Chapter 67

Jujutsu High, Tokyo
10th September, 12:06 JST

The Simple Domain was deceptively versatile, once you understood how to squeeze every ounce of utility out of its mechanics.

Ito Aoi’s Hundred Eye Zone was an extension of a Domain’s ability to automatically detect practically anything that crossed its borders. By connecting that detective ability to her motor functions, she could essentially transform herself into a puppet that reacted instantly to anything using pre-prepared movements that fit any given situation.

The difficulty came in learning and preparing all these movements beforehand, embedding all of this information into the Simple Domain. Movement was as infinite as any other simple set of things that could be combined in a nigh-infinite amount of ways, like a deck of cards or a chess board.

Due to this, full automation was essentially a pipe dream. She needed to be mentally present to remain in top combat form, but not too present.

She needed to be focused on one thing and one thing only, fighting.

Fighting: hitting and trying not to get hit.

Fighting: getting to know one’s opponent and one’s own relation to them in a competitive setting.

Zen'in Naoya’s speed was strange and unnatural. In one second, he could execute movements faster than normal. Each future movement generated a ghostly, ethereal image that his real body quickly superimposed itself onto.

There were twenty-four such ghostly images. This was what her Hundred Eye Zone told her.

Twenty-four images dragging him along greater and greater heights of speed, all in the span of a single second.

And each time he landed his hand on her…

…she transformed into a pane of glass, her frame locked in place.

She focused on where Zen'in Naoya would next strike into her glass self and enforced herself with as much cursed energy as possible.

The cursed energy dissipated the force of the blow. She was broken out of her glass shell without missing a beat, skidding across the ground to receive him once more.

He blitzed towards her.

She predicted his pattern of attack. He would turn sharply to one of her sides and strike her where she couldn’t easily pivot and block.

Blocking would throw off his rhythm.

If his rhythm was thrown off, he would transform into glass himself. Those were the rules of his cursed technique.

She threw the entire weight of her body into a punch to her side where nothing was. A split second before she completed her punch, Zen'in blitzed into the path of the punch and was struck on his face. Mid-flight, he transformed into glass. She dashed towards him and kicked him upwards as hard as she could.

He flew.

She jumped, catching up to his upward flight, but instead of striking him, she grappled him instead.

She wrapped her arms around his neck, grabbed for his ear-rings on his left ear, and ripped them straight out from his ear. He screamed.

Now that he was in pain, he would have a harder time controlling his cursed technique.

She started pummeling his face while still latched to his back. It took three hits before he finally remembered to grab her and transform her into glass, but by the time he did that, she was already disengaging and kicking off of him.

He slapped her leg and transformed her into glass as she flew away from him. He had no way of catching her, no way of generating leverage mid-air to get her. The glass transformation expired, and she was no worse off.

As they finally landed, Zen'in Naoya held his left ear, glaring in utter hatred at her. He was unbalanced. In pain and angry. She ran up to him.

He activated his technique.

She dodged each of his superspeed attacks. The ones she couldn’t avoid, she took on parts of her body that she reinforced with cursed energy, but only if they were strikes and not grabs or slaps. The glass transformation only worked with grabs or slaps, like it was the inside of the hand that needed to make contact to trigger it.

Once he was done with all twenty-four frames, she swiped him across his face with her hand, shearing past skin, muscle, bone, and nerve. A part of her mind wanted to observe that he now looked far more ‘ugly’ than she did, but she genuinely couldn’t find it in herself to care.

While he reeled, yet to understand the gravity of his wound, she struck him right in his mid-section, lifting him up and blowing him past the trees.

She ran towards him.

She then slowed down as she watched him barely able to get up. Her instincts told her to continue, to pummel and smash and cut and rip until there was nothing left for his parents to recognize, because this was a battle and he had told her that he would kill her, and she could not abide a threat to her own life.

Common sense stayed her hand. Awful as he was, he was still her colleague.

 “You… whore!” he shouted. He grabbed at his face and screamed. “I hate you!”

Ito Aoi blinked as her razor-sharp focus gradually dulled at the sight. There was no longer a fight to be had. She had won.

