strictlysupreme Chapter 172 172: Yuta vs. Itadori! The Executioner's Blade!
Chapter 172 172: Yuta vs. Itadori! The Executioner's Blade!
Naoya covered the distance from the bridge railing to the street below in the time it takes to blink.
Not metaphorically. The frame-rate of his Projection Sorcery - the Zen'in bloodline's inherited technique, movement divided into twenty-four discrete frames per second with each frame locked in advance, turned his speed into something that registered less as motion and more as relocation. He was on the railing. Then he was not. Then his fist was already completing its arc toward Yuji.
Choso stepped in front of it.
The impact sent Choso skidding backward across the asphalt, and even then the speed had only been partially absorbed. Naoya looked at him with the slightly elevated attention of someone revising a calculation upward.
"You're surprisingly tough," he said, with what might have been genuine interest if it had arrived without the contempt. "I clearly underestimated the 'Scoundrel' and the 'Cursed Womb.'" He adjusted his stance. "Let's pick up the pace a little."
What followed was not a fair fight. Naoya's speed in this form made him functionally invisible between positions - Choso could feel the displacement of air, track the aftermath of each strike, but the strike itself arrived before the tracking could complete. He was repeatedly hit from angles he had correctly identified a fraction of a second too late.
He kept standing up.
Not because the math was working. Because the alternative was not standing up, and that was not something he was prepared to do.
[Choso is just refusing to fall. Naoya has hit him four times and Choso is just. Still. Standing. The stubbornness of a man who has decided his function is to be in front of his brother no matter what it costs.]
[Naoya is faster. Choso is denser. This is the worst possible matchup for both of them and they're both committing fully.]
Three blocks away, inside a parking structure that had been abandoned since the Incident, Lucas Miller's Yuji was learning the specific experience of fighting someone who is not trying to hurt him.
Finn Blake's Yuta moved with a precision that had nothing aggressive in it - the choreography of someone executing a plan, each strike placed with the care of a person who has been told to be lethal and is doing their best to accomplish that efficiently. His eyes throughout were the eyes of someone paying a debt they didn't incur.
"You're not slow either," Yuta said, tracking Yuji around a concrete pillar. "I thought I could finish this in the first move."
Yuji vaulted over an abandoned sedan, using the tight column geometry of the structure to cut the angles. He was thinking about Gojo's words - the ones Yuta had relayed, the ones that explained what this visit actually was.
Before I was sealed, I found him in Africa. I told him what was going to happen. I told him what to do.
Which meant every move Yuta was making had been approved in advance by the person Yuji trusted most. Which didn't make it easier to survive, but changed what survival meant.
Yuta rested his sheathed sword on his shoulder, pacing through the dust from the shattered pillar Yuji had used a moment ago.
"You've probably worked it out," he said. "I have a greater total pool of Cursed Energy than Gojo-sensei. But he has the Six Eyes - the energy he wastes during a fight is infinitely close to zero. In terms of efficiency, he is the strongest. I will eventually run out." A pause. "But right now, I have plenty."
[The way he just delivered that power scaling explanation like a mild point of clarification mid-fight. Yuta is built different.]
[Leo cast someone who can do "gentle and apocalyptically dangerous simultaneously" and the result is the most stressful character in the show.]
Yuta launched an instant attack, the katana swinging with the precision of someone who has been doing this for a long time and has no wasted movement anywhere in the sequence. Yuji caught a survival knife from the glovebox of the nearest SUV and used it as a parry.
The weapons met in a shower of sparks. Yuji drove forward with the intent of destroying the katana entirely - close enough that reach became irrelevant.
Yuta's reinforced downstroke came through. The survival knife shattered. The edge of the blade opened a deep gash across Yuji's chest, and Yuji's return kick caught the katana's hilt and snapped the blade in half.
Both of them stood in the new silence of the aftermath, breathing.
"Now we're both unarmed," Yuji said.
"Now we are," Yuta agreed.
Then a shadow fell.
Olivia Margaret's Rika materialized from the air beside Yuta with the specific, comprehensive presence of something that views the world in terms of threats to a single person and categorizes everything else accordingly. She wrapped her arms around Yuji from behind with the particular gentleness of something that is capable of much worse and is choosing not to use it.
Yuji's bones creaked under the grip. He couldn't move.
Yuta looked at him. The expression on Finn Blake's face in this moment, the one that the episode held for a full two seconds - was not triumph, not satisfaction, not the cold efficiency the rest of the fight had carried. It was the face of someone who was doing something because they had been asked to, by the person they trusted, and who had not yet fully resolved how they felt about it.
He stepped forward, holding the jagged broken half of his katana.
"Sorry," he said. Quietly. Completely.
"Itadori."
He drove the blade through Yuji's chest.
The screen cut to black before Lucas Miller's expression could complete.
[WHAT.]
[He said sorry. He said SORRY. Like it was a real apology. Like he meant it.]
[Gojo planned this. This was GOJO'S PLAN. The man arranged for his student to be stabbed by his other student and I need to understand the logic before I can process the grief.]
In the alleyway, Choso's internal monologue arrived between hits.
Naoya had landed another two strikes while Choso had been working out the geometry of a counterattack. He pushed himself back to his feet with the specific, unhurried stubbornness that Naoya was beginning to find more interesting than irritating.
"Why won't you stay down?" Naoya said.
Choso looked at him. The blood around his fists moved with slow, focused purpose.
The internal voice came through - the voice-over that had been Leo's device all season for the things characters couldn't say aloud:
Regardless of whether he is successful or not, an older brother must always be an example to his younger siblings. If the elder brother goes astray, the younger brother only needs to avoid the same path. And if the elder brother walks the right path, the younger brother only needs to follow his lead.
I have no template for making mistakes. So I fail again and again, in front of them. But even so — I must walk in front of my younger brothers.
That is why I am strong.
He raised his hands.
"Because," he said, to Naoya's actual question, "I am the eldest brother."
The blood erupted.
The live-chat, which had been processing Yuta's stab in one half of the screen and Choso's defiance in the other, found that the two things together produced a specific emotional state that didn't have a clean name:
[The episode cut right after the stab and the last thing we see is Choso refusing to fall because his brother needs him to still be standing.]
[Leo Vance put the most wholesome relationship in the show inside the most brutal episode of the show. On purpose. Intentionally. He did this on purpose.]
Plz Drop Some Power Stones.
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