Shohei and Sukuna were racing across the night sky, leaping from flying car to flying car, encroaching on the shadow born shikigami throwing them all.
Mahoraga's swarm of projectile cars surged again, more being launched than ever. Sukuna cleaved his way through several about to crash into him dead on, and Shohei took a page out of his book.
Iguana Talon in hand, Shohei funneled his flooding cursed energy into the karambit and supercharged it. Iguana Talon would shatter after slicing through one car, and have its regeneration of its fleshy blade completed instantly thanks to the excessive energy being poured into it. Shohei endlessly sliced through car after car and he began crashing down on the parking garage.
Sukuna swept his leg through the air, gouging a spanning cut across the parking garage. Mahoraga's head was slowly slipping from its two through the middle as its grip on a car went loose. Before its head could fall from its shoulders, its newly reformed hand shoved it back in place and a clunk of its wheel echoed through the night.
Sukuna landed gracefully at his wound on the building and Shohei came tumbling in after him, laying eyes on a fully healed Mahoraga. Both his arm and his leg had returned as if they never were severed and there wasn't so much as a scratch across his face.
"Oh?" Sukuna cooed, hands in his panpockets as he studied the unscathed shikigami. "You did something, didn't you?"
Mahoraga, not capable of human speech and a creature of action, leapt back into battle. The massive shikigami ran the two sorcerers down, attempting to bat away Shohei as he charged at Sukuna.
Shohei, not wanting to let its technique begin adapting to any part of him, unleashed a flurry of gouging strikes with the super charged cursed tool. Each slash gouged a chuck of flesh from Mahoraga's arm, shattering the blade, but then returning for another attack.
Its right arm reduced to a hunk of meat dangling from its shoulder, Mahorarga lashed out at Shohei with the remaining left arm. Shohei leapt far out of reach of the swipe and let the creature direct its focus back on Sukuna.
Sukuna welcomed the charge head on, leaping to attack. Sukuna's flying knee collided with a downward slamming fist of Mahoraga and the combined force nearly leveled the parking garage.
Cars in higher levels were thrown astray through the night sky as levels above exploded. Car alarms wailed and cried as the level they were on came crashing down on structurally weakened ones below, bringing the whole building down.
Shohei went to leapt out the opening Sukuna had created, but Mahoraga interrupted his escape as he passed by. The shikigami caught the fleeing teen by his head, his large snow white hand engulfing his whole skull.
"Oh no!" Shohei thought. "He's gotten faster. He's adapted to Sukuna's superior speed."
Like a ragdoll, Mahoraga swung Shohei around, slamming into Sukuna as debris crashed all around them. Iguana Talon flew out of Shohei's grasp before he could try and hack away at the meaty fingers encircling his face.
Shohei's neck snapped on impact against Sukuna. From neck to toe, Shohei was shredded into nothing by the King of Curses' counter attack before he was sent tumbling through the crashing building.
Pursuing his more formidable prey, Mahoraga cast aside the remains of Shohei's head. As his head rolled across the ground, Shohei's body was already knitting itself together from nothing at the neck in a puddle of his own blood and flesh.
Mahoraga and Sukuna chased each other out of the parking garage before it fully collapsed, leaving Shohei for dead, not noticing he already was putting himself back together.
Shohei's stomach was first reformed, the pool of cursed energy in the body, and soon the other functions of his torso around it.
Shohei gasped for air as his ribcage formed around his newly repaired lungs and heart. Muffled under the remains of a whole building and plethora of car alarms, Shohei screamed his new heart out at the pain of shedding and replacing almost a whole new body.
His limbs regrew at odd angles, avoiding capturing any rocks or scraps of metal in between any fresh muscle fibers or spleens. Shohei thrashed around, pinned under what felt like the weight of the world.
Rubble shifted and Shohei saw a speck of light. He found some purchase underneath him and sat bolt upright, throwing more debris askew. Shohei kicked off heavily, escaping his decimated concrete and rebar prison.
