The Mastermind Behind It All Is…
Not being able to sleep himself was painful enough, but other people sleeping soundly was even more infuriating.
“How can someone your age sleep so peacefully…?”
Toyama Akira had sneaked into the Jujutsu High office, found out who had assigned Gojo Satoru’s missions over the past few days, and, after digging the list out of the database, prepared to pay each of them a visit.
He stood beside the bed of one of the higher-ups from jujutsu headquarters. He had just climbed in through a window with its curtain hanging heavily shut, bringing in the dewy chill of early morning. His eyes had narrowed slightly as they adjusted from brightness to darkness, and then he saw that the man in the bed was actually sleeping soundly. Wait, the sun was already up. How dare he still be asleep?
Akira had not slept, yet this person who had assigned Gojo all those missions was sleeping right here?
What?
“How can someone your age sleep so peacefully…? Someone so useless that you can’t even exorcise cursed spirits and can only abuse your authority to play political games and make life miserable for the people beneath you, and you still dare to sleep…”
Although Toyama Akira was so tired he could have died, he felt that someone else deserved to die more.
“Aren’t you afraid the people beneath you will make you [sleep] first?”
When the old man in the bed finally began struggling to open his eyes because of the incessant muttering, the cold gleam of a blade immediately pressed against his throat. All he saw was a flash of icy light before his chin was forcibly lifted by a freezing touch, leaving him able to see only the shadow of the ceiling.
He could only… hear a voice blurred by cursed energy.
There was a hint of cold mockery in it.
“Sir?”
When Gojo Satoru woke up, he groggily felt around for his phone. The moment he saw the numbers displayed on the lit screen, he fell silent.
Six in the evening?
Wasn’t it six in the morning?
Then he felt what was beneath him: a soft mattress, not the relatively hard seat of a car.
Gojo Satoru: …
Something was wrong.
He raised his head and saw only the air-conditioner remote inserted into the power slot used to turn on the lights.
It was set to 27 degrees, sleep mode.
And then…
Who on earth had turned on the heating in the middle of summer?
Gojo Satoru wiped at the sweat soaking his back and finally understood what had woken him.
…Although he still had no idea how he had fallen asleep.
Toyama Akira was still awake. He wiped the droplets from his forehead. They were not beads of sweat, but morning dew condensed from the cold air outside. The chill seeped through him.
Toyama Akira had gone to have a serious discussion with the old oranges responsible for assigning the missions. He had started with the first one, hoping to make an example of him and reduce his own workload.
At first, the atmosphere had been tense and confrontational.
That was the official, objective version.
From Toyama Akira’s perspective, those old oranges had no idea what was good for them. Even with their heads about to be cut off, they somehow still had the nerve to shout at him and threaten him. Where did they get that confidence?
When the other man’s voice suddenly rose harshly, Toyama Akira’s hand genuinely jerked in fright. The blade wrapped in heterogeneous space instantly sank deep into flesh, stopping just above the windpipe. Toyama Akira’s pupils were still contracted as he soothed his pounding heart, frightened by the sudden noise. Then he looked down and saw that the man who had been shouting moments ago had suddenly become even quieter than he was.
Toyama Akira: …?
He had no idea why they had suddenly become so obedient, but it was wonderful that they had stopped saying stupid yet genuinely frightening threats.
Only then did Toyama Akira have enough energy to begin today’s negotiations. He drew a breath and, somewhat wearily, got straight to the point.
“Is it reasonable to give Gojo Satoru so much work?”
Toyama Akira was tired too. Having to restrain himself from killing these behind-the-scenes masterminds after being worked to exhaustion was even more exhausting. On this point, he had to admit that Gojo Satoru was very strong.
Toyama Akira’s voice was soft as well, drifting like a ghost’s.
Before the man had settled down, the old orange with a blade at his throat had still been shouting things like, “He’s a special grade. Isn’t this what Gojo Satoru is supposed to do? Does he want to defect? Hah, just like that best friend of his?”
“Do you people always communicate this ineffectively?” Toyama Akira’s heart had clenched again when the other man startled him with another shout. He secretly took a health supplement behind his back before speaking in a weary voice. His eyelids were already fighting to stay open as soon as he began. “If you’re incapable of having a conversation, then I’ll have to kill you first and find the next gentleman capable of communicating.”
