Chapter 61

Jujutsu High, Tokyo
1st September, 15:26 JST

Four hundred micrograms was a choice to say the least.

I hadn’t fallen into an entirely different realm as I had feared. That was nice. What annoyed me was how much the drug intruded into all aspects of my life by way of contemplating certain topics without reservation. There was something to be said about ‘knowing too much’.

In my case, it was less about the knowledge, and more about the awareness of the things in my head that I liked to leave in the dark. There was a backroom in my mind where I kept the mental elements that were liable to slow me down for whatever reason, and I had yet to make plans on ever cleaning that room out.

I suspected that five hundred micrograms might inspire me to… give that an honest go. That was a problem. Mental spring cleaning was not only a time-consuming task, but also one that I was likely incapable of doing entirely on my own. There were doctors for this kind of thing, and I wasn’t proud enough of the Reverse Cursed Technique to imagine that it was a remedy even for a damaged psychology.

The yakuza guy I had bought my drugs from had been too flippant about the effects of psychedelics. He called it ‘chemical enlightenment’. He said that taking it would give me an expanded consciousness, and would make me more Buddha-like. As amusing as that prospect had been, I feared that I had underestimated exactly how much introspection had awaited me.

I was hoping that the four grams of cubensis I had eaten forty-five minutes prior might make me less ‘Buddha-like’, and instead leave me with just the carefree sensation of a good high.

Gojo Satoru threw his arm around my shoulders as we walked to the large training field outside the main school building, the same field we had first fought in on the first day of school, Shoko walking to my right and Suguru to Gojo’s left.

We were relatively late to arrive as most of the students of Jujutsu High were already in the field downhill, the exam about to begin in only three minutes.

“Aren’t you excited?” Gojo asked. “For our rematch?”

Truthfully, I was. It was one of the few things that I truly looked forward to, these days. Besides hanging out with Shoko, of course. “You do realize that if you win, we’ll return to being even, right?”

We had essentially tied on our first match-up. Then, on our second, when I had teleported us into the sky and used my Domain Expansion to paralyze him, that had been my unequivocal win, sneak attack or not. We were essentially two-one in my favor. Or one-nil, in the case where the tie awarded us no points.

“That sky fight doesn’t count,” Gojo said. “You do realize I let you win because I thought it would be funny, right?”

He was entirely honest as he said this. Too bad, because a loss was still a loss, whether or not he did it as a joke. “It was funny,” I said. “But it also counts.”

Shoko then walked in front of us and began to backtrack to face me. “Okay, what’s with all these changes, Teira? Why are you so… calm?”

I looked at her flatly. “I’m in my adolescence. Am I not supposed to change my routines at a whim, exploring everything to my heart’s content?”

I didn’t believe that, for obvious reasons. The real reason for my decision to switch up my routine was mostly informed by my past habits, specifically my drinking habit. Chaos was my wheelhouse. It always has been. It probably always would be. This was no different.

“Tell the truth.”

I sighed. “Fine,” I said. “I quit drinking because Naobito made it uncool.”

That was all there was to it, really. He was the first drinking buddy I had ever made, and our non-frequent meetings had killed my attachment to the substance with a vengeance. Not due to anything overly drastic on his part. He was an asshole, but tolerable enough in small doses. We had met two more times over the summer, not including one brief chat in Obon, and each time, we had shared a gourd of sake over some verbal sparring.

That was the reason I had stopped. The reason why that was all it had taken to make me stop was because I was a very chaotic individual, even as I idealized order above all. It was a fascinating dichotomy of mine, made additionally fascinating when contemplating it with the acid.

A lot of what I was, was very fascinating. I hoped the shrooms would make me equally fascinated in myself.

Gojo laughed. Suguru breathed a sigh of relief. “Finally. Teira, I’m proud of you.”

“Hold your praise,” Shoko said. “She’s taking lab chemicals now.”

Suguru gaped at me.

I smiled. “I took mushrooms forty-five minutes ago, too.”

Shoko smacked her forehead. “This isn’t an improvement, you know.”

The extreme mood-swings that resulted from excessive drinking was something that I dearly missed in my day to day. All those strong feelings had their place, even the excessive rage and sadness. Almost especially those feelings, in fact.

Perhaps it was time I finally embraced moderation, the middle way as it were?

