Jujutsu Kaisen — Chapter 102 - Lethal Spores and the Unknown Cursed Womb

Raging shockwaves swept through the abandoned street, dragging a nauseatingly sour stench in their wake.

Yuta Okkotsu dropped into a low stance, his backhand grip tightening on the white-wrapped Uchigatana.

Two kilometers ahead, at the source of the explosion, a sickly green toxic cloud was expanding outward at a grotesque speed.

High-concentration Cursed Energy poison gas. Lethal to any ordinary person caught in it.

"Stop dawdling, move!" Maki Zenin shouted.

The three of them became three blurs, blasting straight through the churning smoke as they raced toward the seaside town.

The closer they got, the worse it smelled.

Massive chemical plants lined the coast, hunched over the shoreline like iron behemoths, belching black smoke into the sky without pause.

Yuta vaulted onto the guardrail of an overpass and looked down.

One look was enough.

His expression went dead.

The seawater had changed.

The Pacific had been blue. Now a vast stretch near the coastline churned with eerie purple foam, roiling and frothing against the shore. Dozens of thick waste discharge pipes fed into the water without stopping, thick and viscous and deeply wrong.

"Yuta, look at the houses!" Maki pointed toward the residential area on the left.

The outer walls of every house along the street were carpeted in mushrooms. Dense clusters, packed tight, interspersed with enormous fleshy spores. The spores were an unsettling dark red, pulsing in and out with a slow, rhythmic breath.

Every time they expanded, they spat a faint purple mist into the air. Visible to the naked eye.

Absolutely disgusting.

Yuta's stomach turned over.

They could not let this spread.

The streets further ahead had already collapsed into total chaos.

Sirens screamed over each other in a wall of noise.

Residents and chemical plant workers in blue uniforms were pouring out in a blind panic. Dozens of cars had rear-ended each other and jammed together; their owners abandoned them mid-street and ran. People tripped and fell. The crowd behind them didn't stop.

Shrill screams and desperate pleas for help tangled together in the air.

Police had pulled up yellow cordon tape at the intersections, shouting themselves hoarse through megaphones, trying to hold any kind of order. Against a scene like this, it meant nothing.

"Yuta, have you found our contact yet?" Maki called back over her shoulder, casually smashing two obstructing mutant mushrooms with her spear as she ran.

Yuta's gaze swept fast through the fleeing crowd.

He found the target.

A potbellied middle-aged man in a tailored suit, being frantically shoved toward a black armored sedan by four bodyguards in black.

"There!"

Yuta's legs detonated with force. The concrete guardrail beneath him shattered.

He launched like a cannonball, crossing dozens of meters of open air before crashing down onto the car's hood with a thunderous impact.

The weight of a body reinforced by Special Grade Cursed Energy was not something metal was built to absorb.

The hood caved in with a massive crunch. The entire front of the car lurched upward.

The four bodyguards went pale and reached for the guns at their waists.

Yuta planted one hand on the car roof, used the momentum to swing his body sideways in midair, and snapped two whip kicks through the air in rapid succession.

BANG. BANG.

All four bodyguards went flying, guns and all, landing five or six meters away and hitting the ground unconscious.

The middle-aged man in the back seat let out a shriek and scrambled desperately for the other door.

Yuta tore the twisted car door off with one hand. He reached in, grabbed the man by the collar, and hauled him out like pulling a root from the ground.

This was Takahashi, the chemical plant's general manager, per the Jujutsu Headquarters' intel.

"Mr. Takahashi." Yuta fixed him with a steady stare. "What exactly happened in there?"

Takahashi's entire body was shaking, fat and all, his eyes darting in every direction. "I — I don't know! It just exploded! It was a natural disaster! Must have been an earthquake — pipeline rupture!"

Lies.

Yuta's eyes went cold.

The evil Cursed Energy roaring up into the sky was thick enough for a blind man to feel it. Natural disaster. Right.

This man was hiding the one thing they actually needed to know.

Every second they wasted here, the civilian death toll in that town compounded.

He was done talking.

"Hey."

A sharp, deeply impatient voice dropped from above.

Takahashi looked up.

Maki came down from the sky, her heavy spear descending with a shriek of wind that cut straight through the noise of the street.

CLANG!

The blade landed flush against Takahashi's scalp and cleaved the armored sedan cleanly in two from front to bumper.

