Chapter 5: The Breakthrough
Perfection is not a state of being; it is a state of absolute, unyielding control.
Inside the lightless, suffocating belly of the Prison Realm, the man who had once been known as the strongest sorcerer of the modern era had long since ceased to be merely human. Satoru Gojo sat suspended in a meditative lotus position, hovering exactly three inches above the sprawling, macabre carpet of bleached human skeletons. He wasn't using Blue to levitate. He was simply resting on the hardened, unbreakable shell of his own condensed reality.
He had achieved the breakthrough.
The frantic, agonizing era of his physical and spiritual mutilation was over. The millions of microscopic detonations that had shredded his flesh, the countless self-inflicted lobotomies that had forcefully rewritten the neural pathways of his brain, the suffocating rivers of his own blood—it was all a distant, archived memory. The crucible had burned away the impurities, leaving behind an entity of terrifying, hyper-optimized efficiency.
To look at him with the Six Eyes would have driven a lesser sorcerer to the brink of insanity.
He was no longer just channeling cursed energy; he was a living, breathing paradox. The dark, volatile surge of his negative emotions—the profound, aching grief for his students, the white-hot, homicidal fury directed at Sukuna and Kenjaku—was drawn from his gut in a continuous, violent torrent. But before that volatile energy could even register as a physical sensation, it was instantly, ruthlessly crushed and multiplied within the newly forged, hyper-dense circuitry of his expanded prefrontal cortex.
The resulting positive energy of the Reverse Cursed Technique did not flare outward in a display of wasted power. It was perfectly, seamlessly woven into the fabric of his innate technique, fueling the invisible, skin-tight Domain Expansion that now served as his perpetual armor.
Limitless: Absolute Zero.
It was flawless. It hummed exactly one millimeter above his immaculate Jujutsu High uniform, an impenetrable barrier of frozen spatial coordinates. It required no conscious thought to maintain. It was as automatic as the beating of his heart, as intrinsic as the intake of breath. The Six Eyes no longer needed to actively sort threats based on mass, speed, or cursed energy signatures. The filter of the neutral Infinity was obsolete.
The Absolute Zero barrier didn't filter; it denied. It was a sovereign territory of Satoru Gojo's soul projected onto the physical plane. Nothing could enter it because the space it occupied refused the concept of entry. It refused the concept of division, rendering Sukuna's World-Cutting Slash a mathematical impossibility.
Gojo slowly opened his eyes.
The brilliant, crystalline sapphire of his irises cast a harsh, ethereal luminescence across the desolate wasteland of the Prison Realm. There was no arrogance in his gaze. There was no playful spark, no lazy confidence born from a lifetime of unchallenged supremacy.
His eyes were terrifyingly, utterly dead.
It was the deadness of a perfectly calm ocean surface before a category-five hurricane. It was the absolute, unshakeable tranquility of a predator that had already calculated the exact trajectory, velocity, and force required to sever its prey's spinal cord.
"The board is set," Gojo whispered into the silence.
His voice was smooth, resonant, and entirely devoid of the manic edge that had characterized his centuries of agonizing trial and error. It echoed off the distant, pulsating walls of fleshy cubes, but the walls seemed to shrink back from the sound, the stagnant cursed energy of the realm inherently terrified of the anomaly it contained.
He had spent an eternity theory-crafting, breaking down the manga panels of his meta-knowledge into complex jujutsu equations, and he had solved them all.
He envisioned Kenjaku. The ancient, parasitic brain piloting the stolen corpse of his only best friend. In the original timeline, Gojo had allowed Kenjaku to dictate the pace of the encounter upon his unsealing. He had allowed himself to be taunted. He had set a date for a duel and walked away, giving Kenjaku the critical weeks needed to prepare the Culling Games for the Tengen merger.
Not this time, Gojo thought, a microscopic, chilling smile touching the corner of his lips. You think you're a mastermind, playing a thousand-year game of chess. You don't realize I've already flipped the board and memorized where every single piece is going to land.
