Jujutsu Kaisen: Megumi — Chapter 40 - Megumi Fakes His Death

Click. Click. Click. Click. Click. Click. Click—

Seven times. Exactly seven.

Above these Shinjuku ruins where all things had been reduced to nothing.

That bone-chilling sound of interlocking wheels carried no earth-shaking roar, yet it cut through the entire space more clearly than any explosion ever could.

For the King of Curses, arrogant across a thousand years, this was the most grating sound in all the world.

But for those watching from the broadcast screen at Jujutsu High, their heartbeats nearly grinding to a halt alongside it, those seven consecutive rotations were nothing short of a miracle tearing straight through despair.

Seven full rotations.

"Just what are you capable of, Megumi Fushiguro!"

Sukuna's hand-blade froze dead in midair.

All four crimson eyes trembled violently, locked onto the boy lying on the ground like a puddle of ruin.

The Megumi before him still looked like a wreck.

Every bone shattered. Cursed energy nearly cut off entirely. His oil spent and his lamp guttered, hovering at the extreme edge where even drawing breath had become a luxury, a hopeless death trap with no way out.

So why was he still pulling off an astonishing seven consecutive rotations?

Sukuna combed through every piece of intelligence he held on Mahoraga.

No matter how complex the technique faced, no matter how fast or slow the analysis and Adaptation proceeded,

the absolute iron law, unchanged since time immemorial, was this:

One complete Adaptation cycle would always, always, terminate at the fourth rotation.

"In that case, those seven rotations should be calculated as..."

If so, then these absurdly excessive extra rotations could only add up to one answer. An answer that made the King of Curses feel as though his blood had turned to ice.

"You have already completed one full Adaptation cycle."

"And pushed the second Adaptation to three rotations!"

Sukuna stared hard at the halo behind Megumi's head, still slowly radiating its ghastly white divine light.

Astonishment and dread twisted together into something extreme, and Sukuna couldn't stop himself from screaming the deduction aloud.

Surely it couldn't be...

Mahoraga had already completely adapted to my Furnace: Open and my cursed energy, hadn't it...

Soundless terror bloomed wildly in the depths of the King of Curses' eyes.

But Sukuna did not give voice to this suspicion, a suspicion that amounted to announcing his own defeat. That morbid, kingly pride forced him to crush the raging storm back down.

The lethal radiance that should have gathered into a technique went dark instantly.

With extreme caution, Sukuna flicked a jagged chunk of concrete up with his toe, lifting it with a force application technique honed to absolute perfection. He channeled pure physical brute strength into it without reservation, snapped his wrist sharply, and that shard of rubble shrieked through the air and was hurled savagely at the defenseless boy drowning in a pool of blood.

"Aaargh!"

Megumi, who had just completed seven rotations, still cried out in pain when the attack landed.

That agonized shriek doused the blood that had just begun to boil inside Jujutsu High's underground broadcast room.

"Wait — the sound of Megumi's wheels turning... doesn't that mean he's adapted to everything Sukuna has?"

In an instant, the emotions of everyone in the room swung from elation back to flickering, guttering uncertainty.

"Those seven rotation sounds..."

"There's no way they were just Megumi buying time."

"Just spinning the wheel to frighten Sukuna, right?"

Yuji asked in a small, slightly trembling voice.

The entire Jujutsu High broadcast room fell into a silence like death.

Even Hajime Kashimo, who had just been screaming himself hoarse as the commentary chairman, clenched his jaw tight and said nothing in response.

After a long stretch of dead silence, he finally pushed out a single line:

"Whether it was true Adaptation or a performance... both are possible."

All they could do was take that hope, so hard won, so fragile, and pin it desperately onto the dark-haired boy on the screen, bathed in the remnants of a dying sun, hovering at death's door.

"Could it be that Megumi's actually lost his mind, and he was just putting on an act to fool me?"

On the battlefield.

Sukuna paced slowly around Megumi's broken body.

He was even deliberating in all seriousness whether to humiliate himself by pressing his ear to the dust-covered ground and personally confirming the faint sound of this brat's heartbeat, to see whether he was truly bluffing.

"You couldn't have awakened some tactic that makes Mahoraga fake its rotations, could you!"

But after a long, cold-eyed observation, Sukuna finally confirmed something that left him feeling both irritated and supremely ridiculous.

Those seven earth-shaking rotation sounds seemed to have brought no actual, substantive change to the battlefield whatsoever.

Recalling the way he'd been afraid just moments ago, Sukuna couldn't help but twitch the corner of his mouth in self-mockery.

"I actually got frightened."

"And yet a wreck is still a wreck..."

The last shred of doubt in Sukuna's eyes was crushed entirely by his own arrogance.

He gathered his cursed energy once more. This time, devastating cursed energy pooled in his palm without the slightest restraint. He would wipe this puddle of blood and flesh off the earth, laughable con and all, erase every last trace of it.

"Farewell, Megumi Fushiguro!"

Immense cursed energy concentrated in his fingers and palm, aimed fully at Megumi's body, a body nearly reduced to bloody paste by the crushing defeat of the lifting contest.

Sukuna raised his hand-blade high above his head.

At that moment, a howling wind tore the overcast gloom hanging over the ruins apart.

A beam of piercing, ghastly pale dawn light poured directly down upon that lethal edge.

And it was precisely by means of this single ray of breaking dawn that Sukuna's casually sweeping gaze finally confirmed what had changed about Megumi's dying body.

Beneath the pure light of the sky,

countless tiny white motes, clean as starlight,

threads of radiance like a divine miracle,

were being born from the void at a speed visible to the naked eye, slowly stitching together Megumi's shattered, ruined body.

"That's Reverse Cursed Technique — weren't both his hands destroyed? He can't summon Round Deer to perform the reversal anymore."

Unknown terror seized Sukuna's heart in a death grip. His expression contorted into something ferocious in an instant.

Without a moment's hesitation, he slammed his palm down.

Yet that strike, which had seemed certain to land, shattered only a few remaining scraps of light scattered across the scorched ground, producing nothing but a hollow, dull thud.

Megumi's body simply vanished from before him, at the very edge of death, in an instant.

"What?"

Sukuna stared at the hand-blade that had struck empty air.

All four crimson eyes swept the surrounding ruins like a startled beast gone frantic, searching for any trace of the boy who should by all rights have been dead.

At last.

Sukuna found it.

A massive shadow cast down from the sky above.

Like a solar eclipse descending, looming from on high, pressing hard over his great and powerful divine body.

Sukuna stiffened and turned.

Deep within the light breaking through the clouds,

the body of the boy called Megumi Fushiguro hung there upside down in the sky, without the support of any cursed energy, without the lifting of any shikigami.

So sacred.

So arrogant.

So utterly indifferent.

Looking down upon all creation.

➤ Next: Light and Shadow