Chapter 143 - Unlimited Void, 0.2 Seconds of Slaughter

A dark red line of blood tore through the air with a sonic crack, driving straight for the back of Satoru Gojo's head. Choso stared at that white-clad back, unblinking. A hit. At this range, even the strongest couldn't dodge it. Pierce his brain, and today's whole gambit was won. But. The blood arrow stopped in midair. Limitless snapped open in an instant.

Satoru Gojo didn't even turn his head. He stayed exactly as he was: head lowered, right foot pinned hard against Hanami's chest, both hands still gripping the two broken branch-roots he'd just ripped out. He tilted his head a fraction, watching the blood arrow bleed out its momentum against the barrier.

"That's all you've got?" His voice was flat. "You sewer-crawling things — are sneak attacks really all you know?"

Hanami was going insane beneath his boot. Dark green fluid gushed from the hollow craters where its eyes had been. The shrieking was ear-splitting. So noisy. Satoru Gojo's eyelids dropped slightly. Not a shred of pity in his gaze. This kind of garbage, not even human, dared dream of overturning the world?

"It's over."

He raised his right foot. Pale blue Cursed Energy compressed at the sole, converging, building, until the blinding light lit up the entire dim platform.

From the rubble a dozen meters away, Jogo's single eye went wide. He screamed himself hoarse: "No! Stop! Satoru Gojo!"

BOOM!

Satoru Gojo stomped down. The Cursed Energy detonated like a high-explosive shell, punching straight through Hanami's armored chest and obliterating the core buried deep inside with surgical precision. The shrieking cut off.

Hanami's massive body locked up. Then, like a sandcastle left in the wind, it began to crumble from the chest outward, inch by inch, breaking apart and dissolving into ash that drifted across the platform in dark clouds. One of the Four Great Disasters, the Forest Cursed Spirit Hanami, completely exorcised. Silence. The only sound left on the Fukutoshin Line platform was the muffled sobbing of civilians.

Jogo stumbled backward, step after step. Pure terror filled his single eye. A monster. What kind of monster was this? His Cursed Technique had been sealed, he'd been surrounded by humans used as meat shields, and he had still beaten a Special Grade Cursed Spirit to death with his bare fists.

They had absorbed so much resentment, so much fear. Why, in front of this man, did they still shatter like glass? Hanami hadn't even been able to struggle. Then, from deep in the subway tunnel, a metallic screech scraped through the darkness.

"Gegegege..."

Sick laughter, arrogant and unhinged, rolled through the black tunnel like an echo from somewhere rotting.

WHOOOM!

An old subway train howled out of the dark. Brakes screamed against the rails. The carriages jolted to a stop beside the platform. Satoru Gojo turned his head. Behind his sunglasses, his brow creased. The windows were covered in faces. Twisted, pressed-flat faces. Transfigured Humans, hundreds of them, packed into the carriages and snarling like animals through the glass. BANG. The doors blew open.

They poured out like a dam collapsing: thousands of Transfigured Humans, clawing over each other, hurling themselves straight at the civilians who'd already been too terrified to move.

"Help!"

"Stay back! Stay back! AAAH—!"

Screams shredded the quiet in an instant. Several Transfigured Humans wrenched their jaws open wide enough to split their faces, clamped down on a man's arm, and pulled in opposite directions, tearing.

"HAHAHAHA! Wonderful! This is wonderful!"

Mahito was perched on top of the train, leaning out over the edge, his suture-lined face stretched into a grin of pure, delirious joy. He looked down at the ash on the ground where Hanami had been, not afraid, not even close. He was practically dancing.

"Hanami's dead? Truly worthy of the strongest! Those fists really do hit hard!"

He kicked a Transfigured Human off the roof without looking, eyes locked on Satoru Gojo.

"This is the gift I made especially for you! A full thousand Transfigured Humans — and all these helpless little monkeys with nowhere to run!"

Mahito threw his arms wide like a conductor raising his baton over an orchestra pit.

"Come on, Satoru Gojo! Let's find out — are you faster saving them, or am I faster killing them?"

Disgusting. Satoru Gojo watched the hellscape in front of him. Cold. Still. Blood and severed limbs were everywhere. The civilians had nowhere to go in the cramped underground space; they were being tackled, pinned, torn apart. Jogo and Choso had already slipped back to Mahito's side. Three Special Grades, sheltered behind a wall of writhing bodies, completely at ease. Use Cursed Technique Lapse: Blue? No.

The attraction force would pull the civilians and the monsters into each other and grind them all to pieces. Cursed Technique Reversal: Red? Worse. In an enclosed underground space, the shockwave would liquefy everyone's organs. These rats had done the math. They'd bet he wouldn't cut loose down here. They'd bet he couldn't protect all of them. But I am, after all, the strongest.

Satoru Gojo slowly raised his right hand. Index finger crossed over middle finger. Jogo saw the gesture. His single eye shrank to a pinpoint.

"Impossible!" He was screaming. "Has he lost his mind?! Opening a Domain here will fry every last monkey's brain instantly! He doesn't care if they live?!"

Choso froze too, instinct pulling him backward.

Mahito's eyes went wide with hunger. He jabbed a finger downward, shrieking: "Do it! Do it! Show me how the strongest kills all his little monkeys himself!"