He envisioned Uraume. Sukuna's fiercely loyal, ice-wielding servant. Uraume was a wildcard, a massive threat to the students, capable of freezing a battlefield in seconds. In canon, Uraume had been a constant thorn in their side, requiring Hakari to stall them while the main battle raged.
I will hunt Uraume down before December 24th, Gojo decided. I will rip the Frost Calm from their veins and leave Sukuna completely, utterly isolated.
And then, he envisioned Sukuna.
The image of Megumi Fushiguro's face, marred by the black tribal tattoos of the King of Curses, flared in his mind. The secondary pair of red eyes. The arrogant, mocking sneer.
The earthly reader's soul, completely fused with Gojo's, thrummed with a dark, protective violence. The original Gojo had fought Sukuna to find an equal. He had enjoyed the clash of domains, the thrill of being pushed to the brink of death. He had treated the battle for the fate of the world like the ultimate sparring match.
This Gojo felt absolutely zero desire for a good fight.
"I don't want to fight you, Ryomen Sukuna," Gojo murmured, his glowing blue eyes staring through the dark, piercing the dimensional veil of his prison. "I want to dismantle you. I want to embarrass you. I want to beat you so severely that your soul begs to be returned to the Heian era. And then, I am going to hold your battered, broken consciousness down while Yuji Itadori rips you out of my son's body."
He raised his right hand, staring at his palm. He didn't form a hand sign, but the memory of the technique he had forged here—Cursed Technique Maximum: Limitless: Null—vibrated in his newly rewired brain. The executioner's sword. The conceptual deletion designed specifically to bypass Mahoraga's adaptation wheel by erasing the very phenomenon it relied upon.
He was ready.
He was more than ready. He was a god chained to a wall, waiting for the padlock to rust.
But as his mind finalized the battle plans, the Six Eyes suddenly flared.
Gojo's breath stopped. The hyper-optimized circuitry of his brain, processing millions of microscopic inputs per second, registered an anomaly that did not originate from himself.
For the first time in what felt like a millennium, the absolute, stagnant silence of the Prison Realm was broken.
It wasn't a sound. It was a vibration.
A tremor, so incredibly faint that a normal sorcerer wouldn't have felt it if they were pressing their bare hands against the fleshy walls. But to the Six Eyes, it was a seismic event. It was a ripple in the foundational fabric of the cursed dimension.
Gojo lowered his hand. He didn't stand up. He remained hovering above the bones, his posture perfectly relaxed, but every single cell in his body locked into a state of hyper-awareness.
Time, Gojo realized, a profound, electric shock of adrenaline spiking through his system. Time is touching the box.
He focused his perception upward, toward the distant, fleshy ceiling of the realm. The pulsating cubes of meat and bone were beginning to twitch erratically. The thick, python-like veins that pumped the blackish-red fluid were violently spasming.
Then, he felt the cursed energy signature.
It was utterly alien to the suffocating, dark miasma of the Prison Realm. It was bright. It was piercing. It felt like standing directly beneath a roaring waterfall of pure, unadulterated sunlight.
Angel, the meta-knowledge supplied instantly. Hana Kurusu. She's using Jacob's Ladder.
The nineteen days in the outside world had finally elapsed. His students had survived the Culling Games. They had found the Angel. They had brought the back of the Prison Realm to the surface, and they were breaking the seal.
Gojo's lips parted, a soft, almost breathless laugh escaping him.
"You did it, kids," he whispered, a surge of overwhelming, fierce pride warming the cold, calculated machinery of his mind. "You actually did it."
The vibration intensified. It became a low, physical rumble that shook the skeletal wasteland. The mountains of bleached bones began to rattle, skulls tumbling down the calcified slopes, femurs snapping under the shifting weight. The stagnant cursed energy of the realm began to boil, violently reacting to the invasive, purifying light of Angel's technique.
Jacob's Ladder was a technique of absolute nullification. It did not damage physical objects; it extinguished cursed techniques. And the Prison Realm, for all its terrifying, inescapable power, was ultimately just a cursed technique bound to a physical object.
Above Gojo, the sky of the Prison Realm began to tear.
