Jujutsu Kaisen — Chapter 105 - Yuta's Potential, Kenjaku's Hidden Move

A skyful of sickly green acid rain came crashing down in sheets, mixed with the shrieking of larvae.

Yuta grabbed Toge by the collar and burst sideways, rolling toward the load-bearing pillar behind them.

Maki didn't retreat. She advanced.

Her wrist snapped, and the spear whirled into an impenetrable web of steel before her.

CLANG! CLANG! CLANG!

The first larvae to charge in were sliced apart midair by the razor edge. Viscous acid splattered down the blade and ate through the hem of Maki's uniform, burning several large holes clean through. The smell of scorched flesh rose sharp and immediate.

"Senpai!"

Yuta steadied himself and started to move toward her.

The ground lurched.

That bloated Special Grade broodmother had actually moved. Its massive body dragged a trail of acid across the floor, bearing down on Maki at a speed that had no business belonging to something its size. The ruins of its melted face split open into a black-mouthed maw, and it spewed a thick cloud of purple poison smoke.

Maki had just cleaved two larvae apart. Her momentum was spent, new force not yet there.

No room to dodge.

"[Fall back]!"

The roar came from behind, hoarse and ragged.

Toge Inumaki's eyes had gone bloodshot. The snake-eye curse seal at his throat blazed with blinding light.

The broodmother froze.

A fraction of a second. That was all. Maki threw herself into a desperate roll and cleared the collision by inches.

Pfft.

Toge pressed his hand to his mouth. Blood welled up between his fingers and dripped from his chin to the floor.

Forcibly suppressing a Special Grade. The backlash was brutal.

He couldn't even keep his legs steady. All he could do was lean against the wall and drag air into his lungs.

They couldn't drag this out.

Yuta clenched his jaw, running the numbers fast.

Toge-senpai was already at his limit. Maki-senpai had opened the Third Gate, but this enclosed space was saturated with strong acid and poison gas — everything about it worked against her. The enemy was a broodmother with infinite reproduction. A war of attrition meant certain death.

One strike. It had to end in one strike.

Vaporize it. The eggs too. All of it.

Yuta glanced at the silver ring on his left ring finger.

Teacher Toji had said it more than once: relying too heavily on a Cursed Spirit would hold back a person's own physical potential. In recent training, Yuta had kept Rika Orimoto pinned to the lowest possible output.

But this wasn't the time to hold back.

If this dragged on any longer, these things really would gnaw everyone down to bare bone.

"Maki-senpai! Get Toge-senpai out of here!"

Yuta roared and reversed his grip, driving his Uchigatana point-first into the ground. Then he ripped off his jacket and flung it aside.

"Stay back. Don't get in the way."

Maki kicked a larva off Toge and spun around. "You alone can't handle that giant sow!"

She knew exactly what this Special Grade could do. That poison smoke earlier — she'd barely caught a whiff and her head had started to swim.

"Leave it to me."

Yuta's voice was perfectly calm.

He raised his left hand. His right hand rested gently on the silver ring.

"Yuta..."

A voice drifted through the underground space. Hollow and distant, yet soaked in something morbid and deeply wrong.

It was soft. It still drowned out a hundred larvae in an instant.

The broodmother stopped moving. Its translucent abdomen shuddered violently, as if some part of it had just registered a threat from a dimension it didn't understand.

The larvae that had been gnawing frantically at everything around them all dropped flat to the ground at once. None of them moved.

Absolute suppression.

"Rika."

Yuta slipped the ring off his finger. He lowered his head and kissed it gently.

"Crush them. Every last one."

BOOM!

A pillar of black-red Cursed Energy tore out of Yuta's body and punched straight through what was left of the concrete ceiling above. The entire underground space turned white.

An immeasurably vast malice flooded outward like a physical wave.

Maki stared at Yuta's back and forgot to breathe.

Complete form.

Ten times worse than what she'd seen on the training ground. At least.

The poison smoke and acid saturating the air vaporized on contact with that Cursed Energy. Gone, as if they'd never existed.

A pale, enormous hand reached out from the shadow behind Yuta and settled gently on his shoulder.

Then the rest of it emerged.

A pure-white body, vast and wrong. Its head was a single massive eye ringed with sharp barbs. Its mouth split all the way to the ears, and every inch inside was packed with irregular, jagged fangs.

Complete Form. Special Grade Cursed Spirit. Rika Orimoto.

"Yuta... my Yuta!"

Rika Orimoto's laugh was a shrieking, hair-raising sound that bounced off every wall.

That single enormous eye locked onto the broodmother.

The thing that had been so unstoppable moments ago was now squirming frantically backward, trying to claw its way back into the sewage pipe.

"Ugly freak."

Rika Orimoto's voice dropped. Cold now. Bone-deep with killing intent.

"Who said you could point that filthy thing at Yuta?"

BANG!

She was gone. Only a massive crater remained where she'd stood.

Rika Orimoto's body became a streak of white and appeared above the broodmother's head in the same instant. Fast enough that even Maki's enhanced kinetic vision could barely catch a smear of afterimage.

The broodmother let out a wretched, despairing shriek. It swelled its abdomen and tried to spray its most concentrated acid in one final death-thrash.

"Too slow."

Rika Orimoto drove one clawed hand straight down, wrapped in berserk black-red Cursed Energy, and punched it deep into the broodmother's massive translucent abdomen.

SQUELCH!

Unhatched larvae and gouts of green blood burst outward all at once.

The broodmother thrashed. Dozens of long, thin limbs hacked at Rika Orimoto from every angle.

CLANG! CLANG! CLANG!

