I divided this chapter into two because it was getting a bit too lengthy! One more to end this prologue arc, and then the fate of this story will be decided!
Ending a fight with a Black Flash is one thing.
Landing one, and then continuing to fight is another matter entirely.
It feels like riding a rollercoaster with no restraints straight off the edge of a cliff and into the event horizon of an expanding black hole - and that sounds stupid and doesn't make a lick of sense, really, but if Percy had to describe it somewhere down the line, he'd still probably go with it.
Because really, there are no right words fit to describe the state that he's in as he and Satoru slam into one another and go absolutely batshit insane.
In the wake of that one-in-a-million chance impact, with his mind locked into the acclaimed 120% performance boost and his cursed energy rip-roaring through his veins, Percy feels the most dangerous he's ever felt ever.
He celebrates this breathtaking achievement by breaking past Satoru's guard, blocking an overhead blow with a wide arcing swing of his left arm before burying his right fist into his gut with enough strength to almost fold him in half. It's the first blow he manages to land, but his left fist quickly shoots for Satoru's face as he gasps in pain, and Percy finally fulfills his first goal of decking the Gojo heir in the face.
Perfection.
He cocks back to raise his tally to three for three, but the next thing he knows, he's being grabbed by the bicep and the forearm as he goes to jab and finds himself hurled in a spinning loop that somehow ends with Satoru's fist cracking against his jaw and sending a jolt of what feels like fire lancing through his skull and neck.
The force of it is no joke, either. He has to make himself slam down onto his knees to break the momentum in place of getting driven face-first into the ground like a rag-doll in a car crash commercial.
"That's more like it!" Satoru yells gleefully as he kicks him so hard he just about freaking skips along the dirt and off to the side. It'd be almost comical if it wasn't very much real and very much painful, and at least one of his ribs is likely to give out in the aftermath of it. "Show me what you've got, weakling!"
And that taunting right there is a prime example of why people are told to be careful what they wish for.
Percy leaps to his feet, ignoring the raw scrapped skin of his side and face and spits out a wad of dirt, not in the least bit deterred.
After all, even though he's never been much of a battle junkie in either life, he's actually having fun.
"I'm going to make you eat those so bad."
Satoru's answering grin is wide enough to be painful, and well on its way to ending up on the wrong side of unhinged.
Neither of them gives a shit. They lower their heads andcharge.
Things get a little fuzzy after that.
Percy gets tossed over a shoulder and slammed down hard enough to leave an indentation in the earth. Satoru gets kicked in the face. Both of them end up slamming their foreheads against one another in a vicious headbutt, and on and on it goes.
It's a blur of flying fists and limbs and half-maniacal flashes of teeth that can barely be called smiles, a wild dance that is refreshingly equal with each of them giving just as good as they get - and he's not sure whether it's the fight or the power that he revels in, but revel in it he does.
Maybe a bit predictably, it's Satoru who truly escalates first.
At some point, Percy manages to kick out his knee from under him and seize him by the backs of his neck and shirt, before heaving up and away... only he doesn't come back down.
No, the preening lunatic actually risesup, twisting in mid-air to look down at him with gleeful superiority.
Because of course he can fly.
He points a hand down, and it's only Percy's well honed survival instincts that save him. The hairs on the back of his neck rise, he gets a looming premonition of doom, and he wastes no time leaping to the side just as the air, the ground - the very space in the world he'd just been occupying implodes with a sound like a landmine going off.
Percy could have called foul - It was Satoru who specified no cursed techniques - or bitched about the attempt at a cheap shot. He could have even called time out, because things were clearly getting out of hand.
Hah!
Since he's never been that smart, he does none of that. Instead, he grins right back, lets his cursed energy roar out in a nearly overwhelming burst, and sends a tidal wave three stories high up and at him. It accelerates forward with so much force, and in the distance, he can see rows of trees that Satoru is hovering over getting ripped out of the ground like toothpicks.
"Okay, nope!" He hears Suguru yell and spies his manta ray curse descending from above to carry him and Shoko off to safety, but he doesn't so much as look their way.
Instead, he focuses on the way Satoru cackles and throws out his hands.
"Blue."
The world lights up and tints in hues of sapphire, an orb of something confusing but deadly appears a few feet in front of Satoru before he fires it to his left, and then what should have been an inexorable attack gets rendered useless. The rushing wave collapses, its form sucked into the spatial distortion even as it gets sent rocketing away, and by the time the ridiculous technique collapses and the water bursts back out again, it's too far away to do a damn thing.
"Missed me!" Satoru crows and goes to attack again, and Percy hisses.
That power is such a hack- but he's dealt with worse.