It was a horrific, visceral sight. The fleshy, geometric cubes that formed the ceiling didn't just break apart; they rotted. The blinding, golden-white light of Jacob's Ladder pierced through the dimensional boundary like a thousand burning spears. Wherever the light touched the meat walls, the flesh instantly necrosed, turning black and dissolving into a foul, hissing ash.
The eyes embedded in the walls—the weeping, terrified eyes of the Prison Realm—shrieked. It was a psychic scream that tore through the dimension, a sound of pure agony as the ancient cursed object realized it was being conceptually erased.
Gojo watched the destruction of his cage with total, terrifying apathy.
He didn't shield his eyes from the blinding light. The Six Eyes eagerly devoured the incoming data, analyzing the specific frequency of Angel's technique, memorizing the exact mechanics of its cursed energy nullification.
Jacob's Ladder targets techniques, Gojo calculated, his brain operating at lightning speed. When the dimension completely collapses, I will be violently ejected into the physical space where the front of the Prison Realm is currently located.
His meta-knowledge provided the geographic coordinates instantly.
The Mariana Trench.
Kenjaku, ever the meticulous planner, hadn't just left the front of the Prison Realm sitting in the ruins of Shibuya. He had taken it and dropped it into the deepest, darkest abyss on the planet. Over eight thousand meters below the surface of the Pacific Ocean.
Kenjaku's logic was flawless. Even if the seal was broken from the back, Gojo Satoru would materialize at the location of the front. He would instantly be subjected to a water pressure of over eight tons per square inch. His lungs would collapse, his eardrums would shatter, and the absolute lack of oxygen, combined with the crushing force, would obliterate even a Special Grade sorcerer before they could even cast a domain.
"Kenjaku," Gojo murmured, shaking his head slowly as the golden light of Jacob's Ladder rained down around him, turning the skeletal wasteland to dust. "You fundamentally misunderstood what you locked in here."
The original Gojo would have survived the trench. He would have used his raw, monstrous output of cursed energy to reinforce his body, wrapping himself in a hyper-dense layer of standard Infinity, and he would have used Blue to violently propel himself to the surface, sustaining massive physical damage that he would have to heal with RCT on the way up. It would have been a desperate, panicked escape.
But this Gojo did not panic.
He didn't need to reinforce his body. He didn't need to brace for impact.
He had Absolute Zero.
"Let's test the armor," Gojo said softly.
The psychic screaming of the Prison Realm reached a deafening crescendo. The fleshy walls were completely vaporizing now, the infinite dark being swallowed by the overwhelming, purifying light. The skeletal ground beneath Gojo dissolved into nothingness.
For a fraction of a microsecond, Satoru Gojo existed in a state of dimensional limbo—caught between the collapsing pocket dimension of the cursed object and the crushing reality of the earthly plane.
And then, the box shattered.
The transition was instantaneous and violently jarring.
The blinding light of Jacob's Ladder vanished, replaced instantly by the absolute, primordial blackness of the deep ocean.
The roar of the collapsing dimension was replaced by the terrifying, immense silence of the abyss.
Eight thousand meters below the surface, the physical weight of millions of tons of seawater slammed inward, rushing to fill the sudden displacement of space caused by the materialization of a human body. It was a force capable of crushing a titanium submarine into a tin can in a millisecond.
It hit Satoru Gojo.
Or rather, it tried to.
Exactly one millimeter above the fabric of his dark blue uniform, the ocean stopped.
The water pressure, exerting over a thousand times the standard atmospheric pressure of the surface, collided with the passive, unbreakable barrier of Limitless: Absolute Zero. The laws of physics demanded that the water crush the human. But the sovereign rule of Gojo's internal domain dictated that the spatial coordinates he occupied were completely locked. The space refused to compress. It refused to yield.
The result was an absolute, flawless negation.
Gojo hung suspended in the pitch-black, freezing depths of the Mariana Trench. He didn't feel the crushing weight. He didn't feel the biting, sub-zero cold of the deep water. His uniform remained bone-dry. Not a single drop of the Pacific Ocean touched his skin.
He was perfectly, entirely unaffected.
