“Running away isn’t cowardice.
It’s an advanced tactical decision to cut your losses.” With a backpack full of souvenirs, notebooks, and three changes of clothes, Mizuki Makoto stood on a secluded path behind Jujutsu High, giving himself one final pep talk in the first faint light of dawn.
‘I’ve spent forty-eight whole hours planning this.
It has to work!’ Anyone who wanted to stay at the Tokyo school was welcome to it.
That grueling routine of “ten minutes of training, followed by an entire day of vomiting and unconsciousness” had become a serious violation of his principles as an artist.
At this rate, Gojo Satoru’s fists would turn his brain into tofu pudding before he ever finished the final chapter of Gojo Mai.
His scumbag teacher was busy taking the twins Geto Suguru had left behind, Mimiko and Nanako, to Principal Yaga to sort out their enrollment, so Makoto had seized the opportunity to make his escape.
He was heading south, bound for the Kyoto school.
Beyond wanting to preserve a life that hadn’t even reached its expiration date, he had three main reasons for leaving.
The first was the goddamn, utterly demoralizing limit he had reached with his strength.
A jujutsu sorcerer’s capabilities were largely determined by five factors: cursed energy reserves, cursed energy control, cursed technique precision, barrier techniques, and the one he despised above all others—hand-to-hand combat.
For someone who had transmigrated into this world, physical combat was about the only thing he could improve through training—or, in his case, repeated beatings from Gojo Satoru.
Almost everything else was practically written into his DNA at birth, especially his cursed energy reserves.
His Limitless did have an unusual feature: it could steal cursed energy through [Cognition], indirectly raising that ceiling.
Unfortunately, he had already squandered almost all the material Shoko-nee had supplied about “Geto Suguru’s resignation” on Bitter Summer, a devastatingly angsty adult novel aimed at women.
The result was that his cursed energy reserves had become firmly stuck at the awkward level of Semi-Grade 1.
He was like a reasonably capable computer whose graphics card could handle plenty of demanding AAA games—in his case, combinations of different cursed techniques—but whose power supply simply refused to provide more juice.
The moment he tried an overclocked special move like Blue Rage, the whole system crashed.
His second reason was Gojo Satoru’s utterly incomprehensible approach to teaching.
If normal instruction was an introductory stage in a MOBA, Gojo’s lessons were the opening tutorial of Sekiro: here’s how you attack, here’s how you defend, and here’s Ashina—sorry, Gojo—Genichiro.
Congratulations, you’ve learned everything!
Now get out there and smash the top of your skull into the strongest sorcerer’s fist!
Kusakabe, Jujutsu High’s foremost practitioner of doing the bare minimum, had once put it perfectly: Gojo Satoru could do just about anything, but expecting that bastard to teach anyone was wishful thinking.
A genius simply couldn’t understand ordinary people.
As far as Gojo was concerned, barrier techniques, cursed energy control, and technique precision were passive skills that anyone with a functioning pair of hands and a brain should be able to max out immediately.
The only thing that required any actual “effort” was hand-to-hand combat.
Makoto strongly suspected that the white-haired geezer’s unhealthy fixation on physical combat came from the thrashing he had received in his schoolgirl days at the hands of Zenin Toji, the original Heavenly Tyrant.
Apparently, the trauma of being ground into the dirt through sheer brute force had turned into something Gojo called “tough love,” which he was now generously inflicting on his innocent students.
Of course, Makoto had tried taking a shortcut.
The previous week, it had occurred to him that if Echo Mimicry could reproduce as much as half the effectiveness of Star Rage and Thin Ice Breaker, then imitating his good buddy Inumaki’s Cursed Speech should be entirely manageable.
Hoping to put an end to this inhuman training, he had waited until Gojo looked completely relaxed, taken a deep breath, and fixed him with a solemn stare before roaring from the depths of his soul: [SHIT YOURSELF!!!] Gojo’s smile froze.
Unfortunately, Tokyo was not treated to the sound of the modern era’s strongest sorcerer explosively shitting himself.
Instead, a second later, as the command left Makoto’s mouth, he felt as though a hundred bullet trains had slammed into his chest at once.
