Chapter 188: Chapter 188 - Worlds Apart [bonus]

[You couldn’t say for certain what kind of impact today’s lecture would leave on Satoru Gojo’s proud heart.]

[The cigarette between your fingers had burned halfway down. Through the haze of smoke, you watched the boy standing before you, uncharacteristically quiet, lost somewhere deep inside his own thoughts.]

[Across countless previous simulations, you’d watched him endure the worst the world could offer: the death of the Star Plasma Vessel, the despair of his closest friend’s betrayal, one cruelty after another tempering him into something distant and divine, gazing down from a height where nothing could reach him anymore. But in this timeline, Gojo felt... lighter. That was the only word for it.]

[Not weaker. Never weaker. His soul simply carried less weight.]

[Your interference, your preemptive maneuvering, had wrenched his life onto a different track. Apart from this sparring field where he couldn’t force you to fight him at full power, couldn’t grind you beneath his heel and taste true victory, everything he’d experienced had come too easily. Smooth sailing from start to finish.]

[You tilted your head back and watched the clouds dissolving overhead.]

[The price of happiness, you supposed. Humans needed to claw through suffering, to be broken apart by loss and rebuilt from the wreckage, before the soul could undergo its sharpest metamorphosis. And you had stolen that from him with your own hands, denied him the taste of those extremes.]

[After the bitter end to that sparring match, Gojo still came around from time to time, stubborn as ever, like a child who refused to put down a toy he’d been told he couldn’t have. He’d challenge you in the most absurd situations imaginable.]

[Sometimes there was no warning at all. A fist wrapped in dense Cursed Energy swinging at you from around a hallway corner, or a sudden teleport to your blind spot mid-training, striking without a word.]

[None of it mattered. Your response never varied, a tediously predictable three-move repertoire: refuse, surrender, or simply stand there with both hands in your pockets and let his fist hover half an inch from the tip of your nose without so much as blinking.]

[After enough punches thrown into dead air, enough of that maddening sensation of swinging at nothing, even the proudest prodigy alive deflated like a punctured balloon. He finally, reluctantly, accepted a truth that made his teeth ache: as long as you didn’t want to fight, no force on earth could make you draw your blade.]

[Days slipped forward in that strange, quiet tug-of-war.]

[One afternoon, on a day off, you made your usual trip into downtown Tokyo to check on Megumi Fushiguro’s progress and drop off some new pastries along with the next round of living expenses for Tsumiki and the others.]

[The last light of sunset painted the old campus buildings in amber as you strolled back at an unhurried pace. In the corridor, you ran into Masamichi Yaga coming the other way, arms full of felting wool.]

[He paused long enough to nod toward a door further down the hall. Atsuya Kusakabe had been waiting for you in the first-floor reception room for quite some time, he said. Something urgent.]

[Your stride hitched for half a step. Several threads of information clicked together behind your eyes, and you had a fair idea of why a man who treated inconvenience like a terminal disease would show up uninvited.]

[But the moment you pushed open that heavy wooden door, before you’d even crossed the room to sit down, Kusakabe moved.]

[He’d been pacing the floor, radiating a restless, fraying energy. The instant your silhouette appeared in the doorway, he lunged toward you like a drowning man seizing the last rope thrown from shore.]

[His hands clamped onto both your shoulders. The same hands that held a sword with calm precision were shaking, trembling violently beyond his control.]

["Thank you... thank you so much. Thank you, Hayase..."]

[His head dropped. The words came out raw and ragged, repeating in a broken loop that had nothing to do with logic and everything to do with a dam finally giving way.]

[His chest heaved. And there, rolling from the reddened eyes of a man who wore cowardice like a badge of honor, who hid behind the mask of a washed-up slacker so convincingly you could almost believe it, fat, scalding tears broke free.]

["Mr. Kusakabe. Don’t get worked up. Breathe. Take your time. I’m listening."]

[Under that patient reassurance, the storm behind his eyes gradually eased to something he could manage.]

[He dragged a rough hand across his face, smearing the tear tracks without caring how it looked, and began to explain, his voice still thick with congestion.]

[It came back to the Cursed Corpse you’d given him a long time ago, the one Masamichi Yaga had crafted by hand.]

[Kusakabe had passed it along to his sister, the only family he had left. She, in turn, had done the most natural thing in the world: given the fuzzy little Cursed Corpse doll to her young son as a good-luck charm. To Takeru, the nephew Kusakabe loved more than anything.]

[A few nights ago, on a rain-slicked highway, his sister’s car had been caught in a devastating pileup.]

[When the photos from the scene reached Kusakabe’s hands, every drop of blood in his body went cold. The entire rear seat of the family sedan had been crushed into an unrecognizable mass of twisted steel by an out-of-control freight truck that had plowed in from behind.]

[No ordinary person could have survived that kind of impact. And yet a miracle happened.]

["If that Cursed Corpse doll you gave me hadn’t wrapped itself around Takeru and shielded him the instant of the collision..."] 𝑓𝘳𝘦𝑒𝑤𝑒𝘣𝘯ℴ𝘷𝘦𝓁.𝑐𝑜𝑚

["Even the firefighters who cut through the wreckage with hydraulic tools couldn’t believe it. Buried inside that heap of metal so mangled you couldn’t tell it had ever been a car, Takeru was curled up beneath the shattered doll without a single scratch on him. Not one."]

