Antarctic Expedition Underway
After that, Fushiguro Megumi exchanged a few more blows with Toyama Akira.
It really was only [a few blows]. Seeing that this timid-looking senior, who seemed to be suffused with a faint aura of death, possessed such an impressive cursed technique, Fushiguro developed a bit of fighting spirit as well. He brought out his real ability and fought the boy. And then…
When Divine Dog first appeared, the boy was holding back tears.
When a mountain of rabbits, a sea of rabbits, a horde of empty-eyed, deathly silent island rabbits was summoned, the boy tore the cuffs of his shirt.
When Toad (□□) was summoned, the boy nearly bit through his lower lip, yet the tears were still spinning in his eyes.
When Great Serpent was finally summoned, the boy’s tears at last spilled over. His face was covered in tears.
For some reason, when the boy finally started crying, both Fushiguro Megumi and the boy relaxed at the same time.
Toyama Akira had finally figured it out. He didn’t need to keep putting himself through misery just to save face. The fact that he could hold on without running away was already impressive enough, so why force himself to hold back his tears? He couldn’t hold them back in the first place!
As for Fushiguro Megumi, he had watched the boy’s tears hover on the verge of falling. From the moment his heart had tightened at the initial [?!], to the later […] and […When are those tears actually going to fall?], to finally seeing his shikigami instantly pierced through and destroyed while the boy stood there with tears streaming down his face, his feelings had become complicated. It was as though Lin Daiyu were weeping as she buried flowers while carrying a weeping willow over her shoulder and sweeping the roof off his house.
He had the overwhelming urge to shut his eyes tight.
Fushiguro Megumi knew the boy was genuinely afraid. No one would have such a vivid earthquake of the pupils and such full-body trembling every time a shikigami was about to touch them, only to vanish without a trace the next instant.
Fushiguro could also tell that the boy had absolutely no foundation in hand-to-hand combat. He relied entirely on being scared enough and cowardly enough. He relied completely on that surge of adrenaline brought on by being driven into a corner.
In theory, no one could be driven into a corner forever. No one’s adrenaline could stay maxed out forever.
But Toyama Akira could.
When Divine Dog approached, he saw the shikigami’s grim, wolf-like teeth and felt as if he were about to be bitten to death, suffocating as though he were truly there.
When Rabbit Escape approached, countless indescribable scenes from the Cthulhu mythos flashed through his mind without even touching him, scaring him into reciting bizarre prayers. This was why you shouldn’t ask Western gods to kill Eastern shikigami!
When Toad (□□) charged at the boy, Fushiguro Megumi was certain he hadn’t seen wrong. In the brief moments between teleporting away in panic, the boy had shown an expression of relieved, deathly stillness, as if preparing to slit his wrists.
Then, when he flashed back into view, he wore an expression of hesitation and restraint. The next time Fushiguro saw him, he had a blade pressed to his throat. A moment later, his expression was one of anguished indecision.
Fushiguro Megumi: …
Fushiguro Megumi did not understand what he was agonizing over.
Why not just turn around and use your technique to pierce the shikigami?!
By the later stages, Fushiguro Megumi had even begun to feel a little frustrated at the boy’s failure to live up to his potential, and wanted nothing more than to deal with his own shikigami for him.
But Fushiguro knew that only the boy, only someone with such a bizarre cursed technique, could pierce someone so quickly and without them sensing a thing.
And that technique could only be used by the boy.
Agility, suitable hand-to-hand skills, precise judgment… the boy had none of them.
What he did have was…
Watching the boy’s back as he finally stopped pretending altogether and wiped away his tears with his back turned to him,
Fushiguro Megumi thought silently. What he had was simply this: he was scared enough.
This was an entirely new field. If the boy ever went to a haunted house, the staff would probably suspect he was a plant.
Once the fight was over, Fushiguro Megumi hesitated, then decided he should still help the boy, whose shoulders were shaking, back to his feet. He knew the boy had surely been scared limp. But the moment he approached, he heard the boy muttering something again.
