I Don’t Understand It, but It’s Hard to Respect It Either
Even after Gojo Satoru and the others explained to the boy that this was Okkotsu Yuta’s contracted cursed spirit, Toyama Akira still couldn’t stand up.
He didn’t quite dare raise his head. The cursed spirit looming above him looked large enough to support the entire classroom. It was completely inhuman, and its teeth were terrifyingly sharp. Each tooth was as big as his face, as if it could swallow ten of him in one bite. The cold, sinister air seemed to blow straight at him at full force, like the chill wind that would whip through a horror movie protagonist’s face as they explored a basement in the dead of night.
God, was he about to die?
Death would be fine. Toyama Akira simply couldn’t keep his heart from pounding, every beat feeling like it was leaping straight off a cliff.
Stop scaring him! He felt as if the sinister wind was about to blow his soul right out of his body.
The boy only just managed to recover enough of his sense of responsibility to respond to his teacher and new classmates’ questions.
“……I’m……I’m fine. It’s just cooler sitting on the floor……”
God, why couldn’t he see clearly anymore?
Toyama Akira forced his eyes wide open, only for the corner of his vision to catch another glimpse of the grayish-white, razor-sharp teeth right beside him. He instantly squeezed his eyes shut again.
Gojo Satoru had no idea how the boy managed it. Even with cold sweat streaming down his face and his eyes closed, he still found Gojo’s exact position and reached out to him. When Gojo instinctively extended a hand to help him up…
The boy took the sunglasses off his face.
Gojo Satoru: ……
With extraordinary naturalness, and with the grim determination of someone going to his death, the boy put Gojo Satoru’s sunglasses on his own face. Only then did he dare open his eyes a tiny bit.
With his back to Okkotsu Yuta, Toyama Akira staggered to his feet, rubbing against the floor as he rose. At the same time, he managed to dredge a little reason back from his runaway brain and explained distractedly, “Okkotsu-kun, I’m sorry…… It’s not that I have anything against you.”
“Your, your……cursed spirit miss is very nice too.”
God, he felt the cold wind beside him grow even more violent as soon as those words left his mouth, as if the cursed spirit had suddenly pressed its enormous head against his side and was staring at him with those inhuman eyes.
Toyama Akira closed his eyes and steadied his trembling legs.
“I’m just too much of a coward. That’s my problem…… It has nothing to do with you.”
“I’m……I’m glad to meet you.”
With his back still turned, the boy extended a friendly hand toward Okkotsu Yuta.
Gojo Satoru: ……
Wasn’t back-to-back hugging the only thing he’d heard of? Since when was there back-to-back handshaking?
Oh, Yuta shook it.
Why did he look so moved?!
Zen’in Maki’s expression gradually changed from [He looks so strong, so why is he kneeling?] to [Oh, but he’s pretty good with words. He knows how to comfort people even while kneeling himself.] Her gaze became increasingly appreciative, with just a trace of the wistfulness one might feel watching the protagonist of a movie walk into the sunlight at the end.
Okkotsu Yuta’s eyes flickered, and his lashes trembled violently. After a moment of stunned silence, he carefully took the hand the boy had extended behind his back. “I’m glad to meet you too……Toyama-san. I’ll have Rika go back first.”
Even Panda, who had arrived with Okkotsu just moments ago, was now standing beside Gojo Satoru, drawing out his words in admiration. “What a good kid.”
Gojo Satoru, watching the scene unfold: ……
No, seriously.
He’d had his sunglasses taken away, so he really didn’t understand what everyone was getting so emotional about.
Now that the boy was officially enrolled, Gojo Satoru kicked him into the Jujutsu High dormitory.
Toyama Akira wasn’t suffering from any baby-bird dependence on Gojo Satoru, nor was he insisting that an adult accompany him before he could feel safe. Instead…
The boy’s fingers dug fiercely into the doorframe, leaving marks deep in the wood. Gojo Satoru tried several times to pry them loose, but couldn’t. When he tried to kick the black-haired boy inside, the boy even knew to use his heterogeneous space to block Gojo’s incoming foot.
Refusing to enter, the boy looked up with an utterly clear and innocent expression. “Gojo-sensei really won’t live with me?”
“That’s right.”
This little brat. Had he mistaken Gojo for some kind of male mommy? Why was he so clingy?
After being refused, the boy looked up again, hesitant and pleading.
“Then is there anyone stronger than Gojo-sensei, um, or, well, about as strong as Gojo-sensei, who can live with me?”
