The Right Hand of God

Tokyo Metropolitan Jujutsu Technical High School. There, Gojo Satoru, a teacher and renowned as the strongest modern Special Grade Jujutsu Sorcerer, holding a photograph in his hand. It showed a silver-haired girl dressed in a nun's habit.

His current mission, assigned by the higher-ups in the jujutsu world, the Jujutsu Administration Bureau, was to capture the girl alive. Apparently, she had escaped from the UK and come to Japan. This mission was a request from the British jujutsu community.

"Unusual for those stubborn, prideful old geezers," he muttered.

The higher-ups usually looked down on overseas jujutsu communities and were generally uncooperative diplomatically. For them to accept this request so willingly, Gojo assumed a considerable amount of money must have been offered.

"Wow, this is huge. Maybe even more than my bounty," he said, surprised.

There's a dark web site used by jujutsu sorcerers for bounty hunting, covering jobs like assassinations and kidnappings. Even on the dark web, it's fairly well-known among jujutsu sorcerers, and it brought back bitter memories for Gojo from about ten years ago. Out of curiosity, he looked up the girl on the site and found her bounty.

The bounty was 10 billion pounds, roughly 1.6 trillion yen. This was not a sum an individual could muster. Even if all jujutsu sorcerers and curse users pooled their resources, they couldn't gather that amount. This was almost certainly a state-sponsored operation.

The fact that another country was desperate enough to hire curse users and also approach the Jujutsu Administration Bureau indicated how serious this was. The non-lethal condition of the request suggested that the girl had significant value, likely enough to recover the 10 billion pounds.

Curse users aren't idiots. Such an absurd bounty would make them cautious, not out of fear of a breach of contract but because it indicated extreme danger. Even those who had forsaken humanity would avoid obvious risks.

Yet, there were always a few reckless individuals who disregarded danger. And considering the target was a young girl, many fools would flock to such an "easy" job, imagining they could live in luxury forever. Reports indicated that several curse users had already attacked her and were subsequently knocked out or injured and captured by jujutsu sorcerers.

"I really don't feel like doing this," Gojo sighed.

Despite his reputation as a scoundrel, Gojo didn't enjoy tormenting a young girl, especially since she was not a criminal but a runaway. He preferred his adversaries to be those he could defeat without feeling guilty.

As he wandered the city following eyewitness reports, he noticed something odd about the flow of pedestrians. There was a section with significantly fewer people. It wasn't a place where people would naturally stop, and avoiding it meant taking a detour.

Continuing his observation, he felt that the area was repelling people rather than being avoided by them. Suspecting a barrier, he checked with his Six Eyes but detected no cursed energy.

Feeling uneasy, Gojo allowed himself to be led towards the more deserted area. Using his smartphone's map app to track his current location, he discovered residual energy.

"Bingo."

His hunch was correct. Curiously, though, there had been no trace of cursed energy until this point. Following the residual energy, he found a man sitting on the sidewalk, appearing to be drunk.

Getting closer, he realized the man wasn't breathing.

"Is he dead…?"

He had a pulse, and Gojo could hear his heartbeat. Surveying the area, he found more individuals in the same state as he progressed. They were clearly not ordinary people, and the residual energy belonged to these curse users.

Gojo took photos and sent the information to his assistant supervisor. They would dispatch jujutsu sorcerers for capture and transportation.

As he continued, he reached an intersection. The traffic light was green, but there were no cars. Curse users lay unconscious all over the road.

In the center stood a lone girl.

Seeing her, Gojo inadvertently dropped his smartphone.

Exorcising a curse with cursed energy is akin to fighting fire with fire. But have you ever thought that using positive energy could efficiently exorcise a curse, which is essentially a mass of negative energy? While it's true that infusing a curse with reversed cursed energy could exorcise it, it's not that simple.

The first problem is that there are very few users of reversed cursed energy. Even fewer can use it on others. Secondly, it's impractical. Reversed cursed energy is created by multiplying negative energy, producing a positive force, a rare and strenuous feat.

Despite its power, it's energy-consuming. Jujutsu sorcerers already have to manage their cursed energy consumption in battles, making it unreasonable to use for combat. Only someone with extraordinary cursed energy like Yuta Okkotsu or the efficiency of the Six Eyes like Gojo could manage it.

Even they must be strategic about its use. It only offers a decisive blow against curses when injected directly. Reversed cursed energy merely reverses the effects of techniques and doesn't have inherent advantages against curses. Moreover, positive energy is only effective against curses, not against curse users. A high-level sorcerer with such power would generally rely on domain expansion for a sure-kill attack.

But what if someone possessed an immense amount of positive energy, making consumption irrelevant?

While strong negative energy is common among powerful sorcerers and curses, strong positive energy is scarcely known. Today, Gojo updated his record of observing positive energy. The girl radiated an overwhelming, natural force, not an artificial one, with exceptional quality, quantity, and intensity. His Six Eyes perceived her emitting a dazzling light.

Additionally, she had no cursed energy at all, reminiscent of Toji Zenin. Was she a Physical Gifted under Heavenly Restriction?

No, this was clearly not a curse but rather a blessing. The positive energy she wielded suggested she was sent by heaven, not just blessed by it.

"Hello?"

Restarting his frozen body, Gojo spoke to her, masking his surprise.

"Hello," she replied in Japanese, disrupting his pace.

"No malice or hostility, huh?"

