"A cave?"
"Figures. Cowards who skulk in the shadows can only hide in places like this." Felt eyed the cave mouth and curled her lip.
"Lady Felt, please stay back."
Reinhard stepped forward, positioning himself between her and the entrance. In the same motion, he drew Subaru and Meili behind him as well, leaving every last cultist in Gojo's path.
"They're all yours, Gojo."
"Yeah. Just sit back and enjoy the show." He paused, glancing over his shoulder. "Oh, and Subaru? The green-haired one is yours. I'll save him for you."
Subaru's lips moved without sound. He didn't need words. The gratitude was written across his face.
The campfire flickered.
Whatever panic had seized the Witch Cult at their arrival was already fading. The robed figures settled with unnatural speed, rising in silence. No orders. No chatter. They simply stood and drew their weapons, moving in eerie unison like puppets on invisible strings.
From deeper in the cave came the sound of footsteps.
Gojo ignored the rank and file. His gaze lifted past them, toward the darkness inside.
A gaunt silhouette emerged from the shadows.
"Ohhh!"
"What an intoxicating scent."
"What enviable devotion!"
"This rich, thick aroma... it is proof of Lady Satella's love!"
"Welcome, beloved followers."
The shadow peeled away to reveal a face drained of color. Deep green hair hung in a ragged fringe above sunken cheeks, the skin stretched so tight over the cheekbones it looked ready to split. His eyes were the worst part: bloodshot, bulging, set in hollows so deep they seemed to belong to a skull rather than a living man. They looked like they might burst from their sockets at any moment.
He walked out of the cave one deliberate step at a time, stopped in front of Gojo, then wrenched his neck sideways at an angle no spine should have allowed. A grin split his face, equal parts madness and menace.
"Petelgeuse Romanee-Conti!"
The name ripped out of Subaru before anyone else could speak. He was on his feet, teeth bared, fury radiating off him in waves.
"Oh?"
"You know my name?"
"Could it be that my diligence has finally earned Lady Satella's recognition? That she has graced one so beloved as you with knowledge of me?"
"AHHH!"
Petelgeuse's body convulsed with ecstasy. He cupped his own face in both hands, eyes rolling back, lost in some private rapture as though he'd just received a reward beyond description.
"Slothful... ah, I have been far too slothful."
"To think she pays me such attention, and yet here I sit, resting. Unforgivable. Absolutely unforgivable..."
While he rambled, his fingernails raked down his own cheeks, carving raw red furrows into the pale skin. Blood welled in the grooves. He didn't seem to notice.
Gojo watched this performance with the flat disinterest of someone channel-surfing past a bad commercial.
"Hey. You done talking to yourself?"
"You're the Sin Archbishop of Sloth, right?"
Petelgeuse's head swiveled toward him, still cocked at that grotesque angle.
"I am of the Witch Cult, Sin Archbishop representing Sloth, Petelgeuse Romanee-Conti desu!"
"Guess you're not as diligent as you think. If you were, you'd know my name too."
"I do know it."
"I'm no good with people who live entirely inside their own heads." Gojo scratched the back of his neck. "But whatever. Doesn't matter. If you're who I think you are, then let me see it. This so-called Authority of yours. Show me what it can do."
"Watch out!"
Subaru's warning came the instant Gojo finished speaking. The Archbishop hadn't moved. Hadn't shifted his stance. Yet somehow, an attack was already underway.
To Reinhard, to Felt, to everyone else, nothing had changed. The air looked exactly the same.
But Gojo didn't need the warning. Not really.
Because what was invisible to everyone else was perfectly, crystallinely clear through the Six Eyes.
In his vision, Petelgeuse stood rooted to the spot like an idiot. But from his body, dark arms were extending outward, one after another. Calling them arms was generous. Each was more accurately a hand connected to a black, tubular appendage with no muscle definition, no joints, no bone structure. Just writhing tendrils ending in grasping palms.
In the space of a blink, seven or eight of them came hurtling toward him.
Based on Subaru's intel, their attack method was almost certainly physical. The entire strategy hinged on invisibility: strike what the enemy couldn't see coming.
Gojo looked at the oncoming hands and let the corner of his mouth twitch upward.
He didn't move. Didn't guard. Didn't flinch. He stood exactly where he was, hands in his pockets, radiating the casual disinterest of a man waiting for a bus.
Petelgeuse, still muttering to himself, watched this with satisfaction. In his eyes, Gojo was already a dead man. Once the Unseen Hands reached him...
"Hm?"
The thought snagged. Something was wrong.
The Unseen Hands had closed the distance. They should have been twisting his limbs off, snapping his neck. But no matter how Petelgeuse willed them forward, they couldn't make contact. Not by a hair's breadth. It was as though an invisible shell surrounded Gojo entirely, and nothing could breach it.
"No."
"No!"
"No, no, no, no, n..."
Petelgeuse stared, bloodshot eyes contracting. More Unseen Hands erupted from his body and surged toward Gojo.
From Subaru's perspective, the sheer number of them threatened to swallow Gojo whole. When the direct approach failed, the hands changed tactics, coiling around him like constrictors, tightening from every direction. Trying to crush him alive.
"Oh, you mean these things?"
"Seems like your Authority isn't working out too well."
Gojo stood in the center of the writhing mass, utterly unbothered. He even reached out and scratched the palm of one Unseen Hand, apparently curious whether it was ticklish.
