"I won't save anyone..." Regardless of what the truth actually was, this was the single sentence Mahiru spoke aloud.
This included both ordinary people and sorcerers.
On the battlefield to come, if you wanted to keep your own life, you could only rely on yourself.
"And you?" Jogo asked, following behind Mahiru. "What do you plan to do?"
What to do? Mahiru let out a snort of laughter.
What else could she do—
Naturally, give it everything she had.
Night, the small hours, then early morning.
Forenoon, noon, and finally dusk.
When the arrow is nocked to the bow and touches the string, one always feels time pass in a flash. The day's final preparations thus came to an end, and in the blink of an eye, dusk arrived.
"Is the plan still proceeding as usual, Miss Mahiru?"
In her earpiece came Masamichi Yaga's inquiry.
Before her eyes, the lingering afterglow sank inch by inch behind the mountains.
Wind brushed past her ears, her blue hair fluttering. The girl closed her eyes, rolled her neck, and gave a light chuckle: "That's right. The plan stays the same."
No matter what, the time was already upon her; even if she felt the plan wasn't perfect enough, there was no longer any need to fret over it.
People are always like this.
If they spot a storm approaching from afar, people grow panicked and flustered, anxious and stamping their feet; but if the storm truly bears down overhead and the rain pours in torrents, people instead calm down, and even feel a touch of exhilaration.
She, at this moment, was exactly so.
Standing atop the building, watching the sun sink bit by bit, the girl's heart was beating with a steady yet rapid pulse.
The closer the crucial moment drew, the more relaxed the girl's heart became instead.
Facing the setting sun sinking in the distance, she even closed her eyes, savoring this last lingering thread of daylight.
"Principal, the evacuation of personnel in the nearby area has been confirmed complete... but Tokyo is too vast, and there are too many people. The only ones who could truly be evacuated are in the immediate vicinity; farther out there are even more people. We absolutely must do our best to keep the battle zone contained—"
"Mahiru, the entire [Kugisaki Squad] is ready and standing by within Jujutsu High, awaiting your command..."
"Hold on! Our informant says Hajime Kashimo, who previously attacked the sanatorium, has appeared in another city. He seems to have no will to fight—is he... not joining the battle this time?..."
"Mahiru, we're all hidden in the high-rises around the black hole. As per the plan, we won't move until you give us the signal to strike..."
Message after message swept past her ears.
Yet the girl's heartbeat grew ever steadier.
She waited for the sunlight on her body to lose all its warmth, waited for the comm channel in her ear to fall silent of all voices.
Mahiru opened her eyes.
What met her gaze was already a sheet of dark night, along with neon lights that weren't all that bright.
"...Hahaha." Sensing something, the girl began to laugh. "Then let it begin."
Rumble, rumble—
The ground began to tremble, the surges of Cursed Energy like a tsunami. Somewhere far off at the edge of the sky, an enormous beam of Cursed Energy shot up into the heavens, as if raising a conspicuous beacon to the whole world.
"What is that?!" In the comm channel, the silence was broken once more. "Is it a Curtain?... Or a ritual?..."
Mahiru's smile widened. —It's the Culling Game.
After she defected, and upon discovering that Kenjaku's attitude toward her had shifted, she had already understood: Kenjaku had other ways to launch the Culling Game, and didn't have to rely entirely on her "Idle Transfiguration."
Before, she had thought Kenjaku was hiding some super-powerful trump card that could forcibly drag every person in all of Japan into the ritual.
But as it turned out—who would have guessed... At this moment, facing that beam shooting into the sky, she actually caught a whiff of something laughable from it.
—Wasn't this exactly the "Idle Transfiguration" she had unleashed that one time she opened her Domain at the hotel?
Hahahaha.... "So you actually stored up my [single attack] and used it to launch the Culling Game?" Mahiru laughed heartily. "These tactics of yours are far too shameful, aren't they?"
Shameful and laughable as it was, Kenjaku had indeed successfully launched the ritual.
The Cursed Energy within that azure beam was terrifyingly immense.
Mahiru's stored-up [single Idle Transfiguration] was expanded and guided by Kenjaku, successfully covering every corner of the nation and linking to each and every person who had long ago been marked.
The chosen ones were transforming into sorcerers.
The fated and the fateless together formed the backdrop of this enormous ritual.
At this very moment, Kenjaku struck up the prelude to the Culling Game.
And the sorcerers' side could, for now, only watch helplessly as the Culling Game's initialization process began, unable to produce any effective means of intervention.
