💎 WEEKLY POWER GOALS 💎
🔥 60→1ch | 100→2ch | 200→5ch
⏰ Resets Monday!
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Riko had nowhere to go.
Her apartment was rubble.
She stood in front of the wreckage, biting her lower lip hard, refusing to let a single tear fall.
“I…
I’m not ready.” Her voice trembled.
“I want to go back to Renchoku Girls’ Academy.
Finish my last day of classes.
I want to say goodbye to them.”
Toji frowned.
Girls were such a hassle.
About to be absorbed by some ancient monster who’d lived god-knows-how-long, and she was still hung up on attending music class.
With that kind of free time, she’d be better off running 100,000 meters around Tokyo Tower with him.
Sweat every last drop of sadness right out of her skull.
He was about to refuse and throw in a quick lecture on the psychological benefits of squats, but then he saw her eyes.
Red-rimmed.
Holding.
He swallowed his words.
Teacher Guy always said: a man who can’t protect a maiden’s innocent smile is unworthy of speaking of youth.
“Fine, go!” Toji threw his hand out in a broad wave, nearly taking the lamppost beside him clean off its base.
“It’s your youth, you’re the one who has to put the perfect ending on it!”
Outside Renchoku Girls’ Academy.
Satoru Gojo was crouched on a tree branch, chewing daifuku out of pure boredom.
Suguru Geto leaned against the trunk with his arms crossed, a few fly-heads released and circling the perimeter on silent watch.
Below them, Toji was going absolutely berserk with single-finger handstand push-ups.
Sweat had soaked through every inch of that skintight suit.
“I’ll point out,” Satoru Gojo said, crumpling the daifuku wrapper into a ball and flicking it off into the void, “that this is a girls’ school.”
“You’re out here dressed like that, lurking by the gate.
Security’s going to call the cops on a pervert.”
Toji didn’t even blink.
He kept counting, loud enough to rattle teeth.
“Nine thousand nine hundred ninety-eight!
Nine thousand nine hundred ninety-nine!”
Satoru Gojo went still.
Through the dark lenses of his sunglasses, he looked down the street.
Dozens of identical men in black were closing in from all sides, moving with that wrong, synchronized gait that set off every instinct.
Each one gave off a faint, sticky pulse of Cursed Energy.
“Q Group remnants?” Suguru Geto straightened up.
His eyes went cold.
“Quite a few of them.”
Satoru Gojo scoffed.
Were these clowns actually stupid?
Cheap clone techniques to stall the strongest?
Even third-rate manga had retired this bit.
A diversion.
Obviously.
Keep them busy out here while somebody went for Riko inside.
He didn’t even bother removing his sunglasses.
He raised one hand, almost lazily, and a knotted mass of Cursed Energy at his fingertip shredded the three clones charging point-first into bloody scraps.
“Geto, you babysit these flies.” He dropped from the branch and turned to look at Toji, who was still pumping out reps.
“Hey.
Muscle-for-brains.
Stop.
Something’s wrong inside, go pull the girl out.
Toji drove both feet into the ground and launched, spinning a clean three-sixty in midair before landing without a sound.
He, the magnificent Blue Beast of Tokyo, was being given orders by a white-haired kid who didn’t even have abs.
Still.
Running assassinations on sacred school grounds.
These rats really did need to be cleaned out.
“Leave it to me.” Toji stood straight and slung on a black trench coat.
He needed a moment before going in.
This was a school.
A place where the flowers of the nation were supposed to bloom.
If he walked through those gates in the eye-searing green spandex suit and traumatized a classroom of girls, he’d completely blow his new Sunshine Daddy reputation.
He closed his eyes.
Reached inside.
And forcibly strangled down the wild, near-overflowing heat and voltage surging through him.
He’d done this a thousand times.
In his first life as the Sorcerer Killer, camouflage and infiltration had been carved into his bones long before he’d ever known peace.
When he opened his eyes, the green irises were different.
The raw fanaticism of Maito Toji, gone.
Not suppressed.
Gone.
What lived there now was the flat, bottomless cold of someone who had killed for a living.
