can also gain a second layer of enhancement through Piercing Ox's property of growing stronger as it moves!"

➤ Next: The 200-Meter-Radius Weightlifting Arena of Shinjuku