Chapter 173

Megumi puts Reggie down and turns away from the Tokyo No. 1 Colony, only for a fresh arrival to find him. While Takaba and Hazenoki settle their own scrap, the lens swings to the Sendai Colony, where the carnage has run far past anything the capital produced.

Bleeding on the ground, Reggie assembles how the boy beat him: the pool and the domain masked that Divine Dog: Totality was still in play, and Megumi never escaped on Nue but coaxed his foe inside instead. Smarting at having been outwitted by someone far younger, the old sorcerer listens as Megumi recounts how the shadow bird wore out lifting Yuji and Ino up a Shibuya tower. Asked about Tengen, Reggie can barely recall the name, brands the immortal's account of the game a bluff, and denies any tie to Kenjaku. With his final breath he orders his Kogane to hand over every one of his forty-one points and wishes his killer a fool's end; five of them transfer to Megumi.

A rooftop explosion across the city marks where Hazenoki keeps throwing punches at Takaba, stumped that the comedian shrugs off each bomb and even winds up coated in ankake sauce. The moment Kogane announces Reggie's elimination, Hazenoki gives up and goes home, leaving Takaba's botched point-grab as a gag. The narration names Takaba's power Comedian, which makes real anything he is convinced will be funny, a gift that could even rival Gojo though its owner has no idea. Elsewhere a frantic Remi is run down by Divine Dog: Totality until Tsumiki's voice stops her brother, who collapses just as the Angel, Hana Kurusu, descends onto him.

The final pages introduce Sendai's four titans. Dhruv Lakdawalla fought in the Civil War of Wa and is now in his second incarnation, sitting on ninety-one points with shikigami whose orbits build a domain. Ryu Ishigori holds seventy-seven points and the largest cursed energy output among every player in the game. Takako Uro carries seventy points and the power to bend the sky, having once headed the Fujiwara clan's Toh, whose Sun, Moon, and Stars Squad answered to her. Kurourushi rounds them out, a special grade cockroach curse with fifty-four points that stays dormant until conditions turn its way. Their clashing temperaments freeze the colony rather than uniting it, and the standoff snaps when Yuta Okkotsu, who regained special grade a trio of months past the Night Parade and ranks second only to Gojo in raw power, fells Dhruv to reach thirty-five points. Akutami's note jokes about blanking on the word sansukumi and resorting to calling it that thing from Pokemon.