The warehouse district of Yokohama's industrial sector was a maze of rusted metal and forgotten dreams. It was also, according to their intelligence, home to a particularly nasty Special Grade curse that had consumed three sorcerers from a lesser clan who'd tried to exorcise it without backup. The higher-ups had designated it as a mandatory team mission—all four Special Grades were to deploy together. It was rare for them to work as a complete unit anymore, their individual strengths usually sufficient for most threats, but the casualty report had made the bureaucrats nervous.
"Just like old times," Satoru said cheerfully as they approached the designated barrier. His hands were in his pockets, his posture relaxed, but Ryouta could sense the razor-sharp focus beneath the casual demeanor. Satoru had grown tremendously over the past months. His control over Limitless was now absolute, his Reverse Cursed Technique refined to the point where he could maintain it indefinitely. He was, without question, the strongest sorcerer of their generation.
"Old times were three months ago," Shoko muttered, though there was a hint of a smile on her usually stoic face. She'd been spending time with Nanako and Mimiko, teaching them basic healing techniques, and the experience had softened some of her cynical edges.
Geto was the most changed. The crisis at the village had been a turning point—not the breaking point from the original timeline, but something else. A crucible that had tempered rather than shattered him. He carried himself with a new gravitas, a quiet determination that replaced his earlier idealism. He'd stopped trying to save everyone and started focusing on saving those he could reach. It was a subtle but profound shift.
The curse itself was a grotesque thing—a amalgamation of industrial accidents and worker exploitation, a twisted mass of metal and flesh that had taken on the vague shape of a many-armed giant. Its domain was the warehouse complex itself, and the moment they crossed the threshold, reality shifted. The walls became organic, pulsing with a sickly rhythm. The air grew thick with the smell of oil and blood.
"Formation Delta," Geto commanded, and they moved as one. They'd trained this pattern extensively—Satoru as the mobile striker, drawing aggression and dodging attacks. Geto as the controller, using his curses to restrict movement and create openings. Shoko positioned at the rear, maintaining a healing field. And Ryouta as the ghost, his Veil of Unbeing active, moving through the battlefield unseen to strike at critical moments.
The curse roared and lashed out with metallic tentacles, each one tipped with spinning saw blades. Satoru didn't even bother to dodge. His Infinity shimmered, and the attacks simply stopped, kinetic energy dissipating harmlessly. "My turn," he said, and fired a concentrated Blue that tore three of the tentacles clean off.
Geto's curses swarmed in from the flanks—a coordinated assault of flying curses that wrapped around the remaining limbs, pinning them. The curse thrashed, trying to break free, and in its distraction, Ryouta struck. He appeared behind its core, visible for just a fraction of a second, and drove his hand into its back. His Primordial Divergence separated the binding that held the amalgamation together, and the entire structure collapsed like a puppet with cut strings.
Seventeen seconds. That's how long the fight had lasted. They'd become a machine of terrifying efficiency.
As they exited the dissipating domain, Satoru stretched lazily. "That was barely a workout. The reports made it sound way scarier."
"Three sorcerers died," Shoko reminded him, her tone sharp. "Don't get cocky."
"I'm not cocky," Satoru protested, then grinned. "I'm just aware of my own excellence."
"There's a difference?" Geto asked dryly, and even Ryouta chuckled. The easy banter between them was a relief, a sign that despite everything, the bonds between them remained strong.
Back at Jujutsu High, Nanako and Mimiko had become a familiar sight. The twins, now recovered from their physical ordeal, were thriving under proper care and training. They'd bonded strongly with Ryouta, viewing him as their savior—a perception that made him uncomfortable but that he accepted as a responsibility. They were gifted students, their natural cursed energy reserves substantial, though their techniques were still developing.
Ryouta found them in one of the training yards, practicing barrier construction under Geto's supervision. The technique was advanced for their age, but Geto had insisted on teaching them defensive skills first. Protect before you attack, he'd told them. It was a philosophy born from his own painful lessons.
"Sensei Ryouta!" Nanako called out when she spotted him. The honorific made him wince—he was only eighteen, hardly deserving of such formal address—but the girls had insisted.
"How's the training going?" he asked, approaching the group.
"Mimiko's barrier is stronger," Nanako reported, a hint of competitive frustration in her voice. "Mine keeps collapsing at the corners."