I shivered slightly from the profundity of that realization, anxiety creeping into my head and my body at the same time. The dreaded ‘come-up anxiety’ had finally reared its ugly head.

That dread was compounded with the realization that the mushrooms were also making me more ‘Buddha-like’, which wasn’t something that I wanted.

“I’ll tell Iemon,” Gojo said. “He’ll ground you for sure.”

I rolled my eyes. “Tell him whatever you want.”

“He gave me his number,” Gojo said, pulling out his phone as he did. He went to his contacts and showed me it. Hibana Iemon, and his number. “I will call him.”

The threat had suddenly gained that much more gravity, and I began to dread the prospect for reasons I couldn’t fathom. I didn’t answer to Iemon, but the way he was becoming these days made it more difficult for me to dismiss his concerns like I usually did. He was a nuisance that refused to heed my warnings not to form an emotional attachment with me. What was more, the audacious little cur had chosen to call my bluff that I would punish him severely should he try to treat me like his ‘dear niece’.

I had delayed in punishing him, and it had given him all the confidence necessary to finally act as a guardian—my guardian. And the more I delayed in punishing him, the more difficult it became for me to take that step. It was a positive feedback loop of reluctance that I was well into the upswing of. It was made even more severe by the fact that Shoko had been able to successfully heal him. He was still undergoing intense physical therapy from the best doctors of the non-sorcerer world, but he was well on his way to recovery.

These factors all combined to make it impossible for me to punish him. I had lost my edge. Lost my hatred. I didn’t know what to do about that.

I distended my jaw and swallowed his phone whole.

A portal awaited inside my gullet, transporting the device to the Timeless Sanctuary, all the while as Gojo pushed away from me and looked at me in disgust. “I had nice pictures, Teira! Summer memories! What the hell?!”

“I’ll give it back once I poop it out,” I lied to him. “Once I do, you’ll remember never to threaten me with Iemon again. I’ll make your life miserable.”

Gojo’s consternation warred with his amusement, but I knew that the former would win, based on the growing shadow in his features. “I don’t know why I bother with your gross self.”

I burped.

We were finally at the edge of the slope down to the field where almost sixty students were waiting, most of them grouped up and ready to take on lone stragglers.

The first-years were still stubbornly opposed to cooperation, which I didn’t strictly agree with. In a real combat scenario, cooperation was king. This was just a simulation, but those should be taken as ways to refine one’s tactics for real scenarios.

With the recent increase of sorcerers, it might become even more tenable for sorcerers to team up long-term rather than embark on solo exorcisms like in the days of yore, where most cases of cooperation commonly involved a mentor and a student pair.

All four of us stopped at the edge of the slope.

“What are you gonna do, Suguru?” Gojo asked.

“Ideally, nothing,” Suguru replied. “But if I’m forced to fight, I will fight.”

“Teira?” Gojo asked.

The more I thought it over, the more I disliked the first-years being so chaotic and averse to cooperation.

I wanted to do something about that.

I felt some embarrassment over that, for some reason. They were not my clan members, but my classmates. I was acting well above my station trying to school them. They would think of me as overbearing and rude and—

The damn come-up anxiety. I needed to focus. I would be damned before I let a bunch of teenagers drive me into a spiral of self-doubt.

The grass moved like waves in the ocean. The wind felt unaccountably vivid and pure, like energy from the very heavens. The nature of campus was in perfect balance and harmony. The people in the field weren’t.

So much competition. So much blood would be shed.

But it would all be for a good cause.

“Teira?”

I opened my mouth to say ‘I’ll beat the crap out of everyone until they finally work together’. Instead, I found that these words did not agree with some unknowable wavelength of the universe. They were wrong, or misplaced.

I was misplaced.

An alien from another dimension. I was not even from this Earth. Not even from this country. I was not Japanese. Nor even a child.

The realizations did not induce a sense of rejection in me, but rather a sense of intense curiosity for a world without me.

A me without me. Ego death. The drug dealer had said something about this, and the literature surrounding the subject was murky, but I was almost certain that I was slowly approaching this event horizon.

“Enough about Teira,” I said. “This is Shoko’s time,” I said, patting her shoulder gently.

I could feel myself disappearing somewhere as I said this. I looked at her, and smiled proudly. “My time has come,” I said.

“Teira?”

“I am going somewhere,” I said to her. “You’ll be on your own for the time being.”

“You’re not taking the exam?”

“I am,” I said. “But I will be away as well.”

