Jujutsu Kaisen — Chapter 69 - Jujutsu High’s Bizarre Rules Horror

"A noodle-brained idiot. The villagers bullied him, pointed at him like he was a monster. But he never fought back."

Toji tapped the back of the chair with his fingers. "He just kept thinking he must have done something wrong."

Yuta stared at him. "And... what happened to him after that?"

"Those morons just got worse." The cold sneer at the corner of Toji's mouth spread slowly, his eyes going somewhere dangerous.

"But you know what I did?"

Yuta shook his head.

"I helped him break every single leg. Every brat and villager who ever bullied him."

Toji smiled. It was cruel. It was satisfied.

"If Might Guy hadn't talked me down, the grass on those bastards' graves would be three meters tall by now."

The office went silent enough to hear a pin drop.

Yuta's mouth hung open. His head buzzed.

Broke them? He broke the bullies' legs?

"You get it now, kid." Toji stood, and his shadow fell over Yuta completely.

"Being bullied, that's the bullies' fault. Someone messes with you, and instead of figuring out how to hit them back, you sit here wallowing in self-pity? Thinking it's your own fault? Thinking if you just died the world would finally be at peace?"

He stepped closer. Loomed. Stared directly down into Yuta's eyes.

"That is the most brain-dead thing I've ever heard."

Yuta's eyes went red.

Ten years. For ten years, everyone had treated him like a monster. Even his own relatives couldn't stay away fast enough. Even when classmates bullied him, the teachers just brushed it off with a shrug.

This was the first time. The first time anyone had looked him in the eye and told him, with absolute certainty, that it wasn't his fault.

The ones who were wrong were the ones who hurt him.

"Your fault isn't that you have power."

Toji reached out a large, calloused hand and pressed it down firmly on top of Yuta's head. He ruffled it, hard, twice, no gentleness in it at all.

"Your fault is that you're a weakling. You can't even control your own power. You don't even have the fists to protect yourself."

The rough weight on top of his head felt startlingly real.

Yuta looked up. His vision blurred.

The massive stone that had been sitting on his chest for years, it felt like this man had just smashed it apart with one brutally straightforward punch.

"Starting today, you're under my care."

Toji bared his teeth. That smile came back. The one that made the entire Jujutsu High go quiet whenever it appeared.

"What... what do I do?" Yuta sniffled, grabbing onto those words like they were the only light in a very dark room.

He wanted to get stronger. He wanted to control Rika. He never wanted to be bullied again.

Toji turned around and, like a magician reaching into a hat, produced a wad of bright green fabric from somewhere.

He snapped it open with a sharp CRACK.

A green spandex bodysuit unfurled inside the office, blindingly vivid, stretchy as a rubber band, with a bizarre sheen that had absolutely no business existing on any piece of clothing.

"Step one!" Toji threw his arms wide. His eyes were actually glistening. "Use the sweat of youth to show that Rika of yours what a real man looks like!"

Yuta Okkotsu stared at the bodysuit.

The tears at the corners of his eyes stopped mid-fall and refused to move.

...

The wooden door swung open with a faint creak from the hinges.

Yuta Okkotsu carried a plastic washbasin. Toothbrush, towel, and folded neatly on top, that eye-searing, blindingly bright green spandex bodysuit.

He stood stiffly in the dormitory doorway and introduced himself.

"I'm the new student, Yuta Okkotsu. Please take care of me, senpai!"

By the window, the bed.

Megumi Fushiguro sat cross-legged on top of it, a thick math workbook open in his hands. He looked up at the sound, eyes landing on Yuta.

Then his gaze dropped.

It locked onto the fluorescent green in the washbasin and didn't move.

Megumi's face was normally flat as a wall. But his cheek muscle twitched. Twice.

Then his eyes changed.

Yuta recognized that look immediately. He'd seen it before, doctors stepping out of a hospital ICU to face the waiting family.

Pity. Deep, genuine, helpless pity.

"Megumi Fushiguro. Second year."

Megumi slid slowly off the bed, slippers dragging across the floor with a low scrape that set the teeth on edge. He walked up to Yuta and set an ice-cold hand on his shoulder.

No warmth. None at all. His voice, when it came, had the flat cadence of someone reading a death notice.

"Before your perception gets completely twisted, I have a responsibility, as a survivor, to walk you through the survival rules of this school."

Survival... rules?

Yuta went still.

Had the green guy lied to him? His mind was already cycling through images of what punishments in the jujutsu world might look like. None of them were pleasant.

"Rule one." Megumi raised a single pale finger. Something dark and dim stirred in his otherwise lifeless eyes.

"At five-thirty AM, zero seconds, your eyes open and you are out of bed."

"Not five thirty-one. Not one second past. Five. Thirty. Zero."

Yuta blinked.

