Jujutsu Kaisen — Chapter 63 - The Iron Fist of Youth and the Grand Cause Cruelly Torn Apart

Before the words even finished, Gojo Satoru and Toji vanished.

No Cursed Energy flicker. No technique wind-up.

Pure physical explosion. A sonic boom split the air with a sound like tearing metal.

Geto Suguru's scalp crawled.

Were these two lunatics actually serious?

He instinctively formed a seal, reaching for a Cursed Spirit.

The shadow swallowed him whole before he finished.

"Eyes on me, brat!"

Toji's boot connected with the back of Geto Suguru's knee.

CRACK!

His leg folded. Geto Suguru pitched forward, balance gone, nothing to catch him.

Gojo Satoru's fist arrived before he hit the ground.

BANG!

The right hook took him square in the left cheek.

"Ugh!"

Half his face swelled instantly. The thick copper taste of blood detonated in his mouth.

That monstrous strength launched him sideways. He tumbled twice across the asphalt, rolling through gravel and pooled blood before coming to a stop.

Insane.

These two had completely lost it.

Geto Suguru pressed a hand to his face, staring wide-eyed.

What the hell was this? A street-corner gang brawl?

"Rainbow Dragon!" He bit down hard and forced his Cursed Energy to surge.

The shadow behind him boiled. The massive Special Grade Cursed Spirit roared, its grotesque head rearing up.

"What are you roaring for! Can't you see the adults are handling something here!"

Toji didn't even turn around. He threw a backhand.

Pure physical force cracked into the Rainbow Dragon's skull with a thunderous boom.

The Special Grade Cursed Spirit famed for the hardest scales in existence was smacked stupid. It let out one pitiful cry and retreated into the shadows.

Geto Suguru stared.

That half-second of blank shock was all Gojo Satoru needed. One stride and he dropped his weight onto Geto Suguru's waist, pinning him flat.

"Satoru! Get the hell off me!" Geto Suguru thrashed violently.

This was humiliating. He was the feared, dreaded, catastrophically evil cult leader of the Time Vessel Association.

"Screw that!"

No wasted words. Gojo Satoru raised his fist and drove it into the right side of Geto Suguru's face.

BANG!

"That's for being a brainless idiot!"

Geto Suguru's head snapped sideways. His skull rang.

BANG!

His left eye caught the next one. It swelled shut immediately, blooming purple and black.

"That's for being a self-righteous arrogant bastard! You think you have to carry every single mess yourself — who the hell do you think you are?! Some kind of savior?!"

Gojo Satoru raised his fist and brought it down again. No technique, no finesse. Just raw haymakers, over and over, hammering head and face.

BANG. BANG. BANG.

The muffled impact of fist on flesh echoed through the hollow ruins.

The corner of Geto Suguru's mouth split open. Warm blood flooded his throat.

He fought back with everything he had. Special Grade sorcerer's physical strength, detonating, trying to throw both of them off.

It didn't matter.

One was a Heavenly Restriction Tyrant. The other was the strongest Divine Child alive, close-combat ability maxed to the ceiling.

They moved like they'd drilled this exact scenario. Each took an arm. Geto Suguru was nailed to the ground.

"You wouldn't even step on an ant, but you came to this pit of filth to play the big bad wolf!" Gojo Satoru's fist buried itself in Geto Suguru's eye socket.

"Let go of me!" Geto Suguru screamed it, the veins in his forehead standing up like cords.

He was a Special Grade Curse User. He had pledged to wipe every last non-sorcerer off the face of the earth.

And here he was. Like a street kid who'd lost a fight, being beaten into the mud by his former best friend.

What was this?

He had taken every crime onto his own shoulders to cut every bond cleanly. He had braced himself for the entire Jujutsu world to hunt him. He had made peace with dying at Gojo Satoru's hands.

But Gojo Satoru wasn't using his technique. Toji hadn't touched his blade.

They were disciplining a runaway teenager throwing a tantrum.

"I said let go!" Geto Suguru wrenched his head up and spat a mouthful of bloody saliva onto Gojo Satoru's collar. His eyes had gone red. "What do you understand?! You don't understand anything!"

Gojo Satoru went still.

Geto Suguru shoved them both off and forced himself upright.

He locked onto those pale blue eyes. His chest heaved. Every emotion he had compressed and sealed for months cracked open all at once.

"Was I supposed to just watch sorcerers throw themselves into the grave one after another?!"

"Was I supposed to watch our innocent juniors become cold corpses, again and again, just to protect a bunch of monkeys who do nothing but generate curses?!"

His voice had started to break from the shouting.

"I wanted to protect ordinary people too! I wanted to hold onto that righteous doctrine we believed in back then!"

Something moved through his eyes. Pure, devastating agony.

"But those monkeys aren't worth it! They were never worth it! They're ignorant and selfish and greedy! Only when every last one of them is gone will this world finally be clean!"

