Satoru Gojo called the Being a god made in the image of humans.
Humans are awful, and therefore, the being is awful. At the core of the rift that exists between the North-South monster, Ryomen Sukuna, and the East-West monster, Yuji Itadori, is the fundamental belief that humans are good in some sort of way.
They are the sole members of the advance team that will set the barriers. If the whole attack team approaches, Alghera will probably respond in some sort of way, but they've been doing little experiments, and she doesn't seem to care if they get close to her as long as she's not bothered.
Sayuri has confirmed from afar to Sukuna via earpiece that Limitless currently isn't in her body, which is exactly what they need. The earpieces probably aren't going to last long while the real fighting starts, but at that point, they won't need them. It's the tricky stuff that happens before that requires some coordination.
Each of them has a bag filled with cursed nails that have been painstakingly made over the past two years. After all, in the same way that Kenjaku had to prepare for literal months to create a barrier that could contain Satoru Gojo and keep everyone else out, restraining a creature of this type would have been impossible for sorcerers in most ages.
While they're walking, Yuji experiences something that doesn't make sense and is actually quite creepy:
Sukuna is talking to him; the nails have to be placed very precisely, in the correct order, without mixing up any of them. While he is talking, for about two seconds, everything he says sounds like gibberish and his body moves in this very weird, creepy way, like someone rewinding a VHS tape.
"What?"
Sukuna answers, "Number 8 goes on the spray-painted mark outside the old cat café."
Yuji wonders for a second if Sukuna used his Temporal Distortion ability on him, but he's not allowed to per his binding vow with Megumi, and Sukuna doesn't play when it comes to binding vows.
"Did you just do something to me?" he asks.
"Like what?"
"I dunno. You were doing everything in reverse for a second?"
Sukuna answers, "When you work a job where you get hit in the head a lot, no matter how good you are at reverse curse technique, eventually little things will start happening in your brain. Megumi's brain has all kinds of weird little glitches because I took Gojo's domain straight to his brain and then got his head split open by Alghera."
Having his rowdy uncle, the criminal, casually shrug off his concerns as just a normal amount of brain damage is…weirdly a very them moment.
The monster comes into view, sitting on some rather rustic throne made from concrete. She'd often been spotted in this location, a bit zoned out. Seeing her in a passive state was incredibly misleading because she was the reason nearly all the humans living in Japan had died.
It's really insulting in some ways to Sukuna, how she is so incredibly unserious about having Ryomen Sukuna in her vicinity without even being on her guard, without asking what he is doing.
Sukuna feels insulted.
Since Alghera basically just looks like Gojo with long purple hair and black eyes, her appearance is somewhat delicate despite the fact she absolutely tore through them every time they tried before.
When she finally locks in on him, he dashes to the last location, places the nail, and chants, throwing up the inner layer of the barrier and trapping her inside.
From outside, they can feel her nails scratching on the outside.
"Sounds like the wretched bitch has finally decided to wake up," Sukuna comments.
A barrier that the most powerful sorcerers very carefully developed and executed can certainly contain even Alghera, but it is strengthened by multiple conditions:
The rules of the barrier are inscribed on the top of the barrier's top, so the curse knows what the barrier can do.
And secondly, the barrier is strengthened by targeting a 'rule-breaker' class of creature, one with a partial soul.
Inside of the barrier, Alghera attempts to summon Limitless into her body so that she can fight the sorcerers, and…nothing happens. She looks up at the words printed above her.
No cursed spirit with a partial soul can leave this barrier.
No cursed spirit with a whole soul can enter.
Only Humans with the victory kanji written on their body may enter or leave.
No cursed energy, techniques, or fragments of soul may pass through without being inside of a vessel.
Outside the barrier, Sukuna and Yuji set up the middle and outer barriers.
Alghera is one half of and the primary consciousness of the most powerful cursed spirit that has ever existed, and she is not a fool. As she looks up, she remembers the four curses who came to her.
How long ago had it been?
They worshipped her, praised this era of curses, but warned her that this group of humans was unspeakably dangerous. When she told them that all together, doing the most they can do, they could not make her spill a single drop of blood, they cautioned her. Begged her to take action she did not want to take until she sorted out her tensions with her least cooperative captive, Satoru Gojo.
Most of her 'subjects' lost their sense of identity as soon as she consumed them, and remain within her, a slurry of human souls that allows her to fish out one paired soul and technique and move it here or there. Satoru Gojo is like an ice cube that refused to melt like the others when dropped in the boiling cauldron inside of her.
Now, when he was finally running out of strength to fight her, this.
At the end of Satoru Gojo, this.
Once the barriers were set, Alghera is left to stew inside the barrier while the rest of the strike team closes in on the battlefield.
The next part of the battle is critically important, and they are careful.
Half of the Being is inside of the inner barrier; the other half is split between the other nine 'Great Curses' that are scattered throughout the world, where they've done to everyone else what Alghera did to Japan. They need her to summon all her other parts to Shinjuku, combine them, and enter the outer barrier.
If she enters the outer barrier as 'pieces,' she will realize that it's a trap and not all the pieces will become trapped.
Cursed spirits are fundamentally inane to some degree in the sense that there is always something fundamentally wrong with their minds, no matter how intelligent that mind is. Gojo confirmed this is true even for Alghera, so trying to predict and manipulate her behavior the same as a human probably has some limitations.
But they have one advantage:
Alghera has never, not for one day since she was born seventeen years ago, been forced to consider that humans might harm her. She's never been harmed by them once since she's used her anti-infinity barrier to defend against them. She's trapped without it there at the center, and once she realizes that they can hurt her and will kill her, she'll either half to let go of half of herself or trying to get her copy of Limitless into the inner barrier.