He opened his glowing blue eyes. In the absolute absence of sunlight, the Six Eyes flared like twin, miniature stars, illuminating the murky, sediment-filled water around him. He saw the bizarre, translucent deep-sea creatures darting away in terror from the sudden, overwhelming burst of cursed energy that had just appeared in their silent world.
He didn't need to breathe. The Absolute Zero domain sealed the millimeter of air around his body, and his hyper-optimized RCT was currently perfectly cycling oxygen through his bloodstream, keeping his cellular functions operating at peak efficiency without requiring the intake of external air. He could stay at the bottom of the ocean for a week if he wanted to.
But he had a schedule to keep.
"Alright," Gojo thought, his voice carrying clearly within the sealed, dry bubble of his domain. "Let's go say hello."
He raised his right hand, pointing his index and middle fingers toward the invisible surface, eight kilometers above him.
He didn't need to violently explode his way out. He didn't need to panic.
Cursed Technique Lapse: Blue.
He generated a concentrated sphere of destructive gravity directly above him. He didn't let it detonate; he maintained it, creating an intense, directional vacuum that pulled the ocean water upward with catastrophic force.
He tied his own physical coordinates to the pull of the vacuum.
Instantly, Satoru Gojo shot upward like a railgun projectile.
The speed was incomprehensible. He shattered the underwater sound barrier in less than a second. The sheer friction of his ascent through the dense water generated a massive, superheated cavitation bubble around his Absolute Zero domain. The ocean water literally boiled into plasma as he tore through it, leaving a swirling, violently churning vortex of steam and displaced water in his wake.
To the sea life, it was an apocalyptic event. A glowing, blue comet ascending from the abyss, carving a physical tunnel through the ocean.
Seven thousand meters.
Five thousand meters.
Three thousand meters.
Gojo's face remained utterly impassive. His arms were relaxed at his sides, his white hair plastered back by the gravitational pull of his own technique. His hyper-processing brain effortlessly managed the immense, sustained output of Blue while perfectly maintaining the Absolute Zero armor. He wasn't even exerting ten percent of his maximum capacity.
One thousand meters.
The water began to lighten, transitioning from the pitch-black of the abyss to a deep, murky twilight.
Five hundred meters.
Sunlight.
It was the first time he had seen the sun in perceived centuries. The Six Eyes instantly adjusted to the influx of light, the data streaming into his mind, painting the upper layers of the ocean in agonizingly vivid detail.
Fifty meters.
Ten meters.
With a concussive, deafening roar that sounded like a low-yield nuclear detonation, Satoru Gojo broke the surface of the Pacific Ocean.
A massive, towering geyser of displaced water, steam, and pulverized sea foam erupted hundreds of feet into the air, creating a localized tsunami that violently rocked the surrounding waves.
Gojo shot out of the geyser, rocketing straight up into the clear, blue sky.
He killed the Blue technique at an altitude of five hundred feet, allowing his upward momentum to slow. He adjusted his cursed energy, engaging the neutral aspect of his innate technique to lock himself in place, hovering effortlessly in the mid-air.
He was out.
He was finally, truly out.
The first thing he did was take a breath.
He commanded the Absolute Zero domain to become selectively permeable for exactly one microsecond, drawing in a massive lungful of fresh, crisp, salty ocean air, before instantly resealing the barrier.
The sensation of the real world—the smell of the salt, the warmth of the sun on his face, the sound of the crashing waves far below—was a sensory overload that would have brought the earthly reader to his knees in weeping gratitude. But the merged entity of Gojo Satoru merely closed his eyes for a brief moment, savoring the data, calibrating his internal systems to the reality of the earth.
"November 19th," Gojo stated, his Six Eyes analyzing the exact angle of the sun, the temperature of the air, the atmospheric pressure. His brain automatically calculated the date and the time based on the environmental data. "Right on schedule."
He opened his eyes. He looked down at his own hands. They were the hands that had slaughtered the higher-ups in canon. They were the hands that had ripped Hanami to pieces. They were the hands that would soon carve a path of absolute devastation through Kenjaku's forces.
