Just then, Toji’s ear gave the faintest twitch.
His five senses, honed to an absolute edge by the Heavenly Restriction, caught something.
A discordant note buried under the ambient noise of the building.
Shoe soles dragging through the dust on the stairwell floor.
Very quiet.
More than one person.
Coming for me?
No.
No, that’s not right.
Toji’s pupils snapped tight.
The malice radiating off them was aimed precisely at the two small figures standing behind him.
The Time Vessel Association.
They actually dared.
They actually dared to come after his children.
“Megumi.
Tsumiki.”
Toji’s voice dropped like a stone into still water.
That blazing warmth, the sun-hot energy that had filled the room moments ago, drained out of him completely.
What replaced it was something else entirely.
Something that had no temperature at all.
The kind of cold that lived at the bottom of a place with no light.
“Get behind your father.”
His back, in that moment, was a mountain.
Megumi and Tsumiki didn’t understand what was happening.
But the aura rolling off the man was the kind that reached past the mind and grabbed the soul directly.
Their bodies moved before they could think.
They pressed in close, fists clenching around his pant legs, and peered through the gap toward the door.
BANG!
The wooden door exploded inward.
Splinters scattered across the floor.
Several men in black suits filled the entrance, and for one breath, the room held perfectly still.
The atmosphere was nothing like they’d planned for.
The scar-faced man in front stepped through the threshold and stopped dead.
His pupils contracted.
“…Something’s wrong.” His voice came out dry.
His throat worked up and down.
A thin film of sweat broke across his temple.
He took half a step back without deciding to.
The eyes that should have been hard and dominating were filling with something else now, fast and uncontrollable.
Fear.
Visible fear, rising like water.
“Isn’t he…
never around?
Why is he here?”
He’d never seen this man himself.
But he’d heard the stories.
Around underworld tables, over drinks.
In the low voices of men whose faces had gone white.
He’d heard them.
“The Sorcerer Killer.” Toji Fushiguro.
A body under Heavenly Restriction.
Not a scrap of Cursed Energy.
Pure mortal flesh.
And with that, he had ground high-and-mighty sorcerers into nothing, snapping them apart like insects.
Even Grade 1 sorcerers had no option but to run.
Speak that name anywhere on the dark side of the jujutsu world, and the color left every face in the room.
And right now, that man was standing less than 3 meters away.
“Fall back — fall back—” The scar-faced man’s hand was shaking.
“Mission’s off.
Go.
Go now!”
“Afraid of what, exactly?”
A dismissive snort from behind him.
The new kid.
Three months in the organization and already swaggering.
Buzz-cut, loose posture, stepping past the scar-faced man like he wasn’t there.
He looked Toji over with the kind of eyes you’d use on something beneath contempt.
“That’s it?” He blew a bubble with his gum, snapped it, and rolled his eyes.
“A loser with zero cursed techniques, and you lot are terrified of him?
Three months I’ve been listening to you people talk this guy up like he’s the King of Hell.
He’s a washed-up stray dog dragging two brats around.”
He even lifted one hand, pointing lazily at the two children behind Toji.
A smirk stretched the corner of his mouth.
“You refused the cult leader’s orders.
You threatened the mission.
These two kids are going to pay for your arrogance.”
His voice cut off.
Because Toji raised his eyes.
“You…” That gaze moved across their faces, slow and deliberate, as if cataloguing the architecture of each skull.
“What did you just say you were going to do to my children?”
It was not the look of a man regarding other men.
It was the look of a predator doing arithmetic.
The scar-faced man’s legs gave out.
He hit the floor with a thud, both knees down.
The new kid’s gum fell out of his open mouth.
His body understood before his brain did.
Every cell firing the same signal, unanimous and absolute.
Run.
But Toji had already moved.
No warning.
No sound.
No flicker of Cursed Energy.
One moment he was there, and then he simply wasn’t, like a frame cut from film.
The scar-faced man’s eyes reflected empty space.
His brain was still trying to process the blank.
Then a force hit his jaw from below.
Staggering.
Crushing.
CRACK!
That was the sound of a neck vertebra snapping.
An impossible angle.
Absolute violence.
No ceremony.
He didn’t feel pain.
The world tilted and spun.
The last thing his eyes registered was his own pair of dust-caked leather shoes.
Start to finish: a single instant.
The lanky one and the fat one registered nothing but a blur.
Then their companion was on the ground, collapsed like a dropped bag of wet sand.
“What, what just—”
“Monster!”
