Jujutsu Kaisen — Chapter 71 - Passionate Youth Starts with a Sweat-Drenched Morning Workout!
"CRACK!"
A sound sharp enough to set teeth on edge exploded through the fourth-floor dormitory.
Yuta Okkotsu's brain stem hadn't even finished booting up before a horrific pain detonated through his backside, like getting T-boned by a dump truck at full speed.
His scream hadn't even made it past his throat when the back of his collar yanked tight, and his feet left the ground entirely.
"Three minutes late! Looks like last night's gentle moonlight failed to awaken the beast in your heart! New student!"
Toji Fushiguro hoisted Yuta's full weight with one arm and strode forward, then blew straight through the window.
In Yuta's violently contracting pupils, the man, all cables of corded muscle, didn't pause for even half a second. He stepped off the fourth floor like it was a curb.
The wind hit like blades across Yuta's cheeks. His heart tried to claw out through his throat.
He was dead. Rika hadn't even finished loading her black-aura progress bar, and the two of them were about to splatter into twin puddles of mud on the flagstones below.
"BOOM —"
The shockwave rolled outward. Dust and smoke erupted in every direction.
The expected shattering of bones did not happen.
Toji's feet drove into the paving tiles like two heavy-duty steel spikes. The terrifying kinetic energy of the drop punched two massive spiderweb cracks into the ground around him. His knees hadn't even bent.
He tossed Yuta aside with a casual flick. Yuta rolled 3 times across the ground like a busted burlap sack, clutched his burning backside, and hunched over in the dirt, retching violently.
He hadn't even finished evacuating his stomach acid when the scene in front of him, something that could only be described as nuclear-grade mental pollution, crashed his brain completely.
The morning training ground wasn't just Megumi Fushiguro and Maki from last night. There were several unfamiliar faces. And even... a giant panda doing the splits?
But the critical detail: whether human or bear, every single one of them was wrapped head to toe in fluorescent green bodysuits. Skin-tight. Gleaming in the morning light. And strapped to every calf, without exception, were iron sandbags as thick as load-bearing bricks.
The two people standing at the very front of the formation, though, were what genuinely shattered Yuta's worldview.
The white-haired man with the blindfold-dark sunglasses. The legendary strongest in the Jujutsu World. Satoru Gojo.
He had both hands shoved in his pockets and was yawning without a shred of dignity.
Next to him, Suguru Geto wore his hair in a loose half-bun, heavy dark circles under both eyes, rubbing his temples with the expression of a man who had already made peace with death.
Neither of them was wearing the tights, but weren't they Special Grade Jujutsu Sorcerers? Why were they here for special training too?
"Suguru, I stayed up all night playing Mario Kart. My temples are throbbing." Satoru Gojo whistled low, slanting a glance at Toji as he approached, and dropped his voice. "Think if I fake acute gastroenteritis right now, that gorilla will let me off?"
"You're welcome to try." Suguru Geto didn't even bother lifting his eyelids. His voice was perfectly flat. "Provided you're prepared for him to punch the Inverted Spear of Heaven through your Limitless, strip you naked, hang you upside down from the torii gate on the back mountain, and make you recite the Youth Declaration in front of the entire school."
Yuta silently swallowed. Every single hair on his body stood at attention.
"All hands! Back mountain! First warm-up: 3 laps around the mountain on your hands!"
Toji produced a megaphone from nowhere. The sound waves hit the trees hard enough to send leaves shaking loose in sheets.
"Anyone who doesn't finish forfeits breakfast! And will face the back mountain waterfall and shout 'I will protect my comrades and burn with youth' 100 times! Move!"
A few sounds of extremely suppressed teeth-grinding rippled through the formation.
But under the sweeping pressure of Toji's radar-like gaze, every person flipped onto their hands with the smooth, practiced efficiency of people who had learned the hard way. One by one, they moved out in a long column, like a swarm of mutated, oversized green spiders surging mightily toward the mountain path.
"New student! Stop playing dead! Change into your battle gear and fall in!" Toji waved one hand, and a wad of green fabric smacked Yuta directly in the face with pinpoint accuracy.
