Chapter 164 - Yuta Returns

"Rest a bit, Yuji. You haven't closed your eyes once in the last twelve hours."

Choso's voice echoed through the empty ruins. Yuji yanked his fist free of the black mucus and the Grade 2 Cursed Spirit in front of him crashed to the ground. He doubled over, gasping, his short hair plastered to his forehead with sweat and blood. He didn't want to stop.

The moment he closed his eyes, the images would slam back in. Sukuna wearing his body like a suit. Buildings shredded by invisible slashes. Crowds with nowhere to run. Screams crawling through his ears like insects. All of it done with these hands.

"I can't stop." Yuji gritted his teeth. "Sukuna destroyed so many city blocks. Killed so many innocent people. If I don't push myself to clear out every Cursed Spirit that got loose, the disgust alone will kill me."

He had to keep moving. Use his body's exhaustion to crowd out the space in his skull where the guilt lived. It was the only way to keep from going insane. Choso looked at Yuji's faintly trembling legs. The furrow between his brows deepened. He's already at his limit. Cursed Energy reserves nearly empty. Every muscle fiber protesting. But Choso could feel the fierce, burning obsession inside Yuji.

Blood Resonance didn't lie. His little brother was suffering. How could an older sibling stand by and do nothing?

"I'll go with you." Choso stepped up beside Yuji. "But I walk in front."

Yuji couldn't be bothered to argue with this overly familiar Death Painting. He nodded, and the two of them took off toward the next block where Cursed Energy readings were spiking. They crossed a collapsed elevated highway, and the night wind turned cold. Not one or two.

Thirteen massive shadows oozed out from the darkness between the high-rises. None of the chittering noise of low-grade Cursed Spirits. The Cursed Energy radiating off these things was so thick it turned the stomach. All Grade 1. Kenjaku's army of Cursed Spirits had converged on this exact point.

They needed a way through. Yuji narrowed his eyes and started shifting into his Divergent Fist stance, and a spider Cursed Spirit with a human face burst from the ruins on his left, its scythe-like foreleg driving straight at his chest. On a normal day, he would have dodged it clean.

But he was running on empty. His body felt packed with lead. He saw the trajectory. His legs were half a beat behind.

SHHK!

A gash deep enough to show bone opened across his chest. Yuji flew backward and crashed hard onto the hood of a wrecked Honda. The windshield exploded into pieces and he coughed up a mouthful of blood.

"Yuji!"

Choso's eyes went red. Both hands slammed together. "Piercing Blood!"

A high-pressure thread of blood punched through the spider Cursed Spirit's skull like a laser. It also completely exposed Choso's position. The remaining twelve Grade 1 Cursed Spirits attacked at once, locking Choso in the center from every angle. Venom spray. Sonic shockwave. Raw physical pressure. All of it at once, driving Choso into a corner in an instant.

Choso roared and threw up a dark red blood wall, forcing it to hold against the barrage crashing in from every direction. Damn it. He could not fall here. Was he going to watch his little brother die in front of him again? Cracks spread across the blood wall. Just as it was about to give way—

SHING!

A blade of cold light cut through the dark without any warning. It was too fast. Like space itself had briefly slipped out of alignment. The five Grade 1 Cursed Spirits surrounding Choso from the front froze mid-motion. Then their massive bodies slid cleanly apart at the waist. The cut surfaces were smooth as mirrors. Purple filth-blood erupted like fountains and soaked the ground.

One slash. Five Grade 1s. All dead before they hit the earth. What the hell is this? Yuji pressed a hand to his chest and stared. At the edge of the two-story ruins, under the moonlight, someone was standing. White Jujutsu High uniform. A long blade in one hand, still dripping black.

One foot planted on the rubble. Body arched backward at the waist in a twisted, almost languid bend, the ligaments pulled to an angle that had no business existing on a human being. That strange posture on that grim, blood-soaked battlefield carried an indescribable eeriness. But Yuji knew that face.

"Y — Yuta-senpai?!"

