Clearly Overpowered Yet Excessively…
“Training ground?”
Toyama Akira watched everyone follow Gojo Satoru, who strode ahead with his long legs and an air that said he cared for no one, then silently edged closer to Zen’in Maki, the nearest person. “What’s a training ground?”
Then he saw the decisive, capable girl who had given him such a brutal welcome on his first day of school. Her face was solemn, and even beads of cold sweat had appeared on her forehead as she tightened her grip on her cursed tool. Still, she opened her mouth to explain to Toyama Akira, though her voice sounded dry, as if she were speaking through clenched teeth.
“It’s… where Gojo-sensei usually trains us.”
“…Pickled mustard greens.”
Toyama Akira turned around and saw that it was a classmate who had only just returned to Jujutsu High after completing a mission today, a white-haired boy with his collar pulled up over his mouth. Akira had not seen him yesterday. According to Zen’in Maki’s introduction just now, he seemed to be a boy with a cursed speech technique. His name was Inumaki Toge.
Toyama Akira had already greeted him, so when he heard the words that drifted over from the boy’s mouth, cold sweat broke out on him as well.
“That sounds dangerous.”
Zen’in Maki, standing beside him: ……
“Mentaiko!”
“…That really does sound dangerous.”
Zen’in Maki: ……
Wait, how did he understand that?
Zen’in Maki was baffled.
Zen’in Maki was bewildered.
But before long, Zen’in Maki came to terms with it.
Inumaki also got along with Gojo Satoru.
Anyone who could get along with Gojo Satoru was cut from the same cloth.
……
After hearing Inumaki Toge’s words, Toyama Akira grew tense as well. He clenched his fists and discovered that his palms were slick with cold sweat, while his calves had begun to tremble. He forced his voice not to shake as he asked, “…Are there cursed spirits?”
Zen’in Maki glanced at him. “No.”
Then she explained properly, “It’s actually just Gojo-sensei fighting us, training us in hand-to-hand combat. It’s just that he…”
Zen’in Maki had not finished speaking when she was interrupted again.
The boy let out a long breath and patted his chest flat. He broke into a pale smile, instinctively relieved to have survived a disaster.
“If it’s Gojo-sensei, then that’s fine.”
Zen’in Maki: ……
No.
Sure enough, everyone who got along with Gojo Satoru was seriously messed up!
Once Toyama Akira learned that he would not have to face those inhuman, terrifying creatures, he felt considerably more at ease.
It was only a fight with Gojo Satoru. At worst, he would get beaten up a little. It should not be a big deal, right…
……
Five minutes later, Toyama Akira was darting all over the training ground. In the end, he latched onto a beam in the ceiling and refused to come down, no matter what.
“Come down, Akira.”
“No…” The boy clung tightly to the pillar, trembling so hard that his fingers had gone white. “You come up, sensei!”
“Come down, Akira…”
“It’s fine. Respect your elders and cherish the young. You come up first, sensei…”
The white-haired teacher below him kept both hands in his pockets and said cheerfully, “Come down already, Akira…”
“Cockroach cursed spirits can fly really high, you know…”
And besides…
Toyama Akira did not even have time to look at Gojo Satoru before, prompted by Gojo’s warning, he turned his head and then saw the deep-red form of the cockroach cursed spirit fill almost his entire field of vision as it charged straight at him. His hands and feet went cold in an instant, and he felt as though his soul had left his body.
It’s so fast, aaaaaah!
What kind of teacher was this…
“Weren’t you supposed to fight me, Gojo-sensei?”
Toyama Akira fled and teleported for his life, screaming at the top of his lungs.
“You can’t just ignore the rules of fair play!”
Waaah! Don’t open your mouth, the little cockroaches can fly into it too, aaaaaah!
Are those serrations on their legs, or what? Even the hairs on them are longer than his fingers, aaaaaah!
Toyama Akira felt like dying. But he thought someone else deserved to die more.