Ryouta knelt beside her chalk outline on the ground. His Primordial Six Eyes could see the issue immediately—her cursed energy flow was uneven, concentrating too much power at the center and leaving the edges weak. "You're thinking of it as a wall," he said. "Try thinking of it as a sphere. The strength should be distributed evenly throughout."
He demonstrated, creating a small, perfectly symmetrical barrier that shimmered like a soap bubble. Nanako watched intently, then tried again. This time, her barrier held, fragile but stable.
"Better," Geto said, nodding approval. "Keep practicing. Consistency is more important than power at your level."
As the girls returned to their exercises, Geto pulled Ryouta aside. "Thank you," he said quietly. "For everything. For stopping me that day. For giving me another path to walk. I don't know if I've said it enough."
"You don't need to thank me," Ryouta replied. "We're friends. That's what friends do."
"Still," Geto insisted, his dark eyes serious. "I was standing at the edge of something terrible. You pulled me back. I won't forget that."
They stood in companionable silence, watching the twins practice. Ryouta's omniscient awareness spread out over the campus, a constant background hum of information. He could sense Satoru in the main building, annoying Yaga with questions about potential overseas missions. He could sense Shoko in the medical wing, treating a student who'd overextended themselves in training. He could sense the peaceful rhythm of a school day, the mundane beauty of normalcy.
But beneath it all, there was something else. A discordant note he'd been sensing for weeks. Something wrong in the foundation of their world.
Satoru had been getting stronger at a rate that defied logic—even by his own prodigious standards. His mastery over Limitless had evolved to the point where he could maintain Infinity indefinitely without any strain on his cursed energy reserves. His Blue and Red had become so refined that he could modulate their power with surgical precision, from barely a whisper to city-leveling force. And his Domain Expansion, Unlimited Void, had reached a level of sophistication that was genuinely frightening.
Ryouta watched his brother during a private training session, his Primordial Six Eyes analyzing every movement. Satoru was practicing a new application—using Blue to create gravitational wells that could redirect his own attacks mid-flight, allowing him to essentially make his techniques "curve" around obstacles.
"Like this?" Satoru asked, firing a Red that curved ninety degrees in mid-air before striking a target dummy.
"Almost," Ryouta said. "You're still using too much energy on the redirect. Think of it as changing the definition of 'straight' rather than forcing the attack to turn."
Satoru frowned, then nodded slowly. He tried again, and this time the Red's path seemed more natural, less forced. "How do you do it?" he asked suddenly. "How do you always see exactly what needs to be fixed?"
"Practice," Ryouta said, which was technically true but not the whole truth. His Primordial Six Eyes gave him an understanding of cursed energy flows that was fundamentally different from Satoru's version. Where Satoru saw everything, Ryouta understood everything. It was a subtle but crucial distinction.
"You've been distracted lately," Satoru observed, his tone shifting from student to concerned brother. "Something bothering you?"
Ryouta hesitated. He'd been noticing anomalies in mission reports, inconsistencies in the way certain curse incidents were being classified and handled by the higher-ups. Nothing concrete, just patterns that didn't quite add up. His past-life knowledge told him that corruption in jujutsu society ran deep, but he hadn't expected to stumble across evidence of it so directly.
"Just a hunch," he said finally. "I might need to do some investigating."
Satoru's expression grew serious. "Need backup?"
"Not yet," Ryouta said. "Right now it's just suspicions. But if I find something concrete... yeah, I'll need you."
"Just say the word," Satoru said, bumping his fist against Ryouta's shoulder in their familiar gesture. "Whatever it is, we handle it together."
Three nights later, Ryouta found himself in the archives of Jujutsu High, going through mission reports from the past decade. His omniscient awareness was focused on the documents themselves, reading not just the words but the intent behind them, the subtle manipulations and omissions.
The pattern was clear once he knew what to look for. Certain types of curses—specifically those that manifested in areas where the local clans had financial interests—were being deliberately misclassified. Grade 2 curses reported as Grade 3 or 4, making them the responsibility of lower-ranked sorcerers or auxiliary families. Those sorcerers would attempt the exorcisms, often failing and dying in the process. Their deaths would be written off as "unfortunate miscalculations," and the higher-ups would send someone more competent to clean up.
But why? What did the clans gain from this systematic negligence?
Ryouta's search led him to financial records, carefully hidden but accessible to someone with his level of clearance and perception. Insurance payouts. Inheritance claims. Property acquisitions. The pattern became sickeningly clear: the clans were profiting from the deaths of lower-ranked sorcerers. They'd take out insurance policies on their auxiliary members, send them on missions they knew were too dangerous, collect the payouts, and acquire property cheaply when families were forced to sell after losing their breadwinners.