I was barely hanging on by a thread to who I was. It was all disappearing.

All of it.

The good, and the bad.

The id, the ego, and the superego. All the framework was becoming intangible, leaving a psyche bereft of structure. All there was, was the contents. The memories and feelings. And there were so many feelings.

“This is your opportunity to find out who you are,” I said to Shoko. “When you’re alone. I’ve taught you everything I can, but it’s time you stand on your own two feet and prove to yourself that you are more than the person you think you are.”

Shoko’s brows furrowed. “Teira… you put a bounty on me.”

“It’s not nearly as impressive to stand on your feet if you aren’t carrying any weights as well.”

“I can’t do this.”

“Maybe,” I said. “But what’s important is that you try. Shoko, I’m… going now. Good luck.”

And just like that, the pilot of my life finally left the wheelhouse, and I knew what it felt like to be truly adrift in the universe’s eddies of causality.

The waters were so warm…

000

Shoko always knew that a day would come where she would be forced to pay the piper. All this training was only for the purpose of being strong enough to challenge the strong. Teira talked a big game about how she wanted Shoko to be too strong to die due to her own weakness, but somehow it always felt like her strength invited the sort of challenges that would likely kill her.

Teira was staring emptily at the sky, her dark orbs unblinking. She was… gone, now. So strung out that she barely had any awareness of the real world.

Her failing was a real possibility at this point. Gojo stared intensely at Teira, whirling around her as he did. “How is she going to defend herself?”

An apparition manifested next to her. A dark robed creature wearing a large hood, inside of which was a network of spirals that barely even suggested a real face. Michiko’s true form.

She took Teira’s hand and led her down the slope gently.

“That thing always gives me the creeps,” Suguru said.

“That’s gotta be cheating, using a Special Grade curse for this exam,” Shoko said. If people could just bring Special Grade curses to school to do their fighting for them, wouldn’t that entail that the Big Three would have an undue advantage over the other students?

Suguru, of course, didn’t count, as his innate technique specifically involved subjugating cursed spirits. They were all a part of his power. Michiko was not directly a part of Teira’s power in the same way.

“You’d think so, but actually, this is arguably more impressive than using your own power,” Gojo said. “Special Grades like that one don’t just enslave themselves to humans. Teira really lucked out on their connection. Ah well, see you guys on the other side.”

Then, Gojo jumped. He flew dozens of meters into the air before landing gently in the middle of the sparse crowd. Everyone immediately distanced themselves from him.

Suguru chuckled at the sight. He looked over his shoulder at Shoko. “I’ll have your back for a favor.”

“If you want a kiss, ask Gojo, not me,” Shoko stuck her tongue out at him.

Suguru chuckled. “If I wanted a kiss, I’d opt for a more attractive option.”

Shoko suppressed her smirk. “I heard all about your date with Ito, you know, so don’t act like you’re all that.”

Suguru’s jaw tensed.

Shoko saw no downsides to taking Suguru’s offer. They were already friends, so she tended to share her healing with him on a regular basis to help him train. In return, he’d usually run to town to get her whatever she needed. His flying cursed spirits made him the ideal gofer.

She didn’t think that owing Suguru a favor would be bad. At worst, it would be endlessly embarrassing if he asked for something unreasonable, which was a fifty-fifty likelihood. He was a hormonal teenage boy that sucked at dating girls.

Ultimately, the pain of owing him a favor couldn’t compete with her own tiny desire to see where she really stood if she were to go all out.

She had to try, if only for Teira’s sake.

Teira was busy staring at the sky, while Michiko hovered besides her protectively. The other students gave the two of them an even wider berth.

“Thanks, but no thanks,” Shoko said.

She ran down the slope, sliding down on the halfway point just as a procession of the school’s faculty exited from the main building and marched towards the slope to the field before stopping at the lip.

The wheelchaired principal Dojima was standing next to several teachers, including Yaga-sensei. At some point, Shoko had offered to try healing Dojima, but his frailty was the result of age and incredibly old wounds. They had been well beyond her ability to heal. Worse yet, her R-ray had identified that his vitality was flagging severely.

He had, perhaps, a handful of years left to live if she had interpreted her power correctly. It was a shame, but death was a part of life.

One of the teachers gave the principal a megaphone, which he activated with a brief screech before speaking into it, coughing twice to test the volume.

