Chapter 63: Chapter 63 - Playing by the Rules [bonus]
[The word hit and your pupils contracted. Your brain caught up in an instant.]
[Inside the Zenin clan’s insular, bloodline-obsessed hellhole, the Kukuru Unit was the bottom rung. Clan mbers who’d inherited no Innate Technique, so with cursed energy so faint it barely registered.]
[Under jujutsu law and Windows’ classification standards, these people were, for all practical purposes... civilians.]
[If you deployed destructive jujutsu against "civilians" in broad daylight, the one caught breaking the secrecy code wouldn’t be Naoya.]
[It would be you.]
[He never expected them to beat you. They were at shields, designed to seal off your techniques and pin you down.]
["What are you standing around for?! Move!"]
[They didn’t need to be told twice. Four Kukuru Unit mbers surged forward like wolves unleashed.]
[Three ford a tight triangular formation, thick arms swinging to cut off every avenue of retreat. The fourth slipped around your blind spot, darting straight for gumi like a leopard.]
[The world seed to slow. You started to turn, but the fist from the left was already closing on your jaw, the sweeping leg on the right sealing the exit.]
["Hayase...!"]
[A scream tore through the noise. Raw with terror, helplessness, and total collapse. It punched through the air and buried itself in your chest like a bullet. Your heart lurched, missing a beat.]
[Because gumi Fushiguro, that painfully precocious child, the little adult who called you "Mr. Hayase" or "Sensei" with forced composure even when staring down Cursed Spirits... he had never once called you the way Tsumiki did. Never with that kind of unguarded, desperate need.]
[That single word was his last line of defense crumbling. A final distress call to the only person he thought of as family.]
["gumi...!!"]
[You whipped around, eyes burning red, reaching out without a thought for anything else, but a heavy fist filled your entire field of vision.]
["Crack!"]
[A calloused iron fist smashed into the side of your face. The impact snapped your head sideways. The taste of rust flooded your mouth.]
[In that single second, the one who’d circled behind had already locked both arms around gumi’s waist.]
["Let go!! Hayase...!!"]
[gumi thrashed wildly, small hands clawing at the air, but against a grown man’s strength he was a kitten held by the scruff. The man showed no rcy, covering the distance to Naoya in a few quick strides.]
[Naoya ripped the sobbing boy from his subordinate’s grip and hurled him into the open door of a black luxury sedan like a piece of luggage.]
["Tch. Noisy little brat."]
[He dusted off his hands with a look of disgust, as if he’d touched sothing filthy, then turned, one hand resting on the car door.]
[As the window rose, about to seal away gumi’s pale, struggling, terrified face, Naoya peered through the half-lowered glass. Across the crowd, past the three n beating you down, his eyes found yours.]
[His lips curled into the cruelest, most satisfied grin yet. Eyes brimming with the sick thrill of revenge.]
[He raised his right hand, beckoned with one taunting finger, then drew it slowly across his throat.]
["Slam!" The door shut. The engine roared like a beast. Tires shrieked against asphalt, and the black sedan tore away.]
[Watching those taillights carry gumi into the distance, sothing black and almost physical churned in the pit of your chest.]
[Behind your eyes, the scene replayed on loop. gumi’s wide eyes, filled with terror and defiance, as they shoved him into the car. And that voice, cracking with tears, echoing over and over.]
[Hayase...]
["Crack! Thud!"]
[Two more solid hits. The force drove you half a step back.]
[The three Kukuru mbers, seeing you refuse to use jujutsu, grew bolder. Under Naoya’s earlier signal, their strikes turned vicious and dirty. Every blow aid at sothing vital. This wasn’t just stalling anymore. They wanted to break you for good.]
[Your head hung low, black hair falling over your eyes, and you let the punches rain down. Face... stomach... shoulders. Again and again.]
[At your sides, your fists clenched until the knuckles went white. Bones ground together with an audible, teeth-aching creak.]
[Did it hurt?]
[Honestly, these flimsy physical blows were nothing. Compared to what Naoya Zenin did to you every day in that hopeless simulation, cursed energy torture dealt out purely for his own amusent, this didn’t even register as an itch.]
[You could feel it. That passive state carved so deep into your soul it had beco part of you. Bearing Insults and Heavy Burdens. After an eternity dormant, it stirred back to life.]
[Only this ti, it wasn’t about surviving like a dog.]
[This ti, it was about converting every drop of this towering rage into the purest, most lethal force imaginable.]
[Slowly, inch by inch, you raised your head.]
[The air, noisy just a mont ago, seed to have its temperature ripped away in the instant your eyes ca up. The three Kukuru mbers, mid-swing, froze in the most unnatural way. Fists hanging in dead air.]
[In your eyes, they found nothing. No fury from being beaten. No panic. Just a suffocating, abyssal stillness. The kind of primal, marrow-deep tremor that seizes every living thing when sothing at the absolute top of the food chain locks on.]
[You ignored the stares of the bystanders. Didn’t draw on even a whisper of cursed energy.]
[For trash like this, you didn’t need a technique.]
[One deep breath. Every muscle fiber in your body dialed to its perfect killing state. Cursed energy roared through your circuits at full speed. When you spoke, the voice that ca out was low, cold, and stripped of anything resembling human warmth.]
["Clench your teeth."]
["Wha..."]
[The closest one. The biggest. The one who’d been grinning the widest. He didn’t even have ti to blink.]
[Your right fist, ripped upward with an air-splitting sonic crack and detonated dead center on his face.]
["CRACK!"]
[Not the sound of flesh hitting flesh. The wet, heavy crunch of a sledgehamr caving in a waterlon.]
["Psshh...!"]
[Blood and shattered teeth erupted in a fine mist against the sunset, spraying outward in a starburst pattern, painting your knuckles and half your sleeve red.]
[The man weighed over two hundred pounds. He didn’t even get a scream out. The bones of his face visibly caved inward. His massive fra launched off the ground, sailing three, four ters through the air on nothing but raw kinetic force.]
["Thud!"]
[He hit the pavent like a dead tree. Consciousness gone. Only a faint twitch remained.]
[The remaining two Kukuru mbers stared at their colleague lying in a spreading pool of blood, life status unknown. Then they looked at you. At the fist slowly lowering, slick with red. At the face showing absolutely nothing, like a war god descending into the mortal world.]
[Their Adam’s apples bobbed. Their calves began to shake beyond their control. Sothing naless and absolute finally surfaced in the depths of their eyes.]
[Fear.]
[You flicked your wrist, shaking the blood off your knuckles. Like brushing away sothing dirty.]
[Your head tilted slightly. Those lightless eyes settled on the last two like they were already corpses.]
["You’re next."]
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