Jujutsu Kaisen — Chapter 38 - The Hound Pup's First Bite
The mess was finally cleaned up.
The price was Gojo Satoru and Toji getting their heads pushed down by Masamichi Yaga and spending the entire day swinging shovels in the back mountain like a pair of construction foremen.
But Gojo Satoru didn't feel the slightest bit wronged.
He now walked like he owned the world.
Once Reverse Cursed Technique clicks into place, it's like ripping out a gas-guzzling supercar's engine and dropping in a nuclear reactor with infinite range.
Maintaining Limitless burns through mental energy at a catastrophic rate? Just use Reverse Cursed Technique to repair the scorched brain nerves in real time.
Cursed Energy expenditure too high? Positive and negative Cursed Energy cancel each other out and reset.
The word "fatigue" had been completely ripped out of Gojo Satoru's dictionary.
The old fossils at Jujutsu Headquarters gnashed their teeth in impotent fury. But faced with a monster who could blast out Hollow Technique and nearly vaporize the entire back mountain, they had no choice but to hold their noses and deliver the Special Grade Jujutsu Sorcerer certification to the school like obedient errand boys.
The Strongest had been born.
And the school's entire operational model changed because of it.
Kento Nanami submitted his resignation, picked up his suitcase, and transferred to a regular high school.
Yu Haibara was granted indefinite leave and spent his days at home staring at the ceiling, questioning every life choice he'd ever made.
The school's combat strength had always been stretched thin. Now it was nearly nonexistent.
The once-inseparable Strongest Duo fell apart.
Gojo Satoru alone could match a reinforced battalion. Why waste two people on what one could handle?
Mission dispatch sheets rained down on him like snowflakes.
Okinawa. Hokkaido. Kyushu.
He flew solo across the whole country, turning Cursed Spirit exorcism into a national sightseeing tour.
I am the strongest under heaven. That was his honest, unfiltered inner state.
But Geto Suguru had been left behind.
The midsummer cicadas screamed loud enough to split a skull.
In front of the old shrine at the school's back mountain, Geto Suguru stood with his eyes lowered, pinching a black orb between his fingers. It reeked.
This was the fifth Semi-Grade 2 Cursed Spirit exorcised today.
He stared at that orb. It smelled like the rag someone used to wipe up vomit. Every time he swallowed one of these things, he felt like his esophagus had been scraped raw.
Gojo Satoru had run too far ahead.
So far that even at his absolute limit, Geto Suguru could barely make out the other's back anymore.
They had entered the school together. They had promised each other they'd become the strongest together.
But now Satoru alone could solve every problem in the world.
So what did that make him?
Dead weight?
To catch up to that bastard blazing with light, to actually live up to the ideal of the strong protecting the weak, there was only one thing he could do.
Eat.
Keep eating.
Shove those filthy things, condensed from the malice of ordinary people who would never know what they were creating — down his own throat, one after another.
Gulp.
The black orb slid down.
Geto Suguru clamped his hand over his mouth, dropped to his knees, and retched violently.
Nothing came up. Only the tears that squeezed from the corners of his eyes.
What was all of this even for?
To protect those monkeys? The ones who felt no gratitude, who just kept endlessly spawning more Cursed Spirits?
He wiped the drool from his lips with the back of his hand, hard, and forced the dangerous thought back down before it could finish forming.
He straightened. Expressionless. And walked toward the next mission location.
A hundred meters away, Toji hung upside down from the branch of a century-old tree, watching all of this, boredly picking his ear.
This kid's state is seriously wrong.
That suppressed, rotting negative energy — you could smell the sourness from fifty meters out.
The light in those eyes was dimming by the day. The whole person had become a steel wire stretched to its absolute limit. One more ounce of weight and it would snap.
Should he go say something?
Toji flipped off the branch and landed, dusting the bark from his hands.
Forget it.
I'm not some daycare advice columnist.
He'd taught these brats taijutsu. He'd given them the guts to smash through the rules.
But a wavering conviction? Nobody could fix that for someone else.
The more twisted the origin of power, the more vicious the backlash when it turns.
If this kid couldn't even get past the nausea his own technique caused, then an eight-pack and perfect form wouldn't save him.
Setting Geto Suguru's psychological spiral aside, Toji's own days lately had been genuinely comfortable.
Nobody dared touch him.
The old tangerines at Jujutsu Headquarters got blood pressure spikes just hearing the name "Fushiguro," let alone actually coming to cause trouble.
The school was quiet and empty. No one dragging him into sparring sessions. He had his energy entirely to himself.
The physical foundation for the Eight Gates was solid. Now it was time for technique.
Deep in the forest, sunlight broke through the gaps between the leaves in scattered shafts.
Toji stood still. His hands flew through seals.
No Cursed Energy fluctuation. Only a peculiar energy — his alone, nothing like anything this world had seen before — flowing through his meridians.
BANG!
A burst of white smoke.
The Toji who had been standing there vanished. In his place stood an identical Masamichi Yaga.
Black sunglasses. Handlebar mustache. Even that perpetually suffering expression on his face was reproduced without a single flaw.
Transformation Jutsu. Done.
This thing was miles more useful than the Jujutsu world's disguise techniques.
Toji's mouth split into a grin, and "Masamichi Yaga's" face immediately produced an extremely obscene smile.
If Principal Yaga himself were standing here, he'd probably have a cerebral hemorrhage on the spot.
BANG!
Another burst of white smoke.
He was back to himself, but now two identical copies of him stood at his sides.
Clone Jutsu.