The remaining nine vessels which are combined equal to Alghera in power have one copy of Limitless between them. She only has to believe they'll kill the unprotected pieces in order to cause her to combine them into one and run into the trap, effectively capturing all of her at one time.
If they fail in this, and she doesn't bring her copy of Limitless to the battle, or decides to let half of herself be killed, it would be progress, but hunting down the fragments might actually be impossible considering how big the world really is.
Sukuna believed a fragment with only five percent of the Being's total power and no Limitless was probably equal to Rika in power and destructive ability, and Japan was the only country that really had the firepower to kill a Rika.
No—they had to finish the Being off today, in its entirety, so they could live in the world without it.
They have to manipulate her into believing that she can win without losing any part of herself if she combines her other vessels into one single vessel with Limitless, and then walks into the outer barrier.
And so, Yuji and Sukuna step back into the inner barrier.
If she knows the strike force is huge, maybe she'll react differently; if she knows they have Limitless, she almost definitely will. The trick here is that she must believe that she is in danger, but that she will not be in danger if she escapes from this barrier by making herself whole again and then uses the anti-infinity barrier to do to them what she did before.
"You dare to restrain me, insects?"
Sukuna asks, "We dare. What are you going to do about it? You can't leave this barrier until you make yourself whole."
Alghera presses her lips together briefly. "You know that I am one, and not ten?"
"I know everything. I know what you are, how you were made, that you are one being that exists in ten bodies, how to find all of your pieces no matter how far away they are, and that if I cut you right now, you will bleed," Sukuna answers.
One of these things is a lie; Sukuna has no means to locate her other vessels, but sandwiched between two other truths he should not have, she likely isn't intelligent enough to read his deception.
Alghera is only seventeen, after all. Has she ever known a liar?
Alghera takes the bait, unknowingly, believing that if Sukuna knew this and that, he must know the third thing too. To her, he is arrogantly brandishing his forbidden knowledge.
An ice laced dismantle attack slices forward, and for a moment, she refuses to step out of the way for these mere humans, only to have the bottom half of her face sliced clean off before the blood oozing from this gaping wound froze in a waterfall-like shape off her chin.
Sukuna read a report when he gained access to the Jujutsu Society's information, about Satoru Gojo and Toji Fushiguro. When he was questioned about it, Gojo told Yaga that while he wasn't afraid of pain or being hit, having someone else injure him when he was so accustomed to his infinity protecting him was incredibly disorienting.
His judgement failed him, and he was unable to think clearly. Even with his incredible abilities, he could not mount a defense of limitless cursed energy against a man with none.
The fact that Sukuna hurt her seems to disorient her because she has never been harmed by humans. Not once. Not even a papercut. She is trapped, in this bubble, with someone who can hurt her.
Yuji sees the snow falling upward for a couple of seconds, like his brain is glitching again.
Certainly, Sukuna isn't messing with him right then.
Maybe he was just tired?
Alghera is making calculations in her mind; these sorcerers have a plan, and she can't use the anti-infinity barrier against them. She can't flee from them to come up with her own plan without summoning her parts, and if she does that, she'll have Limitless and it will no longer matter what their plan is. She can simply crush them.
To her mind, it seems they don't know that she can move her parts very fast and that it's nothing for her to rejoin all her vessels into herself.
But what if they have allies outside? The safest thing to do is to bring her parts in together, under the protection of the anti-infinity barrier.
Alghera heals her destroyed face and asks, "Do you really want a fight, little insects, that you would dare to cut me?"
"That's why we're here!" Yuji answers.
Alghera takes the bait.
The two of them scrap with her, staying out of the way; they only need her to know she needs to leave the barrier. They aren't really fighting, simply kiting her because she's mad. If she realizes her life is absolutely in danger, she might try to survive by not bringing the rest of her there.
Yuji in some ways slightly enjoys talking shit to a bad guy with Sukuna, an experience that is somehow weirdly like sitting at the table with the cool bad kids at school for some reason. At the same time, their plan requires masterful execution, which is why it is only the two of them participating in this stage.
They are leading her, one step at a time, into doing exactly what they want. If she suspects for even a second that there's more to think about than what they have given her to think about, she might realize that it is a very bad idea to do what she's doing.
But she's a cursed spirit, a monster with no real motives except to act on her inescapably violent nature. She doesn't have goals. She's not trying to do anything. Jogo once told Sukuna that they envied the place humans had in the world, but Jogo didn't actually do anything to help himself achieve that goal. If he'd just shown up in Tokyo on his own.
The Disaster Curses reincarnating intact and then going straight back to where they were slain to provoke the people who slew them was a prime example of cursed spirits just actually having shit for brains. Even if they were intelligent in the tactical or academic sense, they were riddled by a lack of logic and thoughtfulness because that's what humans are like.
They supposedly did it to protect the world ruled by curses, but it didn't really work out?
None of that really matters.
What matters is that Alghera is following along exactly like they need her to. She is arrogant, and she is inexperienced, and she thinks they keep their distance because they are scared of her and not because they're not trying to do too much to her.
Gojo told Sukuna that because Alghera had a copy of Limitless, whichever piece of her had it could move around the world almost instantaneously, so if she needed to recompile herself, that vessel would probably warp around and absorb the other vessels. He did not believe that this process would take more than ten to fifteen minutes, but that while it was incredibly difficult to warp across vast distances, it didn't necessarily take more cursed energy than crossing smaller distances. Similar to wormhole, it simply involved connected spaces that weren't next to each other, not travelling across the distance between the two. Since the Being existed in the two places that needed to be connected at the same time, it was probably much easier to do this than for a standalone person trying to do it.
