The silence that followed the curse's erasure was heavier than any sound. The rainbow beetle, oblivious, continued to crawl on Satoru's finger, its iridescent shell a tiny, shimmering jewel in the twilight. Satoru's gaze flickered from the empty space where the monster had been, to his twin's unnervingly calm face, and back to the beetle. His Six Eyes, for all their divine processing power, had registered an impossibility. There was no technique, no energy fluctuation consistent with an attack. One moment, a Grade 2 curse existed. The next, it didn't. It was as if a line of reality's code had been silently deleted.
He looked at Ryouta, at the silver-gold eyes that held the depth of a starry night sky, and he didn't see his quiet, reserved brother. He saw something ancient, something absolute. He finally understood. Their entire lives, their rivalry, their training—they hadn't been playing the same game. Satoru had been trying to win at chess, while Ryouta was the one who had written the rules of the board.
The understanding didn't bring fear, or jealousy. It brought a profound, bone-deep sense of awe, and something else, something warmer: security. He, the strongest, had a shadow that was even stronger, and that shadow was entirely, unconditionally devoted to him.
"You," Satoru said, his voice barely a whisper, "are completely insane."
A small, genuine smile touched Ryouta's lips. "It's taken you this long to figure that out?"
Satoru let out a shaky laugh, the tension breaking. The moment passed, the impossible event filed away into a new, separate compartment in his mind labeled "Ryouta." He knew he wouldn't get answers, not yet. But he had seen a glimpse of the truth, and it was more terrifying and more reassuring than he could have ever imagined.
That night marked a subtle but fundamental shift in their dynamic. The boisterous rivalry didn't cease, but it was now underpinned by a new layer of respect from Satoru, and a new layer of quiet responsibility from Ryouta. The incident had been a slip-up, a crack in his carefully constructed facade of normalcy. He had let his protective instincts override his strategic concealment, and it had revealed too much. He vowed to be more careful. The world, he knew, was not ready to see what he was capable of. And more importantly, he wasn't ready to bear the consequences of that revelation.
Their entrance into Tokyo Metropolitan Curse Technical College at the age of fifteen was less an event and more a quiet inevitability. For the Gojo twins, it was not a question of if, but when. They were assigned to the care of Masamichi Yaga, a stern, imposing man whose cursed energy felt as solid and reliable as bedrock.
Satoru, naturally, made an impression. He strode into the classroom with his hands in his pockets and a cocky grin, his very presence a declaration of dominance. He immediately sized up their two classmates.
Ryouta followed in his wake, a silent shadow. His Primordial Six Eyes, however, were doing a far deeper analysis.
Shoko Ieiri was slouched in her chair, a look of profound boredom on her face. Her cursed energy was a cool, calm, and stable blue-green, flowing in the opposite direction of normal energy. Reverse Cursed Technique, Ryouta thought, his past-life knowledge bubbling up. She's a natural healer. Her energy feels… grounding. Stable. He could also perceive a faint, lingering aura of weariness around her, the signature of someone who already felt older than her years.
Then his gaze fell on Suguru Geto. Geto was Satoru's opposite in every way. He was composed, his posture perfect, his smile polite and measured. He radiated an aura of calm righteousness. His cursed energy was immense, a deep, swirling abyss of power that felt fundamentally different from their own. Ryouta's eyes narrowed slightly. He could perceive the thousands of distinct energy signatures contained within Geto—the curses he had consumed. It was an incredible, horrifying power. But beneath the surface of Geto's calm, righteous energy, Ryouta perceived something else, something faint and almost undetectable: a hairline fracture. It was a tiny, dissonant note of doubt, a whisper of conflict between his immense power and the ideology he professed.
So this is him, Ryouta thought, the weight of tragic foresight pressing down on him. The other strongest. The one who will walk a different path. Seeing him now, so full of conviction… it's hard to reconcile with the man he will become. The manga showed his fall, but it never truly captured the pressure that would cause a soul this strong to break.
