Chapter 167 - Gate of Limit vs. Gate of Limit — Megumi Fushiguro's Pep Talk

"Eight Gates, Fifth Gate — Gate of Limit."

The shockwave whipped up a violent gust. Empty bottles on the bleachers outside the ring exploded into powder. Outside the ring, Megumi Fushiguro silently raised a hand and covered his face. An indescribable despair seeped through the gaps between his fingers. It's over. That idiot is going to get beaten to death.

Panda leaned against the chain-link fence and let out a heavy sigh. "This is bad. Even I can't bear to watch."

Megumi asked out of curiosity.

"How did Hakari-senpai break through the Fifth Gate?"

Panda scratched the fluffy underside of its chin, voice tinged with exasperation. "Hakari-senpai's luck really is off the charts. After leaving Tokyo Jujutsu High, the guy went completely obsessed. Everyone else who trains this physical art has to memorize the meridian pathways by rote — Hakari-senpai did it purely on muscle memory and dumb luck.

"Second year in, there was a time Hakari-senpai was nearly beaten to death in an underground bare-knuckle fight, and smashed through the Fifth Gate on pure physical instinct."

"Bypassing the first four gates entirely and jumping straight to the Fifth?" The corner of Megumi's eye twitched hard.

He knew senpai was fearsome enough to open five gates, he just never imagined it had happened like this.

"That's right. When heaven decides to feed you, there's no stopping it."

Panda looked toward the ring with sympathy. "Itadori is in serious trouble now. Let's hope senpai leaves him in one piece. Fifth Gate speed is already beyond what the eye can track."

Just as Panda said, the fight was one-sided slaughter from the very first exchange. With the Gate of Life empowering him, Yuji's punches could even produce a sonic boom. But he swung at air. Kinji Hakari had vanished from right in front of him.

"Too slow!"

The voice came from behind. Yuji felt a chill sweep the back of his neck. Before his brain could issue a single command, a searing pain tore through his back, the kind that felt like it would snap his spine clean in two. Hakari's whip kick landed hard across Yuji's back.

BOOM! Yuji's entire body was slammed into the chain-link fence at the ring's edge, wrenching the thick steel rods into a wild, exaggerated arc. Too fast. Completely impossible to follow. Yuji spat blood, hands gripping the fence with everything he had, trying to pull himself free. His organs felt like they'd tumbled through a washing machine spin cycle. Even his breath carried the taste of blood.

This was not a fight between the same weight class. Before his feet could even touch the ground, a piercing sonic boom bore down on him again. Hakari, wreathed in raging blue steam, had already reappeared in front of him.

"Running? Weren't you pretty chatty a moment ago!"

Hakari sneered and drove a heavy punch straight at Yuji's face. Yuji crossed both arms and threw everything into guarding his head.

BANG!

The savage force shattered the sleeves right off Yuji's arms. Yuji was blasted across the ring like a limp rag sack, rolling seven or eight times across the ground before barely skidding to a stop. Pain. His bones felt like they were coming apart. Yuji yelped and rolled, scrambling in sheer desperation to dodge the downward chop Hakari immediately followed up with.

The steel floor split open, half a meter deep. All he could do was dodge. There was absolutely no room to fight back. Yuji began moving frantically around the ring. Every last burst of power the Gate of Life gave him went into running, weaving left and right, like a mouse being toyed with by a cat.

"Is this what your resolve looks like!"

Hakari stood at the center of the ring and didn't give chase. A roar of pure rage tore out instead.

The veins on Hakari's forehead bulged. Something was surfacing behind those eyes, the memory of a profound humiliation. That devil in the green spandex suit, who had strung Hakari upside down from a tree at Tokyo Jujutsu High's entrance and made Hakari shout anti-gambling slogans under the blazing sun. That social death. That disgrace. Even now it could jolt Hakari awake in the dead of night.

"If all you do is dodge, what is the point of lasting three minutes!"

Hakari stomped the ground. The ring buckled and crumbled beneath it, and Hakari charged at Yuji like a rampaging dinosaur bursting out of its cage.

"With weakness like this, forget saving anyone — you can't even protect yourself!"