Fear hit them like a fist around the heart.
They wanted to move.
Wanted to scream.
Their bodies were concrete, from the neck down, completely locked.
Because the man was already standing in front of them.
Silent.
Still.
Simply there.
Deep inside Toji’s chest, something was waking up.
A power that hadn’t stirred in a long time.
Violent, and very much alive.
Not the pure physical force of the Heavenly Restriction.
Something else.
Something deeper, seared into his soul like a brand.
In Konoha, they called it chakra.
The resolve to protect his family struck the fuse like a match.
First Gate: Gate of Opening, Release.
No shout.
No ritual.
No performance.
For a man who had carved the Eight Gates into his bone marrow, this was no different from drawing breath.
The brain’s limits on the body dissolved.
Every percent of physical potential detonated at once.
To the lanky one and the fat one, the world became slow.
Thick and treacle-slow.
They watched Toji raise one hand.
Watched that calloused palm, every ridge and scar of it, grow larger in their vision.
Frame by frame.
They fought to dodge.
Their bodies didn’t cooperate.
Thought and flesh had completely decoupled.
BOOM.
BOOM.
Two impacts.
Dense and final.
The lanky one’s head went into the wall.
Face-first.
The plaster cracked outward from the point of contact in a perfect spiderweb, all the way to the corners of the room.
The fat one’s limbs twisted.
All four of them, wrong angles, simultaneous.
He dropped to the floor in a heap, a shape that no longer had any structural integrity, like something from which every bone had been quietly removed.
From the moment the door came off its hinges to the moment all three of them were down: 3 seconds.
Maybe less.
Toji hadn’t broken a sweat.
He stood in the wreckage.
The killing intent bled slowly off his body, like heat leaving a stone.
He turned.
Megumi Fushiguro and Tsumiki Fushiguro were peeking out from behind his broad back, two small heads side by side, their eyes enormous.
Terror was in there, yes.
But behind the terror, taking up more space, was something that didn’t have a name yet.
Raw, disbelieving awe.
Toji’s brain caught up with the situation.
Ah.
Right.
That was probably a bit much for children.
Guy-sensei’s face surfaced in his mind, twisted with grief and disappointment.
“Toji!
The Iron Fist of Youth is for protecting people, not for putting shadows in their eyes!”
“WAAAAAAAAAHHHHHH—!”
Sorcerer Killer mode: terminated.
Toji spun on his heel, hit his knees in a single fluid slide, threw his arms wide, and crushed both kids against his chest.
His face had already completed the full transformation into tears, the expression of a man whose heart was in pieces.
“I’m sorry!
Daddy scared you!
Daddy just wanted to clear out the trash with passionate, hard-hitting sweat!
Daddy was wrong!”
This time, Megumi didn’t pull away.
He stared at the man in front of him.
Then he looked at the three figures on the floor, shapes that only loosely resembled humans anymore.
Then back at the man.
Something turned over in that small head.
Quiet, and slow, and new.
For the first time, the word “father” attached itself to something real.
Something he could almost hold in his mind.
Powerful.
Violent.
But somehow, without question, safe.
Toji held the two of them, kept his voice steady and low, soothed the shaking out of their shoulders.
But his gaze had already traveled past the ruined doorframe and out into the Tokyo night sky.
He understood now.
Sitting still and waiting only meant the trouble came to him.
It would always come to him.
There was no end to it.
The Time Vessel Association.
The jujutsu world.
All those rotting, lightless corners, packed with threats to his family, too many to count.
If he wanted a life with Megumi and Tsumiki, a real life, the kind with morning light and open space and room enough to sprint headlong into the sunrise, then waiting was not the strategy.
He had to move first.
Hard.
Fast.
With everything he had.
Every threat, every shadow, every last one of them, ground to nothing.
He needed money.
That hadn’t changed.
But now he had something that outranked money entirely.
The Star Plasma Vessel mission.
He was going to take it.
Not as an assassin.
As a guardian.
The question was where to find the people offering it.
One place surfaced in his mind.
A place he had always despised.
A place he had never once bothered to deal with, out of pure contempt.
Tokyo Jujutsu High.
Fine.
Let those old men crouching behind their barriers find out firsthand what burning youth actually looks like.
The legendary Sorcerer Killer was about to walk through their front door and ask for a job.
.
Toji: Alright!
Dear readers, add this to your bookshelf!
That’s the best fuel for youth there is!
➤ Next: Job Hunting at Jujutsu High