Jujutsu Dragon Emperor Chapter 11 — Months Later (Patreon)

The training yard behind the dorms had become an unofficial battleground over the past three months as Gojo had never let his exhibition match loss go end constantly trained to rectify the results and once more take his place as the strongest. Naoto would never let that happen so he has to constantly train too otherwise he'd be quickly left behind. 

What this caused was a constant situation where two adults acted like children as they fought to prove they were the best. 

Naoto and Gojo circled each other, sweat already beading along both their hairlines despite the early hour and the lingering chill. Gojo struck first, a snapping jab that Naoto rolled his shoulder away from before countering with a hook that Gojo ducked under. 

They traded like that for a while, feints folding into real strikes and real strikes folding back into feints, each of them reading the other easily due to how often they'd spared together. 

"You're telegraphing the leg kick again," Naoto said, catching Gojo's shin on his forearm and shoving it aside before driving a knee toward his ribs that Gojo twisted away from at the last possible second.

"I'm not telegraphing it, I'm baiting you," Gojo shot back, already circling to reset his angle. "There's a difference between a mistake and a strategy, Zenin, you'd know that if you didn't spend all your time reading books like a nerd."

"Maybe you should read more, I'm sure I can ask Mirajane to send over some pop up books that I used to read to Maki snd Mai."

Gojo barked a laugh and came in again, faster this time, his hands a blur that Naoto blocked piece by piece, forearm to wrist to forearm, until one slipped past his guard and clipped his cheek hard enough to sting. Naoto answered immediately, driving forward and wrapping an arm around Gojo's middle to throw him, but Gojo had learned that particular trick weeks ago and twisted his hips at the exact moment needed to slip the grip and land an elbow across Naoto's shoulder cheek instead.

It went on like that, exchange after exchange, until Naoto finally decided he'd had enough of trying to match Gojo's speed.

He rolled his shoulders back and let his muscles do what three years of relentless conditioning and a body built on the Hanma bloodline had shaped them to do. His shirt strained at the seams as his back tensed, and then it simply gave up entirely, the fabric tearing apart at the shoulders and down the spine as the demon face etched into the muscle there came alive, the snarling visage rippling as his back tightened beneath it.

"Oh, come on," Gojo said, taking an involuntary step back. "You're doing the freaky back thing again. That's basically cheating."

"Hey we said no cursed energy... this is just good ol fashion muscle." Naoto grinned and came forward with renewed speed, his strikes landing with significantly more power now that his body had shifted into a gear Gojo simply didn't have access to. A combination caught Gojo's guard and buckled it, and the follow-up sent him sprawling onto his back in the dirt.

Gojo rolled up onto his feet and watched as Naoto, csme quickly with a punch directed at his face. Gojo pivoted out of the way, missing it by inches and saw as the punch hit the trunk of the tree that was behind him with enough force that the wood split with a sound like a gunshot, the roots tore free of the earth and the whole thing toppled sideways and crashed into the grass.

There was a long pause.

"That is not a normal thing a person's body should be able to do," Gojo said, pointing at the wreckage of the tree while still lying on the ground, "You're not a sorcerer, you're a gorilla that learned how to talk."

Naoto looked over his shoulder at the toppled tree with mild satisfaction before turning back to Gojo, still grinning. "Jealousy's an ugly color on you, Satoru. Must be rough being built like a coat hanger."

Gojo sat up fully, brushing dirt off his arms with exaggerated indignation. "Excuse me? I am not built like a coat hanger. I have a perfect physique, the kind the woman go crazy for in their romance novels." He grabbed the hem of his own shirt and yanked it over his head, tossing it aside and flexing one arm. His frame was lean and while admittedly he did have some respectable muscle it was all wiry tendon and quick-twitch muscle built for speed rather than mass. "This is what peak physical conditioning looks like when you're not compensating for something."

"Compensating," Naoto repeated, raising an eyebrow.

"You heard me."

"Satoru... you look like a chopstick someone drew on."

"At least I don't look like I still need to evolve."