The screech of shearing metal wiped Takahashi's mind completely blank.

The spearhead pressed against the underside of his chin.

"Still working on your excuse?" Maki's voice was cold enough to draw frost. "Turn around. Look at your factory. Look at those things on the walls."

"This entire town is about to be destroyed." Her eyes didn't move. "Say natural disaster to me one more time."

"Waah,!"

His legs buckled. He dropped to his knees in the broken glass, crying and heaving, snot and tears running freely.

"I'm sorry! Don't kill me! It's all my fault!"

Takahashi's head hit the ground in frantic bows as he howled, barely coherent.

"The higher-ups kept pushing us for profits, the treatment equipment cost too much, we discharged untreated industrial wastewater straight into the sea, and the karst cave shelters under the mountain, we filled those with waste too!"

He stabbed a trembling finger toward the giant spores seeping purple mist into the air, his voice barely holding together.

"We angered the demons! This is nature's revenge! There are monsters in there, they're eating people — everyone's dead, everyone,!"

Yuta closed his fist.

Man-made. All of it.

Human greed. Extreme pollution. The fear of every resident and worker packed into that town, all of it had soaked into this place like rot into soil, until finally something hatched. Something Special Grade.

"Irredeemable scumbags." Maki spat the words out and kicked Takahashi 2 meters away.

She flicked the blood from her blade with one sharp snap of her wrist.

"Where's the worst of it?" Yuta cut straight through Takahashi's wailing, voice flat and even.

Takahashi, face-down on the ground, raised one fat trembling finger toward the tallest structure on the coastline, Reactor Tower Three.

"Factory Three, the main waste discharge pipeline runs under it, that's where the monsters came from, "

"Senpai. Toge. Let's go."

Not another word. Yuta turned and charged straight for Reactor Tower Three.

The three of them disappeared into the factory complex within seconds, swallowed whole by the purple mist.

---

At the same time.

Outside the West Tokyo Eiju Juvenile Detention Center, rain fell in slanted streaks.

Kiyotaka Ijichi stood rigid beneath a black umbrella, his face drained of color.

He pointed at the churning mass of flesh hanging in the air above the high wall, and his voice came out in pieces.

Megumi Fushiguro looked up.

The Cursed Womb crouched above them was revolting.

"An attractor?" he muttered.

"What?" Nobara Kugisaki climbed the steps with her hammer hanging from one hand. "Fushiguro, what are you mumbling about?"

"Something's wrong with this place. It's not just Sukuna's finger." Megumi glanced over at Yuji. "Whatever happens in there, don't act rashly."

"Relax." Yuji patted his chest. "If we can't win, we run. Master said as long as you're fast enough, the enemy's skills can't catch you."

Megumi had no counter to that.

The question was whether running would even be an option.

"Divine Dogs."

One black wolf, one white, erupted from the shadows and surged ahead.

The three of them pushed open the heavy iron doors of the juvenile detention center.

The moment the doors shut behind them, the sound of rain disappeared.

The corridor, which should have been a straight hallway, had warped into an enormous tube of scrap metal and broken concrete, bolted and spliced together with no logic to it. Iron pipes jutted from every wall at every angle, crossing over each other like a spider's web.

"It's an Innate Domain." Megumi scanned the space around them.

Larger than he'd expected.

Much larger.

"The door's gone!" Nobara spun around. Where the entrance had been was now a solid iron wall.

She swung her hammer into it. The wall didn't move.

The way out was sealed.

The fastest solution was to kill whoever owned this domain.

The black Divine Dog let out a low, quiet growl.

Not far ahead, scattered among a tangle of iron pipes, lay several bodies. One was only a lower half, still wearing a shredded prison uniform.

"This is, " Yuji moved closer. His expression dropped.

He recognized the name tag on the uniform.

It was the survivor he'd promised that family member, the one he'd said he would bring back.

Dead.

Yuji's hand closed into a fist.

"Don't." Megumi reached out and pulled him back. "Find the exit first."

Everything about this place was wrong in ways that settled deep in the gut.

"Too late," Nobara said.

The nails were already wedged between her fingers. Her eyes were locked on the ceiling.

Megumi looked up.

The air tore open.

A pale hand reached through from the void, five fingers spread wide, and in the center of its palm a single eye rotated slowly, staring down at them.

➤ Next: I Summoned Sukuna?