He takes off sprinting in a zig-zag to throw him off, mind already clocking the way the next application of Limitless hits behind him. The ground is nearly pulled out right from under him as an attractive force he can barely outpace sucks it in relentlessly, following him as he bolts just out of its range and drawing closer beat by beat, and it takes him some three seconds to clock Satoru's game.
He's trying to force a surrender by taking out Percy's footing.
Credit where credit is due, it's a good plan. A great one, even, and it would have worked with just about anyone else.
But with Percy?
Honestly?
Fuck the ground. He can make his own damn footing - and he does
The momentarily slack-jawed look he gets from Satoru as he wills water to erupt into being beneath him and go so solid at the surface that it lets him sprint up its surface is going live rent-free in his head forever.
Running up his impromptu water bridge and closing the distance between them, he throws out a hand to throw another wave at him when a flash of sudden inspiration hits - he can feel his cursed energy better than he ever has before, and that suddenly comes with ideas.
Instead of creating another unilateral wave, he seizes it before it can coalesce, condensing it into a swirling sphere the size of a basketball. The same amount of power, but focused. Refined.
Compressed.
Percy waits until he can feel it reach a dangerous threshold and get ready to blow, before he leaps up, bursting over Satoru as he tries to twist space around him into a pretzel again and aims straight for his center mass.
Satoru evades the resulting explosive jet by the skin of his teeth, and it shoots past him and straight down like a bolt of lightning. Percy's intense focus almost wavers when he sees and feels it gouge and drill through solid rock like a hot knife through butter.
Yikes. Too much power.
The moment of hesitation costs him. He starts falling before he can make himself another platform, and Satoru rocketsupto meet him. Percy manages to clench his fist, waiting just until that shock of upside-down white hair is mere feet away before he throws-
"Nope."
He freezes.
As in, he literally freezes, upside down, fist outstretched and caught inches away from Satoru's solar plexus by an invisible force.
"Infinity." Satoru declares pompously, and it sounds like he's declaring his victory. In his mind, he probably is. "The strongest defense - the space between the two of us is divided infinitely and without end. Your hits will never land."
So this is what Shoko had meant.
"Ah," Percy says sagely, still struggling despite it. He can almost feel what it means - He can still feel the momentum of his fist traveling, but he's not going anywhere. "I call bullshit."
"Isn't it just?" Blue eyes gleam, and his cursed energy swells menacingly. "Now here's to getting even."
And then his fist slams into Percy's gut like the wrath of armageddon, and it's like he's dying and his body is getting the memo one violent internal explosion at a time.
Frankly, the fact that he doesn't cough up a lung because of it it is nothing short of a miracle.
"Payback's a bitch, isn't it?"
He's still reeling from the first one, which means he doesn't even see what direction the second punch comes from before he finds his skull rattling and his eyes registering the sight of the ground coming up as he hurtles down like a meteor.
If it wasn't for his enhancement, he'd have probably broken his neck. As it is, his brain still almost short-circuits from the rough landing, and by the time he heaves himself out of the literal crater he's been driven into Satoru is already descending from above, haloed by the orange light of the sunset and radiating the absolute confidence of someone who knows they're unstoppable.
Of course, the blooming black eye, the bruises across his face and Percy's absolute lack of shits to give take away from the effect somewhat - as does the fact that he still looks genuinely elated.
"That wasn't half bad, you know?" He even sounds happy, and Percy's surprised at how much more of a tolerable human being it makes him sound like. "I don't think anybody's landed that many hits on me since before I hit the double digits."
"Stand still and I'll land plenty more," Percy says as he pushes himself back, shaking off the dirt of his arms as he straightens. "Or did you think that I was done?"
Satoru looks surprised for a second before it melts back into that stunned delight he's been radiating since Percy nearly ruined his year with his Black Flash - like he couldn't believe that he still had the nerve to step up to him again but was going to shamelessly enjoy it anyway.
"Then bring it!"
He fully intends to - He never did like quitting, and he's ready to keep going even if it means he'll keep bouncing off that barrier like a rabid badger on steroids for the foreseeable future- he'll figure out a way around it somehow, apparent invincibility be damned.
In the meantime, though...
Time to run back the classics.
His cursed energy swells, and Percy draws on more of it than he's ever had to pull forward at once. He imagines a wave worth of water, then a lake, then an ocean, and he keeps on going, visualizing the truly ruinous flood he's about to unleash onto the world.
Satoru's eyes must pick something up, because he laughs loudly and stretches out his arms. The blue glow of his technique lights up again in reparation for the coming cataclysm.
The tension swells, their energy crackles, and-!
"What in the ancestor's names is going on here?!"
Percy's concentration promptly pops like a soap bubble and his cursed energy falls back with an anticlamatic failure.
Both of them turn.
