Chapter 142 - Satoru Gojo, Subway Showdown

The elevator doors slid open with a harsh metallic screech. Satoru Gojo stepped onto the Fukutoshin Line platform, one hand in his pocket. What greeted him was a living hell. Hundreds of non-sorcerers packed the wide platform, shoulder to shoulder, faces blank and hollow. They were crammed into every inch of available space like sardines bundled into a corner, no room to move, barely room to breathe.

Nobody spoke. Even their breathing was careful. In the center of the crowd, three inhuman monsters stood in a triangular formation, every eye fixed on the white-haired young man who had just walked in. The small volcano atop Jogo's head vented acrid sulfurous smoke. Hanami held a deadwood staff. Choso stood expressionless at the rear, hands already forming seals.

"Finally showed up, Satoru Gojo."

Jogo bared his teeth. Mad, feverish delight erupted from his single eye. "Why are you alone? That monkey Toji Fushiguro didn't tag along? Oh, right — he can't even make it through the barrier outside!"

Satoru Gojo didn't bother responding. His azure eyes swept the platform through his lenses, cold and unhurried. Too many people. These scumbags had picked an extremely clever battlefield.

"Don't bother looking!" Jogo cackled, throwing his arm out at the dense crowd around them, arrogance naked on his face. "The space in here is exactly this size! The moment you use your Cursed Technique, every single one of these monkeys gets shredded into paste! Go on, then! Can you do it?! Can you bring yourself to pull that trigger?!"

Satoru Gojo pushed his sunglasses up the bridge of his nose. The noise. Did these sewer-crawling pieces of garbage have some strange idea about who he was? Did they honestly think a handful of civilians could tie his hands?

"You went through all this trouble to lure me into a place where I can't use wide-range techniques..."

His lips curved into something cruel. He didn't even glance at Jogo's threat.

"Just to pick out a nicer grave for yourselves?"

Since you're in such a hurry to die, come at me all at once. He rolled his neck.

CRACK!

Terrifying Cursed Energy detonated outward like something solid, fracturing the subway station's floor tiles into countless web-like cracks in an instant. Shards of rubble began to float, rising slowly against gravity. The battle erupted. Jogo struck first. He didn't open with the wide volcanic inferno he usually relied on. Instead, he spread his arms wide.

WHOOSH! WHOOSH—WHOOSH!

Dozens of winged Sonic Ember Insects burst from his sleeves, their bodies wreathed in searing, high-temperature flames. They didn't fly straight. They dove directly into the packed civilian crowd, weaving madly through the gaps between bodies, boring toward Satoru Gojo through the mass of people. The nearest civilians didn't even have time to scream. Their hair and clothes ignited on contact with the heat.

Satoru Gojo's eyes went cold. Right foot drove into the ground. His figure vanished.

BANG. BANG. BANG.

He flickered through the crowd, fingers snapping out precise bursts of Cursed Energy bullets, shattering the insects one by one as they closed in. But the Sonic Ember Insects were fast, and they used the civilians as living cover the entire time. One misstep and the people around him would be blown to pieces.

"What's wrong, what's wrong?! Is this all the strongest has got?! Dodge! Keep dodging!" Jogo laughed, throwing out another wave of insects.

The ground lurched before he finished speaking.

BOOM!

Hanami surged Cursed Energy through the earth. Thick, massive tree roots erupted from the ground. They didn't go for Satoru Gojo directly. They moved like tentacles, brutally sweeping up five or six civilians who'd collapsed to the floor in terror. Hanami swung them like weapons. The screaming bodies hurtled through the air straight at Satoru Gojo.

Satoru Gojo had just cleared the last wave of insects. He turned his head. Several living, screaming people were already in his face. Tsk. Genuinely disgusting.

He couldn't activate Cursed Technique Reversal: Red to blast them away. The repulsive force would liquify their organs before they hit the wall. He had no choice but to kill his offensive stance entirely, using micro-precision Limitless to generate a razor-thin buffer at his fingertips. Both hands extended in rapid sequence. He caught each hurled civilian, stripped their momentum, and set them down to the side.