Even so, Toyama Akira really did not dare die. He was afraid that if he stopped to kill himself, the cockroaches would slam into him before he had the chance.
“My technique should be able to kill me instantly.” Toyama Akira muttered with his eyes shut, but he did not dare keep them closed for long, because…
He opened his eyes. The enormous compound eye of the insect had already appeared right in front of him.
So red.
So big.
So…
He really wanted to die.
Holy crap, there are so many legs, aaaaaah! And there are those damn serrations on them!
Aaaaaah, God, what kind of person can fight a cursed spirit like this, aaaaaah!
Toyama Akira tried several times to charge toward Gojo Satoru.
One moment, he was thinking, [Teacher, I’m weak, please save me].
The next, he was thinking, [Never mind, you don’t have to save me. Then die with me, teacher, aaaaaah].
Gojo Satoru, however, was not afraid of cursed spirits, nor was he afraid of insects. He was far more practiced at controlling his cursed technique than Toyama Akira was.
As a result, he easily dodged the boy charging at him headfirst.
Gojo Satoru: ……
Finally.
Gojo Satoru could not help smiling in relief. The skill he had honed over the past few days, dodging attempts to hug his legs, had finally become second nature.
He watched the boy’s black hair fly into disarray, watched the gray-green eyes that only surfaced occasionally blaze with anxiety and panic to their utmost intensity, and slowly let his smile fade.
His voice sank.
“Exorcise the cursed spirits, Akira.”
Gojo Satoru lowered his sunglasses. His blue eyes focused seriously on the boy’s frantic yet incredibly swift figure.
“You can’t keep running forever.”
But the boy, entirely consumed by fear, could not hear a word he said.
Gojo Satoru pressed his lips together again, then pushed his sunglasses back up the bridge of his nose.
His brows and eyes were hidden behind the square frames, making his expression impossible to read.
“After this, I’ll put even more cockroach cursed spirits inside. If you don’t exorcise a single one, the cursed spirits in here will only keep multiplying. Even if you have your teleportation technique to run away, the space you can escape to will keep shrinking. You’ll definitely…”
Toyama Akira’s consciousness had nearly left him. He was running on instinct alone.
Letting intuition and instinct drive his brain seemed to allow the part of his consciousness that had curled up and trembled in terror to hide away.
But when Gojo Satoru said [I’ll put in more cursed spirits], his unfocused gray-green pupils suddenly contracted and darkened.
[Bzz……. bzz……]
By the time Gojo Satoru’s next words fell,
“You’ll definitely…”
He could not take it anymore…
“…touch the bodies of the cockroach cursed spirits.”
Cockroaches?
Cursed spirits?
No…
His pupils instantly narrowed into vertical slits.
[Bzz…… fear level: 15%]
Gojo Satoru saw the boy stop. Although Akira’s head hung low, making his expression impossible to see, at least it looked as though he was no longer planning to keep running.
Gojo secretly let out a sigh of relief, then began guiding him according to the boy’s temperament.
As though he were casting some kind of bewitching spell.
“Listen to me.”
“Akira. I’m the strongest. You can trust me.”
Trust.
The sound of the cockroaches’ wings drew closer.
“You can only gain true *safety* by destroying what you fear.”
Bewitchment.
The disgusting, icy sensation had not actually appeared on his skin, yet the cold wind passing over him made the boy feel as though he had already sensed it.
[fear level 37%. Consume?]
Toyama Akira looked up in an instant.
The narrow eyes that were usually hidden behind his thick black bangs opened completely.
His gray-green pupils contracted into vertical slits, taking in every detail of the scene through a full 360-degree field of view and feeding it back to his brain without a blind spot.
Everything that frightened him, every clear image and every objectively existing thing, was abstracted away.
There was no cursed spirit shaped like a grotesquely huge cockroach. No humans. No beams.