"Our Curtains can't interfere!" Yaga's voice was heavy. "What the enemy has spread is a special ritual and special Curtain covering the entire nation—our Jujutsu techniques can hardly stop it!"
In truth, it wasn't entirely impossible to stop.
The Culling Game was a death game—a slaughter game—with rigorous logic. It had a start button, and naturally a stop button too. It was just that the means of "stopping the ritual" were incomparably cumbersome.
Mahiru couldn't reverse-engineer and crack the ritual with Idle Transfiguration.
Even killing Kenjaku wouldn't stop the ritual.
But as long as one used the Culling Game's own rules to press its end button, the Culling Game would stop on its own. Yes. The launch of the Culling Game could not be prevented.
But letting it launch and develop on its own actually did no real harm.
It was a vast game system. Kenjaku had powered the system on, and afterward the sorcerers' side could likewise find the shutdown button and turn the system off.
What was truly thorny right now was still this battle that would follow after Satoru Gojo released his Domain.
If Satoru Gojo and Mahiru and the others won, then afterward they could easily shut the Culling Game back down.
But if they lost—if Satoru Gojo and Mahiru were defeated, with the shutdown button guarded by Sukuna and Kenjaku—then no matter how simple the shutdown conditions, the sorcerers' side would have no way to act.
So what truly mattered most... was still this battle right in front of them.
Crack— Hearing the sound and feeling something in her heart at the same time, Mahiru raised her head.
In midair, the black circular Curtain shattered, its fragments dissolving into dregs of Cursed Energy, revealing the "black hole" within.
At this moment, Satoru Gojo had finished the final dissolution of the black hole and released his Domain.
The shell of imaginary mass completely dispersed, and the black hole—originally as chaotic as an abyss—now exposed its inner core to the world: like a black, luminous, gigantic pearl suspended in the air.
Eerily beautiful.
That was the "singularity," and also the place where Yuki Tsukumo slept.
The Curtain shattered, and the white-haired, blue-eyed man tumbled out from within, falling toward the rooftop where Mahiru stood.
And at the same time, on the distant horizon, a black, oppressive tide came surging forth. The end of Satoru Gojo's Domain was like the sounding of some horn, instantly throwing this once-tranquil heaven and earth into turmoil.
From the mountain forests, from the depths of the sea, vast numbers of Cursed Spirits gathered into a legion, like a flood, rushing toward their side.
"Here they come!" Yuji Itadori's voice was taut. "But there are way too many of them!"
Those Cursed Spirits numbered at least tens of thousands; this formation was clearly an all-out, full-force sortie.
What they were targeting was, just as expected, this very instant when Satoru Gojo released his Domain.
"Mahiru, by rights you could go save Yuki now..." Yaga said to Mahiru, "but I think it's still better to guard Gojo's side and wait until his Technique Burnout ends before going."
Yaga and the students didn't actually know the full picture of Mahiru's plan.
He was merely making a judgment based on his own reasoning.
This judgment was, in fact, not problematic.
Indeed, the singularity might possibly revert back into a black hole within a short time. If they didn't immediately go and pull Yuki Tsukumo out, then by that point, Satoru Gojo might have to use his Domain to dissolve it once more.
But this couldn't be helped either.
Technique Burnout was simply far too lethal.
During this period after the Domain was released, Satoru Gojo could no longer use the Limitless Technique to defend, and his physical body would be exposed to any attack.
What's more, the opposition still had a Sukuna.
"Mahiru, wait a bit longer—as long as we can hold out through this period..."
As long as they could endure this painful window of Satoru Gojo's "Technique Burnout," their odds of victory would rise. At the very least, they wouldn't be caught with any major openings.
But to Yaga's astonishment, the girl seemed to have no intention of heeding his words.
"Heh..." Mahiru gave a light chuckle, noncommittal.
She raised her head.
Satoru Gojo was falling through the air.
Wings spread out behind her, and facing the falling Satoru Gojo, she beat them toward the direction of the black hole.
"Calm down! Doing this, you'll—"
Yaga's shout was tossed behind her.
The girl seemed to intend, at this very moment, to take over Satoru Gojo's position without the slightest hesitation and dive into the black hole. She seemed to feel not at all that leaving the Technique-Burnt-out Satoru Gojo alone here was any kind of risk.
In midair, she and Satoru Gojo brushed past each other.
The white-haired man and the blue-haired girl exchanged a smile, understanding each other perfectly, and forcefully clapped a high-five.