Limitless was such a strange wonderland to Sukuna, and he was quietly itching to rip Satoru Gojo's soul and his technique out of the Being so he could see if it was truly limitless. Finally getting to end Gojo for good, getting to use that technique…he's temporarily so excited he almost loses his focus.
"Inbound," Sayuri's voice calls over the earpiece as a creature that looks like a second copy of Alghera appears right outside the barrier after not being permitted to warp directly to Alghera by the barrier.
The two halves run toward each other, and suddenly, writing appears on the ceiling of the third barrier, and Alghera perhaps realizes that there are other barriers, but it doesn't register in her mind the reason that would be.
She only knows that she will make herself whole, and then use the anti-infinity barrier to protect herself while she trounces these cheeky sorcerers.
The half of her that holds Limitless suddenly runs face-first into the wall, as the half that doesn't reaches out to touch the wall of her own barrier.
It's then that she realizes that there is something between them.
There is a ten meter wide band between where her two halves are contained, and even though she could escape from these barriers if she was whole according to the rules of the barrier, it's impossible for her to do that.
More importantly, the other half of her now can no longer escape.
She was, minutes ago, free all over the entire world, and now, she has been fully contained in a three hundred meter space.
Was it a trick?
WAS SHE, THE QUEEN OF THIS WORLD, TRICKED?
When she turns, both of the sorcerers are gone, and she is left to claw on the walls of her barrier, separated by that narrow gap. These barriers are not veiled; it's how she didn't see the one on the outside until she was inside and how she can see clearly from each side the other part of herself that she cannot join together.
If there was ever going to be a problem, Japan would certainly be it, so her strength has always been here. She's never considered the possibility that she would have to face the Japanese sorcerers without Limitless, and while she doesn't believe they have the raw power to kill this half of her…what if they do?
What if these insects kill half of her?
She doesn't understand why they would want the rest of her there, with Limitless. Surely, she'll be able to kill them with the other half of her with the protection of the anti-infinity barrier after the barrier falls. After all, it can't last forever. Right?
The sorcerers watch as she visibly makes these calculations from various places of cover as they move into position. Her faces move identically, proof Sukuna was probably right that while she lived in ten different bodies at once before, at any given time, she likely didn't have to give full attention to more than one.
An urban setting really was just such a good place for a lot of people to attack one other person, and the two teams gather in a dilapidated building that stretches through the buffer zone.
Everything for Shoko's pop-up triage center was rushed in before the outer barrier became occupied, and some aides are helping her set up.
The longevity of the barriers is a real issue, as the strength of a barrier of their type can be degraded by assault. It would be foolish to think one could just permanently imprison a creature like that. Keeping Mahito under the barrier at the Bone Pit was an experiment of sorts, but Mahito lost his sense of self at some point and stopped trying to escape. He also didn't have as much destructive ability when confined alone, with no transmuted souls.
These barriers were going to catch heat from sorcerers and possibly get clipped in domain expansions.
This wasn't really based on anything particularly accurate, but Sukuna assumed the barriers could fail at any point after two hours and it was unlikely that they'd still be up after four, but he doubted it would matter. Whatever was going to happen was going to happen in the first hour.
Each team had four anchors:
Team A – Balghera (Team Limitless): Sukuna, Maki, Sayuri, Inumaki
Team B – Alghera: Yuji, Megumi, Noritoshi Kamo, Ryosuke
They had taken to calling the creature that would be in the outer ring Alghera-B, but eventually, that just got shortened to Balghera.
The two teams also included four members who were first grade, but didn't have an attack strong enough to lead against either half of the curse. Their role was to support, and between the two barriers, Ui Ui and Mei Mei were posted, charged with scouting for and recovering injured members and delivering them to Shoko.
There were also alternates, who could be sent in if someone died, but realistically, if a team lost one of its anchors, there wasn't any number of alternates who could take their place. The fact that two of these anchors are sixteen-year-olds is unfortunate at best, but that's how it is for those born with top-grade techniques.
The teams have two very different approaches; Team B is built around two sets of complimentary techniques, Blood Manipulation and Ten Shadows, where the members can work off each other well or even use someone else's technique to their advantage. Their goal is to just do wholesale damage to Alghera until she dies.
Team A has the trickier task of dealing with the anti-infinity barrier, which essentially 'eats' anything that enters it. If one punches the anti-infinity barrier, their hand ceases to exist, so it is critical to time attacks perfectly to when Sayuri neutralizes the barrier. Otherwise, Maki could lose her famed sword, and anyone attacking up close could lose body parts.
Anti-infinity wasn't just a defensive hazard; in their first bouts with her, she used it almost exclusively for both offense and defense, swatting enormous holes into her opponents. This is the reason that so many sorcerers died in such rapid succession when she was first born.
Because of this, there was a lot they didn't know about how Alghera was going to fight since both her primary offense and defense had been taken. And on the Balghera side, it would be intermittently available.
Sayuri said that the anti-infinity barrier is in some ways to infinity what reverse curse technique is to cursed technique, and that casting it is probably difficult and energy-consuming. It's also damaging to the brain of the user to do it over and over and to maintain it consistently.
So their strategy was to break the barrier and time that with powerful attacks, but also to break it enough times that Balghera temporarily burned the technique out.
Gojo was the one who said this would happen when he visited Sukuna, and Sayuri independently came to this conclusion as well, implying that if a person could mess with infinity enough times and force it to be recast too many times in a row, Limitless would temporarily burn out in a person who didn't have Six Eyes.