Blood sprayed from his mouth, and he shot through the air like a launched cannonball, embedding himself squarely in the training ground’s reinforced load-bearing wall.
According to Kirara and Maki-chan afterward, they had spent a full hour working at the shattered masonry with crowbars before managing to extract him in one piece.
Meanwhile, the man responsible for that catastrophic cursed energy backlash had merely held his stomach with remarkable elegance and smiled wickedly at his beloved student mounted on the wall.
“Mizuki, that was a creative way to utterly destroy someone’s dignity, but it’s a little too ambitious for those skinny limbs of yours!” At that moment, Makoto had understood a fundamental truth: win, and it was a revolution; lose, and it was treason.
‘That’s why I get beaten until I can’t tell north from south every day.
He might even think he’s helping me “condition my body,” but I’m pretty sure he’s just getting revenge for the porn I draw of him!’ His third and most important reason was that he needed fresh material.
Since he couldn’t squeeze much more out of Gojo Satoru through Limitless for the time being, he needed another special grade to exploit.
Leaving aside Geto Suguru, that disgrace to special grades who only served to dilute the gacha pool, there were three worthwhile sources of special-grade material in the world.
He had already milked Gojo dry for now, while information about Okkotsu Yuta was too widely known to support the sort of sophisticated rumors people would wholeheartedly believe.
That left Tsukumo Yuki, the oldest longest-serving special-grade sorcerer, the jujutsu world’s undisputed champion of skipping work, and a professional slacker who had spent twenty years being nowhere to be found.
Because she stayed out of sight for so long, almost nobody knew anything about her.
‘If I can get even a few genuine details and make her another source of material for Limitless, the rumors I invent could become exponentially more powerful!
‘My strength could jump tenfold—maybe even ninefold!’ As someone who had transmigrated here, Makoto possessed a piece of highly confidential information: Kyoto’s Todo Aoi, his brother from another mother and father whom he had never met, but who apparently gave off the same vaguely perverted energy, was Tsukumo Yuki’s personal disciple.
Nobody in the world knew more about the woman who only ever showed her face long enough to disappear again.
(Tsukumo Yuki: ‘Actually, I don’t even show my face.’) “Semi-Grade 1…
Sounds impressive, but in front of that white-haired geezer, it’s only the difference between going down in one punch or two.” (White-haired geezer: ‘Fooled you.
It’s one punch either way.’) Makoto gave a bitter smile and tightened his backpack straps.
‘If I want to break through this limit, Tokyo has nothing more to offer me.’ Between Gojo Satoru and Hakari Kinji, the place had two teachers whose preferred solution to everything was beating it into the next life.
Their entire teaching philosophy could be summed up as: “As long as it won’t kill you, we’ll beat you like we’re trying to.” More importantly, for the time being, Gojo-sensei’s reach didn’t extend into every changing room training room at the Kyoto school.
“Goodbye, Gojo-sensei.
Goodbye, Maki-chan’s wonderfully powerful arms.” Makoto glanced back at the school buildings half hidden among the greenery, filled with the solemn resolve of a man setting out on a mission from which he might never return.
‘It’s not as though I’ve actually defected.
I left a perfectly personal leave request under my pillow.’ [Prolonged training has exhausted my artistic inspiration, so I have decided to travel to Kyoto for an indefinite period of “folklore research.” P.S.
Gojo-sensei, please don’t try teleporting over to catch me.
Otherwise, the next cover of Gojo Mai may feature you and one of Principal Yaga’s cursed corpses—a combination that would take us into unspeakably hardcore territory.] ‘Sensei is so protective of his students—and so averse to unnecessary hassle—that once he sees this slightly threatening leave request, he’ll probably be generous enough to give me a few days off.
Probably.’ Makoto pulled his cap lower and squeezed onto the Kyoto-bound Shinkansen.
‘Todo Aoi, my dear brother, get ready to hand over every last embarrassing secret you know about your teacher!’ [Current time: 09:15.
Location: Tokaido Shinkansen.
Objective: Finish wreaking havoc at the Kyoto school before being dragged back.]