The journey back to the outskirts of Tokyo toward Jujutsu High felt like walking into a meticulously laid trap. We moved with the paranoia of hunted animals. We didn't take the subway; the subterranean tunnels felt too much like the veins of the dead System. We didn't take the main roads, where the traffic had begun to flow again in a hauntingly normal fashion.
Instead, we moved through the jagged back alleys, staying in the long, flickering shadows of buildings that were still bleeding residual data. Every time a crow flew overhead, cawing into the damp morning air, I felt a phantom twitch in my thumb—the urge to check for a quest marker or a mini-map. Every time my heart raced, my eyes darted to the top left of my vision, searching for a stamina bar that was no longer there. But the screen was gone. There was only the cold, biting reality of the morning wind and the heavy silence of my friends.
As the massive, weather-beaten wooden gates of the school finally came into view, the atmosphere shifted. Usually, the mountain air here was crisp, scented with pine and the faint aroma of incense. Today, it felt like a heavy, wet blanket draped over our shoulders.
"They're waiting for us," Megumi whispered. His hand didn't go to his pockets; it rested firmly on the hilt of his combat knife. The shadows beneath his feet were unusually long, stretching toward the gate as if trying to warn us. "And they didn't bring tea and snacks to celebrate our return."
We pushed through the gates. The central courtyard, usually a place of quiet training, was occupied. It was lined with dozens of sorcerers I didn't recognize—men and women in traditional black uniforms, their faces obscured by white paper talismans inscribed with binding runes. The Execution Squad.
Standing at the top of the stone stairs was Gakuganji, the principal of the Kyoto sister school. He didn't look like an old man today; he looked like a statue. He clutched his electric guitar as if it were a broadsword. Beside him, three masked elders sat behind a thin bamboo screen. They were shadows behind a veil, ancient and nameless.
"Ren of the Void," a raspy, ancient voice echoed from behind the screen, sounding like dry leaves skittering on a grave. "Step forward and be judged for your transgressions."
The Trial of the Glitch
I stepped into the center of the courtyard, the gravel crunching under my boots. It was a lonely sound. Maki and Nobara immediately moved to stand beside me, their loyalty instinctive, but they were cut off. A wall of transparent, shimmering blue cursed energy slammed down from the sky, a high-level barrier that separated me from my friends.
"Don't!" I shouted, holding up a hand as I saw Maki's hand fly to her blade and Nobara reach for her hammer. "If we fight them now, we prove every lie they believe about us. Let them talk."
"Ren," Gakuganji said, his voice unusually grave, devoid of its usual sharp edge. "You have committed the ultimate taboo. You did not just exercise cursed energy; you manipulated the very fabric of our reality. You cooperated with a foreign, digital 'System' to rewrite the laws of the world. To the higher-ups, you are no longer a student. You are a Special Grade Hazard—a glitch that must be corrected."
[STATUS: JUDGMENT IN PROGRESS]
[THREAT LEVEL: S (BEYOND CLASSIFICATION)]
"I didn't work with the System! I broke the damn thing!" I argued, my voice echoing off the stone walls of the surrounding shrines. "I saved this city from being deleted by a machine that saw people as code! Ask Yuta! Ask Maki! They saw what happened at the top of that tower!"
"Yuta Okkotsu is currently under house arrest and investigation for his failure to complete his Mandatory Quest," the voice behind the screen countered coldly. "And Maki Zenin has always been a rebel, a girl without cursed energy who seeks to pull down the pillars of her own house. Their testimony is compromised. The fact remains, Ren: you possess the Void. A power that does not belong to the history of sorcery. A power that can erase existence without leaving a trace of a soul behind."
The Chains of Command
One of the elders tapped a heavy wooden staff on the floor. The sound was like a thunderclap. Suddenly, the ground beneath my feet erupted in a complex, glowing array of sealing circles. This wasn't the glowing purple of my gravity; it was a deep, oily black. Ink-like shadows spiraled up my legs like hungry vines, wrapping around my waist and binding my arms to my sides.
I gasped as the seals tightened. This wasn't a System attack. There was no "HP" bar dropping, but I could feel my very circulation being strangled. This was old-school, high-level Sealing Jujutsu, perfected over a thousand years to pin down monsters.
"You will be held in the deepest level of the school's prison," Gakuganji announced, his eyes fixed on the horizon, refusing to look at me. "Until we can determine if your 'Void' can be safely extracted from your soul... or if the soul itself must be destroyed to remove the threat to the world's stability."
I felt the ink burning into my skin, cold and acidic. In the old days, I would have relied on a [Gravity Repulse]—a simple button press in my mind to shatter the floor. But the buttons were gone. I had to find the source of the power within the messy, unrefined space of my own heart. I closed my eyes, reaching past the panic, reaching for the "Void" that simmered in my chest.
It wasn't a skill. It wasn't a level. It was a feeling—a hollow, silent space where everything and nothing existed at the same time. I didn't push against the seals. I simply invited them into the nothingness.
The black ink didn't break. It didn't explode. It faded. The deep black turned to grey, then to a faint mist, and then it simply dissolved into nothingness, as if it had never been written.
The courtyard went deathly silent. Gakuganji took a sharp step back, his hand trembling on the strings of his guitar. Even the elders behind the screen went still.
"I'm not going into a cage," I said, my voice low and vibrating with a frequency that made the paper talismans on the executioners' faces flutter and tear. "I stopped the Architect because he wanted to control the script of everyone's life. I'm not going to let a group of old men do the same thing just because you're afraid of a world you can't control with your old scrolls."
The Declaration
I looked past the elders, toward the horizon where the sun was now fully visible, shining on a Tokyo that was scarred but breathing. The "Errors" were still out there—monsters born from the wreckage of the System.
"The Culling Game changed the rules forever," I continued, looking at Maki and Nobara through the shimmering blue barrier. They were watching me with a mixture of pride and fear. "There are monsters out there now—glitches in reality—that your old books can't explain and your old seals can't hold. You need me. You need all of us. You can either work with us to fix the world, or you can stay behind your screens and wait for the 'Errors' to find you."
I turned my back on the elders—a move of pure defiance—and walked toward the blue barrier. I didn't use a technique. I didn't chant. I just walked. As my shoulder touched the blue energy, it didn't push back. It shattered like a sheet of thin glass, the shards evaporating into light before they could even hit the gravel.
"We're leaving," I told Maki, Nobara, and Megumi. They didn't hesitate. They stepped into line behind me. "We have a city to protect. If the elders want to arrest us, they can try. But they'll have to find us first."
As we walked out of the heavy gates of Jujutsu High, the weight of the mountain seemed to lift. We were no longer students. We were no longer players. We were officially rogues. No school to guide us, no System to reward us, and no rules to bind us. Just five friends, a dying world of ghosts, and the infinite Void between us.