Chapter 28

  It was funny how that, for Gojo Satoru to beat me, he only had to be a halfway competent user of his Limitless technique.

  But for myself to beat him…

  …I had to bring to bear every tactic of Jujutsu Sorcery that there was.

  Even at the highest level if need be.

  But Jujutsu was not just about power levels. Only a child, like Gojo, would assume such a thing.

  I knew better.

  Time for Plan A.

  “Arthropodal Aspect,” I chanted, my lower hands tied up in a Flying Lotus mudra. “Grasshopper. Southern Cross. Broken World. Rain.”

  My left forearm transformed into the rough wing casings of a grasshopper, while my right forearm grew the pegs of a grasshopper’s hind legs.

  I crossed both forearms and ripped them against one another.

  The movement produced an ear-piercing chirping sound that travelled directly towards Gojo Satoru’s smug form. The sound, when directed, could shatter an entire cliff face’s depth by almost a foot.

  A second later, he dug into his ear with his pinky. “Kinda loud. Try again, maybe?”

  Dammit. Alright then, Plan B.

  I ejected hundreds of large shikigami from my body just then. Fireflies in the hundreds, whose shine were piercing.

  Then I released winged silverfish, with carapaces so reflective that they acted as mirrors.

  Plan C.

  While I set the attack up, I released some of my pressurized canister bugs. They were beetles with distended, circular bodies holding onto poison fumes by the very skin of their teeth. From this distance, none of their fumes would reach the school.

  I released all five canister bugs around Gojo.

  A halo of pristine air surrounded Gojo, from which no poison could enter.

  That much was expected.

  I was intending on keeping his surroundings poisoned until he ran out of air. It was—

  I sensed him drawing in fresh air from the poison cloud.

  His Infinity was automatically doing the work of keeping his aura well-ventilated, replacing old air with new, still letting no poison enter.

  Dammit. That plan goes out the window.

  And he still hasn’t moved. He was just taking it all on his Infinity, patiently waiting for me to break.

  Trying to induce true despair, are we? I grinned. I liked his style.

  My fireflies and silverfish had finally finished setting up my Archimedes’ death ray.

  The light struck Gojo head-on with a thin beam that was thousands of degrees hot.

  Some of the light got through, but most of it couldn’t penetrate. Clearly. He wasn’t burning in the slightest.

  “My Infinity detects all methods of attack that might threaten me, and acts accordingly,” he explained. “This is done in conjunction with my Six Eyes, which, aside from granting me superior sensory capabilities, basically turns my brain into a computer of a sort. It’s running a software protecting me at all times.”

  What absolute bullshit.

  And then he had the nerve to reveal his hand to me. I wondered how effective that would be since I already knew the basics of his technique. Though not its extended applications.

  I watched as his aura of Infinity grew even as his cursed energy output didn’t increase. Well played, Gojo.

  Alright, screw this. Time to face the facts: this is an all-or-nothing defense, exactly as I suspected.

  Even the Khepri’s Judgments waiting at the edge of my natural two-hundred mile range could do nothing at this point. Worse, if any of them missed, I would destroy the entirety of campus.

  And much of Tokyo, really.

  There just wasn’t any getting through with my cursed technique.

  In my seven years of staying inside a kodoku jar filled to the brim with the purified essence of poisons secreted directly from my Juchū, I had of course filled many such vessels with an equally powerful blend of noxious liquids in which I marinated over a thousand different tools throughout the years. Some, I bathed with directly, though it didn’t make a difference in their strength.

  No, the only tools that had truly become one-of-a-kind due to this proximity to myself were my eyes—and only then, because I had also made them a part of my soul.

  Still, out of all the different tools, ninety-seven of them had engraved Innate Techniques, making them Special Grade cursed tools according to how Jujutsu Society classified them.

  That didn’t make them as powerful as a Special Grade sorcerer, of course. Such a thing would be inconceivable.

  Indeed, over the months that I had been training my body using a variety of our Special Grade tools, I had learned the true use of a cursed tool: to be in the hand of a master of fundamental cursed techniques—preferably one without an innate technique to their name.

  The cursed tool’s main role was to make the weak strong.

  And to allow a certain degenerate to perform jujutsu to his heart’s content.

  It didn’t take me long to swallow the fact that before the might of Gojo Satoru, I was indeed ‘the weak’, in need of this strength.

  I gave away all these Special Grade cursed tools to the clan’s strongest fighters, holding back only the ones with ‘Trump’ capabilities.

  That was, abilities that affected other abilities. Engraved innate techniques whose activations could affect cursed energy output or the orderly function of a cursed technique in various ways.

