"Domain Expansion!" Dagon's deep voice resonated through the open air like a reverberating cave. "Horizon of the Captivating Shandha."
The four sorcerers stood on the shore of a beautiful island beach, at the mercy of the cursed spirit that Shohei and Naobito failed to stop casting their domain.
Shohei stood by Naobito looking onto the sea, each readying their countermeasures.
Nanami and Maki stood off away from Naobito and Shohei, who both had just been leaping around the atrium, knocking Dagon around faster than either of them could keep up.
The blonde man and young girl stood dumbstruck on the shore as well, peering out to see Dagon at sea when their respective shoulders and hips erupted in a stream of blood.
Maki glanced behind and Shohei tracked her gaze. Swimming through the air as though it were plain old water was a wicked looking purple piranha. A shikigami. The sure-hit attack of the domain.
Flashes of Hanami's endless swarm of impaling branches flashed through Sho's mind. His stomach where they ran him through burned with the memory.
Shohei moved faster than he ever had before due to pure desperation, landing between Nanami and Maki in a crouched position, hands hidden by his hip.
He spoke the incantation, "New Shadow Style: Simple Domain!" and a small barrier erected itself centered on Shohei, encapsulating Nanami and Maki in its protection.
Rattled by the possible blunder of leaving his ally's side, Shohei turned back to Naobito. The old man however was in no state of immediate danger.
"Secret Art: Falling blossom Emotion," he chanted, surrounded by a layer of cursed energy primed for a counter attack. A piranha like shikigami lied split in half behind the sorcerer.
He remained crouched, one hand suspended in front of him with middle and forefinger raised. His other hand primed to counter by his belly, a typical stance of Falling Blossom Emotion. An anti-domain technique passed down among the big three clans.
Like Simple Domain, the user doesn't activate their own domain, and instead, the moment an enemy domain's guaranteed-hit attack activates, it protects the user by countering with their own cursed energy.
A glint of motion in Shohei's peripheral snapped his head back out to where Dagon stood at sea. Dagon was interlocking his fingers and joining his palms in another hand sign. Shohei felt the cursed energy surge all around them in the domain.
"Activate technique: Death Swarm!" Dagon's reverberating voice echoed.
As he had risen to float just above the surface of the water, a swarm of gigantic, monstrous shikigami resembling various sea creatures surged from the water beside Dagon. They converged on the sorcerers.
"Maki-san. Gojo-san." Nanami gathered their attention, ready for the attack. "The shikigami aren't heading straight for us! They'll be gouging out our flesh in the next instant we aren't protected by this Simple Domain. Don't think about it!" Nanami began to sound intense, desperate even. "The moment you feel contact, cut them down one after another! That's the best you can manage with your scant cursed energy, Maki."
They all looked over to Naobito who was facing a heavily concentrated stream of shikigami. As he was weathering the storm untouched, Dagon used the cover of shikigami to surprise attack him.
Dagon appeared in front of Naobito, surprising the man with his own taste of medicine. He punched Naobito through the small forest along the shore, emboldened by the domain's boost to his physical stats.
As Naobito took his stance and began muttering the enhancement, Dagon appeared behind him in a blur and said, "The sea is the source of all life." and the next moment a massive eel like shikigami had its jaws around Naobito's entire torso, pinning his arms to his sides.
"Death Swarm is an endless swarm of shikigami," Dagon informed casually.
"Prepare for his sneak attack," Nanami warned, taking a defensive stance in the Simple Domain. "He's quicker in his own domain. He'll try to knock us out-"
"There is no stopping its onslaught."
And surely like Nanami was going to say, Dagon slipped through the forest, showed himself as a ruse on one side of their Simple Domain, and appeared on another, bashing Nanami away from Shohei.
Once Nanami was beyond the border of the Simple Domain, Shohei lost all sight of him in the truly endless sea of creatures that engulfed him.
"Nanami-san!" Shohei called desperately and pointlessly.
Maki tried counter attacking Dagon with a lunge of her spear.
Dagon caught the blade of her spear again between his palms, and from his black midriff, emerged a sea serpent shikigami. It wrapped its jaws around Maki's ankle. It tore her off her feet and dragged her from the perimeter of Shohei's Simple Domain.
Two more shark sized shikigami latched themselves onto her with their wicked teeth as Dagon lunged at her.
