Jujutsu Kaisen — Chapter 104 - Grotesque Crawlers, the Abyssal Mother
The iron grate over the sewage pipe was kicked clean off its hinges.
The stench hit them first. Rotting flesh, thick enough to taste.
Maki Zenin raised one hand and signaled the other two to slow down.
The deeper they went, the worse the air got.
The concrete walls on either side had lost any trace of their original surface. A thick layer of dark purple fungi covered everything, wall to wall, floor to ceiling. Every few centimeters, a fleshy spore the size of a basketball pushed outward from the concrete.
They pulsed in a slow, rhythmic cycle. Full and swollen. Then collapsing. Then swelling again. All of them packed with viscous green liquid.
Inhale. Exhale.
The entire underground sewage system breathed like a living thing. One massive, wet, heaving organ.
"What the hell is this?" Maki flicked her spear in disgust.
The tip grazed one of the spores by accident.
Squelch.
Green acid sprayed out in a pressurized jet. It hit the steel floor plating and ate straight through, leaving a black hole ringed with white smoke.
"Too close." Yuta Okkotsu stepped back half a pace. His scalp prickled. If that acid had caught skin, it would have stripped a layer right off.
He kept his eyes locked on the passage ahead. Endless darkness.
Rika's Cursed Energy churned uneasily inside him.
The feeling of being watched, by hundreds of eyes, thousands of eyes, kept climbing.
This place was something else entirely. Far worse than the Grade 1 Cursed Spirit nest they'd cleared last time.
Toge Inumaki had his collar pulled all the way up over his nose. His eyes swept the surrounding dark in slow, careful arcs. His fingers stayed tight around his throat medicine.
Then.
Skitter. Skitter. Skitter.
The sound came from everywhere at once. The faint, tooth-grinding rasp of chitin scraping against chitin.
Yuta's heart slammed against his ribs.
Two points of dim purple light appeared in the darkness ahead.
Then ten. Then a hundred.
A thousand.
Countless clusters of dark purple light blinked awake across the black, spreading and merging until the entire passage ahead was a rolling, heaving sea of violet.
The light surged toward them fast, that scraping sound rising with it.
In the faint glow, Yuta finally saw what they were.
Insects. Each one roughly three times the size of a rat, bodies warped and wrong. They moved on long, razor-sharp legs like arthropod limbs. Their mouthparts flared outward. Fangs dripped with something thick and corrosive.
Tens of thousands of them.
They packed the underground passage so densely there wasn't a gap to be found, all of them drooling, every compound eye locked onto the three living humans ahead.
"We're surrounded." Yuta's palms were damp.
"Tch." Maki's sneer was sharp and cold. "Creepy little garbage."
She drove the base of her spear into the ground with a heavy crack and looked up. The ceiling above them was thick concrete, shot through with cracks.
"Too cramped down here. Can't move right."
The muscle in Maki's right leg went iron-hard.
"First Gate — Gate of Opening. Open."
Green Cursed Energy detonated off her body. Her legs fired in the same instant. She left the ground like a cannonball, launched straight up.
Her spear cut a blinding white arc through the air.
BOOM!
The concrete ceiling shattered.
Tons of debris and rebar rained down into the swarm below. At least a dozen crawlers were crushed outright, their heads caved in beneath the falling weight.
Sunlight drove down through the breach. A hard, direct beam slicing into the dark.
The swarm shrieked. These things had lived underground their entire existence. The sudden light hit them like a weapon. Their formation collapsed in an instant, thousands of creatures scattering and slamming into each other.
"Yuta, Toge — standard procedure. Pull them together!" Maki's voice rang down from above.
"On it!"
Yuta didn't retreat. He moved forward, straight into the front edge of the tide, sword already in hand.
He dropped every restraint. Special Grade Cursed Energy flooded out of him in a single, unreserved wave.
Rika's presence swept across the entire depression like a tide.
To every low-grade Cursed Spirit in that tunnel, Yuta Okkotsu was the most intoxicating, irresistible thing in existence. Bait wearing skin.
Every compound eye in the swarm flooded red.
They abandoned Maki. They abandoned Toge Inumaki. Every creature in that tunnel turned and swarmed directly at Yuta.
"Come on, then!"
He gave ground deliberately, sword flashing, severing forelimbs from the crawlers closest to him as he backed toward the large water-collection depression at the lowest point of the pipeline. Not running. Pacing. Drawing them in.
The swarm poured after him like a dam had burst.
"Toge!" Yuta bellowed.
He hit the brakes. One sharp sliding step and he was clear, out from the edge of the swarm, standing on solid ground.
On the elevated platform above the depression, Toge Inumaki ripped his collar down from his face.
The Cursed Speech seals on his cheeks, the snake-eye fang marks, were fully exposed.
Immense Cursed Energy flooded into his vocal cords.
"[Don't Move.]"
The rule-binding force of Cursed Speech came down like something physical. Like weight. Like gravity.
Every crawler in the depression froze.
Thousands of them. Mid-lunge, mid-snap, mid-stride. They stayed exactly where they were, locked in place, not one antenna able to twitch.
"That's what I'm talking about!"
Maki was still airborne. Still falling. She twisted hard at the waist.
"Third Gate — Gate of Life. Open!"
Two limiters, broken back to back.
The muscle lines across her body rose in sharp relief. The green aura around her flared and shifted, deepening into a furious, churning blue.
Her skin flushed red with blood engorgement. The sheer density of her qi and blood pressure warped the air around her into visible heat distortion.
