The ruined palace was filled with the sound of his laughter and slow applause. Gojo Satoru clapped and clapped and laughed as the world burnt around him, and the sound of a wooden roof breaking and falling from its own weight echoed in the clearing.
He finally came to a stop and looked at the three vermin before him. "Now what do we have here?" he began with a grin as he eyeballed the trio before him. They had been patient enough to completely let him get it out of his system, something that spoke to their sheer age and power. Restraint was not something vengeful spirits were known for, but this trio were not just any vengeful spirit.
There were three men, at least they looked like men, and the fact that they were able to mimic the form they had worn in their past life spoke to just how old and powerful they were. The one closest to him looked like restrained anger. His body was almost bubbling, and his red segmented and laminated samurai armor seemed to change form with every false breath the black haired and eyed man wore. Taira no Masakado. The progenitor of the Zenin clan.
The next man sat on a sedan that floated in the air, looking like the definition of unbothered. The haughtiness expected from one of noble blood, not just noble blood but royalty, was clear in the way he looked down on Satoru with his red eyes. Emperor Sutoku stared at Satoru, and with a grin, the honored one realized the spurned deposed emperor was not unbothered or uncaring, just arrogant enough not to care for his presence.
The last face was a familiar face. A face that Satoru saw when he looked into the mirror, or when he looked at his cousin, or any other extended member of the Gojo clan. There was a refined air about him. His clothes were pristine and well pressed, with the only exception being the blood on his hands. His features were fine, and his eyes were closed with long white hair that trailed to the ground. If Satoru had been doubtful of the elders' tales previously, a single look at the man before him told him the truth. This was Sugawara no Michizane, and he was Gojo Satoru's ancestor.
"Why."
The words left his throat hoarse. He was not looking at the others. Masakado, he had fought in his teens when the vengeful spirit had somehow managed to escape its bindings. With greater context at hand, Satoru suspected Kenjaku had something to do with that. However, Satoru had beaten him. It had not been easy, but he had won in the end. That was before Geto's betrayal. Before his first death at the hand of Toji Fushiguro. Before his awakening.
Sutoku, he had not fought, but he knew him enough to realize that he had never been truly powerful, simply spiteful. The deposed emperor had not been a particularly powerful man or sorcerer in his era. His only deed of note was being the progenitor of the Kamo clan. Whatever he had in his repertoire, Satoru was not worried. There was only one true threat here, and it was to the figure he asked his question.
Unlike the rest of the vengeful spirits that had haunted the whole of Japan when they turned, Sugawara had maintained a single focus during his spree. He had only gone after the people who had framed him for treason, and after slaughtering them all, he had returned to the Palace and asked to be destroyed. Unfortunately, there had been no sorcerer powerful enough to kill him in that era, so he had been willingly sealed, and the matter was forgotten as he had never fought against his restrictions like the rest.
Sugawara was the closest thing to a reasonable vengeful spirit, and his participation in the attack was the first true surprise Satoru felt. He looked at his ancestor, blue eyes staring deep into his being. Unlike the false human shell Sugawara wore, Satoru could see his true form. Humanoid in shape, even if he was at least seven feet tall and covered in a white traditional kimono. Where his face should have been was a sealing paper plastered into his forehead, and if you peered past his clothes, there was no true body to be seen. All that was there were eyes, wide blue eyes, similar in shade to Satoru's pair.
"Why are you doing this?" Satoru asked once more, his focus on his ancestor, and Sugawara remained silent.
"What are you waiting for, you limp wristed scholar, or should your emperor do everyt..."
Emperor Sutoku began, but he never got to finish because the next moment, Satoru pointed an uncaring hand at him and whispered.
"Cursed technique reversal: RED."
A vibrant red orb appeared at the tip of his fingers, one that slowly grew brighter and more vibrant with every passing second. A heartbeat later, it exploded with massive repulsive force as it shot away from him and slammed into the vengeful spirit.
Without turning his head to look at the deposed emperor, Satoru saw with his six eyes as the vengeful spirit was stripped of its haughty and humanoid form into its true stature as monstrosity as the red explosive orb slammed into it. Sutoku put his huge primary appendage, a pair of pincers, in front of him, but it was not enough, not nearly. With a scream of pain, RED dug into the twisted vengeful spirit and ripped him away from his false throne and sent him deeper and deeper into the ruined palace until he was lost in its depths.
"Jiki would be sad. I promised him we would get to see his maternal family as soon as he graduated." Satoru noted to himself, his voice weary and tired as he surveyed the destruction before him.
"What is the greatest desire of a vengeful spirit?"
Satoru turned at once as he looked at where the question came from. Sugawara was seated on the floor, legs crossed, and inviting him into a discussion. Taira bristled on the spot where he stood as Satoru walked up to his ancestor and sat down in front of him. The Zenin progenitor was furious, but Satoru knew it would not do anything. The vengeful spirit was wise enough to know that alone, he would lose.
"Revenge." Satoru's answer was simple. It was what he had been taught and what he had witnessed in his long time acting as the sword of the jujutsu society.