Phantoms without physical substance, sure. But in high-speed combat, they'd make a perfect, lethal misdirect.
As for the Substitution Jutsu, he had that locked down long ago. A log or a rock prepared in advance, a swap the instant an attack landed, practically a cheat code for staying alive.
The Three Basic Jutsu. The most common, dime-a-dozen foundational ninjutsu in the Naruto world.
But dropped into a world that had absolutely no framework for any of it, combined with his Heavenly Restriction body, the result was a chemical reaction that should've been illegal.
The Six Eyes could see through Cursed Energy flow.
They couldn't see through chakra.
Next time he fought that brat Gojo Satoru, he was absolutely using this. He was going to make that smug kid eat a face full of concrete.
I'm gonna draw a turtle on his sunglasses.
Toji rolled his neck with satisfaction and checked his watch.
5 PM.
Time to hit the supermarket before someone else grabbed the discounted beef.
He needed to cook something good tonight. Those two brats deserved a real meal.
Megumi had been growing again. His green spandex was almost too small. He'd need to get two new sets custom-made.
Saitama Prefecture. The Fushiguro residence.
The evening sun had warmed the living room floor to a pleasant heat.
Toji had gone to the supermarket. The two children were alone.
The TV played a raucous Kamen Rider episode. Tsumiki hummed something soft and tuneless, standing on a small stool at the kitchen sink, washing apples.
Four-year-old Fushiguro Megumi sat on the sofa.
He wasn't watching TV.
He was staring at the shadow pooled beneath his feet, stretched long by the setting sun.
Ever since the Ten Shadows Technique awakened, he always felt like that black shadow hid something enormous inside it. A vast, deep world. Whenever he wanted, he could reach in and pull something out.
The green idiot he called Dad was always forcing him to do squats. But when it came to teaching him to control this power, he was surprisingly solid.
"The shadow is your pocket. Don't be afraid of it. Command it."
"You are the master. They are dogs."
Dad's exact words.
Megumi extended his small palm and shaped a dog-head hand sign in the air.
The black shadow rippled faintly, like something was pressing up against the surface from below, about to break through.
Then Megumi stopped moving.
The temperature in the living room dropped.
Not the clean cool of air conditioning. Something else. The kind of cold that raises every hair on your body at once.
The sunlight outside the window was still there, but it felt smothered, blocked by something thick and wrong.
A smell crept through the air. Sour and rotten, like a sewer fermenting for ten days, layered with a nauseating, iron-heavy stench of blood. Pouring straight into the nostrils.
Something was coming.
Megumi knew that smell.
Over the past two weeks, when Dad had taken him to the school for physical assessments, he'd caught it from a distance, the scent of low-grade Cursed Spirits being exorcised by the Jujutsu Sorcerers.
But this was home.
Dad wasn't here.
Megumi's eyes changed.
The last trace of a four-year-old's softness drained from his face entirely. What replaced it was a coldness that had no business being in a child that age.
He didn't scream. He didn't bolt.
He slid off the sofa without a sound, walked barefoot to the kitchen doorway.
"Sis."
His voice was low. Flat.
"What is it, Megumi?" Tsumiki turned around, a bright red apple in her hand. "Almost done washing these."
"Open the cabinet under the sink. Get inside."
"Don't come out unless I call you."
Tsumiki went still.
She looked at her little brother's face. Jaw set. Eyes hard.
She had no Cursed Energy. She couldn't see anything. But that instinctive pressure, the heaviness pressing down on the air itself, told her everything.
"Megumi..."
"Now."
No room for argument in his voice.
Tsumiki bit her lip. She was older than Megumi by a few years, but she knew exactly when not to get in the way.
She dropped the apple, yanked open the cabinet door, and folded herself inside.
The door clicked shut.
From the living room, the glass balcony door let out a faint, dry scrape.
Megumi spun around.
On the balcony tiles, empty just a moment ago — something was crouched there.
It looked like a lump of rotting sludge given a crude shape. Three massive eyes, every inch of them threaded through with red. A mouth packed with uneven, jutting fangs. Gray drool sliding down the glass in slow strings.
A Grade 4 Cursed Spirit.
To a Jujutsu Sorcerer, this thing wasn't even worth warming up on. Gojo Satoru could crush it without a glance. An ordinary person with a gun could put it down.
But for a four-year-old, it was a different story.
The monster's three eyes spun in frantic circles, then locked onto Megumi, dead center in the living room.
It had smelled the Cursed Energy.
Fresh. Tender. High-quality soul.
"Kekekekeke..."
A laugh like grinding bone.
CRASH!
The bloated body hurled itself through the glass door.
Shards burst outward and hung in the air for half a second. The monster stretched its massive, dripping maw wide open, a wall of foul wind rolling ahead of it, and lunged straight at Megumi.
There was no running.
Megumi's mind hit maximum speed.
If he bolted for the front door, the monster would pivot the instant he turned. It would tear through the cabinet and devour Tsumiki.
This was his home.
The home Dad had scraped together piece by piece, the one he'd sworn would never let them go cold or hungry again.
You want to touch my sister?
You want to destroy my home?
Not a single trace of fear in those eyes.
Megumi locked his gaze on the Cursed Spirit in mid-lunge. Something ferocious ignited in that small body, raw and absolute.
His hands snapped across his chest in a sharp cross, fingers locking into a perfect dog-head shadow.
The vast Cursed Energy that had barely begun to wake inside him surged through his meridians and crashed into the black shadow beneath his feet.
"Divine Dogs!"
➤ Next: Megumi's First Battle and Toji's Big Cleanup