Juchu Kaisen - 40 (Patreon)

Chapter 40

Ieiri Shoko had gained eight kilograms since our training began, seven days ago. She had gone from weighing forty-five kilograms to fifty-three, at a height of five feet and four inches. Almost a kilogram of lean growth every day.

About half of that mass had been ingested orally. The other half had been generated by the Reverse Cursed Technique. Judging from the rate at which she was picking up new mass, I suspected that she would plateau at about sixty kilograms. That would be her human limit, sans stronger performance-enhancing drugs or body modifications.

For the purposes of a Jujutsu Sorcerer of her height and build, that wasn’t bad at all. Mukai Reiko likely weighed around that amount, and she was at the bleeding edge of Jujutsu Sorcery, at Grade One.

Out in the field where we normally underwent Jujutsu lessons, Yaga had us standing in a row, and stood in front of us, arms folded. He had the air of a drill sergeant to him as he inspected us.

“I will test you today,” Yaga said. “By punching you in the face.”

“Eh?!” Takahashi exclaimed.

“It will be a strong punch for the standards of non-sorcerers, but one that you could easily defend against by manipulating your cursed energy. Should you fail, you will be forced to undergo remedial lessons. To make things fair, everyone will be tested.” Including Gojo and I.

He was going to punch me in the face.

Fair.

I just hoped that when it came to testing the girls, he wouldn’t pull his punches.

“Gojo, you’re up first.”

The punch that Gojo got sent him flying off his feet and across the field. Indeed, it had a fair bit of cursed energy to it.

“Satoshi,” Yaga called next. Satoshi didn’t even hesitate to step up and get socked. This punch, however, lacked the sheer power that went into Gojo’s strike.

Did he have it out for Gojo?

“Nakamura.”

The lanky dreadlock-wearing boy stepped up and got hit with a similar intensity as Satoshi’s. It barely made him do more than just stumble backwards, but he had defended himself properly.

After finishing up with the boys, it was time now for the moment of truth. “Hibana.”

He struck me. And I went flying.

I did a few flips and landed daintily on the grass before giving him a curtsy from a hundred feet away. He gave me a nod.

So he was testing us differently. Not really sure what the point was since he knew that I was strong. Perhaps it was just for fairness.

Next, “Ieiri.”

I sensed carefully for Yaga’s punch. It landed with a heavy thud, producing a similar level of force to the one that had struck the boys.

As Yaga walked down the row of girls, they all got the same power in their punches. It was a relief.

As I returned to the row, Yaga gave a nod of satisfaction. “Everyone passes. Except for Aomori. I’m sorry, but you must see me after class.”

Then she’d see me after that class. Aomori was frustrating to try and get to know. She clearly wanted to be friendly, but she was terrible at it. I could use this as an excuse to get closer to her.

Aomori whimpered and nodded. On her face, a welt was already forming. Poor girl.

“As you all may recall me mentioning when one hothead amongst you acted up—and I won’t mention any names,” he said as he sent a quick glare at Satoshi, who looked away like a kicked dog. Yaga had done a good job taming the idiot. “But I wouldn’t let you spar amongst one another until I deemed you ready. Those who have passed my test, you are ready to finally learn the fundamentals of hand-to-hand sorcery combat. Congratulations. You worked hard and produced results far faster than normal. I want you to pat yourselves on the back. As for you, Aomori—don’t be discouraged. You’re not behind the curve by any means.” Only this class’ curve.

“We can finally spar now?” Nakamura asked.

“Yes,” Yaga said. “Today, each of you who passed will spar at least twice. I will set up a preliminary class ranking based on the results of these bouts. You are required to fight twice, but you may fight even more times should an opponent choose to accept your challenge. To kick us off, Satoshi Ren and Ito Aoi. Step up.”

Takahashi gasped. Ito Aoi, for her part, didn’t seem ruffled at all as she stepped forward, Satoshi doing the same.

A tiny worry of mine dissipated at this development. Yaga wasn’t doing something as stupid as separating the fights by gender. No gendered rankings at all, seemingly. Everyone was held to the same standards.

“You two will fight until submission, or until I call an end to the match,” Yaga explained.

“Kick his ass, Aoi!” Suzuki cheered.

“Go easy on her, ya punk,” Nakamura laughed. Gojo and Suguru both seemed amused by that. Idiots.

“Don’t underestimate her, Satoshi,” Kobayashi advised. He sounded sincere as he said that.