Mahiru, without looking back, drove her Anti-Gravity Technique to protect herself and plunged headlong into the black hole.
And Satoru Gojo, conversely, landed on the rooftop—in the very spot where Mahiru had just been standing.
"This is bad..." Yaga's heart went cold. Satoru Gojo straightened up and turned his head to scan the rooftops of the surrounding buildings.
Ishiryuu rubbing his fists eagerly, Urogi with a grave expression, Druv sitting cross-legged, and a Special Grade Cursed Spirit shaped like a giant Asian elephant...
At some unknown point, the enemy had already arrived here.
At some unknown point, they had already surrounded Satoru Gojo on all sides.
"This is really bad!!..." Yaga's heart sank to the bottom of the valley—the enemy had indeed been aiming for this very moment!
Boom!!—With no more idle talk, Ishiryuu laughed excitedly, and from atop his head shot an enormous beam of Cursed Energy, blasting toward Satoru Gojo.
At the same time, several bird-shaped Shikigami appeared from beneath Satoru Gojo's feet, circling around him, tracing ring after ring of inviolable trajectories.
"Tch." Satoru Gojo clicked his tongue.
With his Technique interrupted, unable to use the Limitless Technique, he also had no means to teleport.
Facing this cage and the assault, he could only mobilize Cursed Energy, reinforce his defenses, and tough it out.
But even without Limitless, relying solely on Cursed Energy defense, the likes of Ishiryuu and Druv could hardly harm him in the slightest.
The beam slammed into him, blasting the building's rooftop to smithereens, yet it failed to leave so much as a single wound on Satoru Gojo's body.
The attacks came in an unbroken stream; several crimson rays swept in—probably the Kamo Family's special unit, modified by Kenjaku, firing a volley of "Piercing Blood" at Satoru Gojo.
The man spun around, his figure weaving through the inviolable domain, dodging every Piercing Blood, then turned back and slammed a fist into the charging Ishiryuu, blasting him straight away and smashing to bits the unknown, powerful cursed tool in Ishiryuu's hand as well.
"Cough!!—" Ishiryuu coughed up a mouthful of fresh blood, feeling as though all his internal organs had been shaken and injured.
Space rippled; the canvas distorted.
Satoru Gojo abruptly looked up. Urogi Kyoko, who had already closed in above him, gritted her teeth and slammed both hands downward.
—[Ushura Bullet]!!
Satoru Gojo was terrifyingly strong; relying on Cursed Energy reinforcement and physical techniques alone, he could suppress these enemies.
But being unable to use his Technique had, as expected, dropped his strength by a whole tier.
Facing Urogi Kyoko's Technique, the Technique-less Satoru Gojo had no way at all to counter, and was savagely smashed into the building's structure.
The skyscraper was struck down another section, growing shorter.
This battlefield was almost like the heavens collapsing and the earth splitting.
"Keep him pinned!" Urogi Kyoko roared. "Don't stop!"
After only a few exchanges, Urogi Kyoko had already felt an immense pressure from Satoru Gojo.
Even though her opponent could only use physical techniques, Urogi had just realized that if she had been even one second slower, she would undoubtedly have died.
She seemed to have smacked Satoru Gojo down, but in reality she had narrowly escaped death.
This made cold sweat stream down her body.
This guy is just way too strong!
Her opponent had clearly lost his Technique and was being besieged, yet for some reason Urogi simply could not, no matter how she tried, picture a scene of Satoru Gojo being killed.
Damn it.... This sense of an insurmountable shadow, like a towering mountain.... Damn it...!
This was almost exactly the same as what she had felt a thousand years ago, when she faced Sukuna and challenged him!
Just what kind of monster was this Kenjaku making them challenge?!
"Hey, Druv, hurry up and restrain him with your Shikigami!" Urogi suddenly shouted, because she noticed that Druv's Shikigami seemed to be a beat too slow.
This actually wasn't Druv's fault—no one could have imagined that Satoru Gojo wasn't being suppressed by them at all.
Urogi Kyoko was shouting, Druv's Shikigami was rushing over, but this momentary gap had already appeared.
The next second, several chunks of rubble were tossed into midair, and the white-haired man instantly turned into an afterimage, stepping on those tossed bits of rubble to ascend into the sky from nothing, appearing before Urogi Kyoko in almost an instant.
"...Crap!"
Urogi Kyoko's eyes nearly split open as she reached out to pull at the canvas.
But Satoru Gojo's speed had long since exceeded the limit of the wind-up needed for her to pull the canvas.
