Jujutsu Kaisen — Chapter 72 - Yuta Okkotsu's Debut
Two in the afternoon. An abandoned elementary school on the outskirts of the city.
The Barrier was already up. The sky had turned a deep, oppressive red.
Yuta Okkotsu gripped his katana hilt with both hands, palms soaked through. This was his first real field mission, and his legs wouldn't stop shaking.
Maki Zenin had a dark red Special Grade Cursed Tool spear slung over one shoulder. She glanced at Yuta — at the way he was trembling like a leaf — and didn't bother softening it.
"Stay in the back. Don't get in our way." She dropped the line flat and strode through the school's front entrance.
Toge Inumaki tugged his Jujutsu High collar up over the snake-eye markings at the corners of his mouth. He patted Yuta on the shoulder. "Salmon."
"...What?"
Yuta stared at him, completely lost.
"That means relax." Maki was already inside, spear resting across her shoulder, voice carrying back through the doorway. "Inumaki is a Cursed Speech User. His words carry curses, so he uses rice ball fillings in place of normal conversation. Just stay close to him."
Yuta swallowed hard and jogged to catch up.
The building hit them with the smell first. Rot and decay, thick enough to taste.
The moment they stepped into the hallway, the ceiling split open. Lockers burst apart. Over a dozen misshapen Cursed Spirits, Grade 4s, Grade 3s, came pouring out all at once.
"Don't move."
Toge didn't even lift a hand. His voice was quiet, clear, almost bored as it carried down the empty hallway.
The Cursed Energy of his Cursed Speech rippled out in a wave.
Every single one of those Cursed Spirits froze mid-lunge. Claws bared, mouths open, locked in place like they'd been slammed into an invisible press.
SWISH,
Maki moved.
She cut through the frozen horde like a leopard through tall grass, fluid and unhurried. The spear became a blur of afterimages. Each pass left a piercing shriek behind it, and a spray of black blood.
3 seconds. The hallway was clear.
A single drop of black blood fell from the spear tip.
Maki glanced back at Yuta, still rooted to the spot. "Stop staring. Keep up."
Her tone was sandpaper. But Yuta noticed, he couldn't help noticing, that every strike she'd thrown had landed in exactly the right place to keep any Cursed Spirit from getting within 5 meters of him. Not once.
She'd never had any intention of letting him get hurt.
Yuta fell in behind them. The heart that had been jammed in his throat slowly dropped back where it belonged.
They were so strong.
Not just the power of it, though that was staggering enough. It was the way they moved together. The way they handed their backs to each other without thinking, without checking, without a word. An understanding that ran so deep it didn't need language.
So this is what Jujutsu High students are like. So this is what it means to have comrades.
Something warm moved through Yuta's chest, through the part of him that had been wrapped in fear and rejection for so long he'd forgotten what else it could feel.
Being protected. It felt like that.
The three of them climbed the stairs to the third floor and followed the hallway to the end.
The music room.
Wuuu... wuuu...
Faint. Unmistakable. A child crying, leaking out from the gap beneath the closed door.
Civilians. Caught in the middle of this.
Maki's eyes went sharp. She didn't pause. One kick, full force, and the heavy wooden door left its hinges and smashed into the wall, splintering apart.
BOOM!
The music room was wide. Desks and chairs shoved into the corners. A cluster of elementary school kids, seven, maybe eight years old, huddled together in a pile, screaming.
And hanging directly above them, from the ceiling, was the thing.
3 meters of twisted humanoid body, skin crawling with pustules. Its limbs bent backward at every joint, spider-like, fingers gouged into the ceiling. No eyes, no nose. Just a massive, gaping mouth packed with fangs.
A Grade 2 Cursed Spirit.
The Cursed Energy pressure rolled off it in waves, thick as mud, filling the room from floor to ceiling.
Yuta's breath stopped. His hand locked around his katana. This was a Grade 2? This wasn't even in the same universe as the trash in the hallway.
"ROAR!" The Grade 2 dropped from the ceiling in a single lunge, its full bulk aimed straight at the children in the corner.
"Looking to die."
Maki's voice was cold. One corner of her mouth curved up in an arc that looked like she'd borrowed it from someone else entirely.
"Perfect timing. You'll do nicely as a test of how far my special training's come."
"Eight Gates, Second Gate, Gate of Rest — Open!"
BOOM!
