Meili had been doing exactly as Gojo instructed, steering her Mabeasts into a perimeter net to cut off any fleeing cultists. Her shout carried clear across the clearing.
"Restless bunch, aren't they."
Gojo flicked his bangs aside and turned toward her. "Where?"
"This way!"
She pointed, arm outstretched.
"Alright, you're off the clock." He called back to Subaru without looking. "I'm going to clean up. Sit tight."
"Got it."
After everything he'd been through, Subaru looked hollowed out. Wrung dry. As if every drop of hatred he'd carried had been purged from his system along with his dinner.
Gojo's silhouette shot into the sky and streaked off in the direction Meili indicated. Twenty meters out, maybe less, he spotted them. Three figures in hooded robes, standard Witch Cult dress, scrambling through the undergrowth.
"Running without a fight isn't a great look, you know."
His voice was still hanging in the air above them when his body blurred to a stop at their side. For trash like this, he didn't even bother with Blue. One raised hand and it would be over.
Then dark palms erupted from one of the fleeing figures.
Dozens of them. A swarm of Unseen Hands that blotted out the night, surging at him from every angle.
"Ah. So that's the play. Trying to ambush me with this trick."
Not a flicker of surprise. The same relaxed composure as always.
He'd suspected as much. Back when Petelgeuse had jumped into that teenager's body, the thought had crossed his mind: there was probably more than one spare. Meili's report of escaping cultists had cemented it. The Sin Archbishop of Sloth had slipped himself in among the runners.
And here he was. Right on cue.
"Too bad for you. It's the same as everything else you've tried. Like how no matter what you do, you'll never earn the Witch's love as easily as my friend and I did. Pointless."
The words landed like a slap. Petelgeuse's frantic retreat slowed to a halt.
"You! My diligence, my devotion... it is the most sincere, the purest there has ever been! Someone like you could never be more beloved than I am!"
Gojo's taunt had cracked open the most fanatical follower of the Witch of Envy like an egg. All those years of sacrifice, all that suffering and self-mutilation in the name of love, and this stranger with the white hair waltzed in reeking of the Witch's favor. Worse still was the boy with the upturned eyes, whose scent of the Witch was so potent it stirred something dangerously close to jealousy.
Lies don't cut. Truth does.
Petelgeuse abandoned all pretense of escape and threw everything he had at Gojo. Futile. He knew it was futile. He attacked anyway.
"What a pain. Looks like there are more bodies where that came from."
Gojo shook his head. After several exchanges, he'd developed a grudging respect for how annoying this enemy was. Against anyone who didn't already know what they were dealing with, Petelgeuse would be a nightmare. The Unseen Hands alone could threaten most of the Royal Knights outside of Reinhard. And even if you managed to kill him, the moment exhaustion set in and your guard dropped, he'd pop back up in a fresh body and strike again.
"Witch, Witch, WITCH..."
Petelgeuse howled, drowning in his own martyrdom.
Until a small blue sphere materialized in front of his face, and the howling stopped.
"Switching bodies really tanks your combat power, huh."
One detonation later, Gojo studied the wreckage on the ground and noted the difference. Weaker. Slower. A clear step down from the original.
"Big Bro! There's another one over here!"
Meili's voice rang out from the distance.
Gojo scratched his head, launched back into the sky, spotted the direction she was pointing, and took off.
"Look, why don't you save us both the trouble and stay dead? I'm not a fan of extra work."
"You know nothing of love..."
BOOM.
...
"How many spare bodies did you set up? I'm getting tired of this."
"Love, love, love, love! Why won't you grant me your love..."
BOOM.
...
"That's five now. You really are scared of dying, aren't you."
"O Witch, please turn your gaze upon me..."
BOOM.
...
Under Meili's guidance, there was nowhere left to hide. Her Mabeasts blanketed the forest in a living net. Even inside the collapsed cave, small creatures wriggled through the rubble to flush out any bodies still breathing.
By the time the hunt ended, Gojo had killed Petelgeuse nine additional times. He touched down beside Subaru and the others looking, for the first time that evening, mildly inconvenienced.
"Think we finally got him."
He rubbed his forehead. "If there'd been any more, I was going to start getting a headache."
"Guess a Sin Archbishop of the Witch Cult earns the title for a reason. Not many people can annoy you this much." Felt was crouched over Petelgeuse's original corpse, rummaging through the remains with a cheerful grin. A small pile of salvaged items sat beside her.
"You can't be serious. You're a Royal Candidate and you're looting the body yourself?"
"So what? Nobody else is around, and there's something satisfying about picking a defeated enemy clean." She lifted her chin proudly, then deflated. "Shame this guy didn't have anything worth taking."
"What's this book?"
Gojo reached down and picked up a volume with a black cover.
"The Witch Cult's scripture. A Gospel." Reinhard's tone was measured, informative. "It's said that every action the Witch Cult takes follows the instructions written inside."
"Prophecy? Something like that?" Gojo turned the book over in his hands. "So them being here tonight was because of this thing?"
Curiosity got the better of him and he flipped it open. Dense text filled every page, but the characters were meaningless to him. Not unfamiliar in the way a foreign language was unfamiliar. He couldn't even process the shapes of the letters. His brain refused to parse them.
