Chapter 43

Megumi spent longer than he should have staring at the hole in the wall where his reluctant father and the Gojo scion had torn their way through. His opponent had not made that same mistake. If Toji were here, he would've had him climbing to the top of Mount Fuji again... in bare clothes only... again. Yet there was still time to rectify it.

"Surrender now. I don't want to have to hurt you." The girl spoke up behind him, and he ignored the cold feeling of steel resting on his shoulder, so close to his neck. He regretted being distracted by her beauty earlier. He had been stupid and running of teenage hormones.

Her voice had a soft cadence, lacking any hint of malice, with even a touch of compassion. Most of the sorcerers he had encountered in his short existence were curse users—unregulated sorcerers who couldn't fake that particular emotion even to save their lives.

Yet he was doing this for something greater than himself. For someone more important. All he had to do was get out of here, track down the healer and wherever she had wheeled Tsumiki to after their brief talk, and get them out of here. Toji could take care of himself. The first step was getting past the girl and the sword she had on his shoulder.

Instead of replying to her, he focused on his cursed energy, the flow of negative energy, and the innate technique imprinted into his very being. With his back to her and his hands obscured, he locked his fingers into a great triangle shape and whispered, "Toad."

With the moonlight casting his elongated shadow, it stretched naturally behind him, enveloping his opponent's own. The amorphous black shape on the ground undulated and coiled. Before the girl could react, a tongue shot out from his shadow, swiftly wrapping itself around the hand that had held the blade to his throat, freezing it in place.

In an instant, four more tongues darted out from different obscure corners of the room, seizing her remaining limbs and immobilizing her.

He pivoted sharply and unleashed a flurry of rapid strikes: a devastating kick to the side of her ribs, an elbow crashing into her jaw to dislocate it, and finally a roundhouse kick aimed at her head that sent her hurtling through the doorway and into another patient's room. The startled screams of onlookers reminded him of a glaring fact—they were fighting in a hospital, right in the heart of a bustling district. The local law enforcement might be useless when it came to apprehending curses, but bullets killed sorcerers as easily as regular humans, he would know.

It was only a matter of time before they showed up. As he dropped his still outstretched leg to the ground, a thought began to creep up on him as he sped his way past the broken door in search of Tsumiki, while ignoring the room he had sent the girl through.

The last kick had felt strange. Unlike most shikigami users, his mostly useless lard of a father had trained him to discard the feeble nature that came with depending on shikigami for battle. He had hit wooden training dolls and people enough times to know when a hit landed perfectly.

It was that nagging thought that saved him, even as he turned away from the fallen form of his opponent and nearly lost his head for it. He was saved by the sudden outburst of caution.

So when he felt the hairs at the back of his neck rise, he reflexively ducked, the sound of a blade singing in his ear as it sailed above him and parted the few strands of hair that had been too slow to escape its wrath, barely audible amidst the chaotic clamor of the panicked patients in the other room.

The moment he rose to his feet, he was greeted by his opponent's back. She had dashed past him and tried to take off his head in one blow!

She slowly turned to face him again, and he noted something different. He could see bruises from where his first two attacks had landed, but she acted like there wasn't a third. At least crashing through the door alone should've hurt her, so how did she do it?

Then he suddenly remembered how she had simply tanked Toji's blow instead of turning into a broken mess, and his hands locked together and changed shape, while the girl's eyes hardened as she shifted her stance.

It didn't matter in the end. She was simply an obstacle, one that had gotten in his way twice now. And he would do anything to remove her. The technique was brought to life as two familiar howls rang out in the otherwise quiet night. His shadows bubbled and rolled as he called out with a hardness to his voice.

"Demon Dog."

...

"You owe me a blade," Toji remarked with a casual tone as he continued to twirl the chain at his side. His stance was solid and grounded, with his feet spread out. It rooted him to the ground and allowed him to swing the chain around him so fast that his figure was a barely perceptible blur hidden by how fast the chains were moving.

