Chapter 72 

Jujutsu High, Tokyo
10th September, 12:45 JST

Takahashi Hana could have made wiser decisions than immediately launching into an all-out assault against the five boys that had put her between a rock and a hard place, in the middle of pitch darkness at that.

Unfortunately, the dark fucking terrified her, and she couldn’t be blamed for making hasty decisions while under mortal terror. The world suddenly losing all light at once was a concept that she had never considered very closely. She wasn’t scared of the night. But the only night she had ever truly experienced was the one in civilization, and its darkness was fought off valiantly by the marvels of modern technology.

True darkness didn’t exist except inside cramped spaces or in bathrooms with lights off, or in rooms with thick curtains.

True darkness on a mass scale, in the open air, just didn’t exist in the modern world. Or if it did, it wasn’t something that people commonly experienced.

This feeling, of being in the dark in the open, felt like having your eyes taped shut with ductape. Or glued shut with a hot glue gun. It was terrible. Blindness was terrible. She had no idea how anyone could cope with such a disability.

It hurt when they hit her back, but not as much as it would have if they weren’t under her slight control. They were treating her as an unruly pet animal that had suddenly attacked someone. When your dog latched onto someone, you would try to pull them away, not pummel them to an inch of their life. Likewise, they only tried to soften her while she rained blows and scratches on anyone that she could reach.

A blow to her stomach lifted her off her feet and sent her staggering down the forest. She wheezed in agony.

She felt the presences of the five sorcerers surround her, but none continued their assault, just letting her wheeze for breath on the ground.

This sucked.

“Please just surrender already! You’re a first-year and our underclassman, so that’s why we’re being soft on you, but you need to meet us halfway, you know.”

Her requirements for secrecy dictated that she should meet them halfway. If she pulled them to her side too hard and too fast, they would know that they were under a mental suggestion. Male idiocy could only carry her that far.

The darkness in the sky finally abated, and to her utter shock and shame, she hadn’t done any substantial damage. Her scratches had only drawn red lines on skin, but no blood. Her panic had worked against her, and she hadn’t properly molded her cursed energy.

She pushed herself to sit on her knees and sighed. “Fine. Sorry. I—“

And then a red streak punched the most injured sorcerer in the face so hard that he disappeared three meters into his subsequent flight towards the woods.

In one pregnant moment, Takahashi Hana absorbed the sight like a dry sponge. Suzuki Yui, the first year’s resident girl punk, had arrived to support her.

She hadn’t planned on relying on any of her friends for this Exchange Event, but in the here and now, she would take whatever help that she would get.

000

Jujutsu High, Tokyo
10th September, 12:46 JST

A lot of things tended to piss Suzuki Yui off. It was the reason she had fallen into the crowd that she had, back when she lived among non-sorcerers.

To be a punk, you had to be constantly pissed, on the verge of exploding in rage from the myriad ways in which everything—and it truly was everything—sucked. Anger was her default mood through which she expressed every other emotion, even joy and amusement. Anger was the tint in the glasses that she used to see the world.

But right now, seeing her new best friend beaten up and cornered by a bunch of cowardly upperclassmen, there were no nuances to her anger. No other emotion but anger—the passive anger that she felt at all times, and the active anger she now felt, both emotions multiplying against one another and causing her such rage that her ears felt hot on her head.

“Yui!” Hana cried.

Only three of the four boys focused on her, raising their fists and weapons.

The fourth held Hana in a chokehold, but he wasn’t applying pressure to knock her out. All he was doing was holding her in place, consternation evident on his expression.

He was holding her hostage.

“Surrender!” he shouted. “Or I’ll eliminate her!” His voice was shaky. He clearly didn’t want to do this.

Even his friends looked at him in disgust, which was rich considering they had already ganged up on her.

“What, you’re embarrassed?” Yui spat. “Now that there’s someone here to witness your cowardice?” Assholes.

Now, all three of the boys were focusing on their wayward friend. Just as one opened their mouth to, presumably, yell at him, Yui was already upon them.

