After repeatedly slashing and dicing Mahito into minced meat like a mango, Yuji Itadori gradually regained his sanity through the brutal continuation of soul fusion. The memories in his head scattered and disappeared like melting snow, and each quietly vanishing fragment silently pushed him, reminding him of what to do now.
He shook his head, looked at Mahito before him, who had been torn into countless pieces, and subconsciously asked:
"Have you always been this weak, Mahito?"
Faced with Itadori—whether it was mockery or a genuine question—Mahito didn't dare and couldn't answer the other person at this moment. If it weren't for the cursed seal the master had carved for himself to ensure he couldn't die before his cursed energy ran out, he would have been chopped up long ago.
It could be said that facing Itadori now, he felt like facing Nishida Kagetatsu in the past.
No, it was worse than Sukuna. Now he had no desire to resist at all, let alone any thought of surpassing his opponent in shame. He just wanted to run away, and he would never come out until Yuji Itadori died.
Seeing that the other party wasn't speaking, Yuji Itadori, whose head still hurt, didn't bother to answer. At that moment, Megumi Fushiguro stood up from the ground, having broken free from Demon Head Kijuro's hypnosis.
When he first opened his eyes, before they were fully focused, he was strongly struck by the tragic and strange scene before him.
The bus was cut in half, the crack as smooth as a precisely cut mirror. Debris was scattered haphazardly on the road. The trees on both sides of the road had long lost their branches and leaves, leaving only bare stumps standing vertically with smooth, neat breaks, as if they had never had branches.
Looking up again, the mountains in the distance were even more shocking. More than half of the mountain had been sliced off, the cut so straight it was chilling, without any sharp rises or falls.
His heart trembled. He stared intently, his astonishment surging. His pupils suddenly contracted, and the blood in his entire body seemed to freeze at that moment.
In a trance, he realized that all these traces could be connected into a straight line.
The crack in the bus, the cut on the mountain—they were all on the same horizontal line, as if the upper part had been erased by an invisible giant hand following the same trajectory. It was eerie and revealed a suffocating, powerful force.
He turned his head and saw Itadori standing with his back to him. His body was straight, the cold aura around him even stronger than before, and even his shoulders carried an indescribable weight.
In front of Itadori, the originally flat and wide road had been sharply cut into an even grid. Every cut was straight and neat, with the same depth, as if sliced by an invisible blade following an exact ruler. The lines were so clear it was chilling.
Between the gaps in the grid lay a figure—this person had been cut with the same force and the same pattern, the wounds almost eerily flattened, perfectly matching the grid of the highway.
The tragic and strange sight made him shudder. Subconsciously making a gesture to summon Mahoraga, he asked cautiously:
"Itadori?"
Itadori turned his head at the sound, holding the Prison Realm in his hand with an expressionless face.
Seeing that there were no wrinkles of Sukuna's possession on the other party's face, Megumi Fushiguro calmed down, but the doubts in his heart did not diminish; they only grew stronger.
What... what is happening?
Faced with his friend's doubts, Itadori didn't help dispel them but said lightly:
"Megumi, wait for me a moment. It'll be quick."
After that, Itadori lifted the edge of the Prison Realm, which had been evenly cut into a Rubik's cube, used his senses to find a knot of cursed energy inside, and finally successfully helped Locke unseal it.
After Locke, who was a shadow clone, was unsealed, the first thing he did was check the surrounding situation. He was stunned by the scene around him, then asked:
"How long was I sealed?"
"It seems... sixty-eight years? No, only twelve minutes."
Itadori, whose head had started hurting again, rubbed his forehead, no longer confused about it, and began to tell Locke what he still remembered.
"There's no time to explain, Brother Locke. The current situation is very dangerous. The cursed spirits at Tokyo Jujutsu High School are very dangerous. They were born specifically to deal with Gojo-sensei. You have to tell the real body not to leave Gojo-sensei there."
"Shibuya... it's Kenjaku and the demon... and... you can't go to the trap they set for you. Just let me handle Jōro. Let me go. I'll go."
Faced with the other party's incoherent speech, Locke and Megumi Fushiguro couldn't understand the situation either. But seeing the slash marks around, as well as the tear stains on Itadori's face, he seemed to understand something and asked directly:
"You... are you the future Itadori?"
Hearing this, Yuji Itadori's eyes involuntarily filled with blood and tears. His body gradually became uncontrollable, and he said something he didn't want to say at all.
"Why... why do you notice, Brother Locke? I haven't said anything yet."
Hearing the other party's words, Locke immediately understood everything. He hugged Itadori with a guilty conscience and comforted him:
"Well, the future has truly been unfair to you. Don't worry. Leave everything to me. I will inevitably rewrite the future you experienced."
After these words, Itadori couldn't hold back any longer and cried loudly. Then, Locke dismissed the shadow clone.
At the same time, Locke, who had planned to stay here with Mahoraga and Gojo Satoru and rush to Shibuya after receiving the memory from the shadow clone, suddenly changed his expression and coldly said to the cursed spirits:
"Don't you want to see Nishida Kagetatsu? As you wish. Next—"
"Substitution."
Before they could react, the cursed spirits broke free from the abyssal oppression. The Locke before them suddenly changed—the oppressive feeling around his entire body disappeared, as if he had become an ordinary ronin.
It seemed that the other party was not Nishida Kagetatsu, but an ordinary person who was a cosplaying wanderer.
"I'm not in a good mood right now, so I'll make this brief."
Drawing a sword from the shadows, Locke suppressed the anger in his heart, maintained the mindset of "never breaking character," and said seriously:
"I have always been different from Nara. I never despise my opponents, simply because I know very well that a cursed spirit is born into this world for a reason."
The words paused. Kagetatsu slowly drew his sword. The setting sun shone diagonally, and the snowy blade reflected the sky, filled with light.
"But right now, tens of thousands of innocent people are threatened by disaster. I can no longer treat you with the heart of an 'opponent.' And now, to me—"
"You are merely a disaster to be eliminated. That's all."
The moment the words were spoken, the sky light reflected on the blade suddenly became fierce, piercing the cursed spirits' eyes with intense pain. In the next moment, a devastating, terrifying pressure burst from Kagetatsu's body.
A piercing fear condensed into a frozen wave, instantly engulfing the minds of all the cursed spirits, making them freeze in place, unable to react.
In an instant, beneath the cursed spirits' eyes, only Kagetatsu's indifferent but extremely terrifying face remained.
The terror, filled with calm composure, was as if the entire world had turned upside down and was pressing down on them.
Between heaven and earth, only the clear sound of a blade remained. The sharp sword light tore through the sky and spread in all directions.
Kagetatsu had already appeared behind the group of cursed spirits and slowly sheathed his sword. The sharp sound of the blade settling faded, and the group of special-grade cursed spirits, caught in the wind, all turned into flying ash and dissipated invisibly.
When Cursed Blue opened his eyes again, they quietly met on the wasteland of the soul. Facing Cursed Blue, Jogo, who was waiting there, had rarely lost his usual violence and become a little calmer.
"How was it? Was it fun?"
"...The gap is so wide that he couldn't even make him go all out. But it can be considered that he really made us see."
"Enough. Just fight him next time."
"Forget it. If he appears again, I won't be in this world anymore."
"Haha, then let's go together. Everyone... a hundred years from now, we'll meet again."
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