“Don’t…”
Hm?
“Don’t…”
Was he still afraid? Fushiguro Megumi rubbed his forehead helplessly. He had just sighed and was about to lift the boy by the armpits when he heard:
“[Don’t be so scared]”
Toyama Akira struggled to hold himself back. He could still hear the voice appearing in his mind.
[Fear level 35%]
[Use?]
[…]
[…]
[…No,]
[Use?]
[Don’t,]
The voice in his mind simply kept repeating:
[…Use?]
Toyama Akira desperately gathered up his scattered consciousness. In the instant before his pupils lost focus, he exhausted the last shred of his strength, suddenly scrambled upright, and shoved away the nearest person, Fushiguro Megumi. Then…
[Do not use.]
He fled.
[Use…?]
[Yes… no… yes, confirm use.]
“So you’re saying Toyama Akira went to Antarctica?”
Gojo Satoru was away on a mission.
To be honest, he had already felt a little uneasy leaving Toyama Akira alone at Jujutsu High. He had indeed been prepared to hear that something had happened to the boy on the second day after he left and be called back.
But he had only been gone for half a day!
Gojo Satoru looked at the van parked outside the mission site and began to suspect that Toyama Akira had timed his escape to coincide with the end of his mission.
After considering that for a while, he began to doubt his ears.
“You mean… Antarctica?”
After receiving Fushiguro Megumi’s confirmation from the other end of the phone, Gojo Satoru began to doubt his own brain.
“Antarctica…”
Gojo Satoru covered his mouth, lowered his hand, covered it again, then finally looked up at the sky at a forty-five-degree angle before looking down at the ground at negative forty-five degrees. “What is Antarctica…?”
Fushiguro Megumi: …
Another one’s gone mad.
Gojo Satoru hadn’t actually forgotten what [Antarctica] meant. He was wondering whether the Antarctica Fushiguro Megumi had mentioned was really the Antarctica he understood it to be.
What if there was a convenience store called Antarctica at the foot of the Jujutsu High mountain? What if there was a zoo called Antarctica? What if, heaven forbid, someone was actually named Antarctica?
However, after he offered up a series of wildly imaginative and utterly absurd guesses, his calm, black-haired adopted son merely shook his head coldly.
He rejected every single one of Gojo’s guesses and finally said:
“It’s the one you’re thinking of.”
Gojo Satoru: …
Gojo Satoru returned to Jujutsu High, precisely 4 hours, 37 minutes, and 57 seconds after leaving. One of the students he considered the most talented, most promising, and most unexpected among all geniuses had displayed his potential and, to everyone’s astonishment, actually gone to Antarctica.
After barely accepting this absurd piece of news, absurd enough to make him laugh in fury, Gojo Satoru managed to taste a trace of comfort within it.
Look, his student could escape all the way to Antarctica in one shot!
Could any of his other students do that?
And then…
“Ant…”
“Ant…”
“Uh, ant…”
With one hand braced beneath his chin and covering most of his mouth, Gojo Satoru struggled for quite some time before finally managing to string the halting syllables together smoothly.
“Ant…”
“No wonder he collected so many Antarctic expedition tour flyers! He saw this coming all along, that little bastard!”
Fushiguro Megumi had also placed his hands on the table. When Gojo Satoru slammed his hand down and shattered it, Fushiguro was suddenly left with nothing to support himself on: …
Yes. Those Antarctic expedition tour flyers had been the clue that the boy had teleported to Antarctica.
There was hardly any furniture in the boy’s room. This was not because he believed in minimalism. He simply thought that the more furniture there was, the more places there would be for bugs to nest. Since this was someone who could wrap himself in space and sleep suspended in midair, it was perfectly normal for his room to be full of nothing but air.
Still, there were a few things in Toyama Akira’s room. Two things, more than anything else.
One was a large assortment of Gojo Satoru merchandise, including posters, acrylic standees, life-size cutouts, and so on, which Gojo Satoru had conned him into believing could ward off evil.