“……”
The corners of Gojo Satoru’s mouth, which had just lifted helplessly, immediately flattened. Cursed energy surged forth, bypassed the space between them, and blasted the boy into the dormitory, embedding him in the wall.
“No one.”
Gojo Satoru turned to leave. Then, still too angry to let it go, he came back, grabbed the doorframe, and pulverized half of it into dust. “Besides, there’s only one strongest, and it’s me!!”
Gojo Satoru turned and left.
So he’d been treating him like a bodyguard!!
“He’s so temperamental…”
Embedded in the wall, the boy shook the plaster dust from his hands. He looked nervously at the wall behind him, patted it, and only let out a breath once he had confirmed it could still bear weight.
“Whatever. At least he’s human…”
The next morning, when Gojo Satoru went to wake Toyama Akira, he found the boy suspended in midair in a peculiar position.
Gojo Satoru: ……
Okkotsu and Panda, following behind him, seemed to assume the boy had been attacked. With Okkotsu in the lead, they hurried forward to “rescue” him, only to…
Just as they were about to grab the boy, something invisible blocked them.
Gojo Satoru: ……
Okkotsu frowned and tried from above, below, the left, the right, and every direction imaginable, only to discover that he couldn’t touch the boy at all.
The boy seemed to be enclosed in some invisible space.
If Gojo Satoru could hear Okkotsu’s thoughts, he would definitely have told him he was right.
Gojo Satoru hadn’t expected this guy to wrap himself in that heterogeneous space of his, all for the sake of…
Apparently finally awakened by Okkotsu’s commotion, the boy slowly opened his eyes. His unfocused gray-green gaze took a while to settle, and then Toyama Akira spotted Gojo Satoru from a distance and couldn’t help showing off. “Look, Sensei!”
“I made a high-end mosquito net!!”
Gojo Satoru: ……
This was exactly why he was speechless, damn it!
……
Toyama Akira really was afraid of insects.
Then again, for a coward like him to have a fear of insects was only natural…
The moment he heard that Jujutsu High was located on a mountain, the boy was already in a bad way. Black spiders weaving webs between the branches flashed through his mind, along with green mantises perched on leaves and red cockroaches that might crawl out of some rotten floorboard.
Toyama Akira: ……
Could he choose death instead of going to Jujutsu High?
Just as he naturally dropped to his knees and reached out to hug the white-haired young teacher’s leg to beg for mercy, the strongest teacher proved himself worthy of the title. Somehow, he moved even faster than the boy using his teleportation technique. His hand blurred into afterimages, and in the pose of a benevolent emperor telling a kneeling subject, [Rise, my subject], he caught the boy before his knees hit the ground.
Toyama Akira: ……
Gojo Satoru smiled gently. “If you dare refuse, I’ll take you for a stroll around the cursed-spirit-infested back mountain where we train.”
Toyama Akira: ……
Though this was more or less what he had expected, Toyama Akira wasn’t too disappointed. He merely retreated to his second choice and hinted hesitantly, “Then……ahem, since Gojo-sensei is so strong, is there anything that can protect the safety of my residence? I mean, something like an evil-averting talisman…”
Toyama Akira still had no idea how strong Gojo Satoru’s claim to being the strongest really was. He simply used the gentlest voice he had ever possessed, with the ingratiating, downcast tone of a student who hadn’t done his homework over the holidays and happened to run into his teacher at an arcade.
Gojo Satoru, however, had no idea what comparison was running through the boy’s mind. Compared with the headache-inducing state he had been in earlier, the boy’s current behavior gave Gojo a rare, soothing sense of relief. Seeing him lower his head and ask timidly and obediently even made Gojo imagine a black-and-white border collie with its head perpetually bowed, rather than a black-and-white husky.
“Sure.”
Gojo Satoru smiled as the boy immediately looked up, his eyes shining with sincere anticipation.
Then he casually pulled open a drawer in his bedside table and tossed out a roll of something. Wow, it was as long as the bed. It was a life-size, 1.9-meter poster.
Toyama Akira’s brain wavered between, “Huh? Would a normal person really stuff life-size posters of himself into his bedside table?” and, “As expected of a jujutsu sorcerer. So this is what talismans are like. The bigger the talisman, the stronger its effect, right?”
Though he used the latter thought to reassure himself, Toyama Akira still retained enough common sense to regard the poster, which was taller than he was when spread out, with polite suspicion.
“So this will…”
Avert evil?