Naoto laughed, rolled his shoulders again and flexed deliberately, watching Gojo's expression curdle with disgust. "These are genetic gifts, my friend. It's a shame you don't know what it's like to be blessed with such things," Naoto said said in an attempt to rage bait gojo. 

"Are you joking me?! You think those are genetic gifts?! I have the six eyes and limitless technique, the first to have both in hundreds of years! If you wanna talk about genetic gifts I won the lottery!"

"We're not using cursed techniques, dumbass, that's the whole point of this exercise."

Baited

"I'm aware," Gojo said, snatching his shirt back up off the ground and not bothering to put it back on, simply holding it bunched in one fist as he reset into a loose stance. "I'm just saying that muscle is not a good indication that you've been blessed with goood genetics."

"Sure it is let me show you. Get back over here, twink, let's go again."

...

Across the yard, Shoko sat on an overturned crate with a cigarette already burning between her fingers, watching the entire exchange. Beside her, Geto stood with his arms crossed, his expression somewhere between amusement and resignation.

"Three months," Shoko said, exhaling a thin stream of smoke toward the sky. "Three months and they still do this every single morning. I genuinely don't know where they get the energy."

Geto let out a long breath through his nose that doubled as a laugh "At this point I think it's less about training and more about being the best—"

"It's a pissing contest," Shoko said.

"That's a fair assessment," Geto said with a wider grin on his face. 

Shoko glanced sideways at him, taking another drag. "Surprised you're not out there with them today. You usually join them."

Geto allowed himself a small smile, shifting his weight onto one hip. "Even I need a break occasionally. There's something exhausting about being around that much unfiltered ego before breakfast."

"Honestly, I'm just relieved I managed to talk them out of using cursed energy for these little morning sessions," Shoko said, flicking ash off the end of her cigarette. "Can you imagine? Both of them just going at it at six in the morning until they both pass out. We'd be rebuilding this entire campus by the end of the week."

"That would make quite a mess," Geto agreed, watching as Naoto's punch took another tree down again somewhere on the other side of the yard. "Relatively speaking, I suppose."

Shoko's gaze drifted back toward the fight, settling on Naoto as he came up from a dodge, sweat tracking down the line of his back, his muscles drawing tight beneath the demon's snarling outline as he pivoted into another exchange. She watched a moment longer than strictly necessary, her cigarette forgotten halfway to her lips.

Geto noticed and the corner of his mouth curved upward. "You've been staring for a while."

"I'm observing his form," Shoko said, without looking away.

"His form."

"His fighting form. As a future medical professional, I have a vested interest in understanding how the human body sustains that level of repeated structural stress without snapping in half." She finally took her drag, exhaling slowly. "It's purely clinical."

"Of course it is," Geto said, his tone perfectly mild. "Purely clinical. I'm sure the flush on your cheeks is also clinical. Some kind of reaction to the smoke, perhaps."

Shoko turned and gave him a flat look that didn't quite manage to hide the color rising in her face. "Don't start, Suguru."

"I'm not starting anything. I'm simply noting an observation, in the same spirit of detached medical curiosity you've adopted."

"You're an ass."

"I've been told."

She took another drag, deliberately not looking back at the fight for a moment, though her eyes drifted there again within seconds anyway, drawn back like a compass finding north.

...

Out in the yard, Gojo pressed with a sequence that immediately felt different from anything he'd thrown before. He feinted a jab, then feinted a hook, then feinted a low kick, each false start drawing a defensive reaction out of Naoto before Gojo finally committed to a real attack.

Three rapid kicks thrown in succession, each one landing from a slightly different angle, the final blow sweeping Naoto's legs out entirely and sending him flipping forward through the air before he crashed down hard onto his stomach in the dirt.

"AND down he goes," Gojo announced to absolutely no one, throwing both arms up like he'd just won a championship belt. "Three-time feint into triple kick finisher. I've been working on that for two weeks."

Naoto groaned, pushing himself up onto his elbows before rolling onto his back and staring up at the morning sky for a moment, more impressed than annoyed despite the dirt now packed into every crevice of his exposed torso. "Okay. Okay, that one was actually good. The misdirection on the third feint completely sold it."

