In the previous simulation timeline, this was about the point where Gojo and Geto would casually brush the Kyoto students off. Arrogant, sure, but still in the range of normal prodigy behavior. A few cutting words, a one-sided snub, nothing more.
This time was different.
Touma had stepped in early. He'd taught them ahead of schedule, filled in theory they shouldn't have understood yet, and shoved both of them through a stretch of growth that should've taken years. The result was ugly in the most absurd way possible. Their strength had jumped so far that the Exchange Event barely felt real anymore.
What used to be competitive disdain had turned into something worse. Back then, they looked down on the opposition. Now they honestly couldn't bring themselves to care.
On this bright, blazing morning, it wasn't just Gojo acting like the Kyoto side didn't matter. Even Geto, who usually bothered to keep up basic manners, had stopped pretending.
And really, why would they bother?
The gap between those two and an actual Grade 1 sorcerer was already huge. Against a pack of students who hadn't even graduated yet, most of whom were still fumbling around with their own Innate Techniques, this wasn't a contest. It was a bad joke.
So in the Tokyo waiting area, discipline had completely gone out the window.
Gojo had his long legs crossed and most of his body draped over the wooden railing like bones were optional. His spine bent at an angle that looked medically irresponsible. White hair caught the sunlight. His round sunglasses had slipped halfway down his nose. When he opened his mouth, his voice came out as one long, syrupy complaint, full of theatrical suffering.
"Ahhh... Suguru... how much longer are those Kyoto small fry gonna waste our time before they crawl over here and witness my all-crushing miracle?"
He said it while chewing bubblegum, completely serious about how unserious he was being. A pink bubble swelled from his lips, held for a beat, then popped.
Beside him, Geto stood with both hands tucked into his sleeves, smiling like a fox who'd somehow been put in charge of the henhouse. Pleasant on the outside. Absolutely not pleasant underneath.
He tilted his head and answered in a tone that sounded patient and reasonable, which only made it meaner.
"Satoru, keep your voice down. No matter how... feeble... our opponents may be..."
He really leaned on the word feeble, wrapping the insult in silk and somehow making it hit harder than if he'd just said they were trash.
"You should still try to show a little enthusiasm. We're the hosts. Basic hospitality matters. More importantly, if you get impatient halfway through and throw out Hollow Purple without proper output control... well. If their fragile little bodies get caught in it, the paperwork afterward would be awful."
That did not calm Gojo down. If anything, it made him worse.
He shoved a hand through his white hair, clicked his tongue, and looked genuinely annoyed.
"Tch, what a pain. Why do I have to bother controlling it? Why not just open with one Purple, send all of them straight to heaven, and save everyone the trouble of wasting our precious youth on this garbage?"
"Go! Jo! Sa! To! Ru!"
Yaga finally exploded.
His huge frame trembled. A vein throbbed at his temple. The look he threw at Gojo was vicious enough to strip paint off steel.
He didn't need to say it out loud. The meaning was obvious.
This Exchange Event is being held on our campus. If you blow up my school with that nonsense, I don't care if you're the heir of the Gojo Clan. I will beat you to death myself.
Gojo stuck his tongue out, glanced away like a cat ignoring a scolding, and that was apparently the end of the discussion.
Looking over the whole Tokyo waiting area, the only two people behaving like anything close to normal human beings were Shoko Ieiri and Touma. Both of them were off under the shade of a large tree.
Shoko leaned against the trunk with the lazy ease of someone watching a rerun she'd already seen twice. A slim cigarette rested between her fingers. She blew out a thin ring of smoke, looked toward the far side of the venue where Kyoto's group had just arrived, and caught sight of Principal Gakuganji's face turning red-purple after overhearing Gojo and Geto's running commentary.
Then she looked at Touma and smirked.
"Hey, Touma. You're really just going to stand here and watch? Not even a little interest in joining? Even if those two idiots up front don't cause trouble, you could take Panda out there and deal with Kyoto's students without breaking a sweat."