He didn't dwell on it. Instead, he waved the book in Betty's direction.
She didn't need to be told what he wanted. After rewarding him with an impressive eye roll, she stepped forward and took the Gospel from his hand.
The instant her fingers touched the cover, she froze.
"Geuse..."
"Geuse? What's wrong, Betty? You knew him?"
Gojo studied her face. The haughty little girl who never let anyone see past her defenses looked, for the first time, genuinely shaken. Sorrow and disbelief etched across features that were usually twisted into a pout.
"Yes."
She ran her fingers along the Gospel's spine and answered quietly. She hadn't recognized him. That frothing lunatic bore no resemblance to the gentle spirit she'd once known. Even standing right in front of him, she hadn't made the connection.
What stung worse was that he hadn't recognized her either. His eyes had swept right over her without a spark of remembrance. Complete, total erasure.
"He was my etiquette teacher."
One sentence. It hung in the air, pulling curiosity out of everyone present.
"Your etiquette teacher?"
"That's... a bit much, isn't it? How old would he have to be? Humans can't live that long. Even the Great Sage and the Sword Saint from the old stories didn't last that many centuries."
Felt stared at Betty, bewilderment plain on her face.
"Because he wasn't human. He was a spirit."
Silence fell over the group. Every pair of eyes drifted from Betty to the mangled corpse on the ground, and back again. Nobody could reconcile the image of that raving psychopath with the small, delicate girl standing before them.
The mood turned fragile. Gojo cut in before it could shatter.
If Betty wanted to share more, that conversation could wait until she was ready. Right now wasn't the time to push.
"Hey, Betty. Can you read what's in this thing?"
The redirect was blunt and obvious, and Betty accepted it without complaint.
"The Gospel is only a crude imitation. And since each copy corresponds to a specific individual, I can only make out fragments."
"I was hoping we'd get something useful out of it."
"A book every rank-and-file cultist carries around? What could possibly be good about it." Felt dismissed the Gospel with a wave. "More importantly, a Sin Archbishop and he didn't even have any money on him. How broke can you be?"
"He's a Sin Archbishop. You really think he was going out and buying things like a normal person?"
"Well, when you put it that way..."
"Big Bro! There's one more!"
Meili's voice cut through the conversation, and every head snapped toward where she was pointing. So much for the victory lap.
"Would it kill you to just die properly and stop making work for people?"
Gojo sighed and flicked a small red sphere toward the spot Meili indicated.
Red.
A low hum vibrated through the air.
Not far off, a figure had been rising from beneath the earth when the surrounding Mabeasts closed in. Petelgeuse looked at the growling creatures ringing him on all sides and understood. This last finger, this final vessel, had no chance of slipping through.
Faced with that reality, there was no fear in his eyes. No hesitation. Only the fire of madness burning brighter than ever.
"O Witch! O Witch!"
"Grant me more of your love!"
He didn't run. He didn't waste time trying to fight Gojo.
His original body was gone. Every finger had been hunted down and destroyed. He knew, with absolute clarity, that he was outmatched.
But that didn't mean he'd lost.
The Unseen Hands propelled him forward at breakneck speed, hurtling straight toward Gojo and the others.
He'd barely begun to move when crimson light flooded his vision, swallowing everything in its path.
BOOM.
Where dense forest had stood moments before, Red carved a trench hundreds of meters long through the earth, erasing trees and soil alike.
"Now I understand why nobody's been able to deal with these Sin Archbishops for so many years."
Gojo let out a long breath.
"That guy was absurdly hard to kill. If it's all the same to the universe, I'd rather never run into another one of these lunatics. Way too much hassle."
"They're sewer rats." Felt had no love for the Witch Cult either. "Nobody ever knows where the next one will crawl out."
"Is it over this time?"
Having killed Petelgeuse twice with his own hands, Subaru's hatred had found its outlet. The sharp edge in his voice had dulled to something closer to exhaustion.
"Hopefully."
"Reinhard, do you have a Divine Protection that can destroy the soul along with the body? Because if this guy shows up again, I'm tagging you in to finish it for good."
Gojo had run out of elegant solutions. Petelgeuse simply didn't play fair.
"I can try."
Reinhard didn't refuse. He smiled, calm and accommodating as ever.
Then, mid-conversation, Subaru went rigid.
Something strange crossed his face.
"Gojo, I think I feel..."
Crack.
His head wrenched violently to the right, hard enough for everyone to hear the snap of vertebrae.
That got their attention instantly. Before anyone could speak, Subaru's eyes blew wide open, and his lips stretched into a grin no human face should have been able to produce, as if invisible fingers were hooking the corners of his mouth and pulling.
"What rich, abundant love!"
"Ahh, my brain trembles!"
His expression twisted into something feral and ecstatic. The same deranged fervor. The same cadence. Identical to every possessed vessel that had come before him.
"Subaru!"
Experience told them everything they needed to know. Alarm rippled through the group as they turned toward him.
Gojo alone didn't react.
Not because he didn't care.
Because out of everyone here, Subaru was the one person he didn't need to worry about.
Who was Natsuki Subaru?
He might look talentless. Unremarkable in every measurable way. But he was the sole object of the Witch of Envy's obsession, the bearer of Return by Death.
...
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