“C’mon, dude,” Gojo scoffed at Kobayashi. “There’s a limit to how cautious one can be.”

“I’m surprised to hear that, Gojo-san. I see that even the Six Eyes has its limits.”

“The hell?!”

“Kill him!” Shoko cheered. All these comments seemed to be going over both the fighters’ heads as they faced off against one another.

Yaga gestured for us to make space, and then yelled. “Fight!”

Satoshi didn’t hesitate to rush in as usual. He was very predictable in that fashion. A simple playstyle carried by his overwhelming strength—not so overwhelming when you, too, had the gift of cursed energy.

I had already analyzed Satoshi, so it wasn’t a surprise that somebody else had as well.

Ito went low, ducking the punch and sweeping Satoshi’s legs from under him while he was in a critical moment of imbalance.

She then copied the same punch that Mukai Reiko had used to put Satoshi down. She had considerably less force to play with, so this punch didn’t bury his head in the dirt, but it did cause him to hit it so hard that he bounced.

Ito then straddled Satoshi and began wailing at his face with precise, surgical punches designed to knock him unconscious. Somewhere between the fifth and tenth blow, she had managed this.

“Match over!” Yaga roared as she dragged Ito by the scruff of her shirt off from Satoshi. Then she pulled Ito’s hand in the air. “Ito Aoi wins!”

Ito blushed furiously at the sudden attention, staring at the ground with a shaky smile.

The crowd was quiet as a church.

I clapped my hands. The rest of the girls followed a beat afterwards. Suzuki started cheering like the national team of her favorite sport just won the world championship.

And the guys were all various degrees of absolutely dumbstruck. Except Kobayashi, who had observed the fight with clinical detachment. I was beginning to understand that technique of his more and more.

A powerful Thinker-class ability, certainly. A combat thinker, good at dodging. Good at reading people’s threat levels.

Or maybe it was the power of luck itself.

Jujutsu Sorcery had all kinds of crazy all-or-nothing abilities. I couldn’t rule anything out. But I would keep an extra eye on him.

As I thought this, I leaned closer to Shoko. “If you can make the top eight, Shoko,” I leaned closer to her ear and whispered, “I’ll let you see and touch my brain.”

Her heart skipped a beat in sheer excitement.

This fascination of hers was… fascinating. There was clearly an element of sadism to it—she liked seeing blood, and causing normally-fatal injuries. I had told her at one point that my brain was my one true weakness, and that she wasn’t ready to play around with it as it could mean my death.

She obviously had enough of a moral compass to reject an outcome that would lead to my death, but feelings were interesting in how contradictory they could be.

And I wasn’t actually scared that even leaving my brain exposed to her would allow her to kill me. She couldn’t exactly damage it unless I stopped enforcing it with cursed energy.

“That’s… gross,” Shoko said, her lips quivering in anticipation. “Why would anyone want that?”

Beats me. Humans were some of the weirdest creatures in existence. There was no logical explanation for this fascination of hers. She was a weirdo.

My favorite weirdo in the world. I grinned, putting both my hands on her shoulders and massaging them. “Give it your all, tiger of… hmmm, where are you from?”

“I’m from Shinjuku,” she said.

“Tiger of Shinjuku!” I shook her by her shoulders a little, causing her to yelp.

“Ieiri Shoko! Ishikawa Takumi! Step up!”

I pushed her ahead, as the big Takumi followed after, a sketchbook in hand.

000

“Sir, are we allowed to use our cursed techniques?” Takumi asked.

Ieiri Shoko raised an eyebrow at the question, and the sketchbook that he was holding. She had no idea what his cursed technique was. No idea what her own was, too, or if she even had one. It was more likely than not that she didn’t, because innate techniques were actually rather rare in the world of Jujutsu.

According to Teira at least, innate techniques made up about eighty percent of a Jujutsu Sorcerer’s lethal potential. To flourish with only cursed energy manipulation required an extreme amount of practice, dedication, and the knowledge of generic cursed techniques like barrier techniques, shikigami construction, Binding Vows—all sorts of crap, really.

Shoko had spent the better part of her every waking moment absorbing as much information about the world of Jujutsu as possible. She almost couldn’t believe that she even had it in herself, to keep up with the endless rigor. She had never worked this hard in her life. Never believed it possible for herself.

Hopefully, once she figured out one of Teira’s RCT extension techniques, the one that she used to ward off mental fatigue and keep her focus levels optimal, she would be able to keep up more easily. She still didn’t have the first clue about how to use karate. Even that was new for her.