In other words, since both Alghera and Sayuri would have to recast their respective barrier techniques, they were making a wager that Six Eyes would give them the edge since Alghera didn't inherit Gojo's eyes. The fact she tore up his corpse was really one of her biggest mistakes; if she'd taken his eyes, they'd be in a much more dangerous situation.
Once the triage station is set up, and everyone has been given their instructions, and Yuji hypes them up with a pep talk that Sukuna rolls his eyes at, it is time.
Finally.
After seventeen years, it is finally time to see if they'll emerge victorious from the Age of Alghera or if they will simply die in it and leave the world to fester in this cursed era.
Sukuna reaches out to slap Sayuri's ponytail as they make their way to the outer barrier but finds that his hand is stopped.
It's oddly poetic in a way, that he could reach out for her forever and never touch her if she stayed like this.
"Brat."
She looks up and behind, turning slightly. "Hmm?"
"Be careful. Keep your eyes open."
"Don't worry about me. I learned from the best, right?"
The Alghera side begins first, and the Being is met by a sudden assault of crushing power. Yuji's shrine dismantle, Megumi summoning Mahoraga and Rika, Ryosuke using his frog form to suddenly hold her in place with his tongue so the hits land, and then slamming her into the ground, an onslaught of blood arrows charged with high-intensity cursed energy.
Immediately, Sukuna's side moves to strike.
Balghera is certain that this side of her is safe, but suddenly there is someone behind her, and a fist charged with enough cursed energy to make any normal curse explode hits the anti-infinity barrier and it simply disappears, allowing the hit to make explosive contact at the exact same time as Sukuna touches her belly and uses a cleave attack, doing wholesale damage to her torso.
On the Alghera side, the first time Yuji hits Alghera with a soul-shaking punch, he can tell from the feedback that this creature has a bunch of human souls inside of it.
Is that the secret, to how it uses other techniques?
If it has Gojo's technique…does that mean…?
Yuji realizes he can't get distracted by that. If that's true, it doesn't change anything.
They have to do what they have to do.
But certainly, if Sayuri has ever seen Alghera before this battle, she knew what was inside of it and probably told Sukuna. That's why he placed him and Maki on opposite teams, so soul-affecting powers would affect the Being simultaneously.
Sukuna is a bastard and a half, but he's slick.
On one side, they hammer Alghera relentlessly, but all the damage they do, while it is effective, doesn't seem to move the needle very much. Even without her cheat armor, she's still monstrously tough, capable of instantaneous regeneration, and when she starts to attack, she uses purple spikes—perhaps her true innate ability?
They're seeing purple spikes on the other side as well, and the first fatality is on Sukuna's side, one of the secondary team members. He's not that surprised, and not that willing to go out of his way to keep them alive. At some point in the future, they'll realize they're mostly there to increase the number of targets on the field unless they die.
Their side has to be so careful, so precise, because Sayuri is the only one that can tell when the anti-infinity barrier has been reactivated. Maki impales Balghera with her sword fully, and causes turbulence inside of her that is only exacerbated by the fact the Being is trying to fight two high-intensity, life-or-death battles simultaneously.
Balghera had already wised up, and they didn't know it, because while Sayuri was laser-focused on anti-infinity around Balghera, there was no rule that the field had to be around her.
She'd created a tiny bubble the size of a tennis ball, floating in the air near her. A tiny dot in a sea of cursed energy, and when she kicked Maki back, it was onto this.
It went straight through her skull and left a hole big enough that light came through it.
Instant kill, there was nothing anyone could do about someone losing a massive chunk of their brain.
Ui Ui appears in an instant and holds up three fingers to indicate there have been three fatalities only ten minutes into the battle. Sukuna knows two are on their side, but he tries not to look over at the other side. He mostly wants Maki's body out of sight, so Ryosuke doesn't see it from his side.
People were always going to die.
That was just the kind of party this was.
Sukuna retrieves the sword and gives it to one of their backups to use for the battle, wondering how he can avoid this same fate.
Sayuri's senses were clearly overwhelmed, and looking over to her, he can tell she's freaking out because she didn't see it. Maki was a person she'd known since she was a child, and in a weird way, she is family too.
"Focus!"
The girl had been distracted because she knew exactly whose light had gone out on the other side: Ryosuke.
No matter how many times it was explained to her that it might go this way, she wasn't prepared to actually face it.
Like fate heard their side needed a miracle because the one they had was malfunctioning, it suddenly started to snow heavier, not enough that visibility was impaired, but enough that he could see a point ahead of him where the snow was disappearing.
On the other side, it's bloody, and Yuji and Megumi press on, dreading the fact that they'll have to tell Maki that her precious son didn't make it. Was it someone's mistake? No, he was just young. Young people make mistakes. They made mistakes when they were young too.
But this wasn't a place where a person could make a mistake and survive.
From afar, an older man watches with binoculars, concerned.
Kusakabe was selected to stay behind in the event that they failed, both because he was old and suffering from a constellation of chronic injuries and because the thing he was best at was raising sorcerers who immediately surpassed him in every way.
If they lose, the first thing Alghera is probably going to do is wipe the Jujutsu Society off the face of the earth, so he's already hidden all the sorcerers. Evacuating Shibuya would have been obvious behavior that might tip off the curse to a large-scale attack. Besides, they really didn't have many places where the residents of Shibuya could just go.
Alghera would find that many people wherever they went.
Hiding a few dozen young sorcerers was easier.
At the same time in the gap barrier, Shoko stands ready with her sutures and staples, bags of blood, and medicine, but by that moment, she's been sent five and all five went straight under a sheet, because Alghera knows how to make sure anyone she puts down, stays down. Forever.