Just like that.

And yet, he still maintained this story that she was this despicable creature of many names, like ‘slut’ or ‘whore’.

She laughed, even though she didn’t find this situation funny at all. This was like going on that date with Suguru, but a hundred times more cringe-inducing. She couldn’t help herself.

“What are you laughing at?!” He roared as he finally managed to get on his feet.

“You!” she laughed. “Ah, sorry,” she calmed down. “This really isn’t funny. It’s just, I don’t know how else to react in this situation. You’re the nastiest boy I’ve ever met in my life, and really, everything you say to me gives me goosebumps of embarrassment! I truly hate talking to you,” she giggled.

This was a new experience. Hating another person. Yet, she didn’t feel the hatred so much as she felt ridicule at the prospect of hating someone in the first place. Why should she? To end up like him, cursing and grumbling at people she had never met before in her life? What part of this was aspirational at all?

“I see, now!” she continued. “You’re a loser!” she laughed. That was exactly right. This boy was a loser in every way there was, including strength. He was someone that a less charitable person than Aoi would relentlessly bully, because it was so easy to bully someone so nasty. All one had to do was impress their difference upon him.

“You fucking bitch!”

She thought of coming up with a repartee, but aborted that train of thought quickly because it really did not matter one bit. “Whatever, loser,” She continued giggling. “Goodness gracious, I’ve never met someone this pathetic yet unsympathetic in my entire life. You’re like a disgusting little monster that no one in this world wants. It’s a sad story, but why should I care about a disgusting little monster, anyhow? Just be grateful you aren’t a cursed spirit, or you would be dead already!” she laughed.

She had never seen a person come so close to giving her the same impression as a cursed spirit, purely based on personality alone. Zen'in Naoya was a special boy.

And if Teira was telling the truth, which she very likely was, then there were more of him where he came from.

She turned to leave, her Hundred Eye Zone still up as Zen'in Naoya roared into the sky in shame.

It was good to be alive, because it was fun to assimilate new experiences. Never in her life had she ever felt the need to bully another person, but she could clearly see its appeal now. Perhaps bullying was actually an important tool all along, to discourage bad behaviors?

But then, who decided what ‘bad behaviors’ were?

Perhaps bullying wasn’t acceptable, after all? As a tool for education, at least. As a tool to extract pleasure from harming someone, it was ideal.

The only reason why she would stoop to this level was to harm someone that hated her for no reason at all. In this situation, she was practically faultless.

Still, she had to have better things to do than trade words with the likes of Zen'in Naoya, whoever he was.

“I’LL KILL ALL YOU BITCHES!” he roared.

She kept walking, confident that whatever he chose to do, she would be able to react to it in time.

Rather than use his technique to run towards her, he used it to run away instead.

That was that.

000

Jediflipping was underrated to say the least, but then again, most drugs were.

Drugs were fun. I had always known this. And yes, indeed, I had known that drugs were capable of ruining your life, but then again, so was alcohol. So was tobacco, and gambling, and driving fast cars for fun or doing extreme sports. Yet, none of those things were nearly as frowned upon as fucking around with your serotonin receptors in the comfort of your home, or in nature, meeting with someone as kind and compassionate as Iori Utahime.

I held her hand as we laid down on the grass, gazing up at the sky. We had taken a break from exorcising cursed spirits to just talk. The LSD and psilocybin was making me appreciate my environment more, but the MDMA was making me far more appreciative of other humans. It wasn’t in the same way as alcohol, either, which only gave me an undue amount of confidence in my own charm. Rather, I was just infinitely more interested in hearing all about Iori-senpai’s life story.

“In the end,” Iori said, “my father simply doesn’t believe that I have what it takes to become the next clan head. That distinction will go to my cousin,” a male cousin who was also a Grade Two. “Unless I supplant him. But…”

She wasn’t confident in her own strength. She wanted strength for political power, like many others did, but she just didn’t have what it took, in her opinion and mine. In a way, she was like Shoko, but more fossilized, less flexible.

She could potentially become a Grade One one day, but in order to achieve this, something fundamental about her would have to change.