  “I sense that you harbor a lot of hatred for me,” Gojo said. “I don’t really get why. I know that my clan told me to consider you an enemy. Told me all sorts of stories about what your clan were responsible for in ancient history. I never really took any of that crap to heart. I just wanted to see what you could do. Always have.”

  I paused, finding my words slowly. “I… find your way of being to be insufferable. I carry an immense burden to improve the lives of everyone I’ve taken responsibility for. My own clan, and the children of this school, most of whom I located with my Juchū. My intention is to reform the customs of Jujutsu Society that I find to be regressive. I do this by cursing myself indiscriminately in order to bless the world. You… haven’t demonstrated an ounce of such a resolve, or initiative, or really a belief in anything. And yet you are the strongest. Don’t you find that to be a waste? An injustice?”

  The more I had waited to prepare for my inevitable clash with Gojo Satoru, the more reasons I had found to view him in a less than charitable light. The strongest sorcerer of the modern era was a carefree child.

  He ought to be a carefree child.

  But not the strongest. Not at the same time.

  I couldn’t allow that to be the case.

  Gojo blew a raspberry. The cloud of noxious gases finally dissipated completely. “There you go, assigning meaning to strength, like any old weakling would. Girl, I just happen to be strong, alright? I don’t need to be anything else but that if I don’t want to.”

  “You can just… shake off the weight of all the lives that hinge on your actions?” I said. “You can do that without flinching?”

  His expression flickered slightly. He frowned, eyes slightly contrite. He scratched the back of his head. “I don’t normally go in for oldie politics-chatter, so if you can just—“

  “You can either be a carefree child, or the strongest,” I said. “It’s one or the other, dammit. I won’t let you choose both.”

  “Let me?” He grimaced in pure, unbridled disgust. “What makes you think I need your permission to do any damn thing?”

  “The law of Jujutsu,” I said. “Where the strongest rule.”

  I mentally transmitted to Michiko to open up a portal. I shoved all four of my hands into it, retrieving a quartet of daggers. I used my Juchū to immediately spin a circuit of temporary spider silk onnecting all four of them, and jumped before releasing them all around Gojo.

  One done.

  I retrieved a sharp dagger and shoved it into my chest, stopping my heart.

  Two done.

  Then, I retrieved one final item: a blacksmith’s hammer.

  I let a centipede crawl out from my palm, wrapping it around the hammer’s handle.

  “Hm,” Gojo watched the entire process dispassionately. “I shouldn’t be surprised. You are a monster.”

  The formation around the tied-up knives lit up, creating a barrier that immediately lowered the output of whoever was inside the barrier by half. Now, Gojo wouldn’t have the resources to use his extension technique.

  The Binding Vow inside the knife I had stabbed into my heart allowed the user to sacrifice their heart in exchange for one sure-hit attack. Usually, that sacrifice meant more, but with the Reverse Cursed Technique, it didn’t matter.

  And the hammer? Once its innate technique was activated, it could only swing in a downwards arc, and it would not stop until it hit the ground.

  Gojo would try to dodge this one. I was sure of it.

  I wouldn’t let him.

  A few of my pre-prepared shikigami flew down from the sky towards Gojo.

  They were not my kamakiri—I didn’t employ those against enemy sorcerers anymore, not after what Toji had done to them. Instead, I preferred to use a different model that I had dubbed Reaper Ants.

  The Reaper Ants were four-limbed creatures with two arms and two legs. They were covered in a black carapace, and in their hands, they wielded Injector Swords. These were a merged Juchū shikigami that took the shape of swords. These swords could be infused with cursed energy from the Reaper Ants, and also had their own stockpile of cursed energy.

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  The real secret was the substance contained inside the length of the swords—a purified, magnified version of a poison that could erode cursed techniques.

  Both of the ants flew towards Gojo.

  I grew an additional two arms, and twisted four of my hands into a complex multi-joined mudra. A mouth opened up on my throat, and then another between my collarbones. They chanted streams of incantations at the same time, allowing the Reaper Ants to work to their fullest potential.

  It typically wasn’t possible for me to add more than two million Juchū and change to a shikigami like the kamakiri without just making them bigger. And bigger was better for many purposes.

  For the purposes of anti-personnel combat against highly skilled targets like Toji and Gojo Satoru?

  It wasn’t nearly enough.

  By combining handsigns and incantations, I could finally compress several tens of millions of Juchū into a smaller frame, creating monstrosities that could keep up, or even outspeed monsters like Toji. All it required was keeping my mouth and hands full with incantations, which would usually prevent me from holding weapons—but that’s where the extra arms came in.