"You... can see them?"
Petelgeuse's bulging eyes went wider still.
"Wait, was I not supposed to?"
"Sorry about that. Really."
"How about you just pretend I can't?"
The surprise on Gojo's face was perfectly calibrated, his apologetic tone so transparently insincere that it might as well have come with a wink.
Petelgeuse's crooked head began to tremble. The trembling intensified, faster and faster, until it seemed a genuine question whether his neck could take the strain.
He was a madman. A lunatic. Everyone knew that. But he wasn't stupid. He recognized mockery when it was staring him in the face.
"AH!"
His spine arched backward until his body nearly folded in half, head touching the ground behind his heels. He clutched his skull in both hands, then snapped upright again.
"Slothful! I have been far too slothful!"
"AHHH! MY BRAIN... MY BRAIN TREMBLES!"
His shriek tore through the night, raw and unhinged.
Gojo yawned.
"If you're not going to cooperate, then forget it." He raised one finger. "I don't think we have much left to discuss."
The moment the words left his mouth, a small blue sphere launched from his fingertip and streaked toward Petelgeuse.
The instant it left his hand, gravity warped. Stones, grass, flowers, dust, every small object in its path was wrenched inward and pulverized. Where the sphere passed, even the ground cracked and caved.
Petelgeuse noticed the incoming attack. His expression didn't change. The madness held firm. His arms spread wide like a conductor raising his orchestra to a crescendo, then snapped inward.
The Unseen Hands that had been uselessly coiling around Gojo abandoned their target and rushed back to their master's defense, slamming against the blue sphere one after another.
BOOM.
BOOM.
Nothing visible to the naked eye, yet thunderous impacts echoed without pause along the sphere's trajectory. From Felt's vantage point, it looked like some invisible force was battering the orb, but beyond that, there was nothing to see.
Gojo watched the Unseen Hands throw themselves at his Blue in wave after wave, grinding down its energy. The attack method was crude, he'd give them that. But it was interesting.
Hand after hand collided with the sphere, annihilated on contact, only for Petelgeuse to summon replacements that repeated the cycle. Over and over. An endless, mindless grind.
After chewing through a significant number of Unseen Hands across that short distance, the Cursed Energy sustaining that shot of Blue finally dissipated.
"So that's all you've got?"
Gojo sighed. "I'm starting to question how reliable the whole 'Witch of Envy devoured the world' story actually is. You're supposed to be on the same level as a Witch, a Sin Archbishop, and you're this weak? You've underperformed beyond anything I imagined."
"Or is there something else you haven't shown me yet?"
He pulled off his sunglasses. Those ice-blue eyes, sharper now, carrying a rare edge of seriousness, fixed on Petelgeuse.
"AHHHHH!"
"MY BRAIN TREMBLES!"
The only answer was more shrieking.
Then Petelgeuse shoved his fingers into his mouth and bit down without hesitation. Blood sprayed. The crunch of teeth meeting bone was audible.
Gojo understood. There was no reasoning with this. No angle of communication left to explore. The man was broken at every level, a lunatic through and through.
"Fine."
He shook his head, and a vicious red light blazed to life.
"I've lost interest."
"Oh!"
Blinding crimson erupted from his fingertip. This was nothing like the Blue from moments ago. Red carried several times the force, and it showed.
Petelgeuse felt the difference immediately. Madman or not, survival instinct cut through the delirium.
"Ah, is this too a result of her favor?"
"How beautiful."
"But... why? Why not me?"
"Is it because I wasn't diligent enough? Because I was too slothful..."
Even as he screamed, the Unseen Hands launched his body sideways, hurling him out of the sphere's path. He pivoted midair and sent a volley of hands streaking toward Reinhard, Felt, and the others behind Gojo.
"My apologies."
"I had no intention of interfering in a one-on-one fight."
"But protecting Lady Felt is my duty."
Reinhard's voice was calm, almost gentle. He couldn't see the Unseen Hands. But the disturbances in the air, the shifts in pressure, the subtle wrongness rippling through the environment around him were more than enough.
His hand found the hilt of the Dragon Sword Reid and closed around it.
The blade refused to draw. As always. Without an enemy it deemed worthy, the sword would not leave its scabbard.
But the scabbard alone would do.
Reading the flow of displaced air with preternatural precision, Reinhard swung. The heavy sheath carved through the darkness, and with a clean, unadorned stroke, severed every Unseen Hand reaching for his charges.
Petelgeuse, meanwhile, had bigger problems.
No matter how he twisted and fled, the small red sphere tracked him, closing the gap with patient inevitability, until finally it connected.
BOOM.
The detonation swallowed him whole. Smoke and debris erupted skyward, erasing him from sight.
"Is it over?" Subaru murmured, staring at the billowing cloud.
The answer came a heartbeat later. Shapes burst from the smoke, dozens of dark silhouettes surging toward Gojo in a frenzy.
"I have been so diligent! I have given everything!"
"Slothful... forgive us our sloth, for we have squandered her love."
"Love must be repaid! We must return the love she has given!"
Petelgeuse's voice rang out from somewhere inside the haze, raving, incomprehensible.
But madness didn't translate to power.
Same as before, the Unseen Hands couldn't cross the threshold of the Limitless Cursed Technique. Not one of them came close to touching Gojo.
...
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