He forgot the pain in his chest entirely. Yuta Okkotsu looked down from the ruins, still holding that warped backward arch. He smiled at Yuji without saying a word. The next instant he was gone from the rooftop edge. Only a blurred afterimage remained in the air.

"Run!" The higher-grade Cursed Spirits had enough instinct to sense the aura, something from an entirely different dimension, and tried to turn.

Too late. The soft sound of a blade parting flesh rang out again and again. Yuta moved through the Cursed Spirits like he was taking an evening stroll. His left hand never left the scabbard. Single-handed slashes from the right only, each one landing precisely on a Cursed Spirit's core. No wasted movement. Not a scrap of Cursed Energy wasted.

The last Cursed Spirit made a final stand, gaping its maw and spraying a blast of strong acid. Yuta flipped his grip into an upward slash. The blade drew a blinding white arc and split both the acid and the Cursed Spirit's head clean in two. The whole thing took less than ten seconds. Twelve Grade 1 Cursed Spirits. Total annihilation.

Yuta lightly shook the black blood from the blade and slid it back into the scabbard. He landed in front of Yuji, reached out, and pulled him up from the pile of broken glass. The three of them found a relatively clean slab of concrete and sat down. Yuji stared at the high-grade Cursed Spirit remains scattered across the ground, his pulse still unsteady.

Any one of those things could have slaughtered an entire street.

"Senpai — weren't you in Kyoto as an exchange student? What are you doing in Shibuya?" Yuji asked.

Yuta scratched the back of his head, looking a little sheepish.

"I was in Kyoto at first. But after half a year, Kusakabe-sensei said there was nothing left to teach me. The exact words were, 'If you stick around any longer, you're going to see every card this old man has left,' and I was told to stop wasting my time there."

Yuji stared. Kusakabe-sensei was a master of the New Shadow Style, and even that wasn't enough?

"So I went to Africa for a while, to see if there were any different approaches to Cursed Energy use over there." Yuta let out a slow breath. "Stayed there the better part of a year, then got an urgent communication from Geto-sensei. Said Tokyo had blown up and to get back immediately."

He pointed up at the sky.

"No time to spare, so I chartered a private plane and parachuted in. Landed and immediately felt a fight going on nearby. Came to check it out on the way."

Yuji's mouth dropped open. "Senpai, that's insane!"

Yuta glanced at the roughly bandaged bloodstain on Yuji's chest, then at the ruined landscape of Shibuya stretching out around them. Yuta lowered his eyes.

"I'm sorry, Yuji. I came back too late."

It sat badly with him. The old fossils at the top were always playing their petty games, piling all of this onto first-year kids. If he had arrived sooner, maybe the Sukuna incident never would have happened. At the very least, his kouhai wouldn't have had to carry this much.

"No no no, senpai, your timing was perfect!" Yuji waved his hands. "If you hadn't shown up just now, we would've been done for!"

Yuta smiled, then turned to look at Choso, who had been sitting quietly to the side recovering Cursed Energy since the fight ended. Something had struck Yuta as strange about this person during the battle. The Cursed Energy aura sat somewhere between human and Cursed Spirit. And the appearance, definitely not anyone from Jujutsu High.

Most telling was the way Choso had thrown himself in front of Yuji. That wasn't strategy. That was pure muscle memory.

"Who is this?" The hand resting near Yuta's hilt tightened slightly. Things were chaotic. If this was an enemy, he would draw without hesitation.

Choso raised his head and met the Special Grade Sorcerer's gaze without flinching. Choso pointed at Yuji. Expression completely serious. Voice landing like a dropped stone.

"I'm his older brother."

Yuta went still. He looked at Choso, the two black marks under the eyes, the hair tied up in a spiky topknot. Then he looked at Yuji, pink hair, expression somewhere between earnest and vacant. In what world were these two related? Hair color, bone structure, even the nature of their Cursed Energy, none of it matched by any stretch.

When did Jujutsu High start taking on family members like this? Yuta turned to Yuji with a baffled look, silently asking for help.