"Weak," he barked, winding up a kick. "You're next."
She barely managed to pull her spear away from his grasp and block the kick to her chest, but was still sent sailing into the forest, shikigami still tearing at her flesh.
"You ugly bastard!" Shohei cursed, charging Dagon on the edge of his Simple Domain, Iguana Talon raised.
"Humans are truly ugly," Dagon replied, blocking the slash with his large forearm. The slashes once gouging chunks from the curse now only left moderate cuts, only to be immediately healed. "Not from their appearance, but from the lies, deceit, and delusion they hold in their heart."
Shohei slashed, backhanded, and kicked the curse in a small exchange on the edge of his Simple Domain. Dagon may have thought this was a risky maneuver by Shohei, but the boy was using it as a gauge.
Shohei kicked the curse firmly in the stomach, knocking it away and retreated to the center of his Simple Domain.
"He's sloppy. He's a novice at hand to hand," Shohei thought to himself. "He purely relies on his impressive physical capabilities to fight and falls back on his large reserves of energy to heal from any blunders he makes along the way. Him being a Curse Womb before this means this is probably his first real fight even if he ate all those humans. That means he is arrogant, ignorant, and susceptible to bait."
Shohei lowered his Simple Domain and instead erected his own shroud of Falling Blossom Emotion, having learned the technique from Gojo, and him in turn from their clan.
The shikigami swarm appeared from nowhere and began washing over him harmlessly as he pretended to cleave some of them apart with his blade too.
Just like Shohei predicted, after pulling it off on Naobito once, Dagon tried knocking Shohei out of his stance of the anti-domain technique, not stopping to ponder why the boy switched techniques. This time however, Shohei was ready to counter.
Shohei slipped the massive strait the curse threw and severed his arm from his shoulder partially. Sho pulled his hands aside and cast, "New Shadow Style: Simple Domain."
The two anti-domain techniques swapped roles again, and there Dagon was in the middle of Shohei's Simple Domain with no shikigami to obscure his view. Shohei then began his assault on the curse.
Shohei sliced him across his chest or severed a tentacle here and there, Iguana Talon still dealing some damage. Every attempt Dagon made at fleeing the fight, Shohei caught him by his wrist, tentacle, or wing and flipped him over his shoulder or onto his back, keeping him engaged.
Without any cursed energy reinforcement, Dagon was still marginally stronger and almost quicker than Shohei, but Shohei's further and further bolstered martial arts training trumped Dagon's raw strength.
For several moments Shohei kept up this endless dance, but when Dagon gave up fleeing back to the security of his sure-hit, the ground was evened. He began to spawn normal shikigami from his bottomless stomach and not flinch when Shohei delivered a nasty cut or two. Dagon had plenty of cursed energy to burn healing himself, and Shohei had to admit he was not going to make a dent in it with measly stalemated melee combat.
Shohei turned to the defensive to steal some glances at the others' situations. Maki was still unseen in the forest, Nanami wasn't making a dent in his mass of fish, and only a few occasional blood splatters could be seen from the horde of creatures surrounding Naobito.
Sure, Shohei could blast and tear apart Dagon some more with Gravity Conductor, but that won't kill him fast enough to help the others. Shohei could even entirely double his strength by just reinforcing and speeding up his and Dagon's brawl. He might even lure Dagon into striking him with Stygian Void active, but he could just entirely stop the onslaught on the others if he opened his Domain. Dagon surely couldn't be more refined than his if he only just evolved into a true cursed spirit.
"If you're gonna call me weak, then kill me in a single blow, Octobitch," Maki's voice carried across the commotion of battle. The girl emerged from the treeline, wiping a dribble of blood from her lip and casting aside the broken half of her destroyed spear. The shikigami that once attacked her lied in brutalized, torn apart heaps behind her.
"Then I'll devour you," Dagon resigned, fleeing his combat with Shohei, who was distracted by the injured Maki. Dagon raised a hand for another wave of shikigami to swarm Maki. "Just like the other two."
"No!" Shohei cried, readying his own domain.
As he brought his hands together for the casting of his domain, an eruption of shadows surged from far out in the sea. Atop the pillar of shadow was their saving grace, Fushiguro.
"Shohei! Maki-san!" the boy called, stress painting his face as his hands remained clasped in their sign.