Already, the man had worked out a way to counter Amaterasu. Even after facing it only once, Toji understood that he needed a clear target before manifesting the heavenly flames upon it."

Yet the man's counter was redundant. He could not use the flames, not after unleashing Kagutsuchi barely days ago. Missed checkups with Shoko for weeks meant the consequences of those actions had accumulated and were rapidly catching up to him.

Already, he was forced to let his eyes shift into the neutral third stage of the Sharingan, as the Mangekyo's sight was too blurry. Instead of dwelling on that, he allowed the scarred giant of a man to speak, all the while calculating optimal trajectories to get past his whirlwind defense.

"And you're not fully healed from your bout in Shinjuku," Toji noted, and Jiki caught the strange tone in the man's voice—it almost sounded like sadness.

Jiki felt his brow scrunch at that observation before he replied, "You were there?"

Even though the man was barely visible within the whirlwind created by the chain that separated them, Jiki noticed the movement—a shrug. "I had to see how much you've grown. I was not disappointed." It was the second person watching him grow. The weight of expectations would have been overwhelming if this were the first time, but instead, he let it slide off his back.

So he had seen Kagutsuchi then. That was one trump card lost already. His eyes tried to follow the chains, and it didn't take him long to realize it was a fruitless endeavor. They had no fixed length; instead, they extended and retracted as the user saw fit.

"Why did you take her?" he questioned the man with curiosity. He already knew the sorcerer killer hadn't taken Shoko because of his hand; he had seen how fast Maki healed. It couldn't have taken him more than a few weeks to regain that particular limb. That left only one other option: the girl with brown hair and the boy with black.

It was the most ridiculous option, and the sheer thought almost brought a laugh to his lips. Toji Fushiguro. Sorcerer killer. The most wanted person in Jujutsu society after Geto's demise. Sole Hyper Lethal class human. Father.

The reply he got was the chain lashing out in an arc aimed at his head. Instead of standing still, he turned immediately as he saw the chain leave the circle of protection and began racing to the side, circling Toji's still form.

The chain gathered enough speed to tear through everything in its path, its metallic links ripping through the car he raced past, separating the roof from the rest of the body.

The building behind the car was torn and wrapped as the chain ripped through it horizontally, maintaining its relentless pursuit while Jiki sprinted for his life. It was a gamble and a plan, one that if it worked...

He continued to run, circling Toji as the chain barely lost speed and strength, slicing through buildings horizontally. The moment Jiki began to feel an immense burn in his calves and thighs, he knew this was as good as he was going to get.

He ground himself to a halt, ripping up the road in his effort to stop completely. When he finally did, he raised a hand, and the chain caught up with him. Like an anaconda denied its prey for too long, it violently wrapped itself around his limb. However, its strength had waned after tearing through multiple buildings to reach him.

He stood where he began, opposite Toji once more, staring the man down. The chain twisted and squeezed, causing his hand to grow paler as it was deprived of blood. But that was all it did—instead of turning his limb into a broken mess.

"I win," Jiki stated softly, as Toji watched with a raised brow and teeth still bared widely.

The scarred man looked confused until the groaning of multiple buildings filled the air. The silence of the night shattered as chaos erupted. A cacophony of snapping steel and cracking concrete surrounded them as eight buildings began to give way, their structural integrity compromised.

A horizontal line had torn through the buildings, a path carved by the rampaging chain that had sought his life. Slowly, realization dawned on Toji's face as he stood in the middle of the crumbling structures. The initial fractures grew into a deafening roar as the massive structures began their descent, concrete meeting ground with a thunderous crash that echoed like an earthquake.

High-pitched symphonies of shattered glass filled the air, debris clattered against collapsing ruins, and dust billowed upward. It created an overwhelming explosion of force that engulfed everything.

Toji was swallowed by the destruction that followed, buried beneath multiple buildings' worth of bricks and rocks in an avalanche of his own making. Jiki's last glimpse of the man was a mad grin and a whisper he could only hear by reading his lips, "Well played." before he vanished into the dust and debris kicked up.

