Jujutsu Kaisen — Chapter 113 - Staircase of Flesh and Blood

The iron gate clanged shut behind them.

Yuji and the other two were swept forward by the tide of bodies, shoved and pressed into the dark, narrow passage.

"Don't let panic consume you." Nanami's voice came low beside Yuji's ear. "Use your head. Observe."

Yuji nodded and forced the rage from moments ago back down.

He kept Junpei close, the boy's face had gone white as chalk, and followed the crowd out.

The next second, everyone stopped dead.

This was no game lobby.

It was a cavern. Enormous. Alive.

The walls were dark red flesh, constantly shifting and squirming, their surface coated in a slick, viscous membrane. The space opened like a massive funnel, and they were standing on flat ground at the very bottom.

At the center, a sacrificial altar rose over 10 meters tall, built from countless twisted bones and knotted chunks of flesh.

At its peak, a giant grinding maw ringed with razor-sharp teeth slowly opened and closed, filling the silence with a wet, grating crunch.

"What... what the hell is this place..." Yu Haibara's throat worked. His stomach lurched hard.

Then the flesh walls lit up.

Row after row of text, written in cold, ghastly white light.

[Participants: 527]

[Clear Condition: Reach the sole exit at the top of the cavern within the time limit (2 hours)]

[Ascension Method: Offer 'sacrifices' to the central 'altar' to activate the staircase to the next level]

[Note: The higher the 'quality' of the sacrifice, the more staircase steps are activated, and the longer they last]

"Sacrifices?" Someone in the crowd read the word out loud. Their voice was trembling.

Dead silence.

Then the panic hit like a burst dam.

"What does 'sacrifices' mean?! Are we supposed to kill each other?!"

"This can't be real, there's no way —"

A man with bloodshot eyes let out a sound that wasn't quite human. He lunged at the frail woman beside him and shoved her with everything he had, driving her toward the white-bone altar at the center.

"We're all going to die anyway! Might as well let me go up first!" His face was unhinged. Wild.

The woman's scream split the air.

That single act knocked over the first domino.

Survival instinct obliterated reason. The dozen or so people nearest the altar collapsed into each other in a frenzy. They grabbed whoever was closest, man, woman, old, young, and tried to hurl them forward as stepping stones.

The ugliest thing in human nature put itself on full display.

"Stop!"

Yuji Itadori's roar shook the cavern.

He moved.

The man who had shoved the woman barely registered a blur before an iron-grip hand clamped down on the back of his neck. One second later, a force that couldn't be resisted yanked him clean off the ground, one-handed.

"What were you..." Yuji's voice came out quiet. Low. But the chill in it reached bone. "...trying to do just now?"

"I — I —" The man's crotch went warm. A rank, hot trickle ran down his pant leg.

Yuji didn't give him another word. He swung his arm and threw the man like a bag of garbage into a protruding ridge of flesh wall. The man hit it with a dull, meaty thud and crumpled. Still.

Yuji stepped forward and planted himself between the crowd and the altar.

"Anyone else moves," He swept his gaze across the room. Every thug who had been snarling and brawling a second ago went rigid, like chickens with a hand around their throats. ", ends up just like him."

Nobody moved.

Yuji had settled the room with pure, direct force.

Kento Nanami hadn't spared the chaos a glance.

From the moment they'd entered, his eyes hadn't left the altar or the rules on the wall.

Sacrifices. Quality.

His mind moved fast.

The cursed spirit running this game fed on despair and panic. Whatever rules it had designed were built to herd participants toward slaughtering each other. "Murder as sacrifice" was almost certainly one of the intended answers.

It was also, without question, the trap. The highest cost. The lowest efficiency.

Nanami adjusted his goggles, stepped around the bodies still grappling on the ground, and walked straight toward the altar.

Yu Haibara fell in immediately, covering his flank.

"Mr. Nanami..." Junpei Yoshino grabbed the hem of Yuji's clothes, his whole body trembling. "Are we... are we all going to die here?"

"No." Yuji put a hand on his shoulder. His voice didn't waver. "Trust Nanami-senpai."