“You all know why you are here,” the man began, his voice old and weary. “So I will spare the niceties and explain the rules one last time. There are fifteen slots open, and sixty-three of you. The last fifteen people left standing will receive a slot. If you are rendered unconscious, you will be transported out from the field by a barrier, and out of play. If you admit defeat, you will be transported out from the field by a barrier, and out of play. Otherwise, you will remain in play for as long as you can tolerate it, regardless of how heavy your injuries are.”

And just like that, Shoko saw a path to victory.

She hid her smirk as she puzzled together her little plot.

One of the teachers then began to chant, raising two fingers in the air. They were too far away to hear, but Shoko would bet that he was using Tengen’s incantation to cast a barrier.

Seconds later, an amber film expanded over the field, the barrier now put in place to enforce the rules that the principal had shared.

“With all this said, go!”

Some male third-years whose names Shoko didn’t recognize immediately honed in on her. They all looked sheepishly at her. “I’m sorry, Ieiri-san,” one said, “but… I could really use that money.”

At least he was being respectful.

Shoko spread her arms, and let them rain brutal blows on her.

They really had nothing on Teira.

She was left bruised, a surprising amount of bones broken, by the time they were done with her. She ran the Reverse Cursed Technique to prevent falling into unconsciousness, and they seemed too dull to question why she wasn’t being teleported out from the barrier. Instead, they moved on to other prey.

The battle had started in earnest, and if Shoko played her cards juuust right, she would come out of this as a competitor of the Exchange Event proper.

000

Nowhere in the rules did it say that you actually had to fight to gain a slot in the Exchange Event. Kobayashi Jun kept that in mind as he ran his own strategy. The rules were simple: the last fifteen standing were awarded their slots. Those who fought ran the risk of defeat. Those who ran away or employed cowardly means were far more likely to make it ahead.

Jun was aware of this, of course. But that wasn’t all.

Not only was he aware of this, he was aware that plenty others were aware of this. His Coward’s Dance positioned him physically in the blind spaces of the mass’s collective rage and violence, allowing him to pass as a phantom underneath everyone’s radar. Everyone but Gojo Satoru and Hibana Teira, but for this preliminary exam, they were deliberately choosing not to engage anyone. They were not challengers. They were the challenge.

While a larger percentage were busy brawling for all they were worth, including most of Jun’s classmates, Jun also spotted several rats and cowards trying to wait out the bell.

One of them included his fellow class rep, Shoko. Her strategy was base, but it was far from rat-like. She had sustained heavy injuries for her gambit. As far as deception went, she had inserted a degree of dignity into her strategy that couldn’t be mistaken for cowardice.

 Jun got behind one of the ‘waiters’ and jumped on his back, wrapping an arm around his neck to restrict his pulse. Fifteen seconds later, the man disappeared from his grasp as he was knocked unconscious.

Jun moved on. Two girls. Three boys. Then two more girls.

Jun’s mission was simple: it was to rack up a score. He doubted that anyone was keeping count, but in case anyone was doing so, he didn’t want to be taken for one of these ‘waiters’ who were trying to wait out the bell in relative safety. Neither did he want to risk himself in the big fights. The field was in utter chaos.

Satoshi was busy throwing wild punches that caused the upperclassmen to genuinely fly away like they weighed nothing. He was using one man as a bludgeon, holding him by his foot to sweep away his opponents.

Nakamura was using guns created by his cursed technique to shoot people. Enough shots, and most of his opponents forfeited on their own. Those who didn’t usually just fell unconscious. The medical team of the school were busy setting up tents to administer emergency medical treatments. Shoko would have her hands full after this exam was over.

And then Jun witnessed something unaccountably strange.

Aomori Sakura was in the middle of a crowd of upperclassmen, holding a mudra and concentrating deeply.

Surrounding her? Traps.

Horrible ones, too. One upperclassman had stepped into a pit of sharp sticks, one of them poking straight through his foot. Another one’s leg was caught in a bear-trap of all things. A third was hanging by his neck from a rope attached to a stick that had sprung up straight from tension. Once he fell unconscious, he would be immediately teleported out, so he wasn’t in any real danger. Still, the sight was unaccountably morbid.

Had Aomori rigged the field beforehand? That sounded improbable.

Was this her technique, then? The ability to manifest trap-like phenomena in her surroundings? His Coward’s Dance pointed towards an emphatic ‘yes’. The range around her was very dark red. She was no longer a wide-ranger with anemic combat ability, it seemed.

