Jujutsu High, Tokyo. POV: Fushiguro Megumi
Megumi had only ever felt more useless than he had during the incident at Sugisawa when Tsumiki had been cursed.
"No, no, it's fwoo then hyoi."
This was a close third.
They'd been at this for four days now. Every morning, every evening. Whenever Ieiri had free time, which wasn't often, he'd been visiting her at her clinic. Fwoo, then hyoi. Whatever that meant. The traditional model—the one Gojo had given him—wasn't working.
No matter how hard he tried, he wasn't able to visualise multiplying negative energy against itself. Like, what did that even mean?
Ieiri-san made a small incision on his palm. Barely enough to draw blood. Cursed energy flowed into his hand as it had countless times before. He tried to make it dense—make it pile up onto and into itself until it collapsed into something useful. Into something that could have stemmed the bleeding of the non-sorcerer that Negi hurt. Or something that could have cleared his head in time for him to save Itadori.
There's also the deer, if only…
After a full minute of this, of his cursed energy being so densely packed that he was outputting it instead—Nothing happened. The process, as ever, felt more 'additive' than 'multiplicative.' His energy only got more negative.
"How was that Ieiri-san?"
The doctor hummed, stifling her cigarette against the countertop.
"You've got potential," she finally said. "You're less hopeless at this than Geto was, at least. Gojo too."
"Gojo-sensei..." Megui's eyes widened. "Really?"
"Yeah. He didn't have any talent in this until that homeless man killed him."
"What?"
Before she could respond, a buzz rang from the counter. Another in his pocket at the same time.
"Huh, speak of the idiot," she said. "You, too?"
Megumi nodded.
"It's a link..."
"Think he got hacked?"
Ieiri-san was already tapping her screen.
"Only one way to find out."
***
Jujutsu High, Kyoto. POV: Iori Utahime
"Bitter."
Iori Utahime was the first to notice. It wasn't a dramatic shift, nor was it a volta in the poetry of the confrontation. Just the slight pinprick of sensation along her tongue. The air tasted bitter, and it hadn't before.
Excluding Miwa, who had just returned from a mission, her only other student in attendance was Noritoshi, who was watching the 'fight' like a man who missed a bus that had later crashed.
Utahime felt a headache drilling into her skull at the prospect of explaining what the hell had happened to their campus.
Irresponsible.
Gojo had just singlehandedly changed the ecosystem of the mountain. A brilliant flash of purple had stolen her breath in the same instant it had ripped the treeline from the ground. The only reason she wasn't standing there in front of that man-child, with her fingers theoretically choking the life of him, was the fight itself. It hadn't ended. Her gaze hardened as she watched them speak.
Utahime loathed this fact with every fibre of her being, but she knew him. Iori Utahime knew Gojo Satoru. She knew him the same way a seasoned dancer knew a sprained ankle. It was an unfortunate consequence of years of their acquaintance. Utahime watched Gojo take a 'fighting' stance, and there was that word again, irresponsible.
It didn't typically apply when it came to prospective students.
"That poor girl," she found herself saying.
Gakuganji had retreated to the safety of the crowd, but it was easy to pick out his familiar cursed energy source. Utahime spiked her own signature, and somehow, some way, that was enough to snatch his attention away from the monumental display in front of them.
Their eyes met.
Stop it, she all but said. Gakuganji replied with stillness.
Then the stands lit up in perfect clarity. Water droplets glistened like diamonds as a bolt tore the sky open. There was a thump, the wet sound of a body hitting the ground. Then another behind her. Then another.
Utahime whirled her head around at the sounds, and saw all at once the many servants and scions of the great families—and many of the not-so great families—dropping like flies.
The air had tasted bitter, but now it tasted pungent.
"Stop the fight!" she yelled, as her lungs strained against the wind.
Maybe he heard her. Maybe he was still responding to the look in her eye.
"I can't."
***
POV: Gojo Satoru
If I were to become you, this foolish ideal would become a lot more grounded and real, don't you think?
It was hard, though he made it look effortless. Being the one. Being the strongest. It weighed on him. He never really considered what it was to be Gojo Satoru, until the day Suguru walked away.