That sounded... survivable? Actually, back when he was being bullied at his old school, he'd sneak out before five just to avoid those people, out into the grey early morning before anyone else was awake.

"What happens," Yuta asked carefully, "if you break the time rule?"

"A human-shaped green monster personally tears your door off its hinges. Your blanket — your only shelter — gets shredded on the spot." Megumi paused. "Then, using strength that could crush a Grade 3 cursed spirit's skull without effort, it delivers a heavy blow to the lower half of your body."

The corner of Megumi's eye twitched. Just slightly. The involuntary flinch of someone whose deep trauma had just been poked.

He had clearly lived through this himself.

Something cracked in Yuta's understanding of the world.

He instinctively covered his backside. Cold sweat prickled across his skin.

"Rule two."

Megumi pointed slowly at the lump of green fabric sitting in Yuta's washbasin. His expression was the same one you'd use to point at a patch of rotting skin.

"Whatever the temperature. The moment you step onto the training ground, the moment that green anomalous entity has its eyes on you, you stuff yourself into that thing. Anyone who refuses triggers doubled punishment."

"Doubled?"

"Correct. You might be hung upside-down from the dead tree on the back hill, facing the rising sun, and forced to recite a deranged incantation called the Declaration of Youth over and over until you hit 100 repetitions."

Megumi sighed. "Last year, a third-year senpai decided to test the rule. Figured he could outwit it."

"He was left hanging until noon the next day. When they got him down, his mind was gone. He looked at everyone like they were a wild boar charging straight at him."

Yuta stared at the bodysuit. It didn't look like clothing anymore. It looked like something that breathed. Something that waited.

I need to destroy this thing before it destroys me.

He turned the thought over quietly.

"Don't bother." Megumi cut straight through it, killing the hope without ceremony. "The material is fused with Special Grade cursed object fibers. Water won't touch it. Fire won't touch it. Blades won't cut it. You cannot burn it and you cannot tear it."

Despair.

That was the only word for what Yuta felt right now.

"Last rule. And this one is a survival tip, the one that actually keeps you alive."

Megumi's hands went into his pockets. His body tilted forward, just slightly, a twitchy and involuntary lean, voice dropping low with the weight of hard-won experience.

"No matter what you're enduring. No matter how far beyond human limits the suffering goes. The moment that thing bares its teeth and asks you, 'How are you feeling?', you immediately roar back one of the designated phrases. 'This is the sweat of youth!' 'My blood is boiling!' Something like that. Loud. Unhinged."

"Shout it with enough fanaticism. Look deranged enough. It will shed tears — some kind of liquid, origin unknown — and then turn around and leave."

Megumi delivered this like a man passing on scripture written in his own blood.

"This is the only known method to interrupt its behavior. Memorize it. Don't find out the hard way what happens if you forget."

Yuta's mouth was still open. He felt like the air had been slowly vacuumed out of his lungs.

The world had gone insane. Completely, thoroughly insane.

Rika Orimoto was a twisted Special Grade curse, yes. But this place, this school called Tokyo Jujutsu High, felt far more like an inescapable nightmare you couldn't wake up from.

Yuta was seriously weighing whether to summon Rika right now and flee into the night.

Then the dormitory window,

Two dull, heavy knocks. From outside.

This was the fourth floor.

Yuta's entire body locked up. He turned his head slowly.

Outside the window, in the moonlight, a man hung upside-down. His eyebrows were thick as two black caterpillars pressed flat against his face.

"Oh! I've found a fresh green apple absolutely bursting with potential!"

His eyes blazed in the dark like a pair of high-powered searchlights.

The grin that split his face was enormous, cartoonish, wrong in a way that was hard to name, and when his teeth caught the moonlight, they actually gleamed. A physical, real, cross-shaped starburst of light, flickering in the night air.

A wall of pressure slammed into Yuta.

Pure. Undisguised. The kind of physical force that didn't belong in the modern world, something older, something that belonged to a creature that had never learned to hold back.

Inside him, the Special Grade cursed spirit stirred.

And whimpered.

Rika was afraid.

That single fact emptied Yuta's veins of warmth in an instant.

WHOOSH,

Wind tore through the room.

Yuta's vision skipped. When it settled,

Megumi Fushiguro was already wearing the green spandex bodysuit.

He stood ramrod straight beside the bed, stiff as a board, like a cucumber yanked fresh from the soil with nothing left to live for. His eyes were screwed shut. His face was a mask of pure, concentrated humiliation.

And then he opened his mouth and screamed with everything he had.

"BURN! THIS IS THE BOILING HEAT OF YOUTH!"

Yuta's jaw nearly hit the floor.

This guy. This cool, deadpan, impeccably composed Fushiguro, was actually screaming that?

He even cracked his voice.

➤ Next: Yuta Okkotsu's First Day