No dodging this. In Yuji's pupils, that enormous fist expanded at terrifying speed. The air warped from the pressure building around it. Even breathing had stopped. Was he going to die here?

"Youth is meant to burn brightest when you're backed into a corner, Yuji!"

In his mind, the roar of that wildly exhilarated man, all gleaming white teeth, suddenly rang out. The image of Toji Fushiguro giving a thumbs-up in the evening light, as if laughing at how pathetic Yuji looked right now. Desperation? Compared to Sukuna slaughtering those innocent civilians. What kind of desperation was this! Yuji's eyes instantly flooded red. Bloodshot in a way that looked terrifying.

Deep within his soul, in the Innate Domain, Ryomen Sukuna, who had been settling in to enjoy the show, suddenly opened his eyes. He could feel it. This damned vessel was attempting something extremely dangerous again.

"You little brat, what the hell are you doing now! Stop yanking on the meridians, if this body breaks down, I'm the one with problems too!"

Sukuna cursed from his throne of bones. Too late.

"No more dodging. It won't help anyway."

Yuji clenched his jaw. His mouth was full of blood.

"Eight Gates, Fifth Gate —"

The Cursed Energy inside him, raging alongside his blood in full overload, forcibly smashed open that insurmountable barrier.

"Open!"

Pfft, the capillaries across the surface of Yuji's skin burst open in a massive wave. The beads of blood had barely seeped through before his body's intense heat flash-evaporated them into a pale red mist. The steam shifted abruptly to a blinding deep green and expanded outward with a catastrophic pressure wave.

Megumi's eyes went wide. He shouted. "You idiot, forcing the Fifth Gate when you haven't even adapted to the Fourth will kill you!"

Hakari's fist was already at his face. Yuji didn't retreat. He answered without turning his head.

"Even if I die, I will complete my mission!"

Every last trace of Cursed Energy surging through his meridians, without reservation, without holding back, he drove it all into his right fist. The Divergent Fist's double-delayed impact was too slow. What he needed was a single, instantaneous explosion.

"Black Flash!"

Within the yellow-green steam, a streak of black lightning, heart-stopping, impossible, detonated out of nowhere at the apex of his fist. This was the ultimate combination: the raw physical explosive power of the Fifth Gate and the spatial distortion of Cursed Energy, compressed into a single strike. Two fists, one large, one small, collided in midair. No massive explosion.

Just the teeth-aching crunch of bone grinding against bone under unimaginable pressure, and then a visible ring of white vacuum shockwave erupted from the point of contact, grinding the already-shattered steel ring entirely into rubble. Hakari felt an unprecedented surge of savage force pour through the forearm and straight into the chest. That was not Cursed Energy. It was raw, unreasonable, physical kinetic force.

Both feet carved two deep furrows into the ground. Hakari slid backward, out of control. Biting down hard, trying to brake with sheer leg strength, but the recoil was too powerful. Only after being driven back a full dozen steps, back slamming into a load-bearing pillar at the ring's edge and snapping it, did Hakari finally grind to a stop. The entire venue fell dead silent.

Just the sound of broken stones rolling across the floor. Panda's jaw dropped and stayed there. Megumi looked like he'd seen a ghost. So that was the depth of that idiot's power? Hakari shook out a still-tingling right arm, expression darkened to its absolute limit. Pride severely wounded.

Pushed back by a first-year junior, if word of this got out, where would a senpai put their face?

"Interesting." Hakari exhaled slowly, eyes turning dangerous. "But still too green."

Hakari strode forward, intent on completely dismantling this kid's ability to resist. But stepping into the center of the ruins, Hakari froze. Yuji Itadori was still holding his punching stance, but both eyes had rolled white. The deep green steam had vanished entirely from his skin. He stood there like a rotting log, propped up by nothing but a single stubborn breath, refusing to fall. Completely drained.

Forcing the Fifth Gate open, then landing a Black Flash, his body had reached the edge of total collapse.

"Is that all you've got?" Hakari let out a cold snort, raised a fist high, and drove it down at Yuji's blood-soaked face.