Five minutes later.
Yuta was on his hands on the rough mountain path, wearing the bodysuit that seemed to generate its own glow-in-the-dark special effect, a 50-kilogram custom sandbag strapped to his back, arms already shaking. The most surreal morning of his 17 years of life had officially begun.
Gravel scraped his palms raw within minutes. Sweat stung the wounds with a sharp, biting pain.
It was too heavy. He'd barely made it halfway up the mountain and his arms were vibrating like something live current had been run through them. His lungs burned. His vision strobed black at the edges.
Can't go on. My wrists are going to snap.
Yuta gritted his teeth. His elbows buckled. His whole body slapped into the mud like a collapsed pile of wet clay.
He waited for the mockery. It never came. Nobody around him had the spare attention.
Maki was grinding her teeth, alternating her hands in a furious flat sprint, somehow faster upside-down than most people managed on two legs.
Megumi Fushiguro wore his hereditary dead-fish stare and crawled forward like a soulless mechanical track, silently reciting math formulas under his breath to keep his mind somewhere else.
At the very front, Satoru Gojo was cheating, using his Limitless to levitate his palms a half-centimeter off the ground whenever Toji's back was turned.
Everyone was struggling under the same monstrous load.
"Okkotsu-kun! Control your breathing! Shift your center of gravity to your core — don't brute-force it all through your wrists!"
The voice that came from beside him was so bright it was almost blinding.
Yu Haibara walked over on his hands, glossy black bowl-cut hair, and even in that position, he was smiling like a small sun.
"I'm the school's assistant instructor, Yu Haibara! Just Haibara is fine!" With casual ease, Haibara shifted to one-handed support and freed his other hand to slap Yuta on the backside. "First time at this intensity makes you want to die, right? That's normal. As long as your heart is still beating, youth hasn't abandoned you yet!"
Yuta went still.
This kind of unreserved warmth, unguarded, a little clumsy with it, he hadn't felt anything like it in 10 years.
No disgust. No pity. Just someone reaching back for a teammate who'd fallen behind.
"Th — thank you, senpai." Yuta clamped down on his back teeth, found some scrap of strength from somewhere he couldn't name, and forced himself back up.
But the gap in raw physical ability wasn't something a few words of encouragement could close.
Halfway through the second lap, his body gave out completely.
His lungs felt like torn bellows. Every breath came in with a thick, metallic taste of blood. He went down again, and his brain slid toward semi-consciousness, starved of oxygen.
It hurts.
So tired.
Someone... is hurting... Yuta...
Pitch-black shadow spread from beneath him like spilled ink, slow and quiet.
Rika had felt her host's suffering. The cold, twisted, destruction-hungry pressure of the Special Grade vengeful Cursed Spirit began to leak out, past the edges of Yuta's control.
The air temperature dropped to freezing in an instant. White frost visibly crystallized across the surface of the dead leaves along the mountain path.
One second before that massive surge of black Cursed Energy tore completely free,
The air stopped.
A killing intent pressed down over Yuta's head like a mountain. More terrifying than Rika's. More primal. It carried not a trace of Cursed Energy, and yet it was so dense it was suffocating. Pure. Physical. Absolute.
Yuta forced his heavy eyelids open.
Toji was crouched in front of him. Yuta had no idea when he'd gotten there. The grin, that manic, blood-pumping, idiotic grin, was gone.
Those dark green eyes looked like two bottomless old wells. They looked at Yuta the way you look at a corpse.
This was the gaze of the tyrant who had once ground the entire Jujutsu World beneath his feet.
Even Rika, who had pushed barely half a shadow through, let out a trembling whimper under that absolute physical killing intent. The spreading halted. She pulled back.
"What's wrong, fresh little seedling?" With Rika suppressed, Toji's mouth split into a grin, that manic curve settling back onto his face like it had never left. "How does it feel? The tempering of youth weighs exactly this much."
Inside Yuta's skull, Megumi Fushiguro's flat, emotionless life-or-death warning from last night detonated like a charge.
He clawed at the dirt. Hauled his upper body upright. And then, with every last scrap of strength left in him, he tore his throat open and let out a sound that wasn't quite human.
