POV: Suzushina Yuriko
"Twilight."
Esoteric physics descended on the world as ink upon papyrus. She could read it in the air, in the numbers that screamed as space-time folded like another page had been turned in the story of the universe.
"Eyes of wisdom."
When the last syllable fell, it wasn't so much that Yuriko moved, but that the distance between her and Satoru exploded. One minute she had been kneeling at his side, the next, she was elsewhere. Through the grass. Through a tree. Another. She counted ten, as she sailed along the path ordained in space by the densest, bluest expression of cursed energy she had felt to date.
Trees were uprooted. The ground sheared off in layers. Steam erupted in her wake. Then gravity remembered.
Yuriko remembered gravity in reciprocation. The acceleration she experienced because of it. The instance the connection was made, her tumble was over. Not because Satoru had cancelled his technique, but because she understood how the effect it exerted was accomplished.
The maelstrom of blue hung in the air like a delayed execution.
By the time Yuriko regained her bearings, her back was to the ground, and her face to the sky. Raindrops, fatter and heavier than they had been even seconds before, pinged off her body and into the soil.
Not since the curse in the park, and Hasaba Mimiko, had anyone so utterly dictated the way she moved. Not even Sukuna. It made her feel like a child. It felt like a conscious slight. And she spied, with her little eyes, snow white hair and that irritating fucking smile.
He was already there; he might have been there already. Along the end point of her trajectory, waiting. Speed, or teleportation? Satoru kneeled beside her head, as she had done to him.
"Aw," he said. "She's scowling."
She was not scowling! What she was doing was calculating. Running the numbers. Without a frame of reference, the first time she had tried to hit Satoru, she assumed he was somehow forcing the concept of deceleration upon her. But that didn't explain the blue expression of his power. It didn't explain how he could teleport. It didn't explain... Limitless. The name of his technique. Arrogance? Or was it a literal—
Yuriko thrust her palm into his threshold, fingers stopping shy of a slap. Except they didn't stop. She could feel her muscles propelling her digits through physical space. By all the metrics her power provided, she was getting closer. Closer, and yet... "Calculus."
Satoru's smile widened to her intense revulsion.
"You're a fucking asymptote."
"Eight points," he said, raising both thumbs. "I'm guessing I won't have to explain Zeno's paradox?"
She rolled her eyes, as the implication set in, "You plot your co-ordinates in physical space, and... Dividing... Distance. Space."
"Yup! Infinitely."
"But that's bullshit!"
Satoru raised an eyebrow. He opened his mouth, a multitude of micro-expressions flickering across his face. Ultimately, whatever he was going to say died a quiet death.
"I'm going to start hitting you now," he preened. "I don't know when I'll stop."
"Bring it on!"
And a quick calculation jettisoned her further into the thicket, thereafter.
***
POV: Itadori Yuji
"Hehe, boom!"
Itadori Yuji was having too much fun right now. As much fun as a blindfolded teenager could have under his present circumstances. Per Yuriko's demands, he wasn't allowed to watch, but he could listen.
At the crowd's collective gasp, Yuji pumped his fist in the air and whooped. Because that was what she did. Yuriko subverted expectations.
Then he felt the glare on his neck. The cousin. Kugisaki.
"You know," she began, her voice low and gravelly, "if you two're going to be at her table, you're also supposed to stop when she's being a hard-headed dumbass."
"I don't think she's doing anything dumb," Sasaki responded.
"But she does! Couldn't you tell? She pretends she's so put together and logical, but sometimes, when she knows she's wrong, she'll—"
"Say something rude to derail the argument?"
"I was gonna say change the topic...But I guess she's doing that now. I should have hit him harder. What did he do to my adorable little cousin?"
"Ain't you the same age?"
"Whatever."
"What was she like?" Sasaki asked.
"Littler Yuriko?" Kugisaki released a wistful sigh, "Bubbly..."
Huh?
"A little bouncy." Kugisaki chuckled. "She used to play with the lights to control the 'fly distribution' across the house, whatever the hell that meant." He could hear the smile in her voice now. "Wow, I had to stop myself from hitting her so many times. Guess some things never change."
"And now, the girl is far beyond your reach entirely." A wizened voice rippled with mirth.
"Who asked you and your wrinkly dick?"