Combo Stack required that she map out all her subsequent hits in her head, and then perform them in the right order. If she got it right, her innate technique would multiply the power of her hit, raising the baseline power of her strike. The increase in her power also compounded. The closer she got to perfect timing, the higher that multiplier would become.

The highest multiplier she had gotten was a whooping factor of three. She imagined that if she was lucky enough to hit a Black Flash, then the true potential of her innate technique would finally be revealed.

Then, Grade One would not just be a pipe dream for her.

Her first strike hit her unsuspecting target’s face.

Combo Stack compounded the power by ten percent. For the vast majority of the cases in which she used her innate technique, the power multiplier could be best expressed in percentages.

At the start of the school year, she had only been able to garner a ten percent increase in her power at most.

Now, ten percent was the bare minimum.

The fist which she used to punch the boy in his face grabbed hold of his shirt and pulled him closer to her, so she could throw her left fist.

Thirty percent.

She kicked against the ground.

Eight percent. Not much, but that was eight percent on top of the thirty and ten percent she had already accrued in her power multiplier. The force of her step blasted her towards the boy, and she buried her knee into his gut.

The boy flew away, leaving a trail of vomit behind him—

Yui saw stars.

When she finally stopped rolling on the ground, having realized just how far that strike to her head had launched her, she was apoplectic.

And gleeful.

They had no idea just what they had provoked.

She took stock of the battlefield.

The fourth guy, that had been holding Hana hostage, was now being squeezed to an inch of his life by Hana, whose thin arms were wrapped around the boy’s neck while his face turned blue—

And he was gone.

Alright, one less thing to worry about.

“Alright!” Hana shouted. “I’m done playing now! Go crazy, Yui! I surrender!”

Just like that, she disappeared as well, taking with her a weight resting on Yui’s shoulders. Hana seemed satisfied with what she had accomplished, and now that she was bowing out, Yui wouldn’t have to worry about protecting her.

And without Hana by her side, Yui also wouldn’t have to worry about keeping a cool head and fighting for the sake of such boring concepts as ‘completing the mission’ or ‘helping the team’.

Right now, all she wanted to do, in the whole wide world, was to cut their arms and legs off, and then blind them.

But she’d settle for just beating them.

“Enough games,” the boy she had roughed up growled. On his left arm, the air shimmered with a light that grew more and more intense until it resolved into the shape of a large, round disk.

The glow disappeared, revealing a golden, metallic shield.

“My name is Ukyo Baisho,” he said. Ukyo had shoulder-length black hair and a muscular build, but was otherwise not very different from the average male upperclassman in Jujutsu high. “My technique is called Impact Absorption Shield—“

Oh, hell no.

“MytechniqueiscalledComboStackanditallowsmetomultiplythepowerofmystrikebyacertainamount,andeachsubsequentstrikeincreasesthatmultiplierbyasmallamount,likecompoundinginterest.”

Her impromptu speech had cut Ukyo’s off, and he had stared at her in bafflement, left with no choice but to listen to her rapid-fire delivery of her innate technique’s rules.

The moment she was done, she dashed towards them.

Ukyo’s confusion turned to resolve, and he rushed towards her as well, holding his shield up.

Impact Absorption Shield.

She understood its gist even as she punched into it. Each of her strikes failed to penetrate the shield. All of her kinetic energy either disappeared into the shield, or was slightly reflected in the form of recoil.

Unfortunately for Ukyo, letting Yui build up her innate technique by granting her a surface through which she could grow her power was self-defeating. Yui’s innate technique worked best against moving targets such as people and whatever they held. It worked poorly against static vertical targets like walls and trees, and worked the worst when it came to the ground.

Her ideal target was, in fact, the Impact Absorption Shield.

Before Ukyo could even blink, Yui had let off half a dozen strikes on the shield, each one with a rate of increase hovering between twenty and thirty percent.

Then, on a whim, she pivoted her body and stomped.