One upperclassman stepped on a patch of grass. The grass immediately revealed itself to be on top of a board with a hinge in the middle. The board rotated on that hinge, revealing a spike trap underneath. He screamed in agony.

Jun blinked the sight away.

Ishikawa was being protected by Frieza, who seemed to delight in brutal displays of power. Ishikawa’s temperament made him ill-suited for combat, so he tended to try and avoid it by discouraging it by any means necessary. That was a fascinating paradox to behold.

When Jun was finally done with his fellow rats and cowards, he made a quick stop next to Shoko. The violence was dying down. There were only twenty left. He crouched next to her. “You worked hard for this victory,” he said to her.

She kept her eyes closed as she replied, trying not to seem out of place. Anyone with a working brain would know that she was out of place. She looked defeated, and yet she was not. If she had been, the barrier would have teleported her out.

Critical thinking was difficult on the best of days, especially in the heat of battle.

“Don’t screw me over,” she said.

“Not at all,” he said as he sat next to her. His Coward’s Dance told him that he still didn’t have to move just yet. The battle was raging a fair distance away now, and Gojo, Geto and Hibana were forming something of a bulwark between them, even though they were both all doing nothing. “I’m simply giving props where they’re due.”

White light shimmered around her as she healed some of her injuries.

“Doesn’t it hurt?” Jun asked.

“Not as much as my cramps do,” she said.

“That… can’t be right.”

She smirked. “No, but I find lying to be fun.” Then, “how many of us didn’t make it?”

“None,” Jun said, to his surprise. “Even Aomori is pulling her weight. It’s… really quite something.”

As in, it was quite a disappointment. Jun wasn’t the type to endlessly idolize his upperclassmen, but what was the point of them if they weren’t strong and impressive? At this rate, the only one worth praising was Mukai-senpai, and she wasn’t able to attend this Exchange Event.

Jun would have liked stronger upperclassmen.

“Are they not fighting us?”

“They’re only fighting us,” Jun said.

Even now, Satoshi was busy fighting off a horde of second-years that had teamed up to address him specifically. Jun hoped desperately that they would win. Similar scenes could be seen all over the field. Groups of upperclassmen teaming up to tackle lone first-years. Ito razing through every comer with brutal efficiency. Suzuki and Takahashi doing the same.

Why are we so strong?

Jun’s eyes fell on Gojo, who was busy lying back first on the packed dirt without a care in the world.

Hibana was standing in a zombie-like fashion, staring emptily into the sky, present but clearly checked out. His Coward’s Dance said exactly as much. The only card she had in her hand was that cursed spirit next to her. A partner spirit, an even more complicated working of Jujutsu than shikigami creation.

The first-years were likely strong because of them. When the ceiling was on the same level as the stars, even those on the ground could reach the sky.

Nineteen left.

One more fell into one of Aomori’s horrifying traps, but this challenger had the wherewithal to immediately announce her surrender before she could fall properly. She disappeared in the nick of time.

Eighteen left.

Suzuki rained a litany of blows on a second-year, each strike heavier than the last until one lucky hit to the chin instantly disappeared him, causing Suzuki to punch air on her subsequent strike. She broke off her combination and whirled to find another opponent, her red hair swishing this way and that as she looked around.

Seventeen left.

Frieza backhanded an overeager third-year, causing him to instantly disappear, likely with a broken jaw. The cartoon alien cackled at his cruelty.

Sixteen left.

Clearly, no one was keeping count. Satoshi certainly wasn’t. Otherwise, he would have stopped to consider that there were only fifteen people left standing, not counting Shoko who was on the ground and pretending to be defeated.

He instead put his human cudgel out of his misery by punching him in the face until he disappeared.

Some of the first-years had began fighting amongst themselves as the crowd had thinned, but all of that ended as the barrier lifted and the megaphone crackled to life again.

Jun gently tapped Shoko’s shoulder so as to not cause her pain. “It’s over. Congratulations.”

He stood up and watched as she writhed on the floor, the white light of her positive energy making her abused body whole. He offered her a hand, and she took it, pulling herself up with ease and smiling brilliantly. “Congratulations to you as well.”

All in all, twelve upperclassmen defeated put Jun at a respectable level, in his own opinion. Today had been an unequivocal victory.