"Megumi!" the two lovers called out to their first-year to the rescue.
A slim shadow raced across the ocean, over the sand, and to Maki's feet. Protruding from that shadow were three interlinked bars. A clear sign of Playful Cloud.
"Goddamn Megumi," Shohei cheered in his head. "You are one cheeky underclassman!"
Dagon raised a hand towards Megumi falling through the sky as his shadows settled.
"You dare infiltrate my domain on your own? How foolish."
Two natural shikigami surged from Dagon's stomach, but both Shohei and Maki appeared behind Dagon while he was distracted attacking. Their sudden appearance caused the curse to miss his attack.
"What?!" he gasped, failing to counter or block.
Maki bashed him in the chin with Playful Cloud. Shohei super charred Iguana Talon, tearing open his chest with a slash, the blade shattering.
Maki twirled Playful Cloud as gracefully as a dancer with a ribbon, and bashed the octopus back into the sea.
Shohei took aim at the off-balanced curse and raised his hand above his head, slowly lowering it in a perfect vertical line through the Octopus. Thereforth crashed down a thin line of gravity, and attempted to cleave Dagon right down the middle. The curse ducked his head to one side, leaving only half his body from the shoulder split in two.
"The guaranteed-hit effect of my domain is gone!" Dagon choked on his own purple blood. He glanced over his shoulder at Megumi holding his domain open in a mass of swirling water. "That boy is deploying his domain." He hacked another surge of blood and focused on healing himself as Shohei and Megumi reconvened.
"You alright?" Maki and Shohei both asked in unison. Then shared a small grin amidst the battle.
Seemingly done calculating whatever he was planning in his head, Dagon fully healed, turned back to Megumi shouting, "Easily done!"
He fired two writhing giant shikigami from his bottomless stomach, tearing through the water towards Fushiguro.
Like a bat out of hell, and with the help of Megumi's Toads, Nanami dashed across the water, beating the shikigami to Megumi's side.
Cleaving one fish in half as it was upon Fushiguro, Nanami came crashing down at the boy's feet. The second tried snaking its way around Nanami, but he spun around, and with a flash of his sword and forced weakness from his technique, he took the creature's head straight off.
The two cool, calculated minds shared some words off at sea that Shohei couldn't hear, but Nanami remained at the boy's side to protect him.
As for the other victim of Death Swarm, Naobito emerged in a flash behind Dagon, his one remaining arm reared to strike.
Dagon blocked his punch and Maki attempted to sneak attack the curse while distracted, but it sprouted two shikigami springing from his stomach to attack both on either side of him. Luckily Shohei fled above like once before, blasting the curse into the sand with the force of a crashing house.
Maki bashed a hole through her shikigami and Naobito simply stomped the head in of his.
"You only took one measly right arm," Naobito started, shirtless and bloodied, but still kicking like a mad dog. "But it had 71 years in it. That's going to cost you!"
Nanami continued to chop apart any shikigami that freely emerged from the sea in an attempt to kill Fushiguro. Shohei felt at liberty to tear apart Dagon with Maki and Naobito while the blonde sorcerer stood guard over his friend.
"Well, you two," Shohei called as he hovered over Dagon, the curse climbing to his feet. "Who wants to take his head off first."
"Me!" they both demanded, readying to strike, finally not arguing amongst themselves.
Shohei readied his own attack, another blast ready to pin and crush Dagon then and there while the other two berated him with attacks, but then all action ceased.
"You three!" Nanami bellowed with the force of a thunder crack, rippling the water at his feet, no concern for politeness or niceties. "Gather 'round!"
Without a second thought, the three of them, despite their differences and variation in skill, all put their faith in the grade-one sorcerer.
Naobito and Maki raced across Megumi's Toad's suspended in the water as stepping stones. Shohei streaked across the water in flight so fast that it raised a crashing wave behind him.
"To Fushiguro-kun's feet," Nanami demanded, but then Dagon caught on.
The curse, perplexed by the seeming bolstering of Fushiguro's defenses, realized their attempt at an escape through an opening of Megumi's domain.
As the three of them were diving towards where Nanami instructed, a pair of hands grouped their way through the opening of the domain.
Right there in that moment between those who inherited the Zenin family curse, those who couldn't leave it behind, and all others, they bore witness to someone who was free. Someone who truly left it all behind and his overwhelming intensity.