Jujutsu Kaisen: Tragedy Life Simulator-Chapter 96 - The Throne Built on Mountains of Dead [bonus]
[Up on the rooftop, your landing hit like a meteor.]
[Concrete blew apart under your feet, cracks racing outward in every direction.]
[Miguel’s pupils shrank. He dropped into a fighting stance, every muscle wound tight.]
["Hey, now... this isn’t how it was supposed to go. My opponent was supposed to be the Special Grade down there."]
[The instant Suda recognized you, all the color left her face. She slapped a hand over the comm at her ear and shouted into it.]
["Change of plans! It’s Hayase! He ignored Gojo and came straight for Miguel! The plan’s blown, we need to move up the..."]
[She never finished.]
[Behind you, the giant LED billboard on the neighboring tower flashed a hard red, stretching your shadow across the rooftop until it spilled right up to Suda’s feet.]
[The moment she opened her mouth, that shadow came alive.]
[A huge serpent made of thick, black cursed energy burst out of it without warning.]
[No pause. No mercy.]
[Its jaws snapped shut around Manami Suda’s slim neck and crushed it. Blood sprayed into the air. She didn’t even get a scream out before the life left her body.]
[On the other end of the comm, Toshihisa Negi’s voice crackled through, confused and sharp.]
["Hello? What happened? Suda? Answer me!"]
[The only reply was the soft thump of a headless body hitting the rooftop, followed by the dull knock, knock of a beautiful head rolling twice across the concrete.]
[Blood spread fast.]
[You stood over it without a flicker of expression and slowly raised your right hand. Metal whispered against lacquered wood as Asakirimaru, the blade that had already taken Larue’s life, slid free inch by inch.]
[You lifted the gleaming edge and pointed it straight at Miguel, who stood there braced like he was staring down a natural disaster.]
[Your voice was cold enough to frost the air.]
["So you speak Japanese. Good. That makes this easier... are you one of Suguru’s people too?"]
[Miguel’s whole body stayed locked tight. He didn’t answer right away.
Because the thing standing in front of him felt wrong.]
[You weren’t a Special Grade sorcerer. If anything, the raw amount of cursed energy pouring off you was actually lower than his.]
[But the pressure coming from you was horrible.]
[Your killing intent was so savage it felt like it had been crushed inward and chained down, only for something ugly and unstable to keep throbbing underneath it. It made Miguel’s skin crawl.]
[Then his eyes dropped below your knees.]
[Blood was still streaming out of both pant legs, pooling on the rooftop in dark, widening puddles.]
[He knew what that meant immediately. This man had wrecked his own body for that kind of speed.]
[And he hadn’t even blinked.]
[There was also the shadow technique that had killed Suda in an instant. Miguel had heard Larue talk about your ability to replicate cursed techniques, but in the few seconds since you’d arrived, he’d already picked up the residual traces of at least two entirely different and absurdly dangerous techniques coming off you.]
[A line of cold sweat slid down Miguel’s temple.]
[Geto’s warning, never face him alone, hadn’t been dramatic. If anything, it had undersold the problem.]
[A sharp crack split the air.]
[Miguel gave up pretending to be calm. He grabbed the frayed rope in his hands with both palms and pulled it tight. The Black Rope, woven over decades by the sorcerers of his homeland, sang as it stretched.]
[He met your gaze and answered in a low, hard voice.]
["Of course I’m Geto’s ally. I’ll use everything I have to help him claim his throne."]
[Whatever little expression had been left on your face vanished completely.]
[You looked at him and said it like a simple fact.]
["So even if that throne is built on top of tens of thousands of innocent corpses, you still don’t care. Fine. I get it."]
[Even while you spoke, Phantom Night Parade was already tearing apart his cursed energy signature and the structure of his technique. Your brain, pushed right to the edge, kept running calculations in parallel.]
[The cursed energy coming off that strange rope was abnormal. That much was obvious.
