Gojo was a little curious, honestly, what kind of expression this arrogant prig would wear after getting a lecture straight out of modern physics.
"This ability of mine, the one that keeps your attacks from reaching me, is called the Limitless Cursed Technique..."
He rattled it off with the ease of long practice. He'd done this speech more times than he could count.
As the explanation unfolded, the sneer and disdain drained out of Regulus's face, replaced by a flat, glassy confusion.
What, exactly, was the convergent infinite series inside Achilles's "paradox"?
What did it mean for a given distance to keep halving itself forever?
Every word the man said was a word Regulus recognized. Strung together, though, they read like scripture in a language he'd never learned.
After listening for a long stretch, the only thing he managed to pin down was this: so long as this man didn't want something reaching him, nothing ever would.
This ability itself is an infringement on my rights!
Resentment surged up, thick and hot.
Attacking others, wounding them, killing them, those were his prerogatives.
What gave this white-haired smartass the authority to make his attacks fall short, forever?
Worse still, knowing the mechanism didn't help him. Not at all.
He couldn't even begin to imagine a counter.
The whole trade had bought him nothing.
"Your turn."
Gojo finished his explanation and smiled pleasantly across at him.
Refusal to honor the Vow wasn't a worry. This wasn't some hollow promise whispered by a faithless lover. Vows bound the soul.
The terms were clear. Renege, or conceal anything, and the Vow's effect would strip the offender of their own ability. Even an idiot could do the math on that one.
Regulus scoffed, but he didn't stall. He launched into it.
"My Authority is called Lion's Heart. So long as my heartbeat continues, I can halt the state of any target it's applied to, locking it in place."
He kept it crisp and compact, clearly trying to match the deliberately opaque flavor of Gojo's explanation.
"Halt their state?"
"Hmm. I see."
"I keep telling you people. You Sin Archbishops aren't strong on paper, but those Authorities of yours are obnoxious across the board."
Gojo pushed his bangs aside, something resigned in his eyes.
He'd floated the Contract offer mostly to leverage a quirk of Cursed Technique and get the information for free, in hopes that once he understood the trick, he could crack it and put an end to this. Having now heard it out, he found the Authority more brazenly unfair than even his Limitless Cursed Technique.
Fixing one's own state. That was a fancy way of saying invincible.
Lock your body at a given moment and you didn't take wounds. You didn't age. You didn't tire or hunger. Poison wouldn't touch you.
Applied to objects, the destructive potential was off the charts. The object's motion was frozen, which meant, on top of everything else, it became unbreakable.
Stack both properties together.
That answered the question of how a man could turn kicked sand or a thrown pebble into a lethal attack.
Without Limitless, blocking something like that wasn't really an option for anyone.
How were you supposed to stop an unbreakable object locked on a permanent forward vector? Ordinary weapons and armor simply wouldn't do it.
Even a puff of breath from his lungs could carve a person in half.
Still, turning it over a moment longer, Gojo caught on something.
By Regulus's own account, the Authority held the user's state in place.
That meant every physiological process stopped. No thirst, no hunger, no fatigue.
Which also meant his internal organs were all frozen.
So how was he satisfying the condition that his heart keep beating?
A flicker of interest moved behind the blue eyes. He might have found something worth poking at.
"I'm no expert, but if anyone's heart stops beating long enough, they die, right?"
A small smile curled on his lips as he said it.
"Heh. You think you've figured out how to handle me?"
"Whether it works, I couldn't tell you. But it's worth a proper test."
The words were barely out when a searing glow erupted between them.
Regulus laughed under his breath and crossed his arms, watching with open contempt.
"Pathetic. You'll see in a moment how futile all this is."
Gojo didn't bother with a reply. He simply began pouring everything he had toward the man in front of him.
One after another, small blue spheres gathered at his fingertips.
His reasoning went like this.
To keep satisfying his Authority's condition, Regulus likely only locked his state at the moments attacks were about to land. That window couldn't be long, because a heart held still long enough would kill him anyway.
In which case, maintaining a relentless, overwhelming bombardment would force the lock to stay active.
The man would either release it to let his heart beat again, in which case he'd eat the next attack, or keep it up and die when the heart refused to restart.
Whether the logic held, Gojo had no idea. He wanted to try it.
Blue after Blue launched across the gap.
Regulus didn't move.
A faint, bored distaste sat on his face as he let the attacks come.
Thunderclaps rolled across the earth, one after another, until the ground shook like a city in a quake.
Through all of it, Regulus stood exactly where he'd been.
A slight sway, now and then, when the ground shifted under him. Nothing more than that.
Gojo kept the rhythm up at full power for ten straight minutes.
For every second of those ten minutes Regulus was inside the storm, without a breath of respite.
Even so.
His expression never altered. No alarm surfaced. He made no move to retaliate.
He simply watched, the way one watches a bad circus act.
"So you've got something else holding the line."
Gojo studied him without a trace of disappointment, rubbing his chin instead, contemplative.
"No wonder you were so generous about telling me your Authority."
"Are you any different?"
Regulus's lip curled.
"Me?"
Gojo jabbed a thumb at himself, face twisting in exaggerated innocence.
"I told you mine in full, unlike you... wait a second. Don't tell me you actually didn't follow what I said?"
