Satoru Gojo sat on the ground with every line of his posture dripping contempt.
That scorn came through loudest in how casually he held himself, as if none of this warranted his attention.
But.
For all his dismissive air, his mind was turning over the Sin Archbishop of Greed's ability, Regulus, piece by piece.
This was exactly what bothered him, as he'd said himself.
Each Sin Archbishop's Authority ran stranger than the last, and every one of them packed a nasty punch.
Short of the owner spelling it out, guessing at the mechanics was a pain.
And pain-in-the-ass work was the last thing that interested him.
Given the choice, he would have rather skipped these people altogether. A straight fight against someone like Reinhard van Astrea was more his speed than puzzling out what bizarre trick the next lunatic had up his sleeve.
Through his Six Eyes, he'd watched each of his attacks, Blue and Red alike, strike Regulus with pinpoint accuracy.
Not a scratch on him.
This wasn't like his own Limitless Cursed Technique, which kept incoming attacks from ever reaching him.
The man had eaten every hit, clean.
Yet something about him didn't add up.
Like that sand he'd flung earlier.
As though the man himself existed in some kind of untouchable state.
And somehow that same property extended, at will, to things around him. His clothes. The objects he threw. Still, Gojo's sharper instincts had caught something else: whenever one of his attacks landed, the ground beneath Regulus still buckled and cracked, exactly as it should have.
"How generous of you. Don't mind if I dig in."
Lye showed no trace of discouragement at his failed opening. If anything, the opposite.
A feast like Satoru Gojo came along once in a lifetime, and he wasn't about to rush the tasting.
"Swallow, hold, chew, gnaw, bite, tear, rend!"
"Gluttonous Binge!"
Lye's body blurred into deep-purple afterimages, circling Gojo in a frenzy.
No matter how cunning the angle, no matter how twisted the approach, the dagger in his hand never came within a hair of its target.
His agility didn't matter. His technique didn't matter. None of it reached.
The blade was useless, so he threw it away without hesitation and drove an open palm toward Gojo's chest.
A strange sheen shimmered across that gaunt, filthy hand.
Anyone watching would have known that palm meant something very bad for whoever it touched.
Gojo simply watched, unimpressed.
The result was identical. Weapon or bare skin, nothing closed the final distance.
Fists tested. Blade tested. Lye still wasn't done.
He sprang backward to open space, then snapped both arms out to the sides. The mana in the air answered, surging at his call.
Water beaded from nothing, gathered, and coiled into a roaring waterspout that bore down on Gojo.
The column screamed forward.
The sound alone was monstrous, whipping the surrounding air into howling gusts.
Physical, magical, it made no difference. That invisible force around Gojo refused to yield.
And without breaking through it, nothing could touch him.
"You're starting to bore me to sleep."
"So go ahead and die first."
Gojo raised a finger as he spoke. Behind the dark lenses, his pale blue eyes sharpened by a fraction.
"Phase."
"Twilight."
"Eyes of Wisdom."
The words dropped from his lips calm and measured, each syllable shaped like a key fitting a lock.
The instant his voice began, Lye sensed something coming. He moved like a startled monkey, quick leaps meant to carve out distance.
But.
Mid-motion, his body reported the truth: a powerful, wrong-feeling pull had taken hold of him.
It tugged at him so hard he felt the beginnings of real resistance, something he couldn't shrug off.
The small, wiry frame stumbled forward against its own will, dragged toward the blue sphere that was the Blue.
Knowing he was in trouble, Lye twisted his mouth into a grim smile, and right in front of Gojo his body rippled and changed.
What had been a scrawny figure swelled into a thickset adult man.
The newly-muscled fist came hammering down into the ground, sinking in up to the elbow, anchoring him in place against the pull.
Except.
Blue wasn't merely suction.
Especially not Blue empowered by the chant.
Gojo watched the struggle with no hurry at all, then flicked the condensed Blue from his hand straight at its target.
The ground tore apart in its wake. The earth itself was hurled upward.
By the time it reached Lye, it had swallowed stones and soil from the ruined path, swelling into a massive sphere that barreled into him.
"BOOM!"
His figure vanished inside it.
Before the dust could even start to settle, a searing line of red lanced out without warning, streaking after him.
Attack chained into attack. There was no room for him to recover, let alone retaliate.
Blue, reinforced by the chant, had pinned him in place.
Escaping Red's reach was effectively impossible.
Gojo didn't linger on Lye. He turned his gaze to Regulus, who hadn't lifted a finger to help even when his fellow Sin Archbishop had clearly been in mortal danger.
"Now. It's your turn to entertain me."
"Entertain you?"
"Who do you think you are? Is this a joke?"
Regulus flickered into existence in front of him.
This time he didn't bother with kicked sand or tossed pebbles. He swung a full-bodied punch at Gojo's face.
An attack at that level wasn't even worth lifting an eyelid for.
And as expected, the fist froze in the air before him, unable to advance another inch.
The interruption gave Gojo an opening to satisfy some curiosity.
While Regulus clenched his teeth and strained to push through the Limitless Cursed Technique, Gojo simply loosed a Hollow Technique: Purple at point-blank range.
"KRRA-BOOOOM!"
Thunder split the sky.
The leaves of Flugel's tree rattled overhead with the shock.
Through the chaos, the torrent of energy from Purple struck Regulus and split clean in half around him, tearing off to either side.
That force ripped the earth open and atomized everything in its path.
Everything, that is, except the man standing in the middle.
Gojo watched it all with quiet focus. He hadn't layered the chant on the Purple this time.