"Well, look what we have here," Satoru said, breaking the silence. "So you're the other two. I'm Gojo Satoru. And this quiet one is my brother, Ryouta."
Geto rose and offered a polite bow. "Suguru Geto. It is an honor to be in a class with the heirs of the Gojo clan." His gaze lingered on Ryouta for a moment, intrigued by his silence and the unnerving depth of his silver-gold eyes.
Shoko just gave a lazy wave, not bothering to get up. "Shoko Ieiri. Try not to break anything."
The first few weeks at Jujutsu High were a strange blend of intense training and, for the first time in their lives, a semblance of teenage normalcy. Yaga's training was brutal and practical. He didn't care about their lineage; he cared about results. They were thrown into simulated combat, forced to exorcise curses under controlled conditions, and drilled relentlessly on the fundamentals of jujutsu theory.
Satoru and Geto, the two titans of their generation, immediately formed a bond forged in the fires of friendly competition. Their sparring sessions were cataclysmic events that often required Yaga to intervene before they destroyed the training grounds.
Ryouta, as always, remained in the background. In group exercises, he played a support role, using his techniques with a quiet efficiency that made him an invaluable but unremarkable teammate. He would subtly manipulate the battlefield to give his allies an advantage, a nudge here, a slight pull there, his actions so subtle they were almost always attributed to luck or the enemy's clumsiness. His concealment had reached a new level of artistry.
But it was the moments between the training that truly defined their new lives.
One weekend, Satoru, already bored of the confines of the school, declared they were going into the city. "Yaga-sensei will kill us," Geto warned, ever the responsible one.
"He'll only kill us if he catches us," Satoru retorted with a wink.
An hour later, the four of them were wandering the crowded, neon-lit streets of Shibuya. For Ryouta, it was a sensory paradox. He kept his perception dialed down, but he could still feel the thrum of millions of lives, a vast ocean of emotion and low-level cursed energy. It was a far cry from the sterile, controlled environment of the Gojo estate.
They ended up in a noisy, brightly lit arcade. Satoru immediately challenged Geto to a game of air hockey, their match quickly devolving into a loud, chaotic battle of cursed-energy-enhanced slap shots that nearly broke the machine.
Shoko, looking thoroughly unimpressed, turned to Ryouta, who had been quietly observing. "You're not into… that?" she asked, gesturing to the flailing duo.
"Not particularly," Ryouta admitted.
"Good." She pointed to a fighting game cabinet in the corner. "Virtua Fighter. More your speed?"
Ryouta felt a ghost of a smile. Virtua Fighter. A classic from his past life. "I've played a bit."
They sat down at the machine. Shoko was a surprisingly aggressive player, her fingers a blur on the controls. Ryouta, however, had the muscle memory of a seasoned gamer from another lifetime, combined with the impossible reflexes of his Primordial Embodiment. He didn't play aggressively. He played perfectly. He saw the patterns in her attacks, the openings in her defense, and he exploited them with a calm, surgical precision.
He won every match, but he never took a perfect round. He always let her land a few hits, keeping the matches close enough to be fun.
"How are you so good at this?" she asked, leaning back, a look of genuine, frustrated curiosity on her face. "It's like you know what I'm going to do before I do it."
"Just good at pattern recognition," Ryouta said, the simple explanation a mask for the truth.
It was in these small, insignificant moments that a quiet friendship began to form. Shoko, with her grounded, no-nonsense demeanor, seemed to appreciate his lack of bravado. They didn't talk much, but they fell into an easy, comfortable silence, a shared island of calm in the storm of Satoru and Geto's energy.
Later, as they sat on a bench sharing crepes, a more serious conversation began. Geto, watching the endless stream of non-sorcerers passing by, had a thoughtful, almost troubled look on his face.
