Jujutsu Kaisen — Chapter 109 - Paradise Game — Face to Face

"Your practical training starts early."

Kawasaki City. Nova Cinema.

Two lines of yellow police tape cordoned off the perimeter.

Satoru Gojo ducked under the plastic strip without breaking stride and stepped through the main entrance.

Yuji Itadori followed close behind. His first step onto the screening room carpet sank into something sticky. When he pulled his foot back, dark red threads stretched and snapped between his sole and the floor.

The thick reek of blood hit him first. Then the moldy, stale-popcorn smell underneath it. Together they punched straight through to the back of his skull.

Yuji's stomach lurched. He forced the nausea down and raised his head. His gaze passed over Satoru Gojo's shoulder and landed on the center of the screening room.

Three lumps lay collapsed in front of the tattered red velvet seats.

Flesh, bone, and organs had been kneaded together by something brutally, carelessly strong. Three human torsos, in defiance of every law of basic physics, had been fused into a single irregular mass of meat.

Yuji's fingers dug into his palm. His nails pressed until they almost drew blood.

This wasn't murder. This was treating living people like clay and squeezing them because you could.

"This is beyond cruel." Yuji ground his back teeth together. "What the hell did this?"

Satoru Gojo reached up and pulled his black blindfold down around his neck. Those azure eyes locked onto the mass.

"Not conventional physical destruction. Not a brute-force compression using Cursed Energy, either."

He crouched. His slender fingers hovered two inches above the corpse sphere, close but not touching.

"It's the soul. The killer directly reached these three people's souls and forcibly reshaped them. The flesh had no choice but to follow the new mold." He tilted his head slightly. "That's what you're looking at."

Touching souls. Reshaping them.

The thought hit Yuji like a physical blow.

A Cursed Technique this depraved actually existed in the world.

Satoru Gojo pressed two fingers together and pinched something free from the pocket of the blood-soaked clothing. He flicked off the blood. A solid black metal card.

On the front, an absurdly wide grin was printed in dark crimson lacquer. On the back, small text was engraved into the metal: Paradise Game.

"These three unlucky bastards received an invitation."

He tossed the card to Yuji. "They refused. Or maybe they just never figured out the rules. Either way, the guy delivering the tickets turned them into a jigsaw toy on his way out."

Yuji caught it. The sharp edges bit into the web of his hand.

"I'm going to slaughter that bastard." He stared at the grin on the card. His knuckles cracked, one by one.

"Good spirit. But with your half-baked Cursed Energy control right now, you'd just be walking in as the meal."

Satoru Gojo pulled out his phone and dialed. "A dungeon this interesting deserves a proper party. Time to recruit some grunts."

Twenty minutes later.

"Gojo-senpai! We made it!" A bright, energetic voice rang through the hall.

Yu Haibara strode in with that black mushroom cut bouncing on his head, a slightly ill-fitting black suit jacket thrown over his white T-shirt.

He didn't even glance at Satoru Gojo. He locked straight onto the pink-haired boy, crossed the distance in a few quick strides, and slapped a heavy hand onto Yuji's shoulder.

"You're really alive! I knew it — someone Toji-sensei picked couldn't possibly go down that easily!"

Yu grabbed both of Yuji's shoulders and squeezed. "These muscles are solid, genuinely solid. Worthy of an Eight Gates inheritor!"

He was grinning with his whole face, a full row of white teeth, radiating the kind of warmth that had absolutely no business being at a murder scene.

The man who followed him in was not radiating anything.

Kento Nanami wore a crisp khaki suit. Blond hair combed without a strand out of place. His signature full-coverage goggles reflecting back the room's dim light.

He stepped over the bloodstains on the floor and stopped in front of the corpse sphere. He looked it over slowly, through the lenses. The air around him dropped several degrees.

Then, without a word, he reached up, grabbed his necktie knot, and yanked it down. He pulled the tie free from his collar and wound it around his right hand, coil by coil, steady and deliberate.