And now she was going to fight some six-foot-tall and several inches guy who likely weighed double what she did.

It was hard to imagine Takumi laying a hand on her. His placidly grinning self seemed at odds with such a thing, but Shoko wouldn’t let her guard down on that account.

“I encourage it,” Yaga-sensei said, in response to his questions. Then he raised his voice to address the onlookers. “The use of innate techniques is allowed and recommended! If you don’t have one, then tough!”

Harsh. But fair. In the real world, you couldn’t exactly expect someone to take it easier on you just because you were gimped in the innate technique department. Especially not a damn cursed spirit.

Takumi opened his sketchbook and ripped a page out. He then held the sketchbook in his armpit, held the paper out, and made a gesture with one hand, eyes closed. His grin was gone.

The paper started burning. As it did, she caught a quick glance at the subject. A… black man?

In a flash of cursed energy, a new figure emerged.

He was tall, although shorter than Takumi by a few inches—not that it meant anything. The man was a giant. This figure was a whole lot more muscular as well. He wore only laced boots, shorts that reached his knees, and a pair of red boxing gloves. His frame was covered with rippling muscle, and his skin was dark.

He had a fairly handsome face, and geometrically shorn hair, with rigid box-like edges. And he was smirking.

“Should I explain my technique?” Takumi asked.

“Uh… please do,” Shoko said because she was lost. Yaga raised an eyebrow at her.

“If I work hard on a drawn subject while understanding them to a deep extent, I can summon them into reality,” Takumi said. “They are akin to shikigami, though more temporary. The power of the subject scales with how much I understand them, and what I can imagine of them. This is Muhammad Ali, the heavyweight boxing champion of legend. And as far as my imagination goes, I really can’t picture him losing to anyone.”

He was grinning, like he was sharing a fun fact.

And then she remembered what Teira had taught her of one of the most basic binding vows in Jujutsu Sorcery—revealing ones hand.

Takumi had given her the choice to be polite, and she had walked headfirst into danger, like an idiot.

Shit.

“Mab-blabit, dangdabby, sang-bang-rangalang,” Muhammad Ali said as he skipped on his feet. The hell was that, English? “Dangnabalab rab-tab.”

“What is he saying?” Shoko asked.

Takumi blushed. “Ah. I don’t think he’s really saying anything at all. I don’t really understand English, you see.”

So he couldn’t just draw and then summon Albert Einstein to do his math homework.  

Everything he summoned had to exist within the confines of his knowledge and imagination.

And just because he couldn’t imagine Muhammad Ali losing, didn’t mean that he could imagine the exact way in which he was a heavyweight boxing champion. And wasn’t this guy a non-sorcerer, anyhow?

Ieiri Shoko got this.

“Begin the fight!” Yaga said.

“Get her, Ali! Don’t hold back!”

“Dang-nabba-rabba doo-di dang pang!”

Shoko sent a punch that Muhammad Ali weaved without effort.

The moment right after that, he sent a punch to her face so strong that she understood the meaning of the phrase ‘seeing stars’.

That punch was strong.

Very strong.

But far, far weaker than one of Teira’s.

She healed the damage to her brain, and threw herself bodily at Muhammad Ali.

The man grimaced in disgust at her blatantly breaking the rules of boxing as she grabbed his arm and started kneeing his thigh.

He pushed himself away from her and let out a furious stream of gibberish. He even turned to Yaga-sensei for a moment as he gestured his gloves at Shoko.

Yaga-sensei shrugged helplessly. “This is a sorcerer battle, not boxing.”

“Dang-rabalaba—“

And while he was distracted, she nailed him on his head with a healthy burst of cursed energy.

Muhammad Ali then hugged her. His giant, beefy arms held, and all she could do was knee him, but she wasn’t able to generate enough force.

She started headbutting him, too, desperate to get out of the hold before Takumi joined in on the battle.

When Muhammad Ali finally let go of her, she saw that Takumi was still standing a fair bit away, watching the fight with a bated breath. Why wasn’t he fighting?

Wait.

Why am I even fighting his shikigami?

She found a rock on the ground and lobbed it at Takumi as hard as she could.

Takumi let out a gasp as he watched the projectile zoom towards him. He flared with cursed energy to defend, and closed his eyes.

The rock hit his eye. Not hard enough to injure him severely or even draw blood, but enough to have him yell out in pain and double over, temporarily blinded.

She sprinted towards him. Muhammad Ali tried to entreat Yaga-sensei for a referee intervention or something. He had made the mistake of still assuming that this was a boxing match.