The stomp launched her forward, towards one of Ukyo’s two remaining partners, who was busy preparing some kind of Super Sentai mecha out of several discrete shikigami, each of them melting together to form a twenty-foot-tall humanoid creature.

She blasted through its torso while the shikigami-machine was mid-transformation, scattering the limb and head shikigami. Her rush had placed her next to the shikigami master, whose eyes were only beginning to wide at the suddenness of her attack on him.

He was too slow to react even as she dragged him in front of her on pure instinct.

Just as she did, Ukyo’s other partner had finished firing off a hailstorm of… birds? They looked like sparrows made of black metal, and their wings were sharp as razors.

And they curved through the air.

She kicked her impromptu hostage towards the flight of bird projectiles. Out of the seven making their way towards her, three lodged into her hostage. Two sliced past his arms, grazing them on each side. The remaining two had dodged him altogether.

That meant four projectiles for Yui to worry about.

Cursed Energy Manipulation was a game of math, and risk.

You had one pool of energy to work with. That energy could be bafflingly effective when concentrated right, or it could grant a baseline increase in every parameter when applied evenly across the body. This passive usage of cursed energy was the bread and butter of all Jujutsu Sorcerers, but it did not defy expectation.

I’m going to use cursed energy only on my hands to destroy these bird projectiles.

Spending all of her energy on her fists, leaving the rest of her body utterly defenseless, was a risk unlike many others. These birds might kill her should they land anywhere but her fists.

Due to this risk, and due to swearing a binding vow with herself, her fists were now very likely stronger than these birds.

Now, all she had to do was punch them.

Or die.

Yui’s heartrate sped up as the fear became palpable. Then, she held her breath.

Right cross.

The bird disintegrated on her fists like they were made of an even harder metallic substance.

Some shrapnel from the bird’s material—mere solidified cursed energy—still scratched her arm.

Combo Stack added fifty percent to her damage multiplier.

Left jab.

Sixty percent.

This bird was struck so hard that no shrapnel even came close to her. The bird turned into a spray of solidified cursed energy that sprayed backwards, hitting her hostage’s back and ripping up his jacket.

Left jab.

Seventy percent.

The angle of her strike made the ensuing spray of solidified cursed energy from the bird miss the hostage entirely.

Uppercut.

Eighty percent.

With the last bird finally gone, Yui stomped.

The ground shattered beneath her feet even as Combo Stack returned to her a measly five percent increase in the Combo she had built up thus far. Her multiplier was at 7.71, meaning that each of her strikes were seven times as powerful as usual, and she could extract additional power by merely allocating her cursed energy efficiently.

In a fraction of a second, Yui was already in front of the guy who had launched those metallic birds.

In front of that guy, and Ukyo Baisho, who had intercepted her in the nick of time. He raised his shield.

Yui summoned all of her rage and anger at the world and all the ways, both tiny and big, that it just fucking pissed her off, and punched Ukyo Baisho’s shield.

It glowed slightly at the contact.

This contact increased her multiplier by one-hundred percent.

No sparks of black electricity sprung forth from the contact, something that pissed her off even more.

She punched again. The glow increased.

And again.

And again.

Each time, the glow became brighter and brighter.

When her multiplier was at a whooping thirty-one, she swore a binding vow to limit all of her output to her fists alone, and punched the ground.

The earth shattered around her for dozens of meters.

The recoil of her own strike blew her into the air.

The two remaining boys fighting her spun uncontrollably.

Uncontrollably until the shield, now glowing with power, slowed Ukyo’s uncontrolled spin through the air.

He landed feet first against the trunk of a tree almost twenty meters away. It, and many of its neighbors, were on the verge of falling to the ground due to Yui’s strike.

Ukyo held his shield like a Frisbee.

Then he threw it.

Fast.

Too fast.

Yui had not listened to the end of Ukyo Baisho’s explanation of the Impact Absorption Shield, but she didn’t have to be a genius of Jujutsu to understand that the glow corresponded to the amount of energy the shield had absorbed.

It also wasn’t beyond the realm of imagination that this shield had an offensive application as well as a defensive one.

