Juchu Kaisen - 42
Chapter 42
“Do me a personal favor, Suguru—never take any of your fellow classmates lightly again. Okay?”
A personal favor. What a joke.
Teira had a way of making anyone she talked to feel like a child in comparison. That was typical. She was wise beyond her years… isolated incidents of childishness notwithstanding.
In most matters that didn’t pertain to her own personal bullying campaign against Satoru, she was largely right about… pretty much everything. Irritatingly enough.
That was why he walked up to Takahashi to issue his challenge without mincing words or trying to appear less threatening.
The girl sputtered in surprise and indecision, taking too long to answer.
Figured. She didn’t really have much of a fighting spirit. She was a trickster, who had gotten the upper hand due to his own ignorance about the cursed technique that had forced him into submission.
He was no longer ignorant, however. He knew her game.
And he wanted a rematch.
Still, the more she sputtered, the more he lost his desire to fight her.
If he did, he would just destroy her anyway. She wasn’t a worthy opponent anymore.
That wasn’t to say that he had anything against tricksters. Tricks were helpful. Tricks were what had earned her a rightful victory against him.
But then, what was the point in fighting her again if the jig was up? He might expose her tricks to the rest of their classmates. And it would be better for Suguru if any of them fell to her. It would ease his own personal sting of failure, at the very least.
“Never mind,” Suguru said. “Will anyone else take my challenge?”
“Fight me!” Satoshi roared.
“Anyone higher ranked than me,” Suguru said. “I decline your challenge, Satoshi. Don’t ask me again.”
Suzuki Yui gently pushed Takahashi behind her. “I’ll fight you, then. As one fellow loser to Hibana.”
Suguru almost scoffed. As if that makes us equals.
He blinked at the odd thought. Satoru’s arrogance had certainly begun to rub off on him. What a bother.
“Excellent,” Yaga-sensei said. “Everyone, step back and give space.”
A few moments later, he called the match.
Suzuki rushed up to him, fist cocked.
Suguru released a hailstorm of fish-like curses at Suzuki. She blocked and punched them as quickly as she could. But while she was busy repelling the rabble, Suguru struck her with all the force that he could muster.
She flew.
He didn’t chase after her. Instead, he allowed a black wolf-like curse with six legs and eight eyes to run up to her and bite her entire torso before shaking her furiously.
She screamed in pain as the creature shook her about and slammed her against the earth.
He let this play out for twenty seconds before commanding the curse to spit her out.
She laid on the ground, writhing in pain. The curse hadn’t broken very far past her skin, but the force of its clamping jaws would certainly produce a tapestry of bruises in a few hours.
“The winner is Geto Suguru!” Yaga-sensei called.
Nothing outside the realm of his own expectation. She was strong, but he had known from the start that he was stronger.
“Next,” Suguru called out tiredly. Next would be… Nakamura. Suguru grinned as he locked eyes on the hip-hop enthusiast, who chuckled bashfully.
“Not today, brother. All outta juice.”
Suguru would respect that. “Another time, then.”
Then who else was up there in the rankings?
Right. Ito Aoi.
A truly worthy opponent. One that Geto Suguru didn’t dare to meet in pure hand-to-hand combat, either. She was too strong, unassuming as she looked.
“Ito-san,” Suguru said, looking at the girl. She was about twenty meters away, half-hidden behind Takahashi and the other girls. “Will you fight me?”
Suguru could recall, with a faint amount of irritation of their naivety, how little stock he and some of the other boys had put in the girl fighters. The likes of Suzuki, Takahashi, and especially Ito.
But from the looks of things, Ito fought better than the boys he had beaten up in the dormitory.
Ito walked past Takahashi wordlessly.
Takahashi grabbed Ito by her wrist. “You don’t have to fight him, Aoi-chan!”
Ito said nothing to that, simply standing still and staring at the ground listlessly. “Why not?”
Takahashi gasped in shock. “What do you mean…?!”
“I don’t… care about my position,” she said. “I don’t mind if he beats me.” She was murmuring so quietly that it was all Geto could even do to hear her words.
Takahashi let go of her wrist, at a loss for words.
Suguru… was darkly amused by Ito’s attitude. For someone so meek to be so threatening was entirely outside of Suguru’s realm of experience. He had no idea how to even speak to her. He feared that encouraging her would be condescending.
Very well—then I’ll just be straightforward. “Fight me, Ito Aoi.”
Ito Aoi walked up to him. She was wearing a blue track suit, and her short ear-length bob barely shook with each step. Such was her coordination.