There are three bodies with destroyed heads, one that is simply missing above the chest, and one that has no head at all.
No injuries, only corpses, a sign that even the slightest misstep on this battlefield would be fatal.
Everything in this world is horrible, but this is supposed to be the last horrible thing before the world will improve.
This was always the deal: the strongest would fight, some of them would die, and the rest would get to live in the new world.
When Inumaki makes her way to her station twenty minutes later, and she covers his body, she's sure he died from backlash for using his technique. A sacrifice…she hopes he wasn't forced to do this for Sukuna.
Shoko muses over how convenient it would be for Sukuna to complete his task by self-sacrifice, but she knows they won't get lucky.
Meanwhile, Sukuna knows as the battle wears on that they are in very serious trouble. Half of the anchors on his team and all four of their supports are gone and Sayuri is having difficulty not freaking out. It's really just him and Sayuri, and the alternates, who he assumes are going to drop like flies.
There is a loud whistle, and Sukuna takes one hanging around his neck and returns blows it.
This is the signal for Sukuna and Yuji to simultaneously throw their domain expansions. Since Sayuri has to neutralize Balghera's anti-infinity field first, they used the whistles to determine the timing since they accurately predicted all the earpieces would be broken as soon as the battle started. And they were.
Sayuri moves in and neutralizes the field and then uses Wormhole to cover her while she runs just far enough to get clear.
Sukuna blows the whistle again and they both open their domains.
Sukuna can call his domain multiple times, but Yuji can only do it twice at maximum before he's burnt out. Satoru Gojo was really the only other person he's met that could go back-to-back.
Anyone who can't maintain their technique after a domain expansion can't really use them in a fight where that isn't expected to end the battle, otherwise they'd end up with no technique in a battle that was yet ongoing. It was classified in their training as a move one does if they're sure they're probably going to die anyway, or if they're willing to do so for some strategic advantage. Realistically, survival was the greatest advantage, and Sukuna could tell they were losing it.
There was a bunch of shrill screaming on the other side that Sukuna knew probably came from Rika becoming unbound to Megumi, which could only mean one thing: Megumi had been killed too.
The beginning of the battle was cacophonous with the Being and the sorcerers going at it as hard as they could, but it's gradually becoming quieter, and Sukuna knows that means they are losing despite every advantage they tried to secure for themselves.
Twin domain expansions are certainly not silent, however, especially not ones that howl with the inescapable torment of malevolent or vengeful flames, depending on which side road one happens to be on.
It's after this twin domain expansion that the Being collectively begins to show serious signs of decline.
Yuji can't use his again without burning out his technique, so he is left, alone now, bludgeoning and cutting up the weakening curse. He can tell that she is beginning to spiral, and assumes if Alghera is, Balghera is probably on the ropes too.
When Sukuna's domain completes, his target has been completely obliterated. For a second, he panics because he wanted to take Limitless from the weakened body, not completely destroy it.
But he sees that right as he was casting his domain, the Being split this half of itself in two, a gamble that while Sukuna was busy roasting a fourth of her total power that served as bait, she passed Limitless into this new vessel since doing so didn't require crossing a barrier.
While he cooked the bait, keeping his domain open for as long as possible. Since it's almost impossible to see beyond Malevolent Shrine once it is in progress, he did not see what was happening.
This prevented him from using Temporal Distortion to protect Sayuri, which was the only reason Sayuri hadn't been killed up to that point. He prioritized her survival over everyone else's and always used whatever was at his disposal to protect her from the lightning-fast attacks from the Being.
But during his domain expansion, he hadn't been aware of her.
Sayuri is eerily standing perfectly still.
With no head.
The Being is holding her head by the ponytail, a huge spike through each eyeball coming through the back of the skull.
This second copy is also bleeding profusely, from everywhere. Sukuna doesn't know what Sayuri did to it—he thinks he would have sensed her opening her domain even from within Malevolent Shrine and he told her not to do that no matter what. But one of the most important things about this battle that had always been true is that when infinity and anti-infinity cancelled each other out, neither Sayuri nor Balghera would have their protective field.
The more likely explanation is that Sayuri used a maximum output reverse curse attack.
Whatever had happened, he'd destroyed part of the Being, and the rest of his half was near death.
The fact Sayuri has been killed simply doesn't really register with him at first because his mind blocks it out, allowing her to regard this event like every other death that has occurred.
There's clear liquid dripping out of the Being's nose and eyes, and Sukuna says, "It doesn't matter that you killed her if you've burned out Limitless."
Sukuna cuts the Being up into more and more pieces, and it's unable to formulate a barrier or heal or meaningfully attack.
When he rips the core out of it, he attempts to use Tore Reksten's technique-stealing ability on it. It definitely only works on human techniques, and human techniques required human souls to inscribe them on the body.
He doesn't want all the techniques. His body probably couldn't hold them, and it would be a waste.
When he calls for it, it answers him. He feels like Gojo might have fought this assimilation under any circumstance, but he wasted all his inhuman soul strength fighting Alghera.
Sukuna rips the technique and the soul it came attached to from the body and uses the technique-stealing ability to sever Gojo from his technique. This being his true death is fitting, since he was Sukuna's kill, after all.
Then he slices up the curse until it finally can't continue on any longer in this vessel and simply dies.
It's suddenly deathly silent, and the barriers fall because all the curse fragments have been eliminated, meaning that Yuji's team has successfully completed their objective as well.
Alghera is dead.
The Being is gone. Over. Her time has ended.
Sukuna has achieved this victory, seventeen years in the waiting. He has ended Satoru Gojo forever and stolen Limitless.
