Jujutsu Kaisen — Chapter 114 - Fists Destroy the Rules
The blood-red handcuff marks materialized out of thin air and tightened, cold and merciless, snuffing out the last flicker of hope that had just ignited in those thirty blood donors.
"What does this mean? What the hell does this mean!"
"We did what it asked! Why is this still happening!"
The crowd's panic detonated. Desperate screams bounced off the cavern walls and came back wrong, shredded and hollow.
The staircase of light was no longer a way out. It was a noose, hanging over every single person in the room.
The nearly 500 who hadn't given blood yet were staring at the thirty "hostages" now. Fear and greed, tangled together, carved into every face.
The organizer's intent couldn't have been more obvious. Force the remaining crowd to attack the thirty in a scramble for the staircase, or destroy it in the chaos, trigger the reckoning, and drag everyone down together.
It wanted fireworks. The kind lit by betrayal and slaughter.
"Bastard..."
Yuji Itadori's teeth ground together hard enough to hear. The fury in his chest was close to burning out everything else.
"Calm down, Itadori."
Nanami pressed down on his shoulder, grip steady and sure.
"Anger is exactly what it wants."
His gaze swept across the staircase, then locked onto the walls. They never stopped moving, that slow, organic writhing, like something breathing.
He had noticed it earlier: when the distant crowd's panic sent tremors through the cavern, the flesh walls rippled. Not structurally. Not with any domain logic behind it.
Like water disturbed by a stone.
The domain's core rule was a game. But the walls themselves, they seemed to be nothing more than a physical construct.
And anything physical could be destroyed.
"The organizer wants us to play at its table."
Nanami's voice was quiet. It still cut through every other sound in the room.
"It never said we couldn't flip the table."
He turned to Yuji Itadori. His eyes were knife-sharp.
"Itadori. That wall. Can your fists open a way through it?"
Itadori followed his gaze up toward the cavern ceiling. A grin spread across his face, white teeth and pure menace.
"Piece of cake."
"Good."
Nanami nodded, then looked over at Yu Haibara.
"Haibara. Calm the crowd. Make them believe us. This is the only way everyone walks out alive."
"Yes!"
Yu Haibara nodded hard, no hesitation.
He opened his mouth to call out.
Itadori was already moving.
He walked to the cavern wall and dropped into a low stance. The ground under his feet cracked apart.
BOOM!
He launched like a cannonball, straight up, and hit the vertical flesh wall running. His feet found purchase on the sheer surface with savage, practiced ease.
Ten meters. Fifteen. He kept climbing.
Then he stopped, drew his right arm back, muscles corded and rising under his skin, and drove his fist into the wall with everything he had.
The impact was a low, concussive thunder that rolled through the entire cavern. The whole wall shuddered.
A crater. Half a meter deep, punched clean into the flesh by one hit.
He used it as a foothold. And hit it again.
Then again.
In the most brutally unreasonable way imaginable, on a sheer vertical wall with nothing to stand on, Yuji Itadori carved a staircase with his bare fists.
Silence fell over the cavern like a guillotine.
Every mouth hung open. Nobody breathed.
Itadori dropped back to the ground, landed clean, and flicked the mucus off his hands.
"Path's open."
His eyes swept the crowd, burning steady.
"Single file. One at a time." His voice was even. "Anyone cuts in line. Anyone touches the person next to them."
He let the pause sit for a moment.
"I'll throw them onto that altar myself and let the monsters have them."
Absolute violence. Absolute order.
Yu Haibara was already sprinting into the center of the crowd, lungs full.
"You all saw it! We have a way out! We don't have to survive by selling each other out!" His voice cracked at the edges but held. "Let's walk out of this hell together — every single one of us — alive!"
Junpei Yoshino stared at the passage carved by fists. Then he looked at Itadori standing in front of him, this thing that looked like a human and moved like a force of nature.
He was the first one to walk to Yu Haibara's side.
The people around him exchanged glances. The wariness that had been wound so tight it was almost a weapon finally loosened. One by one, they made their choice.
They chose the unreasonable strength.
They moved to Yu Haibara's side.
...
In the monitoring room, the Gear Cursed Spirit stared at the screen. The gears on its head ground together with a high-pitched, metallic shriek.
"Wrong. This isn't how the script goes. You're supposed to tear each other apart in despair!" The shriek climbed. "Disobedient insects!"
It slammed both hands onto the control console and forced a rule override.
[SYSTEM WARNING: All participants who ascend by means other than the Blood and Flesh Staircase are in violation. Erasure protocol initiated.]
The command went out.
CRACKLE!
