"No," Shien said flatly.
Gojo's grin didn't waver. "No? Just like that?"
"I'm not interested."
"Shien," Naobito cut in sharply, stepping forward. "Will not be fighting you, Gojo-san. This conversation is over."
Gojo tilted his head, looking between father and son. "Wow, protective much? Is the kid scared?"
Shien's eye twitched. "I'm not scared."
"Then what's the problem?"
"I have nothing to gain from fighting you," Shien replied coolly. "You're the strongest sorcorer alive. Even if I gave it everything, I wouldn't land a single hit on you. What's the point?"
Interesting, Gojo thought. Most people would jump at the chance to test themselves against him—or they'd be too terrified to consider it. But this kid was being practical.
"What if I made it worth your while?" Gojo asked. "I'll turn off my Limitless. No Infinity. And I won't use any of my cursed techniques on you. All you have to do is land one clean hit."
Shien's eyes narrowed, calculating the odds. No Limitless meant no automatic defense. No techniques meant fighting on more even ground. It was still probably impossible—the Six Eyes gave Gojo perfect perception—but better than before.
"Fine," Shien said. "But I won't use my cursed technique either."
Gojo laughed, genuinely delighted. "Deal! I like the confidence!"
"And if I win," Shien continued, "I want to meet Shoko Ieiri."
Gojo's eyebrows shot up. "RCT? You want to learn Reverse Cursed Technique?"
"Yes."
"Hate to break it to you, but Shoko's a terrible teacher. Worst I've ever seen. She can do it perfectly but can't explain it to save her life."
"I don't need her to teach me," Shien said. "I can learn by observing and experiencing it."
Oh, this kid is something else, Gojo thought. Confidence bordering on arrogance, claiming he could learn RCT just by watching. Yeah, Gojo was definitely interested now.
"Alright," Gojo said, grinning wider. "You land a hit, I'll introduce you to Shoko. Deal?"
"Deal."
Naobito looked ready to explode. "This is ridiculous—"
"Oh, lighten up, Naobito," Gojo said cheerfully. "It's just a friendly spar. What's the worst that could happen?"
The training field stretched two hundred meters across, packed dirt bordered by dense forest. Word had spread through the compound like wildfire, and a crowd had gathered along the perimeter—Hei members, Kukuru unit veterans, servants, all watching with mixture of fear and anticipation.
Sayo stood near the front with the twins, her face pale. Maki gripped the wooden fence so hard her knuckles had turned white. Mai pressed close to Sayo's side. Naobito stood apart, arms crossed, expression unreadable.
Shien noticed them all as he walked to the center of the field. His mother's worry. The twins' shock at being this close to actual combat. His father's barely contained fury.
I'll be fine, he thought, though he wasn't entirely sure that was true.
Gojo removed his blindfold completely, tucking it into his pocket. Those impossibly blue eyes fixed on Shien with crystalline clarity.
And then Shien released the binding vow.
For the past year, he'd restricted his cursed energy to fifty percent output during normal hours—a constant limitation that built pressure like a dam. The restriction allowed him to activate "Prime Time" when needed: one hour of two hundred percent output, everything unleashed at once. He would be restricted to ten percent of output for an hour after that and would be under cooldown for another twenty four hours before he could use the ability again. But it was worth it to fight the strongest.
Shien activated prime time.
Cursed energy erupted around Shien in a visible aura, the sheer pressure cracking the ground beneath his feet. Dust swirled outward in concentric rings. The nearest trees bent away from the force.
The crowd gasped collectively, several people stumbling backward.
That's..., Gojo thought, eyes widening slightly. The quantity was staggering—more than anyone he'd ever encountered. This kid has more cursed energy than the other special grades combined.
His grin widened into something feral. Finally. A fight that might actually be interesting.
Shien's body coiled like a spring, and then he moved.
The distance between them vanished in an instant. Shien closed fifty meters faster than Gojo had expected, the earth cratering with each explosive step. No wasted motion. Pure, devastating speed.
Fast, Gojo thought, shifting his weight.
The first punch came low—a liver shot with enough force to crack ribs. Gojo sidestepped, and the strike cratered the ground where he'd been standing. A chunk of earth the size of a car tire was obliterated into dust.
