Jujutsu Kaisen — Chapter 67 - The Power to Shatter Rules — Maki and Mai Join the Youthful Big Family
"I think I just heard someone say they wanted to lock my son up."
The words hit the courtyard like a stone dropped into still water. Even the wind stopped.
Naobito Zenin's hand, gripping his half-empty sake gourd, shuddered.
He knew exactly how terrifying this man was.
If a fight broke out here in the Zenin Clan compound, that redwood gate would mark the end of the entire family.
"Toji, you've misunderstood." Naobito stepped forward quickly, putting himself between Toji and Ogi Zenin.
He forced a dry smile. "No one's going to touch him. I merely invited Megumi to visit the clan grounds. No coercive measures whatsoever."
Sweat was already trickling down the old man's forehead.
He had to set the tone now. Give Toji no excuse to explode.
Toji stared at Naobito for two seconds.
Then, without warning, the dense, suffocating murderous intent rolling off him simply vanished. Gone. Like it had never existed.
"Son!" Toji's mouth split wide, flashing his trademark gleaming white teeth.
He strode across the rubble-strewn ground and clapped a heavy hand on Megumi's head. "Is it true? They didn't use any dirty tricks to force you, did they? Because if they did, Dad is going to use the Iron Fist of Youth to smash this whole dump to splinters right now!"
Megumi rolled his eyes under the weight of that hand.
That face-changing speed. Not casting this man in a historical drama was genuinely a waste of talent.
"No." Megumi swatted the calloused hand away and shoved both hands back into his pockets.
"They said they wanted me to inherit the clan head position. I wasn't interested. I just came to see exactly how rotten this garbage dump you always talk about really is."
He swept an unhurried gaze around the dilapidated courtyard walls and the servants trembling along them.
"Looks like pretty rotten. The air even stinks."
Naobito's face flushed the deep red of pig liver. The Zenin Clan, one of the Three Great Families, had just been ranked below a public toilet by an eight-year-old.
Awkward. Profoundly, painfully awkward.
And he couldn't even lose his temper.
"Insolent brat!" Ogi Zenin had finally found his voice.
He was done.
He was a respected elder of the Zenin Clan. He was not going to stand here and let some expelled piece of trash and his little whelp say whatever they pleased.
Ogi jabbed a finger at Megumi and bellowed. "What does a little brat like you understand! The Zenin Clan stands as one of the Three Great Families of the Jujutsu World — do you have any idea what that glory means? Return to the family, accept our full cultivation, and the Ten Shadows Technique will shine again! The Zenin Clan will be great again!"
"Dad." Megumi didn't even bother glancing at the ranting old man. He turned his head and pointed at the ground. "Those two little sisters. They're pitiful."
Toji followed Megumi's finger.
Two girls, twins, kneeling on the ground. Trembling.
The smile faded from his face.
He crossed the courtyard and stopped in front of them. Then he crouched down.
The short-haired girl's back was covered in welts. Purple-black, crisscrossing, ugly. The kind left by something thin and deliberate.
She was biting her lip hard, shielding her sister behind her like a wounded animal protecting its cub. Her eyes held nothing but defiance and wariness.
The short-haired one. Her Cursed Energy was pitifully thin, her upper limit locked at Grade 2.
The one with braids was worse. The Cursed Energy in her body was practically zero. She probably couldn't even see Cursed Spirits.
Toji stared at them both.
Too familiar.
That posture, curled up in the dirt, completely powerless before so-called elders with blades, was a mirror image of himself, 20-some years ago.
No talent. In the Zenin Clan, that made you worth less than a pig or a dog.
The Will of Fire burning in his chest, the one that belonged to Might Guy, slammed into the buried, suffocating memories of his old life. The fuse caught instantly.
Behind him, Megumi felt a wave of sharp, involuntary sympathy move through him.
He was thinking about what his old man had once told him. A childhood spent being thrown into pits of Cursed Spirits. Days and nights of being used as a punching bag because he had no Cursed Energy.
It hurt to think about.