The hem of the trench coat cracked in the wind.
The scar at the corner of his mouth, sliced by tree shadow, looked like something that could end a conversation permanently.
He moved without sound, vaulted the gate in a single motion, and slipped into Renchoku Girls’ Academy like a black panther going to ground.
Music classroom.
Riko sat beside the piano, pressing keys at random.
Not playing.
Just pressing.
Her friends had clustered around her, chattering about where to get crepes on the weekend.
She forced out a smile that didn’t reach anything.
Her chest felt like someone had dropped a lead weight into it and left.
Tomorrow she was going to die.
Everyone was still laughing.
Still making plans.
Only she would cease to exist.
She watched a sparrow dart past the window.
Her eyes burned again.
It’s not fair, she thought.
It’s really, genuinely not fair.
BANG!
The heavy wooden door of the music classroom exploded inward, kicked from outside.
The sound hit like a physical thing.
Every voice in the room cut off at once.
Forty girls looked at the doorway.
Toji stood there.
Silent.
Still.
The kind of man a room notices without being able to say exactly why.
The black trench coat lay across his shoulders like it had been tailored for someone made of architecture.
His face was all hard angles and zero expression.
Not a sound in the classroom.
Someone swallowed.
Nobody could say who.
Then the sharp little gasps started, one after another like dominoes.
He’s gorgeous.
God, that energy.
Mature. Enjoying the story? Read on at novelping.com.
Cold.
The dense, dangerous gravity of a man who had clearly done things that weren’t in any textbook.
For a room full of teenage girls who spent their days drilling scales and conjugating verbs, he was a precision-guided hormone strike.
“Um, ” The young music teacher’s face had gone full red, right to the ears.
Even her voice stuttered.
Her hands slipped behind her back.
She was fishing her phone out to get a photo.
“, may I ask who you’re looking for?”
Toji walked past all of it like it didn’t exist and headed straight for Riko.
This coat is too tight.
The irritation surfaced briefly.
He’d buttoned every button to sell the look, and now it felt like his chest was in a vice.
He’d need to carry someone out of here in about 2 minutes, and this expensive scrap of fabric was going to crater his burst capacity.
Besides.
Teacher Guy had been very clear on this point: a true warrior never hides his sweat.
A sweet-faced girl with more nerve than her classmates finally broke ranks.
She stepped forward, blushing hard, both hands extended around a pink envelope.
“Um — excuse me — Mister!
Can I have your contact info?”
Riko sat in her chair.
She closed her eyes.
She knew exactly what was coming.
She knew it the way you know a train is coming when you feel the rails start to hum.
These poor idiots had no idea what they were looking at.
Toji stopped.
He looked down at the girl with the envelope.
Contact info.
She wants to explore the true meaning of youth with me?
Water the seeds of life’s hope with shared sweat?
Absolutely.
Without question.
“Young maiden!” His voice came out like a temple bell dropped down a stairwell.
The window glass buzzed.
“Give me your number — five in the morning, we run!
Passion!
Dawn!
Let’s go!”
The girl hadn’t even finished processing the words.
Toji raised both hands.
Grabbed his lapels.
RRRRIP.
The expensive black trench coat tore straight down the middle.
He dropped the halves on the floor without looking at them.
Beneath it: a full-body spandex suit in a shade of green so bright it seemed to generate its own light source.
Reflective as wet frog skin.
Every muscle, every groove, every individual cable of tendon, perfectly outlined by fabric that had zero mercy.
And on his calves: bright orange knitted leg warmers.
The girl who’d been holding out the pink envelope had frozen completely.
Her expression had not changed in several seconds.
This wasn’t a contrast anymore.
This was a mutation event.
“Young maidens of Tenuchi!” Toji hit a full bodybuilder side-chest pose, arms flexed, chest popped, teeth catching the light like a dental commercial filmed in direct sunlight.
“These final days of school life must be honored with sweat!
Put down the soft songs!
Together, let’s do calisthenics!”
Dead silence.
Five full seconds of it.
The kind of silence that settles over graveyards at three in the morning.
➤ Next: Depart, to Okinawa!