"I know, right?" Gojo dropped down into a crouch beside him. "The trick is the rhythm. Most people expect feints to come in pairs because that's the natural pattern your brain wants to fall into. Three breaks the pattern just enough that your guard relaxes for a split second on the real attack."

Naoto sat up fully, brushing dirt off his arms while nodding along, genuinely engaged despite having just been put on his stomach by the move in question. "Show me the footwork again. Slower this time."

Gojo's grin turned positively delighted, and he immediately scrambled back to his feet, gesturing for Naoto to do the same. "Okay, okay, watch the hips. Everyone thinks the feints are about the hands, but it's actually all in how you load your weight before each attack." He demonstrated in slow motion, shifting his weight from one leg to the other in small increments while throwing exaggeratedly slow versions of the feints. "See? Weight goes back, fake jab. Weight shifts forward just slightly, fake hook. Then the real load happens here, on the third feint, except you're already pivoting into the first real kick before they register that the third one was fake too."

Naoto watched intently, his eyes tracking every shift of weight and angle of hip rotation with the same focus he gave his talisman work, occasionally stepping in to mimic the motion himself while Gojo adjusted his stance with small corrections.

"Your turn," Gojo said once he was satisfied Naoto had the basic shape of it. "Show me that elbow-into-throw thing you did on me. The one where you catch the punch and use the momentum to flip the whole exchange."

Naoto's face lit up with the kind of energy that mirrored Gojo's own. "Right, right, okay, the timing's everything on this one. You have to catch the strike just as it's extending, not after, or the leverage doesn't work." He walked Gojo through it slowly, breaking the motion into its component parts. 

What started as a simple demonstration spiraled, the way it always did between the two of them, into a full collaborative redesign, both of them trading suggestions back and forth until the original throw had been reshaped into something neither of them had done before. 

"Okay, that's insane," Gojo said, grinning as he tested the modified version on Naoto one more time, sending him stumbling back a step with the sheer unexpected speed of the new setup. "We should name it."

"We are not naming our moves, Satoru."

"Speak for yourself. I'm calling it the Gojo Special."

"You named, like, six things the Gojo Special already this month."

"And they're all special. That's the whole point."

From the steps, Shoko's voice carried across the yard. "If you two are done inventing new ways to hurt each other, you have lessons in twenty minutes."

Both boys turned, the realization hitting them at roughly the same moment, and a chorus of groans rose up simultaneously.

"We were in the middle of something important," Gojo called back, already knowing it wouldn't matter.

"You were shirtless yelling about the Gojo special," Shoko called back. "Lessons. Twenty minutes. Go."

Naoto sighed and bent down to retrieve his ruined shirt. "Guess we'll finish deconstructing the throw later."

"Obviously," Gojo said, already jogging toward the dormitory entrance. "Last one to the showers has to explain to Yaga-sensei why there's a tree in the middle of the yard!"

"That tree is your fault too, you know!"

"Not if I get there first, Zenin!"

...

Naoto's room had returned to a state of order after the chaos of move-in day, the photographs back on the wall, the tea set arranged neatly on the desk, the print of old Tokyo finally secured with enough adhesive strips that it had survived three months of Gojo-related disturbances without falling again. 

He toweled off quickly after his shower and pulled on a fresh uniform shirt, buttoning it as he crossed to his desk and picked up his phone, thumb already finding Mirajane's contact before he'd even sat down.

She answered on the second ring. "Naoto! I was wondering when you'd call today."

"Sorry, sorry, mornings have been busy these days." He leaned back in his chair, propping his feet up on the edge of the desk. "How is everyone? How are the twins?"

"They're wonderful, as always, currently arguing over whose turn it is to feed the koi in the garden pond, which somehow turns into a screaming match every single time despite there being more than enough food for both of them to share." There was the faint sound of movement on her end, a door sliding, and then her voice rose slightly in volume as she apparently turned away from the receiver. "Maki! Mai! Come say hello, your brother's on the phone!"