  My torso elongated slightly to accommodate the extra growths, and I began to swing the blacksmith’s anvil over my head like a lasso, using the ever-increasing length of my centipede shikigami growing out from my palm as a rope.

  Gojo looked surprised at the speed of the Reaper Ants and my transformation, though none of it mattered enough that he felt the need to protect himself any further. Infinity had shrunk in size, but it was still easily protecting him.

  The Reaper Ants released the cursed technique toxin.

  It dissipated into the Infinite distance between the tips of the blades and his skin, not coming into contact with anything.

  Dammit.

  I had somewhat expected this.

  The cursed technique poison worked to destroy cursed techniques by targeting the ‘weave’ of cursed energy that enabled the technique’s effect.

  Infinity protected that weave with… well, an infinite distance. And in that infinite distance, there was no weave of cursed energy to be found, enabling this ability.

  Fuck. Whatever. Time for Plan E.

  I released the hammer in a wide over-head arc, adding more and more slack to the centipede rope to prevent it from releasing early.

  Right when the arc coincided with a path to his head, I sent cursed energy through my Juchū, into the blacksmith’s hammer.

  “Alright, that’s enough,” Gojo drawled.

  He raised his hand, intent on meeting the hammer.

  Big mistake.

  The hammer’s Innate Technique activated, becoming an irresistible force of downward descent.

  Gojo turned his opened hand into a finger gun.

  A flash of red, and the hammer exploded. Red. No, forget the color. That was Positive energy channeled through a technique.

  Had this been his Cursed Technique: Reversal?

  He then grabbed one of the Reaper Ants by the throat before punching its head clean off, doing the same to the ant behind him.

  He ripped the barrier technique off the ground with contemptuous ease and then directed a palm at me. “Maximum Output: Blue!”

  I ran away.

  A ball of searing blue light that acted as a black hole for my purposes chased after me, ravaging what was left of the field with contempt as I ran every which way to avoid it.

  Gojo grinned with glee and malice as he chased me down without having to move a finger.

  “What right do you have to lecture me?!” Gojo shouted over the sound of the world being destroyed by his own power. “None of you can dictate my path! It’s mine to choose as I please!”

  I really hoped it wouldn’t have to come to this.

  Rejecting my earnest plea for him to take his role seriously. Rejecting the call of responsibility. Wanting the benefit of his status as well as the benefits of being a child…

  I had killed so many people in my quest to bring about a fairer world, for myself and those in my generation. Committed unspeakably heinous acts for the sake of a more just tomorrow.

  Gojo Satoru… did not have the qualifications to stand besides me.

  Once he let go of his Blue, I clasped all of my hands together and grew two extra mouths. As I did, all the Juchū floating above us in the air took the vague shape of a dome, helping me better picture the Barrier Technique.

  Gojo’s eyes widened in abject horror.

  And mine, as well as my mouth, widened in pure glee.

  Oh? What’s that, little boy?

  Did someone fail to unlock their Domain Expansion before our big fight?!

  All my mouths synched as one. Five voices, four of which should have belonged to my sisters, spoke as one, twisting reality into the shape of our inner souls.

  Plan… F.

  “Domain Expansion: Scarab-Faced Goddess’ Necropolis!”

  000

  From the moment that Geto Suguru had laid eyes on that girl, Teira, he’d felt a chill grow up his spine. She hadn’t seemed human at first. Not on account of her looks at first.

  No, Suguru saw it in her movements. She seemed supernaturally still at all times, her motions measured and smooth, like she was going through life at… a higher framerate than others. It didn’t seem like she belonged.

  Owing to his cursed technique, he had of course pondered a question: was she, too, a cursed spirit? Suguru could sense them better than he could sense other sorcerers. To him, they almost lit up in his senses like food, which was ironic considering how bad they tasted going down. Still, something in his spirit always urged him towards them.

  Teira, however, did not feel like a cursed spirit.

  Nor did she feel entirely human.

  Suguru was new to this world of curses and sorcery, even though he had spent the better part of a year hunting down cursed spirits in his hometown during his spare time. He didn’t actually know what was sacred and what wasn’t. He had been worried that his own technique might be construed by more advanced sorcerers as blasphemous, or something similar. After all, he was taking in the power of cursed spirits.

  Teira, too, was doing something similar, for certain. Suguru could sense it. Something about her evoked the nature of a true cursed spirit.

  And as he watched the savage battle occurring on the field outside of the window to homeroom, he felt more and more sure that Teira was skirting the ‘line’ far closer than he could.