Sugawara smiled. It was the same soft schooling smile that Jiki gave him every so often when he did something the other Gojo considered ridiculous or foolish.
"Perhaps, but for a vengeful spirit, vengeance is a quick and brutal thing. An act that more often than not is satisfied in a moment or two. Yet even after fulfilling that grudge, we remain. If that was truly our desire, would we still wallow in these earthly shells?"
Satoru knew a rhetorical question when he saw one, so he remained quiet as Sugawara arranged his words before continuing and answering his own questions.
"No, if simple revenge was all a vengeful spirit desired, then after accomplishing it, we should cease to exist without a sorcerer needing to come and send us along."
"Then what is it, what is left of a vengeful spirit after its vengeance is done?" Satoru questioned, and with that, Sugawara's smile shifted from schooling to sad.
"The desire to live once more."
Satoru stared back in surprise. He had never considered it. There were far too few vengeful spirits with the capability for speech. Most of them fell along the lines of babbling empty words, psychic remainders of whatever they wished or willed in their past life. Then there were others, the rare few that were either powerful enough to communicate simple words, like Rika, or the ones that had grown old enough to speak and even fake at being human for a few moments, like Sugawara.
"It is a desire at the root of all vengeful spirits. If you give most vengeful spirits the offer to come back to life or fulfill their vengeance, at least ninety percent would wish to return to life. The ten percent that pick vengeance would regret that choice once their anger and retribution are spent, and they would seek a way to return to living, or punish the people around them with the audacity to keep living while they suffer the existence that is being a vengeful spirit."
Satoru stared at his ancestor for a long second as he tried to run the numbers, his experiences, and the scene before him, before coming to a conclusion.
"What did Kenjaku promise you."
"Life," Taira spoke up from behind him. The Zenin progenitor had grown tired of being ignored and had decided to insert himself into the conversation. Satoru kept quiet, so the vengeful spirit huffed in a very humanoid motion as it moved to his side and sat down in the space between Sugawara and himself, turning their sitting arrangement into a triangle.
"We are like souls without bodies, yet with shells formed of cursed energy. That was what he confirmed when he unsealed me years ago. So when he came back, he came back with an offer and proof of work. A boy who had never had a body of its own, one like us that has lived life with one leg as a curse and one leg as a human. Kenjaku was able to put the boy into a body, a body perfectly optimized and compatible for the boy, and one that was able to house it."
"Now, the boy can live, and it is not this false mimicry of life that we endure." Sugawara continued from where his fellow vengeful spirit stopped as he stretched his false human hand out and inspected it. "He feels like a human would, pain, hurt, both emotional and physical. He hungers for rice cakes whenever he wants. He loves, he cares, he celebrates, and rejoices. He can walk underneath the sun and grumble at the heat, while his pale skin tans. He can tread barefoot in the snow and feel his toes go numb as frostbite sets in."
Sugawara raised his head from his inspection and turned to Satoru. "Kenjaku offers the greatest gift of all, he offers life."
"And what does he demand as payment?" Satoru asked, even knowing the answer as he did.
Sugawara's face lost all expression as the humanoid face began to slip off like a melted candle, and the hundreds of closed eyes beneath his kimono snapped open, an eerie shade of bright blue.
"Your life!"
The next moment, everyone exploded into motion as a massive lance of solidified blood that had been forming for the past few minutes dropped from the lower atmosphere with enough speed and force that it ruptured the sound barrier as it struck. In that same moment, Sugawara and Taira spilled out of their shells and moved.
Sugawara clapped, all six hands, and the sky above them immediately darkened. Lightning, moving far faster than the solidified blood stake, struck everywhere. Yet with Limitless active, Satoru sat unbothered. It was the follow-up crack of thunder that shook Satoru, as a heartbeat later, his curse technique was burnt out, and Limitless flickered off.
The shadow the solidified blood cast beneath him immediately darkened and spread out in a massive inky blotch as multiple desiccated hands shot out from beneath him, and took a hold of Satoru's limbs just as the stake was inches away from his vulnerable head. He flexed his limbs, but they did not budge an inch. The strength in the hundreds of desiccated limbs that literally covered his body was more than a match for him.
For the second time in his life, Gojo Satoru felt a strange sense of fear as death hung above his head like a headsman's axe. His six eyes dulled as for the first time in his life, he looked at the world just like any other human or sorcerer did. His cursed technique somehow burnt out, like he had just activated a domain expansion.
The trio had executed this even better than Ganesha, Uraume, and the special grade tree curse spirit had managed to, an ambush that had stripped him of things he had never lost, that had shocked him physically as it did psychologically. Yet in the end, just like the previous people who had thought to ambush him and kill him in the split second when Limitless was stripped from him, they forgot.
Gojo Satoru let out a soft breath as he exhaled with a sentence on his lips. "Throughout the heavens and the earth." He stared back at Sugawara through his single visible yet dull eye, lost in the weave of arms that held him down. "I alone am the honored one."
Behind the seal etched paper that hid the inky void that was Sugawara's face, a massive smile appeared and spread in the darkness.