If it had been any other opponent, Jiki might have turned away satisfied with a job well done. Fortunately, the hospital was out of range of the disaster—it had mainly affected office buildings and a few scattered residential or retail structures. With luck, they were as empty as the offices.

Jiki would have been on his way back to secure Shoko and rendezvous with Satoru. If Geto was truly dead, he wouldn't leave his older cousin alone to grieve that loss.

The chain still wrapped around his arm suddenly tightened, prompting a frown on Jiki's features. The absurdity of a heavenly restriction akin to Toji's own was incredibly annoying. The man's durability matched that of special-grade curse spirits' regeneration—an irritation that he was growing tired of.

He could hear subtle creaking from the mountain of debris ahead, and the subtle sound of shifting stone. Unwanted but once again expected. If Toji got out and Jiki was still down a hand, it might as well be a death sentence.

He pushed more cursed energy into his eyes, feeling it morph once more. Three separate spinning tomoe seamlessly merging into one fuma shuriken shape. The enhanced clarity and rush that came with the activation was tinged by something else this time; pain.

He sharply looked down at his hand, a few meters from the limb itself and the chain that anchored him to the human-shaped monster beneath the mountain of rocks.

"Amaterasu."

Like a hot rod had been shoved into his head and through his cornea, he could feel hot, sticky blood slip past his eyelids and trail down his face. As always, the pain was excruciating, making every activation feel like his eyes were being gouged by molten daggers.

He cut off the cursed energy flow to his eyes completely and looked at the world for the first time in months, if not years, with his completely mundane gray eyes. Everything looked dull and lacked color and life. Toji's chain had taken out the electricity in the surrounding area, and he had not realized it due to the increased clarity his Sharingan bestowed him.

The cursed energy-enhanced links of the chain fell victim to the black fires and dropped to the floor, followed immediately by an explosion from the debris and a blur racing out. Even in the midst of everything, he noted how the detached parts of the chain had sped back to the owner.

If he had still been attached to it, he would've either lost the hand or been forced to face a pissed-off Toji Fushiguro head-on. He couldn't say what was worse.

He flipped back as Toji launched out of the dust and debris, a laugh tearing its way past his throat and echoing in the previously quiet night.

Toji Fushiguro's laughter was a deep, resonant thing that echoed through the night, filled with a mixture of genuine amusement, pain, and an underlying menace. His eyes glinted with a wild, almost feral light, and his mouth curled into a predatory grin. It was a laughter that sent chills down spines. A laugh that would've made any sorcerer turn and run.

Jiki answered it with an unimpressed raised brow as he shook blood back into the limb. Toji pounced again, and Instead of the futile act of trying to match the scarred man strength for strength once again, he let his body fall back, and he looked up. Placid gray stared into feral black as Toji sailed above him.

The purple curse still wrapped around the man snapped its mouth open, and out came something that Jiki vaguely recognized—a weird round projectile that had a pin removed as it fell toward him.

His eyes shifted once more, and he endured the hot iron burning its way through his optical nerves as he whispered once more. "Tsukuyomi."

His target was not the empty space in the fabric of the world that was Toji Fushiguro. It was his greatest asset and weakness all in one. The purple segmented curse wrapped around his frame with barely opened slits for eyes but that was all Jiki needed. The brief glimpse at the optical organ was all it took for the technique to sink into the cursed spirit-psyche. Its eyes widened, revealing a beautiful blue on par with Satoru's own before slipping shut as the curse went unconscious, trapped in that twisted world of darkness.

That should stop the scarred man from pulling out another outrageous heaven-defying weapon from his living arsenal.

Jiki immediately snapped his eyes shut, his hand to the ground while his right foot lashed up instinctively, regardless of the pain he felt, and as the man and his curse sailed over him, he batted the gridded projectile to the sky. The resounding explosion that followed highlighted the fact that it had not been dropped carelessly.

