The message was simple. Against absolute power, every rule they'd written, every scrap of authority, every defense they'd built amounted to a joke.
"What exactly does the gentleman intend?"
Kikunojou forced the words out, voice gone hoarse with rage he couldn't quite bury, a tremor riding underneath it. He held his posture as best he could, scraping for whatever dignity remained in front of the others.
"We extended you every courtesy. Not once did we offer offense. Now you break into the Holy Residence, wreck the building, terrorize everyone in this room. Does the prospect of a larger conflict not concern you at all?"
Something had to be said. He couldn't let the man lead them around by the nose, couldn't let Tokyo's leadership be dragged through the dirt without a word of protest.
Even knowing the protest meant nothing, he made it. If nothing else it bought seconds, and seconds might produce an opening.
Satoru lifted his head, gaze settling on him from behind the dark lenses, tone flat and empty of anything.
His fingers came up and hooked the frame of the glasses, unhurried, and tugged them down.
They slid free, uncovering those pale blue eyes. Clear, bottomless, cold all the way through, with a lazy disinterest layered over it. The look a man gives a troupe of clowns.
"Ah, my apologies."
The smile stayed where it was, easy at the corners, and nothing in his voice resembled regret. Amusement, maybe. "The trip over was taking a while. I didn't want to keep everyone waiting, so I rushed a little and broke some of your things."
"I'm sure you all understand."
His gaze traveled the room, mild, and pressed down on everyone it touched.
Not one of them could hold it. Eyes slid away, heads dropped. Some stared at the rubble on the floor, some worried at their sleeves, and nobody breathed too loudly.
That offhand tone, that jokester's posture. He'd dismissed every person present and every ounce of authority they claimed.
And they swallowed it. Anger and humiliation went down together and stayed down.
Provoking him meant something none of them wanted to imagine.
His words went into Kikunojou like a blade, and into every official there with him.
"What is it you want?"
Kikunojou pulled in a breath, forcing the fear and fury back, eyes locked on the man, face black as a storm front. "Did you come here only to make a display of yourself? To humiliate this government?"
The situation had slipped his grip, and he moved fast. Redirect the conversation. Move the attention somewhere else.
He already knew what Satoru had come for. His surveillance around Seitenshi had captured every word of that call.
The three prisoners. The hunted children.
Point everything at Yasuwaki and let the man burn his rage out on those three. That might keep the rest of them breathing and keep Tokyo's face intact.
Otherwise there was a real chance of something worse. A massacre of the leadership. The whole government erased.
"Ah, thanks for the reminder. I might have overlooked it."
Satoru raised a hand, casual, the gesture of a man brushing lint off a sleeve.
Cursed Energy rolled through the Council Chamber, invisible and enormous, and settled over every person in the room like a weight on the lungs.
The officials crouched under tables and in corners were ripped off the floor by something they couldn't see, hauled toward the conference table without any say in the matter.
Short cries, no time to fight it, and then they hit the ground around the table hard. Groans. A few came up with split lips and blood at the corners of their mouths.
They tried to rise, tried to run, and found their bodies locked in place. Not a finger would move. All they could do was lie there with terror written across their faces.
The soldiers went next, flung across the chamber like kites with the strings cut, slamming into walls with dull heavy sounds and dropping unconscious.
Silence again, deeper than before.
Every official held pinned where he lay, watching, faces gone slack with despair, eyes emptied out like men who'd already accepted the verdict.
Whatever Kikunojou had said, it had been a story told to comfort themselves.
Soldiers, weapons, defenses. Against this, all of it was a joke that fell apart the moment someone leaned on it.
So was their power. So was their dignity.
He turned away from them and looked up at the three men suspended in the air, his voice unchanged, and something murderous underneath it.
"All right. Time to settle accounts."
Level, almost bored, the way a man mentions the weather. The meaning underneath put a chill through every spine in the room.
The three began shaking harder, faces slick with tears and worse, terror pouring off them, voices cracking as they begged.
