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Before the words had even faded, Toji’s figure vanished from where he stood.
No.
Not vanished.
Satoru Gojo’s Six Eyes kicked into overdrive, he could see it.
The man had become a blood-red afterimage, crossing 20 meters in an instant at a speed that made a mockery of physics.
BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM!
A relentless, airtight barrage of thunderous impacts exploded against the air one inch from Satoru Gojo’s face.
Like a heavy machine gun on full automatic.
Like it would never stop.
That invisible Limitless barrier shuddered violently under the onslaught of fists, ripple after ripple tearing through the surrounding air as if the barrier itself had become something solid, something that could be hurt.
“This guy…”
The easy smirk on Satoru Gojo’s face was gone.
His Six Eyes caught every punch, every muscle contraction with perfect clarity.
He could see all of it.
So what?
His opponent was too fast.
So blindingly fast that his body couldn’t react.
Not even close.
Limitless is absolute.
He can’t touch me.
That was what Satoru Gojo had told himself at the start.
Then something started feeling wrong.
His brain was overheating.
Maintaining the Limitless technique demanded ultra-high-precision Cursed Energy manipulation every single second, screening every incoming object, calculating threat level, mass, velocity, then applying infinity to halt it in place.
Deflecting a blade or a bullet was like breathing.
Effortless.
Automatic.
But Toji’s attacks weren’t coming one at a time.
They were coming from every direction at once, dozens per second, possibly hundreds.
That meant his brain had to run astronomical calculations every single instant.
His Cursed Energy consumption had gone from a trickle to a burst dam.
“Damn it…” Satoru Gojo ground his teeth together, veins rising sharp on his temple.
This couldn’t go on.
“Cursed Technique Lapse: Blue!”
One hand came up.
A black singularity crackled to life at his fingertip, dense with gravitational force.
If he could just catch that monkey, just grab him for one second,
The red afterimage curved along the outer edge of Blue’s gravitational field without slowing.
The bombardment didn’t pause.
It got worse.
He couldn’t land a hit.
Through the Six Eyes, the truth was plain: the man wasn’t using technique.
He wasn’t using strategy.
He was using pure, savage explosive power, turning his own body into a cannonball and hurling it at the barrier again and again and again.
Is this guy out of his mind?
He’s burning his own life to do this!
Satoru Gojo’s head was splitting now.
Like needles driving into his skull from every angle.
He could feel his Cursed Energy reserves cratering at a rate that made his stomach drop.
1 minute.
5 minutes.
10 minutes.
The dense blur of fists became a crimson storm.
Up on the mountain path, Suguru Geto and Kento Nanami had long since stopped moving.
They stood frozen, staring.
All they could see was a solid mass of red, with Satoru Gojo locked at its center.
The impacts were deafening and they never stopped, never paused, a sound like something trying to beat a mountain into rubble.
They couldn’t make out individual fists.
Only the white shockwaves that kept erupting outward through the air.
“He’s…
draining Satoru’s Cursed Energy.” Suguru Geto’s voice had gone quiet.
The disbelief in it ran deep.
“He’s trying to exhaust the Limitless with nothing but physical force…”
A combat method like this.
They had never heard of it.
Never imagined it.
Inside the barrier, Satoru Gojo’s situation was worse than either of them knew.
His vision was doubling.
The Six Eyes were feeding him more data than his brain could process, a flood that was close to tearing him open from the inside.
Warmth spread through his nostrils.
Blood ran down his upper lip, unhurried and unstoppable.
Can’t hold it.
Can’t maintain it much longer.
He could feel the Limitless growing thin.
Like a balloon that had been stabbed too many times, stretched past the point of repair, ready to give out with the next hit or the one after.
If this kept up, he would lose consciousness.
Brain overload and Cursed Energy exhaustion, right here on this mountain path.
Satoru Gojo.
Beaten by a man with zero Cursed Energy.
Beaten like this.
“Stop — stop!”
He forced the words out on his last scrap of strength, voice cracked raw.
“I’ll run!
I’ll do the laps!”
The instant the words left his mouth, that indestructible infinity flickered.
Once.
Twice.
Like a light bulb with a severed wire.
Then it went out.
The roar of impacts cut off like a switch had been thrown.
Silence.
Toji came to a slow stop in front of him.
White steam rose from his body in waves, his green spandex soaked through with sweat.
The blood-red glow that had wreathed him faded, and his skin returned to its normal tone.
He looked down at Satoru Gojo — on his knees, heaving for air like a fish that had been dragged onto dry land — and smiled.
Wide.
All teeth.
“Now we’re talking.”
Satoru Gojo’s legs folded. This chapter was copied from g.com without permission.
He went flat on the ground and stayed there, without the strength to lift a single finger.
Lost.
Completely and utterly lost.
Not on technique.
Not on Cursed Energy output or strategic thinking or any of the things that were supposed to matter.
He had been beaten by brute force.
The most basic thing there was.
The thing he had always looked down on most.
This total, all-encompassing helplessness, it was more humiliating than getting one-shotted would have been.
Suguru Geto and Kento Nanami stood frozen where they were, minds blank.
The unrivaled strongest.
The one who used his Cursed Technique and still lost.
Dismantled by raw physical power, by a man who hadn’t drawn on a single drop of Cursed Energy.
That fact hit like a sledgehammer directly to the foundation of everything they thought they understood about strength.
“Alright.
Stop lying there like a kid who lost his first race.”
Toji laughed, loud and unself-conscious.
He bent down and grabbed Satoru Gojo the way you’d grab a limp cat by the scruff, then hauled him up and slung him over one shoulder.
“A man says it, a man does it!”
“You’ve still got laps left.
Your teacher’s going to run every one of them with you.”
He turned, settled Satoru Gojo’s dead weight against his shoulder, and started running again.
Stride steady.
Pace unhurried.
As if 10 straight minutes of that kind of output had been nothing more than a light stretch before the real work.
Suguru Geto watched the green figure carry his best friend down the path and shrink into the distance.
The dull ache in his stomach was back.
A nightmare.
This was, without question, the single most terrifying nightmare Jujutsu High had ever produced.
…
At the finish line on the training grounds, Shoko Ieiri was leaning against the post with the posture of someone who had been waiting long enough to stop caring.
A slender cigarette rested between her fingers.
She looked up when she caught movement in the distance.
A figure running toward her, carrying something over one shoulder.
Something roughly the size and shape of a person.
She raised an eyebrow.
Then the shape got close enough to make out, and she recognized the face of the thing being carried.
Her eyes lit up.
She snapped the cigarette out with two fingers, dug her phone out of her coat pocket, and had the camera up and aimed before the thought had fully finished forming.
Click.
Clean shutter sound.
Shoko studied the screen.
Satoru Gojo, draped over Toji’s shoulder like a dead dog, wearing the expression of a man who had genuinely stopped seeing the point of continued existence.
The smile that spread across her face kept going until she had to make herself stop.
“Heh.” A quiet laugh, deeply satisfied.
She slid the phone back into her pocket.
“That photo is worth at least a month of free drinks and cigarettes.”
➤ Next: The Mobile Fountain and the Troll School Doctor
Jujutsu Kaisen