Naobito ignored her, "The Six Eyes, a spectated match, and a daughter of Hatsuko's lineage in attendance. If only Megumi were here, I would say it was fate. I wonder if this plays out the same way it did then."
Huh. That explained exactly nothing! At least to Yuji. Kugisaki was a different story.
"Hey!" Yuji exclaimed. Because there were now fingers digging through his—Gojo-sensei's—blindfold. He reached for them, but Kugisaki had already found what she'd been looking for and pulled away.
"If that upjumped Hello Kitty funko-pop goes too far, I'll kill him my—"
"Eyes of wisdom."
Yuji more than heard the words, he felt them. There was a pull. There was the feeling of something potent and unpleasant coming into being. "Gojo-sensei?!"
"Holy!" Sasaki screamed.
"Shit!"
Someone snorted, and the sound somehow had a Kansai accent. "Still think ya can kill that? Only Toj—what are you doing?"
Clothes ruffled and Yuji felt his palm clasped crisply around a wrist before his mind completed the thought.
Kugisaki growled, "Let go."
Her arm strained downward in a slamming motion.
"You gonna try to stop the fight?"
Her glare burned through the blindfold, "Duh."
"Then no."
"He's hurting her. You're supposed to be her friends and you're letting him hurt her." The pitch of her voice rose. "Aren't either of you worried?"
"It's...not that I'm not worried..." Frankly, every fifth thing that Yuriko did was concerning. A full—he counted on his fingers—twenty percent. But when it came to her physical safety... Yuji shrugged. He turned his head to where he knew Sasaki was. Even without seeing her face, he knew she felt it too. "It's just..." After all he had seen Yuriko do; after all they had seen her do for them.
"I can't even imagine Yuriko losing."
"I can't even imagine Yuriko losing."
***
POV: Gojo Satoru
Ludicrous. Truly. Ludicrous was the only word Satoru could conjure to describe exactly what Yuriko was doing.
As he chased after her into the brush, she waved her hand. A wild, flurried, gesture. A vortex of force, given form by the particles in the air propagated towards him. Infinity held without a shudder. Of course it had... It always held until it truly mattered. The gale dug up the topsoil, never touching him, never even altering his course, but it devastated anything it could actually touch. A grade two curse would have expired in an instant.
But Satoru had seen Yuriko's power, like a fingerprint upon on the wreckage of the school. If it was only destruction, then almost every sorcerer had the potential to destroy. Some days it seemed like that was the only purpose of Jujutsu. In that respect, Yuriko wouldn't be unique.
What was ludicrous was the scale of information she must have been processing for the simple trick alone. The benefit of knowledge had lifted the scales from his eyes, and now they were observing. Dissecting. Peeling back the layers on the anatomy of her technique. Every 'atom,' every nano-'Megumi' of cursed energy carved a different path for matter to follow. And it all synergised; it all flowed into what could only be seen as simplicity by regular eyes.
Satoru closed the distance. Fist raised, shoulders squared. He threw a punch, not as hard as the last one—just probing.
As they had before, his knuckles, muscles, bone—all the mass he had put behind the strike—abruptly changed directions. This time, his eyes catalogued the transformation.
Satoru's flight reduced a tree to splinters, while Yuriko herself landed horizontally on another tree trunk, shoes to the bark, standing. Lowkey, she reminded him of a Naruto character in that position. White hair and red eyes would make her... Kakashi. He fucking hated Kakashi.
"You're really annoying. You know that, right?"
But all the little imp had to say for herself was, "Skill issue."
He rolled his eyes.
"No, really I mean it," Yuriko insisted. "For you, hitting me is the same as exercising your own pain tolerance. Meanwhile, I've already begun to parse the flaws in your own defences."
"Oh?"
He caught it in the way her expression sat: bored honesty.
"Your system runs on a blacklist. You individually calculate and exclude only what you've deemed as 'unsafe'."
Close. "And that's not what you do?"
"Fuck no." The girl shuddered, as she slid down onto the grass. "Your formula's riddled with redundancies, why would I ever do that to myself?"
Formula? Hm. If he was an asymptote to her...What did that make her to him?
"Eh, it works."
"Does it?"
At that, a fist dug into her pocket. She pulled out a silvery pellet—though it was closer to a hunk of material—with not even a drop of its own cursed energy.
"When we first met, you told me you had 'special eyes.' Now look," she gesticulated, inviting him closer. "Look with your special eyes."