Boom!!—
At this moment, Ishiryuu, from a distance, fired a beam of Cursed Energy, blasting it into Satoru Gojo to try to save Urogi. But that enormous beam, capable of melting steel, when it struck Satoru Gojo now, produced no effect whatsoever.
Bathed in the beam just like that, Satoru Gojo, his gaze icy, clenched his fist and blasted a punch toward Urogi Kyoko.
Urogi, at this moment, seemed to glimpse the far shore of the netherworld.
Bam! Satoru Gojo furrowed his brow, because this punch had hit nothing.
Just an instant before he struck Urogi, an invisible telekinetic cannonball slammed into Urogi, blasting her entirely away—which instead let her dodge this calamity.
It was that Special Grade Cursed Spirit in the distance that saved Urogi's life.
The man landed anew on another rooftop, gazing toward that Asian-elephant-shaped Special Grade Cursed Spirit. He spent a fraction of a second considering which of these enemies he should deal with first.
But the next second, he suddenly sensed something and abruptly turned around.
"Yo... Satoru." He saw Kenjaku, using Suguru Geto's body, standing right behind him, raising a hand toward him in greeting. Smiling gently.
Exactly the same as the year he was eighteen.
—It's really... been a long time."
"So, what exactly is this Prison Realm thing?" Just yesterday, Urogi Kyoko had asked Kenjaku this. "You said before that activating the Prison Realm takes one minute, but then you said it doesn't take one minute. What's the deal with you? Left brain fighting the right?"
"Nope," Kenjaku had said at the time, smiling and pointing at his own head. "This one minute includes both real time and subjectively perceived time."
The reason people say the Prison Realm is something designed specifically to deal with Satoru Gojo is precisely because its mechanism is too cheap. Because the time it calculates is, of all things, the brain's subjective time.
If a person thinks very slowly, taking ten seconds to think over one second's worth of matters, then for the Prison Realm to seal this person, it would have to spend ten minutes loading the bar.
Conversely, if this person thinks especially fast, processing a minute's worth of matters in one second, then in one second the Prison Realm could finish loading a minute's worth of bar and complete the sealing outright.
Kenjaku's plan targeting Satoru Gojo was based precisely on this rule.
The body he wore was none other than that of Satoru Gojo's best friend, Suguru Geto.
No matter what Satoru Gojo was thinking when he saw Suguru Geto's face—whether confusion, shock, or recalling all sorts of memories of himself and Suguru Geto—as long as he was utterly off guard and his brain's thinking accelerated, then Satoru Gojo would be sealed in an instant.
Heh.... Yes.
Satoru Gojo was destined to lose.
Satoru Gojo had no possibility of winning at all.
No one could, while completely off guard, see the face of a dead best friend and have no ripple in their mind.
Even if this youth had become invincible under heaven in the blink of an eye, he would still be trapped by those three years of his adolescence.
For Satoru Gojo, this was a heaven-set trap, a dead end.
—That was how it should have been.
"Yo, Satoru... long time no see."
On the battlefield, Kenjaku stood behind Satoru Gojo, waving, the Prison Realm held in his other hand.
A flicker of astonishment flashed through the eyes of the white-haired man before him.
But the next second, Kenjaku suddenly realized something was off—because Satoru Gojo's reaction was a little too calm, as if he had anticipated it long ago.
So that's how it is? Kenjaku's heart sank.
He knew that the worst-case scenario he had been worrying about all along had already come to pass.
His plan had been seamless, but there was one single point that had to be guaranteed—Satoru Gojo had to be utterly mentally unprepared for the fact that Suguru Geto's corpse had been parasitized.
Kenjaku believed his secrecy measures had been done fairly well, and believed that the blue-haired Cursed Spirit shouldn't have been able to perceive the causal connection between all of this.
But... was it really so after all? Had his plan been seen through by Mahiru once again?
So annoying, truly detestable. That blue-haired Cursed Spirit—how could she perceive everything?
Every single time it was like this. Every single time it was so.
If not for Mahiru, all his plans should have come to fruition naturally; but because of this blue-haired Cursed Spirit, time and again his plans failed and were thwarted.
Heh. But this time was different.
This time, Mahiru, you cannot stop me.
Precisely because he had been foiled several times by this blue-haired Cursed Spirit, this time he had kept an extra measure of insurance and called out Sukuna as well.
"Sukuna!!"
Kenjaku suddenly shouted out loud, and at the same moment, Satoru Gojo abruptly looked up—in the sky, that blonde angel girl appeared conspicuously.