Isn't this moment supposed to feel good?
This is the hardest-earned victory of his life, and yet it tastes like nothing?
When he turns, Sayuri's body has disappeared. Ui Ui's doing, certainly. Sukuna ponders why he feels torn between the urge to flee from this place until he dies from a heart attack from running or to go to the triage area and just stare obsessively at the corpse.
Yuji hobbles over to Shoko first, where he learns that of the sorcerers who gathered to fight, all four supports for each team, all four backups for each team, and three anchors from each team had died. In other words, of twenty-four people who trained to participate in this fight, twenty-two of them had died.
The only survivors were he and Sukuna.
Most of his friends who were still left have now died, and Yuji feels sick and tired of everything that has ever been. He doesn't feel like he won anything; he just feels like he exacerbated all the losses that have been accumulating over the years.
This was a big deal for everyone else, and he's sure everyone else will have a good time celebrating it, but for him, it was too much.
If he and Sukuna were the only survivors, that can only mean Sukuna lost the only person he has probably ever truly cared about in his life.
Yuji is so weary as he sits down on the ground in the infirmary next to Megumi's body that he wonders if it's really so fortunate that he always seems to make it.
What's supposed to happen now?
He's too tired and too sad to care much about anything.
When Sukuna comes to the triage area, he finds that Shoko has Sayuri's headless torso naked on a table, and she's cutting it open.
"What are you doing?" he asks, infuriated.
Shoko looks up and says, "There's only one way to preserve the Gojo blood line now. I'm collecting her ovaries."
Does he understand why this is happening from a pragmatic standpoint? Yes. What Shoko is currently doing is literally the only way the most powerful technique known to exist would be preserved in future generations.
But on the other hand, he remembers when Sayuri was talking to him and asking him if he would want to meet her baby, if she had a baby someday. She was a kid who liked a boy and had an idea of how her life was supposed to go, probably very normal dreams about marrying and having a family someday and welcoming a child with a kid who is resting under one of these sheets.
He thought about it when she asked, and he saw in his mind an older Sayuri, fussing comically over a little chubby baby of her own with the Boy. There is a kind of satisfaction a person who raises a child feels when they imagine that child becoming a parent.
The idea that she would become posthumously become a mother to something in a petri dish without her consent is…he's not sure what it is, but it gives him a sense of something intensely negative that permeates his very soul. Whatever Shoko makes will never be loved by her mother, and in any case, it'll have a different father than the person that Sayuri wanted to have a child with.
It is Shoko's job to do the best that she can to preserve and build whatever power she can, but it was Sukuna's job to take care of Sayuri. He doesn't care if it means the Gojo clan techniques disappear forever.
"Stop and sew her up. Put her clothes back on."
Yuji is sitting on the floor, doing his best not to pay attention to what is going on. Shoko, mutilating a corpse out of the Jujutsu Society's desperate need for powerful sorcerers, a matter of survival. Then there's Sukuna, who definitely understands why it's necessary, but is clearly very upset.
Shoko does as she is told, because Sukuna looks like he'll just kill her if she argues.
Shoko asks, "Do you want me to put her head back on?"
"Yes."
Once Shoko has put Sayuri's bloody clothes on and stitched the head onto the body, Sukuna takes it and leaves without saying anything else.
Everyone there is left with the horrible sting that even though they won, it came at a cost that was perhaps acceptable in the scope of all humanity, but unacceptable to them who had to live with it.
Sukuna meanwhile isn't really sure what it is that he wants to do. He didn't really want the Jujutsu Society to have Sayuri's body. They weren't her blood family. He wasn't either, but he at least didn't want to cut her open and take her organs.
He's not sure why, but even though he said he would never return, he goes back to the farmhouse.
He gently lays her body on the kitchen table, careful because even though her head is attached, it's still internally decapitated and quite flimsy.
For a while, he just sits in the chair next to her, until he remembers the promise he made her. She said if he died and she lived, she would take his ashes along with her, but if she died and he lived, she wanted him to eat her so she would become a part of him, and they would still be together.
Sayuri was right; if he eats her, some part of him will stay with him forever.
Sukuna raises her hand to his mouth and bites, tearing the flesh on the palm of her hand away.
He knew if anyone knew what he was doing, they would never understand, but sometimes his feelings just manifested themselves as a hunger that could never be satisfied.
So he ate her, ate the flesh lovingly nourished by meals at this very table, the heart that would pound when she laughed too hard, the hands that drew Roachkuna sketches, the tongue that always wanted to talk to him, the brain that maybe contained years of good memories, the hand that used to hold onto his sleeve when she was little and she got scared.
When he is full, he wanders upstairs to the room she used to sleep in because it smells like she does, and he falls asleep.
Yuji, maybe because he just wants to leave Shibuya for a day, goes looking for Sukuna the next day, and doesn't have to guess where he is.
Sukuna doesn't answer the door, so Yuji enters without permission and finds something truly horrific waiting for him in the little dining room.
Sayuri's body is both 'open,' and her bones are exposed. There are bite marks and small chunks of flesh missing here and there, places where teeth scraped on bare bone.
Yuji is sure he would have thrown up on any other day, but his system is set to 'completely numb,' so he simply acknowledges this as one of the most sorrowful, broken things he's ever seen in his entire life. He feels pity for Sukuna for having such fucked up feelings, and knows this is in some horrible way, an expression of love.
He hears a door upstairs open, and sees Sukuna standing at the hallway railing that looks down onto the first floor.
"What do you want?"
Yuji asks, "Is it okay if I cremate the body?"
"Knock yourself out."