Naked and still steeped in continuous cursed energy, Shohei gasped, hunched over in an adjacent city street.
"Never again," Shohei declared. "Never again will I come so close to death so many times in one night. That is if I survive these monsters." He sat up, a malicious breeze reminding him he was nude. "Now, where can I find some pants before those two tear down the town and I run out of Bountiful Horizon."
Shohei deactivated Tunnel Vision, reaching out to scan the volumes of blank, energyless buildings surrounding him for anyone that resembled a store. Shohei clocked a department store down the street and darted his way to the entrance, kicking in the locked door.
He tore through the pitch black isles, searching for any shadow that resembled a rack of clothes. After fumbling around in the dark for almost a minute of wasted precious time, Shohei found a rack of pants. He threw on a pair of baggy joggers, tied the draw string as tight as he could, and barreled back out of the store barefoot and shirtless.
He scanned the mile of his surroundings and immediately traced where Sukuna and Mahoraga were duking it out. What was more cornering was their location and surroundings.
In relation to what the veil around Shibuya was cutting off from Shohei's vision, his fight had slowly shifted its way up north west of the city. The portion of the city where he and Inumaki first entered the city and began coraling all the civilians they met.
From the look of it, Inumaki had purged the area of all enemies and gathered every person he came across in a select few buildings. People were cram packed in the lower levels of offices, stores, bars, restaurants, and several folks even cowered in the railway system below the surface.
Sukuna and Mahoraga ravaged a few buildings already, as there were several fading signatures of the recently deceased. Any alive signatures around them were fleeing from the scene, pouring out of their hiding spots, climbing deeper into the buildings, or were cut down in the crossfire of Cleave and Dismantle.
In the canvas of the night sky, Shohei saw sparks of energy fly. Sukuna and Mahoraga were dancing in the air, beating each other across the head while crashing and burning.
Sukuna threw Mahoraga by an operation crane, swinging on the hook and chain, kicking the shikigami to the ground and dragging the construction equipment with them.
Shohei leapt atop a building and began racing from roof to roof. Across the skyline, he saw a collapsing building, several people shouting from the falling rooftop.
"Hang on!" Shohei bellowed, making a mad dash for them all. Shohei was two rooftops away.
One distant figure lost their grip in an attempt to cling onto another, falling even more prematurely.
Shohei was one last leap away. He dove off a shorter building, catching the screaming figure mid air before rolling to a rooftop across the way, cradling the human in his arms.
"Ow!" The woman yelped. Shohei looked down to see her arm wasn't secure in the landing and was hanging limply by her side, broken.
"Wait here!" Shohei bid, setting the woman down hurriedly before diving back off the roof.
He crashed into the sliced in half building, scaling the side as he ran up it. His feet pierced the concrete then freed themselves with every stride.
The severed top of the building was falling quicker, whatever supports that held it aloft while askew all but gone.
Unable to access Gravity Conductor to simply lower the building top to the ground or scooping up the two dozen civilians on it, Shohei had to leap onto the severed roof itself.
The dozens of men and women were too terrified by their approaching death to notice Shohei had clambered onto their death bed.
Shohei wrapped his arms around the closest three girls' waists, rushed to the edge of the debris, and leapt directly downward.
He expelled a raw blast of cursed energy from his feet, cushioning his crash landing for his passengers. He threw the girls several feet further down the sidewalk, away from the eminent crash site of the building.
In a flash, the sorcerer leapt directly back up, the rooftop not even half way down its original height. He grabbed two men by their collars in each hand, lept back down to the street, released a blast to cushion his fall, tossed them at the girls' still scrambling feet, and returned to the rooftop.
Again and again Shohei repeated these steps, the next time with four children, and again with two young men, five small teens, two men, two boys, four women, and one final time with a grown woman. All the meantime, the building was crashing at a far from slow speed.
