Chapter 102: Chapter 102 - Geto
[The mont you finally understood the warped chain of cause and effect tying Yuta Okkotsu to Rika Orimoto, the whole thing felt like so sick joke.]
[You’d chased the truth all the way into a dead end, one where the current rules left no room for punishnt.]
[You had already secured approval through back channels for Yuta Okkotsu’s execution. But as long as his awakening was officially judged passive, and as long as Satoru Gojo stood in front of him, killing the boy by force would not be justice. It would be personal revenge wearing a righteous face.]
[Love. That was the excuse. Love, and from that, a Special Grade Curse with enough autonomy to protect its host.]
[What a disgusting setup.]
[Sotis you caught yourself thinking it would have been cleaner to follow the higher-ups’ logic from the start. Kill the unstable bomb in secret. End it before it could get worse.]
[If anything, this only proved how rotten the jujutsu world’s rules had beco. They were full of holes, full of exceptions. Bloodline got exceptions. Talent got exceptions. Every absurd special case got an exception. anwhile, the real source of the disaster could walk free.]
[And the normal people caught in the Night Parade? The ones who died in it? No one was speaking for them. Their lives had already been flattened into lines on a report, casualty totals on soone else’s paperwork.]
[In the end, until you could wipe out cursed energy and curses completely, seizing the current jujutsu establishnt and rewriting its rules would probably save more people, faster.]
[The Night Parade’s aftermath sparked a vicious political fight inside jujutsu society over what should be done with the dead.]
[The higher-ups wanted the whole thing buried quietly. Suguru Geto’s na erased, his existence scrubbed clean from the record. Gojo fought them head-on and demanded a proper funeral. Geto’s birth parents had died by his own hands years ago. At the end of it all, the only person willing to collect his body was the friend who had once been closest to him.]
[It was open defiance.]
[Suguru Geto had launched a terrorist attack. Hundreds of deaths were attached to his na. And now the head of the Gojo Clan, the man called the strongest jujutsu sorcerer alive, was going to bury him himself.]
[Even people on Gojo’s side opposed it. Loudly. But nobody dared push too hard. Not against soone like him. The timing was too bad, and panic from the Night Parade still hadn’t settled.]
[On that point, you actually agreed with a good number of Gojo’s own allies. You were not as cold as the higher-ups, who probably would have denied Geto even a grave marker. But this was the wrong mont. Let the dust settle first. Bury him later. Doing it quietly as a friend was one thing. Ignoring the fallout entirely was just reckless.]
[That difference in judgnt was why you did not attend the funeral.]
[The higher-ups noticed the crack between you and Gojo imdiately. When the comndations ca down afterward, they barely ntioned the fact that Gojo had personally stopped and killed Geto.]
[Instead, they aid the spotlight at you.]
[A Grade 1 sorcerer who had crippled Special Grade Suguru Geto before the main battle had even begun, then hunted down and slaughtered the rest of his faction afterward with cold efficiency. That was the story they pushed. They polished it. Blew it up into a legend.]
[Your brand of harsh, uncompromising order was exactly what those old fossils wanted. So much so that even the Gojo Clan leadership, despite knowing nothing about your private attempt to obtain Yuta Okkotsu’s execution rights, started looking at your loyalties with obvious suspicion.]
[Those political ripples did not really calm down until a month later, when the next Tokyo-Kyoto Jujutsu High Exchange Event was announced.]
[With second-years Kinji Hakari and Kirara Hoshi both suspended, Tokyo had no choice but to send its first-years: Maki, Toge Inumaki, Panda, and Yuta Okkotsu.]
[Principal Yaga had strongly wanted you to lead the team. But the second Yuta’s face ca to mind, irritation stabbed straight through your chest. You shoved the job onto Gojo without even pretending to be polite. Let him handle his own student.]
[With the school mostly emptied out, you took the chance to visit Geto’s grave alone.]
[The cetery on the outskirts of the city was dead quiet. The kind of quiet that pressed against your ears. Overhead, the sky hung low and gray, like it might collapse at any minute.]
[You drove deep into the grounds and stepped onto the narrow path leading to Geto’s headstone.]
[That was when you passed a tall man in an oversized black hoodie, most of his face buried in shadow.]
[In the split second you crossed him, your nose caught sothing wrong.]
[Not just unpleasant. Wrong.]
[It was heavy, damp, saturated, like rotten wood left soaking in wet earth.]
[At first you brushed it off. Maybe soone had just finished visiting a grave.]
[Then Phantom Night Parade, that passive chanism always ticking in the back of your mind, suddenly scread.]
[The warning that hit your nervous system was so sharp it made every hair on your body stand up.]
[The man in black was a jujutsu sorcerer.]
[And the Innate Technique Phantom Night Parade identified from him was one you could not possibly mistake.]
[Cursed Spirit Manipulation.]
[Your pupils shrank.]
[You were still trying to process when Cursed Spirit Manipulation had beco so mass-produced technique when Phantom Night Parade shoved a second result into your skull hard enough to make your vision flash white.]
[Three.]
[That person had three Innate Techniques.]
[Besides Cursed Spirit Manipulation, there were two more inside him, still unidentified and still being analyzed.]
[Three Innate Techniques.]
[For a second, your thoughts went blank.]
[This was beyond ridiculous. In all your years in the jujutsu world, you had never heard of anything this blatantly impossible.]
[It was not like your Phantom Night Parade, or Yuta Okkotsu’s Copy, where techniques rotated through so borrowed dium. Phantom Night Parade’s feedback was clear. That body contained three separate Innate Techniques carved into one vessel at the sa ti.]
[And that was not even the worst part.]
[Phantom Night Parade followed a strict rule. Even if it encountered the sa technique twice, analyzing it through a different host would never be instantaneous. It might be faster than a first scan, sure, but never imdiate.]
[Yet this ti, Cursed Spirit Manipulation had been identified instantly.]
[Which ant only one thing.]
[You had already analyzed this exact host before.]
[And in your entire life, you had only ever analyzed one user of Cursed Spirit Manipulation.]
[When that answer locked into place, a chill exploded up your spine and dropped you straight into an icy void.]
[Impossible.]
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