He flexed his fingers. The power coursing through him was intoxicating. It was a well of infinite, dark energy, perfectly controlled by a mind that had transcended the limitations of human neurology.
He turned his gaze toward the horizon, looking toward the mainland of Japan.
The Six Eyes extended their perception across the curvature of the earth. He bypassed the physical limitations of sight, tracing the flow of cursed energy across the country. He saw the chaotic, swirling hotspots of the Culling Game colonies. He saw the faint, desperate signatures of his students.
And then, he found it.
A massive, deeply entrenched epicenter of foul, ancient cursed energy. A localized singularity of arrogance and malice.
Kenjaku.
And standing right beside him, radiating an oppressive, suffocating aura that tasted of blood and overwhelming malevolence... Sukuna. Inside Megumi's body.
Gojo's brilliantly glowing blue eyes narrowed into sharp, dangerous slits. The air around him suddenly dropped in temperature, a physical manifestation of his killing intent.
In the canon manga, Gojo had teleported directly to Kenjaku immediately after breaking out of the trench. He had arrived with a smirk, throwing insults, ready to start a brawl. He had allowed Uraume to intervene. He had allowed Kenjaku to monologue.
We are doing this my way now, Gojo thought, his face a mask of absolute, terrifying calm.
He didn't smirk. He didn't stretch.
He raised his right hand, pointing a single, pristine index finger toward the distant coordinates of Kenjaku's location in the Kanto region.
Teleportation, via the Limitless, was the act of compressing the space between his current coordinate and his destination. But doing it precisely, across hundreds of miles, required exact spatial calculation. A calculation his newly evolved brain processed in less than a thousandth of a second.
"You thought you buried me, Suguru," Gojo whispered, the name carrying no affection, only the cold, hard promise of an executioner. "But you just planted a seed."
The space around Satoru Gojo violently warped.
With a sharp, cracking sound that shattered the sound barrier and sent a shockwave rippling across the surface of the Pacific Ocean, the Strongest Sorcerer in History vanished from the sky.
Phase one was over.
The shift had begun.
Kanto Region - The Surface of the Ruined City
Kenjaku stood amidst the rubble of a destroyed city block, the stitched scars across his forehead stark against the pale skin of Suguru Geto's stolen face. He was dressed in traditional monk's robes, his hands tucked casually into his sleeves.
He was smiling.
It was the smile of a mastermind who had accounted for every variable, every statistical anomaly, and every possible outcome. The Culling Games were functioning perfectly. The required cursed energy to initiate the merger with Master Tengen was nearly secured. The major threats from Jujutsu High were bogged down in localized conflicts, completely unaware of the true scale of the endgame.
Beside him stood the King of Curses.
Ryomen Sukuna occupied the body of Megumi Fushiguro. The boy's black spiky hair was slicked back, the dark tribal tattoos marring his youthful face. Sukuna was clad in a loose-fitting dark robe, his posture radiating a casual, overwhelming boredom. He was a god slumming it among mortals, waiting for something, anything, to entertain him.
And slightly behind Sukuna stood Uraume, the loyal servant, their expression a mask of cold, devout subservience.
"The seal has been broken," Kenjaku stated, his voice smooth, carrying the relaxed cadence of a man discussing the weather. He looked up at the sky, his eyes crinkling in amusement. "I felt the dimensional collapse of the Prison Realm a few moments ago. The Angel finally found the back gate."
Sukuna scoffed, a dark, rumbling sound in Megumi's stolen throat. He lazily stretched his neck, the joints popping.
"Took them long enough," the King of Curses muttered. "So, the brat is free. Where is he?"
Kenjaku chuckled, turning his gaze toward the east, toward the Pacific.
"At the bottom of the Mariana Trench," Kenjaku replied, his smile widening into a grin of profound self-satisfaction. "Even if he survives the initial unsealing, the water pressure and the lack of oxygen at that depth are insurmountable. He will have to expend massive amounts of cursed energy just to reinforce his body and propel himself to the surface. By the time he arrives here, if he arrives at all, he will be exhausted, panicked, and heavily reliant on his Reverse Cursed Technique to heal his ruptured organs."