A burst of wind pressure ruffled Yuji's hair. The fist was 1 millimeter from the tip of Yuji's nose.

"Beep beep beep! Beep beep beep —"

A jarring, absurdly cheerful electronic chime rang out through the dead silence of the underground fight club. Yuji Itadori braced on sheer willpower and reached into his pants pocket. He pulled out his phone. His lips were swollen like two sausages. He mumbled in a slurred voice.

"Sen... Senpai... the alarm... 3 minutes... are up."

THUD!

The moment he finished that half-sentence, Yuji crumpled to the ground like a heap of wet mud and passed out cold. Hakari's fist froze in midair. The muscles in Hakari's face began twitching uncontrollably. Lost...? Break the agreement? Couldn't afford the humiliation. Just walk away like this? This was stuck in the throat, honestly worse than being made to wear the pink spandex suit back then!

The top of the third-years, stopped dead by a first-year rookie who timed things to an alarm clock?! Did this kid open the Fifth Gate while watching the clock?! The scene became extraordinarily awkward. Hakari stood in the ruins, fist still raised, unable to put it down, unable to follow through, face flushing redder from sheer bottled fury than the blood on Yuji's body.

Outside the ring, Megumi let out a sigh. The way these people's minds worked, he understood it all too well. Dealing with hot-blooded idiots who were proud and easily embarrassed, reason was completely useless. The only way was to play into that man's style and get under their skin. Megumi vaulted over the chain-link fence and walked up to Hakari.

The corner of Hakari's eye twitched. Hakari stared hard at Megumi. "What are you trying to pull? Want a beating?"

"Hakari-senpai." Megumi's tone was completely flat. The words that came out of his mouth, however, were embarrassing to the extreme. "Actually, he's always talked about you."

Hakari blinked. "Hah?"

"That idiot dad of mine, he'd often stand at the pull-up bars on the training grounds and just stare into space."

Megumi began making things up without so much as a flicker on his face.

"He said: 'That kid Kinji, sure, he's a hopeless gambler. But the flame of youth burning inside him outshines everyone else.'"

Megumi could feel the goosebumps piling up at his feet, but he had to keep going.

"He also said, breaking your ribs was tempering your body. Making you wear the pink spandex suit while hanging you upside down was a baptism for your spirit. Everything he did was to make you bloom your own lotus in the face of adversity."

Megumi looked Hakari directly in the eyes. "He has a sharp tongue and a soft heart. He has always believed, deep down, that you would come back to find him with even stronger taijutsu."

Hakari's raised hand slowly lowered. The image of that devil of a man surfaced unbidden.

When that man had broken the ribs, he did seem to have said something like "too weak."

So... that hadn't been mockery. That had been the bitter expectation of someone who believed in more than what they saw?

"Re... really?" The rims of Hakari's eyes went suspiciously red.

Megumi nodded without a moment's hesitation.

"I'm his son. Of course I know him best!"

The hostility and grievance in Hakari's eyes dissolved without a trace, replaced by a fervent, deeply moved expression, the look of someone who had just found the direction of their life.

"That bastard old man..." Hakari jerked his head back sharply, as if fighting to keep the tears from falling.

Hakari spun around and bellowed at the floor below the ring. "Kirara!"

Kirara stepped onto the platform, expression full of confusion. "Kogane?"

"Clear the place! Shut it down!"

With a sweeping wave of the hand, Hakari bent down and hoisted the unconscious Yuji up onto a shoulder. The voice barely contained its own excitement.

"This fight club is closed for now! We're heading out!"

"Where to?" Kirara asked.

"Tokyo Jujutsu High, to take part in that stupid Culling Game!" Hakari marched toward the exit with long, forceful strides.

"To crush the brains of whoever dared to scheme against the old man! To prove my youth was not wasted!"

Panda stared blankly at everything that had just unfolded, then gave Megumi a thumbs-up. Megumi let out a long, slow breath and wiped the cold sweat from his forehead. That was close. If there had been even a moment's hesitation just now, the two of them would not have made it out of here today.

That idiot dad's motivational garbage was nauseating, but against single-celled organisms like these, it worked every single time.

➤ Next: Enter the Game