Chapter 98: Hellish Specia lTraining
There were ten days left until the Shibuya Incident.
For the students of Tokyo Jujutsu High, those ten days were not training.
They were hell.
No, worse than hell.
Because the one training them was Yami.
"Too slow!"
"Again!"
"If this is all you can do, then going to Shibuya is the same as throwing your lives away!"
His voice cracked across the training ground like thunder.
Wooden sword in hand, Yami moved through the field like a phantom. He slipped through every guard, every blind spot, every half-baked defense, and each strike landed exactly where it hurt most.
Whack.
Whack.
Whack.
Yuji Itadori, Megumi Fushiguro, Nobara Kugisaki, Maki Zenin, Toge Inumaki, Panda...
Nearly all of them were sent flying in the same instant, crashing hard against the dirt.
Groans rose one after another.
"So... strong..."
Yuji forced himself up with one hand, wiping blood from the corner of his mouth.
Over the past few weeks, he had genuinely believed he was getting stronger. He had fought special grades. He had survived battles that should have killed him. He knew, objectively, that he had improved.
But in front of Yami, all of that confidence shattered in seconds.
The pressure was overwhelming. Not louder than a curse, not more violent than a monster, but cleaner, sharper, and far more terrifying.
Facing Yami felt like facing death itself, only death happened to be holding a wooden sword and criticizing your footwork.
"Quit talking and stand up."
Yami gave them no chance to rest.
His gaze moved to Yuji first.
"Itadori, your Divergent Fist is interesting."
Yuji blinked, startled to be singled out.
"The delayed impact. The second burst of force. It's a good idea." Yami stepped in front of him and lightly tapped Yuji's chest with the wooden sword. "But you're wasting too much."
Yuji gritted his teeth and straightened instinctively.
"Your force is scattered. That means your efficiency is low. Stop thinking about landing two separate hits."
Yami's eyes narrowed.
"Think about overlap."
He lowered the tip of the wooden sword and spoke more slowly.
"Breathing. Muscles. Blood flow. Weight transfer. Put all of it into one point."
"Not one hit after another."
"Two impacts landing on the same instant."
"A stacked strike."
Yuji's eyes widened.
Yami turned and walked toward a massive boulder at the edge of the field.
"Like this."
He drew back one fist and punched it.
The hit looked casual.
There was no huge sound, no dramatic shockwave.
For a moment, nothing happened.
Then the entire boulder trembled and collapsed inward, crumbling into fine powder from the inside out.
Yuji stared at it, stunned.
"Is... is that the advanced version of Divergent Fist?"
"A bad version of it," Yami said flatly. "If you can't make it your own, don't bother copying it."
But the way he looked at Yuji told him everything he needed to know.
He was being shown a door.
And for the first time, Yuji could see the outline of what was behind it.
Then Yami turned.
"And you, Megumi."
Megumi, who had only just gotten back to his feet, straightened without a word.
"Your Ten Shadows Technique has absurd potential. At the Eighty-Eight Bridge, you opened an incomplete Domain."
Megumi's expression shifted slightly.
"Chimera Shadow Garden," Yami said. "That was good."
Then his voice hardened.
"But not good enough."
Megumi frowned.
"A half-finished Domain won't last three seconds against a real special grade. The reason yours is incomplete isn't lack of talent. It's hesitation."
Yami stepped closer.
"You're still limiting yourself."
Megumi's hands unconsciously clenched.
"You keep thinking a Domain needs a closed space. Walls. Boundaries. A defined shell."
Yami glanced down at the shadow beneath Megumi's feet.
"That's not the point."
Then he drove one foot into the ground.
In the next instant, the shadows around Megumi boiled.
Black spikes erupted upward from every angle, surrounding him in a jagged ring. Megumi's pupils tightened, but he didn't move. He knew Yami wasn't trying to hurt him.
"Shadows aren't just where your shikigami come from," Yami said.
His voice had gone quieter now, but in some ways that made it hit harder.
"They're your body. Your weapons. Your territory."
He looked straight into Megumi's eyes.
"And if you understand them deeply enough, they become your world."
Megumi's breath caught.
"Stop looking for boundaries," Yami continued. "Instead, make the world adapt to you."
He tapped the dark ground with the wooden sword.
"Let your shadow spread."
"Let it swallow everything."
"Only when you stop borrowing the environment, and start forcing the environment to accept you, will your Domain become complete."
Megumi lowered his gaze to the shadows at his feet.
Something flickered in his eyes.
A missing piece.
Not fully grasped yet, but close enough to feel.
Then Yami moved again.
"Zenin."
Maki lifted her head immediately.
Unlike the others, there was no frustration in her expression. Only intensity. Hunger.
She gripped her long-handled cursed tool tighter and stepped forward.
"You have a body most sorcerers would kill for," Yami said. "Heavenly Restriction gave you strength beyond ordinary people, but you still haven't brought it all out."
Maki clicked her tongue. "Get to the point."
Yami tossed something at her.
She caught it one-handed.
A pair of sunglasses.
Completely opaque.
Maki stared at them. "What?"
"You rely too much on sight."
Her expression darkened immediately. "That's rich, coming from someone swinging a sword around with his eyes open."
Yami ignored the comment.
"Put them on."
"You're joking."
"I'm not."
