Jujutsu Kaisen — Chapter 110 - Entering the Mission Instance

A blinding white spotlight cut into their eyes. Several figures in red work uniforms, faces hidden behind oversized plastic grinning masks, stepped into their path.

"Invitation. Identity verification."

The lead masked man held out his hand. His voice came out hollow, like something filtered through a tin can.

Kento Nanami unwound the tie from his right hand and stuffed it in his pocket, snapping back into the role, the blank, businesslike demeanor of a debt collector who'd seen it all. He slapped the black card into the man's palm.

"This brat owes our group fifty million. Someone said we could turn this deadbeat into cash here. You buying or not?"

His tone was flat and cold. He shoved the bound Yuji Itadori forward.

Yu Haibara stepped into character instantly, driving his foot into the back of Itadori's knee.

"Stay still! Try running again and I'll break both your legs!"

Itadori stumbled forward with the momentum. He used the motion to duck his head, and the corner of his mouth twitched.

Haibara-senpai's kick actually hurt.

The masked man checked the black card, then swept an infrared scanner over Itadori from head to toe.

"No contraband. Go ahead."

He handed back the card and tossed three transparent plastic bags their way.

Haibara untied the rough hemp rope from Itadori's wrists, took the bags, and pulled them open.

All three went still.

Each bag held one stale, bone-dry croissant and one small, completely unlabeled bottle of water.

Plus a single plastic chip stamped with a grinning clown face.

At the center of the chip, in red: "100."

"What's this supposed to mean?" Haibara turned the weightless chip between his fingers. "Pocket change?"

Itadori tore open the packaging and bit into the croissant. It crumbled into dry flakes the moment it hit his teeth and nearly choked him.

He could understand handing out food to people who'd come here to risk their lives. But arcade tokens?

"Don't touch anything yet." Nanami stopped Haibara from biting into his bread with the back of his hand, eyes already moving across the space.

They'd cleared the security checkpoint. They were inside.

The scale of this place made no sense.

The ceiling soared at least 30 meters overhead. Every wall was cold gray-white concrete, bare, hard, unbroken. Spread out across a space the size of a football pitch, packed shoulder to shoulder, were people.

A thousand? Two thousand?

Homeless men wrapped in rotting bedding. Bankrupt office workers in shredded suits. Street thugs with cheap tattoos running up their necks.

Shouting. Cursing. Somewhere, a woman was crying. The noise layered into a din that pressed against the skull.

This was not a normal underground facility.

Nanami shoved both hands into his pockets and began forming hand seals with his fingers inside the fabric, quietly reaching for his Cursed Energy.

Nothing.

The Cursed Energy that usually answered like an extension of his own limbs sat completely inert. Something locked it in place, some absolute rule he couldn't push through.

"Something's wrong." Nanami moved half a step closer to the other two, voice dropping to just beneath the noise. "This place is a fully formed Innate Domain. The spatial laws have been rewritten."

Haibara's throat worked.

A Domain. They hadn't even laid eyes on whoever was running this, and the scale was already this.

"The problem," Nanami continued, "is that Cursed Energy is under a forced seal within this space. I can't produce a single technique."

Itadori swallowed the bread.

Cursed Energy sealed.

So it was pure close combat, then.

Something in his chest loosened. He almost felt like smiling.

Every day, Teacher Toji had pushed him to his limits, wasn't that exactly the point? To let him crush everything with nothing but his body?

When it came to raw physical force, he was already a monster who could grind Grade 1 Cursed Spirits into the pavement.

"Before we understand the rules, stay low." Nanami glanced at Itadori. The look was a warning directed at someone who was clearly itching to start something.

He nodded toward the thickest part of the crowd.

"You two take the east side. I'll take the west. Use whatever method you need — pull useful intel and be back here in 15 minutes."

They split without another word.

Itadori tucked his hands into his hoodie pocket and threaded his way through the gaps in the crowd, head down.

Every glance that landed on him was the same, naked, unhidden, hostile.

No law here. No morality. Just survival, stripped bare.

He was still moving when sounds reached him from a shadowed corner ahead. The muffled thud of blows. A man snarling.

"Hand over the chips! Now!"

"I haven't eaten all day — the water and bread are mine!"

Itadori stopped.

3 bald men with full-sleeve tattoos had a scrawny, black-haired teenager pinned against the wall. The kid wore long bangs that fell over the right side of his face and a high school uniform gone gray with grime. He was holding onto his plastic bag like it was all he had left.

"That's my goddamn entry fee. You won't give it up?"

The lead thug wound back and swung his fist straight at the boy's head.

The boy squeezed his eyes shut.

BANG!

The fist stopped in midair.

Itadori's right hand had locked around the thug's wrist.

"Taking someone else's stuff." His voice was easy. "Not cool."

He applied a little force.

CRACK!

A sharp, sickening snap of bone.