Their cursed energy was sealed. But Kento Nanami's steadiness, that particular, unshakeable composure of a grown man who had seen worse, settled over Yuji like an anchor dropping into deep water. Inexplicably, it held.

Nanami reached the altar.

Up close, the thing was worse than it looked from a distance.

He didn't look at the bones and flesh. He crouched and ran his eyes along the base instead, checking carefully.

There.

In one extremely well-hidden corner of the base, tucked beside a small groove, a symbol had been carved into the surface. A single drop of blood.

Nanami stood back up and scanned the rules on the wall again.

"Quality." That word could be read more than one way.

A hypothesis began to take shape.

"Haibara. Itadori." He turned and gestured them over.

Both closed in immediately.

"I may have found another way." Nanami pointed to the groove and laid out his reasoning in quick, precise sentences. "This game has to have constraints built in. There may be a path through cooperation."

"Cooperation?" Yu Haibara blinked. He glanced at the gamblers and thugs a few meters away, every one of them staring with eyes full of suspicion and barely contained aggression. "Get that crowd to cooperate?" It sounded harder than climbing a vertical cliff.

"High-stakes games always keep a safer option in reserve." Nanami's tone left no room for argument. "The host wants a spectacular show of despair. It doesn't want all its actors dead in the first five minutes. There's a back door built into this. There has to be."

"So what do we do?" Yuji asked.

"Someone needs to go first." Nanami looked at Yu Haibara.

Yu Haibara got it immediately.

He stepped forward without hesitating for even a second.

"Leave it to me."

The black-haired youth pulled in a slow, deep breath. Then his face opened into that easy, broad grin of his, the one that looked like sunlight.

He walked up to the group Yuji had cowed into stillness and raised both hands.

"Everyone! Please, just hear me out!"

Every eye in the room found him.

"I know you're all scared. I'm scared too." Yu Haibara's voice rang out honest and clear, the kind of voice that made people lean in without knowing why. "But killing each other is a dead end. That's exactly what the thing running this place wants to watch."

"We found a way that might not cost anyone's life. All we're asking for is a little bit of your trust."

He reached down, picked up a sharp sliver of bone from the ground, and without any hesitation, drew it hard across the palm of his left hand. Blood welled up immediately, dark and bright at once.

"Please, trust us. Just this once." Yu Haibara met the crowd's suspicious, frightened stares head-on, hitting each word with full weight. "We are not your enemies. The only enemy any of us has is the bastard who built this place."

"Let's get out of here. Together. Alive."

He turned and pressed his bleeding palm flat against the small groove at the base of the altar.

Blood traced the lines of his hand and dripped, slowly, into the hollow.

The crowd was silent.

Junpei Yoshino stared at Yu Haibara's back. Then he looked at Yuji, standing solid between him and the altar.

He bit down. He set his jaw. This boy, the one who had been pushed around his whole life, reached for courage for the very first time.

"I'll, I'll do it too!"

He rushed forward. He cut his own palm the same way Yu Haibara had and let the blood fall.

One. Two.

A mother near the back of the crowd stood frozen for a long moment. Then she walked forward.

One by one, more followed. Yu Haibara's honesty, Yuji's unmistakable strength, between the two, something tipped. Person after person chose to believe in what felt like a long shot.

When the 30th drop hit the groove, the entire altar let out a deep, resonant hum.

The grinding maw at the top went still.

A staircase extended from the altar's side and settled onto the platform with a solid, final weight.

"It worked!" Yu Haibara shouted, voice cracking with relief.

The crowd exploded. Cheers and sobs and voices all at once, the sound of people who had just pulled themselves back from the edge.

Kento Nanami did not relax.

The text on the flesh walls shifted.

[Warning: 'Blood Covenant' activated.]

[The vitality of the sacrificed is now bound to the staircase.]

The cheering stopped.

Every one of the 30 people who had offered their blood, including Yu Haibara and Junpei Yoshino, watched as shackle-like brands rose to the surface of their wrists.

Nanami's face went still and dark.

This was no staircase to freedom.

"We..." he said quietly. His voice carried something rare in it. Something close to grief.

"Have become the sacrifices."

➤ Next: Fists Destroy the Rules