His tone ended the argument.
Maki stared at him for another second, then shoved the glasses on in obvious irritation.
Everything went black.
"From now on," Yami said, "you don't get your eyes."
Maki's grip tightened around her weapon.
"Then use everything else."
He stepped behind her.
"Your skin. Your hearing. Your instinct. The movement of air. The pressure of intent. The shift before a strike lands."
His voice came from somewhere on her left.
Then somewhere on her right.
"Learn to hear breathing."
"Learn to feel motion before it becomes form."
"When you reach that point..."
Maki stiffened.
Yami stopped directly in front of her, though she could no longer see him.
"You won't need glasses to see curses."
The days that followed were brutal.
No, brutal wasn't enough.
Jujutsu High's training ground became a battlefield in all but name.
Screams, curses, roars, impacts, and the endless crack of wood striking flesh echoed across campus from dawn to dusk. Yami pushed them until their lungs burned, until their limbs shook, until they hated him, admired him, and feared disappointing him more than they feared pain itself.
He did not just teach them techniques.
He taught them how to breathe.
Not Sun Breathing.
Not Moon Breathing.
Those were beyond them.
But the fundamentals, the relentless discipline of Total Concentration, the ability to synchronize breath with flesh and force, those alone were enough to drag their physical abilities up to an entirely new level.
Day Five.
Yuji finally did it.
Under Yami's pressure, after failing so many times his fists were trembling, he landed a perfect Black Flash.
The burst of black lightning was thicker than ever before, the impact cleaner, denser, more terrifying.
For the first time, he understood what Yami had meant by overlap.
Day Seven.
Megumi disappeared into his own shadow and emerged from another point several meters away without losing control.
Again.
Then again.
Then again.
His movements through darkness were no longer awkward. They were fluid. Silent. Ghostlike.
The shape of Chimera Shadow Garden was beginning to change.
Day Nine.
Maki, eyes hidden behind those useless black sunglasses, blocked three of Yami's attacks in a row.
Not guessed.
Not barely survived.
Blocked.
Each strike of her weapon cut the air with sharper precision than before. Her body was adapting. Her senses were waking up. The crude beginning of something new was taking shape inside her movement.
Something that looked dangerously close to a breathing style of her own.
And then came the evening of the tenth day.
The sun hung low over the campus, staining the entire training ground red.
Everyone had collapsed onto the dirt.
No one wanted to move.
Yuji was flat on his back, chest heaving. Nobara was half-sitting, half-dying, too tired even to insult anyone properly. Panda looked like an actual rug. Inumaki's hands were trembling. Megumi sat with one knee up, utterly spent. Maki was still gripping her weapon, but only because her fingers had probably locked in place.
They looked terrible.
But their eyes were different.
Brighter.
Sharper.
This was not confidence born from arrogance.
It was the hard, ugly kind. The kind beaten into your bones through pain, repetition, and failure.
Yami planted the wooden sword beside him and looked at them one by one.
For the first time in days, the severity in his face eased.
"Good."
Just one word.
But every exhausted body on that field seemed to tighten slightly in response.
A faint smile touched his lips.
"You finally have the right to stand on that battlefield."
No one spoke.
They listened.
"Remember this feeling," he said. "Remember how this pain feels. In Shibuya..."
His gaze lifted to the reddening sky.
"This may be what keeps you alive."
There was a pause.
Then Yuji laughed first.
It was weak, breathless, but real.
Nobara joined in next, then Maki, then Panda, then everyone else. The laughter spread over the training ground, messy and tired and filled with something fierce.
"Don't worry, Teacher Yami!" Yuji shouted from the ground.
They called him that in private now, half joking, half serious, despite the fact that he was technically their classmate.
"We won't drag you down!"
"Yeah!" Nobara snapped. "Whatever cursed spirit shows up, we'll smash them one by one!"
Panda raised one arm dramatically. "We are the true strongest generation!"
"Inumaki," Yami said dryly, glancing at him.
Inumaki lifted one hand weakly.
"Salmon."
That earned another round of laughter.
Yami watched them quietly.
But even as he smiled, his heart did not fully settle.
He looked up.
The clouds above the school were growing thicker.
The air felt wrong.
Like something waiting just beyond sight.
In the system panel, his synchronization still sat at thirty percent.
No matter how hard he trained, no matter how deeply he sharpened himself, it would not move.
A bottleneck.
He already knew the answer.
Training alone would never break it.
Only a true life-and-death battle could.
Only the kind of fight where the next breath might be your last.
Only the kind of battlefield where despair and awakening happened at the same moment.
Yami slowly clenched one hand.
"So that's how it is..."
His voice was almost too quiet to hear.
Then he looked toward the distant city.
Toward Shibuya.
Toward the stage already being prepared.
"Come on, then."
His eyes sharpened.
"Show me what you've built."
The wind picked up around the training ground.
Everyone else was still laughing, still basking in the exhausted satisfaction of surviving his training.
Only Yami's expression grew colder.
"If the stage isn't good enough..."
His hand settled lightly on the hilt at his waist.
"I'll burn all of Tokyo down myself."
And somewhere beyond the horizon, the storm kept drawing closer.
.....
[If you don't want to wait for the next update, read 50 chapters ahead on P@treon.]
[[email protected]/FanficLord03]