When Gojo Satoru entered the boy’s room and saw all that merchandise, he naturally pushed up his sunglasses and turned his head away, avoiding the silent, contemptuous gaze Fushiguro Megumi shot at him.
The other…
Was something that could rival Gojo Satoru’s merchandise in quantity: Antarctic expedition merchandise… No, flyers.
“He put my merchandise together with this stuff?! What terrible taste!”
Fushiguro Megumi calmly pulled his bristling teacher out of his way and said politely, “You’re blocking the path.”
Gojo Satoru, now out of the way: …
Only after the spiky-haired boy walked to the front did he get a clear look at the flyers Gojo Satoru had been pointing at.
Unlike the pile of Gojo Satoru merchandise, which had been carefully protected in dust covers, acrylic frames, and the like, these flyers were visibly worn. They had simply been left out in the open, looking as though they were often picked up and handled. There were even numerous notes written on them.
Fushiguro Megumi: …
Fushiguro Megumi unconsciously sighed. “This is the difference between the white moonlight and the bloodstain of a discarded mosquito.”
Gojo Satoru was just about to curl his lips upward.
“No, this is the difference between virtual love and real love.”
…Gojo Satoru’s smile instantly fell.
Fushiguro Megumi’s gaze swept over the Gojo standee placed backward inside its dust cover, then shifted to the carefully annotated flyers in his hand.
Gojo Satoru’s eyes followed Fushiguro Megumi’s gaze to the items.
Gojo Satoru: …
So love really could disappear?
“So you had the window pull up the nearby surveillance footage, discovered that the last place the boy appeared was a travel agency, and concluded that Toyama had escaped to Antarctica?”
“Not only that.” Fushiguro Megumi knitted his brows and shook his head calmly. Then he picked up the stack of flyers on the table, which required both hands just to lift, and shook it. “One flyer is missing. Toyama-san must have come back before he left and taken one of them.”
Gojo Satoru looked at the pile of flyers that Fushiguro Megumi could not even pick up completely with both hands and fell silent. “…How did you tell that one was missing?”
“Toyama-san numbered them. There were 251 in total, and the first one is missing. Number one.”
Gojo Satoru: …
How should he put it? He was increasingly convinced that the guy had done it on purpose.
Although he knew Toyama would not deliberately cause trouble over something like this, it was just…
It looked so unintentionally deliberate!
Gojo Satoru and Fushiguro Megumi compared notes and reconstructed Toyama Akira’s possible escape route.
After Toyama Akira and Fushiguro Megumi finished fighting, the boy had suddenly vanished just as Fushiguro was about to help him up. He had been muttering strange things before disappearing, but the boy was strange under normal circumstances anyway, so Fushiguro hadn’t paid much attention at first.
He had assumed that some patch of air with a particularly unpleasant molecular weight had scared the senior again, and that the boy would probably come running back after a while, pretending nothing had happened. So he had waited nearby. When nearly an hour had passed without Toyama Akira appearing, Fushiguro finally sensed that something was wrong. He searched the entire school but found no sign of the boy. Only then did he realize a problem:
The boy’s technique allowed him to remain indefinitely in spaces no one could see as long as he kept teleporting.
If he truly activated it without restraint,
then no one would be able to find him.
Here, praise was due to Fushiguro Megumi, the mature, experienced child laborer. After considering this disastrous possibility, Fushiguro did not panic. Instead, he quickly forced himself to calm down.
From his previous fight with Toyama Akira, he had more or less figured out that the boy’s hamster-running-wheel-like teleportation technique had two fatal problems.
One was that the boy needed to [see] the route. He had to see what lay ahead and pre-plot the route in his mind before he could teleport, so he could not simply teleport to some distant location. He had to keep appearing along the way, [seeing], [sensing], [remembering], and [pre-plotting] the spatial route before he could continue teleporting.
