Shell casings rained down, ringing bright against the floor, until a thin brass carpet covered the stone.
Some still held the heat of the barrel. A few rolled several turns before settling; others clattered into small heaps, catching the cold overhead light.
The soldiers kept firing, and watched the figure hanging in the air remain perfectly upright, untouched, and felt something hollow open in their chests.
Fingers worked the triggers on instinct. Muzzle flash after muzzle flash. Every round struck the same invisible nothing and stopped, never getting close enough to stir the hem of his coat.
The truth arrived all at once. This man in dark glasses with the lazy smile wasn't an enemy they could fight. They didn't even qualify to stand against him.
Satoru descended slowly, as though savoring the swarm of metal circling him, or peeling away the pride of Tokyo's leadership one layer at a time.
The ceiling above had already been reduced to fragments, and grit and dust drifted down in sheets, filling the air with a choking mineral smell.
He came through it unhurried, spine straight, that careless smile still in place, as if the gunfire and the collapsing ruin were only scenery he'd stopped noticing.
Betty and Sumire Muroto stood inside a shell of Cursed Energy. Stone chips and screaming rounds alike deflected the moment they came within a few feet, and neither girl felt so much as a breath of it.
Betty leaned back against the invisible wall, studied the dense cloud of flattened slugs, and yawned. Her lashes fluttered once. Tedious, all of it.
She'd seen his strength too many times for a storm of bullets to register as anything more interesting than street noise. A decent book would have held her attention better.
Sumire, experiencing it for the first time, was another matter entirely.
She rose slightly onto her toes, eyes wide and bright with hunger, drinking in every detail, muttering to herself in a steady stream of wonder and calculation.
"Incredible. This puts the Repulsion Shield to shame."
"No Repulsion Shield could absorb that volume of large-caliber fire in that span of time, let alone turn all of it aside so effortlessly. The density of this Cursed Energy is beyond anything I projected..."
Her fingers curled tight, knuckles blanching, her mind already racing through principles and applications.
The longer she spent around him, the more he resembled a vault with no bottom to it, forever producing another surprise, forever rewriting what she thought Cursed Energy could do.
For Takuto Yasuwaki and his two men, dangling in the grip of that same power, the experience sat at the opposite pole.
At the start they'd clung to a scrap of hope. The Holy Residence was close, and it held Tokyo's finest soldiers behind its heaviest defenses. Something might yet turn. They might yet live.
Then he'd made his entrance, tearing through floor after floor, and the message needed no words. This wasn't going to end quietly.
Bound and suspended, they could only watch the building come apart around them, feel the weight pressing down on their lungs, and find they lacked the strength to even struggle.
They'd swallowed their terror somehow and been carried to the doorway of the Council Chamber.
The sight of all those armed soldiers, faces grim, lifted them a little. A spark returned to their eyes.
They traded a glance, and each read the same small hope in the others. If the soldiers caught him off guard, if the volume of fire was enough, he might actually go down. And they might walk away.
The answer came within seconds and ground that hope to powder.
However wildly the soldiers fired, however thick and fast the rounds came.
Not one of them accomplished anything. Not one even reached the barrier around him. They bounced away and piled up on the floor in drifts.
Watching the air fill until there was no gap left in it, deafened by the gunfire, the three men felt themselves falling, down into some cold pit where breathing came hard.
Their faces went bloodless. Lips shook. Cold sweat had soaked through their shirts and clung to their skin like ice.
If all of this couldn't scratch him, then only one option remained.
Something in the class of a missile. That might, barely, pose a threat.
But he stood inside the Holy Residence, surrounded by Tokyo's leadership. No one was firing a missile here. The building would be flattened and every person in it turned to red mist along with him.
The last scrap of luck they'd been holding onto dissolved, and despair rolled in over them like a tide.
They understood at last what "handle it properly" had meant. Not a punishment. Not a warning.
He intended to bring them before every senior figure in Tokyo and execute them where everyone could watch, and use their corpses as a message to anyone else with ideas.
"Mr. Gojo! Mercy! I was wrong! I admit it, I was wrong!"
Yasuwaki broke, begging through sobs, his voice shaking beyond his control.
His body thrashed against the hold, and the more he fought, the tighter it drew, until his ribs could barely expand.