When it came to needling people, Gojo had his craft.
He said it with a performatively startled look, watching Regulus the way one watches a particularly slow child.
Regulus's mouth twitched. The fury in his eyes was no longer hiding.
"Don't say I never gave you a chance. Come on. See if you can crack my ability."
Gojo yawned, stretched out on the ground, and beckoned lazily with his fingers.
"You think I'd pull a stunt as stupid as yours?"
Regulus's scoff dripped disdain.
"I really am starting to believe you didn't understand a word. You don't have even the beginnings of an idea right now, do you?"
"Who do you think you're looking down on, you bastard?"
His eyes blazed, and he lashed out in pure temper.
"Looking down on you, sure. You can't so much as touch the hem of my shirt."
Gojo smiled, breezy.
"And you think you can hurt me?"
The rage was undiluted now.
"Heh."
The sound he made meant nothing on the surface, but what lay behind his eyes was unmistakable.
"Fine, then. Let's settle in here together and find out who wins in the end."
Gojo hated this kind of mess. He always had.
And when it came to this particular mess, he had to admit he didn't have many tools. Still, his lack of an answer didn't mean no answer existed.
Not when there was someone nearby who came with a cheat code wired into his bones.
Reinhard van Astrea.
Let him handle it. Perhaps the knight carried some Divine Protection uniquely suited to peeling back a defense like this.
As a knight of the kingdom, cleaning up after Witch Cult Sin Archbishops fell squarely into Reinhard's job description.
All Gojo had to do was keep this thick-skulled fool parked right here.
Doing the math on time, the caravan should have been close to turning back by now.
Once Reinhard arrived, the rest wasn't his problem. Cheat code versus cheat code, see whose plot armor ran thicker.
"Are you trying to be funny?"
"I can burn decades out here with you. Centuries, even. Doesn't faze me."
"What qualifies you to compete with me?"
"Words, words, words."
Gojo slid the dark glasses back onto his face. "If you're a coward, then leave. I'm not stopping you."
He punctuated it with a yawn.
"If you're going to keep swinging, keep the noise down. I'm trying to rest."
With that he tuned the man out entirely, eyes drifting shut. To all appearances, he was genuinely settling in for a nap.
Regulus, watching this, felt the heat rise. Being dismissed so thoroughly stung, and it left him caught on both horns.
Arrogance ran deep in him, but Gojo's words had put him in a corner where walking away and staying both felt wrong.
If he left, didn't that prove Gojo right?
If he stayed, what was he doing here?
The uncomfortable truth was symmetrical. The man couldn't hurt him, and he couldn't hurt the man.
Was he really going to stand around like a fool, waiting for some winner to be declared?
He sank into heavy thought. Several hundred years of life, and this was the first time he'd run into a situation shaped like this one.
He'd never come across anyone he couldn't solve, apart from Pandora.
His head was beginning to ache.
A muscle in his cheek jumped. With no better idea, he took to throwing punches and kicks at the reclining figure, working off steam.
The most it earned was the faint flutter of a few stray hairs on Gojo's forehead.
After a while, even that exhausted him, and he stopped.
Staring down at the apparently-sleeping man, his chest burned with a fresh wave of helpless anger.
"Giving up already?"
Gojo's voice cut in out of nowhere. He lifted the glasses a fraction and grinned.
Regulus laughed once, coldly, but didn't resume.
"There's no need to make it so complicated."
"You're human. You need food. You need water. A few days of cutting those off, and you're done."
"Sure, sure."
Gojo waved it off. "Try it, then. Just make sure not to let me live through it."
Regulus couldn't be bothered to argue further. He walked over, sat down beside the prone figure, and lapsed into silence, apparently mulling something over.
Gojo made no complaint about the company.
In that strange, grudging peace, another two hours or so slipped past.
Then, from the distance, the sound of movement.
He pushed himself upright and stretched.
Looking out across the plain, he saw a long line of Dragon Carriages snaking toward them. Unless he was mistaken, this was the convoy sent to haul the White Whale back.
A quick scan of the line picked out Felt and the others without much trouble.
Reinhard and his group were seated at the very front, in the lead carriage.
"This is nonsense. Charging that much, honestly? Those Royal Capital Commerce Guild people are vampires..."
Felt sat with her small face sour, grumbling under her breath.
Once they'd made it back to the Royal Capital, they'd started hunting down commercial guilds, trying to scrape together enough Dragon Carriages to haul the White Whale home.
Except.
Reinhard had led them on a circuit through the whole city, and even with him at the helm, securing the necessary number of carriages had been uphill work.
The head of House Karsten, Crusch, had recently been buying up Dragon Carriages and weapons and supplies in bulk.
Which meant the Royal Capital's pool of available carriages had dropped to a trickle.
A handful would have been no trouble. Moving a creature the size of the White Whale was a different matter. You didn't do that with a handful.
After enough asking around, Felt's options boiled down to two.
Approach Crusch, whoever she was preparing for, and see whether she'd cut them a deal on the carriages she'd hoarded.
Or go to Anastasia.
The head of the Hoshin Company had no shortage of carriages at her command, given her line of business. She also had standing relationships with every commercial house in the capital. If she were willing to lean on those connections, pulling together a convoy wouldn't be beyond her.
...
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