"Yo," the blonde girl said with a smile, extending a finger toward Satoru Gojo. "Me too—long time no see."
—[Dismantle]!
Several slashes instantly came cleaving down at Satoru Gojo.
If Suguru Geto's face couldn't seal Satoru Gojo in one go, then let Suguru Geto's face work in concert with Sukuna's attack to seal Satoru Gojo.
Now that Satoru Gojo's Limitless Technique was disabled, the one who benefited most was Sukuna.
In the original work, Sukuna had relied on Mahoraga to overcome the Limitless defense, but now, with Satoru Gojo in Technique Burnout, in Sukuna's eyes he was just a living target.
Sukuna unleashed countless slashes in an instant.
Even his most ordinary, most common slashes landed on Satoru Gojo's body in great numbers and quite solidly.
Sukuna's slashes—even the wide-area, dense slashes that sacrificed quality for quantity—were enough to break through the defenses of Satoru Gojo's body.
With this barrage of attacks, even if each slash didn't cut deep, it was enough to pin Satoru Gojo in place, allowing the Prison Realm to successfully seal him.
Haha.... Mahiru, this time I'll admit, your insight has astonished me once again.
But this time, your plan is useless, because I came prepared!
Had I not summoned Sukuna in advance, I would probably have been killed here by Satoru Gojo for failing to seal him.
But I've already summoned Sukuna in advance, so—the winner is still me. This point will not change!
Hahaha, what a pity! Mahiru! You're very sharp. But alas, my schemes leave nothing to chance!—
Kenjaku laughed, laughed smugly.
But the next second, his pupils abruptly contracted, and at the same time, Sukuna in the sky also suddenly had his pupils tremble.
"Wha..." The anticipated scene of Satoru Gojo being instantly slashed into a bloody mess by countless cuts did not appear.
Hundreds upon thousands of slashes packed densely together, yet not one landed on Satoru Gojo's body—because around him, a ring of invisible protective membrane had already emerged.
—Limitless. It was actually the Limitless defense?
How could that be?! Kenjaku was greatly shocked. And at this moment, he finally noticed that Satoru Gojo had already arranged his fingers into a finger-snapping pose, aimed at him.
A scarlet radiance suddenly burst forth at his fingertips.
—[Red].
This was one of the most commonly used attacks of the Limitless Technique; that scarlet light represented the "reverse" concept of Limitless.
Only at this moment did Kenjaku realize with a start that Satoru Gojo had never been in Technique Burnout at all—but how was that possible?
In an instant, countless thoughts flashed through Kenjaku's mind.
Had the duration of Technique Burnout passed?
No, it definitely hadn't passed. The battle just now seemed long, but in reality it was a flash of lightning and flint; by rights Satoru Gojo's Technique should absolutely still be in the Burnout state.
Could it be that the Domain Expansion was fake? Had Satoru Gojo not expanded a Domain at all?
No, that's not right—that Domain was real; he had already confirmed it.
Then, had Satoru Gojo's Domain not brought about a Technique interruption?
That was even more impossible. Technique interruption was damage to the brain; no one could avoid this damage during a Domain Expansion...
Wait a moment. ...Damage? Kenjaku silently repeated this word in his mind.
He seemed to have anticipated something; a daze and disbelief flashed through his eyes.
Yes, damage—since it was damage, then it ought to be curable.
It was just that healing this kind of damage was extremely difficult—so much so that curing it might be even harder than destroying and rebuilding the brain.
Even the strongest Reverse Cursed Technique physician at Jujutsu High right now couldn't cure this kind of Technique Burnout, which was why Kenjaku had never imagined anyone could heal brain damage and Technique Burnout... but it seemed there was just one person he had failed to account for—Mahiru, that blue-haired Cursed Spirit with a nearly unsolvable healing ability.
If Mahiru spent time researching and practicing, could Mahiru then use [Idle Transfiguration] to treat Technique Burnout?
...It seemed... it wasn't impossible.
The red light at Satoru Gojo's fingertips surged violently.
Kenjaku's mouth fell open. He suddenly recalled.
Just now, when Satoru Gojo fell onto the rooftop and Mahiru flew into the black hole, Mahiru and Satoru Gojo... seemed to have... clapped a high-five once.
...Haha. Kenjaku grinned. Boom!!—
Then, he was completely engulfed by the red light shot from Satoru Gojo's fingertips.
The radiance of [Red] shone over the dark night of Tokyo.
____
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