"Dad," Megumi said quietly. "Take them with us. This isn't a place for people."
Toji stood. He took one slow breath and turned to look at Ogi Zenin.
The temperature in the courtyard dropped.
The Will of Fire means the leaves of the old tree become spring soil, nurturing the new shoots that come after.
It does not mean letting these rotting, undying maggots latch onto those shoots and drain them dry.
A chill crept down Ogi's spine under that gaze. He clenched his teeth and forced his elder's dignity into his voice.
"Bastard! This is a family matter! I am disciplining my own daughters. An outsider has no place here!"
"Family matter?"
Toji rolled his neck. His cervical spine cracked, once, twice, three times.
He started walking toward Ogi Zenin.
"Just now, you tried to take control of my son." His voice was low, but it struck every pair of ears in the courtyard like a blow. "That's the First Crime."
He kept walking.
"Domestic abuse. Bullying children who can't fight back. Raising a blade against them. That's the Second Crime."
Before the words finished —
BOOM!
A sonic boom cracked through the courtyard.
Ogi never saw Toji move.
His retina caught only a green blur. Then a tearing, violent pain detonated in his abdomen.
"GWAH!"
His eyes bulged. A mouthful of blood, thick and dark and carrying fragments that shouldn't be outside a body, sprayed from his lips.
Toji's fist had buried itself in his stomach. The kinetic force launched Ogi backward off his feet.
He hadn't even hit the ground when Toji was already above him.
Right leg raised high. A battle-axe, swinging down with everything behind it.
BOOM!
Ogi's body cratered into the bluestone floor. Half a meter deep. Spiderweb cracks spreading out from the impact point in every direction.
Gravel scattered across the courtyard.
The Zenin Clan members stood frozen. Not one of them reached for a weapon. Not one of them had the nerve.
This wasn't even the same league of combat.
Ogi lay at the bottom of that crater, bones broken in numbers that would take a physician some time to count. His face was soaked in blood. Fear had finally arrived in his eyes, the real kind, the animal kind. He tried desperately to raise his hands and form a seal. Tried to summon a Shikigami.
CRACK!
Toji's foot came down on Ogi's right hand.
The sound of finger bones splintering carried clearly across the silent courtyard.
"AAAAAH—!"
"Stop!"
Naobito couldn't take it anymore.
Ogi was a bastard, but he was still Naobito's younger brother. If Toji beat him to death in front of everyone, whatever was left of the Zenin Clan's dignity would be ground permanently into the mud.
He threw aside the sake gourd. Both palms slammed together.
Projection Sorcery, activate.
1 second, forcibly divided into 24 frames.
Naobito's speed rocketed to its limit. He became a streak of light and drove straight for Toji's back. He had to pin Toji down before the next strike landed.
Toji didn't even turn around.
Against absolute power, every clever rule in the world is paper.
He spun. His right arm swelled, the muscles surging, veins standing out like coiled ropes beneath the skin.
No Cursed Energy. No technique. Pure physical force tore through the air, and he threw a single, clean punch directly into Naobito's incoming streak of light.
BANG!
Fist met palm.
The speed. The frames. The rules of Projection Sorcery. All of it shattered on contact, crushed flat by brute force that simply didn't care.
An irresistible, overwhelming power surged up Naobito's arm and kept going.
The bones in his right arm screamed.
CRASH!
Naobito flew. A kite with its string cut, tumbling backward across the courtyard, smashing through half the wall of a side court, disappearing under an avalanche of broken brick and tile.
Silence.
Just the wind moving through the ruins.
Megumi stood where he was and watched all of this with no expression on his face.
Dad really is the strongest.
Naobito pushed debris off himself and forced his way to his feet. He pressed one hand to his chest. His face was the gray of cold ash.
He couldn't win.
This piece of trash the family had thrown away, he had grown into something that even the clan head had to look up to.
"Toji Fushiguro." Naobito's laugh came out bleak and hollow. "You are no longer a member of the Zenin Clan."
"Let's end this here. Take Megumi and go. The Zenin Clan will not pursue today's matter any further."