"Now eat this!"

Jogo caught the exact moment Satoru Gojo's hands were full and pressed his palms together. A massive molten fireball coalesced above the crowd and came crashing down. Satoru Gojo teleported into it. He took it with his body, crushing the fireball apart in mid-air.

Sparks and scalding debris rained into the crowd. Civilians screamed, bolted in every direction, and slammed straight into the barrier sealing the platform. They had nowhere to go. The stampede crushed in on itself.

"HA HA HA HA!" Jogo jabbed a finger at Satoru Gojo, tangled up in the chaos, unable to throw a single real strike. "So what if you're the strongest?! Drag you down with these monkeys and you've got nothing! Look at you — running around like a stupid dog putting out fires!"

The three Special Grades had abandoned any pretense of a real fight. This was a war of attrition. Utterly without dignity. They were using his need to protect civilians as a leash and yanking it from every direction at once. Satoru Gojo moved constantly through flame and root and screaming bodies. On the surface, he looked harried. Overwhelmed. Locked into pure defense. But his face was blank.

His azure Six Eyes ran at full speed. Torrents of information poured into his brain, tracking Cursed Energy flow, mapping Jogo and Hanami's positions to the millimeter. This style of fighting was suffocating. He'd be the first to admit it. But it also meant that these two idiots, focused entirely on keeping their attacks from hitting each other, were slowly drifting closer together. Just a little more.

A bit closer. The prey was almost inside the trap.

"Die!"

Jogo watched Satoru Gojo catch another thrown civilian. Something vicious flashed in his eye. Now. This was it. He shot forward like a cannonball. A massive, arrogant tongue of molten lava thrust straight at Satoru Gojo's face. Right at that instant, Satoru Gojo dropped Limitless. The invisible spatial barrier protecting him disappeared completely. He charged forward with nothing but bare flesh and bone, straight into Jogo's lava tongue.

Jogo's heart surged. Limitless deactivated?! So it was true, under that brutal micro-control load and the constant drain of protecting civilians, his Cursed Energy output had finally hit the wall!

"Go to hell, Satoru Gojo!"

Blinding molten red light exploded from Jogo's palms. Heat that could melt steel. He drove both hands at Satoru Gojo's skull with everything he had. Land this clean, and even the strongest loses half his head. Contact. Jogo felt the heat against his palm. Then his single eye blew wide open. Nothing there.

Satoru Gojo had slipped sideways at a speed that human bone structure had no business achieving, a tenth of a second, a lateral glide that brushed past Jogo's palm close enough to feel the heat. Then his hands shot out. Both pressed down on Jogo's shoulders and drove him down hard.

Right leg came up at the knee like a hydraulic piston, loaded with berserk kinetic force, and drove straight into Jogo's face.

CRACK!

A bone-splitting sound that crawled across every scalp in the station. Jogo's nasal bridge and half his face caved in. Nosebleed and scalding magma mixed together and sprayed from his face in every direction.

"AH—!"

Jogo screamed and staggered backward. Satoru Gojo didn't follow. He stayed where he was, shook the blood off his trouser leg with one casual flick, and watched. He curled the corner of his mouth. His eyes held nothing but cold madness.

"That's how it is, then."

He looked at Jogo cradling his face and Hanami frozen beside him. His voice dropped to something that barely had warmth left in it.

"To neutralize my Limitless, you used an advanced technique called Domain Amplification. Wrap the domain around your body like a film of water and you can actually touch me. It's a solid trick."

Through the searing pain, a wave of shock crashed through Jogo. How did he see through it that fast?!

"But..." Satoru Gojo stepped forward and twisted his wrist. His knuckles cracked one by one.

"When you're using Amplification, maintaining the volume means you can't simultaneously use your own Innate Techniques. Isn't that right?"

Jogo and Hanami both went perfectly still, like they'd been dropped into ice water.

"No techniques?" Satoru Gojo's grin stretched wide, the grin of something that had no business being this happy about what came next. "When it comes to taijutsu, I'm half a student of that muscle-brained idiot myself. Did you actually think I was some sheltered rich boy who only fights with his abilities?"