Kenjaku turned to look at Sukuna, his dark eyes gleaming with anticipation.
"He will come straight here, of course. His ego won't allow him to do anything else. But he won't be the untouchable god he was in Shibuya. He will be a drowning rat."
Uraume stepped forward, their hands resting lightly on their hips. "Shall I freeze him the moment he appears, Lord Sukuna? A weakened Gojo Satoru is hardly worth your time."
Sukuna waved a dismissive hand. "No. Let him catch his breath. I want to see the look on his face when he realizes I took his precious student. I want to break his spirit before I break his body."
Kenjaku smiled. It was the perfect trap. They held all the cards. They had the hostages, the high ground, and the psychological advantage. Gojo Satoru would arrive, blinded by rage, exhausted by the trench, and he would walk right into a slaughter.
"Any second now," Kenjaku murmured, his eyes scanning the empty air above the rubble.
The air didn't ripple. There was no sudden, explosive burst of cursed energy to announce an arrival. There was no dramatic warping of space, no sonic boom of a desperate, panicked teleportation.
There was just... a shadow.
The light of the sun hitting the rubble suddenly shifted, cut off by an object that had not been there a microsecond before.
Kenjaku blinked.
He didn't feel a cursed energy signature. That was the first thing that struck his ancient, hyper-perceptive mind as fundamentally, terrifyingly wrong. Satoru Gojo was a walking nuclear reactor. His presence was supposed to be loud, arrogant, and oppressive.
But the entity standing exactly ten paces in front of Kenjaku was a total void.
It was Satoru Gojo.
He was standing perfectly straight, his tall, imposing frame draped in an immaculate, bone-dry dark blue uniform. His stark white hair was perfectly styled, untouched by water or wind. His hands were resting casually in his pockets.
But it wasn't the pristine condition of his clothing that made Kenjaku's breath catch in his throat. It wasn't the fact that Gojo showed absolutely zero signs of physical exertion, exhaustion, or panic.
It was his face.
The blindfold was gone. The dark sunglasses were gone. Satoru Gojo's eyes were fully exposed, the brilliant, unnatural sapphire of the Six Eyes glowing with a steady, haunting luminescence.
And he wasn't smiling.
In all of Kenjaku's thousand years of existence, in all of his meticulously gathered data regarding the Six Eyes and the Limitless, Satoru Gojo had never looked like this. There was no cocky smirk. There was no playful tilt of the head. There was no bubbling, explosive rage at the sight of Geto's stolen body or Megumi's hijacked face.
Gojo's face was a mask of absolute, terrifying apathy. He looked like an executioner staring at a spreadsheet.
For a profound, agonizing second, absolute silence reigned over the ruined city block. The wind seemed to die. The ambient noise of the distant Culling Games vanished. The world itself held its breath.
Kenjaku's smile slowly, involuntarily, slid off his face. A cold spike of primal, unexplainable dread pierced the base of his stolen spine. The thousand-year-old parasite, the architect of the modern jujutsu world, suddenly felt an emotion he hadn't experienced since he first encountered the Six Eyes centuries ago.
He felt like prey.
Sukuna's secondary eyes narrowed, the King of Curses instantly registering the subtle, terrifying wrongness of the situation. The cursed energy output he was expecting from Gojo wasn't there. It wasn't that Gojo was suppressing it; it was as if Gojo existed in a completely separate dimension, visually present but mathematically absent from the world.
"Satoru..." Kenjaku began, forcing the familiar, mocking tone into Geto's vocal cords, desperate to regain control of the narrative. "My, my. You certainly took your time. How was the water?"
Gojo didn't react to the taunt. He didn't look at Kenjaku's face. He didn't look at the stitch marks. The earthly reader's grief over Suguru Geto had been entirely processed and compartmentalized in the darkness of the box.
Instead, Gojo's glowing blue eyes shifted with slow, deliberate precision.
He looked directly at Ryomen Sukuna.