The girl observed him with curiosity. Indeed, he harbored no ill will. Why would he against a runaway girl? Only the unconscious curse users could answer that.

"Oh, you can tell? I'm quite the gentleman," he joked, trying not to provoke her.

"Did you do this?" he asked, pointing to the fallen curse users.

"i did it, or rather they did it to themselves. I did some experimenting with them," she answered, fiddling with the cross necklace around her neck.

"If its possible, could you come with me quietly?" Gojo requested.

"I've been taught not to follow strangers."

It was a polite refusal, under the pretext of a typical safety rule.

Negotiations failed. Sighing, Gojo decided to use force. He moved instantaneously, aiming a chop at the back of her neck.

"What?"

The blow, meant to knock her out, had no effect. It felt like hitting a sponge, or rather water, absorbing the impact before it reached its target.

"Is it a cursed tool?"

But he sensed no cursed energy. Instead, the energy was the same as the one radiating from her, a positive force. There were no known cursed tools that handled positive energy. If such tools existed, sorcerers' survival rates would not be as abysmal. The common belief that money couldn't buy life would be overturned in the jujutsu world.

Gojo thought that perhaps the mere existence of this cursed tool might be the reason why the British jujutsu world was trying to capture her.

At the same time, if this was foreign jujutsu, it wasn't something to be underestimated. Though it was a misunderstanding, Gojo's evaluation of the overseas jujutsu community rose slightly.

While the cursed tool was intriguing, this wasn't the time for that.

He realized that half-hearted attacks wouldn't work.

"I'll go even stronger next time, so don't die on me, okay?"

This time, he approached her head-on. Once again, in the blink of an eye, he closed in and threw out his left fist with the power to penetrate tank armor.

Even after all this, Gojo still saw her as nothing more than a runaway stray cat.

His fist stopped when it touched her habit. The girl didn't even flinch.

The fact that she didn't step back meant that neither the cursed tool was destroyed nor the attack penetrated. That was enough to decide on his next move.

"Reversed Cursed Technique: 'Red.'"

With the power to fling an object weighing several hundred kilograms like a pinball, he launched it at the girl at point-blank range.

Even with this, the impact was absorbed by her habit and didn't reach her. The deflected momentum escaped into the ground, causing a loud explosion-like sound and creating large cracks in the asphalt. The curse users lying on the ground were blown away like popcorn by the shockwave.

The girl, confirming or perhaps showing off her robustness, smirked.

"Is that all you've got?"

However...

The cross she wore on her chest wasn't so lucky. It shattered into pieces.

"Aaaaaaaah my cross!!!"

The girl screamed.

She threw her hands up in the air and let out a melodramatic wail.

It must have been important to her.

No, even without thinking too deeply, destroying the cross of a devout believer who walks around the city in a habit is nothing short of sacrilege. From a Japanese perspective, it's like smashing a family's ancestral gravestone.

A dynamic act of disrespect.

Gojo, not considering such things, was actually troubled. The order was to capture her alive, not to kill. From the previous encounter, he realized that any effective attack might kill her. He had already done things that would be more than enough to fatally wound an ordinary person.

He was at an impasse.

"Would you mind just coming quietly with me?"

"I spent a month selecting the materials... You can't get this in Japan..."

Their conversation wasn't connecting.

The girl glared at him with a cute yet furious expression, as if she was ready to bite.

In the next moment, a red arm, like mummified skin and bone, shot out from her right shoulder.

Even with his Six Eyes, Gojo couldn't read the technique of the girl's habit, which seemed to be a cursed tool.

It was the same with this technique. It exuded an abnormal and overwhelming power that even non-sorcerers could feel. However, the principles and mechanisms behind it followed otherworldly laws. It was like trying to read an alien language, making it impossible to decode.

But Gojo, through experience and intuition, gauged its threat.

When evaluating a jujutsu sorcerer, the phrase "bottomless curse energy" is often used, but it's just a metaphor. There's definitely a bottom; it's just that no one has seen it.

If there truly were no bottom, one could theoretically destroy the Earth at the subatomic level with just curse energy.

In that sense, this arm seemed to genuinely have no bottom.

Even if he blocked the attack with Limitless Curse Technique... in a contest of power, he feared he would run out of energy first.

No, before that, the town might not survive.

His intuition was correct.

The third arm growing from the girl's shoulder—"The Holy Right"—was a technique that drew out necessary power as needed. The concept of running out of energy didn't exist, and the size of the faucet adjusted to the opponent, hence there was only a limit to instantaneous output. Swinging the arm would defeat the opponent. That was its nature.

This was the power that the protagonist of "A Certain Magical Index," Touma Kamijou, described as ridiculously overpowered, like an RPG command labeled "defeat."

Without "Imagine Breaker," it didn't reach "Divine Right," but if in perfect condition, it could pulverize an entire planet if needed.

The power about to be unleashed was more than sufficient to defeat Satoru Gojo.

Thus, what he did next was purely reflexive, without any real intent behind it.

"—Domain Expansion"

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『Divine Punishment Technique』 The technique of Vent of the Front. A magic that indiscriminately incapacitates anyone who harbors malice or hostility towards the caster, regardless of distance or location. From a scientific perspective, it maintains a near-death state through oxygen deprivation. A chained cross serves as the spiritual tool. Originally, only those with the divine attribute of fire can handle this special magic.

『The Holy Right』 The technique of Fiamma of the Right. Swing the arm. Win. That's all.