The follow-up came immediately: a high roundhouse kick from Taekwondo, blade of the foot aimed at Gojo's temple. Gojo ducked under it, felt the wind pressure slice past his hair, heard the crack of displaced air.
His base strength is absurd, Gojo noted, blocking an elbow strike that sent shockwaves up his arms. Without any cursed energy reinforcement, he's already ten times stronger than a normal human. With reinforcement...
Another crater formed where Shien's foot planted. Another shockwave as his fist missed by inches.
He's physically stronger than Toji was at this level, Gojo realized with genuine surprise. And he's nine years old.
Shien flowed between styles like water—crisp Taekwondo kicks, brutal Muay Thai elbows, precise Sambo strikes, traditional karate forms. Each transition was seamless, each combination designed to overwhelm and confuse. Shien was mixing up every martial art he knew to catch Satoru Gojo off guard.
But the Six Eyes saw everything.
Every muscle twitch. Every fluctuation of cursed energy that preceded movement. Gojo deflected, dodged, or simply wasn't where Shien's attacks landed. The Six eyes enhanced his perception to the point were other's appeared to move in slow motion, even still Gojo was being pushed to the brink as he was not using limitless and relying solely on CE reinforcement and the six eyes.
Behind them, a tree thirty meters away toppled as a stray shockwave sheered through its trunk.
He's reading everything, Shien thought, frustration building. Every subtle movement, every cursed energy fluctuation—the Six Eyes process it all before I can complete the action.
He needed to change tactics.
Shien stopped reinforcing specific body parts and instead flooded cursed energy throughout his entire body—an aura of chaotic, fluctuating power that masked his true intent. The signature became noise, static, impossible to read clearly through conventional means.
Then he pressed forward again, faster, more aggressive.
Clever, Gojo thought, genuinely impressed. The kid had adapted mid-fight, recognized the Six Eyes' advantage, and found a counter-strategy. If Shien did not have the serum his arms would have splintered against Gojo cursed energy reinforced blocks and parries.
Shien's fist slipped through Gojo's guard—actually through it—and Gojo had to warp space instinctively, teleporting three meters backward.
The kid was already moving, predicting the teleport location, foot driving toward where Gojo would reappear.
Gojo barely twisted out of the way. The kick carved a trench in the earth ten meters long.
"Now we're talking!" Gojo shouted, grinning wild.
The training field was being systematically destroyed around them. Every blocked strike created shockwaves that rippled outward. Every missed attack left craters. Trees at the field's edge were being uprooted, entire sections of fence obliterated by the pressure waves.
The crowd had backed up fifty meters, some people holding onto others to avoid being blown away.
Shien caught a glimpse of them between exchanges. His mother's hand pressed to her mouth, eyes wide with fear and awe. Maki staring like she'd never really seen him before, finally understanding how much he'd been holding back during their training sessions. Mai trembling, pressed against Sayo's side. Naobito's expression caught between pride and horror, watching his son fight the strongest sorcerer alive to a standstill.
Focus, Shien commanded himself, ducking under a palm strike that would have caved his skull in.
He cycled through styles again—Muay Thai clinch attempt into Taekwondo spinning back kick into Sambo leg sweep into pure karate combination. Gojo deflected or evaded each one with minimal movement, economy of motion that spoke to decades of combat experience.
The Six Eyes are too much, Shien realized. No matter what I do, he perceives it before it lands. I need something he can't predict.
He started turning his cursed energy reinforcement on and off mid-strike. Bait with no energy, attack with full power. Fake left with minimal output, explode right with maximum force.
Gojo's eyes narrowed slightly, processing the new pattern, adapting in real-time.
He's learning during the fight, Gojo thought with delight. Constantly analyzing, adjusting, improvising. When was the last time someone pushed me to actually think?
A chunk of the compound wall collapsed as a shockwave hit it sideways. Roof tiles from a nearby building shattered and rained down. The ground beneath them had been beaten into a moonscape of overlapping craters.
Shien's muscles screamed from the constant switching between cursed energy reinforcement and relying on physical power alone. But he couldn't stop. Wouldn't stop. He had to overwhelm Gojo Satoru or he had no hope. He needed to land a hit, his whole family was watching.
