Chapter 67: Gojo Satoru Breaks the Curtain
The sky cracked.
Not figuratively. Not in the way people described overwhelming power when words failed them.
It actually cracked.
The black Curtain covering the entire exchange event grounds had held through signal loss, panic, and battle. It had smothered the sun and sealed the forest under a lid of cursed darkness. For a second, it only showed a thin white line across its surface, a flaw so small it could have been mistaken for a trick of the eye.
Then the flaw spread.
A sharp, splintering shriek tore across the air.
Everyone on the battlefield looked up at once.
The sound wasn't just loud. It was wrong. It was the scream of a barrier being ripped apart by something so overwhelming that the technique holding it together could do nothing but fail. The black dome buckled, fractured, and peeled apart in huge sections, like eggshell breaking away from something that had finally decided to hatch.
Blue sky poured through the cracks.
And there, suspended in the air beyond the shattered Curtain, was a man with one hand in his pocket and all the ease in the world.
White hair. Black blindfold. Long limbs hanging loose, as if he were just taking a leisurely look around instead of arriving at the scene of a battlefield wrecked by a Special Grade.
Satoru Gojo had arrived.
"Oh?" His voice drifted down, light and amused, carrying over broken trees and torn earth with insulting clarity. "Looks like I'm late."
It wasn't hard to hear the surprise beneath the usual tone.
His gaze swept over the clearing below.
The damage told its own story. Tree roots lay sliced apart in clean lines. Whole sections of the forest looked shaved away by heat and shockwaves. The ground was cratered, churned, and split open.
Hanami was on one knee.
That alone would have been enough to stop anyone cold.
The Special Grade cursed spirit looked terrible. Half its chest had been blown open, one shoulder mangled, its body still twitching as smoke lifted from ruined flesh that refused to regenerate properly. For something like Hanami to be driven into that state inside a span of minutes should have been impossible.
And opposite it stood Yami.
The boy's posture was still straight. His sword was still in hand. At first glance he looked mostly unharmed, but the details told a different story. Steam rose faintly from his skin. His breathing was steady only because he was forcing it to be. The hand gripping Shiranui was trembling, not much, but enough for the Six Eyes to catch.
He had pushed himself hard.
Hard enough that even Gojo, floating above the battlefield, stopped smiling for a beat.
A first year without cursed energy had cornered a Special Grade and nearly finished it alone.
Gojo's mouth slowly curled.
"Well," he murmured, almost to himself. "That's interesting."
His Six Eyes turned once more toward Yami, searching not for cursed energy, but for the shape of what had happened here. The traces left behind were strange. No familiar cursed technique signature. No conventional reinforcement. No domain residue.
Just force. Skill. Heat. Precision. Something outside the normal structure of jujutsu, yet powerful enough to carve into it anyway.
The smile deepened.
"So that's what you are."
Below, nobody moved.
Megumi, Yuji, Maki, Kamo, Inumaki, Todo, all of them were caught between relief and disbelief. They had been seconds from catastrophe, and now Gojo Satoru was standing above them while Hanami knelt bleeding in the dirt.
Normally, that would have been the end of it.
But Gojo did not stop.
If he was here already, he might as well do what teachers were for.
He lifted one hand.
The atmosphere changed at once.
The pressure that descended from above had nothing to do with menace. It was cleaner than that. More absolute. The space around his raised fingers began to hum with that peculiar distortion that came only when the impossible was about to be made real.
Megumi's eyes widened.
Todo's grin faltered.
Even Hanami, battered and half-destroyed, felt it and jerked its head up with naked panic in what was left of its face.
Gojo's voice came down almost lazily.
"Let's clean up a little."
Blue gathered first.
A point of impossible attraction formed above his fingertips, bending light toward itself. Then came red, violent and unstable, radiating pure repulsion. Two infinities, opposite in nature, forced into coexistence by the one man alive who could make such a contradiction behave.
The forest fell silent.
Not tense. Not waiting.
Silent in the way prey goes silent when it realizes the predator has already struck.
"Hollow Technique..." Gojo said.
Purple was born.
It was small. So small it looked almost unimpressive from a distance, just a sphere of compressed ruin hanging in the air. But the moment it stabilized, the world around it seemed to lose confidence in its own existence. Light dimmed. Sound thinned. The space before it looked less like air and more like something already being erased.
Hanami's entire body seized.
For the first time since it had appeared on the battlefield, the curse truly broke.
"Run!"
It wasn't spoken aloud. It was hurled into every mind within reach, raw with terror.
Hanami didn't try to fight. It didn't try to counter. It abandoned everything and drove what remained of its cursed energy into the ground, trying to force roots downward, trying to bury itself, trying to become anything other than the target of that attack.
Too late.
Gojo flicked his fingers forward.
"Hollow Purple."
There was no explosion.
Nothing so crude.
The purple sphere crossed the battlefield and the world disappeared where it passed. Trees, roots, stones, lingering cursed residue, all of it was simply gone. Not broken. Not blasted apart. Removed. As though some unseen hand had wiped a line clean through reality.
Yuji's jaw slackened.
Todo actually stared.
Maki sucked in a breath through clenched teeth.
Even Kamo, who had spent his whole life hearing the legends of the Six Eyes and the Limitless, felt his scalp go numb. Watching Hollow Purple from a distance and hearing stories about it were not remotely the same thing.
That wasn't an attack.
That was a verdict.
Hanami, still trying to escape, was directly in its path.
And then Yami spoke.
"It's not over!"
His voice cut sharply across the clearing. It didn't sound panicked. It sounded certain.
Gojo's eyes shifted.
So did everyone else's.
Yami had already turned, sword half unsheathed again despite the strain in his arm. He wasn't looking at Hanami anymore. He was looking beyond it, toward the far edge of the battlefield, where the air itself had started to warp.
A new presence was descending.
Heavy. Violent. Scorching.
It came with the suffocating pressure of subterranean magma forcing its way toward the surface. Trees bowed under it. The ground trembled in answer. Even before the figure could be seen clearly, the heat reached them.
Another Special Grade.
.....
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