The dozens of people at ground level, Shohei screamed, "Run! Run! It's crashing!"
They all clamored further down the street, but Shohei turned on the spot, clapping his hands and expelling a blast of cursed energy like when he crashed to the ground. The clap's energy collided with the exploding ruble. Hunks of concrete turned back in the air, preventing them from flying past Shohei to crash into the citizens.
"What…" a child began to mutter before Shohei bounded back onto the rooftop where he left the first woman.
"My arm!" the woman cried as Shohei suddenly appeared behind her. "I can't move it."
"You'll be okay," Shohei whispered to her as he scooped her up in his arms gingerly. He had hoped him being calm and quiet would in turn calm her down some before he scared her even more. "Now close your eyes. You don't want to see this."
"What do you mean?" she began to ask. She didn't close her eyes before Shohei stepped off the ledge.
She screamed as hard as she did when she first fell even though Shohei was slowing their descent with his fingers plunged into the concrete of the wall and after they landed.
"Excuse me!" Shohei called the group of former roof dwellers.
The final woman he saved was the first to turn around and the only one to approach.
"Aki!" she cried as the woman with a broken arm threw herself out of his arms.
"Hanna!"
The two women crashed into each other in a hug and collapsed in the street. One furiously apologized for not holding on tight enough. The other dismissed her apologies and thanked God they were alive.
"Excuse me," Shohei called again, addressing the women and their onlookers. Their attention shifted to him.
"It isn't safe here. You can't go back further north where the other citizens are hiding. The terrorists who sparked all these events tonight are fighting there. Go back south through the city as far as you can until you can't anymore. Stay close. Stay together. Don't stop to hide until you're as far as you can be. If you see more danger again, run!"
Shohei dragged the two women to their feet and shooed them off south bound. The others followed their lead, thankfully not questioning the weird haired savior with no shoes or shirt.
The sound of shredding metal tore through the air and across Shohei's ears. He looked up to the source of the sound and saw Mahoraga smothering Sukuna with flying train cars while he tore through them with Dismantle.
Mahoraga's hulking form threw a train car holding Sukuna into a building so hard that the electricity across the city seemed to falter for a moment. Mahoraga chased down his prey and Shohei pondered how he drew himself into a battle of such magnitude.
Shohei looked back at the shrinking figures sprinting south. More commotion rang out as debris and blood spurted through the night sky. Sukuna's maniacal, rapturous laugh echoed even to Shohei.
A dogged determination overtook his buzzing mind as Shohei raced back into action, ready to try his best to stop these titans from ending more lives in their feud.
Racing through the streets and closing in on Sukuna's signature, Shohei spotted the pointed top of a tower crashing through the streets. In an instant, that massive chunk of building was turned to indistinguishable heaps of concrete, raining down across Shibuya.
Shohei turned a corner, ducking a boulder from taking his head off and saw Sukuna. He was perched on a street light as boulders shredded his surroundings like hail piercing the surface of water.
Shohei's understanding of the entity that was Sukuna was further destroyed as he watched the madman rise to his feet and take a bow. Bowing at the destruction raining down around him like it was his masterpiece.
Further above the anarchy, a plane was crashing and burning, engulfed in flames.
"It must have flown through the curtain and been caught in the crossfire of the battle," Shohei rationalized as he helplessly watched it fall.
A small explosion erupted from the plane, and out of a plume of smoke came Mahoraga crashing down to earth.
"Or Mahoraga could have crashed into it."
The wreckage of the plane and Mahoraga crashed to the ground. Some if not all of the wreckage must have landed on the local powerbridge. Electricity was lost through the city as block by block the lights shut off.
Sukuna took back off, colliding with Mahoraga's signature in the distance, a flurry of attacks littering Mahoraga as their fight resumed. Unable to fly or move quite as fast as, Shohei raced after Sukuna, desperately wanting to get back in the fight even if he was outclassed and bound to be torn apart again.