Sorcerers killed curses. The stronger ones killed even more. Gojo Satoru was born with the Six Eyes. Gojo Satoru was born with the Limitless technique. And so, being the embodiment of power, Gojo Satoru's role was to kill the most curses. He liked to think of himself as a free spirit, that he embraced the role because he got a kick out of it. It was like he was made for it! Wait a minute...
That part was easy. Unconscious. Satoru could sleep his way through an exorcism. As far as fighting went, self-doubt and pain were foreign concepts in an ever-distant country. Sleep, sleep.
Then came Geto Suguru, equally bull-headed in his own convictions. The strongest, in his own right. And in his own way, he had been sleeping too.
Suguru's paper-thin dogma, versus his combat-drunk almost-hedonism. How rude and unpleasant had their awakenings been.
Gojo Satoru was born with the Six Eyes, but Gojo Satoru did not open his eyes until it was too late. Sleep. Sleep.
As the strongest, he should have stopped Suguru then. As the strongest he should reform Jujutsu society, because he could, and because he believed things needed to change. As the strongest, he couldn't/he shouldn't do that by force.
It's not easy after all, Suguru.
Compared to a young Satoru, Yuriko was full of doubt.
He had the best view of the phenomenon. What had been grey overhead, became black. Lances of thunder were tearing the very clouds asunder. Pitter-patters became torrential.
Full of power, too. Jujutsu didn't typically reward such combinations.
But she was using all of it. Every last drop of her cursed energy swelled as it hit the air. What had started with nature, was now being exacerbated by the hand of this fifteen-year-old girl. Yuriko was modelling the environment. Tabulating meteorological conditions, and then altering their variables, until one pocket of air crashed into the next, until clouds piled atop other clouds.
Cumulonimbus.
Satoru peered up at her personal storm. The verdict hung overhead like a hearing and then the gavel dropped. Multiple arms of lightning, each thick enough to have levelled the trees—had there been any left—crashed not into Infinity, but to Yuriko's waiting hand. They scattered.
Tendrils of discharge worming their way into molecules, fixing nitrogen, clumping breathable air into ozone.
He could have stopped her. One red and the winds would have burst apart, dispelling her calculations. One blue and the bolts would have fallen into his hand, accomplishing nothing.
But her previous question rang like a fire alarm at the base of his skull.
"You can take it, can't you?"
It had been a while since someone else had stood level with him. Challenged him in any meaningful way. That wasn't to say that Yuriko had any hope of beating him. And as far as things stood, with only four months behind her, even Yuta could beat her. But he felt something different standing in front of her as he did, seeing the fear in her eyes melt, and pool into crimson certainty.
Yuriko was a girl plagued with doubt who pretended to be sure. In her own way, she was still sleeping. Still unaware of who Suzushina Yuriko was. But right now, in the present moment, with only forty seconds to spare, Yuriko was, in all ways except verbal, declaring herself the strongest.
And that, along with her question, demanded an answer.
Her hands rose from her sides, and Yuriko pounced.
***
POV: Suzushina Yuriko
I don't know.
That was her answer when Yuji and Setsuko had asked her what she was. That was her answer for anything that couldn't be proven, that she didn't have the time or foresight to research beforehand.
I don't know.
The calculation running through her head was based on the velocities it took to travel every subdivided space that Infinity designated. Surprisingly, or—given what she knew about the Six Eyes—rather unsurprisingly, the sequence between her and her mentor was predictable. Much in the same way that she could use the nth term to find any term in the sequence of the triangular numbers, she could work out how 'fast' her fist would need to travel through any given region of his space.
The issue was getting through all of them at once.
She could prove it. She could find his 'telescoping series' and prove exactly where Gojo Satoru stood in the three dimensions of space, mathematically. However, it was going to take 'faith'—not certainty—in her power that it would have a tangible result in the real world. Thus—
I don't know. But she had to try.
With the last thunderbolt, Yuriko plugged the formula into her mind, and into her limbs. Her shortcut. Her sum to infinity, then launched herself at Satoru.
Colour blurred around her; she threw a punch.
Satoru either knew to dodge or just decided it would be funny, so he tilted his chin and let her fist slip past.