The other was that uninterrupted teleportation was like running on a treadmill. The boy would certainly get tired. Though that might not be particularly important to him, because whenever he got scared, he stopped looking like a human being altogether. Fushiguro Megumi was beginning to wonder whether he could even perceive something as normal and human as [tiredness].
That was what Fushiguro Megumi, awed by the boy’s astonishing adrenaline, thought.
Therefore, after determining the characteristics of Toyama Akira’s technique, Fushiguro immediately accessed Jujutsu High’s surveillance footage. Once he confirmed the approximate direction in which the boy had teleported after his final appearance, he narrowed it down to several neighborhoods and immediately used the mission as justification to have the window pull up surveillance footage from those areas. And then…
“I saw that the last place Toyama-san appeared was a travel agency that did, in fact, offer Antarctic tours. If I’m not mistaken, it’s the travel agency on the flyer Toyama-san numbered [1].”
“The original flyer appeared to have been taken by Toyama-san. I went to the travel agency afterward and got another one.”
After finishing his explanation, the black-haired boy across from him took a flyer out of his bag and handed it to Gojo Satoru.
Gojo Satoru looked at the black-haired boy who had completed the entire investigation in just a few hours: …
He felt as though light were shining.
Then he thought of another missing black-haired boy.
Gojo Satoru: …
He felt darkness descend.
“What you said is certainly feasible.” Gojo Satoru had looked over the flyer and listened to Fushiguro’s account of how Toyama Akira had used that teleportation technique during their previous fight.
“Akira’s always had an excellent sense of space. Though rather than saying he was born with a good spatial sense, it’s more accurate to say that he knew he would need to run away, so he worked very hard to memorize those pre-plotted [escape] routes.”
“So look. From Jujutsu High to the point where he left Tokyo, your surveillance only caught him twice. What does that tell you?”
Gojo Satoru crossed his legs. When he was about to place the flyer Fushiguro had given him on the table, he discovered that he had shattered the table himself. He therefore pretended to be casual, waved the flyer in front of Fushiguro for a moment, then lowered it to his side. “Ahem… This tells us that…”
“The entire route through Tokyo is engraved in his mind.”
Gojo Satoru couldn’t help giving a soft laugh. The amusement merely rippled across the corners of his lips. He raised the flyer to his mouth, blew gently, let go, and watched it fly away.
“So there you have it.”
“Even though Akira’s teleportation technique differs from ordinary teleportation techniques and requires him to pre-plot the route, getting to Antarctica would require him to engrave the route from here to Antarctica into his brain. He would have to keep teleporting, appearing, memorizing and pre-plotting the route, teleporting, appearing… Crossing both hemispheres, he would still be able to do it.”
Fushiguro Megumi’s entire body went rigid at Gojo Satoru’s words. Just listening to Gojo describe it, he couldn’t imagine what kind of workload that was, or how much it would consume his brain and cursed energy.
Under normal circumstances, he would have slammed his hand on the table and stood up. [That isn’t something a human being could possibly do!]
He did not know whether it was because the person describing this was Gojo Satoru, or because the person who had done it was that [Toyama Akira]. Although reason kept telling Fushiguro [This is impossible], he still unconsciously chose not to argue.
In the end, he heard Gojo Satoru say:
“You don’t have to believe in Toyama Akira.”
Gojo Satoru smiled. “But you can’t disbelieve a frightened Toyama…”
“Bang!”
…Akira.
The door was suddenly shoved open, and a bedraggled boy flung himself to his knees on the floor.
“Why do they still check tickets after I’d already boarded the ship…? They were so mean. They actually hit me with a mop… Good thing I managed to escape.”
The boy who had tumbled in was covered in mud and dripping wet. His clothes were tattered, and a suspicious squid hung from his head. He looked as if he had just returned from some unknown place where he had been begging for food. After collapsing to his knees from exhaustion, he noticed the activity in his room.
“Hm? What are you two doing here?”
The boy looked at Gojo Satoru and Fushiguro Megumi, who were staring at him in silence. He was silent for two seconds as well, then realized something.
“Wait, where’s my table?!”