Satoru reversed his curse energy, shifting it from negative to positive, and letting it burst out with an explosive force that burned the arms of the desiccated creatures that had held him hostage. There was no time for them to scream as Satoru burnt through his curse energy, uncaring of the loss of efficiency he was stripped of by losing his six eyes. Instead, he let his curse energy out like a wave, one that forced the creatures to recoil and lose their grip on him just in time for him to move.
He twisted on the spot, whole body corkscrewing as he shot off the floor and leaped to the side, but he had only microseconds and inches to spare, and he paid for his precious escape. The spike of solidified blood carved a furrow from his ear and into his shoulder, and kept on tearing its way along the edges of his skin, ripping apart skin and flesh until it got to the elbow, then it caught on bone.
Satoru strangled the scream that nearly uprooted itself from his throat. Instead, he continued his twisting movement, uncaring of the captured limb. He pulled, ripping his whole body loose and sacrificing the arm in the process. He felt skin tear, muscle and ligament rip, bone break as he hurled the rest of his body away, leaving everything from his elbow down behind as he threw himself to the side.
The only thing that stopped them from immediately following after his weakened form was the follow-up explosion caused by the stake slamming into the earth at Mach 4 speed. The explosion that followed was catastrophic as it completely leveled and destroyed what was left of the royal palace. The explosive force flung Satoru away, his body bouncing along the ground like a stone flicked into a pool. Finally, it came to a rest.
Satoru breathed through roughened lungs, the organ working overtime as his reverse curse technique struggled to heal the numerous damages on his body, starting from the most vital. The damages that came from being in the center of the explosion.
Satoru pressed his single working hand to the ground as he forced his body up with a cackle. It felt like every single bone in his body was broken, and what was not broken felt splintered. His muscles ached and were sore in ways he could not put to words. In all his life, this was probably the worst state he had been in, he reasoned with a chuckle that sent blood splattering to the ground. Yet above all, his greatest loss was his six eyes.
His right leg found its footing, and with that, he brought himself back up to his feet. He had never lost his sight before. He was not blind, but without the six eyes, he might as well be. Was this what his little cousin suffered earlier? This sudden loss of clarity. It was the single thing that had thrown him off the most, even more than the loss of his technique, for at least that was familiar. But absolutely nothing had ever stripped him of his six eyes before.
He staggered as he took a breath, straining his already overburdened lungs with the new influx of dust and debris he sent down his throat and into the organ. He resisted the instinctive urge to cough. He was as blind as he ever was. Not even as a baby was he this blind. He had absolutely zero awareness as to where his opponent was for the first time.
His other senses were ineffective. His eardrums were ruptured from the sonic boom. His nose was useless in the sea of dust. His ability to sense cursed energy was ruined by the sheer static that was the technique that Emperor Sutoku had released and the destruction that had followed. He would have preferred if the deposed emperor had died with the attack he had sent out, but not even he had any true hope that would happen. A single RED would not be enough against a special grade vengeful curse.
Still, it rankled him. The wise thing was to stay in place and wait, use what was left of his curse energy, retreat, fall back, heal as much as he was able to, then come back with vengeance. Yet what sort of honored one would hide in the dust after barely escaping an attack that should have by all rights killed him? Yet Satoru discarded those useless thoughts and took a step forward.
Throughout the heavens and the earth, I alone am the honored one.
The sentence was both an exultation and a plea. A call to his strength and a cry of solitude. Gojo Satoru had been the strongest for so long that he had forgotten what it meant to be weak.
He took another step forward, burning curse energy in amounts he had never burned through before. For the first time in his life, Gojo Satoru was at risk of running out of curse energy, and yet he took another step, this one stronger than the rest as his bones went from broken and splintered to barely healed. After another dozen steps, Satoru came out of the sea of dust and debris he had been in, and eyes closed he breathed in fresh air for the first time in over a minute.
Then he opened his eyes, and he was in the epicenter of the attack. Like the eye of the hurricane, the epicenter of Emperor Sutoku's attack was empty of any lingering dust; the shockwave that had followed after had cleared it.
There were just the three vengeful curses present. None of them unscathed, other than Sugawara. Taira's extremities looked burnt as his true form was revealed as a skull-headed and skinless four-armed gorilla with black wispy hair that trailed down its spine. Its giant muscles had multiple scars and lacerations from where the vestiges of the Emperor Sutoku's attack had struck him as well.
Emperor Sutoku himself stood to the side. His lower body was a humongous centipede, while his upper body consisted of two regular human arms and a giant pair of pincers. His head was a grotesque skull with packed insect eyes in each socket. He was the one who bore the most damage. The pincer and the limb on his right side were simply gone. RED had destroyed it, as were the eyes on that part of the face, looking like they had burst in their sockets.
The Kamo ancestor glowered at him with a furious glare and a growl, one that made Satoru grin as he cracked his neck to his side. He stood alone, exhausted, hurt, his curse technique and six eyes stripped from him, and still he grinned at the trio before him and said.
"And with this, you can tell the world that you had a fighting chance against Gojo Satoru." He declared with a mad grin that forced two of the vengeful spirits to take a step back as the third one laughed.
A/N: This is one of those chapter's i just loved writing. Satoru stripped off Infinity.