She had to be five-foot flat at best. Maybe even shorter. And the tracksuit definitely wasn’t doing her physique any favors—she looked small in so many ways.
But he had seen her move.
When her eyes finally left the ground, the attitude of a shy high school girl disappeared.
A warrior had come to fight.
“Ito Aoi, Geto Suguru,” Yaga-sensei said. “Begin your fight on my mark. There will be no summoning of curses or activations of techniques before that moment!”
That meant that within the short timeframe of the match beginning and his first curse being summoned, Ito Aoi would undoubtedly engage him in a melee near instantly.
And he could not afford to split his focus between summoning a cursed spirit and dealing with her at the same time. He had to hope that their inevitable clash ended in a window of opportunity at least three seconds long.
Unlike Gojo Satoru, Ito Aoi didn’t strike Suguru as someone possessing enough arrogance to let an enemy get their technique off the ground.
Unlike the other fights he had been in today, this one would be serious. Teira, despite her brutal dismantling of Suguru, had still not taken their fight seriously. And Suguru had made the idiotic mistake of underestimating Takahashi for being a girl.
No more.
He raised his fists, and thought back to the days he had spent defending his town from all the cursed spirits in the area. At times, he would spend entire nights receiving information from his network of scout curses, taking out several dozen curses without break. Not the small fry that merely ‘cursed’ people with mild misfortunes—the ones that ate people.
He’d seen the aftermath of those slaughters, too. He’d seen his first body at the age of ten.
A construction accident, they had called it.
The scene, and how the non-sorcerers had dealt with it, had engraved something important into Suguru’s mind.
He had to be strong to protect the blind masses from the threats that they could not even perceive. He had to bear the brunt of seeing evil for their sake. He had to speak evil for their sake. And he had to hear evil for them, too.
The strong exist to protect the weak.
I exist to protect my parents. My relatives. My friends and classmates. My town.
Today, Suguru would give it his all with that exact mission in mind.
For to be strong, he had to overcome every challenge his way. If he could do that, then he would see no more mangled bodies.
“May the best sorcerer win,” Suguru gave Ito a polite nod.
She returned it. “Fight well, Geto-kun.”
Her tone chilled him.
He tensed his frame.
She took on a stance, left fist low and right fist raised, and her body sideways.
“Begin!”
Ito Aoi was ten meters away when the fight began.
Which made it especially curious that she was suddenly right in front of him, her fist buried in his gut, making it feel like his belly-button was making contact with his spine.
Suguru’s plan had been to engage her in a melee, throw her a distance away and summon his cursed spirits.
Screw that.
He activated his cursed technique as he flew.
000
Ito Aoi used to love karate.
Since she was old enough to walk, she had never missed a single day of practice in her family’s dojo. She had grown up hearing about the legends of the Ito-Ryu School of karate, of which her father was its latest head.
Supposedly, the core techniques had been taught to them by a wandering exorcist two hundred years ago for reasons that had been lost to history. There were many conflicting stories, all equally apocryphal. All equally entertaining to a young mind—though she had rejected them all on a fundamental level nonetheless.
Karate was not used for overcoming the strong or defending the weak. Such a thing no longer made sense in a world where people had guns and bombs. Especially for a girl, whose own strength could never rival an equally skilled boy’s. In that case, what was the point of seeking perfection in martial arts for any other reason than because it was fun?
Karate was a game. It wasn’t war or tragedy. It was like chess with the body. Or a dance that could occasionally leave you with bruises and sores. The point wasn’t to knock people out. It was to score points. To control one’s body to the best of one’s ability.
Aoi loved the karate that was just a game, because it never needed to be more than that.
As long as it stayed a game, she could continue to love it.
She was nine years old when her father first spoke to her as though she were on the precipice of adulthood.
They sat in seiza across from one another in the empty dojo. Her father was a forty-year-old man with bristling muscles. The dojo was the family business, but they made most of their money from a restaurant that he ran on the side. Even with his time split between two businesses, he still had time to develop his body and perfect the craft that was passed on to him from his father before him.
“You have talent, Aoi,” her father began. His eyes were closed and his lips were pressed firmly together. “You’re strong. Most importantly, you have a passion for this sport.”
He spoke as if he was reciting a list of negative character traits. At the time, she hadn’t been able to make heads or tails over that discrepancy in tone and words. She, herself, felt quite good from hearing that. She had been riding on the good cheer from testing out Granny Kokoro’s new mochi recipe by the time she had come home to have this grown-up talk.
