Jujutsu Kaisen — Chapter 61 - Shinjuku Massacre, Bloodstained Kasaya
One week later. Shinjuku.
The commercial street blazed with New Year decorations. Crowds in thick coats moved through it in every direction, shopping bags swinging, breath fogging in the cold.
The big screen in the plaza was still running its cheerful holiday ads.
The scarred man stood in the shadows of the pedestrian street, hunched inside an enormous black trench coat, hood pulled low. Beneath the fabric, his body wouldn't stop moving. Those newly grown eyeballs sent waves of stabbing pain every time the cloth rubbed against them, but it was nothing compared to the ecstatic, swelling heat that Sukuna's Finger poured through his veins.
He felt like he could punch straight through an entire department store.
"Darling, let's go eat at that sukiyaki place?"
Less than 2 meters away, a young couple was wrapped around each other like the rest of the world didn't exist.
The guy's hand squeezed the girl's waist. She swatted at him with a giggling scold.
The scarred man's mouth pulled into a fang-filled grin.
Filthy pair.
Two disgusting, noisy, worthless monkeys.
He threw open his trench coat.
"Wow! Look at that guy!" The girl caught the movement from the corner of her eye and spun around. She wasn't scared. She grabbed her boyfriend's sleeve and yanked, buzzing with excitement. "That cosplay is insanely realistic! Is it some monster from a new anime? Can we get a photo with him?"
The guy turned. He was just starting to smile.
The scarred man's body detonated.
Black-red Cursed Energy shredded the trench coat. His bones cracked like a string of firecrackers. His frame exploded upward, past 2 meters, past 3, still swelling.
The bloodshot eyeballs packed across his face and shoulders all wrenched open at once. They fixed on the prey.
A massive hand came down from above.
SPLAT!
No scream. The guy's upper body burst like a water balloon, and warm red-and-white organs splattered across the girl's face.
The girl went still.
She was still holding her arm out for the photo. Her knees folded. She dropped heavily into the spreading pool of blood and shredded flesh, and the scream that should have torn from her throat died somewhere deep inside it.
"Happy New Year, monkeys."
The scarred man let out a wet, slurring laugh and stamped the girl's head to pieces.
Monster! Ahhh,!
The shriek ripped across the Shinjuku night sky.
The crowd went dead silent for one full second.
Then it broke like a wave, a tsunami of screaming that swallowed the whole street.
"Kill them all..." The scarred man flicked shredded flesh from between his fingers. His massive body lunged into the scattering crowd. "Kill all you worthless monkeys!"
This wasn't slaughter. It was one-sided feeding.
Within minutes, the pedestrian street had become a charnel house. Severed limbs and entrails carpeted the snow-dusted asphalt.
The giant Special Grade Cursed Spirit waded through the fleeing crowd. One casual sweep of its arm snapped 3 or 4 people in half at the waist.
Screams, crying, sirens, sound collapsed into a single roar that drowned the entire commercial district.
Shop windows burst inward. Cars flipped and crashed through storefronts.
The scarred man tore off a severed arm, dipped it in the thick blood pooling at his feet, and on a stretch of wall still mostly intact, smeared the symbol of the Time Vessel Association in long, crooked strokes.
---
Tokyo Jujutsu High. Back mountain training ground.
"Nine thousand nine hundred ninety-nine!"
Haibara Yu had half a ton of granite strapped to his back. His legs were shaking so hard they barely qualified as legs.
Fushiguro Toji held an iron-straight handstand on the horizontal bar, veins standing out on his neck. "Hold on! The sweat of youth will never betray you!"
On the grass nearby, Gojo Satoru lay with a blade of dogtail grass between his teeth and his long legs crossed, idly filling Fushiguro Megumi's ears with thoroughly heretical Cursed Energy theory.
Woooooo,!
The highest-level air raid siren tore open the sky.
Masamichi Yaga kicked through the chain-link fence and came sprinting across the field, a tactical tablet clenched in both hands, his face iron-grey. "Shinjuku commercial district — indiscriminate slaughter by a Special Grade Cursed Spirit! Death toll past a hundred! Emergency directive from the higher-ups!"
Gojo Satoru's brow creased hard. He spat out the blade of grass and flipped upright. "Special Grade? Why didn't the Window pick this up in advance?"
Yaga slammed the tablet into his arms.
Surveillance footage from Shinjuku filled the screen. Severed limbs across every street. A 3-meter monster tearing into pedestrians.
And on one wall, painted in blood, the symbol of the Time Vessel Association.
Every trace of ease drained from Gojo Satoru's face.
His pale blue Six Eyes locked onto that blood-red pentagram. Even his breathing stuttered.
Suguru?
That's impossible. No matter how far off the rails he'd gone, he would never slaughter ordinary people like this. Not without a bottom line. Not like this.
But the symbol sat there like a thorn driven straight into his eye.
A large, calloused hand dropped onto the tablet and blocked the screen.
Toji had straightened up at some point.
