"What an absolute lunatic… damn it all… cough, cough, cough..."
At this very moment, slumped strengthless amid the ruins, Kenjaku felt he'd had the most rotten luck imaginable.
Originally he'd thought that, with Satoru Gojo not yet back, they could go on lingering in this mountain forest, waiting for other interesting people to take the bait.
But what showed up instead was a crazy old hag no one could have predicted — who, the moment she couldn't win, just up and opened a Black Hole.
Had he not happened to possess a deft hand at Anti-Gravity Technique, that Yuki Tsukumo might really have dragged Kenjaku and all the rest of them down with her in a mutual annihilation.
And there was the Zenin estate situation too.
He'd already received word: the Zenin estate's plan had been thoroughly ruined by the sudden intervention of Mahiru.
Originally Kenjaku had felt he'd won so hard it wasn't even funny.
Now he felt he'd lost the whole lot.
"Cough! Cough cough..."
Coughing up blood all the while, Kenjaku forced himself, with great effort, to stand up out of the rubble.
It seemed Satoru Gojo had come back as well.
Even though they were in a wretched state now, wounds all over their bodies, they still had to hurry, shift position, and get away from here.
He lifted his eyes, and the sight before him was downright terrifying.
Yuki's Black Hole possessed the most unparalleled physical destructive force. The Black Hole's path of movement was a deep scar she'd gouged across the earth's crust, and this place was the starting point of that scar.
An Imaginary Black Hole was a Black Hole all the same; a Black Hole had detonated inside his Domain, and that he could even still protect his companions and survive alongside them was nothing short of a miracle.
It was also thanks to the Anti-Gravity Technique on him, the one that came from Itadori's mother.
This really was… a stroke of fortune within misfortune.
Still, now that he'd survived, the one who ought to be fretting was no longer him, but rather Satoru Gojo and Mahiru and the rest of them.
He was certain Mahiru wouldn't stand idly by.
But then, what could they actually do?
"So it was caused by Yuki Tsukumo's Technique, of all things..."
Satoru Gojo could, in fact, be counted as the worldly, seen-it-all type. But a thing of this sort — a Black Hole — was indeed something he too was witnessing for the first time in his life.
Yuki Tsukumo...
Truth be told, Satoru Gojo hadn't had much interaction with her. He hadn't even known that her Technique could actually create something like this. The reason Jujutsu High knew this thing came from Yuki Tsukumo was that there was an old jujutsu assistant in Kyoto who was well acquainted with Yuki, and who, the instant the Black Hole appeared, recognized the aura of Yuki's Cursed Energy.
Say what you will — she really did have the strength of a Special Grade.
A nationwide earthquake, with the menace of being able to annihilate an entire city the instant it arrived… without a doubt, this was a mobile natural disaster.
Naturally, Satoru Gojo could not just watch Tokyo be annihilated.
So — what was to be done?
What a Black Hole is, basically every single person has heard something about. The Imaginary Black Hole before him was, in essence, an "object" of super-enormous mass and super-enormous gravitational pull.
Its very existence was a calamity. Which was why there was even less of any concept of "killing" it or "blasting it apart." So, at this moment Satoru Gojo was wondering whether he could shove this Black Hole away… for instance, shove it out into outer space.
"In that case, let's give it a shallow little try." As Satoru Gojo spoke, he summoned up Cursed Energy.
He floated in the sky, drawing closer and closer to the Black Hole, yet he was not in the slightest affected by its gravity.
So it turned out the Limitless Technique could even ward off the gravity of an Imaginary Black Hole.
Satoru Gojo began the chanting of his incantation.
"Nine Cords..."
Although the Imaginary Black Hole worked on the same principle as a normal Black Hole, in actuality its "heaviness" was not really a matter of some genuinely heavy object being there — rather, it was created by a whole series of complex Techniques interacting with one another.
The Imaginary Black Hole was, in essence, a conceptual object bearing "infinitely large mass" and an "anti-gravity mechanism."
"Polarized Light..."