He looked at Megumi's face. He saw the black tattoos. He saw the arrogance in the ancient sorcerer's posture.
The original Gojo would have offered a witty remark. He would have bantered.
This Gojo simply stared.
When he finally spoke, his voice was not the booming, arrogant projection of the Strongest Sorcerer. It was quiet. It was smooth. It was the absolute zero temperature of the vacuum of space, carrying a terrifying, undeniable weight that made the very air around them feel heavy.
"You have nineteen days to vacate my son's body, Ryomen," Gojo said, his words perfectly enunciated, stripping the King of Curses of his title, addressing him like a pest.
Sukuna's eyes widened a fraction, a flash of genuine, homicidal irritation breaking through his bored facade. "Excuse me?"
"December 24th," Gojo continued, his tone never rising, his hands remaining in his pockets. He wasn't negotiating. He was delivering a schedule of events. "Shinjuku. You will meet me there. And I will surgically dismantle you."
Uraume, enraged by the blatant disrespect toward their master, stepped forward, their hands glowing with the bitter, freezing cursed energy of their Ice Formation technique.
"Know your place, you arrogant—" Uraume snarled, raising their hands to cast Frost Calm.
Gojo didn't even turn his head. He didn't take his hands out of his pockets. He didn't blink.
He simply shifted his gaze, locking his glowing blue eyes onto Uraume.
The earthly reader knew Uraume's exact capabilities. He knew Uraume's loyalty. He knew Uraume's threat level.
Gojo didn't use a technique. He didn't fire Blue or Red. He simply allowed a microscopic, fractional percentage of the hyper-condensed cursed energy swirling within his expanded brain to leak past the Absolute Zero barrier, directing the raw, unfiltered killing intent directly at Uraume's soul.
It wasn't an attack. It was a localized gravitational collapse of pure, paralyzing terror.
Uraume gasped, their eyes snapping wide in absolute, instinctual horror. The cursed energy gathering in their hands violently dissipated. Their knees buckled, and they collapsed onto the rubble, their hands flying to their throat as they struggled to draw breath. It felt as though a mountain had just been dropped directly onto their chest. They looked up at Gojo, their body trembling uncontrollably, the primitive part of their brain screaming that looking at this man was a lethal mistake.
Sukuna's expression darkened into a scowl of pure, murderous rage. He stepped forward, the immense, suffocating pressure of his own cursed energy flaring, attempting to match Gojo's presence.
"You seem to have forgotten who you are speaking to, boy," Sukuna rumbled, the air around him distorting with the sheer power of his aura. "I am going to peel the flesh from your bones."
Gojo finally looked back at Sukuna.
A slow, chilling smile spread across Gojo's face. It was a smile entirely devoid of joy. It was the smile of a god who had just confirmed that the insect in front of him had absolutely no idea it was already dead.
"You're going to try," Gojo replied softly.
He didn't wait for a response. He didn't wait for Kenjaku to monologue. He had delivered his terms. He had established the board.
Without another word, Satoru Gojo turned his back on the King of Curses and the architect of the Culling Games. He didn't assume a defensive stance. He completely exposed his back to two of the most dangerous entities in history, displaying an arrogance so absolute, so fundamentally unshakeable, that it bordered on the psychotic.
He took a single step forward, the space around him warping effortlessly.
And he vanished.
Leaving Kenjaku and Sukuna standing in the rubble, staring at the empty space where satoru Gojo had just been.
Kenjaku slowly lowered his hands from his sleeves. His fingers were trembling. He stared at the spot where Gojo had stood, his thousand-year-old mind racing, desperately trying to calculate the variables that had just been violently introduced to his perfect plan.
He wasn't tired, Kenjaku realized, the cold dread finally settling entirely into his stolen stomach. He wasn't panicked. He didn't act like Satoru Gojo. He acted like... a machine.
Sukuna stared at the empty space, his jaw clenched, a vein pulsing on Megumi's forehead. The King of Curses had been disrespected before, but never with such absolute, terrifying dismissal.
The slow burn had ignited. Satoru Gojo was free. And the world was about to find out that the man who went into the box was not the man who came out.