As a person quite fond of Iori Utahime, I didn’t want this for her at all. I’d rather she remain mediocre all her life and relatively happy, than to break in a way that would allow her vessel to be filled with incredible power.

Strength demanded a high price in the world of Jujutsu if you weren’t born as one of the few chosen ones, like I was.

Right now, I didn’t want to be Hibana-sama, the clan head constantly searching for allies in a world full of enemies, constantly trying to establish my presence in this world.

I wanted to be Teira. Taylor. A girl with friends her own age.

I squeezed Iori’s hand gently. A part of me prickled in guilt at the familiar contact with a girl I had just met an hour prior. I hadn’t earned this connection, and yet I had asked this of her, and she had obliged, not out of fear, but out of such bafflement that she had forgotten that denial was a choice in the first place.

Over time, she had grown more accustomed to the contact, and her own hand began to clench around my own as she relayed her story to me.

“But…” she continued. “I can’t. I’m not strong enough.”

I squeezed her hand gently. “I see.”

“I must sound pathetic.”

“I don’t think weakness is pathetic,” I said. “I think strength is a travesty, often abused, rarely used for the common good.”

“What can I do?” she asked.

“You can… rely on me, I suppose,” I said. “Not to install you as the leader of your clan, but to speak loudly enough for you that your will can never go ignored.”

She turned her head to me, eyes wide. “What do you mean?”

“We’re all in this together,” I said. “All the girls and women of this world. It doesn’t matter what our clans are; we all get treated the same anyway, so why put borders between us? Iori-senpai, you can rely on me.”

She let go of my hand, suddenly very scared. “I, uh, Hibana-sama, I don’t understand what you mean, but I don’t believe that I have made any promises to—“

The withdrawal of her hand felt like a shot in the gut. I had said something terrible to her. Something careless and frightening. What was it again? I took a moment to recall our conversation as the feelings summoned after her disengagement had been so heavy and vivid.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “But you don’t actually understand what I was getting at.”

She sat upright and looked down on my supine form. “Then, what did you mean when you said that?”

What did I even say again? Ah, ‘Iori-senpai, you can rely on me’. Right. I repeated that sentence a couple more times in my head so that I wouldn’t forget, and then gave her my answer. “The truth is, I don’t have some kind of secret agenda to amass power for power’s sake. I intend to change the ways of Jujutsu Society from within, and it starts with granting women additional dignity and equality in this world. I don’t care that you’re from a different clan than me. I still see myself in you, too much to ever want to build walls between us.”

“What exactly are you offering?”

“For now? Friendship,” I said. “From you? Nothing at all but that. You have nothing material that you can give me. Nothing that interests me beyond your kind and lovely personality.”

“I don’t want to… be carried,” she said, closing her eyes and balling her fists.

I giggled.

“What’s funny?” she asked angrily.

“Cronyism is the sport of old men, Iori-senpai. None of them see anything wrong with elevating their friends and allies to high positions. Yet, the chorus always goes that this is somehow ‘bad’. And yeah, perhaps it is… corrupt or something like that. But then again, who really gives a damn?”

“I have my pride!”

I tried to reach my hand towards her. She looked at it for a moment before taking it with some reluctance. I interlocked my fingers with hers. “I can see that,” I said. “But pride does not alter reality. And besides, I don’t have to help boost your career for us to still be friends, you know. You talk about work too much, Iori-senpai. None of that has to figure into our friendship.”

“What do you really want from me? Please, just give it to me straight.”

“Friendship,” I repeated.

She let go of my hand and stood up. “Do you think, simply because you’re a Special Grade and I’m not, that you can just toy with me, Hibana?”

I closed my eyes, bared my teeth, and covered my face at the sudden chastisement. This was a failure most humiliating, and now, I was overcome with emotions.

I sat up and turned away from Iori. “Fine,” I said.

“Fine what?”

“I have friends, you know,” I said. “I don’t actually need you. I never said I needed you, or anything from you.”

Stupid, dumb, idiot Teira. There you go lovebombing someone into having a fight-or-flight reaction. All of this was my fault, really.