The over-the-top hot-blooded energy was gone. In its place, something else had settled into the depths of his eyes, the absolute, glacial cold that belonged to the Sorcerer Killer.
"Stop reading pictures, young master." His voice carried shards of ice. "You want the truth? Go pin that brat's head to the ground and ask him yourself."
The knot in Gojo Satoru's chest loosened, just slightly.
"Take me with you!" Haibara Yu dropped the boulder. Sweat and mud streaked down his face. He gritted his teeth hard. "If it really is Senior Geto — I want to ask him myself. I want to hear why."
Gojo Satoru glanced at him.
Two words: "Keep up."
Toji turned, grabbed the limp Fushiguro Megumi off the ground, and tossed him one-handed to Ieiri Shoko as she jogged in. "Watch the kid. Don't teach him to smoke."
Before Shoko could get a single curse word out, 3 afterimages punched through the air with deafening sonic booms and streaked toward Shinjuku.
---
Shinjuku pedestrian street. A living hell.
Firelight the color of a dying sun lit the bodies scattered across the ground.
The scarred man's massive frame loomed over the rubble. His bone-spur-covered arm shot out and seized a young mother by both shoulders, fingers digging in.
Beneath her, pressed under her body, a small girl trembled and couldn't stop.
BOOM.
The air burst shattered the sky.
A rainbow dragon — white scales, crimson eyes, crashed into the center of the street with enough force to end the world. The asphalt cracked and collapsed outward like a spiderweb.
Geto Suguru stood on the dragon's head, dark-gold five-panel kasaya catching the wind.
The wide sleeves billowed.
He looked down at the street below. Severed arms. Entrails. Ordinary people lying dead with their eyes still open, unable to close.
His stomach heaved.
Is this my grand ideal?
Letting scum butcher the elderly and the weak and the children in the street without a shred of restraint? This is the new world I cut every bond to build?
"I believe I gave an order." Geto Suguru's voice was quiet. Beneath it, a murderous intent so dense it had weight. His Cursed Energy pressed down like a collapsing ceiling. "Without my permission, you do not touch non-sorcerers."
The scarred man turned around.
A dozen-plus eyeballs swiveled at once. They found the speaker.
Sukuna's Cursed Energy had eaten through whatever reason he had left. He didn't kneel. He threw his head back and screamed with laughter.
"Lord Geto! You finally came!"
He swept an arm across the carnage around him, showing it off like a painter unveiling his masterpiece.
"Look! I prepared this feast for you! Didn't you say we should kill all the monkeys? Look how beautifully I've done it!"
Geto Suguru's fingernails bit into his palm. Blood dripped.
That blood-red symbol on the wall hit him like an open-handed slap.
The banner he had bled to raise. The cause he had staked everything on. It had become a fig leaf, cover for vermin to satisfy their appetite for slaughter.
"You... what the hell do you think you are."
"Me? I'm your follower!" The scarred man spread his arms wide and split his bloody mouth into a grin. "What you didn't dare do, I did for you! Doesn't the grand ideal need to be watered with monkey blood? Or has the great Master been a hypocrite from the very beginning?!"
Hypocrite.
The word drove in like a rusted boning knife and twisted.
The monster cackled, then both hands wrenched outward.
"For the new world!"
"Stop—!" Geto Suguru's eyes went red. His Cursed Energy erupted.
Too late.
Riiiiip,
In the wet, sickening shriek of tearing flesh, the woman was pulled apart.
Scalding blood rained down onto the little girl's face. It spattered across the hem of Geto Suguru's dark-gold kasaya.
He stood frozen.
He hadn't even moved yet.
BOOM.
2 figures wrapped in killing pressure punched through a glass curtain wall in the distance like falling meteorites and hit the far end of the street hard enough to crack the ground.
Wind scattered the dust.
Gojo Satoru stood at the front, pale blue Six Eyes wide open, taking in everything.
The hundred-meter river of blood. The torn-apart mother. The cackling monster.
And standing across from the monster, kasaya drenched in the blood of the innocent, Geto Suguru.
The air turned to glass.
"Master! They sent the Jujutsu High dogs!" The scarred man felt them at his back and wheeled around, shrieking with joy. "Join me! We'll slaughter them together! Then this world belongs to the Time Vessel Association!"
The roar hit everyone like a hammer.
Haibara Yu went rigid. His lips moved without sound, drained of all color.
Toji pulled his hands from his pockets and every muscle in his body shifted into kill-state. His gaze didn't move from Geto Suguru's throat.
Geto Suguru's throat worked. He watched his best friend come toward him through the blood and the ruin, every line of his body coiled with killing intent.
His mind was blank. Completely blank.
Gojo Satoru walked through the pools of blood and stopped 10 paces away.
He looked at the symbol on the wall.
He looked at the bloodstains on the kasaya.
His jaw was iron.
"Suguru."
Gojo Satoru's voice was barely above a whisper.
It carried a storm inside it that could flatten every block of Shinjuku.
"This... is your grand ideal?"
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