The floor tiles beneath his feet exploded into powder.

BANG!

A sonic boom cracked the air where he'd been standing. Satoru Gojo appeared in front of Jogo as a white afterimage. One instant absent, the next instant there. Jogo didn't even get his hands up. Satoru Gojo seized the small volcano on top of Jogo's head and locked on.

"You—"

"Too slow."

He turned and sprinted toward the load-bearing wall of the platform, dragging Jogo's head behind him like a man hauling a dead dog by the scruff.

SCREEE!

Jogo's face met concrete at high speed. Satoru Gojo ran the full length of the platform. Jogo's face plowed a bloody scorch trail more than 10 meters long across the wall, sparks, pulverized stone, and magma blasting outward in a continuous spray.

"UGHHHAAAAAH!" The scream warped and broke as Jogo's skull ground against the surface.

BOOM!

End of the wall. Satoru Gojo swung him off the ground and hammered him straight down into the platform's cement floor. The ground thundered. A crater opened up. Most of Jogo's bones had been reduced to rubble. He lay twitching at the bottom of the hole like a broken thing, unable to form a single word. Satoru Gojo didn't look at him again.

He turned his head slowly and found Hanami, already moving in from the far side, trying to close the distance. Hanami's massive frame jolted. Not good. It dropped Domain Amplification immediately, trying to get its Innate Technique back online and raise a wall of thick Cursed Wood to slow him down. Several sharp wooden spikes burst from the ground. They didn't finish extending. Too late.

Satoru Gojo blurred. He broke the sound barrier and materialized directly in front of Hanami's face. No technique bombardment. No Cursed Technique Lapse: Blue, no Cursed Technique Reversal: Red. In this narrow, crowd-packed space, Satoru Gojo abandoned Cursed Technique output entirely. He became something else: something that moved on pure physical force alone and hit like a disaster.

Fists and feet blurred into dense afterimages. Every strike landed on Hanami's hardened shell.

BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG!

Each impact detonated with a noise that shook the walls. Cursed Energy behind every punch amplified the kinetic force to a level that defied reason. Hanami's defensive armor, the shell that had shrugged off Special Grade Cursed Tools, started coming apart under the barrage. CRACK. The left shoulder armor split. BANG. A section of its chest caved in.

Hanami's enormous body left the ground, momentum stripped entirely. It hung suspended in mid-air, taking the storm of hits with nothing to show for it. Satoru Gojo's eyes were flat. Murderously, completely flat.

"Dodge."

He grabbed the two thick branches jutting from Hanami's eye sockets.

"You were pretty good at jumping around when you were using those people as shields a minute ago, weren't you?"

Hanami felt it then, the real thing, pure and undiluted. Not pain. Fear. It thrashed. It tried to gather Cursed Energy in its hands and fight back. Satoru Gojo gave it no room to form seals. His knee drove upward and shattered both of Hanami's wrists in one clean strike.

He kept his grip on those two branches, pulled Hanami's head toward him, and dropped his voice to almost nothing.

"Did you think I wouldn't dare to kill..."

The muscles in his arm pulled taut.

"Or did you think you were actually strong?"

The sound of wood tearing, long and grinding.

CRACK!

"AAAAAAAAAAAAH!"

The worst scream Hanami had ever made in its entire existence tore out of it. The two core Cursed Wood branches at its eye sockets, Satoru Gojo ripped them out by the roots with his bare hands. Dark green sap erupted like a severed artery, pouring across his chest and shoulders. He dropped the broken branches on the ground. Raised his foot. Lined it up with Hanami's head.

One stomp to end it. Finish the Special Grade for good. Half a second of stillness. In that half second, Choso moved. He'd been motionless at the rear this entire fight, watching, waiting. Now his eyes snapped open. Both hands thrust forward, seals locked against his chest.

"Blood Manipulation: Piercing Blood!"

➤ Next: Unlimited Void, 0.2 Seconds of Slaughter