It was monstrous. Systematic. And utterly banal in its evil.
Ryouta sat back, his hands trembling with rage. This was the system they were sworn to protect. This was the establishment that Geto had questioned, that Ryouta had defended as flawed but reformable. But this wasn't just flawed. This was rotten to the core.
He thought of the villagers who'd caged Nanako and Mimiko. He thought of the higher-ups who'd sent those three sorcerers to their deaths in Yokohama, probably knowing the curse was stronger than reported. He thought of every "unfortunate accident" that had been carefully engineered for profit.
For a moment, just a moment, Ryouta understood Geto's rage. Understood the temptation to just burn it all down and start over.
But then he thought of Nanako and Mimiko, thriving under proper care. He thought of all the students at Jujutsu High who had no idea how rotten the system above them was. He thought of his brother, who for all his power still believed in their duty to protect.
He couldn't destroy the system. But he could expose it. He could drag it into the light and force it to change.
He spent the rest of the night copying documents, creating a comprehensive file of evidence. He'd need to be strategic about this. Going directly to the higher-ups would just get him silenced. He needed allies. He needed leverage. And most importantly, he needed to protect his friends from the inevitable backlash.
The next morning, Ryouta called an emergency meeting with Satoru, Geto, and Shoko at their usual ramen shop. The owner knew them well enough to give them privacy in the back room.
"This better be good," Shoko muttered, lighting her morning cigarette. "I was in the middle of a surgery."
"It's not good," Ryouta said grimly. "It's the opposite of good." He laid out what he'd discovered—the systematic exploitation, the deliberate misclassifications, the financial motives behind the deaths of countless sorcerers.
The silence that followed was crushing. Geto's face had gone pale, his hands clenched into fists. Satoru's usual grin had vanished completely, replaced by a cold fury that was almost frightening. Even Shoko looked shaken, her cigarette forgotten.
"Those bastards," Satoru said, his voice dangerously quiet. "Those absolute bastards."
"We always knew the higher-ups were corrupt," Geto said, his voice hollow. "But this... this is systematic murder for profit."
"What do we do?" Shoko asked, looking at Ryouta.
"We expose it," Ryouta said. "But carefully. Going loud will just get us branded as traitors and silenced. We need to build a coalition. Find sorcerers we can trust, people with influence who can't be easily dismissed. We need to make this so public that they can't sweep it under the rug."
"That's going to take time," Geto said.
"And it's going to be dangerous," Shoko added. "The clans won't take this lying down."
"I know," Ryouta said. "But it's the right thing to do. And if we don't do it, if we just keep going along with the system... then we're complicit."
Satoru stood up, his full height and presence filling the small room. "Then we do it. We burn the whole corrupt establishment down if we have to. No one gets to profit from the deaths of sorcerers. Not while I'm around."
The determination in his voice, in all their voices, was absolute. They were young, idealistic, and probably naive. But they were also the strongest. And they had just declared war on the very system they were supposed to serve.
That evening, Ryouta and Satoru sat on the roof of Ryouta's apartment, watching the city lights flicker to life as the sun set. It had become their spot for serious conversations, away from the world's prying eyes.
"We're really doing this," Satoru said. It wasn't a question.
"We are," Ryouta confirmed.
"They're going to come after us. The clans, the higher-ups, everyone with a vested interest in keeping things the way they are."
"I know."
"We could die."
"I know that too."
Satoru was quiet for a long moment. Then he laughed—not his usual carefree laugh, but something darker, more fierce. "Good. Let them come. I've been looking for a real challenge anyway."
Ryouta smiled despite the gravity of the situation. This was who his brother truly was beneath the arrogance and jokes—someone who would stand against the world itself if he believed it was right. It was inspiring. It was terrifying. It was exactly why Ryouta had been reborn here, to stand beside him.
"Together?" Satoru asked, holding out his fist.
"Always," Ryouta replied, bumping his fist against his brother's.
Below them, Tokyo sprawled out in all its chaotic glory—millions of lives, each one precious, each one worth protecting. And somewhere in that vast city, in the halls of power and privilege, people were about to learn that the strongest wasn't just a title. It was a promise. And a threat.
The game had changed. The shadows within shadows had been exposed. And the Gojo twins, along with their friends, had just lit a match that would either illuminate the darkness or burn everything to the ground.