The meaning behind that was obvious.
Touma was the one who'd been secretly helping both of those monsters polish their techniques. Even if he didn't match their raw firepower, the flexibility and sheer trickiness of what he could do meant dealing with ordinary Kyoto students would be less of a fight and more of an adult stepping into a sandbox.
While she spoke, Shoko casually reached over and rubbed the fuzzy little head of the miniature panda perched on Touma's shoulder, still disguised as a puppet.
Touma almost never showed what he could really do in public. He'd gotten very good at being forgettable, just another mild, quiet student who disappeared completely in the blinding glare of Gojo and Geto. But inside the school, Shoko and Yaga both knew better. A boy who could help two once-in-a-generation freaks push past their bottlenecks, and who had worked with Yaga to create something like Panda, was not harmless.
Touma took a slow drag from his cigarette and let the smoke out in a neat white line. His expression barely changed.
"I'll pass. No point. At this level, Satoru losing his mind on his own is already enough to finish everything. And honestly, look at Suguru. He doesn't seem very motivated either."
His logic was painfully practical. If he actually walked into the arena, Gojo's show-off instincts would probably kick in on the spot. One burst of excitement later, Touma would be standing somewhere inside the blast radius of a Purple. He had absolutely no intention of risking his life over something this stupid.
Shoko let out a short laugh, ground the cigarette under her heel, and shook her head.
"Touma, sometimes I really forget you're the same age as the rest of us. Listening to you weigh the pros and cons like that is like talking to some exhausted old man. Zero youthful spirit."
He just gave a small shrug and didn't argue.
After stubbing out his own cigarette in a portable ashtray, he straightened the black jacket of his Jujutsu High uniform and started walking toward the Kyoto delegation with his usual steady pace.
At the head of that group, Principal Gakuganji stood gripping his cane so hard his knuckles had gone white. His chest rose and fell sharply. His eyes burned as he looked across at Tokyo's side.
From his perspective, the situation was absurd.
Over there, two students were openly discussing whether they should wipe out his entire team in one shot. Over here, two more were lounging in the shade, smoking, and watching the whole thing like some afternoon performance. For a traditionalist like him, the sheer lack of discipline was enough to give him a stroke.
And yet he couldn't say a thing.
Gojo and Geto weren't just badly behaved teenagers. They were rare monsters already being treated by the higher-ups as quasi-special-grade assets. Gojo had the entire Gojo Clan behind him. As for the other pair under the tree, Shoko and Touma were the jujutsu world's only dual Reverse Cursed Technique healing team, basically national treasures at this point.
The lineup was ridiculous. Blatantly unfair.
Gakuganji had no leverage, no angle, nothing he could use. So all that anger had nowhere to go except inward. He stood there shaking with it, mustache quivering.
Right when it looked like his blood pressure might finally finish the job, Touma arrived.
He walked up to the Kyoto group with an easy smile, stopped two steps away from Gakuganji, and gave a polite bow. His tone was so courteous, so carefully respectful, that even the pickiest old man in the world would've had trouble finding fault with it.
"Principal Gakuganji, everyone from Kyoto Jujutsu High, thank you for making the trip. It must have been tiring. Those two behind me have always been like that, no filter at all, and I sincerely apologize on their behalf for what they said. The sun is pretty harsh today. If you don't mind, I'd be happy to lead everyone to the shaded rest area we've prepared."
There was a reason people said you couldn't punch a smiling face.
Dropped into this nest of Tokyo weirdos, the sudden appearance of someone who was actually polite caught the Kyoto side off guard. Gojo's earlier mouth hadn't exactly improved their opinion of anybody wearing a Tokyo uniform, but Touma's manners were real. Compared to the others, who looked like they had "we're above you" tattooed across their foreheads, that was enough to ease the tension a little.
Gakuganji let out a cold snort. His expression softened by maybe one percent. That counted as acceptance.
