All three of them stood around Hojo, maintaining an obvious distance. Sadly for them, all their previous physical attacks were nothing more than trash before Hojo's defence.
Dodo had punched him hundreds of times in just a few seconds, but nothing seemed to affect Gojo's invisible defence.
But there was still a hope remaining. Oki's jujutsu technique wasn't mostly focused on physical combat, but on hypnosis.
Oki had no need to touch Hojo physically.
"It's cheating! He's using an artifact to protect himself."
What Dodo suspected could be true— in this advanced era of technology, using an artifact in fights is rather common.
"If that was the case, my crow would have already deactivated it."
But Aaida knew— that Hojo wasn't using any artifact, besides she was sure that there wasn't any kind of invisible barrier around him.
Hojo gave a quick glance at everyone, before vanishing from their sight.
"He's gone?!" Dodo stared around with his wide eyes, but Oki instantly realised something behind them. He immediately turned his head around, his eyeballs dancing to catch Hojo.
Hojo stood behind, his hand ready to slice through its path, but at the very moment when his hand was close enough to sever Oki's head in two pieces of meat, his hand froze just a few millimeters away from Oki's nose.
'He's fast,' Oki thought, slowly tilting his head backward. 'I don't know if his initial intentions were to slice off my head, but if he hadn't stopped his hand, judging from his speed, blood would be flowing out of my nose.'
"I don't want to fight with any one of you."
Hojo put his hands back in his pockets. Eventually the room filled with silence, where everyone was lost in their thoughts. It wasn't like any of them hadn't courage to open their mouth first and annihilate the silence.
Actually, they hadn't any words to speak. In this type of situations, typical reaction would be surprise or even fear for few people. But here, they didn't left with the time to react with fancy faces, instead their mind got filled with hundreds of thoughts.
In this era, where strength might not seem too important in comparison to money and education, but from behind, in shadows, jujutsu sorcerers played a big role to ensure a smile on faces of ordinary population.
It's not a big thing as nobody knows and cares about this like nobody cares about the thousands of lines of code running behind their favourite applications.
But when, an 'unknown' to mankind arrives in hope of shelter on their homeland, its crucial to think about all possible aspects in which we could get harm.
Strength... in this situation, they needed strength. Not the strength of an army, not of something nuclear powered, but something that could be only achieved in fiction for ordinary people— jujutsu.
Power of jujutsu sorcerers was significantly weaken, that's why it was normal to be surprise to the extent— that you have no words, no feelings on face, just a weird silence borned out of happiness and excitement, thinking of future.
*****
In a room or rather a large room with its walls covered with screens and monitors, on the main screen, everything happening in white hall was being monitored.
Few people pounded their finger in against the holographic keyboard placed on a long desk of length that almost covered front wall . Desk was all covered by advanced devices & accessories, monitors and hologram projectors.
"Do it fast! Recheck the readings."
"What the hell you think I'm doing?! AI is already calculating speed through camera motions. It's not my mistake that we didn't get any digital signals from that boy."
"Hey, both of you. Are you blind? See behind!"
Usami stood behind with his arms crossed. He was starting at large screen, where an AI— Alex was analyzing— what it could through camera footage. Progression was visible as non-stop text on the screen to keep impatient humans entertained.
After a couple of seconds, text became stable— TASK COMPLETED!
Results visibled on the screen, left everyone stunned. There was lot of info on the screen but a simple result would be— Speed: 2567 m/s.