Geto Suguru had a rare good night’s sleep.
Ever since the Star Plasma Vessel escort mission, he’d known something was wrong with him.
The people he was supposed to save.
The comrade who died.
His own weakness.
His best friend, growing stronger without him.
Countless cursed spirits.
The nauseating stench.
An endless, suffocating summer.
All of it grinding against his mind, wearing it down.
When he’d met the Hasaba sisters, there had been a moment , just one , where he felt the rope holding his sanity together begin to give.
Knot after knot came undone.
The outermost threads frayed and split first.
SNAP.
SNAP.
Crisp, brittle sounds, one after another, the ends curling up like scorched wire.
But just before that rope broke entirely, he appeared.
And when Geto didn’t even know which way was up, the man had kicked him back to his senses.
Fear followed.
Fear at what he’d thought in that moment , every non-sorcerer in that place, dead by his hand.
And then…
Regret.
Regret that…
“…….” His loose white shirt hung soft against his frame.
Long black hair unbound, spilling across his shoulders, his back, the bedding.
His sharp-featured face wore a stillness that would have chilled anyone who saw it.
Forget it.
Geto forced himself to stop thinking, turned over, and got out of bed.
Up.
Washed his face.
Brushed his teeth.
Waved at the mirror.
“AAAaaa…” The cursed spirits only he could see scattered from around his ears and burrowed back into his palms.
These were the spirits he kept on overnight guard duty.
They also doubled as earplugs , oddly soft for what they were, surprisingly comfortable.
Cursed Spirit Manipulation.
Pretty incredible, right.
BUZZ, BUZZ, BUZZ, He turned and sat down on the toilet.
He scrolled through his phone out of habit.
The moment it unlocked, several notifications stared back at him.
The top one was from Teacher Yaga.
[Unread: 9] “Huh?
When did I piss off the teacher this time?” Geto racked his brain, came up empty, then shrugged and closed it.
The second was from Shoko.
[Unread: 32] “…Hm?” Shoko didn’t usually send him this many messages.
An uneasy feeling settled in his gut.
Before he could work out what it meant, a new message from Shoko arrived, knocking Yaga’s off the top.
Geto opened the chat.
[Go.] [Go.] [Go.] He scrolled up.
And up.
And up.
Just that single word, over and over, all the way back to the first message.
[Go stop them.] Them?
Geto frowned.
Was it, BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM—!—!.!.!.
The ground lurched sideways beneath his feet.
A sound like a missile strike rolled in from the distance.
Geto Suguru, still very much seated, tilted sharply to one side and nearly caused a catastrophe of a different kind.
He steadied himself.
His face went dark as ink.
He typed frantically.
He got his answer.
“What do you mean Satoru and Himmel are fighting?
Okay, that part I buy!” “What do you mean the GROUND is GONE!” To which Shoko replied with a single word.
[Clench] …….
.
BOOM!, BOOM!.
Explosion after explosion.
Thunder without end.
Jujutsu High’s campus was vast , roughly seventy percent of it forest, set aside for sorcerers to cut loose with their techniques, run experiments, push their limits.
The best experiment was always a fight.
Sorcerers existed to battle cursed spirits.
Every second of their lives carried the weight of that danger.
Man, woman, didn’t matter.
Anyone who did this work was built different.
And built different people fought.
BOOM!.
In a corner of the forest, trees several meters tall were ripped clean from the earth and hurled skyward.
Dense tangles of roots trailed clumps of wet yellow soil that broke apart as they fell.
Rock fragments sprayed in every direction, detonating into rolling clouds of brown dust.
One tree.
Then another.
Massive trunks rose one after another, branches thrashing wildly in the gale, until the entire corner of the forest had been torn open , countless giants ascending all at once, blotting out the sky.
Mud churned like waves.
Dust swallowed the air.
And that was just the aftershock.
“Ha!
Is dodging all you’ve got?!” From somewhere inside the destruction, the strongest sorcerer of the modern era laughed , and not very gracefully.
Gojo Satoru wore his black Jujutsu High uniform, his lean frame bounding through the remaining trees at blinding speed, arm swinging in a wide arc.
A blue orb gathered at his fingertip.
It carved a long, sweeping line through the air, and every tree in its path groaned under sudden, crushing gravity.
CRACK CRACK CRACK CRACK CRACK CRACK.
Gnarled main roots were wrenched apart, a dense staccato of splitting wood merging into a single roar as it all shot toward the streak of blue ahead.
In an instant, the figure and the orb were less than ten meters apart.
Then he was gone.
Like Minato Namikaze sidestepping the Raikage’s hand chop, the man simply ceased to exist in that spot.
No visible footwork.
No readable movement.
The orb punched straight through an afterimage and obliterated everything behind it.
Gojo Satoru planted both feet and skidded to a stop.
His stunning eyes snapped upward.
WHOOSH!
A white cloak unfurled like a lotus in bloom.
Himmel was upside down in the air.
He completed a full spin, touched down on a tree trunk that the shockwave had launched skyward, and pushed off.
SNAP!
Second acceleration.
Even Gojo Satoru’s reflexes could only register a spindle of black shadow hurtling downward before the position shifted again.
“No way.
No way!
ARE YOU SERIOUS?!” Gojo Satoru bared his teeth, grinning hard.
The reason for all this, as established, was a sorcerer evaluation for Himmel.
That was the official story.
The real purpose was more pointed: confirm whether Himmel — the Heroic Spirit summoned through the Hasaba sisters’ technique sacrifice — posed any danger that couldn’t be controlled.