And speaking of imaginary mass… as it happened, within Satoru Gojo's "Limitless" Technique there was likewise a move that could substitute the "imaginary mass within Infinity" into reality.
That was his strongest offensive move.
And once he had chanted the complete incantation, he could maximize this move's power.
"The Crow's Declaration..."
Then let's give it a try.
Satoru Gojo raised his hand, and with his fingertip, took aim at the very center of the Black Hole.
Dazzling blue and red light converged at his fingertip.
"Hollow Purple."
BOOM —— Ultimate Cursed Energy carried the infinite imaginary mass into reality, and in an instant purple light dyed the entire sky.
This commotion, in that one instant, even drowned out the Black Hole's momentum; the raging wind that had been surging toward the Black Hole was, because of this strike of Satoru Gojo's, instead pushed outward by the swelling energy, the wind direction reversing.
Then, the next second, the purple light collided with that Black Hole, deep and abyssal as a chasm.
And all of this was witnessed by Mahiru and the others.
"Is he trying to shove the Black Hole out away from here?" Mahiru more or less grasped what Satoru Gojo was thinking.
Because what Satoru Gojo had aimed at was the underside of the Black Hole; according to expectation, even if this Hollow Purple couldn't "blast apart" the Black Hole, it could at least shift the Black Hole's running posture by a tiny fraction.
But in reality — to everyone's astonishment — this attack did not alter the Black Hole's trajectory of travel in the slightest. The scenery around the Black Hole rippled because of the Hollow Purple.
The sky-filling purple light was, in the end, completely swallowed up by the Black Hole; the black sun went on advancing as usual, not shaken in the least by Satoru Gojo's attack.
"Hm?" Satoru Gojo's eyes widened slightly in surprise.
The feel of it was strange — not like striking something very heavy or very hard, but more like tossing a stone into a mud pit.
...Can't be done?
Satoru Gojo's expression darkened.
And the crowd from Jujutsu High, who had watched the whole thing, seeing that Satoru Gojo's attack hadn't worked even a little, all turned grim-faced.
"Even Gojo can't do it?" Nanami's face was grave.
If even Satoru Gojo couldn't budge this Imaginary Black Hole, then who else could solve the problem?
Satoru Gojo was the strongest of the modern age. Yes — that point would not be shaken. The Imaginary Black Hole's emergence was an extremely unexpected chemical reaction between the Techniques of Yuki Tsukumo and Kenjaku. But even so, the Black Hole could not, at present, affect Satoru Gojo, who possessed Limitless.
And as for the area the Black Hole had carved through, those towns it annihilated — had Satoru Gojo been the one to do it, his annihilation would have been more precise, and faster.
So even though Kenjaku and Yuki Tsukumo, through an extraordinarily extreme stroke of coincidence, together created this Imaginary Black Hole, it did not mean that Kenjaku and Yuki Tsukumo joining forces could actually beat Satoru Gojo.
But… this wasn't a question of who was stronger in combat power.
The Imaginary Black Hole was drawing near Tokyo.
What they now faced was the question of whether Satoru Gojo and the Jujutsu High crowd could "find a solution to the problem within a limited window of time." Even if Satoru Gojo could ultimately solve the Black Hole problem in the end — so long as he ran over time, then eighty percent of Tokyo's people would die. Would that even count as solving the problem?
So, right now, Satoru Gojo's expression was extremely solemn.
After one failed attempt, countless ideas arose in his mind, only to be ceaselessly negated one after another.
At the very least, the present him needed a partner he could absolutely rely on — one whose creativity of thought and whose mastery of jujutsu were both sufficient.
He turned his head.
He saw, on a hilltop not far off, his students and colleagues standing there.
And beside them, there was an existence that drew the eye most powerfully.
That blue-haired Cursed Spirit he'd been hearing about all this time, but had never truly met face to face, met his gaze.
He saw the blue-haired girl meet his eyes and blink.
Then, she waved a hand at him.
The meaning was as if to say — "Come over here. I've got something I want to tell you."
____
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