None of them had any idea what was hiding behind Touma's spring-breeze smile.
He wasn't being helpful out of kindness. This was just the only clean chance he'd get to stand close to every core member of Kyoto's delegation.
And behind those warm, attentive eyes, Phantom Night Parade was already running at full speed.
As his gaze passed over the Kyoto group, Touma's mind started tearing through their cursed energy flows and Innate Techniques with frightening speed.
He had done this kind of reconnaissance in the old simulation timeline too, but the situation now was different. Kyoto Jujutsu High had always been closely tied to the Kamo Clan and the conservative faction among the jujutsu higher-ups. Even the man standing in front of him, Principal Gakuganji, was one of the conservatives' central pillars.
And in the network of suspicion Touma had spent months piecing together, the Kamo Clan and the conservative camp were still the most likely places for that stitched-forehead sorcerer to be hiding. Every meeting mattered. Every encounter was a chance to check whether someone had already been hollowed out and taken over.
Information poured through his head as the probing cursed energy moved in total silence.
Solo Forbidden Area: a single-flow cursed energy pattern, barrier-type derivative.
Black Bird Manipulation: a traditional animal-control technique.
Sound Amplifier: cursed energy amplification through a musical instrument, confirmed to be Gakuganji's own technique, no abnormalities.
Body Manipulation: crude but effective, complete physical control through cursed energy.
One after another, the details were parsed and sorted.
As Touma turned to guide them forward, something sharp flashed deep in his eyes. Every technique he'd read was cross-checked against the records in his memory at insane speed.
The final result was simple.
Nothing.
No one here had multiple Innate Techniques stuffed into a single body. No cursed energy signature matched the technique in his memories. Every soul fit its vessel cleanly. No stitching. No occupation.
For Touma, that was not reassuring in the slightest.
If the answer wasn't here, it just meant the thing hiding in the dark was buried even deeper than he'd hoped. More patient. More careful.
Like a blade hanging over his neck, held up by a thread he still couldn't see.
Which meant one thing.
He could not afford to relax. Not even a little.
---
As for the actual match after the opening ceremony, there was honestly nothing worth discussing in terms of strategy or suspense.
The supposed highlight of the Exchange Event got completely overshadowed by what happened afterward, Yaga chasing Gojo across three hilltops and beating the life out of him.
The starting whistle had barely finished echoing when Gojo acted.
While Kyoto's students were still creeping through the forest, setting up formations and searching for targets, Gojo had already floated to the dead center of the arena. Both hands were in his pockets. He hung there in the air by the force of his own technique with all the subtlety of a god dropping in to issue judgment.
With his sunglasses off, those pale blue eyes swept over the grounds like radar.
In a few seconds, he'd found the Grade 2 Cursed Spirit the match was built around.
He gave Kyoto absolutely nothing. No time to organize. No time to react. Not even the dignity of struggling first.
One fingertip touched the air.
Red and blue cursed energy fused.
Then a violet meteor dropped from the sky.
Hollow Technique: Purple screamed downward from above.
BOOM.
The whole campus shook. The ground lurched.
That poor Grade 2 spirit didn't even get time to make a sound before it vanished, along with the surrounding trees, rocks, and several meters of earth around the impact site. Everything in the area was scrubbed clean out of existence.
What remained was a massive crater, perfectly hemispherical, so deep the bottom disappeared into shadow.
The match was over in less than a minute.
Geto, who had clearly expected exactly this from the beginning, never even bothered entering the barrier. He spent the whole time leaning against a tree outside the arena, looking bored out of his mind.
When Gojo, still floating in midair after the instant kill, turned and gave him that unmistakable "I'm the greatest person alive" look...
Geto lazily raised both hands and clapped twice.
There was no rhythm in it. No effort either.
With half-lidded eyes and the driest tone imaginable, he offered his praise like he was reading from a script.
"Oh... wow, you're so amazing... truly terrifying..."
---
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