There was a scramble of footsteps and a brief muffled argument over who got to hold the phone first, and then Maki's voice burst through. "Oni-chan! Oni-chan, guess what, I caught the biggest koi in the whole pond today, it was huge, Mira said it was probably older than you!"

"Wow a koi older than me!?" Naoto said, smiling despite himself. "Did you let it go after?"

"Of course I did! I'm not mean!" A pause, and then, more quietly, "When are you coming home, oni-chan?"

There was a tug somewhere behind his ribs at the question, it was hard not to miss them especially since he'd raised them since they were born. "Soon, I promise. Things have been busy at school, but I'll come see you both as soon as I get a real break. I miss you guys a lot, you know that?"

"We miss you too!" Mai's voice cut in now, apparently having wrestled the phone away from her sister. "Maki's been bossy without you here to tell her to stop."

"I have NOT!"

"You have too!"

Naoto laughed. "Both of you behave for Mira, okay? I'll see you soon, I promise. Love you both."

"Love you, oni-chan!" came the overlapping reply, followed by more scuffling and then Mirajane's voice returning.

"They've been counting the days, you know. Don't tell them I said that, they'd never admit it."

"I won't." Naoto rubbed the back of his neck, glancing toward the window. "Is everything alright there? Anything I need to worry about?"

Mirajane's tone shifted, just slightly. "The clan's been doing what the clan does. Naobito-sama hasn't said much directly, but there's been talk among the elders about your standing here, especially after what happened with Gojo at the exhibition match. I think they're embarrassed they nearly wrote you off years ago, and now they're trying to figure out how to claim some of the credit for what you've become."

"Of course they are." Naoto exhaled slowly, the familiar irritation rising and settling just as quickly. He'd long since stopped letting the clan's maneuvering surprise him.

"I overheard one of the elders mention the school's principal by name," Mirajane continued. "I think they may try to pressure him somehow, to push you forward faster than you'd otherwise go, so they can point at your progress and say it was the clan's investment that produced it. Be careful, Naoto. I don't trust what they're planning."

Naoto's jaw tightened slightly. "I'll keep an eye out. Thank you for telling me. You don't need to worry about me though, Mira, really. Just focus on the girls. I'll handle whatever the clan's cooking up."

"I always worry about you. That's not something you get to tell me to stop doing," she said softly. "Come visit soon. Promise me."

"I promise. I'll come see you all very soon." He glanced at the clock on his wall, aware time was slipping. "I need to get ready for lessons, but I'll call again tomorrow, alright?"

"Alright. Take care of yourself."

"You too."

He ended the call just as a knock landed against his door frame and he looked up to find Shoko standing in the open doorway with one shoulder leaning against the frame, an unlit cigarette tucked behind her ear and her uniform blazer already on.

"How are the twins?" she asked, not bothering with a greeting first.

"Good," Naoto said, standing and reaching for his own blazer, which hung off the back of his chair. "Maki caught a fish older than me apparently."

"They do live a long time to be fair." Shoko pushed off the doorframe and fell into step beside him as he stepped out into the hallway, the two of them heading toward the main building. "You talk to them every day?"

"Every chance I get. I haven't seen them in person for months now, which is starting to eat at me a little. School's been nonstop." He glanced at her sideways. "You should come with me next time I head back to the compound. Mai's been begging for an older sister figure who isn't Mirajane specifically because, quote, 'Mira makes me eat vegetables.'"

Shoko snorted. "I make people eat vegetables too. I'm training to be a doctor you know."

"I'll make sure to keep an apple in my pocket."

"Don't think it's that easy to keep me away."

Naot smirked. "So what do you think? Come with me sometime."

She considered this for a moment, glancing at him with an expression that was harder to read than usual, before shrugging one shoulder. "Sure. Why not. Beats sitting in my room avoiding actual training."

They walked the rest of the way to the lecture hall in quiet, falling into step with Gojo and Geto just outside the door, all four of them filing in together as Yaga stood at the front of the room shuffling through a stack of papers.