And while Takumi was doubled over, Shoko sent a flying knee to his forehead. The force of her blow knocked him off his feet and sent him flying almost ten feet away.

He landed with a heavy thud, spread-eagle on the floor.

Muhammad Ali finally had enough, pulled out both his boxing gloves, threw them on the ground and stomped away. He disappeared an instant later. Him and his discarded boxing gloves.

“Ieiri wins!” Yaga sensei called.

000

“The increased output gained from revealing one’s hand is always useful,” I explained to Shoko as she sneakily recovered using the Reverse Cursed Technique. Either Yaga hadn’t noticed, or he was trying not to overreact at her use of it during Shoko’s fight. As a Grade One sorcerer, he should have sharp enough senses to observe such a thing after all. “Normally, I advise my students to try their best to suss out an enemy cursed technique’s particulars without relying on hearing it from them. Case in point, now that Takumi has revealed his technique to everyone, it will forever have an increased amount of output to everyone that heard and understood him. If you discover the details yourself, however, you can avoid this fate.”

“I screwed up,” Shoko muttered.

The ones currently fighting were Geto Suguru and Takahashi Hana. Suguru was extending the battle for no reason by dodging Takahashi endlessly, and putting in the occasional soft punch. For each one, I vowed to beat his face in harder and harder when I challenged him.

He had just watched two girls beat the breaks off two boys, and he was still choosing to act this way. If Takahashi had been a boy, Suguru wouldn’t have hesitated to beat her in one strike. This, on the other hand, was just cruel. Even if he didn’t mean for it to be.

“On the contrary,” I said. “Takumi’s technique relies on his imagination. You understood this and started playing dirty in order to confuse the shikigami, which was programmed to operate on the rigid rules and regulations of boxing.”

It was an interesting technique, however. Takumi was a promising talent, though his aversion to direct confrontation was a major weakness for the moment.

He was a typical shikigami user, a typical Master that overrellied on his minions. If he kept that up, then that would be the end of him.

He was currently sitting on the grass, next to the boys, cradling his sore eye. He wasn’t angered by the loss as much as he was saddened. In his own way, he had tried his best and hoped to win as well.

Satoshi Ren had already recovered, and was raring for another fight. The blunt musclebrained boy needed a healthy helping of subtlety and finesse in his fighting style, too. At this rate, everyone would know how to handle him during his initial bull rush.

Suguru’s punches seemed to slow down as hesitation marred his features.

And then, he let his arms drop. “I can’t keep hitting you,” he said.

Takahashi nodded. “Alright. Then hold still.”

She ran up to him and kicked him on his head.

Wait.

I took a deep sniff of the air. It was floral, owing to the perfume that Takahashi liked to wear, but there was something in the air, too.

Cursed energy infused microparticles. Scent particles.

An innate technique.

“What?! Suguru, quit screwing around!” Gojo roared.

A mind-controlling scent, subtle enough to elude my notice. She must have capped her output at a mere trickle, afraid that if Suguru had noticed something amiss, he would use cursed energy on his nose to defend himself.

Gojo had the good sense to at least not blurt this out to Suguru. That would have been the height of foul play, and I would have punished him for it.

“I’m… beginning to lose respect for Suguru,” Shoko said as she watched the battle. Suguru could only muster his cursed energy to defend himself, but was steadily getting beaten to a pulp.

“You shouldn’t,” I muttered. “This is all Takahashi.”

“Huh?”

“If you’re curious, ask her yourself.” It went without saying that I also wouldn’t reveal Takahashi’s technique if she didn’t want to reveal it herself, even if Shoko could potentially get paired against her.

Nakamura, Satoshi and Gojo were booing the fight. Suzuki looked disgusted by it. Kobayashi… looked like he understood exactly what was happening.

Eventually, Takahashi’s endless strikes inspired Yaga to call the match in her favor.

“Suzuki Yui! Kobayashi Jun!” Yaga called. “Step up.”

“Pay attention,” I said to Shoko. “Try to analyze their innate techniques, if they even have any.”

“Right,” Shoko nodded.

This fight could get interesting.

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A/N: Please let me know if the American gibberish was funny or offensive. I'm too close to tell at the moment.

Anyway, this discount tournament arc will likely last one more chapter before the set-up arc for the Exchange Event starts. Thankfully, I have a lot of ideas to fill out the time spent between the start of the school year (April) and summer when the Event takes place.

Anyway, thanks for reading!