“It’s also something you can do better than anything else. At least, to my knowledge. It’s your greatest strength. It might even be the thing that you dedicate yourself to for the rest of your life.”
At the time, she couldn’t have imagined a more satisfying thing to dedicate one’s life to.
“It might end up feeling like your life’s purpose. The only thing you were born to do, to the point that nothing else feels right.”
Aoi nodded fervently. She already felt that way. Had done so from a very young age. Nothing felt better than karate. Nothing felt more satisfying than perfecting a kick or punch.
“I will support your journey every step of the way, Aoi. And should you choose to commit yourself to anything else, then I will still support you. Do you understand me?”
She had giggled. Giggled. “But I don’t wanna do anything else!”
Her father smiled, though it was a strained one that weighed heavily on his eyes. “I know, Aoi.”
Her days had been a whirl of school, playing with her friends, and on her way home, always stopping by at Granny Kokoro’s mochi shop to spend her allowance on a small treat. Unlike her friends, she only ever had one at a time at her father’s advice. Unlike her friends, she did also show up for one every day.
Sweet treats were essential, but it was important for her to not overdo it. A healthy body was an important asset for any karate-ka.
It didn’t help that Granny Kokoro always complained about how lacking her appetite was every time she popped by.
“Having two won’t kill you, dearie!” Granny crooned as she lifted a box behind the counter of her store. Aoi, nine years old, had been busy staring through the glass, looking at the exhibited mochi and trying her best to decide which one to pick for today.
Strawberry flavored mochi gave her a boost in concentration while training. The chocolate flavor made her sleep more easily. The aftertaste of the vanilla-flavored mochi often paired well with whatever food mom would cook later on in the evening.
But there were flavors she hadn’t tried yet, and flavors that she hated. Pistachios made her feel unbalanced and uncoordinated. Mint made her teeth feel weirdly clean, which wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t what she wanted out of mochi.
Granny Kokoro had a new fruit flavor that she wanted her to try—passionfruit. She had never heard of passionfruit before, but it sounded like something that might make her give it her all during practice later on in the evening.
“Maybe when I’m bigger,” Aoi replied to her absently. “Then I can have two.”
“How are you going to grow bigger if you only ever have one?”
Aoi folded her arms, raised her chin, and repeated what her teachers had taught her: “By eating a healthy and balanced diet!”
Granny Kokoro giggled as she proceeded up the stairs with the box. Before she disappeared around the corner, she gave some advice. “Why don’t you just ask your mom to make you less food so you can eat more mochi, then?”
Aoi’s expression twisted into discomfort. She didn’t like the idea of choosing between her mom’s treats, and Granny Kokoro’s. She wasn’t related to Granny, but she did sometimes wish that she was. Since she didn’t have any living grandparents, Kokoro came the closest to being one.
But mom’s treats were nice, too. Not as good as Granny’s, but Aoi would not be the one to tell her that.
“I can’t choose between you and my mom,” Aoi complained.
“Hahahahahah!” the old lady cackled. “You’re a good daughter, Aoi-chan. Don’t let this old lady corrupt you!”
Finally, she disappeared around the bend up her staircase, and Aoi was still choosing.
She saw a little monkey-like creature with purple, fuzzy fur crouching atop the glass case.
Aoi ignored it. Her life was going well. She had friends, family, and something to be passionate about. No reason to ruin that by giving people reason to think that she was crazy. After all, Tokyo didn’t have purple, fuzzy monkeys with three eyes and cross-shaped mouths.
It disappeared up the staircase, following Granny Kokoro.
Aoi felt like chocolate might be the better choice. She would like to have a better sleep now that she’d seen one of… them.
She finally heard Granny Kokoro descending the stairs. “Made your choice, dearie?”
On her shoulders was the monkey.
“Chocolate,” Aoi said.
The monkey started jumping on Granny’s shoulders. She nearly tripped but caught herself on the staircase’s railing.
“Boring choice,” Granny grinned. “You should try the passionfruit. Didn’t I tell you? It’s a tropical fruit! Very exotic and very, very sweet and sour! You’ll like it, I promise!”
“I want chocolate,” Aoi said, trying not to whimper at the sight of the monkey jumping up and down.
“Hm,” Granny nodded. “There’s nothing wrong with boring choices, Aoi-chan. Just be careful not to always make them.”
The monkey jumped off Granny Kokoro’s shoulders to the wall behind her, then jumped off that wall before striking Granny in the back full force.
