Beads of sweat ran down the forehead of the curse side under the overwhelming killing intent.
Clearly, the situation was overwhelmingly in their favor. They had lured Gojo Satoru into the battlefield they had prepared, used the non-sorcerers as shields, and sealed away his technique and Domain. On top of that, they had added another move in the form of the Curtain, and their odds, which had seemed like 0%, now looked as if they had risen a little.
They had sealed his Domain too, but it was practically the same as cutting off all of the enemy’s limbs.
And yet the man standing before them didn’t seem to care about any of that at all. His presence was simply overwhelming.
What was even more terrifying was the instinct that, no matter what they did—seal his Domain, neutralize his technique, or pull some other stunt—they still might not be able to beat him.
Gulp
The moment Jogo swallowed, Gojo started walking forward as if he had been waiting for it.
He looked completely defenseless, but the curses, crushed by his momentum, gave up any thought of taking another step.
“What’s wrong? You were the ones who told me not to run.”
Gojo was already right in front of them.
Snapping back to his senses, Jogo threw a straight punch with enough force to pierce through Gojo’s torso.
At the same time, Dagon struck from Gojo’s side with a heavy blow, attacks from different directions converging on him.
Thud! Crack!
The instant Jogo’s fist finally touched Gojo’s hand, Gojo seized Jogo’s arm and drove a fist straight into his solar plexus at terrifying speed.
In the same motion, he grabbed the Jogo whose strength had briefly left his body and swung him around, slamming him into Dagon’s heavy strike.
“Ghk! Jogo!”
Using his ally as a shield, Gojo’s blow slowed Dagon’s strike, and Dagon’s stance crumbled.
His weight had shifted forward from the delayed assault.
Gojo’s Six Eyes caught the opening.
Whoosh!
He kicked the now-useless Jogo in the back, planted a hand on the ground, and lowered his stance to the extreme.
Having mastered every kind of martial art, Gojo chose a capoeira attack option.
With one hand on the ground, he spun one leg gracefully and smashed it into Dagon’s knee.
Meia lua de compasso
Crack!
It was only hand-to-hand combat reinforced with basic cursed energy, but when the user was Gojo Satoru, even that was on a completely different level from an ordinary sorcerer.
With the sound of a rotten branch snapping, Dagon’s knee bent in a grotesque direction.
“Gaaah!”
Leaving Dagon rolling on the ground, Gojo strode after the fleeing Jogo.
Pshh!
Even when Choso fired [Crimson Blood Manipulation] from far away to keep him in check, every shot was blocked by [Limitless] and failed to land a meaningful hit.
As if his earlier promise to kill Jogo first had not been a lie, Gojo’s attention was fixed entirely on the volcano-headed curse weaving through the crowd as he ran.
Jogo, the one being chased, was having a miserable time of it.
“Up until just now, that was all the damage I took because I protected my body with the Curtain. Basic cursed energy control and hand-to-hand combat, and he’s still at this level!”
“Gojo Satoru, what the hell is it that you don’t have?”
Jogo lamented the unfair talent bestowed by the gods.
Gojo, who had always been physically gifted, used the absurd field of vision granted by his Six Eyes to display terrifying prowess even in close combat. In fact, when sparring with students, he would seal away [Blue] and [Red] and fight them using only martial arts.
Even if you pulled out a tiger’s claws and teeth, it was still a tiger. With nothing but its thick, muscular forelegs, it could easily crush fragile prey.
The sight of the fleeing Jogo and the pursuing Gojo was, no matter how you looked at it, a perfect hunting scene.
“You think I’m just going to take this lying down?”
Driven to desperation, Jogo ran through the crowd and tried to slip into Gojo’s blind spots.
Using his specialty speed, he hit and ran with the Curtain wrapped around him. He couldn’t drag this out for long. He knew that if he stayed in a prolonged head-on clash with Gojo, he would die, so whenever things turned unfavorable, he hid in the crowd.
Even so, every exchange left him taking overwhelming losses.
Every time he threw a punch that wouldn’t even land, his hand was cut off.
Dagon was buying time by taking the hits in their joint assault, but if their cursed energy kept being worn down like this, exorcism was only a matter of time.
The distance kept shrinking. His cursed energy kept dropping every time he regenerated. Jogo was still walking a dangerous tightrope over a bottomless abyss.
And yet—
“This much was within expectations. Come out, Kuro’ushi!!!”
Had Jogo, who had lived for centuries, and Kenjaku, who had lived even longer, not foreseen this?
Even after recruiting Uraume, they still lacked enough force to keep Gojo occupied. Dagon had grown into his mature form, but since he had only recently been born, he lacked combat experience and could not fully replace Hanami’s absence.
From Kenjaku’s perspective, once Gojo was sealed, he didn’t care what happened to the curses, but at the very least he had to avoid everything collapsing before the plan was complete.
So he brought it out.
Another special-grade curse he had been saving.
“Now, can you see the iron taste?”
Along with that chilling voice, cockroaches that had been waiting beneath the Fukutoshin Line platform poured out in droves.
----------------------------
20:51.
Tokyo Metro Meiji-Jingumae Station, Exit 2.
“A Curtain has been spread over the entire subway station to trap the civilians. Inside that, centered on the Fukutoshin Line platform, there’s another Curtain that prevents sorcerers from entering.”
The assistant supervisor’s pen tapped against the paper map with a light, rhythmic sound.
“Between those two Curtains, there’s a curse or curse user maintaining them.”
“Between them? Not at the platform in the center?”
“This is only a guess, but it seems they’re increasing the strength of the barrier even at the cost of exposing themselves outside.”