"Settle down," Yaga said without looking up, and the four of them found their usual seats in the second row, Gojo immediately stretching his legs out into the aisle. Yaga set the papers down and finally lifted his gaze, his expression somehow angrier than usual. "I have an update to your training schedule. The principal has decided, against my recommendation, that all of you are ready to begin exorcism fieldwork ahead of the normal timeline."

A ripple of surprise moved through the row, though Naoto caught Gojo's eye for the briefest second, and the look they exchanged carried the exact same understanding without either of them needing to say a word. 

The clans.

"Normally we wait longer before sending first-years into the field," Yaga continued, his tone making it clear exactly how he felt about being overruled on the matter. "But apparently the principal believes all four of you have demonstrated sufficient capability to begin supervised missions immediately."

Gojo leaned over toward Naoto, lowering his voice just enough to be technically discreet. "Bet you ten thousand yen this was your clan."

"No bet," Naoto murmured back. "Gojo clan would rather dip your balls in gold and worship them then ever risk you getting hurt anywhere."

Yaga's eyes flicked toward them silencing them. "Each of you, with the exception of Ieiri, will be paired with an upper-year sorcerer and sent on a supervised mission. Ieiri will continue her focused training in reverse cursed technique under the senior medical staff, as previously arranged."

Shoko exhaled audibly, the relief in the sound impossible to miss, though she said nothing aloud.

"Geto, you'll be paired with a third-year for a curse exorcism in Saitama, details to follow." Yaga flipped a page. "Gojo, you'll be working with Mei Mei on a job in Nagoya."

Gojo's face fell instantly, his earlier smugness collapsing into outright protest. "Mei Mei? Yaga-sensei, with all due respect, her cursed energy output is barely above a fourth-year's. Can't I just go with Naoto or Geto instead? It would honestly be more fu—I mean efficient."

"And Zenin," Yaga continued, ignoring him entirely, "you'll be paired with Tsukumo Yuki for an assignment in Nara"

"Sensei," Gojo tried again, "seriously, think about the efficiency here—"

Yaga rolled up the newspaper sitting on his podium and brought it down across the top of Gojo's head with a satisfying smack. "No."

"OW! That actually hurt, you can't just—"

"I can, and I will, every single time you whine about your assignment," Yaga said flatly, setting the newspaper back down. "All of you listen carefully, because I'm only going to say this once. You are special grade sorcerers, every one of you, which is rarer than anything else in this profession. But special grade does not mean invincible, and it certainly does not mean you can be careless. The field doesn't care how strong you are if you walk into it with your guard down. People die out there. Strong people. I won't have any of you become a statistic because you got cocky on your first job."

Naoto reached into his bag, pulled out a pencil, and flicked it across the aisle directly at Gojo's head.

"Shut up and just get the work done," Naoto said evenly.

Gojo's sighed and without even looking, Infinity caught the pencil dead in the air an inch from his temple before he plucked it free of the barrier and sent it spinning right back at Naoto with a flick of his wrist. "You shut up."

Naoto caught it without flinching, smirking as he set it down on his desk. "Was that supposed to be intimidating?"

"It was supposed to make a point."

"The point being you're petty."

"The point being... shut up."

Yaga's expression suggested he was seriously reconsidering killing a few members of his class, but he simply continued through the rest of the lesson plan without further comment, walking them through mission protocol, exorcism documentation requirements, and the proper procedure for requesting backup, all of which Gojo half-listened to while occasionally muttering under his breath about the unfairness of being paired with someone "barely stronger than a vending machine."

By the time the lesson ended and Yaga dismissed them with instructions on where to report the following morning. 

Geto and Gojo peeled off together almost immediately, Geto holding up two tickets with a faint smile. "Basketball tickets," he explained when Naoto raised an eyebrow. "Got them from one of the staff members who couldn't make the game. Gojo's coming with me."

"Tip-off's in an hour," Gojo added, already walking backward toward the gate with his hands in his pockets. "Try not to miss us too much tonight, you two."

"We'll manage," Shoko called after him dryly.

Naoto and Shoko fell into step together as the other two disappeared down the path toward the front gate, the campus quieting around them as students filtered off in different directions. "Food?" Naoto asked.