He ran through every combat style stored in his perfect memory—techniques copied from videos, replicated from observation, refined through practice. Hundreds of combinations. Thousands of possible strike patterns.
Gojo deflected them all.
There has to be a weakness, Shien thought desperately, narrowly avoiding a counter-punch that would've ended the fight. Something I'm missing.
And then he remembered.
Gojo wore a blindfold most of the time. Not for style but because the Six Eyes were too sensitive—too much visual information became overwhelming. They needed to be filtered, controlled. The blindfold was to dampen stimuli to not overwhelm his brain.
Which meant sudden, intense visual stimuli could disrupt them.
Over the past year, Shien had refined his cursed technique beyond simple explosions. He could make the energy burn like fire or dissipate like smoke. He could shape it into concussive shockwaves or concentrated blasts. And he could make it flash—pure luminescence without heat or force, just blinding light concentrated through cursed energy.
A flashbang.
One shot, Shien thought. I get one shot at this.
He pressed forward with renewed aggression, forcing Gojo to focus entirely on defense. Strike after strike after strike, pushing the tempo higher, making Gojo commit to reading his cursed energy patterns.
Then Shien clapped his hands together at point-blank range.
Gojo saw the cursed energy fluctuation, instinctively read it as an incoming attack—
The light detonated directly in front of his unprotected Six Eyes.
Pure purple luminescence shaped from cursed energy, intense enough to burn afterimages into normal retinas, overwhelming enough to completely white out even enhanced perception.
Oh, you clever little—
Gojo's vision became pure white nothing.
Now.
Shien poured everything into his right fist. All his cursed energy, all his desperation. He drove it forward with perfect timing, feeling for that infinitesimal window he'd touched four times before.
One millionth of a second.
Physical impact and cursed energy aligned perfectly.
Reality distorted.
Black Flash.
The spatial distortion rippled outward in visible waves as Shien's fist connected with Gojo's chest. The strike amplified to two-point-five times normal power, kinetic force multiplied through cursed energy synergy. Gojo was launched backward like a missile, body carving a trench through the earth before slamming into the far end of the field hard enough to create a secondary impact crater.
Silence fell over the training ground.
Dust settled slowly. Even the distant sounds of the compound seemed to pause.
Shien stood in the center of the devastated field, right fist still smoking, breathing hard, barely able to stand.
Across the field, Gojo lay motionless in his crater.
And then he laughed.
The sound started quiet, then built into genuine, delighted laughter that echoed across the ruined training ground. Gojo sat up slowly, wiping blood from his mouth, several of his ribs clearly broken based on how carefully he moved.
"That was AMAZING!" he shouted, grinning despite the pain. "Using my own sensory advantage against me—that's brilliant!"
He stood carefully, and cursed energy flooded through him—different from normal reinforcement, flowing backward somehow, knitting broken bone and torn tissue back together in seconds. Reverse Cursed Technique made visible, wounds healing before everyone's eyes.
Gojo walked across the destroyed field toward where Shien swayed on his feet more mentally exhausted than physically. Shien could not show weakness not when the whole clan was watching.
"You're something else, kid," Gojo said, pulling a card from his pocket. "That was the best fight I've had in years. "
He pressed the card into Shien's hand—contact information embossed in simple black text.
"Come to Jujutsu High in Tokyo whenever you're ready," Gojo said. "Shoko will be waiting. And seriously..." His grin turned genuine, almost proud. "Keep training. You're going to be incredible."
He ruffled Shien's hair—earning a weak scowl—and stepped back.
"When you're ready, come find me for a rematch. I'll be waiting."
Space warped, and Gojo Satoru vanished, leaving behind only disturbed air and a field full of shocked witnesses staring at the nine-year-old boy who'd just landed a Black Flash on the strongest sorcerer alive.
Shien looked down at the card in his hand, then at the destroyed training field around him.
He'd done it.
His mother was running toward him now, the twins close behind, all three shouting things he couldn't quite process through the exhaustion. Naobito stood frozen, expression unreadable.
Shien let himself collapse backward into the dirt, staring up at the sky, and allowed himself one small smile.
Finally, he'd get to learn Reverse Cursed Technique.