“I’ll state the issue and my request one last time. Gojo Satoru has too much work, and it’s making me tired too. I feel like my heart is about to stop, and…” Toyama Akira’s half-lidded eyes opened suddenly. His dark pupils contracted slightly, and his gaze fell on the man beneath him, who was tensing and swallowing nervously.
His fingers still held the blade precisely beneath the man’s chin, restricting his field of vision to the ceiling. Now the blade tilted upward, slicing several inches deeper into the flesh beneath the jawbone.
“And if something happens to Gojo Satoru because of this, I’ll die. Obviously.”
“But you’ll die before I do.”
As the boy spoke, he unconsciously held his breath, as though he had entered another state entirely. Unfortunately, the jujutsu sorcerer from headquarters beneath his blade could not see his face. Otherwise, he would have clearly noticed the darkness slowly spreading outward from the boy’s pupils.
The air sank into a suffocating silence. After a while, Toyama Akira seemed to have a switch flipped inside him. He drew in a long breath, then…
“My request is…”
The light returned to Toyama Akira’s eyes. He let out a tired sigh. “Find a way to give Gojo Satoru less work.”
“Is that reasonable?” Toyama Akira, who had never experienced a 996 work schedule but had been beaten half to death by yesterday’s overtime, could barely resist throwing up his hands. “One person doing that much work?”
The man beneath him had apparently become much more obedient after that earlier scare. He lowered his voice and mumbled,
“…But Gojo Satoru is the strongest. There are many missions only he can complete…”
“Is that so?”
“What if we sent you?”
“We can’t beat them either.”
“Oh…” Toyama Akira restrained the urge to press the blade down farther. “Then why are you still alive if you’re so useless? I know when to die. Why don’t you have the same self-awareness?”
The man beneath him swallowed hard. “If we die, the mission schedules, payroll calculations, and window supervision will all fall into chaos…”
At that, Toyama Akira smiled. “Do administrative and logistical operations really need this many people? It’s the twenty-first century. Do you higher-ups still not know how to purchase an information system for logistics management? And can’t AI replace you? Can’t cursed corpses help?”
So this was what happened when someone became furious enough to laugh. Toyama Akira naturally laughed in anger, narrowing his eyes as he lightly swept the blade diagonally across. Just as the blood was about to spatter his fingers, space instantly unfolded across the blade’s surface and blocked it. “Am I asking you to reform the system?”
“If you can’t do it, do you think I’ll let you go?”
The man beneath him groaned and cried out in pain for quite some time. Toyama Akira was afraid he might grab him in his agony, so he had his space obediently bind him first. He had only shaved off a layer of skin. He had no idea what the man was crying about. Fushiguro-kun had slammed into several buildings during a mission before finally coming to a stop, and he had not made nearly this much noise.
Still, Toyama Akira patiently waited for him to calm down. After exactly two seconds of patience, he brought the blade back across.
“…Cough, cough… You can have the window strengthen its cursed-spirit monitoring and improve the accuracy of cursed-spirit predictions. From now on, only assign special grade cursed spirits to Gojo Satoru…”
Toyama Akira patted the man’s face with the back of the blade. “Please continue, sir. It’s far too late to start writing your performance report now. And you address Gojo Satoru the same way I do? Don’t your reports include titles and honorifics?”
“Cough, cough… Gojo…”
The man spat out a mouthful of blood. His hoarse voice dragged on, as though he were hesitating.
Toyama Akira remained expressionless. “You’re not even willing to call him godfather.”
The man: …?
“I’m sorry. Please ignore me.”
By the time the man truly ignored Toyama Akira and continued blankly thinking about how to address Gojo Satoru, Toyama Akira could not hold back anymore.
…
“People who can’t take a joke really are idiots.”
Afterward, Toyama Akira made the old orange think of solutions on his own.
The most he could do was improve the mission response time and filter out the smaller missions Gojo Satoru did not need to handle. But…
But that did not solve the fundamental problem. The jujutsu world had a severe shortage of capable personnel, and there were not many sorcerers who could handle grade 1 cursed spirits. In fact, below the special grade sorcerers, there was practically a complete gap. The only hope for the next generation lay with the underage students at Jujutsu High who had yet to mature.
