Touma had barely turned toward the far end of the hallway when,
Click.
The door beside him swung open.
Warm steam rolled out along with the scent of body wash, and Satoru Gojo strolled into the hall wearing nothing but a towel around his waist, shameless as ever.
His trademark white hair was still damp, hanging loose while he rubbed at it with a hand towel. Even without his usual round sunglasses, those eyes locked onto the movement in the hallway right away.
"Hold on, hold on. I definitely heard something important from the bathroom." Gojo padded across the floor barefoot, heading straight for Geto like a cat that had smelled food. His voice shot up instantly. "Touma's back, right? I heard souvenir. Where's mine?"
Looking at that expression, the kind of face a debt collector would make, something wicked flashed through Geto's half-lidded eyes.
He very deliberately chose not to mention what the souvenir had actually been.
Instead, he put on the look of a man who had just enjoyed something amazing and slowly licked his lips.
"Oh, that? It was delicious. I ate all of it."
"What?!"
Gojo froze.
Geto kept going.
"Touma even prepared your share separately. A huge one, too. But I was starving, so I accidentally ate yours as well. Every last bite."
There was one beat of silence.
Then the hallway exploded.
"WHAT?! Suguru, you trash! You ate my sweets?! Spit them back out! Use your Cursed Spirit Manipulation right now and SPIT OUT MY SOUVENIR!"
"Stop yelling like a brat. I already ate it. What are you going to do about it? Fight me?"
"Fight you? I'll beat you until you throw it back up!"
Behind him, the two strongest idiots in the jujutsu world were already about to start a war in the dorm hallway over an imaginary box of sweets.
Touma shook his head. The corner of his mouth lifted just a little, and he walked off without looking back.
---
A short walk down the quiet campus path brought him to Masamichi Yaga's personal doll workshop.
By now it was fully dark outside. If the lights in the workshop were still on, and the reason wasn't Touma himself, then the only possible culprit was the teacher whose obsession with making Cursed Corpses had long crossed into the absurd.
Touma raised a hand and knocked three times on the heavy door, not too hard, not too soft.
Then he called through it in a half-joking voice.
"Yaga-sensei, according to the rules you set for me, I'm technically not supposed to enter the workshop this late, right? Unless you want to come out and talk in the hallway."
There was a short pause. Then the faint sound of a tool being set down.
Yaga's deep voice came through the door.
"Quit being a smartass. Get in here. It's unlocked."
Permission granted.
Touma pushed the door open and stepped into a room thick with the smell of wool, fabric, and specialty dyes.
At the far end, under the bright light of a desk lamp clearly chosen by someone worried about eye strain, Yaga sat at his workbench.
The contrast was kind of ridiculous.
He was a huge, rough-looking man, but he was holding a precision magnifying glass and studying the object on the table like it was the most delicate thing in the world.
It was the Cursed Corpse core Touma had made before leaving. The one with the abnormal internal structure.
When Touma came in, Yaga set down the magnifying glass with visible reluctance. He took a slow breath, carefully placed the core into a padded case, then turned around.
His voice carried the kind of concern that came from someone who had already decided to take responsibility, whether he'd been asked to or not.
"How was your break? These last two days."
Touma's expression hardly moved. He sat down in an empty chair, laced his fingers over his knees, and answered in the tone of someone giving a routine report.
"Handled some personal business. Stopped by my old house to check on it. Exorcised a few stray Cursed Spirits on the way back."
Yaga let out a long sigh.
Exactly what he'd expected.
From a kid carrying this much on his back, words like "went to an amusement park," "ate something good," or "relaxed at the beach" were never going to show up.
Still hanging onto the tiniest bit of hope, Yaga frowned and kept going.
"And the money I forced on you? Tell me you at least bought yourself something. Or had one decent meal."
Touma didn't even blink.
His answer came out instantly.
"About that. I happened to meet a kid on the street whose family was having a hard time. They needed the money more than I did, so I left it with him. I didn't tell him it came from you, Yaga-sensei, but if I see him again, I'll make sure he knows who to thank."
Silence.
Yaga went completely still for half a second.
He clearly had not expected something this frustrating and this depressing at the same time.
But a few seconds later, the tension slowly left his shoulders, and a helpless smile touched his face.
Right.
Of course.
This was Touma.
Someone who threw every waking hour and every scrap of energy into humanity's survival and into making sure his comrades had a better chance of coming home alive.
Expecting him to get extra money and spend it on himself had been pure fantasy. More unrealistic than expecting Gojo to sit still for five minutes. Giving everything away was just natural for Touma. As natural as breathing.
Yaga didn't say anything else about the money.
He took off his sunglasses. The sharp eyes usually hidden behind the dark lenses were full of something heavy and complicated. He looked at Touma, filled his lungs, straightened his back, and spoke with a seriousness that put them on equal ground.
"Touma. These last two days, I stayed here in the workshop and stared at the core you left behind. I thought about it for a long time." He paused, voice dropping lower. "I think I understand now why you push yourself so hard."
"The things you've suffered, the things you can't talk about... and the fact that before you became a jujutsu sorcerer, you spent much longer living as an ordinary person. That's why you understand the desperation of the defenseless better than anyone else in this school."
The words hit the mark exactly.
In the current lineup at Tokyo Jujutsu High, Gojo and Geto stood way above everyone else, monsters at the top of the pyramid, born with power so overwhelming it let them look down on everything beneath them. Shoko Ieiri, with her natural talent for using Reverse Cursed Technique to heal others, was a national treasure the whole jujutsu world treated carefully. And Yaga himself was a proper Grade 1 sorcerer, elite by any standard.
If you only looked at the world from the perspective of the strong, the gifted, the privileged, your view was always going to be warped.
People like them could never truly feel what it meant to be weak when curses came knocking.
But then Yaga's eyes sharpened again, and he leaned forward over the desk.
"Even so, Touma. Even if your compassion runs deeper than anyone else's, the burden of saving the whole world was never meant to sit on one person's shoulders." His voice grew heavier with every word. "There are things that passion alone can't solve. Things one person can't brute-force by grinding himself down for a year or two."
He jabbed a thick finger toward the box on the desk.
"Let's say your theory is right. Let's say you really bring your plan to the higher-ups, replacing human sorcerers on the front lines with fully independent Cursed Corpses. Then what? I can see your talent for this with my own eyes. If there were a separate rank for Cursed Corpse construction, you'd be Special Grade, no question. But even so, between you alone, or even the two of us working ourselves to death, how many truly combat-capable autonomous corpses could we make in a year? Ten? Twenty?"
"And that's only the start. There's maintenance, repairs, recovery for damaged corpses. And if we try to spread this forbidden technique so production can scale, how much chaos do you think that will cause among the higher-ups and the conservatives? Political fighting, power grabs, all of it. These problems do not disappear just because one person works himself half to death for two or three years. And this is still only the very first stage of your so-called grand plan."
His voice filled the workshop.
Every word carried the fear of a teacher watching a student pile impossible weight onto his own back.
Through all of it, Touma sat there without moving. His expression never changed. His eyes were dark and quiet as a starless night, and he listened without interrupting once.
As if he hadn't already thought through every part of it.
Two or three years?
His research into Cursed Corpses across repeated simulations had gone far beyond that already.
Touma lifted his head and met Yaga's worried gaze.
A faint smile touched his lips.
Then, in a voice that was soft but perfectly clear, he answered.
"Of course I understand."