He caught her arm before gravity could. The unimbued domain. Reflection died where his fingers met her wrist, but she smiled. Because now she had him! Or so she thought before—
"Really? Ammonia?"
—he threw her as the cloud of flammable solids and accelerant detonated around them.
Yuriko bounced and bumped until Satoru cleared the smoke with a casual sweep of his arm. Not a hair out of place. Infinity was back online. He'd localised the blast wave just as much as she had.
A failure. But she was learning.
He could either hit her or survive her. He couldn't do both. Amp up the danger.
Hyperoxia wasn't working anymore. Infinity was filtering the air on a stricter basis. Hypoxia wasn't an answer either— he could heal the damage as it happened. Yuriko's ribs throbbed in envy.
Thunder boomed, and she was moving.
Thirty-five seconds.
Matter surged forward with her. Pebbles and dead branches accelerating at gale forces. She swung. Infinity off. Satoru tapped her wrist away. The debris collided with—Infinity on—nothing. He flicked her in the head, and she sailed over his shoulders.
Another failure. But she was learning.
Yuriko arrested her momentum a metre away.
He's confident. Before her powers, confidence was something Yuriko only felt with a pen in her hand; Sukuna reminded her about its slow, insidious poison when her pride was overweening. Satoru knows he can beat me. Worse than that, the bastard was still having fun. He'll be reckless.
I don't have an answer for the domain trick. But Infinity was workable.
She wasted five seconds observing. And that's when she caught Satoru's eyes flitting off her. Where was he looking? Though she couldn't follow his line of sight, displacement told her he was looking at the stands. Yuji and Setsukowill be fine. She was making sure of it. What else was taking his attention?
It took Yuriko five more seconds to decide it didn't matter. Twenty-five. A distraction was a distraction.
Her field of vision narrowed onto Satoru, and in half a second, she was upon him again—a densely packed, volatile bubble of air trailing closely behind. He snatched the scruff of her collar and spun her twice. Suddenly, the clouds were getting closer.
A failure. He had flung her overhead.
Satoru chuckled, completely at ease, as the corona of light devoured his form.
But then she noticed something. A flinch. A slight smattering of irritation that ran along his brow. It wasn't directed at the explosion. With infinity online again, the blast was affecting him just about as much as it did her: not at all. No, his irritation was pointed in the same direction his eyes kept flickering toward. The stands. Something there, or someone there was...
It doesn't matter.
This was the moment. She could feel it in this dynamic stillness, in the blast softly pulsing off Satoru, his hair an amber in the glow. More. She had to force him to defend. A corkscrew of wind, and volatile gas followed closely behind.
Yuriko seized her momentum and flipped the arrow. She was descending like a bolt of lightning. He would have to defend, and defending meant Infinity.
Satoru had seen her already, and his arms were moving. His right hand danced toward her explosive lance, while his left snaked toward her in the way of his previous responses. Satoru was going to bat her away. He was going to guide her to some irrelevant space like she was just some thrashing kitten he could set aside whenever she got inconvenient. He was certain he could stop the explosion. Certain he could switch from his technique to the domain trick before she had the time to do something that mattered.
That window that he was sure of was where opportunity lay.
Certainty was the plaster of complacency and Yuriko didn't mind being a hammer.
Satoru's arm reached out. Yuriko accelerated, twisting past his fingers by a hair. He was already adjusting, dropping his shoulders, planting his feet. Infinity snapped back around him like a plastic film as her spear from above fizzled impotently in his palm.
Twenty.
She wasn't going to make it. The circumstances were as ideal as they would get, but she wasn't going to make it. She had forced him to maintain Limitless; had forced his hands to be too far apart to teleport—except she hadn't.
She wasn't forcing him to do anything. His pride and his ego had put him in this situation, and his experience was allowing him to resolve it beyond the scope of her preparation.
Yuriko wasn't going to make it. The girl clenched her fist anyway. Thumb outside, the way Sukuna had taught her; her body adjusting as she fell, in an approximation of what Satoru had done when he landed a hit on her just minutes ago.