The reasonable speculation answered the question raised by Mei Mei, a first-grade sorcerer.
Junpei and Yuji, listening from the side, nodded with expressions that suggested they mostly understood.
So it was some kind of binding vow. That would explain why the non-sorcerers, whose cursed energy levels differed, had all been trapped at once.
But the assistant supervisor’s expression, as she watched them prepare to enter immediately, was not a good one.
“Is there more you haven’t explained?”
“Two other assistant supervisors have already been taken down. And between the Curtains... um... I can’t say for sure yet, but...”
“?”
“Why are you dragging it out?”
“Just say it. It doesn’t matter.”
As if she still had something to say, Mei Mei and Yoshino pressed her.
And when the answer came, Junpei’s expression hardened terribly.
“Between the Curtains, there are modified humans.”
“!”
“Oh?”
Mei Mei and Ui Ui stroked their chins with interest, but Junpei could not.
His two clenched fists tightened so hard they trembled.
He’s down there.
The beginning and end of everything.
The one who awakened Junpei as a sorcerer.
The teacher who taught him jujutsu, and the enemy who toyed with him and murdered his mother is down there.
“Junpei...”
“Mei Mei, what about shared vision?”
He was furious. But at the same time, he was excited.
What would it feel like for that idiot, who had once been nothing more than a toy, to have been chased all the way to his throat?
He was dying to know what expression Mahito would make when they met again, what he would say.
“Almost there.”
“Please don’t rush my sister. She’s concentrating right now.”
“It doesn’t really matter. That kid probably has a lot of resentment built up too.”
“Ah, sister. What a merciful heart you have!”
“.......”
Even in this situation, Ui Ui still wouldn’t stop fawning over Mei Mei, and Yuji shook his head.
One minute, two minutes, three minutes. Just as Junpei was growing more and more impatient, Mei Mei finally opened her eyes.
“I get the picture. Itadori, Yoshino.”
“Yes.”
“Which would you rather do: kill a lot of weak modified humans, or exorcise one strong curse?”
“.....”
“Well, for you two, it’d be the latter. The modified humans are roaming around on B4 attacking civilians. The rest seem to be mostly on B5, at the platform.”
“Seem to be?”
“My crows carry cursed energy, so they couldn’t enter B5. They must have used the modified humans to threaten people into fleeing underground.”
The more Mei Mei spoke, the more certain it became.
That was exactly the kind of tactic Mahito would use, treating lives like toys.
Mahito was definitely here.
“My crows were taken down between B1 and B2. There must be a curse or curse user here maintaining the Curtain. Whether they’re trying to hunt the civilians who come back up, or whether it’s because of the Curtain’s conditions, I can’t tell. I don’t know why they chose this spot or why they sealed off B5 either.”
“So he is there, right? Mahito, right below us.”
“Who knows? My crows were taken out before I could even confirm that patchwork face. But if there are modified humans here, that’s what it means. Splitting our forces is a bit of a pain, but if we dawdle, the civilians on B4 will be wiped out.”
“We’ll go through Exit 7, which connects directly to B4, and rescue the civilians.
If things get dangerous for you too, come down.
But if I’m being greedy, by the time you and we regroup, I’d like the Curtain to have lifted and the enemy’s objective on B5 to have been revealed.”
“Don’t worry, Mei.”
“Leave it to us!”
“Confident, huh? You won’t lose, will you?”
Win.
-------------------------------
21:03.
Tokyo Metro Meiji-Jingumae Station, B2.
What awaited Junpei and Yuji there was a gruesome sight.
Crunch crunch crunch
The body of a headless man was being chewed up.
By a grasshopper curse with striking antennae and protruding wings.
It seemed to have died only recently, because the corpse would twitch from time to time, and Yuji’s expression grew colder and colder as he watched.
“Is that it?”
“.....”
“Huh? What are you looking at?”
Sensing new enemies, the grasshopper curse threw away the corpse it had been eating and stood up.
It was a little awkward, but it was clearly intelligent enough to communicate, so at minimum it was semi-first-grade.
“Y-you, you’re a sorcerer, right? A sorcerer, right? I’m smart, you know.”
“Mahito’s here, right? Where is he?”
“Mahito’s below... I’m guarding the Curtain here.”
Guarding it.
At that word, something strange prickled at Junpei and Yuji’s foreheads.
“It didn’t say ‘spread’ or ‘set up.’ It said ‘guard.’”
“This thing doesn’t look smart enough to set up two Curtains. That would require a high level of understanding of barrier techniques. Wasn’t there that contracted Curtain before? That one also used a medium...”
As they kept their guard up and scanned their surroundings, something suspicious came into view.
A stake wrapped in cloth and driven into the ground, completely out of place in a subway station. Its shape was similar to the one from the exchange event.
That thing is the medium maintaining the Curtain this guy is guarding.
Having intuited its true nature, they immediately took their stances and charged the grasshopper guy.
“What? You’re fighting? You, you guys aren’t smart, are you? You don’t even know what kind of curse I—”
“Hwangban.”
Thwip! Crack!
Before the grasshopper curse could do anything, the two poisonous needles Junpei fired pierced its body, and at the same time destroyed the Curtain’s medium.
“Aaaah? The Cur, Currrtain. Mahito’s going to be mad at me...”
The grasshopper curse staggered as poison spread through its body.
Still not fully understanding what was happening, it panicked over the Curtain breaking, and Yuji’s iron fist came crashing down on its head.
“Sorry, but...”
“We don’t have time to play with you.”
Grasshopper Guy vs. Yoshino Junpei & Itadori Yuji.
Time taken to K.O.
Just 3 seconds.
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