But before the boy could finish, Gojo Satoru said, “Oh.”
“I forgot to draw the talisman on it.”
Gojo then brought two fingers together and used his cursed technique to pull a gold marker out of the bedside table. Would a normal person really keep a gold marker in their bedside table? He stylishly caught it between his fingers, stylishly flicked off the cap, stylishly leaned in, and finally stylishly signed his name along the bottom of the poster.
[Gojo Satoru]
The name glittered gold.
Toyama Akira: ……Wow.
The boy would sooner think, “So talismans can be drawn with an ordinary marker,” than suspect that his teacher was conning him.
However, seeing the boy still staring at the poster, the white-haired young man stylishly flicked back his bangs, apparently misunderstanding something.
“Tch.”
“You want it signed to you too?”
“How greedy.”
……
After they “rescued” the black-haired boy from the air, Okkotsu Yuta, Zen’in Maki, and the other Jujutsu High students finally noticed the life-size poster opposite the boy’s bed.
Everyone stared at the poster of their teacher, too large to fit on a single wall, posing flamboyantly while writing [Above and below heaven, I alone am honored] in gold marker, with the inscription Gojo Satoru, signed to Toyama Akira, and fell silent.
Everyone: ……
Toyama Akira: ……?
Toyama Akira suddenly understood.
They must be worried that leaving the talisman exposed like this would damage it and weaken its effect.
He hurriedly explained, “I ordered an acrylic case for it. I’ll store it in there once it arrives. It’s just that, because it’s so large, it’ll take a while to be delivered.”
Toyama Akira saw the ellipses in the expressions of his new classmates somehow gain six more dots.
They looked at him with expressions that were impossible to describe, as if they were filled with regret, pity, and disbelief all at once.
Toyama Akira, however, turned to his teacher in confusion.
The white-haired teacher’s mouth had curved into a “w.” He looked quite pleased.
The people at Jujutsu High regarded Toyama Akira’s decision to place a life-size poster of his teacher opposite his bed with solemn respect, though they didn’t understand it.
Although the guy didn’t sleep in the bed and instead chose to float in midair, so he probably wasn’t facing the poster at night……
All right, they had to respect that while not understanding it either.
Come to think of it, this kind of incomprehensible, unhinged energy was actually rather similar to Gojo Satoru’s…
The students at Jujutsu High couldn’t understand Toyama Akira’s reverence and adoration for Gojo Satoru. What kind of person asked for a life-size poster of that flamboyant teacher and requested it be signed to him?
All they could guess was that perhaps both of them possessed a state of mind so far ahead of their time that they felt a deeper kinship with each other?
Gradually understanding everything…
They understood absolutely nothing.
In the end, everyone simply asked him directly.
“Toyama-kun……do you like Gojo-sensei very much?”
It was Okkotsu Yuta who spoke. The honest black-haired boy had received a series of hints from his classmates before being pushed forward.
Toyama Akira’s brain stalled for a moment at the inexplicable question.
But he quickly worked out the logic.
He didn’t feel anything special toward Gojo Satoru.
But!
Gojo Satoru was a rare kind of human being. He wasn’t an insect or a cursed spirit, he didn’t look frightening, and he wouldn’t kill Akira.
“I suppose I do.”
The boy thought it over, then answered with a smile.
Gojo Satoru, meanwhile, was strolling along behind his students with a bag of potato chips he had appropriated from the boy’s room. He opened it and tossed chips into his mouth as he walked.
He had just reached the students when he heard that exchange. Although he knew the real reason behind the poster incident and had no intention of explaining it, he couldn’t help raising the corners of his mouth at the boy’s answer.
Well, this brat could be quite pleasing in some ways after all.
“I like anyone who’s human.”
The boy finished thinking and answered honestly.
Not a chance!!
Toyama Akira had only just taken one step forward when a bag of potato chips smacked him in the head.
He caught it in a daze before it could roll away. When he took it down, he discovered that it was already half-eaten. Come to think of it, didn’t it look a little like the bag he had bought last night?
Toyama Akira turned around in confusion, only to see his teacher looking absolutely murderous.
“What are you looking at?”
“You’ve got time to chat? Looks like we haven’t been training you enough.”
“Everyone, to the training grounds!”
Toyama Akira: ……
Toyama Akira watched as his teacher’s expression changed from satisfied to extremely dissatisfied.
Silently, he added [Moody] after the label [Temperamental].
Still.
Toyama Akira thought magnanimously.
At least he was human.