Sparks scattered. Rika Orimoto's skin turned every strike. Not even a white mark.

"Die! Die! Die!"

Rika Orimoto laughed through all of it.

Her other hand closed around the broodmother's melted face. Five fingers clenched.

CRACK!

The broodmother's skull burst like a crushed tomato. Brain matter and acid sprayed in every direction.

Rika Orimoto didn't stop.

She opened her maw, bit down on one of the broodmother's limbs, and tore it off with a single wrench. Chewed it twice. Swallowed.

CRUNCH. CRUNCH. CRUNCH.

The sound echoed through the empty underground.

Maki swallowed. She looked at Yuta's back.

This kid's cursed spirit was more of an unreasonable villain than anything they'd been fighting.

Savage didn't cover it. This wasn't a battle. It was a one-sided feeding.

Toge Inumaki quietly tucked his throat medicine back into his pocket. Figured his throat had been shredded for nothing today.

Under a minute.

The Special Grade broodmother was scattered meat across the floor. The fleeing larvae didn't fare any better. One sweep of Rika Orimoto's palm turned a whole swath of them into green pulp.

The underground basin had gone completely silent. Nothing left alive.

"Yuta! Did I do good!"

Rika Orimoto shook the scraps off her hand, her enormous body shrinking rapidly until it vanished into an invisible spirit that wrapped tight around Yuta from behind. That world-ending pressure collapsed with her, gone in an instant.

"Well done, Rika. You worked hard."

Yuta patted her gently and slid the ring back onto his finger.

He turned around, took one look at Maki and Toge's blank faces, and scratched the back of his head.

"So... we're done. Everyone okay?"

Maki pulled her spear back, walked over, and slapped him hard on the shoulder.

"You little brat. You've been holding out on us."

She could see it clearly now. Pops Toji was right. Even without copied ninjutsu, powerful Cursed Energy stacked on top of real physical technique.

This kid had no ceiling. It was practically cheating.

Toge walked over and signed "salmon."

His face was still ash white. But something in his expression had finally let go.

At the same time.

Far across town, halfway up the mountain, an abandoned observation tower.

From the top floor you could see everything: the whole town, the coastline, all of it laid out below.

Hanami stood in silence on the concrete guardrail at the roof's edge.

Its strange, branch-sprouting eyes tracked the hellish chaos below.

A breeze moved through, carrying the industrial acid stench with it.

Hanami spread its arms wide and breathed it in.

With every breath, a vast and formless power rose from the chemical plant below, channeled along the wind and into its body.

The purest fear humanity had to offer.

Mushrooms and spores were spreading wildly across the town, wringing out every last drop of despair from those weak, small creatures and feeding it back as nourishment. The Cursed Energy coursing through Hanami was climbing at a pace you could actually watch.

Even the cursed technique circuits inside it were shifting under the pressure of all that accumulated fear. Something qualitative. Something dangerous.

The more humanity feared this poisoned land, the more untouchable Hanami became.

This was what a natural disaster was supposed to feel like.

"Magnificent view, isn't it?"

Kenjaku stepped out of the tower's shadows at a leisurely pace, dressed in loose monk's robes. In one hand he carried a transparent bulletproof glass terrarium.

Inside it, a small lizard. About the size of a palm.

It was hideous. Its body was covered in grayish-brown fleshy lumps, and a row of sharp, irregular bone spurs jutted from its back.

Kenjaku strolled to the guardrail and drew a small glass vial from his wide sleeve. Inside it sat a single purple spore, concentrated to an extreme and extracted from the chemical plant's core waste. A mutant variant catalyzed through Hanami's Special Grade Cursed Energy. Enough to dissolve an ordinary person into bloody water at a touch.

Kenjaku unscrewed the terrarium lid and dropped the spore in.

The lizard lunged for it immediately. Its maw opened wide, lined with fine needle-sharp fangs, and swallowed the spore whole.

The next second, its body made a sound like wet bones snapping.

The spurs on its back began to glow, a sickly radioactive green. Its body swelled a full size larger in seconds, the growth violent and explosive. Its claws raked at the bulletproof glass in a frenzy, the screech of it sharp enough to set teeth on edge.

A brutal, ancient, destruction-hungry aura radiated off the tiny thing.

Kenjaku watched it hurl itself against the glass and smiled. Morbid. Hungry. Satisfied.

"Very good. Quite the appetite."

He gave the terrarium a pleased shake.

The broodmother reptile had never been the point. What Kenjaku wanted was this: an ancient creature with the evolutionary capacity to absorb chemical waste and pollution-tainted Cursed Energy. To take in everything humanity discarded and grow stronger from it.

Toji Fushiguro, that zero-Cursed-Energy monster, was genuinely troublesome. He'd give him that.

But so what?

Kenjaku turned and looked out at the sea. Purple wastewater churned and rolled in the distance.

As long as humanity kept discharging waste, kept tearing into the natural world, this sea would keep producing nourishment. And this patchwork abomination, stitched together from nuclear contamination, chemical toxins, and humanity's deepest fear, would keep growing. No ceiling. No limit.

That was the real gift he had prepared for Jujutsu High. For the entire world.

Kenjaku laughed softly and reached out one finger, tapping the lizard's spike-covered skull through the glass.

"Eat well. Grow big."

His voice carried strangely in the wind.

"When this sea is thoroughly poisoned — give the world something it's never seen before."

He could barely contain his anticipation. The day this ultimate titan, born from Cursed Energy and the wreckage of modern industry, finally dragged itself out of the deep sea and set foot in Tokyo.

➤ Next: The Death of Yuji Itadori