Something about him has changed, and Yuji asks, "What did you do?!"
Sukuna says, "I merged myself with Tengen's fetus."
"What?! You've had that thing all this time?! What have you done?!"
"I guess I've become a god now?"
His tone is so flat, but Yuji can tell he has become exponentially stronger. There's something about his presence that is simply terrifying.
Yuji asks, "Why did you wait all this time to do that if you could have powered up all along?"
"Obviously, Tengen's fetus was meant to be paired with the result of the Culling Game, so I couldn't do it until the result was deleted."
That wasn't obvious at all.
Yuji asks, "Was Gojo alive in the Being all that time?"
"Yes, he gained control of it once and came to visit me here. He's the one that told us how to kill it. I ripped him and it out of that thing, so now I have Limitless too?" he answers in bored monotone.
Telling Gojo's students they killed him again was supposed to be fun, but most of them were also dead, and nothing feels like it will ever be fun again.
He has godlike power, the ability to manipulate time and space, he can cut whatever he wants. Everything. Nothing. There is no one who could stop him now; he could kill anyone that he wants, or everyone, or no one. There isn't anything in the world that he can't do or have as long as he can obtain it by being powerful.
Sukuna asks, "Did you feel anything when we won?"
"Just more depressed. Did you feel anything when you turned yourself into a god?"
"No. It was quite unsatisfying."
Yuji asks, "Are we going to fight to the death next week?"
"I'm not in the mood. Maybe later."
Yuji cremates the remains in the yard on a piece of sheet metal over a fire because he doesn't want to let anyone else see the body. Other people wouldn't understand this weird, primal, and disgusting way that Sukuna chose to grieve. He cleans the blood off the table and floor, but bloodstains are left behind.
It probably doesn't matter.
Yuji goes into town to buy an urn and some food and a few other things, and once the body is finished burning, he calls Sukuna downstairs and they silently pick bones together, placing them in a simple urn.
"I'll seal the ashes at the Gojo clan's cemetery. Unless you want to keep them with you for a while. Sorcerer ashes are dangerous, but I'm sure you'd be fine," he says.
Sukuna says, "You can take them. They're just ashes."
"I left food in your refrigerator. It's just…I know you don't want to hear a damn thing I'm about to say, but I know it sucks to lose a baby."
"At what point did it stop bothering you?" Sukuna asks.
Yuji answers, "That's the thing. It never stops hurting. If you live another thousand years, you'll wake up knowing you'd trade your soul to have another day. It's not a pain I would wish on anyone, not even someone like you, who made so many others feel that pain."
Sukuna is displeased with this answer, although mentally, he wants to split hairs and say that Sayuri was never really his baby. He took her in to do something for him, and she did it for him. So why did everything suck?
After Yuji leaves, Sukuna goes back upstairs.
Sayuri, being the brat that she was, believed that someday, Sukuna would come back to the farmhouse, and just to rub salt in his wound for how things ended between them, she left him a photo album of pictures she'd taken, either with a digital camera he got her fairly early on or later with her phone.
She left it because she wanted him to feel bad for being a jerk, but he is left with this, a memento of a time that is now passed.
It's not that he feels pointedly sad—everything just feels like nothing.
If she had lived, he thinks he would have been jubilant about the victory over the Being.
Sukuna has achieved everything that he wanted, even grasps power beyond his own imagination.
After about a week, he starts to entertain some increasingly apocalyptic thoughts about what exactly he wants to do with all this power. His appetite to fight really hasn't come back at all, but he feels compelled to do something.
A month after Sayuri's death, Sukuna calls Yuji and tells him to come to Shinjuku.
Yuji assumes that Sukuna has finally decided it's time to fight, and what can he do, but show up and die? Still, for some reason, he goes, like it is an appointment he's always known he'd have to go to.
Sukuna doesn't look like he's there to fight.
Yuji has, since the day they fought, increasingly had these strange brain glitches where everything will appear to move in reverse for a second or two, and when he comes to Shinjuku, for some reason this happens several times as he nears Sukuna.
The King of Curses asks, "Are you satisfied with this world?"
It was a stupid question; Yuji's wife and kids were dead, all his friends were dead, most of the people on earth were still dead, and much of the world was a corpse-filled wasteland marred with endless debris.
"Of course not."
"I'll leave the rest to you then."
Sukuna brings his hands together like he is praying and starts to chant.
There is a shift in the air, something impossible to explain, a heaviness that made him so anxious Yuji felt sick. As he looked around, it looked like everything, as far as he could see, was starting to disintegrate.
"Wh-What are you doing?"
"I'm the god of this world. I can destroy it if I want to," he answers.
Yuji tries to move, but he feels frozen, and then the last few seconds play 'backward' for him, but this reverse setting keeps going and going and going and speeding up as Yuji is suddenly being hurled through the last few days of his life in reverse.
It's not very smooth at first, and Yuji realizes these strange moments where things are moving in reverse were moments where the 'rewind' process wasn't smooth. It happened increasingly often as he got closer to the moment the rewinding would begin since the first hours and days to be reversed weren't smooth.
The acceleration goes faster and faster and faster, except as he blitzes in reverse through the last year, the memories are disintegrating, vague, fading, like they are disappearing.
Sukuna has the Temporal Distortion technique, which allows him to temporarily distort a person's time, but…how they move into the future.
By the time Yuji realizes that Sukuna probably used all the power he had in order bend time the other way for him and him alone, he doesn't think there's anything he can do to stop it. This is clearly something that should be forbidden, unacceptable, and impossible, but that never stopped Sukuna from doing anything that he wanted.