The shockwave that tore out of Maki's body was visible to the naked eye. Her already explosive muscle definition snapped taut in an instant. Veins rose along her forehead. The air itself warped slightly around her, bent by the pure, undiluted weight of physical force.
Yuta's eyes went wide. That wasn't Cursed Energy. It wasn't anything like Cursed Energy. It was something rawer, life force itself, distilled to an absolute.
The hardwood floor beneath Maki's feet shattered.
She became a green blur. She was behind the Grade 2 before it reached the children, arriving after yet striking first, cutting off its path with her body.
"Die, you piece of trash!"
The spear drove forward like a dragon breaking the surface of the sea. It hit with a sonic boom, precise and total, straight into the Cursed Spirit's open mouth.
The kinetic force threw the monster back. It hit the load-bearing wall at the far end of the room and stuck there.
BANG!
One final strike, clean, no hesitation, and Maki shredded the thing's head completely. The body dissolved into ash before it hit the floor.
"That was incredible! Maki-senpai!" Yuta pumped his fist without thinking, the admiration in his eyes impossible to contain.
That kind of strength, the absolute, crushing kind, it did something to the chest. Loosened something.
Maki twirled the spear once, tossed it back onto her shoulder, and turned toward the corner.
"It's okay now, kids. Come on out—"
"LOOK OUT!"
Yuta's pupils shrank to points. He screamed until his voice cracked.
Every hair on his body stood up at once.
Directly above Maki's head, inside the ventilation duct, something peeled back the metal sheeting without a sound.
A face looked out. More twisted than the Grade 2. Radiating Cursed Energy that dwarfed it by an order of magnitude.
A Grade 1 Cursed Spirit.
It had been here the whole time. It had used the Grade 2 as bait.
ROAR,!
The howl split the air. Thick tentacles erupted from the duct like black snakes, trailing razor wind, aimed at the vital points along Maki's back.
Maki was already moving. She dropped low, swept the spear up in a hard arc, and caught the first wave of tentacles before they landed.
BANG!
Sparks scattered. Both her arms went numb in an instant. The webbing of her grip split open, blood running down the spear shaft.
The gap was too wide. The sheer power behind each strike,
"Stop!"
Toge ripped his collar down and forced the words out, voice scraping raw.
Cursed Energy surged from his mouth. The Grade 1 locked up, 1 full second of stillness.
Then Toge buckled, coughing blood, one knee hitting the floor. The backlash from overriding a higher grade nearly took him off his feet entirely.
1 second was all he could give.
For Maki, 1 second was enough.
She used the break to push back, putting distance between herself and the Grade 1, reading the angles, looking for an opening.
Then her peripheral vision caught the children in the corner.
Huddled. Shaking. Directly in the path of every tentacle she'd just pulled the Grade 1's attention away from.
If she kept retreating, those tentacles would reach the kids before she could.
Damn it.
Maki stopped. She planted her feet and didn't move. She brought the spear up and started spinning it, a wall, not a weapon, and met the Grade 1's onslaught head on.
BOOM. BOOM. BOOM.
The room came apart around them. Debris filled the air. The concussive pressure forced Yuta's eyes shut.
Exchange after exchange, and Maki held, but the Gate of Rest was burning through her reserves. Each hit she absorbed was one she couldn't fully disperse. The gate exacted its toll whether she was winning or not.
The Grade 1 waited. And then it found the gap.
A tentacle slid up through the floor from below, silent, and whipped across Maki's calf.
CRACK!
The bone broke clean. Yuta heard it from across the room.
Maki grunted. Her balance went. The spear spun out of her hand and bounced off the wall.
The next tentacle came down like a sledgehammer into her chest.
"Gah—" Blood in her mouth, and then she was airborne, and then she was on the floor at Yuta's feet. The impact took everything she had left. She didn't get up.
The Grade 1 laughed. A grating, grinding sound. It moved toward her slowly, tentacles lifting, savoring the approach.
Time went strange.
Yuta looked at Maki Zenin lying in her own blood. He looked at Toge Inumaki on one knee in the far corner, still coughing. Still trying.
The 2 people who had been protecting him this whole time. Both of them down.
Because he was useless. Because he'd stood in the back and done nothing and let this happen.
Again.
Was he going to watch again as people got hurt because of him? Was he going to stand here again and let it happen?
His hands grabbed his own hair. His nails pressed into his scalp.
