The thunder finally rolled away, its echoes fading into the charred horizon. The air, once crackling with storm-borne violence, now hung heavy with silence. Charred earth stretched for miles and a blackened expanse where forests once stood and hills had cradled the horizon.
Then the dust began to settle.
Gojo hovered above, he narrowed his gaze as his X-ray vision kicked in. The smoke and rock peeled back in layers before his sight, revealing the twisted skeleton of the mountain range and beneath it, buried under thousands of tons of debris, was Cain Marko.
Gojo's lips curled into a smirk. His heart was still thundering and it was not from fear, not even from exertion but from the thrill. The sheer excitement of testing forbidden, volatile techniques on someone who could actually take it and still keep standing.
He teleported, appearing just above the jagged heap of molten stone and fractured boulders.
Hands in his pockets, he tilted his head.
"Is that it? Seriously I thought you were supposed to be the unstoppable force?" he said, voice echoing lightly through the steaming rubble.
"You done, big guy?"
There was no answer yet. Just the crackling sound of superheated stone shifting beneath its own weight.
Gojo looked around, observing the war-torn landscape, every tree incinerated, every hill flattened, and the very air still vibrating with aftershocks.
He chuckled to himself.
"Huh. Ten miles of absolute mayhem. Guess this is what they meant by collateral damage…"
He looked at a smoking crater nearby and added with a smirk "...I'm sure someone will bill me for that."
Then a tremor shock the area. The mound of rubble shook violently. Stone cracked, geysers of hot dust burst upward, and a deep vibration passed through the air. Gojo's expression didn't shift, but his eyes narrowed.
A roar exploded out primal, massive, vibrating the marrow of the earth and with it came a surge of crimson, volatile energy, lashing out like a whip in every direction. The mountain mound was suddenly torn apart, boulders launched into the sky like missiles.
From within, Juggernaut stood, steam rising from his body, his armor flaking off in burning slabs. But more than that he was growing again. His muscle mass expanding. Limbs thickening. His height easily pushing till he was 20 feet now. His breath was a storm. His gaze was locked on Gojo with fury and something else, 'respect'.
Gojo stared back impassive.
But beneath the surface, he was thinking about something interesting.
---
"Telepathy."
It wasn't something he'd leaned on in this universe. In this world, telepaths were monstrous, capable of warping thoughts, shaping dreams, even rewriting concepts.
But they all shared one weakness:
'metal'.
Helmets, headgear, even psychic dampeners… all designed to block that mental edge.
He glanced at Cain's skull still fully-covered in enchanted metal forged from mystical metal. Resistant to magic and to intrusion.
And yet…
Gojo smiled faintly.
'I've never actually tried to read him. Never needed to. Maybe I've just been assuming the rules here are mine too.'
A small smirk made its way onto Gojo's face as the cogs in his mind turned. If brute strength only fed the beast, if physicality only made him stronger, then perhaps it was time to try something the Juggernaut wasn't built to handle, something that would bypass the physical completely. A metaphysical assault. A psychic one. One that would unravel him from the inside out.
His beautiful gem like eyes narrowed slightly, focusing with crystal clarity as Cain Marko took another thunderous step, the earth quaking beneath the weight of his tread. In that moment, just a breath, just a blink. Gojo channeled every ounce of his vast telepathic might and locked eyes with the unstoppable force.
Instantly, the world stilled.
The massive Juggernaut, who moments ago seemed like an unrelenting storm of destruction, began to slow. His next step came with a noticeable lag. His movements, once fluid in their brutality, began to tremble with confusion.
Gojo's eyes glowed faintly with otherworldly light. His mind tunneled deep into Cain's, pushing through the thick, primal mists of hatred and rage until he breached something deeper, the mind of the man. For a second, the physical world around him faded into haze, replaced by the astral shimmer of the mental plane.
Cain Marko's essence unfolded before him like a cracked book, the bindings torn, the pages scorched with unresolved trauma.
Gojo floated in a storm of red and black thought-fragments, emotion-choked echoes of a broken past. Screams, shouts, and a ceaseless pounding of footsteps through memory reverberated all around him.
He could feel the torment Cain endured, how Charles Xavier, his brilliant half-brother, had always outshone him, how resentment festered like a wound. Then came the pivotal memory, clearer than the rest. Cain stumbling through a ruined temple in Asia, his hands bleeding, his mind a maelstrom of desperation until his fingers brushed a glowing gem. The Crimson Gem of Cyttorak.
It pulsed within the mental landscape like a second sun, its energy chaotic and maddening, warping Cain from man to beast.
Gojo's eyes narrowed further as he began to push his own mental strength compressing around Juggernaut's mind like a vice. The storm of thoughts began to quiet under his will.
"All brawn, no brain. No strategy. Just a battering ram with daddy issues," Gojo muttered as he focused.
He began shutting Juggernaut down, one sense at a time. Sight. Sound. Awareness. Piece by piece, Cain's consciousness began to still, like a roaring inferno slowly being suffocated.
But then it pushed back.
Gojo's frown was immediate. A foreign power pulsed within Juggernaut's mind.
His senses flared in warning.
He reached toward it with a cautious mental probe and immediately jerked back. The contact was like being licked by a solar flare. His psychic fingertips burned. Not with fire, but with something far worse, something that wanted him.
"That's not Cain," he muttered to himself, eyes widening.
This presence didn't just resist him. It pulled at him. A gravitational force gripped his astral form, dragging him toward the center of Cain's mind with terrifying ease. The blurred thoughts and psychic mists around him spun into a whirlpool, and no matter how he strained, Gojo couldn't escape.
Panic brushed his spine for the first time. And In desperation, he forged a mental construct, a powerful psychic attack he could come up with in that moment, a Leviathan of burning cerulean flame, shaped like a dragon-serpent, large enough to devour anything, forged from everything he was. The Kirin.
With a scream of thought, he unleashed it into the heart of Cain's mind.
The Leviathan roared through the psychic storm, a beast of annihilation, snapping toward the dark nexus of the power like a tidal wave of destruction.
And then…
Nothing. The being at the center of Cain's mind simply brushed it aside, like swiping away a fly. The Leviathan dissipated like mist.
Gojo's breath caught and his blood ran cold.
"No... That's not possible," he whispered.
The pull intensified. Gojo couldn't fight it. Not anymore. He was yanked forward, crashing into the core.
And then in a blink of an eye, everything changed. He opened his eyes. If they could be called that in this place and found himself in a new place.
The Crimson Wastes.
An endless plain of scarlet dunes and broken spires. The sky overhead was aflame, not with fire but with molten hatred, bleeding red lightning across the horizon. The air itself screamed. The very ground beneath his feet pulsed with unnatural heat.
Gojo stood, unmoving, trying to orient himself.
"This... This isn't a mind," he muttered. "This is a domain."
And if his guess was correct then this would be a demon god's realm.
Cyttorak's realm.
A dimension that lived.
And it had noticed him.
Gojo squared his stance, narrowing his eyes. "Well, shit."
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