"Mr. Gojo! Mercy! Please spare us! We'll never do it again! We'll never hunt another child, we'll never betray Seitenshi again!"
They writhed against the hold, straining for any give in it, and found none. The Cursed Energy sat on them like iron.
He didn't appear to hear a word. His hand rose, and a thread of pale blue gathered at his fingertips, thin-looking and cold, humming with something enormous.
"I'm a fairly merciful person. That's my own assessment, anyway."
The lazy smile held. His eyes stayed empty. "But mercy doesn't apply to you. Nothing you've done earns it."
The light at his fingertips flared, pale blue washing bright across the whole chamber.
It condensed into a small sphere, pulling at everything around it, and drifted toward Yasuwaki.
"Aaah!"
The scream tore out of him, high and ragged, packed with pain and terror, echoing through the ruined hall.
The sphere of Blue didn't kill him. It crushed him inward by degrees, twisting his body under its pull, drawing the agony out.
He convulsed. Wounds from earlier split open again, and blood came out of him in gouts, striking the floor in a steady drip that carried in the quiet.
A pool spread beneath him, the iron stink of it mixing with the dust until the air turned foul.
"No! I'm a Second Lieutenant in the Self-Defense Forces! I belong to this government!"
The pain had driven him near madness and his vision was going, but he dragged up the last of his strength and screamed it, trying to make his rank into a shield.
"You don't have the standing to execute me! You're spitting on Tokyo's law! On the entire government! People will not stand for this!"
The shouting thinned into a rasp. His body bent further, and the expression on his face was one nobody wanted to look at twice.
Not one official spoke for him. Not one stepped forward. Not one lifted his eyes.
They all understood. Anything said now would pull the fire onto the speaker, and end the same way.
Kikunojou included. His face had gone past ugly, filled with helplessness and fear. His mouth opened and produced nothing, and he stood watching, swallowing the shame.
Satoru worked the technique at an unhurried pace, expression unmoved, disposing of something he considered garbage.
"Law?"
He laughed, short and thick with contempt. "You hunted children who'd done nothing. You betrayed Seitenshi. Your hands are soaked. There's nobody in this room with less right to that word."
"You trampled lives and ignored every rule you liked. Law didn't come up then. Now you're here and you want to use it as a leash on me. That's funny."
Kikunojou opened his mouth to argue and closed it again, the helplessness eating through him.
Satoru was right and he knew it. Yasuwaki had earned this. But watching his own man tortured to death in front of him left a rage in his chest with nowhere to go.
"Aaah!"
The scream climbed higher, pure agony now, as though he were trying to expel his soul through his throat.
His body had begun coming apart. Skin rotted under the pressure, bone showed through, and blood covered the floor. The sight was past enduring.
Officials went white and shut their eyes. A few clapped hands over their mouths and doubled over, retching until nothing came up but bile.
They'd spent their careers treating lives as expendable. They'd seen blood before, carried plenty on their own hands. But nothing like this, and the fear of it went straight into the marrow.
That a man could be broken this far had never occurred to them. That Satoru Gojo could be this cold had never occurred to them either.
Seitenshi turned her head away and closed her eyes, lashes trembling, her face drained.
For someone who'd never stood near a scene like this, who'd never wanted to, it was too much to hold.
Yasuwaki deserved it. She still couldn't watch.
Betty wrinkled her nose and edged sideways, putting distance between herself and the mess, distaste plain on her face.
Sumire, by contrast, leaned in with her eyes wide, filled with nothing but curiosity. No disgust anywhere in her expression.
Her research had taken her through stranger rooms than this, and she'd opened up more bodies than she cared to count. Blood and cruelty had stopped registering years ago.
She was studying the interaction between Cursed Energy and living tissue, murmuring observations under her breath, logging details, treating the execution as an experiment worth documenting.
Nothing remained in the chamber but the screaming, raw and piercing, rolling around the empty hall and refusing to fade.
It didn't last much longer.