What counted as dangerous was entirely their call.
But the key question was always whether he could be controlled.
The nature of his technique was one factor.
Himmel’s raw strength was another.
Gojo Satoru had heard that Himmel put Geto in his place.
His thought process had been simple: “My best friend got humiliated, which is hilarious, but I’m going to quietly settle the score.” So he’d invited Himmel to spar.
It was good timing.
Gojo had just hit the top, was young and itching for something, and missions lately had been tedious to the point of misery.
Geto had been ducking fights, too.
A proper sandbag would’ve been perfect.
Except things had gone a little sideways.
Bam!
Bam!
Bam!
He burned through his technique like it cost nothing, eyes tracking left and right, pinning down Himmel’s position.
What Gojo Satoru used was Limitless , the Gojo clan’s hereditary technique, capable of interfering with matter at the atomic level and bending space itself to his will.
In practice, he usually just deployed Technique: Blue.
Artificial gravity.
Concentrated, localized, absolute.
A miniature black hole.
That alone, layered with the Six Eyes’ unparalleled field of vision and his own cursed energy output, was enough to handle ninety-nine percent of everything alive.
But.
It wasn’t doing much here.
Himmel kept slipping out.
Multiple times now, he’d threaded through the blast radius of Blue without taking a direct hit.
And in the same motion, he’d swing his sword.
VWOOM, !.
The sword wave hit harder than Blue did.
Fiercer.
Wilder.
It dragged the atmosphere forward and carved through the earth like an invisible chainsaw running on nothing but conviction.
One swing.
A tiered wall of dust exploded upward, rolling out hundreds of meters in every direction.
The aftershock shuddered through the entire barrier enclosing Jujutsu High.
But.
The dust settled.
Gojo Satoru stood exactly where he’d been.
Not a scratch.
In the ruined forest, the two of them faced each other.
Both were smiling.
Himmel’s smile was simple , the pure pleasure of watching a younger generation that strong.
Gojo Satoru’s was rarer: the genuine delight of finding a worthy opponent.
(What an attack.
No cursed energy , just raw physical output.
Heavenly Restriction, like that man , no.
The destructive power is in another league entirely.) (Speed the Six Eyes can’t fully track.
Dodging my wide-area bombardment , is he reading my cursed energy the moment it activates?
To manage that without the Six Eyes, his observational instincts must be completely inhuman.) (So.
For an opponent like this, ) Gojo Satoru was thinking.
Himmel was thinking too.
(Incredible.) (In terms of pure strength, he outclasses most of the demons I faced in my last life.
Even among the Seven Sages of the Demise, few could keep up with this.) (My attacks , the shockwaves connected, but anything aimed directly at him seems to do nothing.) (Even hitting him from an unexpected angle doesn’t work.
A permanent defensive counter-spell?
Always active?) (So.
For an opponent like this, ) Both of them dropped their weight at the same moment.
The air changed.
Hundreds of meters of open devastation between them.
Gojo Satoru extended his hand.
The light gathering at his fingertip shifted , azure bleeding into crimson.
“Technique: Red.” [Technique: Red] The inverse of Limitless.
Minimum output is twice that of Blue, upper limit unknown.
Its advanced application.
The logic was straightforward.
Fast opponent.
Opponent who reads his movements.
Fine.
Hit harder.
Hit wider.
Bury him in it.
And Himmel, Reached the same conclusion from the opposite direction.
As a swordsman.
As a Hero.
In the era he’d fought through, there were no techniques.
None of this elegant, flashy cursed energy architecture.
But.
He had fought as the Goddess’s Hero.
And that came with its own gifts.
If anything, this was what the test had always been pointing toward.
“Technique Deployment.” He raised his hand.
His lips pressed together lightly.
Something lit up behind his eyes.
Himmel held two techniques in this world.
The first was Tausend Forms , the ability to turn any object into a holy sword.
The second he had never used.
But he had always known its name, the way you know something that was yours before you ever learned to reach for it.
Rank: EX Type: Anti-Unit Noble Phantasm Range: Self Its name, “[Astral Cross]” The moment he spoke it.
Blue particles rose from beneath his feet, drifting upward like mist.
They pulsed in rhythm, rising and falling, and then , as if suddenly given weight , began drawing toward each other, locking into shape.
Gears clicked into alignment.
Lines joined.
A circular pattern formed, and then the particles rose higher, hovering behind him.
They settled.
Silver.
A cross.
Its core had the texture of frost on glass.
The vertical arm tall and straight.
The horizontal arm branching outward at the midpoint, edges worked into smooth, rounded curves.
Silver threads thin as hair wound through the intersections.
Flowers relief-carved at both tips of the horizontal arm.
Silver vines coiled around the junction where the arms met.
Something holy in its shape.
Something old.
The cross trembled after its summoning.
[CLANK.] A violent shudder.
Then it snapped ninety degrees.
[CLANG.] The resonance of a great bell, rolling outward.
And in that moment, Himmel understood what his Noble Phantasm actually did.
A silhouette materialized behind him.
Short and dense with muscle.
Compact, like something built for impact.
Arms corded with strength.
A Viking-style horned helmet.
A nose guard covering the lower half of a broad face.
Brown hair and a thick beard spilling from the rim of the helm, obscuring most of his features.
Dark red cape.
Heavy plate armor.
Whoa.
WHOA WHOA WHOA.
It’s , it’s a Stand!
Everyone back up!
The story is already written.