JJK: I Was Cast as Gojo Satoru, but My Powers are Real!

Chapter 166 166: Mahito's Defeat! The King in Waiting!

Mahito crawled.

This was the new reality of the situation. The spirit who had moved through the Incident with the fluid ease of something that had never needed to worry about the direction of a fight was crawling through the rubble of an underground tunnel, vomiting cursed residue, his reserves empty in a way they had never been empty before.

The evolutionary hunger that had sustained him - the constant, excited hunger of something becoming, had gone quiet. His stock was gone. He had nothing left to draw on.

Behind him, unhurried, Lucas Miller's Itadori followed.

Not ran. Not chased. Walked. With the specific, economical pace of something that has identified its target and has established beyond reasonable doubt that the target is not going anywhere it cannot also go.

"I'll just admit it now, Mahito." The voice was level. The warmth that was usually the defining quality of Lucas Miller's Yuji Itadori - the openness, the reflexive protectiveness, was absent. What remained was the core of the character without the softness. "I am you. I kept trying to deny you before, refusing to listen to your logic. But now it's different."

He stepped over a piece of collapsed ceiling.

"I don't need a reason. I just want to kill you."

Silas Drake's Mahito scrambled through the rubble, and the camera pulled back to frame the scene in the visual language that Leo Vance had chosen specifically for this sequence, a snow-covered landscape, monochromatic and quiet, a wolf moving with unhurried certainty through the drifts behind a rabbit that had stopped believing it could find a burrow in time.

The metaphor was not subtle. It was not intended to be.

"If you are born again as a new curse," Itadori continued, gaining ground with each step as Mahito lost it, "I will find you and kill you again. If you change your name, your face, your soul - no matter how many times, I will be there."

He looked at the thing in front of him.

"I am just one of the cogs in a massive machine. And before I rust away, I will continue to crush curses."

Mahito threw snow. Actual snow - handfuls of the visual-metaphor snow, hurled backward at the approaching figure in the specific, uncoordinated desperation of something that has run out of techniques and is now simply running.

The live-chat registered this with the specific satisfaction of an audience that has been waiting fifteen episodes for a specific reversal:

[He's SCARED. Mahito is SCARED. I have waited for this. I have waited so long for this.]

[Throwing snow. The spirit who transfigured Junpei and laughed at Nanami is throwing SNOW at Itadori like a panicked child. The fall from grace is complete.]

[Itadori's walk. He's not even running. He's just walking and Mahito knows it's over. The calm is more terrifying than any Black Flash.]

[I am rooting for this cog to crush this particular curse with every fiber of my being.]

Itadori's fist connected. The impact sent Mahito tumbling, the snow rising around him, and the spirit landed and scrambled and looked up from the snow at the figure approaching him and experienced, in that moment, the specific interior event that his entire existence had not previously contained room for.

Fear.

Genuine, unperformative, mammalian fear - the kind that arrives when something that has always been the predator finds the perspective suddenly inverted with no time to adjust.

He scrambled. He crawled. He reached for shadows, for exits, for any geometry that offered an angle away from the person following him.

Two feet appeared in his blurred line of sight.

He looked up.

Robert Sterling's Kenjaku stood in the shadows at the tunnel's edge - composed, unhurried, radiating the specific tranquility of someone who has been watching the situation develop and has decided it has arrived at the moment where their involvement becomes useful.

He looked down at Mahito.

A small, terrifyingly pleasant smile.

"Do you need me to save you, Mahito?"

The screen cut to black.

The "SPECIAL" theme hit with a velocity that suggested it had been waiting at the door.

The internet's response was approximately two seconds of silence before it became a single, sustained roar:

[LEO VANCE. I HAVE BEEN PATIENT. I HAVE BEEN REASONABLE. THIS IS THE THIRD CLIFFHANGER IN A ROW AND KENJAKU JUST OFFERED TO SAVE THE ONE PERSON I NEED TO NOT BE SAVED.]

[No no no no no. NO. Mahito does not get to be saved by Kenjaku. He does not get to survive this.]

[I knew it. I knew the moment Mahito started running that they were going to cut before Itadori could finish it. Leo Vance has a cliffhanger quota and he is meeting it religiously.]

[Kenjaku said "do you need me to save you" like he was offering someone a ride. The most casual villain energy in television history.]

[Six days. I have to wait SIX DAYS to find out if the cockroach survives. Six. Days.]

Vance Family Estate. Upper East Side.

The black screen was still showing when Arthur Vance turned to face the ceiling with the expression of a man registering a personal slight.

His favorite character had spent the episode losing an arm. His most hated character had spent the episode getting away. These two things happening in the same forty-five minutes were, in Arthur Vance's taxonomy of narrative satisfaction, a direct and intentional act of aggression.

"My son," Arthur Vance announced to the ceiling, "has done this deliberately."

"Arthur," Catherine Vance said.

"He specifically wrote Todo losing his arm and Mahito surviving to the credits. In the same episode. That is targeted."

"He writes for a global audience of-"

"He knows I watch every Sunday. He knows Todo is my favorite. He knows Mahito is the one I want gone." Arthur Vance pointed at the black screen with the precise energy of someone presenting evidence. "This is personal."

Catherine Vance looked at her husband with the expression she reserved for moments when he was completely wrong about something in a way that was also completely understandable.

"Lauren," she called across the room.

Lauren Vance looked up from her phone, where she had already been reading the first wave of online reactions with the composed interest of someone who has been given advance notice and is watching a confirmed outcome arrive on schedule.

"She said next week's healing gets more intense," Catherine said.

Arthur Vance turned to look at his eldest daughter.

"How much more intense," he said, in the specific register of a man who has concluded that "more intense" means "worse for my favorite character."

Lauren sipped her tea. Her expression was the careful diplomatic neutrality of someone who has read the production notes and has made a decision about what information to share.

"You should get some sleep before Sunday," she said.

Arthur Vance stared at her for a long moment.

He turned back to the black screen. Then he picked up the remote and navigated to the Netflix listing for JJK Season 2, where the "Healing" tag remained.

He stared at it.

"Unbelievable," he said.

Maya West's Mansion.

"Six days," Della Rose said.

"Yep, Six days," Maya West confirmed.

Julian Cross had been quiet for approximately four minutes, which was long enough for Daisy to check on him twice.

"I need to say something," Julian announced.

Everyone looked at him.

"I think Leo Vance has permanently altered my relationship with the concept of Sunday evening," he said. "Every Sunday I watch this show and every Sunday I end up in this specific emotional state. And yet every Saturday I look forward to Sunday. He has done this to me on purpose and I cannot stop."

Daisy patted his arm. "I know."

"It's fine," Julian said. He did not sound like it was fine.

Plz Drop Some Power Stones.

For Advance/Early Chapters:

patreon.com/Shadownarch_