The thug screamed. "AHHH! Let go! Who the hell are you!"

The other two drew rusty daggers from their waistbands and rushed him.

Itadori didn't turn around.

His left leg shot out, two kicks in sequence, landing clean on both of their stomachs.

THUD. THUD.

2 grown men became projectiles. They slammed into a concrete pillar 4 meters back like torn burlap sacks, immediately vomited, and crumpled, eyes rolled white, out cold.

The one whose wrist Itadori still held had gone completely limp. A spreading dark stain soaked through the front of his pants.

"Get lost."

Itadori let go.

The man scrambled away on his hands and knees, left his 2 companions behind, and disappeared into the crowd.

Itadori dusted off his hands and turned to look at the boy still huddled against the wall.

He was shaking. All of him.

His name was Junpei Yoshino. He'd been someone's target his whole life. Not once, not a single time, had anyone stepped in for him.

This pink-haired guy. Was he even human?

"You alright?" Itadori picked up the plastic bag that had fallen and held it out to Junpei.

Junpei took it in a daze. His lips moved twice before sound came out. "Thank you. Thank you."

The noise nearby had drawn attention. Nanami and Haibara pushed through the crowd and arrived one after the other.

Nanami looked at the 2 bodies on the ground. Then at Itadori. He shook his head.

"Made a friend?" Haibara leaned in, grinning at Junpei.

Junpei, ringed by all 3 of them, backed up half a step on instinct.

Itadori held up his chip and got straight to it. "Hey — what's going on in here? What's this thing actually for?"

Junpei clutched his plastic bag. He looked at Itadori, then Nanami, then Haibara. It was obvious, these 3 had no idea where they were.

He swallowed.

"This place," he said, barely above a whisper, "is a slaughterhouse. You have to survive for 7 days."

Nanami gestured for him to continue.

"Everyone gets 1 chip when they enter — 100 Paradise Coins. That's your only proof of existence here."

Junpei dropped his voice even lower and pointed up.

All 3 of them looked.

At the center of the ceiling, suspended more than 20 meters overhead, hung a massive transparent glass cube. Floodlights blazed against it. Inside, bundle after bundle of ten-thousand-yen bills were stacked to the top.

A small mountain made of money.

"You see that box?" Junpei's jaw was tight. "The people running this promised: survive all 7 days, and every Paradise Coin left in your possession gets multiplied by a hundred thousand and paid out in cash."

100 coins. Times a hundred thousand. Ten million yen.

"Nothing's ever free." Nanami's voice was flat as ice.

"No." Junpei nodded. "Staying alive here isn't simple. At noon every day, the system automatically deducts 20 coins per person, a 'basic lodging fee.' Food, water, finding anywhere halfway clean to sleep, everything costs coins."

He held up the stale bread in his hand. "This costs a hundred yen outside. In here, it's 5 coins."

20 auto-deducted per day. 100 to start.

No eating, no drinking, you'd still only last 5 days.

Itadori's chest rose and fell. He forced out a slow breath. "What happens when someone's count hits zero?"

Junpei's lips had gone pale. His whole body was trembling now and couldn't stop.

"Elimination."

"I watched it on the first day. A few people who'd run out of coins, the micro-bomb in their neck just... went off. Nothing left. Not a single intact piece of them."

Goosebumps crawled up Haibara's arm all at once.

"Run out?" Nanami locked onto that. "How do you run out?"

"Games." Junpei pointed toward the heavy iron doors at the far end of the hall, all of them sealed shut. "Random announcements throughout the day. Different survival games. Win, and you earn coins. Lose,"

He didn't finish.

"If you want to stay alive, if you don't want to starve, you can't afford not to play."

---

At the same time.

At the highest point of the underground complex, inside a black monitoring room, screens covered every wall. They threw off a cold blue glow in the dark.

3 of the main displays had Yuji Itadori in frame from different angles, locked and tracking.

On every one of them, the same footage looped in slow motion: a pink-haired boy dropping a full-grown man with a single kick.

A swivel chair rolled forward.

Mahito was sprawled in it cross-legged, loose casual clothes, completely at ease. He watched the screen with his mouth stretched open in a grin, his whole body shaking with laughter. The stitching across his face twisted with every convulsion.

"Hahahaha! Now THAT is interesting!"

He jabbed a finger at Itadori's image on the screen.

"This kid is a straight-up monster! What are his bones even made of?"

He spun the chair around to face the figure standing in the shadows.

Kenjaku stood there in that unmistakable kasaya, a remote control turning idly in his fingers.

His gaze was fixed on the screens, on Kento Nanami and Yu Haibara, moving through the crowd.

The corner of his mouth curved.

"Satoru Gojo's instincts are as sharp as ever."

He set the remote down on the table.

"Sent the Jujutsu High flies to stir things up, and this quickly."

➤ Next: Probing and Game Escalation