Both hands locked onto the spear shaft. She hoisted it above her head.
The kinetic energy compressed to the tip. The air around the spear point began to scream.
"Let me show you disgusting bugs what hellish special training actually looks like!"
She inverted. Head down, dropping fast, using every meter of altitude as a weapon.
A deep blue meteor.
"Great Celestial Meteor Fracture!"
The naginata drove into the center of the depression.
BOOM!
With it came a shockwave. A ring-shaped wall of force that erupted outward from the impact point, skimming the fractured ground in every direction at once.
The air split apart. A visible white pressure wave expanded in a perfect, brutal circle.
The swarm never screamed. Toge Inumaki's Cursed Speech held them in place until the instant the shockwave reached them, and then there was nothing left to scream. Carapaces, organs, bodies: all of it fractured and came apart under the absolute physical force.
BANG BANG BANG BANG BANG.
Hundreds of small concussive detonations chased each other through the underground tunnel as body after body burst.
Thousands of Grade 3 and Grade 4 Cursed Spirits reduced to a drifting purple haze.
The concrete walls of the depression had lost their outer surface entirely, scraped raw, exposing the rusted rebar skeleton underneath.
The dust settled.
Maki stood up straight, breathing hard.
The depression was empty. Clean. Nothing left but a scatter of debris and a layer of scorched meat paste steaming on the ground.
"That was..." Yuta stared. He couldn't finish the sentence for a moment. "That was insane."
He had enormous Cursed Energy reserves. But clearing a swarm that size through pure, direct force? That would have taken him a long time and left him half-dead. Maki Zenin had simply erased the entire terrain.
Toge Inumaki exhaled slowly and pulled his collar back up over his mouth.
"Salmon." He extended a thumbs-up in Maki's direction.
"Don't start." She swung the naginata up onto her shoulder and flicked the meat residue off the tip. The corner of her mouth pulled up anyway.
That bastard Toji's training methods were pure torture. But this kind of destruction — bone-deep, flesh-on-flesh, nothing wasted — she had to admit it felt good.
The three of them let their guard down for exactly one moment.
The entire underground shelter lurched.
No warning. No build-up. Just a violent, full-body shudder that rolled through the concrete.
"What is that? Aftershock?" Yuta dropped his weight and steadied himself.
"No."
Maki was already facing forward, eyes locked on the massive shattered sewage outlet directly ahead of the depression.
Something came through it. Not sound. Not light. A presence. A tide of malice so thick and heavy it moved like a physical thing, pouring out from the depths of the outlet in a wave that hit all three of them at once.
The air, which the sunlight had barely started to warm, dropped to freezing in seconds.
The Cursed Energy behind that pressure was enormous. Dense. Yuta felt it pressing down on his lungs. Breathing took effort.
RUMBLE. RUMBLE. RUMBLE.
Something deep in the outlet was moving. A low, grinding sound, wet and massive, like a colossal body forcing itself through a space too small for it.
CRASH!
Acid and rubble cascaded through the opening. Then, over the lip of the passage, a single enormous front claw came down and gripped the edge.
It was covered in pale white scales. The talons punched straight through half a meter of concrete like it was cardboard.
Then the rest of it came out.
Ten meters tall. Grotesquely wide. It dragged itself into the depression, and Yuta Okkotsu stopped breathing.
A mother insect.
The upper half of its body carried a faint, horrible echo of a female human silhouette. Where the face should have been, the features had melted and fused into a single slick, featureless mass. Below the waist, it was nothing but abdomen. An immense, swollen, sagging belly that dragged along the ground as it moved.
The abdomen was semi-transparent.
Through the skin, he could see them. Over a hundred mutated larvae, each one more than a meter long, packed together in the wet interior. They were moving. Writhing. Biting at each other. Some of them were eating each other alive.
Thick green mucus ran continuously from the creature's lower body, eating pits into the concrete wherever it pooled.
What kind of human tragedy had fused together to make something like this.
Yuta's stomach turned hard.
He'd thought the webbed, deformed thing from the Juvenile Detention Center was bad. Compared to this, that creature looked almost normal.
"Maki..." His fingers went white around the sword grip.
Maki didn't look away from the mother insect. It was still leaking acid. Still moving toward them with that slow, dragging weight.
The ruined mass where its face should have been split open. A crack, wide and wet. The sound that came out of it was a shriek, a single note so sharp and concentrated it shattered the edges of the breach in the ceiling above, and the band of sunlight that had been streaming down flickered and shifted.
"Special Grade."
Two words. Maki said them through her teeth.
There was no question. That pressure was real, and nothing below Special Grade produced it.
And this wasn't just any Special Grade. It was a disaster-type. Breeding capacity. Area denial. The larvae still writhing inside it were the point.
Toge Inumaki had gone pale. He downed a full bottle of medicine in one go and gripped the empty container.
He already knew the math. Against something this size, forcing a Cursed Speech command would blow out his vocal cords from the backlash. No question about it.
The mother insect turned its ruined face toward Maki Zenin.
It had found the one responsible for the swarm.
Sssssizzle.
The abdomen split open.
A massive rupture, wide and ragged, tearing along the underside. And from that opening, over a hundred newly-born mutated larvae came out in a torrent, fangs already formed, already functional, already biting, mixed with a flood of concentrated green acid, the whole mass launched at high pressure directly at the three of them.
"MOVE!" Maki roared.
➤ Next: Yuta's Potential, Kenjaku's Hidden Move