"PASSIONATE YOUTH KNOWS NO FAILURE! I WILL PROVE IT WITH MY BOILING SWEAT!"
The shriek bounced wild through the valley, flushing every crow within a half-mile into the air at once.
And in the instant those words left his throat, from the sheer extremity of survival instinct, from the emotional eruption, the Cursed Energy inside him lurched and locked. The shadow beneath him, Rika's shadow, was forced back. By his own will.
Megumi Fushiguro, passing by, closed his eyes with a pained expression.
Maki rolled hers all the way back and said "Idiot."
Satoru Gojo, constitutionally incapable of not making things worse, let out a long, piercing whistle.
2 seconds of dead silence on the mountain path.
Then.
The killing intent on Toji's face dissolved, like the last snow under a summer sun, gone between one breath and the next.
Two lines of tears, wide as noodles, absolutely waterfall-scale, gushed from his eyes.
"BWAHAHAHA! Perfect! That's the indomitable will of youth!"
He shot to his feet, threw his head back, and howled at the sky. His fists clenched in front of his chest. The muscle across his body surged and jumped like something was being inflated underneath his skin.
"I felt it! That determination of yours — the kind that will never retreat, even burning down to nothing! I'm going to run 500 laps around the back mountain waterfall right now to answer your fire!"
He didn't finish the sentence before, BOOM. Sonic.
Toji turned into a green afterimage. He hit the tree line like a rhino with no brakes, blasted through half the forest in a straight line, and disappeared at the end of the mountain path in a churning wall of dust and snapped timber.
Yuta stared at the violently flattened corridor through the trees, his cracked lips hanging open.
He'd actually survived.
Megumi Fushiguro had not lied to him.
And he'd forced Rika back with a single line of the most embarrassing dialogue he'd ever produced in his life.
Without the high-pressure surveillance of that maniac teacher, the atmosphere across the group visibly loosened. Relying on muscle memory and Haibara's steady help, Yuta ground through the last half lap.
Two hours later.
Morning training: over.
Yuta lay spread-eagled on the training ground lawn, every muscle in his body twitching in no particular pattern, the strength to move a single pinky finger completely gone. But he didn't feel exhausted. Somehow, underneath all of it, he felt alive.
Around him: Mai and Maki bickering viciously over who had to go get the iced cola.
Megumi Fushiguro sitting on the steps, deadpan, complaining about how often a bodysuit could realistically be washed.
Under a tree not far away, Satoru Gojo and Suguru Geto settling, via the most infantile rock-paper-scissors match in the history of Special Grade Jujutsu Sorcerers, who would have to sit through the higher-ups' boring meeting and deal with those old tangerines.
Yu Haibara walked over smiling, and pressed an uncapped bottle of ice-cold mineral water against Yuta's cheek.
The cold made him flinch.
Sunlight came through the gaps in the leaves in shifting patches, scattering across all of them.
No ostracism here. No bullying. No eyes that looked at him like he was a monster.
Just sweat and noise and vivid, stubborn life.
Yuta lay there breathing, watching the deep blue sky.
He thought, slowly: if this was what it meant to stand openly alongside these people, then this eye-searingly green bodysuit...
Actually looked kind of cool.
Just a little.
"Stop playing dead, new student."
A voice came from above him, warm, with an edge of something dry.
Yuta pried his eyes open.
Suguru Geto was standing beside him, looking down at the boy who'd been put through the wringer on day one. Yuta had no idea when he'd walked over.
Plop.
A kraft paper document envelope, stamped with the school seal, landed on Yuta's chest.
Suguru Geto's mouth curved in the particular smile of someone watching a situation they're going to enjoy. "Caught your breath? That's your first assignment. This afternoon — 2 second-year senpai, one abandoned elementary school, one Grade 2 Cursed Spirit. Go handle it."
Not far away, Maki had been toweling down her arms. She picked up her long spear without looking, raised her chin toward him, and her eyes cut sharp as a drawn blade.
"Don't slow us down, new student."
➤ Next: Yuta Okkotsu's Debut