"I shouldn't have hunted those children, I shouldn't have betrayed Seitenshi, I shouldn't have angered you! Spare me this once and I'll never step out of line again. I'll serve you like an animal for the rest of my life, whatever you ask!"
His two subordinates joined in, weeping and pleading with the same frantic pitch, faces smeared with tears and snot, nothing left of the swagger they'd carried an hour ago. They tried to bow and couldn't, bound as they were, so they jerked their heads up and down instead, desperate for any flicker of pity.
The smile on Satoru's face didn't shift. Not even his eyes moved. He might have been listening to insects chirp.
"Mercy?"
The word came out easy, almost light, a small smile riding it. No warmth anywhere in it. Only cold.
While he spoke, the group drifted down through the ruptured ceiling, step by step, Betty and Sumire beside him and the three prisoners trailing behind.
From below, the soldiers and the assembled officials could see nothing of them. The wall of suspended rounds had closed completely, hiding everything behind a dense shifting shell of metal.
Every person in the room understood the same thing anyway. Their attacks had achieved nothing. Those bullets had become props in a demonstration.
"Tap."
One soft sound cut clean through the roar of gunfire and carried to every corner.
His shoes touched the polished floor, weightless as a feather settling, and carrying the force of a mountain.
The marble gave. A shallow print pressed into the stone, and cracks spread out from its edges in fine spidering lines.
The sphere of bullets stopped dead in the same instant, hanging motionless around him.
Silence swallowed the chamber. No gunfire, no shouted orders, no begging. Everything cut off at once.
Only breathing remained, heavy and quick, and the hammering of hearts loud enough to hear.
The stillness lasted one second.
Then the air split with a shriek that stabbed at eardrums.
Every suspended round tore outward in all directions, driven by something invisible, moving so fast they left only streaks behind.
Soldiers and officials alike threw themselves flat, arms clamped over their skulls, forgetting the rubble and dust beneath them entirely. With their lives on the line, nothing else counted.
They shook where they lay, terror written across every face, expecting to be torn open.
Even Kikunojou Tendo.
That tall frame folded down onto the filthy floor without a thought for dignity, forehead pressed to the stone, both hands locked over his head, shoulders trembling.
Satoru had never intended to kill them. He wanted a lesson delivered, and delivered deep enough to stick.
The rounds passed within inches of them and touched no one, burying themselves in walls and pillars instead, leaving the surfaces pocked with holes as fragments of plaster drifted down.
Only then did the group become visible, standing in plain view before the whole of Tokyo's leadership.
Not a speck of dust marked him. His clothes were spotless, which against the wreckage and grime of the room made him almost painful to look at.
Black glasses still hid those blue eyes and whatever sat behind them. The careless smile remained. And something invisible radiated off him and settled over the chamber like a net drawn tight.
Betty and Sumire flanked him, expressions calm, watching the room the way people watch a farce they didn't pay to see.
Betty kept her arms folded, gaze passing over the assembled men with faint distaste.
Sumire hadn't stopped glowing. Her eyes tracked between him and the bullet holes ringing the walls while she murmured under her breath, cataloguing something.
Yasuwaki and his men hung in the air, shaking like wheat in wind, faces gone corpse-white, eyes empty of everything but fear. Nothing remained of the arrogance they'd worn.
The officials crouched under tables and in corners edged their heads up, squinting at the scene, pupils blown wide, bodies refusing to hold still.
Their mouths opened and produced nothing, as though a hand had closed on every throat. All they could do was watch him stand there like something climbed out of hell, wrapped in an aura that stripped the strength from their legs.
Kikunojou raised his head. Dust coated his face, his hair had come loose in every direction, and his authority had gone with it.
His expression had darkened past storm clouds, and rage and refusal and a thread of fear moved behind his eyes.
He stared at the man, fists clenched so hard the knuckles went bloodless, nails cutting into his palms, blood welling where he didn't feel it.
Never once had he imagined that Satoru Gojo would come into the Holy Residence this way, straight into the heart of everything they controlled.
Floor after floor broken open. Provocation stacked on provocation. Not to kill, not to seize power, but to show off, to intimidate, to shred the pride of Tokyo's leadership until they understood that in the presence of absolute strength, they amounted to nothing at all.