That was when opportunity laid itself bare. Pain. As minute as it was foreign on his face. Satoru's eyes shifted off her involuntarily. Toward the stands again.
The young girl, however, saw none of this.
She was too busy throwing a haymaker.
Skin on skin. It landed like a slap. It landed like a back landing on a mattress after a long, hard week. It landed like a test paper landing right-side up on the table.
Oh. But the euphoria, the rush of dopamine coursing through her brain. She had never felt—she had never—why didn't I try this sooner?
"Huh." Satoru caught her wrist and slung her over his shoulder. "Neat."
I'm a... I'm like a.... She neither felt his touch, nor heard his voice. Yuriko caught herself in the air without even thinking; hurricane wings sprouted off her back. It worked. She had thought a bypass into being, and reality itself took a knee like her word was its bond. It was just a punch, but—I'm like a god.
Ten seconds.
Why had she even bothered playing it safe? He was strong, wasn't he? The 'strongest' as it were. And she was in control. In full control. Every particle, every phenomenon. With time, she could understand everything.
No more uncertainty. No more necessity. She had friends, and she was power. She had everything, and she wanted more.
Nine.
Eight.
He—hecan take it, can't he? A flash of lightning caught her eyes a certain way.
I can model more than three spatial dimensions. More than three axes. If Satoru only defined the world in x,y,z...
Yuriko was already calculating. Tendrils of her cursed energy seeped into the environment. Matter screamed where it was caught, colours flashed, particles ascended and descended in energy levels.
Shirai could do it, why can't I?
"Yuriko...?" Satoru's voice barely broke through, but his face, damn, his face. His face said everything it needed to; she just wasn't listening.
Suffice to say he wasn't smiling anymore.
Three.
"What would happen—"
Two.
"If—"
One.
"Domain Expansion."
Yuriko never completed that sentence.
***
Jujutsu High, Tokyo. PotentialOfView: Fushiguro Megumi
Silence rang like a gong through the infirmary.
Mei Mei's crows could barely capture what had happened after the weather turned, but what they had seen was irrational. A scene from another reality that had no place on the screen of a mobile phone, and no business masquerading as an account of events.
It wasn't real. It couldn't be. And yet...
Ieiri-san was pinching the bridge of her nose. Megumi forgot to breathe.
They stayed like this until a pop broke the silence. Perhaps if he hadn't arrived, neither of them would have spoken for the rest of the day.
Cursed energy flooded the room, all the same. The familiar weight of his teacher's existence. In one arm, he was holding something small and breathing roughly. Smaller now to Megumi that she wasn't glaring at him. Suzushina's hair was glittering in the ambient grey of the afternoon. Her eyes were open, but unfocused. A particular expression frozen on her face.
Ieiri-san's chair clattered as she stood. With a pair of gloves, and a torch—neither of which Megumi was aware that she had—Ieiri was inspecting Suzushina's pupils.
Shiny dust fell off the girl's eyelids and clung to Ieiri's finger. Gojo's eyes tracked a singular mote until it hit the ground. They lingered thereafter.
"You didn't..." Ieiri pinched the bridge of her nose again. "What were you thinking?"
"I..." Gojo chuckled. "To be fair—" A pointed glare locked his jaw. "I wasn't."
Ieiri sighed, then waved at a random cot, "Put her over there. Hopefully, she isn't too broken."
Broken...
"Actually, I was here to pick you up."
The doctor raised an eyebrow.
Broken...
"Come on, Shoko. I can't leave Yuji alone in Kyoto of all places. Some poor schmuck might get ideas."
She visibly weighed the thought, looked at her patient, then back at Gojo.
"Fine. How long did she...?"
"Hehe, I actually figured out a new trick." His face fell again at Ieiri's flat stare. He coughed. "Point-two seconds."
"Huh."
"Right?"
Broken...
"Anyway," said Gojo. "Gather round! Yes, you too, Megumi."
Hearing his name finally snapped him from his reverie. Ieiri had been too focused on Suzushina. Far too focused.
"Gojo-sensei..." Megumi mumbled.
"Yeah?"
"What happened to your arm?"
****
A/N:
Alternative title: The One Who Wields the Power of God.
And wasn't that a mouthful?