"Metal?" What was a sorcerer without their pride? And Gojo Satoru placed a great deal of pride in the mastery of his technique. He took the bait and leaned in... Infinity, his Infinity, which was without a doubt the most refined expression of Limitless out of all his predecessors, already accounted for everything on the periodic table. He even left a margin of error for any hypothetical element that could arise. However much he wished for it, there was no way his adorable student had found an actual flaw in such short order. "Magnesium?"
At the closest point of his lean, her cursed energy had already pressed into pellet. Air rushed into her open hands, then heat. Oxygen. It was blinding. The light that detonated from Yuriko's palms impressed a violently white horizon along Satoru's retinas.
He blinked; he blinked hard, but his vision only cleared after a flicker of positive energy ran through his eyes.
Yuriko threw a sucker punch, fist freezing just beneath his chin, "Could you survive a nuke, Satoru?"
"Haha, of course—"
"You can't." Her knuckles crept a millimetre closer. "If you sat there and took it, you definitely couldn't. I couldn't, either. If I did nothing." Infinity held with a mental command. "I'm not talking about the blast wave. I'm not even talking about the heat, or radiation. Do you get what I mean, Satoru? What would we even breathe?"
He had seen this before. Was it something in her face, or her face itself? Was it the way her cursed energy encroached the space around him or was it the way the air currents subtly changed?
Satoru's fingers laced together and he was suddenly fifty metres away from Yuriko. His eyes bled. His ears rang, and the memory came back to him with a flurry of dizziness. Satoru clicked his tongue. Like mother, like daughter. And for the second time in under a minute, the strongest sorcerer of the modern era resorted to healing himself.
"There's this saying in toxicology:" Yuriko smirked, turning to face him. "'The dose makes the poison.'" With a snap of fingers, four powerful vortices whirled into being along her back. "The wind I hit you with earlier told me oxygen has an interesting relationship with your blacklist. 'Safe', pffft. Everyone who's ever breathed that shit ended up dead."
Uhm, actually...
Her power swept toward him through the atmospheric fluid. Nitrogen was cast aside; carbon dioxide was discarded; Yuriko's cursed energy carved its path unimpeded until all that was left was—
"You tryin' to kill me?"
"You'll only die if you die!"
—Oxygen. Pure oxygen.
Yuriko's hurricanes folded and she shot forward like cannon fire. With a lazy cast of red, Satoru matched, then exceeded her momentum, on course to meet Yuriko's fist before her arm could fully extend.
At no point did Satoru ever believe he would lose, but now he wanted to win. He wanted to stare into unflinching eyes of her power until it blinked. He had bled. He was proud of her, really, but now the strongest sorcerer of the modern-day craved absolution for the slight against his identity.
Satoru's mind raced.
Yuriko didn't show her hand out of arrogance. She did so because she knew what she was up against and was clawing for every advantage Jujutsu could provide. The trade off? He now had at least three things to focus on based on what she'd said and done.
Formula?
Yuriko saw Jujutsu in terms of mathematics. If he was an asymptote... Satoru imagined a graph. He imagined his position on it relative to Yuriko's undefined and hazy barri—Not a barrier... He could see it now. Her technique that wrapped around her like swaddling. It wasn't a physical wall that rebuffed assaults on her person. It was a field stretching at most a single millimetre off her skin. A function on reality. Maybe even literally.
Redundancies.
Yoursystem runs on a blacklist. The unspoken implication was that hers did not. She had called him inefficient, and that wouldn't stand. Sorcery was the art of subtraction, after all. He hadn't reduced the necessary hand signs and chants, just to have a student upstage him so soon in technique efficiency. Whitelist it is, then.
His process was brutal, however brief.
In a matter of milliseconds, Satoru had cast aside near-enough the entire threat-level framework that had served him all his life. A healthy mixture of air, light below the thresholds that would make him squint, pressure, the wrinkle in spacetime that pulled him to the ground—everything else would have to answer to Infinity.
Their fists 'connected.' He hadn't flown back. Yuriko pushed. Yuriko pushed so hard, her cursed energy groaned, but this time her power found no purchase through his own.
They landed anti-climatically in front of one another.
"There's your first advantage gone."
Yuriko looked at her fist. Yuriko looked at his fist. She did this five times before she started pouting.