But from what the Six Eyes had just shown him, that detail wouldn't have mattered.
If point-blank range did nothing, adding the chant wouldn't change the outcome.
This wasn't a problem of raw output.
Regulus's Authority hid some kind of secret, and until that secret was cracked open, landing a hit on him bordered on impossible.
Much like the Limitless Cursed Technique, in a way.
"That's your counterattack?"
"Hahaha, useless! Nothing you do can hurt me!"
"And nobody can! Nobody wins against me! Sword Saint, dragon, doesn't matter, all of it, useless! Useless, every last one of you!"
Seeing that his attacks had achieved nothing, Regulus cackled like a man reclaiming lost ground, every ounce of his arrogant self-regard on full display.
"Oh? Is that so?"
Gojo's smile didn't shift. His composure didn't crack. Regulus's attitude bounced right off him.
"Since it seems neither of us can actually hurt the other, let's sign a Contract."
"A fair, honest exchange of information about our abilities. Then we'll see who gets to kill whom. How does that sound?"
"Or are you afraid that if you reveal your power, I'll find a way to kill you, and you'd rather refuse..."
"Are you out of your mind? I am the most satisfied man in this world! A complete being! Unshakable in body and soul!"
Regulus cut him off, sneering.
"Why the hell should I do anything on your terms?"
"I see."
Gojo nodded as if the answer had confirmed something.
"So much for the mighty Sin Archbishop. On the outside you play the swaggering tyrant, but deep down you're just a coward who..."
"Who are you to define me?"
"You, infringing on the rights of others!"
It struck Regulus, in that moment, that in several hundred years he had never met a more infuriating creature than Satoru Gojo. Not one.
Every other loathsome bastard he'd put in the ground long ago.
None of them had ever gotten to stand there running their mouth at him.
Even that unkillable Pandora hadn't been half this irritating.
And now he was stuck with someone who, like himself, couldn't be harmed no matter the attack, and that someone happened to have a tongue that landed on every single nerve Regulus owned.
It left him livid and powerless at the same time, which was its own particular kind of misery.
"You do like to throw that word around, don't you. Rights, rights, rights. Something unpleasant in your past, maybe? Tch, tch, how sad."
Gojo gave him a pitying look, which curdled into a sly grin.
"No wonder you're so defensive about it. Scared, small, gutless..."
He pulled his dark glasses down the bridge of his nose. Those pale blue eyes seemed to reach straight through a person and read what was underneath.
"Here's something you should know. I have a Divine Protection that lets me see straight through people. So I can tell, at a glance, exactly what's going on in there. Including the feelings you're trying to bury under all that arrogance..."
"A Contract, was it?"
A vein ticked at Regulus's temple. He stared at the white-haired man in front of him and made up his mind.
Whatever it took, he was going to put this one in the dirt.
Besides, what did it matter if his opponent learned about his Authority? His wife wasn't with him, and there was no way anyone was breaking it without her.
The reverse, though.
If he learned this man's ability, found the crack, and carved him open because of it, then not only would he get the pleasure of shutting that mouth for good, he'd also keep his own secret safe.
"Man enough to make an actual choice, are we? Looks like I underestimated you."
Gojo's brows lifted in mock surprise.
The mock part, Regulus felt in his teeth. His anger climbed another rung.
Gojo watched the rage build with total indifference. It only registered as one more tiresome delay.
Given the choice between fighting a Witch Cult Sin Archbishop and fighting a Cursed Spirit, he'd take the Cursed Spirit every time.
Against a Cursed Spirit the fight would already be over. He wouldn't be stuck here playing twenty questions with someone whose brain was clearly wired wrong, trying to tease out the rules of their Authority.
"Ah, right. The little lady over there. Want to join in? Or are you really just going to ditch your friend?"
He waved vaguely toward a point off to the side.
The spot where Lye's battered form had been lying was empty. In his place stood a blonde little girl whose height and build weren't so different from the one he'd been pummeling, bare feet on the dirt, clothes somehow spotless in a way Lye's never had been.
She was quietly trying to sneak off.
At the sound of Gojo's voice, her shoulders went rigid. She turned, glanced at him and then at Regulus, and her mouth curved into a sweet little smile.
"Hi, mister, I'm Louis, and my tummy's rumbling, so I'm going to go get something to eat. Bye-bye now."
She turned on her heel, didn't spare Regulus so much as a look, and walked off at a brisk clip. Not a flicker of reluctance about her.
Honestly. Did these people think she was an idiot?
Neither Gojo nor Regulus was packing anything she could handle. Not remotely.
So why stick around?
To get flattened?
Her big brother had already been beaten senseless, which was the only reason she'd gotten the chance to come out at all. She wasn't wasting it.
Let the two monsters chew on each other. She wanted no part of it.
Gojo watched the girl who called herself Louis walk away without moving to stop her. Instead, his gaze drifted back to Regulus.
"Looks like even your partner doesn't rate your chances."
"Enough of your mouth. You wanted a Contract, didn't you?"
The sneer on Regulus's face had teeth. He snapped the words out like a goad.
Gojo shrugged, amused and unbothered, and began drafting the terms.
The Contract itself was simple. Each side would explain their ability to the other.
Straightforward. No traps, no buried clauses.
Regulus signed on without hesitation and bound himself by Vow.
"I'll go first."
Gojo said it with a pleasant little smile. Cursed Technique didn't work like other powers. When someone else learned the details, it actually grew stronger, a quirk that might well have been a parting gift from the world he'd come from.
...
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