“I actually have a lot of things to do anyway,” I continued, “so I really could do without the drama that entails having a new friend. So many people depend upon me anyway, so why even bother with all this frivolity anyway? Who cares about any of this?”

I should just quit school and blow up this deal I had with Jujutsu HQ. What were they going to do, kick my clan out and label us curse users? At this point? Laughable. Jujutsu HQ could do absolutely nothing at this point, and less than nothing after I kicked the crap out of Gojo Satoru in the individual battles.

All of this was pointless. Every last day I spent in this damned school was pointless.

I felt Naoya run a wide circuit around me, taking brief breaks before continuing.

“Wait, actually,” Iori said. “Teira-chan, I didn’t mean it that way. I’m just confused by all this.”

Naoya circled me like a shark. He could sense me. He was preparing to strike me.

While still sitting, I drew my back up and took a deep breath. I was full of feelings, but that was fine. I always was. I could think through them. “Then maybe it’s best that we part ways, if I’m too confusing for you to understand. It’s not your fault. I suppose we just weren’t meant to be.”

Whatever the case, I needed her to go away.

“Teira-chan, I’m sorry that I upset you. I didn’t mean to—“

“Just leave me alone,” I said. “In any case, I don’t hang out with—” weaklings, but the word caught in my throat. “People who find me confusing,” I instead amended. “Who likes having to explain themselves all the time? Don’t you think that gets tiresome? Just go. Get some points for your team. You’ve wasted too much time with me anyway.”

Iori balled her fists, uncertainty etched on her features. She was torn between participating in the games and tending to this crisis, but eventually, pragmatism won over. “We’ll talk about this later, okay? I’m sorry. Please don’t be angry.”

She finally ran away.

Zen'in Naoya intended to fight me, after suffering a humiliating defeat from Ito Aoi. He had probably been warned by his father not to go after me, but he wasn’t thinking very clearly now.

No one ever did when emotions were high, and now I was finally beginning to question the act of purposefully inducing in myself a lack of control over my own emotions. That was what drugs were, when you thought about it. Not all drugs, but definitely the ones I had just taken. All of them affected mood.

All of them had conspired to transform me into an embarrassing mess.

For a moment, I had truly felt like a child once again, unburdened by the world or by the concept of shame or embarrassment, able to just strike up a conversation with a total stranger fearlessly. And it had been fun, just talking. Twenty-three years of trauma had disappeared in that short moment of respite, and if you squinted, you could almost see a normal girl underneath all the layers of monstrosity that had calcified over my skin like a protective chitin, an adaptation to better survive the awful circumstances I had continuously run into throughout my life.

For daring to seek this respite from all my pain, I was being punished.

Damn you, Iori-senpai. I didn’t even like you anyway.

Naoya arrived like a bolt of lightning, grabbing the back of my head mid-run before pushing me into a row of trees.

I enforced myself with cursed energy, but not so much as to completely blunt the pain of it all. Rather than use my own hands to slap my face or punch myself in the head, I let Naoya be my hands and legs.

He tossed me. Kicked me. Punched me. Turned me into a glass pane and shattered me. He bloodied me. Bruised me. Broke my bones. He screamed as he did, his face twisting to become even uglier. Ito had ruined those once-pretty features of his, and she had likely done it out of pure pragmatism and not revenge for his insult. There would be consequences to that, but I would protect her from them. She had done nothing wrong, really, and Shoko could heal the guy’s face.

She didn’t have to, of course. I hoped she wouldn’t—he genuinely didn’t deserve that after calling Ito’s scar ugly. He deserved far worse, honestly.

 And Ito deserved a reward. It had been fun observing their fight.

Finally, he laid me down on my back, straddled my chest, and began to punch me in my face. “I hate you!” he screamed. “I hate you!”

I know, I muttered tiredly in my mind. I fucking know.

It’s all the likes of you ever do simply because I had the gall to exist: you hate me.

And yet, my conscience had accused me of monstrosity for killing the likes of him, for ending the cycle of hatred and violence with a hatred and violence so absolute that it smothered all resistance. What should I had done, employed a more Buddha-like strategy of enlightening my political opponents? Was it really such a fallacy to expect peace from violent actions?