He flipped back to his feet a second later and forced blurry eyes open to see that Toji had already managed to halt his momentum. Judging by the furrow the man had dug into the ground and the rock sailing towards Jiki's head, Toji had done it with his hands. The scarred man was already sprinting after him seconds behind the thrown projectile once more, and Jiki frowned in response.

Close combat wasn't optimal. His eyes were blurry to hell and back. One arm was temporarily out of commission, even if he could feel life coming back into it slowly. His bandages hidden under his haori were already beginning to leak blood once more, considering the stress he had put them through.

His Sharingan might be usable, but the Mangekyo Itself was out of commission. Regardless of its availability, neither the Susanoo nor the Amaterasu were particularly viable techniques to use in an occupied city.

On the flip side, Toji was hurt. The older man was slower. Jiki had seen how fast the man could move when he wasn't holding back. He would be fast enough to run on water just off his pure strength. That he had not gotten to him yet was proof of the damage that dropping eight buildings on him had caused.

They were both at a disadvantage, and he smiled with that knowledge. He had been fighting with a disadvantage all his life as Itachi Uchiha, and even then, he had been lauded as a genius, a prodigy.

This would be no different. He tilted to the side as the stone sailed by and grabbed it allowing its momentum to spin him three sixty back in place before slapping his hands together over the scattered rocks that had been pressed together into a solid shape and began blurring his way through hand signs.

The sequence ended in a modified single ram hand sign as his cursed energy flexed and twisted. " Phoenix Sage Flower Nail Crimson"

The now broken-down projectiles shot off and tore their way toward the still-grinning madman, halfway to the brute, the technique took effect and the multitude of scattered projectiles caught fire and slammed into the man like a point-blank shotgun blast and sent him flipping legs overhead.

That was not enough to take down that monster and his hands had already begun to blur their way through another set of hand signs. A longer set that should obliterate anything ahead of him, regardless of the opponent in the way.

Toji burst out of the dust and debris once more with pockmarked injuries on his chest, even his ever present grin had a hint of pain in it, yet his eyes still blazed with madness. In one hand was the two-pronged blade that had canceled Satoru's limitless and tore his back. The other empty and curse spirit missing from his torso. He must've figured out his curse was out of commission then. So was the blade already out before the curse was hit with Tsukuyomi?

He discardered his unfocused thoughts and cut the technique short and immediately flipped ideas. The blade would cancel out any active cursed technique rendering his Great Flame annihilation useless by creating a space enough for the man to slip through.

Instead, Jiki flexed his cursed energy, moving it to his fist and priming it, total concentration as he felt his lips split as the technique began to blossom. Tsunade thousand-man strength was the brute force to end all, and he had primed it accurately as he swung his hand toward the ground. Ready to blow the road and the path forward that Toji sought to use to get to him, nothing but dust.

He was a split second away from creating a crater and remodeling the sewers below the city when a shout rang out. "That's enough!" And somehow, they both listened to reason and halted just shy of a simultaneous blow that might have left them both dead or gravely injured at least.

Even the sheer act of drawing their momentum to a halt and stilling themselves was enough to cause shockwaves that clashed in their stead, as grey eyes stared at black from meters away.

Jiki saw himself reflected in those eyes, and the dissonance was shocking. He almost couldn't recognize the figure that stared back at him from the reflection in Toji's eyes.

His lips were spread wide in a grin; his eyes held a light, one that he only ever saw when he spent time with Aiko. Was this what Hakari talked about?

...

"I don't like you." A strangely mature boy with a budding mustache spoke from his place at the door. The older teen had barged into the room seeking a fight, particularly against the newest special grade. Jiki's response had been a flat, empty stare.

"What kind of man remains so dispassionate at the prospect of a fight? Of competing, sparring to determine strength?"

The boy entered the classroom fully, marching toward Jiki's table with firm, restrained anger evident in his rigid movements.

Yet Jiki continued to regard him with an apathy born of multiple lives and experiences far beyond the younger boy's understanding.