If this shield returned to her every bit of energy that she had poured into it during this fight, then she would be dead.

She knew her own strength, and she knew that there was no point in resisting it right now.

Her multiplier was still at thirty, but for one punch to stop this shield, it had to be a Black Flash.

Thus, came the question: was she crazy enough to put her life on the line, her only hope of rescue being a technique that no one could perform on command?

Would she die for power?

Was that who Suzuki Yui was?

The world… pissed her off. It just did. Trying to explain it to most people was futile, because most people didn’t have the amount of anger that Yui did. They didn’t have that much anger to give to the world.

Or perhaps it wasn’t anger, but passion that they were lacking? In a perfect world, Suzuki Yui would have no reason to be angry all the time, at her useless parents, her useless teachers, the useless society, and now the useless Jujutsu Society, whose only difference from feudal Japan was the existence of superhuman abilities.

The world had every damned opportunity under the sun to take it easy on poor Yui, and give her more to be happy about than she was angry about.

And each time, the world disappointed her.

To live was to be at the mercy of the world, and all the ways in which it would torment you.

In attaining strength, one could rise above perhaps most of the elements that the world used to torment you. In attaining strength and status, the world could potentially become that much less aggravating.

And she could change the world to make it less aggravating for others.

But first, she had to listen to the world. Listen for its rhythm. That was what Teira had taught her, and the boss knew everything there was to know about Jujutsu.

Could she hear it right now, in this tiny instance between actions?

She closed her eyes.

Without them, timing her strike would become that much more impossible. But she needed her eyes closed, just for a moment, to feel her way towards that imperceptible rhythm that buttressed the world.

She wanted to hear the voice of the bitch that had dragged her through the gutter all her life.

Anger.

So much anger.

When she opened her eyes, the shield was right in front of her. She heard screaming in her ears, a howl that nearly deafened her. She didn’t know if it was coming from within or from outside, but the sound filled her with the kind of apoplectic rage that she had never before felt in her life.

She struck the shield on its thin side, intending not just to return the shield from whence it came, but to destroy the very concept of the shield. She wished that her strike would atomize the shield.

Space warped between her fist and the shield.

All light disappeared within that space, replaced by a void that took on the aspect of many arcs of lightning shooting towards every direction.

Hundred. Two hundred. Three hundred…

Six hundred. Seven hundred. Eight hundred. Nine hundred.

One thousand percent.

Her multiplier was now at a whooping three-hundred and thirty.

The shield shot into the forest, somewhere far, far away.

Time resumed, and Suzuki Yui fell towards the ground. The timer on her Combo Stack was just about to expire when she made contact with the ground, wasting the absurd multiplier she had created.

To extend the Combo, she lightly tapped against the ground with her feet, using just the right amount of power. Just the right amount.

She appeared in front of Ukyo Baisho, who hadn’t been able to retrieve his shield.

She punched the space one foot in front of his face.

That was all she needed to blow him into the forest, only for him to blink away before he could hit any of the trees.

All that left—

“I surrender!”

—was no one.

The battle was over. Even the hostage that had been hit by his friend’s metallic birds had disappeared at some point, likely after she had struck the ground, or perhaps even before then.

Yui’s anger returned.

She was in the zone. She was stronger than ever. She was ready to continue.

And yet… nothing.

She screamed.

000

Jujutsu High, Tokyo
10th September, 12:45 JST

“Do you understand?” Aomori Sakura asked Nakamura Daiki and Ishikawa Takumi.

She was crouched in front of a complex set of diagrams drawn on the dirt ground by a stick, while Daiki and Ishikawa hovered besides her, slowly trying to digest the plan.

Daiki fought against his impulse to file all this information under a folder called ‘useless bullshit’ and then promptly forget about it for a million years. After all, the shit that Aomori was pitching was an extremely complex working of Jujutsu that involved all three of them working together to…

“And then what?” Daiki asked.

Aomori sighed, clearly tired from having to explain the concept so many times. She opened her mouth and said, “bla bla bla bla bla. Bla bla bla. Bla bla.”

