Jujutsu Kaisen — Chapter 54 - Twin Stars Drifting Apart?

The phone screen's glow caught Gojo Satoru's face. Nothing moved in it.

The message thread was clean. One new reply.

From the number that had gone dark a full day and night ago.

"Too late."

Two words. No punctuation.

Gojo Satoru tossed the phone onto the coffee table.

The old fossils had been purged. The massacre charge had been cleared in public. The new Jujutsu Headquarters had even pulled the wanted order.

He'd paved every inch of that road smooth. So what the hell was this guy still sulking about?

"Still can't reach him?"

Shoko Ieiri was slouched on the sofa, idly spinning a scalpel between her fingers.

Gojo Satoru tilted his head back against the cushion, long legs crossed.

"Sends 'too late' and kills his phone again. When he shows his face, I'm beating the hell out of him."

In the corner, Fushiguro Toji was doing one-finger handstand push-ups in that blinding green spandex.

Sweat tapped the floor in a steady rhythm.

At those words, he snapped into a clean aerial flip and landed without a sound. Thumbs up. Teeth white as a camera flash under the lights.

"The dictionary of youth has no such words as 'too late'!"

His voice hit like a physical force. Dust rained down from the ceiling.

"Even if he runs to the ends of the earth, his teacher will chase him down on his hands! That kid's just embarrassed — he's off somewhere wiping his eyes in secret. As a man, what he needs right now is a sweat-soaked taijutsu showdown to blast that knot wide open!"

Gojo Satoru snorted.

"Teacher Fushiguro. Geto is not a hot-blooded idiot like you."

Rapid footsteps in the corridor.

The principal's office door crashed open.

Masamichi Yaga stood in the doorway. No sunglasses. His eyes were a mess of red veins, and dark stubble had pushed through along his jaw.

He walked straight to the coffee table and dropped a kraft paper dossier in front of Gojo Satoru.

"Look at this." Yaga's voice had gone rough.

Gojo Satoru raised an eyebrow.

"More garbage from the new Jujutsu Headquarters?"

"It's about Geto Suguru."

Gojo Satoru tore the string loose and pulled out the pages inside.

No photographs.

Just a few thin sheets of reports.

The first page: an asset flow report for the Time Vessel Association. A massive sum transferred to an anonymous overseas account.

The second page: blurry surveillance photos. Geto Suguru in that eye-catching kasaya, seated on the Time Vessel Association's throne. A row of people kneeling below him. Several of them were Curse Users with ugly reputations.

He had rebuilt the Time Vessel Association.

The fingers holding the paper tightened slightly.

"This guy..."

He turned to the last page.

A freshly issued red document, stamped with the seal of the new Jujutsu Headquarters.

[Jujutsu Sorcerer Geto Suguru has been confirmed to have seized control of the Curse User organization known as the Time Vessel Association and is openly recruiting Curse Users. His actions constitute a serious threat to the security of the Jujutsu World.]

[Effective immediately, Special Grade wanted status is reinstated.]

[Mission Classification: Apprehension.]

Apprehension. Not execution.

The new Jujutsu Headquarters was extending an olive branch. To him. To Gojo Satoru.

The last courtesy they had left to give.

"Ha."

He laughed.

Azure Cursed Energy erupted from him like uncontrolled arcs of lightning. The glass on the coffee table disintegrated into powder.

"I slaughtered every last one of those old fossils. Wiped his ass clean. And he turns around and dives headfirst into the cesspit, then pulls the lid shut over himself?"

Gojo Satoru stood. The emotion in his Six Eyes was violent and absolutely cold.

"What the hell does he want?!"

Fushiguro Toji stepped forward and pulled the report from Gojo Satoru's rigid fingers.

He scanned it. The face that usually wore some exaggerated grin went dark in a way that was genuinely frightening.

"Unforgivable!"

The roar set the window glass humming.

"Even if youth must pass through confusion! Even if this world is rotten with injustice and ugliness!"

Toji drove his fist through the solid wood desk.

Splinters sprayed across the room.

"Betraying your comrades, running with trash — that is the worst kind of desecration. Of youth. Of trust. You want to call that a righteous cause?! This is a coward running from reality, nothing more!"

A crushing physical pressure detonated off his body. The shockwave flipped the wreckage of the sofa clean off the floor.

"I'll drag him back! Break both his arms and both his legs if I have to — I'll haul him in front of us and make him spend the rest of his life paying for it in sweat and tears! That is my absolute duty as his teacher!"

He roared and spun toward the door.

"It won't help."

Gojo Satoru's voice came from behind him. Perfectly calm. Not a ripple in it.

Toji stopped.

Gojo Satoru crouched down and gathered the pages from the floor. He stacked them one by one and slid them back into the dossier. Slow. Mechanical.

He finally understood what "too late" meant.

Geto hadn't been waiting for his name to be cleared.

Geto had been using those two words to cut every last thread connecting him to this world.

He had chosen a road that ran away from all of them.

Gojo Satoru set the dossier on the corner of the desk and straightened up.

He lifted his head.

Those azure Six Eyes had gone back to what they always were at their coldest. Remote. Inorganic. Nothing behind them that could be touched.

"He chose his path."

Gojo Satoru turned and walked toward the door.

"Satoru." Yaga's voice stopped him.

Gojo Satoru didn't look back.

"Then let him."

He walked out. His figure moved down the corridor and disappeared into the light at the far end.

Shoko finally got her cigarette lit. Cheap tobacco smell spread through the room.

"The two strongest." She exhaled a slow stream of white smoke. "Now there's only one." No emotion in her voice. None at all.

Toji stood in the middle of the wreckage.

He pulled a lollipop from his pocket and bit through it with a crack.

"A coward who needs a crowd of trash around him to prove his conviction doesn't deserve that title."

Yaga dropped into the ruined office chair and pressed his fingers into his temples.

"Fushiguro. Watch Satoru for me. I'm afraid he might..."

"He won't." Toji exhaled. "That idiot Geto Suguru already did it himself. Killed off the last piece of hope Gojo Satoru had left in him. All of it. Clean."

On the school training grounds.

Gojo Satoru walked without direction.

The sun was brutal. He hadn't put his sunglasses on. His Six Eyes took in everything around him, passively, relentlessly, the full flood of information with nowhere to go.

Too loud.

He stopped at the bench along the edge of the grounds.

The spot they used to like best.

He had believed, once, that he could dismantle any rule in existence. That he could reach into whatever dead-end obsession had taken hold of Geto and pull him out by force.

He could rewrite the laws of the physical world.

He could not rewrite a person's choice.

Gojo Satoru pushed his hands into his pockets.

Whatever had been moving across his face went still.

He turned toward the school gate and walked. He didn't look back. Not once.

A light breeze rolled through and carried a few dead leaves across the ground. They came to rest on the empty bench, quiet and alone.

➤ Next: Reclaiming a Misguided Youth! The Meaning of the Will of Fire