"Kneading people like garbage." His voice was flat as stone. "What a revolting mess."

"That's the situation." Satoru Gojo snapped his fingers. "Over the past month, missing person reports have spiked nationwide. Over 1,000 people, gone without a trace. The common thread: homeless, gamblers buried in loan-shark debt, people who'd already cut every social tie they had. The authorities are sitting on it hard."

He pointed at the card in Yuji's hand. "Every one of those missing persons' last known locations traces back to the venue of this so-called Paradise Game. Someone is burning through the lives of people at the bottom of the pile like they're disposable fuel."

Kento straightened his suit jacket. "So. What do you want us to do?"

"Infiltration." Satoru Gojo grinned and slung an arm around Yuji's neck.

"Look at our boy Yuji. No registered identity. No background. Just 'died' not long ago, and even his Cursed Energy residue got scrubbed clean by Sukuna. If that's not perfect bait, I don't know what is."

Yuji stood straight. "I'll do it. How do I get in?"

"This place doesn't take walk-ins. You need to look like someone with nothing left to lose." Satoru Gojo pointed at Kento and Yu.

"Kento, Yu — your job is to disguise yourselves as yakuza debt collectors or black-hearted corporate enforcers. Drag this heavily-indebted piece of bait in through the front door like you own the place."

Kento adjusted his goggles. His tone didn't change by a single degree. "Demoted from Jujutsu Sorcerer to debt-collecting gangster, on my own time, babysitting an underage kid. Gojo-san, I think my salary is entirely insufficient for this level of torment."

"Nanami-senpai, come on, don't be so negative!"

Yu threw an arm around Kento's shoulders.

"Protecting our juniors is our responsibility as adults! And this is someone Toji-sensei has his eye on, no less. This is burning youth and bonds in action!"

Kento knocked Yu's arm off his shoulder with the back of his hand. "Don't quote that man's pyramid scheme at me. I am a rules-abiding member of society. That's all."

He turned to Yuji directly. "Kid. Once we're inside, if you run into something you can't handle, get behind me immediately. I'm the adult here. You are obligated to let me protect you. Understood?"

Yuji met his gaze and nodded hard.

"Understood. But I'm not just going to hide. I'll beat every last one of those bastards who treats human lives like toys."

Yu sidled over, still grinning. "Relax, Yuji! Kento's got the sharpest tongue in the room, but when it's time to cut something down, he's the most reliable person you'll ever stand behind.

And I'm here too. Pure attack power, sure, I can't match you two — but when it comes to staying alive? Even Toji-sensei called my Cursed Technique one-of-a-kind."

"Then let's move." Satoru Gojo waved a hand.

"The entrance address is in a hidden compartment on the back of the card. Have a pleasant evening. Oh, and if you find whoever's running the show, keep them breathing. I have questions for that old friend of mine who likes making arts and crafts out of people."

Yuji grabbed a grimy hooded jacket off a nearby seat, shrugged it on, and zipped it all the way up, the collar swallowing the lower half of his face.

The last trace of high-school softness vanished. What was left looked like someone who had spent years grinding it out at the bottom, sharp-edged and simmering.

Three hours later.

Tokyo, Shinjuku Ward. Underground drainage system, Level B4.

Even rats didn't last long down here.

Black wastewater thick with filth moved sluggishly through the ditch beside the passage. The pipes overhead dripped something sharp-smelling and unidentifiable at irregular intervals.

The three of them worked through seven or eight turns in the labyrinthine pipe network and arrived at the end of the passage.

A rusted iron door, 4 meters tall, sealed the way forward.

The surface was eaten through with dark red rust. Beneath it, dense layers of bloody handprints had dried and blackened into the metal, packed so close they overlapped. And right in the center of the door, painted in white lacquer, that same exaggerated grin stared back at them.

Kento stopped. He raised his right hand, wrapped to the knuckles in his necktie.

"Prepare for overtime."

➤ Next: Entering the Mission Instance