  The more she transformed, the more monstrous she became to his senses.

  Was it right to fear her?

  Was it wrong to accept her?

  Suguru looked to the side, where the two resident delinquents of the class had been carted back by Teira’s shikigami. Their paralysis had worn off some minutes ago, and now they were staring at the fight in open-mouthed terror.

  “You know,” Ieiri said airily. “I always used to root for the monster. In those superhero shows we all watched as kids. Though I only paid attention to the dumb fights.”

  “Which one’s the monster?” Suguru remarked. Teira for… everything. Or Satoru, for not immediately running for the hills upon facing her.

  In fact, he was beginning to push her back now. His shield was on and nothing she tried could get through.

  “She’s actually nice,” Ieiri said. “She likes old-timey American music from the 50s to the 70s, and she keeps talking about anime even though no one asks. If you ask me, I think Gojo started it.”

  Suguru laughed slightly.

  “Who the hell is she?!” one of the girls in class asked. She was very pretty, and she had modified her dress into a cheongsam of some kind.

  “Hibana Teira,” one guy said. Suguru looked to him. He had glasses and wore a neatly pressed trench coat customization of the standard uniform. “One-hundred and third clan head of the Hibana clan. It took a moment for me to recognize her. I believe, however, that many of us in this school have already encountered her—through her shikigami.”

  “No way,” Ieiri said.

  “What, you mean the moth woman?” The girl replied.

  “Ah, yeeeah,” a hoodie-wearing guy with dreadlocs grinned. “She’s bug girl? You sure?”

  “I’m positive,” the guy in the trench coat said.

  “Shit!” Satoshi Ren cursed up a storm. “She’s—she saved my damn life!”

  “Wha—me too!” Suzuki Yui shouted.

  One mousy girl raised a hand. “Me… me too.”

  “Who the hell’s the other guy?” Satoshi asked.

  “You’re the one that said his name,” hoodie guy said.

  “I just heard from the teacher that he was the strongest. Asked him in my interview is all,” Satoshi replied. “But seriously. Who is he?”

  “Gojo Satoru, supposedly,” a tall and fat guy said. “It was said as if it was meant to speak for itself.”

  Suguru put the dots together. “None of us are from sorcerous backgrounds. That’s why we don’t know him,” Suguru said. “But yes. Supposedly, he’s well-known in this world.”

  And for good reason.

  “…I have a thousand on Teira winning,” Ieiri said.

  “Hibana is for sure winning,” Suzuki said.

  “Nahhh, it’s Gojo!” Satoshi shouted.

  That’s when a giant dome of darkness swallowed up the field.

  000

  A statue appeared behind me, made of many bronze figures of superheroes twisting together into a pyramidal mound to hold up a statue of myself, one-armed, wearing a jetpack, wearing the same costume as I had all those years ago.

  And around us grew a city littered with insect-riddled corpses, flooded streets and destroyed buildings. The sky above was choked with bugs, and the golden sun behind the sky was barely visible.

  As my Domain expanded, Gojo Satoru made two gestures.

  He pointed his index and middle finger over his shoulder with his left hand. With his right, he held back two of his fingers with his thumb, intent on flicking something towards me.

  Not a Simple Domain. The idiot doesn’t even have an Anti-Domain technique. We are operating on entirely different realms of mastery!

  The purple light that developed on his hand told me exactly what it was.

  He had combined the Blue, and the Red light into something unreasonably powerful. Something that would kill me should it be released.

  But it was too late. A scarab Juchū was already in his throat, blocking his airways. What was more, it was fully Fertile.

  Just one flick of my will and it would immediately begin to cannibalize his soul, turning his airways into eggsacs.

  My thought process grinded to a halt as I realized that Satoru had already released his ray, taking off three of my left arms cleanly. No muss, no fuss.

  The technique continued past me, striking the barrier from within and destroying it utterly.

  I got the message clearly. He had aimed to not kill me on purpose.

  The fight was over.

  And I did the responsible thing by commanding the fat Juchū to crawl out of his throat. He spat it out, furrowing his eyebrows at me. “A Domain Expansion? How absurd can you be?”

  “My bugs do soul damage,” I said as I healed back my three left arms. “Are you well-versed in addressing that sort of injury?” I asked. I had Michiko open some portals, and some bugs go in to retrieve my haori and obi as I intended to dress up again.

  “…No,” he said.

  “I bet also,” I said as I ripped the knife out from my chest, restarting my heart, “That you don’t know how to oxygenate your own brain, either, as you worked to try and stem the damage. I assume you’d try to rip your throat out, bug and all, before it could Reproduce, but I assure you, that wouldn’t have worked. I had more time to attack than you. Even if attacking would have meant my death.”