"There are so many of them," he said, his voice low. "And they're so… fragile. Oblivious. Our entire world exists to protect them, and they don't even know we're here."
Satoru shrugged, taking a large bite of his crepe. "So what? That's just how it is. We're the strong, so we protect the weak. Simple."
"Is it, though?" Geto countered, his gaze turning to Ryouta. He had noticed Ryouta's quiet intelligence, the way he seemed to think on a different level. "What do you think, Ryouta? Is it our duty to protect them, even when they curse us, fear us, and create the very monsters we have to fight?"
Ryouta paused, choosing his words with the care of a bomb disposal expert. He remembered the manga, Geto's slow descent into a philosophy that saw non-sorcerers, the "monkeys," as a blight to be eradicated. This was the first branching point, the first philosophical question that would lead him down that dark path.
"The strong protecting the weak is a noble idea," Ryouta began, his voice soft but clear. "But it's incomplete. It creates a hierarchy that puts an impossible burden on the strong and infantilizes the weak." He looked at Geto, his silver-gold eyes holding a strange, ancient wisdom. "Maybe the goal isn't just to protect them. Maybe it's to create a world where they don't need our protection. And maybe," he added, the point aimed directly at the core of Geto's future conflict, "our first duty is to protect ourselves, and each other. A shield that breaks is of no use to anyone."
The words hung in the air. Satoru looked confused by the sudden philosophical turn. Shoko seemed intrigued. But Geto… Geto looked as if he had been struck. Ryouta had offered him a different perspective, a third option beyond blind protection or resentful extermination. It was a philosophy of self-preservation and mutual support among sorcerers. A seed had been planted. Whether it would grow, Ryouta didn't know. But he had to try.
The day ended with the four of them walking back to the school under a sky full of stars. A fragile, tentative friendship had been forged, built on air hockey, fighting games, and a single, profound conversation.
That night, Ryouta found Satoru sitting on the roof of their dorm, staring up at the moon. The usual manic energy was gone, replaced by a quiet thoughtfulness. Ryouta sat down beside him, the silence comfortable between them.
"Geto's weird," Satoru said finally.
"He thinks a lot," Ryouta corrected gently.
"Yeah. Too much." Satoru was quiet for a moment. "You think too much too. But it's different. He thinks about the world. You think about… everything else." He turned to face his brother, his blue eyes searching. "Today, in the arcade. Shoko. You were letting her win, weren't you?"
Ryouta didn't answer. He didn't need to.
"You do that with me too," Satoru continued, his voice low. "In our spars. You're not just holding back. You're... guiding me. Making me stronger. Why?"
Ryouta looked away, at the sprawling, sleeping city of Tokyo. The weight of his secret, of his foreknowledge, was immense. He couldn't tell him the truth. Not the whole truth. But he could give him a piece of it.
"You're the sun, Satoru," he said, his voice a soft murmur. "You're brilliant, and powerful, and everyone looks to you. You're meant to be in the light." He turned back to his brother, his silver-gold eyes filled with an unwavering, absolute conviction. "It's my job to take care of the shadows, so you can shine brighter without being burned."
Satoru stared at him, the words sinking in. He didn't understand the full depth of their meaning, the future tragedies they hinted at, the primordial power they concealed. But he understood the intent. He understood the vow. It was the ultimate expression of his brother's love, a promise to be his unseen shield, his silent guardian.
"You're an idiot," Satoru said, his voice thick with an emotion he rarely showed. He bumped his shoulder against Ryouta's. "You don't have to do that alone."
"I'm not alone," Ryouta replied, a genuine smile gracing his lips. "I have you."
They sat there in silence for a long time, two brothers under the vast, starry sky. The Strongest and his Shadow. The Sun and the Moon. Each one's existence giving meaning to the other. They were on the cusp of a new era, a dangerous, uncertain future that only one of them could see coming. But in that quiet moment, sitting side-by-side, they were not afraid. As long as they had each other, they were invincible.