"You're really fucking annoying. You know that, right?"
His limit was the fourth glance. Satoru had to bite his tongue. "And—" Pffft. "And you're really in for your second lesson."
And the third point is...
Yuriko blinked, and the next thing she saw was his foot. It stopped just before it could 'hit' her. Satoru was standing on tree branch, by the time she flinched.
Vector transformation. Paired with her notions of efficiency, what would be the laziest way to block any and all attacks with a power like that?
"Reflection," he experimented, and the knitting of her eyebrows proved the theory. Yuriko tensed. Her cursed energy coiled like a spring loaded with potential. "I guess you won't die to this, then—" he took a deep breath and—"Mei Mei! Your crows are in the way!"
"What are you—"
"Phase. "
Whatever hold Yuriko had on the breathable environment collapsed. Satoru aimed a finger gun at his student, who was already lifting off the ground reflexively. Too slow. Despite his chanted warning, the bubble of power at his fingertips crossed the gap between them before Yuriko could even blink. Red struck her field before she could and, as with everything else, bounced off almost contemptuously. He smiled as he mapped out the angle. The attack was never meant for her to begin with.
"Pāramitā."
Satoru tilted his head as the crimson sphere shot past him, growing as it travelled.
"Pillar of Light."
Yuriko's eyes widened as she followed its new trajectory. Satoru swore he could hear Utahime screaming, but that was probably just his imagination.
"Lesson two," he whispered as the ball of red collided with the blue he hadn't bothered to cancel to begin with. "Never inspire your enemy."
***
POV: Suzushina Yuriko
Light that was intense enough to blind her couldn't cross reflection, but when everything else lost depth and definition, the distinction didn't matter. All the world shared a hue, a singular colour. Gone were the browns of tree bark, gone were the greys of the overcast sky, and gone was every colour of every other spectrum but—
"Purple."
Purple. Purple. Purple. Purple. In place of values, and real word numbers, only her senses could partially tell her what had slammed into her. It was so fast she hadn't had the time to exhale. An imperial hue; destruction and abundance incarnate. She couldn't see anything else, couldn't hear anything else, and maybe that was the point.
Just as quickly as it had closed the space between them, the formless mass ricocheted off her field the way everything else did. The attack was close enough to matter, that it didn't matter if she knew its nature or not.
But then again, was it an attack to begin with?
Yuriko's eyes darted frantically about. There were no trees. There was no grass. Her very surroundings looked to be the victim of ordnance. The ground was deeper than it had been seconds ago, and the air was saturated with...with... Cursed energy and what she had come to recognise as 'positive' energy. But there was a third thing, and she couldn't put her finger on it.
Now wasn't the time to reflect on it. Because amongst the altered terrain was an alarming, critical difference. There was so sign of Satoru. No drop of his cursed energy could be felt above the ambience. She couldn't even detect the sound of his breathing. For all intents and purposes, he wasn't there.
Until he was.
Satoru spawned in front of her, right fist flying toward her stomach. His whole arm was burning blue. Her teacher's eyes locked onto her like they had never before; like she was a problem to dissect and resolve. And that smile. That unwavering smile.
Every hair stood at attention on the back of her neck. Move, I have to move. But she was—
"Too slow."
His voice prompted a split-second choice. As she had done against Kamo, Yuriko pushed the weight of her cursed energy in the path of the blow. It had served her well in the first fight. In her mind, it wasn't even necessary measure to take. She hadn't disabled reflection. In her mind, she was safe.
But instinct waged war upon her higher self. Satoru was who he was. And there was a price to pay for that.
Something went awry. In their first clash, Satoru had defeated himself. In the second, he learned to save himself from himself. He had learned. Through pain, through the slightest pinprick of shame, he had learned. And in learning, he transcended himself.
His fist, for just an insignificantly small frame of time, came to a complete stop a millimetre shy of her body. Then a power under Satoru's control wrested his limb away. A wasted endeavour, if not for the forces under Yuriko's control.
Minusone. Reflection. Pain?
Pain. Pain. Pain!
Her world collapsed into a series of needles on every nerve. Her world collapsed into blurred colours as she sailed across the newly christened wasteland. Her world collapsed into a spray of black sparks that couldn't have reached her but did so anyway.
Gojo Satoru was the man that he was, and there was a price to pay for testing that.