  “So then it’s a draw,” he said. “I wouldn’t have needed my throat to release my final attack against you. Obviously.”

  I retracted my arms and started putting on my uniform. “I’m aware,” I said quietly. I sighed. A disappointing outcome, but I wouldn’t act the child by trying to litigate it. I had held back on some options. I could have used my ultimate Arthropodal Aspect technique to increase my speed enough to maybe dodge the purple attack and keep asphyxiating Gojo until he lost consciousness.

  Instead, I had kept what little cards I hadn’t revealed close to my chest, thinking that just the Domain Expansion alone would have been enough. I had accounted for every technique but the last one.

  And it was a technique whose sheer velocity utterly outstripped my own reaction speed.

  In my boundless confidence, I hadn’t considered that anyone could possess such an absurd power. Would Arthropodal Aspect even have helped?

  Maybe not while the purple attack was already formed and in transit. But now that I knew what to look out for, he would never take me by surprise again. I couldn’t dodge the bullet, but I could dodge his aim.

  “Even if I was able to get through your Infinity, we never decided on a win condition. With the Reverse Cursed Technique in play, only the one who first ran out of cursed energy would lose, and you seem unable to spend your energy to such an extent in the first place. You have perfect efficiency.”

  “And you have a pipeline of infinite cursed energy coming to you from all over the country,” Gojo spat. “Even if I tried to cut you off from the source using Infinity, I’d be drawing your physical body way too close to me for comfort.”

  I wondered why he hadn’t tried to do that. I had to assume that the neutral application of Limitless, the Infinity technique, had a range limit. And the only way around that was to pour more energy into his technique in order to utilize its extension, ‘Blue’, or the ball of gravity.

  Although a mutual tie was disappointing, I did have another card up my sleeve, one that I was glad I hadn’t revealed just yet.

  And…

  ‘What did you learn from his Limitless, Michiko?’ I transmitted to my partner spirit.

  ‘More than I could have possibly imagined.’

  ‘You think you can get through?’

  ‘Need more… I need to see more of it…’

  I sighed and nodded.

  Eventually, she’d have enough data to work with. Michiko’s technique allowed her to bend time and space, though it mostly ever extended to expanding space in small spaces, and accelerating time.

  But with a little bit of imagination and inspiration, she could prove to be my biggest weapon against Gojo Satoru.

  “You really are a demon,” Gojo remarked at me. “Like, there is something seriously, deeply wrong with you.”

  “Thank you. I try,” I smiled.

  He returned the grin, though it was undercut by frustration. “Well, I can’t say this wasn’t a disappointment—the outcome, at least. But I had fun, nonetheless.” He approached me, hand outstretched. “Let’s take it easy for the time being. I’m sure we gave Yaga a huge scare.”

  My shikigami dressed me up to completion. I noted that despite the intensity of our battle, Gojo’s shirt had not a scratch on it. That was cursed spider silk for you. Incredibly strong and cut-resistant, and it even did a fair bit to limit shock as well. Thanks to my contract with the schools, all the uniforms were made of them.

  As I summoned more Juchū to help even out the ground of the savaged field, filling the holes and otherwise clearing away the evidence of our incredible battle, I looked at Gojo’s outstretched hand. “You’re not who I thought you were,” I said. “You’re somehow better,” in that he wasn’t some snot-nosed nepo-baby that coasted by on pure talent. He had the mindset of a ferocious fighter. “And yet, worse.” Because he used these qualities to inadvertently prop up a corrupt Society through his sheer presence.

  In the end, I simply had to accept that he was a child, and that this sort of an attitude was his prerogative. For the time being. I took the hand. Just to give the onlookers a more positive view that they could aspire to. I also receded all my facial changes, packing it all tightly into my soul. “You have time to grow up. Take your time, but do grow up. And if you ever get in my way, Gojo Satoru—”

  “Yeah, yeah, I get the gist, psycho.” He seemed a little concerned as he said so.

  “Good,” I nodded.

  I mentally prepared for a reaming as I sensed Yaga finally exist the main building and stomp over towards us. The teacher had all but given up on stopping us from fighting, and was instead planning on punishing us for our blatant breach of the school rules. He intended to make a public example out of us.

  For the sake of my political ambition, and for the children who no doubt had quite the fright watching us fight, I decided that I would submit to his discipline. That would reduce some of the tension, make the kids believe that the administration had anything under control.

  “Are you two knuckleheads quite done?!” the man roared.

  Damn. I need a drink.