Geto Suguru was gulping air, jaw locked tight on his back teeth.

Yes.

This was his cause. His grand, absolute cause.

Even if the path ahead was soaked in blood. Even if he had to carry every curse, every condemnation, every name they threw at him. He would not turn back.

The ruins went quiet.

Haibara Yu stood a dozen meters away, staring at the figure on the ground, tears sliding silently down his face.

Gojo Satoru hadn't moved. His expression was complicated.

"Done?"

A low voice came from above.

"Stop dressing it up, brat."

Toji's voice wasn't loud. But it landed with weight, cutting through each layer of the front Geto Suguru still had left.

Geto Suguru froze.

"You stand up on your platform and preach your absolute righteous doctrine. You talk and talk about protecting non-sorcerers. You tell yourself that's a sorcerer's duty and responsibility."

Toji looked down at him.

"The moment you found you couldn't do it, you turned around and said you'd kill them all instead."

A cold laugh. The mockery was unhurried, almost lazy.

"What kind of grand cause is that?"

"That's just arrogance wearing a different coat."

Geto Suguru's pupils blew wide.

Arrogance?

"You split the world into two pieces, simple and clean. One half is the weak who need saving. The other half is your kind, standing beside you as equals."

Each word came down like a hammer.

"You have always had contempt for ordinary people buried in your bones."

"What you call protection is pity. It's charity. You were already keeping sorcerers and non-sorcerers on opposite sides of an uncrossable line long before any of this."

The words hit Geto Suguru's eardrums like a physical blow.

His mouth opened. Nothing came out.

Toji had reached through all of it and pressed directly on the darkest part of him. The part he had never once let himself look at straight.

"Faced with a broken system, you didn't ask how to fix it. You didn't ask how to change things. You picked the most cowardly exit available." Toji paused. "Kill everyone who caused the problem."

He raised his left hand, the free one, and closed it into a fist.

His knuckles cracked.

"But don't forget. Before you're a Jujutsu Sorcerer—"

BANG!

An uppercut. Terrifying physical force, driving up through Geto Suguru's chin.

"Learn to be a human being first! You bastard!"

That roar detonated inside Geto Suguru's skull.

The force lifted him off the ground entirely. He arced backward through the air, tracing a long parabola before crashing down hard into a water-filled crater a dozen meters away.

Dirty water and blood erupted across his face.

Geto Suguru didn't get up.

He lay in the freezing cold puddle and looked up. The Shinjuku night sky above him was dark. A few faint stars. That was all.

The wind had stopped.

Be a human being.

He blinked. His eyes were so swollen the world had gone soft at the edges.

The months played back through him.

The nausea of swallowing a Cursed Spirit that reeked of bile.

The sick revulsion watching Time Vessel Association cultists clap and cheer.

And then the other thing. The one he had never named. Standing still while Gojo Satoru grew stronger and stronger, until Satoru could solve every problem on his own, and the feeling that settled into Geto Suguru's chest in the space that used to hold purpose.

Hollow. Just hollow.

Yeah.

He had never been anything noble.

He had coasted on the pride of being half of "the Jujutsu world's strongest duo." He had let that name mean something to him.

Then Gojo Satoru crossed into Special Grade. Mastered Reverse Cursed Technique. Touched the edge of Domain Expansion.

Satoru alone was enough.

Satoru alone could cut through the entire higher administration.

Satoru alone could put down a Special Grade Cursed Spirit without breaking stride.

Satoru didn't need him anymore.

Geto Suguru lay there in the filth and let the corner of his mouth pull into something that didn't quite reach a smile.

He couldn't pin down when it had started. When the envy had crept in. Envying that invincibility. Envying the way Gojo Satoru could shatter any rule he pleased.

While Geto Suguru kept swallowing Cursed Spirits one after another, disgusting, bile-soaked things, trying to close with volume the gap that quality had already made absolute.

When had he turned this ugly.

So he had built himself a shell. Dressed the rot in ideology, in mission, in grand cause. He had forced himself to hate ordinary people. Forced himself into the role of the catastrophic cult leader.

But he was no martyr. He was not sacrificing himself for a new world.

He was a paranoid, terrified kid who couldn't stand the thought of being left behind, and who had finally broken all the way into extremism because of it.

He didn't want to cry. It was pathetic.

He couldn't stop it. The tears came anyway, streaming from the corners of his eyes, running through the blood and mud caked on his face and into the corner of his mouth.

Salt and grit.

Whatever had been holding him together was gone. Gojo Satoru and Toji had torn through it without mercy and left nothing standing.

The high-and-mighty evil cult leader was dead.

The person lying here in this cold, filthy puddle was just a lost eighteen-year-old boy with a split lip and two black eyes, who had taken a very wrong turn and couldn't find his way back.

➤ Next: To Hell with the Greater Good — The Strongest Trio Reunites