Every screen in the monitoring room burst into white noise. A massive wave of backlash came roaring back through the system and slammed into the Gear Cursed Spirit like a freight train.
"AAAAAHHH—!"
Forcibly rewriting a domain's foundational rules had one outcome: core logic collapse.
BOOM!
Inside the cavern, the bone altar and the staircase of light flickered violently, then came apart. The collapse shook the walls.
In the same instant, every person in the cavern felt it. A pressure, lifted. A door, opened.
Their Cursed Energy came flooding back.
Kento Nanami ripped his tie free and wrapped it around his right hand in 3 quick loops.
"Overtime has begun."
"AAAAAHHH! Insects! I'll tear every last one of you to pieces!"
The backlash had broken something in the Gear Cursed Spirit. It crawled out from the altar's wreckage, unhinged and screeching. The flesh walls split open on all sides, and low-grade cursed spirits came pouring out in a tide.
"Everyone! Up the steps, now!"
"Cursed Technique — Full Alert!"
Yu Haibara threw his arms wide. A vast golden barrier expanded outward, a wall of light surrounding the civilians.
The low-grade cursed spirits hit it like a wave hitting rock. They clawed and hammered and got nowhere.
The crowd didn't wait. They climbed.
The Gear Cursed Spirit's main body found Nanami in the chaos and swung a claw.
A flash of pink.
Itadori was already there. He hit the First Gate and took the strike head-on, arms locked, the impact driving him back an inch and no more.
"Your opponent is me!"
"Its weak point," Nanami shouted, cutting down a cursed spirit in the same motion, "is the grinding port at the top of the altar!"
Itadori blew apart the flesh-mountain blocking his path with one punch. But even with the First Gate open, it wasn't enough. Too many of them, too dense, the encirclement closing back in faster than he could punch through it.
Yu Haibara couldn't hold the barrier forever. It was already costing him.
Faster. He needed to be faster.
Stronger.
Itadori's eyes went red. His skeleton screamed under the load, every bone protesting what was coming next.
He asked for more anyway.
"Eight Gates Released Formation, Second Gate, Gate of Rest! OPEN!"
BOOM!
Green steam erupted from his body in a torrent. His muscles swelled past their limit, veins rising across his arms and neck like cables pulled taut, coiling under his skin like something alive.
He hit the ground with one foot and vanished.
A green afterimage hung in the air where he'd been standing.
The next instant, he was behind the flesh-mountain cursed spirit. Already in the air. Already falling.
"Divergent Fist!"
The punch landed.
The hill-sized cursed spirit didn't crack. It didn't buckle.
It detonated. The force punched straight through it from the inside out, and what had been a mountain of flesh became a red downpour that filled the cavern from floor to ceiling.
"Well done!"
Nanami was already moving, driving hard toward the base of the altar.
"Pull it down!"
Itadori hit the ground in front of the altar, wrapped both hands around its base, and pulled. The tendons in his back stood out like cables. The veins in his neck rose.
The altar groaned.
Then it tore free. Dozens of tons, dragged out of the stone floor by two hands and a spine that simply refused to quit.
Now.
Nanami launched himself skyward. The short blade in his hand crackled with deep black lightning, pulsing and wrong and beautiful.
Black Flash.
"Ten-Stroke Cursed Technique: Ratio Collapse!"
The blade drove precisely into the Gear Cursed Spirit's open, screaming mouth. The black lightning detonated. The cursed spirit came apart. The altar chunk went with it.
Nothing remained.
...
In the darkened monitoring room, Kenjaku watched the main screen go dark. His expression didn't change.
"What a foolish creation."
He picked up a small crystal from the console, purple-black and dense with collected negative emotion, and tossed it over his shoulder without looking.
"Time to go. Making it to a second phase was already more than this deserved."
Mahito caught the crystal. His eyes stayed on the screen. On the pink-haired boy still trailing green steam, standing in the wreckage.
"Don't be in such a rush."
His mouth split open.
"That brat's soul," Mahito said, and something like hunger moved through his voice. "The shape of it is so interesting. I want to go down there and touch it myself."
He was still smiling when his silhouette dissolved into the shadows on the floor.
Inside the cavern, the fight was over.
Yuji Itadori exhaled. His hands hung at his sides. He could feel the Second Gate fading, the green steam thinning.
Then the cold hit him.
From the bottom up. Bone-deep and wrong, climbing through the soles of his feet before he could name what it was.
He snapped his head down.
A pale hand, stitched with jagged suture lines, was rising slowly from the shadow beneath his feet.
Reaching for his ankle.
➤ Next: Mahito's Domain Expansion