"The power of Sukuna's attacks have ramped up since last I saw!" Shohei noted, leaping over a building. "Mahoraga must be resisting the attacks more and more. It must be almost fully adapted."
As the ultimate shikigami of the Ten Shadows, Mahoraga's technique was progressively adapting to all techniques, enemies, and phenomena it interacted with. Step by step with every turn of it's dharmachakra, it would begin to become relative in physicality, bypass any defenses, or resist any attacks.
That's how it regained its limbs against Sukuna and why it was now taking Sukuna more power to damage it. Ultimately, unless Sukuna killed the shikigami soon, it would be totally immune to slashing attacks. That's partially why Shohei only attacked it with Iguana Talon, to advance its resistance to slashes.
Discovering the two squaring off again in the darkness of the city, illuminated by firelight and raging cursed energy, Shohei found Sukuna and Mahoraga.
Slowly descending, his eyes obscured in darkness, but his ungodly smile shining through the night, Sukuna began bringing his hands together, forming a sign that could mean only thing with his odds of winning rapidly fading from view.
"A Domain Expansion?!" Shohei panicked, pulling his own hands to his hip, reading to cast a Simple Domain at a moment's notice as he neared the ground which the two would soon land on.
Mahoraga, unable to speak, but a foreboding grin spread across its lipless face, was looming over Sukuna as they descended to the ground, a hand outstretched to crush the wicked man.
Shohei was upon them, leaping up to halt Sukuna's technique as Mahoraga was so close to finishing him off.
"Domain Expansion," Sukuna recited to the night. "Malevolent Shrine."
"No!" Shohei gasped, failing to reach Sukuna.
Rather than a barrier engulfing the two enemies before him, Sukuna's domain began knitting itself into existence around the very world around them.
A disfigured Buddhist shrine was erected under Sukuna's feet. Dark colored water replaced the ground. Bull-like skulls decorated the dark water and base of the shrine. The red wooden structure was adorned with horns and hanging human skulls. The four entrances to the center of the shrine were formed by large, grotesque mouths, human teeth and tongues included.
All surrounding Shohei, rather than a separate space cut out and replaced, was the all encompassing domain establishing itself in the real, pre existing world. As far as Shohei's eye could see, Sukuna's domain reached out to. Oddly enough, shortening from a two hundred meter radius, it shrank down to only one hundred and fourty.
"Impossible," Shohei whispered, horrified at a work of jujutsu that redefined what a Domain Expansion could be.
Shohei continued on, finishing his countermeasures, "New Shadow Style: Simple Domain!"
A small domain encircled Shohei as he fell back to the ground. Mahoraga was not as lucky, as it was immediately eviscerated by the can't-miss attack of Malevolent Shrine, its wheel falling to the ground.
Much like Mahoraga, everything began to be turned to nothing more than dust. Buildings, the streets, signs, lights, cars, all being shredded apart.
No more than three seconds after its creation, Shohei's Simple Domain was dissipating. Sukuna's Domain was overpowering it.
"Oh?!" Sukuna called over the pandemonium of his domain. He was looking down at Shohei panicking as his defenses were stripped away. "You survived?"
Shohei looked back up to the King of Curses, standing comfortably in the maw of his domain's shrine.
"I reckon even if your head was severed and body erased, your brain wasn't destroyed. The brain directs the flow of cursed energy, but one does exist in the world with their mind, body and soul as one."
Unable to care less what Sukuna was saying with the verge of being cut to death advancing, Shohei prepared a second layer of defense next, possibly more efficient at defending this kind of onslaught.
"Secret Art: Falling Blossom Emotion!"
The Simple Domain was picked apart. Instead the shroud of energy around Shohei erupted into action, spikes of energy ceaselessly surging and parrying the literal endless wave of attacks that Sukuna's domain was raining down on everything in the hellish shrine.