Granny screamed as she tumbled down the stairs, her screams cutting short the moment she finally hit the floor.
The monkey jumped up on top of the display window once more and pounced on her.
Aoi didn’t think.
She took a stance, and struck.
The monkey flew to the back of the store, then quickly got on its feet and slid through the wall as though it lacked substance.
The subsequent moments were a total blur. Aoi remembered crying next to Granny, tears and snot running down her face at the sight of her head, broken as it was and leaking blood and—
She remembered calling the police. She told them about the monkey. They told her they would see to it. She made them promise to tell her if they made any progress.
They never did.
Granny’s surviving family took over the store and sold it. Within a week, it had turned into an Izakaya. It no longer sold mochi.
Aoi’s life didn’t change from that singular day, nor even the weeks that followed.
She saw more monsters, and in response, she threw herself into karate with a renewed vigor, no longer for play, but for survival.
Ito Aoi was ten when she had won a double elimination karate tournament with zero losses. Within that same month, she took to the streets to fight the monsters that no one else could see.
She was eleven when she found out that no one in the dojo could stand up to her. Not even the older boys who were fifteen.
It didn’t take long after that to discover the thing that made her strong. It wasn’t skill, nor a knack for good technique. It was just strength.
Pure, raw, ugly strength. The same strength that was supposed to make fighting boys untenable, was making it so that people fighting her was untenable.
Karate stopped being a game that she could win fairly.
She made a choice upon that realization. She could suppress the thing that made her a bear among humans in order to once again rediscover the joy of karate.
Or, she could give up on the game, and take up the war instead.
To fight an unseen foe. To protect those around her. To give up on her passion and do the thing that only she could do.
“You’re not going to any more tournaments?!”
The one who screamed was Kaburagi, a girl that Aoi had fought in a past tournament. She had beaten her soundly. From that day onwards, Kaburagi had declared her a rival.
She stomped through the dojo where Aoi was quietly practicing her kata. “Yes,” she replied briefly.
“Why?!”
Aoi had no answer to that.
“Tell me why! We were supposed to reach the top together!”
Aoi’s heart clenched at those words. Once upon a time, she would have jumped at the opportunity to share this bond with a person who was equally passionate as her. Her friends at school barely cared about her hobby, and many of them found it weird for some reason.
She wanted to be friends with Kaburagi. But she couldn’t.
The war beckoned. And she had no comrades in arms.
“I’m sorry,” Aoi said.
Kaburagi, mercifully, didn’t linger for very long.
Aoi was twelve when she learned that she didn’t really have any friends. Her friends had gotten tired of her tomboyish attitude, and the karate club in school did nothing for her.
It was impossible for her to lose, or be challenged even in the slightest, no matter how hard she tried. If she lowered the power of her energy, something else would sharpen in return, like her own senses. Everyone else had energy—a trickle compared to her own—and much could be read from that energy. When she tried to close herself off from those senses, something else seemed to take precedence.
It was like all of her experience in karate coalesced, and she became sharply aware of the next move that an opponent would make.
This rarely helped her against the monsters who didn’t really fight like humans, but fellow karate-ka were open books to her. Rather than being fellow students of the same sport, she felt like the author of the book itself, and the others were mere readers.
Karate wasn’t about fighting the strong or defending the weak. It was about accruing points and pushing your body to its limits within the boundary of sport—a game. It wasn’t a weapon. It was a contact dance.
And she was a dancer in a war that only she could perceive, and should she choose to stop fighting, more people like Granny Kokoro would die.
She was thirteen when she once again found the monkey curse.
It was surrounded by dozens of its own kind, all playing around in a playground in the middle of the night. The playground had been the place where a child had fallen badly, breaking their neck in the process. The event had taken place years ago, but the playground remained seared in the public’s memory as a place of misfortune.
Aoi had expected a fight.
Yet, the first punch that she had landed on one of the miserable wretches had blown it apart utterly. In the following minute, she did not deal with a cyclone of attacking monkeys. Rather, she hunted them down one after another with a feverish intensity, not stopping until she was sure that they were all dead.
By the time she was done, she was in the middle of the sandbox, wearing one of the monkeys like a bracelet, her arm through a hole on its torso. Purple blood covered her body, and it disintegrated by the second.