Daiki nodded along, pretending like he understood.

“Bla bla bla, bla bla. Bla bla bla.”

“Mhm, mhm, mhm,” Daiki hummed and nodded at the same time.

Aomori then stared at Daiki for several long, uncomfortable seconds. The bespectacled girl was probably the least animated person the freshman year of Jujutsu High, and if Daiki was being honest with himself, she was also someone that he had ignored since the day he first joined this school.

Who could blame him? She had chosen to wait until just last week to finally start flexing her innate technique, and now she was spitting jargon about complex barrier techniques and power synergies.

And throughout it all, throughout all of Aomori’s explanations, he still hadn’t the foggiest what they were trying to accomplish.

“Do you understand?” Aomori asked.

Daiki opened his mouth to say yes, but then thought, why bother?

“No, actually,” he said flatly. “I don’t. I’ve got no idea what you want.”

“I want you to rap something that lets me increase the activity in my cerebral cortex, and it also increases the percentage at which Ishikawa-kun’s Cerebro device increases my spatial awareness, all the while—“

“Why,” Daiki stopped her. “Why? What are we doing here? Clearly, it’s big, but you’re not giving me the big picture.”

“It’s top secret,” Aomori said. “But if we play our cards right, I can win us the first round with just this.”

Top secret?

“I’m not gonna rap about some boring bullshit,” Daiki said hotly. “That’s not how my technique works.”

“You can rap about whatever you want—“

“And I don’t want to rap about this,” Daiki said.

“Why?”

“Because it’s boring, and I don’t understand it.”

“Can’t you just… do it anyway?”

Daiki turned to Takumi, all the while pointing his thumb at Aomori in utter disbelief. “Can you believe her?”

Takumi just blinked. He then frowned in thought, before shrugging. “Daiki’s reasons make perfect sense, Aomori-san. You can’t just force a creative person inside a box not of their own choosing. That would kill his passion, and that would kill his music.”

Daiki beamed. “Exactly! Thank you, Taku-chan! It’s a simple concept, Aomori-san. I don’t rap about stuff I find boring.”

“This isn’t boring,” Aomori said, her eyes intense.

“Then tell me what the hell you’re trying to do!”

“Do you remember when the sky turned black five minutes ago?” Aomori asked, pointing up at the amber veil atop their heads, rapidly shrinking. “That’s what we’re trying to do. But more. My plan is to hijack Tengen’s barrier and use it to project and contain my innate domain.”

Daiki nodded, pretending to understand—

--when it hit him like a flash of lightning.

The jargon had taken him some moments to penetrate through, but only because he had been prepared to dismiss her word salad once again, but this? He understood exactly what she meant.

Daiki tilted his head back and roared out a laughter.

Aomori and Takumi looked between one another in confusion as he laughed, until finally, he was ready.

He… had an idea.

“New plan,” Daiki grinned, patting Takumi’s shoulder. “You still have that drawing of me from that rap tournament? I need you to conjure a sound system for me. We’re going all out!”

Nakamura Daiki’s technique, Cursed Rhythm and Poetry, almost seemed to whisper to him exactly what was needed for him to pull this utter madness off.

He knew that it would require much from him in binding vows and power.

If he was off by even a fraction, he might cause himself serious injuries. Even accounting for whatever Takumi would do to help heal him in the event of failure—or worse yet, success—Daiki would still be cutting it close.

Aomori bowed her head at Daiki appreciatively. “Thank you, Daiki. I look forward to working with you. But first, we need to discuss—“

“This is all I’mma do: go all out and pray for the best. That’s the plan. If you ain’t ready to put your life on the line, then you ain’t ready to expand no domain.”

Aomori grit her teeth and nodded. “Fine. We’ll do it the stupid way.”

Takumi giggled. “That’s the only way.”

Exhausting as it had been to listen to Aomori natter to him for thirty minutes about complex Jujutsu, this plan more than made up for it all.

“Let’s fucking go!”