Shoji-sensei stands there, feet ankle-deep in a puddle of water - Percy's handiwork - and stares at the two of them like they're nightmares that have come to life. His pallor is somewhat hidden by the growing darkness, but he's probably gone stark white.
"Uh..."
"What-?" The man is at an absolute loss for words, eyes so wide they're about to pop out of his skull. He looks at them, then up at a where Sugure and Shoko are hovering and playing spectator. "How...why?"
Percy takes in that tone, finally registers the sheer amount of destruction he and Satoru have managed to sow - the training grounds they'd started on and what looks like half a forest's worth of greenery are either levelled or underwater - and acts entirely on instinct.
In his defense, he's never liked explaining himself to his teachers - not since the pre-algebra one that went from a metaphorical hag to aliteraldemon from hell - and this whole situation would need a talk and a college-grade essay to explain, so he promptly decides that discretion is the better part of valor and does what he has to.
"Time to go."
"What?" Satoru sounds befuddled, still lost at the sudden change in atmosphere, and Percy throws a glare over his shoulder.
"Move, Gojo!"
Then he crouches down, channels his energy to his feet and leaps straight up. Suguru lets out the beginnings of a startled yell when Percy lands on top of his curse and latches onto him, ignoring the way Shoko shrieks as the thing shifts to compensate for his weight.
"Floor it!"
"What?"
"Fly, you fool!"
His friend looks at him like he's insane and pointedly doesn't move, so Percy points down at Shoji-sensi, who has started yelling at the top of his lungs. It seems that a copious amount of property damage can help the man overcome his aversion to chewing them out.
Good to know.
"Do you want to go down there and explain this to him?"
"Me?" Suguru asks incredulously, the curse bucking at his emotional whiplash. Shoko throws him an absolutelymurderousglare over his shoulder - it's sort of great. "Why would I have to explain?"
"You let me fight Gojo!"
Never let it be said that Percy couldn't talk out of his ass like a professional - hell, he's spent a lifetime refining the principle into an art form.
"Let you!?"
"Enabling my terrible life choices makes you complicit in the inevitable consequences!" Percy yells right back "Now either deal with it or floor it."
"Yeah, curse-boy!" It says a lot about the urgency of the situation that they barely blink when Satoru lands next to them. "This is all your fault, so hit it already!"
It's probably his presence that does it - the sheer shock value of seeing Satoru and Percy agreeing on something that overwhelms his higher reasoning and gets him to fold to their whims.
"You are a horrible influence!" Suguru roars, and, well, Percy's never denied that.
Still, he can't help but join Satoru and even Shoko in their borderline hystrical laughter as the Manta ray curse whirls in place and soars higher into the air, and the four of them disappear into the night.
…
It's probably a good thing that Yaga is halfway buzzed in his favorite Izakaya bar when he gets the news, because otherwise he'd have probably blown a blood vessel of three.
"What?!"
As it is, he still comes damn close. Some of the older drinking buddies even stop to give him startles looks.
Shoji sounds about as dead inside as he feels as he relays the news, the man having somehow tracked him down hours after the fact because it was either him or the principal, and the latter would make his life a living misery.
Yaga can't blame him for choosing to interrupt his night - he still hardly believes the utter lunacy he's listening to.
"Even ignoring the issue of the outrageous damages," He shudders to even imagine them, actually. "Why would they run away? They live in the dorms - they're just going to have to come back tomorrow?"
What was the point?
"I don't believe that any of them were thinking that far ahead," Shoji says dryly.
Ah.
That makes a depressing amount of sense.
Good gods, their first years weren't just disgustingly powerful potential sorcerors.
They were disgustingly powerful idiots.
"That's not all."
Oh, the hell was it now!?
"I was looking for Jackson-san before I stumbled on their fight for a reason. He's received... well, it's best that I show you."
Yaga watches with growing wariness as Shoji reaches into his pocket, and his stomach falls as he quickly realizes what he's staring at.
"Letters. Inquiries. Even offers." The other teacher declares gravely, placing the stack of sealed envelopes thicker than his wrist down between them ."From various minor sorcery clans and interested parties."
Then Shoji reaches for his pocket again and pulls out two more missives, distinct from the rest, and places them down before Yaga with as much delicacy as a career soldier handling a live grenade.
"These two are from the Ze'nin and Kamo clans respectively."
...
"... I see."
Yaga calmly puts down his glass, flags down the waiter and demands the entire damned bottle.
He was much too sober for this shit.
...
Percy on dealing with his problems responsibly:
/cWpOlCV/URL]
Yaga coming back to work after only a few hours break:
/6QVfSWr/URL]
Percy when Yaga thinks it can't possibly get worse:
/wCw60Gr/URL]
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