PROLOGUE

Gojo Satoru didn’t feel the pain anymore.

No heartbreak.

No regret.

No body.

Just… the slow, eerie sensation of something unraveling. Like a thread tugged loose from the fabric of his soul and cast adrift into the void.

Then—

He existed again.

He gasped like a drowning man breaching the surface, lungs pulling in air that didn’t feel meant for him. It tasted wrong. Heavy. Metallic. His first sensation was heat—no, pressure. Both? A dense yet unstable hum saturated the air around him. Something almost artificial. Mechanized. Laced with violence.

Not cursed energy. 

Not his world.

His eyes snapped open. The Six Eyes flared to life.

Around him stretched devastation. A cratered city block. Buildings torn apart, jagged steel and broken glass jutting from the ruins. Flames poured from shattered windows at the edge of the crater. Smoke curled upward into a grey, bleeding sky. Screams echoed in the distance. Sirens wailed. The air reeked of scorched metal and fresh blood.

He stood at the center of it all. Untouched.

Nearby, a body twitched. What remained of it. The man’s torso ended in an abrupt mess—legs nowhere in sight, exposed organs steaming on the cracked concrete.

A steady beep pierced through his examination. 

Gojo’s gaze shifted. 

A small device, half-melted but still blinking, was embedded in the ground. Faint spatial warping shimmered around it—just enough to tickle the edge of his perception. Definitely not cursed energy. 

He crouched beside it, eyes narrowing slightly.

“…A time-delay spatial trap?” he murmured. “Crude. But clever.”

The blinking quickened.

Gojo stood.

“I’d say ‘nice try,’” he said aloud, “but I don’t appreciate second acts.”

A sharp click echoed across the street.

Then the air twisted. A pulse of impossible force surged outward, the kind of spatial warping even Gojo’s Six Eyes struggled to map—like someone had forced reality to behave by sheer insanity instead of reason. 

Another explosion designed to erase whatever had somehow survived the first blast.

But it didn’t reach him.

Infinity activated and held.

When the distortion faded, Gojo stood exactly where he had been. Calm. Dusting off imaginary dust from his uniform.

“Definitely not Japan,” he said to no one in particular.

A distorted laugh rang out above him, filtering through a voice modulator. Giddy. Mocking. Unhinged.

“You survived that?”

The voice came from a rooftop across the ruined street. A figure stood silhouetted in smoke and fire, armored in reinforced plating cobbled together like a bomb factory’s fever dream. Helmeted. Armed to the teeth. She radiated the unstable confidence of someone who couldn’t tolerate failure, the kind of person who would rather blow up a city block than admit a miscalculation.

She pointed at him like she’d just spotted a new toy—or worse, her next experiment.

“You’re either a teleporter,” she said, “or a cape with a tinker power so busted it makes physics cry. That was a Mark Eight Spatial Distortion Mine. Version four-point-six. It shouldn’t leave atoms behind.”

Gojo tilted his head, unimpressed. “Mark Eight? Sounds like overcompensation.”

He gave a light shrug and casually stretched out his limbs. His blindfold was gone, lost somewhere between death and whatever this was. So the Six Eyes shone with its unnatural brightness, cutting through smoke and distortion with effortless clarity. They tracked everything: every twitch of movement, every flicker of unfamiliar energy humming through the wreckage.

“I’ve died once already,” he said, voice uncharacteristically flat. “Not really in the mood for an encore.”

The woman said something—shouted it, really—but the modulator garbled it into static.

Then she threw something.

An orb, smooth and gleaming, arced through the air with a hiss of displaced pressure.

Gojo’s eyes tracked the orb’s path, too fast for a hand-thrown explosive, too intentional to be random.

Small. Too small. 

The moment it struck the ground, it detonated with a sound like bone snapping underwater.

The blast didn’t scorch or shatter. It melted.

The pavement bubbled. The nearby body slumped in on itself, flesh collapsing like wet paper. Everything organic bar him within a ten-meter radius liquefied in seconds.

“That’s not how bombs work,” Gojo muttered.

He frowned. By all logic, it shouldn’t have done anything like what it did. No cursed energy. No visible ignition. No buildup. Just—

He cracked his neck, slow and intimidating, and stepped toward the woman above. 

“Alright,” he said, gaze fixed on her. “Crazy bomber lady. Let’s have a talk about boundaries.”