Naoya stopped punching me when my face resembled a mangled face repeatedly struck with sledgehammers. My mouth was a mess of teeth poking every which way, a shattered jaw, blood everywhere. The self-harm had well and truly chased away that disgustingly sickly sweet feeling of MDMA that now only gave me nausea at the memory of my prior interaction. I employed my Reverse Cursed Technique at my brain to chase more of the effects away, healing my receptors and reducing the overabundance of serotonin build-up.

The Zen'in clan heir leaned close to my ear and murmured in a low growl. “I will kill you. And after I’m done with you, I will rape your cooling corpse until there’s nothing left of you at all, you monstrous fucking whore. I hate you!”

Around his neck, the long, black chitinous fingers of a Reaper Ant closed. His eyes widened and one of his hands darted to touch the Reaper Ant’s hand. Before he could reach it, another hand grabbed around his wrist.

Then another around his other wrist.

Three Reaper Ants, holding him by his neck and hands, carrying him off from me.

All the while, I healed my face back to normal with the Reverse Cursed Technique, growing new teeth where Naoya had punched out the old ones. I felt good now, like I had just vomited after a round of binge drinking. The poison was gone. The embarrassment still weighed on me, but that, too, would disappear. One day.

Maybe never. Maybe because time was cyclical, because the world was fractal, I was doomed to repeat this pattern.

Then, perhaps, the real solution was to simply get used to what I was, in all its ugliness.

And who was I?

“I’m a teacher,” I said to Naoya calmly. “The second best one there is, because I know everything. And everyone should listen to me. Things work when everyone listens to me. But you won’t listen to me, Zen'in Naoya.” I had never tried to make him listen to me, but I knew his type. I knew he wouldn’t, no matter how hard I tried.

“You fucking—“ another Reaper Ant appeared behind him, and held his mouth wide open. He was utterly helpless.

“You won’t listen to me,” I repeated. “I don’t have the power to make you listen to me. But I know what does.”

A portal appeared above my hand, and out from it, a handful of fungi dropped into it.

“This is the Golden Teacher,” I said. “You will listen when she speaks.”

I walked towards him. He screamed, trying to pull himself away from the ironclad grips of the Reaper Ants, but he was too pathetically weak. He kicked his legs. More ants appeared to hold him still. He thrusted his pelvis, trying to get away. One more ant held him around his waist.

He was powerless to move.

Powerless to prevent this violation upon his autonomy.

Powerless to stop this lesson from arriving, one that he would never forget.

It was impossible to overdose and die on Psilocybin Cubensis.

According to rumor, some wish they had.

Because a reality without veils and blindspots was a special kind of agony for those who reveled in their lack of consciousness, in their attachment to sleep.

“Today, for the first time in your life, you will wake up.”

I stuffed the handful of mushrooms into his mouth. He tried to scream and push the stuff out with his tongue, but I wouldn’t let him. Each time he pushed something out, I grabbed the saliva-ridden chunks of mushroom and reinserted it into his mouth until it was all inside, and then I covered his mouth with my hand so he wouldn’t be able to spit any more.

My Reaper Ants pushed his lower jaw up, forcing him to chew. For minutes, we chewed for him.

In my hand, Michiko summoned one more item: a plastic bottle of water.

I shoved the neck into his mouth and upended the contents, forcing him to swallow as much of it as possible. There had been ten grams in his mouth at one point, all of it compressed. He had managed to spit out quite a bit of it, but even if he had managed to spit half of it, that still wouldn’t matter.

He would learn today.

A/N: I am not going to 'fix' Naoya in such a cheap way, lmao. Please. This will make him more interesting, but not less awful, because I don't actually believe that psychedelics have such a transformative power. The only people you ever hear yap about how DMT or LSD changed their lives are always the most insufferable people you can imagine lmaooo.

In the end, drugs are all about how much fun you can have with them while trying your best to avoid traumatic events borne from overconsumption, or avoid death in some cases. I personally wouldn't recommend drugs on that account.