Jujutsu Kaisen — Chapter 42 - Shattered Conviction — Tears Unshed
Suguru Geto closed his eyes.
Don't listen. Don't think.
Non-sorcerers are the weak. The weak are ignorant. The purpose of sorcerers is to protect them.
That was the righteous doctrine.
He chewed on those words over and over, like a drowning man clutching the last piece of rotted driftwood.
The faint Cursed Energy reaction came from an abandoned shrine on the rear mountain.
The torii gate was broken in half, covered in moss.
Halfway up the slope, the Assistant Supervisor couldn't hold on any longer. Trembling, he muttered something about watching the car and fled faster than a rabbit.
The village chief stopped a hundred meters back, pointing at the shrine, his voice shaking. "Master, it's down there, in the basement! You absolutely must destroy those two monsters, or our village is finished!"
Suguru Geto couldn't be bothered to respond.
He walked toward the shrine alone. The closer he got, the clearer that Cursed Energy reaction became.
It was too clean. None of the negative emotions that clung to a Cursed Spirit. Instead it was saturated with terror and despair, pure and suffocating.
Like two children on the verge of being scared to death.
What exactly was inside?
He pushed open the rotting wooden door. A wave of mildew hit him, thick with the stench of excrement.
He stepped around the altar and found the entrance leading underground. A heavy wooden door, fitted with a rusted iron lock bigger than his fist.
Who were these villagers trying to keep out? Did Cursed Spirits need physical locks?
BANG!
Suguru Geto kicked the lock core clean off.
He descended the steep stone steps.
The basement was cold and damp, with only a sliver of light leaking through the ventilation shaft.
Before his eyes could adjust to the dark, he heard it. Faint. Suppressed. Sobbing.
Then he saw.
At the far end of the basement were two enormous wooden cages. The kind built to hold large livestock. They were covered in horrifying scratch marks and dark-red bloodstains.
Inside the cages were two girls.
5 or 6 years old at most, about the same age as that brat Megumi from Toji's place.
They were skin and bones. Barely an inch of unblemished flesh remained on their bodies, nothing but black-and-blue bruises and scabbed-over whip wounds.
Hearing movement, one of the girls let out a short, sharp scream and clutched the other, even weaker girl tightly against her chest. She stared up at Suguru Geto on the steps with the eyes of someone looking at a demon.
The energy Jujutsu Headquarters had classified as "Grade 2 Cursed Energy" was coming from these 2 girls on the verge of death.
BOOM,
Suguru Geto's mind went blank.
He could almost hear his own blood roaring against his eardrums.
Yu Haibara's breakdown in the infirmary flashed before him. Kento Nanami's back as he walked away without turning around.
This goddamn Jujutsu World.
Throwing minors into the meat grinder, and what were they protecting? This? Something worse than animals?!
"You—" He tried to speak. His throat had no sound left in it.
He took one step forward.
"Ah—!"
The girl flinched like she'd been touched with a branding iron. She scrambled backward, her back slamming into the wooden bars with a dull, sickening crack.
"Don't come any closer! Don't hit us!"
"We didn't ruin the crops. We really didn't."
Her voice was shredded. Every word drove into Suguru Geto's nerves like a needle dipped in poison.
He froze.
He looked at the black blood crusted beneath the cages. The spoiled food in the cracked bowl. The way the girls looked at him, the way you look at something that isn't human.
The "Grade 2 Cursed Spirit" Jujutsu Headquarters had dispatched him to exorcise.
The "evil spirits" the villagers blamed for their failed harvest.
Two innocent children who had awakened Cursed Energy, and for that, an entire village had decided they were monsters.
CRACK!
Suguru Geto heard it clearly. The string inside his mind, stretched past every limit, snapped.
"Disgusting."
Two words, barely above a breath.
Not the stench of the basement.
The people outside.
Those self-righteous, moralizing "non-sorcerers" who turned around and tortured two 5-year-old girls like livestock.
Every Cursed Spirit orb he'd forced down his throat, fighting back the urge to vomit, all of it to protect this?
To protect these selfish, ignorant, vicious monkeys?!
The ignorant mob that had persecuted Riko Amanai. Kento Nanami quitting. Yu Haibara's despair. The students who stepped in to stop a bullying and got pointed at for it. Scene after scene, one after another.
And then Yuki Tsukumo's vision of a world made entirely of Jujutsu Sorcerers echoed through him, louder than everything else.
Yes.
Why protect them?
Why keep torturing himself with a world this full of malice?
Kill all these monkeys. That was the only way the world ever got beautiful.
The righteous doctrine that had sustained him all these years shattered in that single instant. It hit the ground and became the most colossal joke.
Suguru Geto slowly closed his eyes.
When he opened them again, those narrow eyes held nothing. Not one trace of the honor student's gentleness. Not a single fragment.
Only cold. Absolute zero.
He raised his hand. A Grade 2 Cursed Spirit shaped like a giant centipede crawled up from the shadows, its sharp leg segments scraping across the ground with an ear-splitting screech.
The twins in the cage were so terrified their cries died in their throats.
Suguru Geto turned and climbed the steps, his voice completely flat.
"Bite the cage open. Don't hurt them."
He pushed through the door and walked back into the light.
The sky was still overcast.
The village chief and several burly men had been craning their necks. The moment they saw him emerge, they plastered on smiles and jogged over.
"Master! How did it go? Did you kill the monsters down there?"
Suguru Geto looked down at that wrinkled, ugly face and said nothing.
The old man's smile faltered under the silence. He laughed dryly. "Master, please, hurry up and finish the job. We pooled our money, we'll give you a big red envelope..."
"Shut up."
Two words, spoken without force. They pressed down on the old man like a pair of mountains, and the laughter died instantly.
From behind him, a villager worked up his nerve. "What's your problem? You took the money, so do the job!"
Suguru Geto smiled.
It was the smile of a man completely exhausted and completely free.
No more righteous doctrine.
No more responsibility.
These monkeys wearing human skin had no right to exist in this world.
BOOM,!
A ferocious Rainbow Dragon tore through the sky and coiled above the shrine. Its rampaging Cursed Energy pressure crashed across the entire village like a wave. The gale sent villagers tumbling in every direction. Someone wet himself where he stood.
The village chief sprawled in the mud, still screaming. "Master! We're human! Aren't you supposed to protect us?!"
"Protect?"
The word turned Suguru Geto's stomach.
He tugged at the corner of his mouth. His laughter carried the cold of something that had never been warm.
"Monkeys... deserve to be called human?"
He raised his hand, aiming it at the village chief's terror-twisted face.
"Kill them all."
"Leave not a single—"
He never finished.
WHOOSH!
A streak of green lightning dropped from the sky without warning, impossibly fast, and slammed into the ground between Suguru Geto and the villagers.
BOOM!
The earth exploded. The shockwave hurled every villager off their feet.
The dust thinned. A tall figure slowly straightened up.
Toji Fushiguro.
"Oi, bun-head." Toji bared his teeth in a wild grin. "Had a feeling something was off with you, so I followed."
He rolled his shoulders.
"Slaughtering unarmed weaklings..."
"That's not youthful at all."
➤ Next: The Blade Unfallen and the Erased Village