And after overhearing him and Suda, the rest of the picture had fallen into place. In Geto’s original plan, this man, Miguel, had been assigned to fight Satoru Gojo alone.
Nobody alive understood how terrifying Gojo’s Limitless was better than Geto.]
And he’d still decided that Miguel was the answer.]
[That meant only one thing. The man in front of you was strong enough to justify the assignment, and he had some method of dealing with Limitless.]
[None of it mattered anymore. He was going to die tonight.]
[That was the only ending this night had left.]
[Speed had been the plan from the start.]
[But until the system finished parsing Miguel’s technique, you kept your head cool and settled for high-speed probing instead.]
[Extreme Overload Control was already pushed through both legs. Cursed Energy flooded every movement like water breaking through a dam. Human eyes couldn’t keep up with you anymore.]
[Asakirimaru turned into a blur in your hands.
Slash... thrust... feint...
Every line went for Miguel’s throat or heart, the blade shrieking through the air each time it passed.]
[What you hadn’t expected was for the sunglass-wearing sorcerer to actually keep up.]
[His movements were bizarre, loose and rhythmic. Almost like he was dancing in the middle of a death match. Somehow that strange flow let him take your killing combinations head-on, peeling them apart one after another with scary precision.]
[Then, in the middle of another clash, you caught it.]
[Crack.]
[The sound was sharp enough to feel like a whip snapping right beside your ear.]
[The instant Miguel’s Black Rope hit your blade, or even brushed the Cursed Energy wrapped around your skin, Phantom Night Parade’s analysis staggered hard.]
[It was like a machine getting blasted by interference.]
[Your eyes narrowed.]
[So that was it.]
[Now you understood why Geto had the guts to send this man alone against Satoru Gojo.]
[The problem wasn’t Miguel himself.]
[It was the rope in his hands.]
[That unremarkable cursed tool worked on the same principle as the Inverted Spear of Heaven, the Special Grade weapon that had nearly killed Gojo years ago. Interfere with cursed techniques on contact. Disrupt them. Cancel them outright if it landed cleanly enough.]
[A few more exchanges told you the rest.]
[Every time the Black Rope successfully messed with Phantom Night Parade, a tiny section near the end of it burned away and crumbled into ash.]
[A consumable.]
[A strategic-grade cursed tool that could interfere with Limitless, and every use shaved part of it away.]
[Your probing had stayed cold and clinical the whole time.]
[Miguel’s reaction did not.]
[He looked down at the rope in his hands, now very obviously shorter than before, and for the first time since the fight started, real horror crept onto his face.]
[He’d made an assumption at the start. The monstrous speed. The raw physical force. The way your body kept moving like it had forgotten human limits. He’d taken all of that for some kind of reinforcement technique, which was exactly why he’d tested the Black Rope on you.]
[What he got back shattered that idea.]
[What you were doing wasn’t a Cursed Technique.]
[It was brute-force self-destruction.]
[Blood vessels rupturing. Muscle fibers tearing. Then Reverse Cursed Technique patching the damage back together in real time so you could keep going.]
[Miguel had seen you healing with his own eyes, and even then, his brain still rejected it.]
[No sane sorcerer fought like this.]
[No sane sorcerer used ripping their own flesh apart as a standard way to accelerate just because they could heal afterward.]
[To Miguel, every swing of your sword gave off the same ugly message.]
[This man is trying to destroy himself.]
[And the worst part was that this still might not have been your actual technique.]
[If the crushing physical pressure he was barely surviving wasn’t even the real problem, then he had to keep some part of his attention free, waiting for whatever your true killing move was.]
[Especially after what he’d already seen.]
[That giant black serpent had burst from your shadow and torn Manami Suda’s head off in a heartbeat.]
[So while Miguel fought, part of his focus stayed locked on the shadow at your feet, stretching and shrinking with the rooftop’s neon glare.]
[That split-second hesitation was already enough to doom him.]