Bountiful Horizon's energy was rapidly draining its stores while it fed Falling Blossom Emotion. Weeks upon months of cursed energy were being poured into the technique, and consumed almost immediately as Cleaves and Dismantles were being fended off.
Dumbfounded at the sight before him, Shohei grunted, "Huh?"
Mahoraga had returned from the bloody mist that he was reduced to moments ago. It was weathering the storm of attacks carving through it at every step. Holes tore through it, limbs began to fall from its body, its head disappeared from its shoulders. Still literally pulling itself together again and again, the beast advanced across the open field of dust.
Shohei looked back to Sukuna, seeing his eyes widened in true disbelief at something weathering the storm of his Domain.
Shohei's heart sank again. Sukuna let a smirk creep across his face. Sukuna raised his hands in acknowledgement, but thereforth rose a familiar heat.
As the world crashed and burned at their feet, flames danced around Sukuna as he conjured another fire arrow.
"Get ready Shohei!" Shohei told himself, fueled with the fleetingly spent energy of Bountiful Horizon. "If Mahoraga doesn't die here and now, there could be no stopping him. If Sukuna doesn't die right now, there's no stopping him. One fell swoop."
Bountiful Horizon utterly flooded Falling Blossom Emotion, and previously very taxed by returning Shohei's body to its full form, was drawing to its end. While it was active, Shohei could not pursue his final dire plan.
Formulating a Binding Vow with himself, Shohei offered the remaining cursed energy of Bountiful Horizon. In return for all of that energy, the energy of his maximum technique was to immediately be poured into Falling Blossom Emotion the instant he concluded the vow.
In his preoccupied mind coordinating his technique and all of that energy, Shohei prepared for the final move that he had been saving since his fight broke out with the shadow and curse incarnate.
Mahoraga fell to one knee briefly, the wheel turned once again, and again it rose up, nearly fully unaffected by the slashes raining down on it. The ruble upturned by the slashes bouncing off of it began to brighten and melt, the heat of Sukuna's attack rising.
Railings, stares, glass, vehicles, construction sights, whole buildings all began to smolder and melt at the heat radiating off of the fully formed attack. Primed with his hands drawn back, Sukuna held a fully conjured bow and arrow composed of fire, leagues more powerful than the simple arrow that almost killed Jogo. The arrow ready to shake the world was aimed right in the middle of Mahoraga's forehead.
No time better than the present, Shohei concluded his Binding Vow and murmured, "Now…"
In a surge still greater than any output he ever displayed, Bountiful Horizon poured all its remaining fuel of energy into Falling Blossom Emotion, flawlessly defending Shohei from the sea of slashes washing over him as promised, exhausting the Maximum Technique.
In that singular moment of Shohei going unscathed in the domain, his cursed energy reserves diminished to what they once were before Bountiful Horizon, the spare cursed energy fueling his Binding Vow instead of replenishing his original store, Sukuna distracted by readying his massive attack, and Mahoraga rearing to make his way onward, Shohei began to chant.
"Gravity Conductor Maximum Technique: Singularity Ignition!"
The teen raised his left hand in front of him, finger splayed skyward, bracing his elbow with his right hand. The white polka dots of his hair, briefly returned to normal, now overtook the black hair in between them. His head of hair floated freely, unaffected by gravity. The blackness of Shohei's right black hole eye receded into only his pupil, overwhelmed by his left eye. The radiating orange and yellow of his left eye expanded to the size of a roaring fire rising from his face, emulating the brilliance of a raging star.
His left hand was aimed at Mahoraga, still focused on clamoring his way towards Sukuna, who now noticed the surge of cursed energy.
"Wait!" Shohei read across Sukuna's lips as he instead aimed the fire arrow at Shohei, but it was too late.
Shohei released his technique, and in Mahoraga's heart came all its cursed energy. The cursed energy came piling and compressing into such a tiny point, and all of a sudden, it collapsed in on itself, exploding outward in a force like a supernova, engulfing all around.