Satoru Gojo didn't look at any of them. His brain was already running past its limits. The Six Eyes tore apart everything in his field of vision, every living body, every current of Cursed Energy, every fold of spatial structure, and reduced it all to data. What's the threshold for an ordinary person inside Unlimited Void? Half a second? Permanent brain damage. 0.3 seconds? Vegetative state. 0.2 seconds.

Only 0.2 seconds. The absolute ceiling of what a human brain could absorb before it broke. A thread of blood slipped from the corner of Satoru Gojo's mouth. The price of overclocking his brain hard enough to control the Domain's duration to the millisecond.

"Domain Expansion."

His voice was low, detonating across the noise of the platform like something final.

"Unlimited Void."

BOOM!

Black and white: a cosmos born in an instant, swallowing the entire station whole, three Special Grades, over a thousand Transfigured Humans, every last civilian, all of it pulled inside. Absolute silence. Time stopped meaning anything.

Information cascaded down like a broken dam, a flood with no shore, pouring into every mind at once: sight, sound, smell, thought, every sense blown open and magnified without limit, until the brain had nothing left to give. 0.2 seconds. Just 0.2 seconds. The black-and-white cosmos burst like a soap bubble. Gone as if it had never been. Thud. Thud. Thud.

The civilians dropped. All of them at once, crumpling like puppets with cut strings, unconscious before they hit the ground. The Special Grade Cursed Spirits and the transfigured monsters didn't fare better; their brain structures were different from humans, which only meant the Soul Paralysis went deeper. Jogo stood with his mouth hanging open. Single eye blank. Body locked solid, as if he'd been poured into concrete.

The grin on Mahito's face had simply stopped, frozen there, expression preserved like an insect in amber. Over a thousand Transfigured Humans, mid-lunge and mid-bite, went rigid where they stood. The entire platform had become a gallery of grotesque statues. Five minutes. That was what the Six Eyes had calculated.

Special Grade Cursed Spirits needed roughly five to six minutes to claw their way back from 0.2 seconds inside Unlimited Void. Enough. Satoru Gojo dragged in a ragged breath and raised one hand to wipe the dark blood from his nose. Tearing pain split through his skull. He ignored it. Before these rats woke up, the field had to be clean.

CRACK!

The floor tiles under his feet exploded. He became a gust of wind, hitting the frozen tide of bodies like a battering ram.

He couldn't use Cursed Energy, not with unconscious civilians scattered across every meter of the platform. This had to be done with hands. With fists. With nothing but the pure, raw physical strength that Toji Fushiguro had hammered into him through hell session after hell session.

"First one!"

Satoru Gojo drove his fist through the skull of the nearest Transfigured Human, dropped into a crouch, and swept his leg in a single arc that snapped the knees of three more. He didn't slow down. Fist, foot, elbow, knee. Every joint a weapon. CRACK! an axe kick split a sternum down the middle. BANG! a straight punch drove clean through an abdomen.

The muffled sounds of breaking bone were everywhere. Dark green blood and broken limbs sprayed through the air. His white hair was soaked through, dyed deep red. Too slow. Faster. He pulled himself into a hundred afterimages across the platform, hundreds of strikes landing everywhere at once, a one-man slaughterhouse operating at full capacity.

He moved between the unconscious civilians with precision, picking out each monster without grazing the people below. Every hit landed with absolute, merciless intent. These people, whatever was left of them, couldn't come back from what Mahito had done to their souls. There was no fixing that. The only mercy left was a fast death.

The rage Satoru Gojo had been holding down for this entire fight finally had somewhere to go. Two hundred. Five hundred. Eight hundred. The seconds ticked by. His breathing turned to grinding, labored pulls of air. The skin over his knuckles had split open long ago, his fists a ruin of blood and bone. He didn't slow down. He got faster. Second 299.

BOOM!

The last Transfigured Human hit the load-bearing wall back-first from a knee strike that didn't hold back a single gram of force. Its chest caved in. It stopped moving. The platform went quiet. Mountains of the dead.

The remains of over a thousand Transfigured Humans blanketed the tracks and the platform. The blood had run together into shallow rivers, the smell of it thick and copper-sharp. And scattered through the carnage, sleeping like they hadn't a care in the world, were several hundred civilians. Not one of them touched.

Satoru Gojo stood in the middle of it all. He bent forward, braced both hands on his knees, and breathed. Loud. Ragged. Ugly. God, that nearly killed him. Even the Six Eyes, with its bottomless well of Cursed Energy, couldn't keep exhaustion from crawling up through his bones. But he'd done it. One man. Two fists. Every civilian breathing. Every monster dead.

Satoru Gojo straightened up, raised his blood-soaked right hand, and wiped his face without particular care. He turned. His pale blue eyes found Mahito and Jogo, both still locked in Soul Paralysis not far away. Time to take these two apart. He stepped forward. Clink. A small, clean metallic sound in the silence. Out of place.

A black cube dropped to the ground and rolled, tumbling across the tiles, coming to a stop right at Satoru Gojo's feet. Eyes covered it. Dozens of them, strange and lidless. They all opened at once and looked up at him. What the hell is that? Satoru Gojo's eye twitched.

Before he could move, footsteps came from the shadows at the back of the platform. Unhurried. Deliberate. Completely at ease.

"Truly magnificent." A warm, measured voice drifted out of the dark. "As expected of you, Satoru Gojo."

➤ Next: Boundary Marker and Reinforcements