"Not pursue it any further?"
Toji's laugh was colder. He crossed to Naobito in a few strides, grabbed the old man by the collar, and lifted him clean off the ground.
"Who the hell do you think you are? What gives you the right to say that to me?"
He pointed at the wrecked courtyard. At the trembling clan members along the walls. Finally, at Maki and Mai still on the ground.
"You're the clan head. The Zenin Clan has rotted into this state on your watch. That's on you more than anyone."
Spittle flew from Toji's mouth and landed on Naobito's face. His voice was throttled tight with fury barely held in check.
"You spend your days hugging that sake gourd and playing dead. You watch the people of your own clan tear each other apart. You watch children with no Cursed Energy get trampled underfoot like garbage. You do nothing."
"You let this system, the one that treats people as disposable tools, that sees Cursed Energy and nothing else — rot all the way down to the roots."
"This is the proud foundation of the Three Great Families? You don't have the first quality of a clan head, and you still dream of reviving the Zenin Clan's glory?"
Toji dropped him.
"You're nothing but a pile of maggots fighting over scraps in a cesspit."
Naobito crumpled to the ground and sat there, shaking. His eyes slowly went hollow.
Was I wrong?
To preserve the family's standing, he had allowed those brutal competitions to continue. That was the iron law every Great Family survived by.
But it was the man that iron law had cast out who stood here now, having smashed his pride to rubble with two fists.
Toji was already done with him.
"I'll spare his life," he said, turning away. "But I'm taking these two with me."
"Brother! You can't let him—"
Ogi dragged his bloodied face up from the bottom of the crater. One last effort.
Those two had no Cursed Energy, they were useless, but they were still his. How could an outsider just walk off with them?
BANG!
Toji didn't even look. He stepped past, threw a casual backhand kick, and caught Ogi precisely on the chin.
CRACK!
Mandible shattered.
Ogi didn't get to scream. His eyes rolled back and he went out cold.
Naobito looked at what was left of his brother, limp as dropped laundry. He let out a slow sigh.
He closed his eyes. Raised one hand. Waved it feebly.
Whatever.
The Zenin Clan was already rotten through.
Toji walked over to Maki and Mai.
The two girls were shaking so hard they could barely hold on to each other.
They had just watched this man beat their father and the clan head into helplessness. He'd swatted them around like stray dogs. And now he was walking toward them, and they had no idea what came next.
Toji crouched down.
The savagery left his face.
He reached out, rough hands, calloused and scarred, and ruffled both girls firmly on their dust-covered heads.
"Listen up, brats." His voice dropped. The tone was serious. "I'm leaving that piece of trash alive today. When you've built fists strong enough to tear this place down yourselves, come back and finish it."
Maki's head snapped up.
Her eyes were full of tears. Something moved through them, first a flash of pure disbelief, then something small and hot and stubborn, like a coal catching light.
Toji grinned.
"Let's go, son. Dad's taking everyone for beef hotpot. We're celebrating the new additions to our Youthful Big Family."
Megumi sighed. He stepped up and took Maki and Mai each by the hand.
"Don't mind him. He's a muscle-headed idiot. But follow him and at least nobody's going to hit you."
Eight years old, instructing two girls three years his senior like a tired parent.
The four of them walked out through the shattered gate and were gone.
In a corner of the ruins, behind the stump of a broken stone pillar, a blond-haired boy had been watching the entire time.
He wasn't looking at his injured father. He wasn't looking at his unconscious uncle.
Those fox-like eyes held no anger at all.
Only a fervor that bordered on something not quite sane. And worship.
He's so strong.
No Cursed Energy. None. And he had just put the entire Zenin Clan under his boot.
No rules. No technique. Just raw, unadorned violence, crushing every scrap of arrogance in his path.
That was real strength.
Naoya Zenin squeezed his fist until his nails broke skin.
He would never end up like these worthless people. One day, he was going to become a monster exactly like that man.
➤ Next: The Rumored Jujutsu High? A Dumbfounded Yuta Okkotsu