For an instant, the world in his eyes seemed to plunge into darkness. Three-dimensional coordinates appeared within it.
The nearest cursed spirit was 18.95 meters away in a straight spatial line, and would arrive in 1.57 seconds.
There were 17 cursed spirits in total. Their coordinates were as follows, measured in meters with him as the origin:
[17.5, 24.8, 90.7]
[16.7, 23.2, 10.6]
[……]
In short… they all had to be eliminated within one second.
The shortest route should be…
The order of the network nodes was…
The preset path coefficient was…
Path preset successful.
Everyone watched as the boy stood silently in place.
Behind him, the antennae of a cockroach cursed spirit were about to touch his back.
Everyone drew in a breath.
It was not that they themselves were afraid of a cursed spirit like this. They had all been on many missions, and cursed spirits came in all sorts of bizarre shapes. Insects were actually among the more ordinary types.
It was just that they had only recently met him, and everyone had already gotten a sense of how timid the boy was. They could imagine how badly he would break down if a cursed spirit like this really touched him.
Especially the few who had entered the boy’s dorm room that morning and seen what he was capable of doing to avoid an ordinary insect.
So breaths were drawn one after another.
Panda even instinctively shut his eyes and covered his glasses with his hands.
Zen’in Maki pressed her lips together. Although she knew this was deliberate training by Gojo-sensei, she was still prepared to “save” the boy, or at least catch him if he fainted in midair and fell.
But…
In an instant.
An instant that seemed to last no longer than a breath.
Every sound vanished.
The buzzing of the cursed spirits’ wings, the terrifying noises resonating from their mouthparts and thoraxes…
In an instant…
It was as though they had all disappeared at the same time.
Only the wind could be heard rushing past their ears.
When they opened their eyes, they could see only a streak of golden light, barely enough to make out a blur. It seemed to have swept across the room once, or perhaps several times. It might even have been several streaks of light.
But none of it could be seen clearly.
It was too fast. Only flashes of light appeared, then shattered into wind.
All they could see was that the cursed spirits scattered throughout the room seemed to have been pierced by something simultaneously.
Then…
They exploded all at once.
Amid the shower of cursed energy surging and spraying through the air, the pale, fragile-looking boy landed directly in front of Gojo Satoru.
The white-haired teacher smiled and was just about to say something.
The boy suddenly thrust one hand behind him.
The cursed spirit Gojo had specially arranged to launch a final sneak attack had barely emerged before space pierced through it.
Not bad.
His combat instincts looked top-notch, too.
Gojo Satoru could not help curling his lips upward.
But when he saw that the boy’s pupils were still unfocused, his gray-green eyes like a green sea rippling outward, he felt that something was wrong.
Hm?
No.
“Akira?”
“Are you all right?”
[fear level has been reset to zero.]
With a thud, the boy dropped smoothly to his knees.
Through his ears, which were still ringing, Gojo Satoru’s voice reached him faintly.
What was he saying?
Oh. It sounded like he was worried.
It was fine. Nothing was wrong.
Everything was fine now.
Nothing mattered anymore.
So the boy raised a hand that trembled as though he were having a seizure, capable of shaking ten spoonfuls of food off a serving counter in the cafeteria, and waved it shakily. His face was as pale as a vampire’s as he lifted it to reassure his teacher.
“I’m fine.”
He thought: He would not remember…
Holy fuuuuuck, it had been less than a centimeter away. No, definitely less than a centimeter. That cockroach had been about to touch him. He felt filthy all over.
He was fine. He was just…
“Don’t worry, Gojo-sensei.”
“I’m going to die for a little while.”
After saying that, the boy immediately pitched forward, folded both hands over his stomach, and peacefully slammed his forehead into the floor with a thump.
Gojo Satoru, who had just been about to help him up: ……
He pretended it was nothing and withdrew the hand that had grasped at empty air.
“…Youth really is wonderful.”
He said he was going to die, and then he died.