The boy, a perfect embodiment of youthful defiance, positioned himself opposite Jiki's desk, staring him down. Jiki couldn't muster any reaction beyond maintaining his idle stare. Hakari. He vaguely remembered a written challenge he had barely glanced at before lighting on fire.

"You're skilled. I've heard plenty about you. Kirara has been watching too, and she agrees. But you approach everything with such detachment. You don't revel in it, don't see the thrill of battle. So tell me, Gojo Jiki, where is your passion?"

His continued silence was answer enough—an indication of how little he cared to engage with the boy's personal fixation. He had no reason to indulge him, and the boy despised him for it.

Fists clenched so tightly they whitened, muscles coiled with tension, the boy stared down at Jiki. Jiki could almost anticipate the half-formed thoughts: a table kick to trap his hands, followed by a flurry of haymakers in an attempt to pummel him.

"Hakari, Satoru-sensei is coming," another second-year student called from the doorway, their attention focused solely on their classmate, as if the rest of the room didn't exist.

Maki had already started to rise. The idea that he posed a threat to Jiki began to spread among his classmates, igniting a spark of determination within them—a flame of camaraderie stronger than anything Jiki had ever felt himself.

In a way, Jiki had brought the will of fire with him, and it burned brighter in his classmates than it ever did in himself. Old man Sarutobi would have been proud.

Suddenly, the boy relaxed, exhaling a single puff of breath before turning and walking away with a simple challenge. "When you find it, find me."

​

...

Was this it, this barely realized feeling of euphoria brought about by battle? Was this "fever"?

Already, he could feel himself growing dispassionate as the thrill faded, his heart rate slowing, and the rush of blood through his body subsiding. He released a slow breath as the pain began to creep in—aches from the tear on his back and the minor injuries bandaged but not fully healed. Another breath escaped him, eyelids drooping halfway before he straightened to his full height.

He could feel Toji's disappointment as the change washed over him. The man frowned down at him, a scowl contorting his face into something almost unrecognizable.

Instead of dwelling on Toji's disapproval, he redirected his attention to the person who had halted the fight.

"Shoko-san, how are you?" He asked the healer, his gaze scanning her form, searching for any injuries or signs of injury.

She waved off his concern with a dismissive gesture, one hand on the wheelchair holding a strapped-in girl.

"I'm not the one leaking like a faulty faucet," she retorted, eyes trailing the bloodstains peeking from under his kimono. Her gaze roamed his form before meeting his eyes. Her expression wrinkled with concern momentarily before smoothing out as she turned her attention to Toji without saying more.

Curious about what had unsettled her, he followed her gaze to the dried blood marking his attire, his hand instinctively touching the area where he felt discomfort.

"Toji Fushiguro, I have a deal for you," Shoko started with a smile as she brought a cigarette from her coat. Realizing she was without a lighter, she looked at him forlornly before sighing and putting the cigarette back into the coat.

Toji, in response, only tilted his head to the side and rocked on his feet. Jiki recognized the movement for what it was: the muscular man was preparing himself for high-speed movement, his interest in Jiki gone as he stared at Shoko and the girl she held, either as a hostage knowingly or not, judging by the look he could pick up in the woman's eyes. Shoko knew exactly what she was doing.

The sound of battle suddenly rang out meters away—sword clashing against something else and the howl of a wolf into the moon. Underneath all of that, the blaring sound of a siren tore through the night and rapidly picked up in volume as it made it's way to them.

The three of them raised their brows with some level of synchronicity as the battle drew closer before Emi came flying out of the window of the closest building. She rolled on the floor and got back to her feet unsteadily, her breathing rough and her cursed energy nonexistent despite the few injuries he could spot.

The black-haired boy followed after her, brimming with refined aggression and violence, and two wolves at his side as the two teenagers clashed once more, blind to the fact that things had changed.

Shoko raised her second eyebrow before giving Jiki and Toji pointed looks.

"How about you calm down your squabbling kids first, then we can get out of here and talk like civilized people?"