Yuji scratched his head. "He keeps insisting he's my older brother. Honestly, I'm pretty lost too..."

Choso's eyes dimmed for a moment. Then the resolve came back, quiet and solid. "It's fine, Yuji. Even if you don't acknowledge it, my determination to protect you doesn't change. That's what it means to be the eldest."

What in the world is this family drama? Yuta had completely lost the thread. But Choso had no malice, that much was clear. That was enough.

"Alright. Since we've been fighting side by side, let's keep moving together." Yuta stood and brushed the dust off his clothes. "There are still Cursed Spirits left in this area. We can't let any of them reach the civilian shelters. Let's clear the whole block in one push."

Yuji's eyes lit up and he was on his feet immediately. With Yuta-senpai leading the charge, their efficiency would at least double. The next half hour belonged entirely to Yuta Okkotsu. Yuji and Choso barely needed to throw a punch. All they had to do was point, and Yuta shot through the block like a white bolt of lightning.

Grade 1, Grade 2, swarms of Fly Heads, none of them lasted a single exchange against his bottomless reserves of Cursed Energy and that precise, devastating swordsmanship. This was what Special Grade meant. This was what it looked like when the gap in power was simply too large to bridge.

"He's unreal..." Yuji watched Yuta casually split a crumbling high-rise in half, Cursed Spirit and all, with one swing of the blade, and swallowed hard.

With someone like that around, a Cursed Spirit uprising was barely worth worrying about. When the last Cursed Spirit dissolved under the blade light, the Cursed Energy Residue across the entire block dropped to zero. Yuta had just sheathed his sword when the special communicator in his pocket went off. He answered. Suguru Geto's voice came through, low and worn thin with exhaustion.

"Yuta, are you finished over there?"

"Just wrapped up, Geto-sensei. Yuji's with me. He took some minor injuries, nothing serious. Any word on Gojo-sensei?"

Two seconds of silence.

"It's bad. Kenjaku's plan is more extreme than we thought. He didn't just take the Prison Realm — he activated a long-range technique before he fled." Geto's voice was cold, each word dropping like a chip of ice. "Right now, the entire Jujutsu High —"

He never finished. The communicator erupted.

"FORGET ABOUT THAT WHITE-HAIRED BRAT!"

Yuji nearly jumped out of his skin. That voice, the raw volume, the sheer ear-splitting force of it, there was only one person it could be. Toji-sensei. Toji's voice hammered through the speaker, riding a backdrop of splintering furniture and crumbling walls.

"That stitched-up brain of a bastard dared to lay hands on my family! Yuta! Yuji! Get back here right now! Tomorrow's special training is canceled! Everyone picks up a weapon and comes with me to drag that piece of trash out! I am going to smash his head into his own stomach with the iron fist of youth! I will make him understand — when you touch a hot-blooded teacher's family, the only thing waiting for you is getting ground into paste!"

"Dad, calm down! That's the headquarters' equipment!" Megumi's voice cut in frantically from the background.

"To hell with headquarters! They touched Tsumiki, I don't care who it is! Anyone who tries to stop me gets it too! Get back here! Everyone assembles now!"

Beep. Beep. Beep. The call cut off. One-sided. No ceremony. The three of them on the ruins stared at each other.

Yuta let out a dry laugh and pocketed the communicator. "Well... Fushiguro-sensei's energy seems as hot-blooded as ever."

A chill crawled up Yuji's spine, colder, somehow, than anything Sukuna had ever made him feel. He knew exactly how terrifying Toji-sensei was when he snapped. Day-to-day, all youth and sweat and loud motivational speeches. But cross his actual line, and the man was a force of nature who could swing Special Grade Cursed Spirits around by the ankle like they were sandbags.

"Tsumiki-nee is in trouble... No wonder Toji-sensei went off like that."

Yuji clenched his fists tight.

"Senpai, big brother, we need to move. Right now. Something huge is about to happen."

➤ Next: Preparations to Enter the Game