She didn’t want this to be over, for she knew what would happen once she returned home and left the war by the door. She would return to being nothing in the eyes of everyone in her life—the layabout that refused to put her talents in karate to good use. The mediocre student whose passion for sports showed—in how utterly lagging she was in every other metric. The friendless freak who barely talked in school. The monster of karate that treated everyone else’s efforts as a mere joke.
Where before, the highlight of her day was practicing karate, she now only looked forward to the moments in which she could feel alive and do the thing that no one else could do.
She didn’t need friends. They would never understand her.
She didn’t need karate. There was no longer a point to the game if it refused to challenge her.
All she needed was the war. All she needed were more monsters.
Day in, day out, monsters.
Kill monsters. Go home. Go to sleep. Wake up. Kill more monsters before going to school.
Holidays, she spent killing monsters throughout the night without an ounce of worry over sleep.
When she didn’t kill monsters, she mastered the monstrous energy within her—the thing that felt equal to the make-up of the monsters. Her own breath of monstrosity. No one could teach her the right way—all she could do was fight and learn through trial and error. Accrue cuts and bruises, and weather endless questioning from her parents.
They would never understand. Nor did they need to.
All that mattered was that the monsters died.
000
Geto Suguru unleashed the black wolf once more.
It burst through a portal created right in front of him while he was mid-flight, still hurtling back from Ito’s merciless strike.
Suguru’s concentration helped push down the flare of agony as he focused on widening the portal as quickly as possible.
The wolf burst through and pounced at Ito, who then spread her arms wide, jumped, and caught the wolf’s neck in a bear-hug.
Her body flipped upside down as she kept hugging the wolf’s neck. Once she completed her arc, feet landing right behind the wolf, she slammed it back first against the ground so hard that it burst into purple gore—
Suguru opened more portals in a panic, not even caring what monsters he was summoning. All he thought, on repeat, was the phrase ‘more’.
Suguru skidded back first against the ground, and quickly caught himself on it, pushing himself up, flipping his body and arresting his momentum by skidding with his feet.
He beheld a massive barrage of cursed spirits converging on Ito.
She took a stance, left arm outstretched and hand flat, right arm cocked back in a fist, and her legs spread outwards.
She remained unmoving until the first creature, in the vague shape of a heron with three beaks, approached her range.
She burst into motion, burying her fist into the heron’s head savagely, her fist coming through the other way. She pulled the bird from her fist and used it to bludgeon another spirit to death.
With brutal precision and efficiency, she ripped the bird’s legs off from its body while it was mid-evaporation and used those legs as bludgeons, becoming a furious cyclone of death and violence.
More.
Suguru summoned a barrage of birds. He knew they couldn’t get close to her if they attacked conventionally. She was too fast, and with each cursed spirit she dismantled, she gained more improvised weapons made of the flesh and bone of dying cursed spirits that lengthened her range.
Suguru commanded the birds to dive into her, even if it meant sacrificing them. Each cursed spirit that he lost would remain dead until he replenished his stock, but he could sacrifice his rabble without much fear. These would be counted as Grade Fours, likely. If they could make use of themselves in death, then Suguru would be satisfied.
Fifteen of them took to the air, flew around in circles and dove down towards Ito at maximum speed, spaced evenly on every angle.
And to ensure that they would hit their targets, Suguru commanded a serpentine curse to wrap around her ankles, pinning her in place.
Ito Aoi brought her arms up and bent her knees in a crouch, curling into a ball.
Her cursed energy flared.
The birds hit, exploding from the force of their own descent.
Ito didn’t waste a moment afterwards, grabbing the serpent and ripping it in half.
She then dug her fingernails into its hide, ripping its skin off and wrapping it around her fists like bandages. She kicked the remnants of the cursed spirit away. It was crippled, but not dead—meaning the handwraps would persist for a while longer.
Suguru gulped.
Was this how a child his own age fought?
Suguru’s swarm made a valiant effort, but Ito was too fast and too strong. She tore through them like a butcher from hell. She ripped a chunk of an armored cursed spirit’s back armor off, using it as a shield to defend against a splash of scalding hot water from a salamander-like cursed spirit. She then threw the chipped off scale like a Frisbee, taking its head off.
At this point, Suguru wouldn’t be surprised if she started involving her teeth in the fight to bite chunks out of the cursed spirits.
And she was only getting faster.
More.
An army of fifty bulbous Grade Threes burst out from the sky. Suguru didn’t want to kill her, but he refused to take any chances. She could handle this much.
At the sight of the latest arrivals, Ito ripped off her handwraps, took a deep breath, and opened her fists into palms, fingers stiffly stretched outwards and pressed together.