What am I doing. I kept saying I didn't want to hurt anyone. I kept saying that. And I'm standing here watching the people who protected me get torn apart by a monster.
This was worse than losing control. This cowardice, it turned his stomach more than anything Rika had ever done.
Something cracked open at the bottom of him.
Fury. Despair. Both at once, absolute and total, surging up from somewhere so deep he hadn't known it was there. An obsession he'd never seen in himself before. Raw enough to strip everything else away.
Unforgivable.
He could not forgive this. He would not forgive this monster.
The last thread of reason snapped.
"AAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHH—!"
He threw his head back and screamed until the sound wasn't human anymore.
In the shadow behind him, something ancient and enormous felt its host's call. Felt the pure, absolute fury driving it. And answered.
The light died. Not gradually, in an instant, the room went dark. The temperature plunged at a rate that had nothing to do with physics. The window glass crackled and frosted over, thick ice spreading in seconds.
"Who dares..."
The voice came from everywhere. Hoarse. Shredded. Soaked in something that had been waiting too long to get out.
"Who dares... hurt... Yuta's friends!"
BOOM!
A black silhouette tore into existence behind Yuta Okkotsu, so massive it nearly split the music room's walls apart just by being there.
The Queen of Curses. Rika Orimoto.
The Grade 1 Cursed Spirit went silent.
It felt what she was. Felt the absolute hierarchy of it, the Special Grade aura, the kind that didn't discriminate, didn't negotiate, didn't leave anything behind.
The monster screamed and turned for the window.
"Die."
Rika reached out one enormous black hand, patterned with markings that had no business existing.
The hand moved faster than sound.
CRUNCH!
Her fingers closed around the Grade 1 mid-flight and held.
No clash of Cursed Techniques. No back and forth. Nothing theatrical.
Bone shattered. Flesh burst. Both sounds came at exactly the same moment.
The monster that had pushed Maki and Toge to the edge of death ceased to exist. What remained wasn't recognizable as anything that had once been alive.
The Cursed Energy shockwave rolled outward and took the roof with it. Bricks and tile rained down. Dust swallowed the room whole.
Silence.
Several minutes passed.
The Cursed Energy faded. Rika's massive form twisted, compressed, and folded back into Yuta's shadow.
Yuta stood in the wreckage. His chest heaved. Cold sweat had soaked through his clothes to the skin.
He looked down at his hands. They were shaking.
It's over. All of it.
This thing that lived in his shadow. This force that destroyed everything it touched the moment he let it out. Maki-senpai saw it. Toge-senpai saw it. They saw all of it.
They'd think he was a disaster walking. A curse wearing a person's face.
He bit down on his lip. His eyes burned.
He couldn't turn around. He couldn't make himself look at their faces. He was afraid of what he'd see there.
A hand touched his shoulder. Cool. Gentle.
Yuta flinched and turned.
Toge Inumaki stood in front of him. There was still blood at the corner of his mouth from the backlash. His face was pale.
But his eyes were calm. There was no fear in them. No revulsion, no careful distance, none of the look people gave monsters.
He raised his other hand and ruffled Yuta's hair. Twice, firmly.
"Spicy cod roe."
Don't worry.
That was all it took. 2 syllables of rice ball filling, and every last wall Yuta had built came down at once.
The tears came before he could do anything about them.
Maki had dragged herself to the wall. She pulled a strip of torn cloth over the wound on her chest and pressed it down. Her face was white. She looked at Yuta and her expression twisted into something that was almost, not quite, a smile.
"What are you crying for? It's ugly." A beat. "You did fine, newbie."
Yuta froze. The tears ran harder. But he nodded. He nodded until it hurt.
Outside the abandoned school, 1 kilometer away, a figure stood at the top of a high-voltage transmission tower with the wind moving through his monk's robes.
He was watching a screen.
Watching a colossal monster crush a Grade 1 Cursed Spirit in a single grip.
Kenjaku's mouth stretched slowly into a smile that had nothing wholesome in it.
"Truly..." He let the word sit. "A magnificent Cursed Energy."
His fingers moved across the screen, almost stroking it.
"An inexhaustible reserve. The potential to replicate any Cursed Technique without condition." He tilted his head slightly. "Satoru Gojo. You've found yourself quite the exceptional chess piece."
He closed the terminal. Turned. Stepped into the dark and was gone.
➤ Next: Jujutsu Headquarters the Property Management Company, The Power of Love