[Takeru and his sister were everything to Atsuya Kusakabe. Beneath the man who joked about self-preservation, who wore apathy like armor and claimed his only ambition was to survive, they were what he would burn his life to the ground protecting. His only anchor in the madness of the jujutsu world.]

[He couldn’t begin to imagine the abyss his sister would have fallen into if she’d lost Takeru in that wreck.]

[Which was why a Grade 1 Jujutsu Sorcerer now stood before you with every last scrap of dignity abandoned, weeping without shame.]

[When the story reached its end, Kusakabe seized your hands again. His knees buckled, gratitude driving him downward, and he moved to drop into a full kneel right there on the floor.]

["Mr. Kusakabe!"]

[You reacted instantly. Both arms locked onto his shoulders with enough force to stop the descent cold, holding him upright with an authority that brooked no argument.]

[Through your lenses, you met his bloodshot eyes. Your expression turned utterly serious.]

["You don’t need to do this. Not for me."]

[In that same calm, convincing tone, you began to untangle the weight pressing down on him.]

["If you trace it all the way back, you’re the one who started this chain. You accepted a request from Miss Mei Mei and helped me first. It was gratitude for that act that led me to give you the Cursed Corpse in the first place. And then the Cursed Corpse happened to be exactly where it needed to be at exactly the right moment. All of this is just the good karma you planted coming back around to you."]

[Kusakabe blinked. He stared at you, visibly thrown, clearly not expecting a boy with a mind as deep and layered as yours to frame something that could have indebted him for a lifetime in such gentle, circular logic.]

[As the tension drained from his shoulders, you let go, the ghost of a smile tugging at the corner of your mouth.]

["Of course, if you still feel like you owe me something... then let’s call it a favor. And when the day comes that I need your help, Mr. Kusakabe, believe me, I won’t be shy about asking."]

[He didn’t hesitate. Not even for half a second. The answer came like a blade leaving its sheath, clean and absolute.]

["Done. Whatever you need, whenever you need it. You say the word, and Atsuya Kusakabe will be there. No questions asked."]

[You looked into the fire burning behind his eyes, loyalty and gratitude forged into something unbreakable, and gave a quiet nod.]

[This was a man whose entire life philosophy boiled down to avoid trouble and survive at all costs. And he hadn’t even paused to ask what kind of favor it might be, or how dangerous.]

[Night settled deep and heavy over the campus. You sat alone on the edge of your dormitory bed.]

[Right on schedule, the annual draw sequence activated. That cold, mechanical chime, as familiar as your own pulse, resonated through the depths of your consciousness.]

[Draw complete.]

[Talent Card obtained: Wide-Angle Vision [R]]

[Effect: Eliminates the natural blur zone at the edges of human vision. Any movement entering the outermost periphery of the host’s retina will be processed by the brain at maximum center-focus clarity, bypassing the standard physiological limitations of the visual system.]

[You studied the description carefully. The moment the card slotted into place, your eyes snapped open.]

[The room transformed.]

[Everything that had lived at the fuzzy margins of your sight, details you’d normally need to turn your head or roll your eyes to resolve, snapped into crystalline focus as if caught by a high-definition lens zeroing in all at once.]

[You adjusted your glasses with a satisfied push. An R-rank card, nothing that added raw strength or expanded your Cursed Energy reserves. But in practical application, it was devastating.]

[A perfect counter against anyone who liked to exploit blind spots. ]

[It couldn’t match the absurd depth and breadth of Gojo’s Six Eyes, that much was obvious. But it was more than enough to let you handle simultaneous threats from multiple directions with a composure that bordered on leisurely.]

[The satisfaction faded quickly, replaced by a dry shake of your head.]

[Because you realized the scenario you’d just imagined, multiple high-speed combatants converging on you at once, remained purely theoretical. Scanning the entire jujutsu world as it stood, you could count on one hand the number of sorcerers capable of lasting more than a few exchanges against you when you fought seriously, let alone ending the fight quickly enough to matter.]

[The idea that several threats of that caliber would set aside their differences and coordinate a close-range assault on you simultaneously? Honestly, you couldn’t picture what that would even look like.]

[Seasons turned. Spring’s warm wind swept through Tokyo and shook the mountain slopes into a blizzard of cherry blossoms, and with it came graduation at Jujutsu High.]

[You stood beneath a tree shedding pale pink petals, wearing a crisp new uniform, watching the scene unfold ahead of you. Gojo and Geto were grabbing each other’s collars, roughhousing their way through a photo, while Shoko Ieiri stood to the side, cigarette in hand, pretending to be exasperated but unable to keep the smile off her face.]

[In those other timelines, the ones you’d watched play out in simulation after simulation, this ceremony had been a funeral dressed in academic robes. Geto’s betrayal had hollowed it out. Death and blood hung over everything like a fog that pressed the air from your lungs, and the weight of absence made every forced smile feel obscene.]

[This time, no one had lost their way halfway through their youth. No one lay forever still on a cold operating table.]

[In this spring where no seat sat empty, where laughter rang out bright and unguarded and alive, this was what a graduation was supposed to look like.

The way it should always have been.]

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