000
“Well, this is depressing,” Shoko said.
We both watched Suguru’s valiant effort, but I couldn’t see Shoko’s point at all.
“Just because his technique is strong doesn’t mean he can’t have weakpoints,” I said. “Besides, Ito is strong. There’s nothing depressing about losing to her.”
“That’s not what I meant,” Shoko muttered. “I’m talking about Ito. She’s too damn strong. I don’t know how I’m supposed to measure up to any of that. Feels like work.”
“You have a fascinating lack of spite,” I said. Shoko raised an eyebrow at me. “I can scarcely understand it, myself, but it’s true. To do what Ito does is to be the opposite of who you are. And what’s the point in doing that? You can get far just being who you are instead.”
“You mean she’s spiteful?” Shoko said. “Her?”
“Oh yeah—she’s gushing with hatred and malice. In fact, I might even go as far as to hazard that aside from myself, she truly embodies the mindset of a classical Jujutsu Sorcerer beyond anyone else in our year—she fights curses with curses, and it shows.”
“More than Gojo?”
I snorted. “Especially so.”
As far as I was concerned, Gojo was not a Jujutsu Sorcerer. He was something else entirely. A rule-breaker. Like Toji.
That didn’t make him weaker, but it did make him different. At least, in my estimation—and I had no cause to doubt my judgment in this matter.
Although, I might have been the least qualified person to judge whether someone was a regular sorcerer or an anomaly. I had yet to meet anyone even approaching my situation.
Suguru finally began to take the fight seriously, and was beginning to summon stronger curses.
Ito straightened her hands.
The moment the first curse approach, she sliced.
The creature was bisected at its ‘waist’, and fell flat on the ground, dead.
“Her cursed technique,” Shoko said.
“Not quite,” I said. I turned my face towards Gojo in order to gain his attention. He was about two dozen feet away. He turned to me and shook his head with an incredulous grin. He, too, had gotten the same impression. “It’s Cursed Energy Manipulation, Shoko. The likes of which does not belong on a first-year at all,” I grinned.
Her arms became a blur, and she herself became a blender that the cursed spirits couldn’t help but mulch themselves against, turning into purple gore smoothie.
In the meanwhile, she was advancing unerringly towards Suguru, who seemed to be trying his best to hold back his panic. He knew by now that he wasn’t worth a single yen coin in hand-to-hand against the monster that was Ito Aoi. Now, he was being forced to fight like a marginally more effective Ishikawa.
All in a bid to climb the rankings which he had disregarded to the extent that he had scored third lowest.
“Screw this!” Suguru roared as he opened a massive portal.
A Grade One.
A bus-sized eel burst through, mouth open to swallow up Ito, and every curse of Suguru’s that got in the way.
Ito tried to jump away, but mid-air, one of the aerial curses attacked her at a particular angle. She punched it into smithereens before it could lay a finger on her, but Newton’s third law was a right bastard as always. The strike launched her back into the path of the eel-curse, and it swallowed.
Just for good measure, Suguru summoned another army of Grade Threes and had the eel swallow them as well.
The battleground was quiet.
Suguru breathed out a sigh of relief and grinned, holding his knees as he panted. That first punch had terrified him to his core, no doubt.
The side of the eel exploded in a flash of black lightning.
Ito, broken, battered, and bleeding from several cuts on her face and arms, rode on the back of a commandeered flying cursed spirit, on her way to Suguru. When it tried to flap away, she stomped its skull in and jumped off from it, towards Suguru.
Suguru roared, opening dozens of portals. Then over a hundred. Then two hundred.
He opened so many portals that his cursed energy ran out entirely. By that point, every conceivable cubic inch of empty space between him and Ito seemed practically chock-filled with cursed spirits, most of which engulfed her and tried to pin her down for good.
It took minutes for Ito to stop struggling within the massive crush of spirits. Minutes for her to exhaust her cursed energy.
Minutes until Geto Suguru could finally breathe a true sigh of relief—even if this victory had cost him his relative anonymity.
“The winner is Geto Suguru!” Yaga shouted. “Geto! Dismiss your cursed spirits!”
I sighed. “The higher-ups will hear of this, no doubt.”
“Why?”
“He’s Special Grade,” I said.
I sensed Gojo staring at the scene of the battle. His eyes sparkled in excitement. I couldn’t help but grin at that.
---
A/N: Suguru is playing Pokemon while Ito is playing Doom. He might need a change of pants after this fight.