Everything is suddenly a blur, and it seems to go on forever and ever and ever, until it suddenly stops, and he nearly has something akin to mental whiplash.
There's a cursed spirit right there, and Yuji instinctively reaches out to slash it, causing it to be killed instantly.
Yuji is standing at a place he remembers, but it's so distant.
Megumi is there.
It's his school—that cursed spirit, Megumi, the clear night sky over Sendai…
Yuji's memories of the future are trapped in his soul and not his brain, so as he stands there, he feels so strange. To call it déjà vu would be…weird and incorrect. It's almost like he's lived this moment before?
And how did he kill that monster?
XXX
Sukuna watches the entire world basically turn to dust and vanish, including himself.
He feels quite smug about the whole thing; the fact everything ceased to exist is proof that his technique would not only work, but that it would achieve the intended goal of causing some other future to exist.
The main thing he knows is that he's definitely just committed the mother of all taboos. There are certain areas that sorcerers are supposed to stay away from for moral reasons, but they usually don't because sorcerers are not good people, and most are actually downright monsters.
Then there are areas that are discouraged because they challenge laws or rules about the world.
Sayuri would be thrilled to find out reverse time travel is possible as long as the thing being sent is only a soul and not physical matter.
This death is fine, he's decided. He didn't die in battle, but he did perish doing sorcery at a scale that others could not even imagine. He is satisfied with this end.
Sukuna suddenly finds himself standing in a place that's abysmally black and empty.
A giant gold-on-black eye suddenly opens and looks down at him.
"Ryomen Sukuna," a voice calls, although it sounds like maybe a chorus of shrill women talking at the same time rather than a single voice.
"That's my name."
There's just a very long silence after that, and while Sukuna has never really cared about whether his actions have consequences, he's a bit nervous now that he's reached the penalty phase. Would he be forced to explain that he killed an unknown but very high number of people for funsies?
This eyeball doesn't look like it gives a shit about funsies.
Sukuna gets a bit antsy just standing there staring up at this huge eyeball and asks, "So what? Are you here to judge me? Are we having a staring contest? I'll poke that eye out to win."
He tries to use his technique, but he's a disembodied soul in a place where that's evidently allowed, and he has no technique…he's just a human soul that at the moment has taken on its last shape.
"So…"
The Eye says, "There are disagreements about what to do with you. There are those who believe that your soul is so wicked that it should be unmade in the hellfire. There are others who believe that we cannot ignore your redemption."
"I was not redeemed. That's not what happened."
"I was watching."
"And you didn't see shit, despite just being a giant eye. The world wasn't fun for me anymore, so I destroyed it."
The Eye answers, "Despite the disagreements between the judges, the rules are clear. We cannot judge you on anything but your karmic debt. In order to have your soul unmade, your negative karmic debt must be great."
"So…how bad of a boy was I?"
The Eye says, "Many acts add up, but, for reference, saving or murdering one life is plus or minus one, but it counts for seven generations, so saving one life means saving their children and grandchildren and so forth.
"You accrued ten times the amount of karmic debt required for your soul to be unmade."
Sukuna is not really surprised to find there are eternal consequences for his actions since human souls are immortal. He's fine with it. It's something he accepted a long time ago.
But then, The Eye adds, "Unfortunately, your last act, despite being vile and inherently selfish, will save the billions of people who perished during the troubled times, as well as their children, and their grandchildren, and so forth. For seven generations.
"Your karmic debt is not only positive, but it is positive eighty-four billion. No human has ever saved as many lives as Ryomen Sukuna, or had as much positive karma."
The number appears, floating in the air in gold numerals.
Sukuna frowns. "That's sort of disgusting, isn't it? It makes me feel kind of gross."
The Eye says, "No one is happy that you will be returning to the world of the living because we all know what you will do when you get there."
"Are you telling me that I could kill non-stop for a lifetime and never achieve negative karma?"
"…unfortunately…"
Sukuna says, "Well, that's kind of stupid, but okay?"
While Sukuna is sure that he will probably not remember any of this when he reincarnates, he thinks it is weird and also funny as hell that somehow, he is in this position. If he'd just died some normal way, he'd be headed straight to the Soul-Melter 1000. He didn't care one bit about anyone that might have been saved except one single person.
"Can I trade some of my points in for a power up?"
"Does this look like a store to you?"
"I mean, it doesn't look like anything."
The Eye says, "As your judge, it is I who will chose the endowments of your next life. I have decided that out of respect for your outstanding karma, I will allow you to live your next life right away, with someone who chose to care for you despite your unending imperfections.
"Your legacy and name will be stricken from the world of the living forever. You will not be remembered as the King of Curses. You will forge a new path alongside your nephew."
Sukuna blinks in confusion. "…What?"
"I will send you back to him, without any memories of the monster you once were."
"No, I mean…what?! I didn't even want to hang around him in this life, why would you send me back?" he answers, before gasping, "You have to reward me, so you're going to give me a reward you know I'll hate. Yuji? Really?"
The Eye doesn't have an eyelid or any features at all, but Sukuna just feels like it is mocking him.
Sukuna answers, "If you send me back to Yuji, I'll jump off a building and come right back here."
"That would only be minus one karma. You'd have to jump a lot of times to get the hellfire ending," The Eye replies.
"Don't you have a lake of fire you can cast me into instead?"
"Try not to mess up this time, Mortal."
The End
Just kidding, there's going to be a sequel:
Age of Itadori – Every trace of Sukuna has been forgotten by everyone, but he reappears in the world as a toddler with almost no memories at all. Itadori meanwhile starts his story over, but with more power and occasional flashes of memories and dreams of a life he hasn't lived yet.