"Food," Shoko agreed.

They ended up at a small noodle stand a few streets down from the school, sitting at the narrow counter with steaming bowls in front of them, the evening crowd thinning out enough that conversation came easy between them. Shoko stirred her noodles absently, her expression more relaxed than usual now that the looming threat of fieldwork had been lifted from her shoulders entirely.

"Honestly? I'm relieved," she admitted, picking at a piece of pork with her chopsticks. "Three months of training and I'm still trash at actual combat. At least this way I don't have to embarrass myself in front of an upper-year."

"You're not trash," Naoto said, though the look she gave him suggested she wasn't buying it. "Okay, you're a little trash. But your reverse cursed technique more than makes up for it. You'll probably end up more valuable to this entire profession than any of us combat types."

"Flattering, but I know what I am." She took a sip of broth. 

"I think you'd make a great doctor," Naoto said thoughtfully, swirling his chopsticks through his own bowl. "Or, you know. A sexy nurse. That works too."

Shoko's eyebrow arched slowly, the corner of her mouth twitching into something that wasn't quite a smile yet but was getting close. "Excuse me?"

"I'm just saying, you have the sexy nurse vibe going on or maybe sadistic doctor."

"You want me to patch you up, Zenin?" she asked, leaning her elbow on the counter and tilting her head, the teasing edge in her voice unmistakable now. "Because I could probably arrange that. For a price."

"What's the price?"

"Depends how nicely you ask."

Naoto laughed and reached over to nudge her shoulder lightly with his own. "Careful. I might actually take you up on that."

"I might actually let you," she said, and the words hung there for a moment between them before she broke the look first and went back to her noodles with a small, smirk still tugging at her mouth.

They finished the meal slowly, the conversation drifting between topics and the occasional charged silence neither of them acknowledged outright, until Naoto reached for his wallet and waved off Shoko's attempt to split the bill, paying for both of them before they wandered back toward campus beneath a sky gone soft purple with the last of the evening light.

...

The next morning Naoto found himself seated at the edge of a quiet park in central Tokyo well before the appointed meeting time, his notebook open on his knee as he sketched out a refinement to one of his talisman seals while the city stirred to life around him. 

He didn't hear anything before the attack came.

A blur cut across his peripheral vision and he reacted on instinct alone, twisting out of the way of what would have been a clean strike to his temple, flowing immediately into a duck beneath a follow-up kick before catching the next punch in his palm, his fingers closing around the fist without so much as a flicker of panic.

He looked up to find Yuki Tsukumo grinning down at him dressed in a uniform that had clearly been altered to suit her own taste, the blazer tied loosely around her waist instead of worn properly and a fitted vest in its place, her hair pulled back and a few loose strands falling across a face lit with genuine delight.

"Not bad," she said, her grin widening as she yanked her caught fist free without much effort behind it. "Everything they said about you checks out. Reflexes like that, this early in the morning, with zero warning? I like it."

"You could've just said hello," Naoto said, climbing to his feet and brushing dirt off his pants, though there was no real irritation behind it.

"Where's the fun in that?" Yuki rolled her shoulder, still grinning, before her hand shot out and twisted around his wrist with surprising speed. At the same moment her other hand came forward in what looked like a punch toward his face, and Naoto braced to block it on instinct, only for her to redirect at the last second, her hand closing around his forearm instead as she pivoted her whole body and swung him bodily through the air toward the nearest tree.

He hit the trunk with a crack that rattled bark loose and sent a jolt up his spine, grunting as he caught himself against the wood and pushed back upright, more impressed than annoyed at how well she'd set up the throw.

Yuki tilted her head. "So Naoto Zenin," she said, her hands sliding into her pockets as she leaned her weight onto one hip, "What kind of woman do you like?"

(AN: So shoko and naoto have a little charged moment between them while eating and Naoto meets another sexy woman from Jujustu. Now I know that it's not confirmed how old Yuki is and I know she was graduated by the time they were in second year... but first year? Who knows man could be. Anyway hope you enjoyed.)