“Jujutsu sorcerers have always been short on geniuses…” the man weakly concluded in the end. Toyama Akira, who had been thinking, shifted his pupils and cast a dark look at him. “Is that something I’m supposed to care about, sir?”
“That’s your job to handle. Complaining to me only demonstrates your incompetence. I’m already trying very hard not to eliminate you first. Please show at least a little usefulness.”
“Besides, as far as I know, you’ve eliminated quite a few geniuses yourselves, haven’t you? Take the heavenly restriction from more than a decade ago. Give him a cursed tool, and his cursed-spirit exorcism output should have far exceeded yours. More recently, Hakari Kinji, whose abilities far surpassed yours, was driven away by you too.”
“It’s strange. Useless people driving away useful ones.”
Toyama Akira slowly twisted the head of the man in his grasp. In the man’s terrified, constricted pupils, he saw his own calm face.
“I hadn’t intended to meddle in any of this. This world already looks rotten enough, as if it’s about to reach the kind of apocalypse you see in a horror movie. Whether it has order or not doesn’t matter. I never thought this world, or I, had much of a bright future anyway.”
“But do you know something?”
“Do you know what the scariest thing in a horror movie is?”
The man seemed to anticipate what was coming and trembled with his lips pressed shut. Toyama Akira’s dark gaze did not look as though it could hear a word anyone said. His head was filled with strange buzzing that surged like a tide. The sounds seemed almost tangible, cold and sticky, dragging his consciousness up and down in a slow, heavy rhythm like waves.
“It’s the stupid teammates who have no idea a horror is about to begin, yet still insist on dragging everyone else down.”
Toyama Akira sighed. Simply imagining a future in which these people dragged him down into some terrifying fate made his fingers tremble.
His empty hand shook as it slipped into his pocket and switched off the recorder.
Then he smiled.
“Do you know why those few times you deliberately raised your voice didn’t attract the attention of your guards?”
“Welcome to my space.”
“You’re the first person to come here…”
Toyama Akira smiled in relief.
“Dead.”
Although Toyama Akira hated trouble, his original plan had been to kill the first one as an example, record the conversation, and then go to the rest of them, play the recording to threaten them, and establish binding vows to bring them under his control.
But while talking with the first old orange, he had noticed the altered voice despite being so tired and dazed. He had still left behind too many verbal mannerisms. That was not good.
Unfortunately, Toyama Akira could not think of what kind of speech pattern he should imitate, or how he should adjust his voice with cursed energy.
He definitely could not let headquarters continue rotting away. Whether they were rotten or not did not matter to him, as long as the rot did not spread to him. So Toyama Akira still intended to involve himself in the power struggle.
That was why he absolutely could not kill all 27 people today. He needed to leave some alive as hidden agents, then slowly expand his influence through the cascading effect of information. He did not need to change too much. He only needed to accomplish two things:
1. He and Gojo Satoru would live a life where they flexibly started work at 12 noon and flexibly finished at 13 in the afternoon.
2. Aside from him and Gojo Satoru, no one else would be allowed to live that way.
However, by the time Toyama Akira had eliminated 26 people, he still had not found a suitable persona to imitate.
Even the name required careful thought. He had already used Kondo Kure and could not use it again. If he used the appearance of a boy, people might easily make the connection. He could hide himself inside his own space, leaving only a transmitter outside to speak for him like an invisible person.
But what kind of persona should he imitate…?
As Toyama Akira walked toward the home of the last old orange, he kept thinking. His thoughts went from the people at Jujutsu High to the old oranges he had found in the database, and finally to someone he had deliberately investigated before.
When he leisurely teleported to the door, he immediately bumped into the bedroom doorframe and covered his head. From inside came the final surviving higher-up’s wary shout:
“Who is it?!”
Toyama Akira seemed to think of something, and his eyes gradually lit up.
Just as he had planned, he hid himself inside space and concealed himself, leaving only a transmitter hidden outside.
The instant the door opened, a familiar laugh came through the transmitter.
Warm, amused, and seemingly always composed.
“A pleasure to meet you, Kenjaku.”
“Has no one in this era heard my name anymore…? You’re holding your head too high…”
Toyama Akira: …
He had a feeling he had mixed up the character a little.
But once you were cosplaying someone, being out of character was perfectly normal too, right?