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The Time Vessel Association’s secret stronghold sat beneath an utterly unremarkable office building.
When the three arrived, the guards at the entrance didn’t even get a chance to open their mouths.
Toji put each one in a loving embrace and choked them unconscious.
Moving deeper inside, the small fry never even got a clear look at the trio’s faces.
Satoru Gojo casually fired off a Cursed Technique Lapse: Blue and sucked them into Russian nesting dolls.
Suguru Geto’s cursed spirits dragged the rest into the shadows.
They stopped at the far end before an enormous door, ornate as a cathedral gate.
From within, waves of chanting poured through the seams.
Frenzied.
Reverent.
“Praise Lord Tengen!”
“Purge the filth, ascend to godhood!”
Satoru Gojo clicked his tongue in disgust and kicked the door open.
What lay beyond made even the two strongest sorcerers, men who had seen every variety of curse the world had to offer, feel something close to physical revulsion.
Hundreds of believers in white robes knelt across the vast underground space.
They swayed in unison, following the rhythm of the obese cult leader on the stage, as if hypnotized.
Their eyes were frenzied and hollow at once.
Their mouths murmured endless scripture under their breath.
The air reeked of it.
Ignorance.
Fanaticism.
A stench that coated the back of the throat.
“Disgusting.” Satoru Gojo’s gaze went cold.
“A bunch of brainwashed monkeys.”
Suguru Geto’s brow pulled tight.
He could swallow any vile cursed spirit without blinking.
But these people, stupid, yes, pitifully so, were unarmed civilians.
His own conviction, the one that had always driven him to protect the weak, made it impossible to raise a hand against them.
So what, then?
Knock them all out?
There were hundreds of them.
Just leave them here to keep being manipulated?
While the two “strongest” wrestled with that moral knot, Toji moved.
The fervor drained from his face.
That warmth, that blazing passion that belonged to Maito Toji, it pulled back like a tide going out.
What replaced it was cold.
Still.
The kind of stillness you find at the bottom of something very deep and very dark.
He tossed his trench coat onto the floor.
The green spandex beneath was as eye-catching as ever, but in that moment the color itself seemed to carry a killing intent that raised the hairs on the back of your neck.
From the belly of his cursed corpse, he drew a handgun.
Cold metal.
A dull gleam under the lights.
The muzzle found the cult leader.
“The Third Hokage once said,” Toji’s voice was quiet, but it carried clean through the entire hall, “wherever leaves dance, fire burns.
But if some leaves have rotted through, gone foul, then they should be swept into the trash.”
The cult leader’s fat face twitched.
He composed himself quickly, spreading a sanctimonious smile back across his features.
“Killing me is useless!
I am here to save them!
I am their god!”
“God?” Toji smiled.
The scar at the corner of his mouth looked savage in the light.
“Alright.”
“This gun has 9 bullets.”
He said it slowly.
No feeling in it at all.
Heaven’s will.
I’ll walk out of here.”
The cult leader’s smile stretched wider.
More contemptuous.
More smug.
He spread his arms and lifted his chin, posturing for a miracle.
BANG!
One clean shot cracked through all the hypocrisy and sanctity.
The cult leader’s smile froze on his face.
Sheer shock replaced it, the naked, uncomprehending kind.
He looked down at the bloom of red spreading across his chest.
His mouth worked, but nothing came out.
He toppled straight backward and hit the floor rigid.
The entire hall went dead silent.
“My apologies.” Toji blew the wisp of smoke from the muzzle.
His smile was cold and unhurried.
“New gun.
Works like a charm.”
Satoru Gojo and Suguru Geto stood dumbstruck.
Their brains felt like they’d been shoved into a microwave.
CPUs running dry.
This…
this was not how this was supposed to go.
One second ago he was shouting about youth and sweat.
Now he was a stone-faced Hong Kong action film hitman?
Then the believers below erupted.
“A miracle!
It’s a miracle!
The cult leader has sacrificed himself for us!”
“He has ascended!
He has gone to God’s kingdom!”
Not fear.
Not a single trace of it.
They reacted as if someone had mainlined adrenaline directly into each of them.
Eyes bloodshot, bodies lurching, they threw themselves into kowtowing and chanting with even greater frenzy than before.
Watching the whole scene dissolve into chaos, Satoru Gojo and Suguru Geto both felt their scalps crawl.
Now what?
These people had completely lost it.
The two exchanged a look.
“Let’s go,” Suguru Geto said, exhaling.
He could already feel his stomach ulcer stirring.
Dealing with ordinary people wasn’t their department.
They turned and headed for the door, intending to leave this whole mess behind and report to Principal Yaga.
They made it as far as the entrance.
Then it rose up behind them again.
That unsettling, tuneless singing.
“God is with me…”
“Purge the filth…”
Both of them whipped around.
The hundreds of believers, after barely a breath of silence, had already resumed swaying.
Already murmuring.
As if the man who had just died on that stage had been nothing but a hallucination.
Their eyes were more frenzied than before.
More hollow.
“Ha.”
Toji’s low chuckle came from the doorway.
That familiar, blazing smile was back on his face.
Sunny.
Completely at odds with the backdrop of hundreds of people losing their minds behind him, which made it look like something else entirely.
“Friends who love life!” His voice cut clean over all the noise.
“I’m giving everyone 1 minute.
Get yourselves together, leave this moldy place, and go outside to breathe some fresh, youthful air!”
The answer was louder hymns.
Only a scattered handful, the cowards or the ones not yet completely hollowed out, scrambled and stumbled toward the door.
“Looks like everyone really loves it in here.” Toji nodded pleasantly, raised his wrist, and checked a watch that wasn’t there.
“Well then.
Time’s about up.”
He lifted the gun, still trailing a thin thread of smoke.
The smile didn’t move.
“Ten.”
BANG!
A casual shot.
One believer took it in the chest and crumpled slowly, the smile still on his face.
The woman beside him flinched hard, then the frenzy swallowed her back up.
“Nine.”
BANG!
Another shot.
“Eight.”
BANG!
“Seven.”
…
Shot by shot, without a flicker of emotion, Toji put down one numb believer after another.
Ricochets skimmed past the hems of white robes.
And as the reality of it accumulated, the bodies, the sounds, the near-misses, something in the room shifted.
The real, physical terror of death began to win ground against whatever hollow faith had been propping them up.
“Ahh—!”
Someone finally broke.
A single scream, raw and full-throated, tore through the chanting.
Panic spread through the crowd like a disease catching fire.
The hall erupted.
“People are dying!
Run!”
One by one, then all at once, they snapped out of it.
The frenzy cracked open and left bare terror in its place.
They screamed.
They shoved.
They clawed toward the exits without any thought for the person next to them.
The scene dissolved into pure, stampeding chaos.
Satoru Gojo and Suguru Geto stared at the sudden reversal, stunned flat.
“You—” Suguru Geto surged forward and grabbed Toji by the shoulder, eyes bright with shock and something that hadn’t resolved itself into a single emotion yet.
“What are you doing?!”
Toji lowered the gun slowly.
He turned his head and looked at the two of them with the patient expression of a man stating something self-evident.
“Did you forget?”
“I’m actually a hitman.”
Satoru Gojo and Suguru Geto had nothing to say to that.
In that moment, it was as if they were seeing the man in front of them clearly for the very first time.
Not the muscle-brained idiot bouncing around in a green spandex suit.
A killer.
A man who looked at human life the way you look at grass by the roadside and felt nothing about cutting it down.
Cold-blooded, all the way to the bone.
➤ Next: Final Payment Refused, Riko’s New Life
Jujutsu Kaisen