novelnext Chapter 149 149: Domain Amplification! Gojo vs. The Trap!
Chapter 149 149: Domain Amplification! Gojo vs. The Trap!
Beverly Hills - Maya West's Mansion.
The room had been loud for the first twenty minutes of Episode 5. By the time the Kenjaku strategy flashback began, it had gone quiet.
Maya West set down her glass.
"They're not trying to outpower him," she said, watching the screen. "They're trying to use the city against him."
Della Rose had been leaning forward in her chair since the episode started, her elbows on her knees. She didn't look away from the screen. "If he uses his big techniques in that crowd — "
"He vaporizes everyone. If he opens his Domain — "
"Same result." Della Rose exhaled. "So they've turned the people into a cage."
Maya West nodded slowly. Across her living room, several other industry figures who had been invited for the viewing were running the same calculation. Kenjaku's strategy, delivered in Robert Sterling's cold, precise cadence during the flashback - one minute, keep him within four meters, the civilians make his own power unusable, was the kind of writing that made even professional storytellers put down their phones and pay attention.
On screen, Kenjaku's plan was being tested in real time.
Level B5. Station.
Hanami and Jogo moved first - Domain Amplification activated, a thin shimmering aura wrapped around both spirits that neutralized Gojo's Infinity on contact. The physics of the technique were simple and brutal: no barrier, no defense, direct impact. Against anyone else in the world, it would have ended the fight in the opening exchange.
Against Leo Vance's Gojo, it meant he had to actually move.
He did. With a liquid, unhurried grace that made the evasion look less like an emergency and more like a preference - a slight tilt of the weight, a pivot, landing softly on the tracks two meters clear of both strikes simultaneously. The camera caught his expression during the movement: not concentration, not urgency. Mild interest.
"I see," he said, landing. "Domain Amplification. You're wrapping yourselves in a void to bypass my Infinity." He paused. "Clever. But it comes at a cost, doesn't it?"
Jogo drove a burning hand through a civilian's chest without looking at her. The man became a human torch. The screaming filled the platform.
"Do I have to burn through every life here before you understand your position?" Jogo said.
Leo stood still. The smile remained. Something else moved behind it - not distress, but the specific quality of a person making a calculation they don't enjoy making. His eyes, still covered by the blindfold, tracked the casualties with the Six Eyes' precision.
"I'm sorry," he said, quietly enough that it almost didn't register over the screams. "I can't save everyone. So I promise to exorcise them instead."
He reached up and removed the blindfold.
The aquamarine Six Eyes opened fully to the platform's fluorescent light, and every person in every living room watching the episode felt the temperature of the scene drop several degrees. This was not the playful Gojo from the subway entrance. This was something older and more absolute.
Jogo felt it too. A single bead of sweat traced the volcanic ridges of his head.
"What are you surprised by?" Jogo barked. "Trying to find excuses early?"
"As if." Leo's voice was completely level. "What I'm surprised by is that you actually thought your little brains could figure out a way to beat me."
The live-chat ignited:
[The way he said that. Zero heat. Zero performance. Just a statement of fact.]
[Gojo removing the blindfold is never NOT a moment. Every single time.]
[Jogo is sweating and Gojo looks like he's deciding what to have for dinner.]
Hanami lunged. Leo caught the spirit's arm mid-swing, the grip immediate and total, and hurled the massive form across the tracks with a motion that looked less like effort and more like inconvenience. Jogo followed. Leo's hand closed around the volcanic spirit's arm with a hydraulic finality.
With a smile that was simultaneously innocent and genuinely disturbing, he tightened his grip.
Jogo's arm came free.
Purple blood hit the white of Gojo's shirt in a wide arc. Hanami watched, and understood in that moment that Gojo had deactivated the Limitless entirely - no cursed technique, no spatial buffer, nothing. Raw cursed energy and physical dominance, calibrated precisely to not create shockwaves that would harm the crowd. He was fighting with one hand tied behind his back and still dismantling them.
"Don't drop the Amplification, Hanami!" Jogo screamed.
Too late. Hanami, in the shock of watching Jogo's arm removed, had reached for an innate technique. The Amplification flickered. Gojo was already above him.
"I heard these are your weak points."
Both hands found the horns at the same moment.
The sound that followed was not one that the audience would forget quickly. The horns came out of Hanami's skull with the finality of something irreversible.
Gojo turned, holding them, and looked at the wall where Jogo had landed. He walked toward the fallen Hanami with the unhurried pace. Above him, blue light began to gather.
"As expected," Gojo said. "You can't maintain Amplification and use your technique simultaneously."
The blue light released.
Hanami's body met the subway wall at a velocity that rendered the distinction between them academic. One of the Four Great Disasters - a Special Grade Cursed Spirit powerful enough to threaten any Grade 1 sorcerer alive - was dead.
The platform was quiet except for the sound of Gojo's breathing and Jogo's involuntary stillness.
[He just— in a CROWD. With one hand. While keeping every bystander ALIVE. That's so cool that I don't have words for it.]
[Hanami deserved better. Also Gojo is terrifying. Both things.]
[The blue light. Every time. The BLUE LIGHT.]
The live-chat humor was running alongside the awe, the way it does when an audience is simultaneously delighted and unnerved:
[Jogo called him "baldy" last week. JOGO CALLED HIM BALDY. How is this man still alive.]
Jogo was asking himself a version of the same question.
He stood alone on the platform, one arm gone, staring at the man in the blood-stained white suit. Around them, the survivors of the crowd lay unconscious or fled or trapped behind Hanami's now-inert root structures. The timer in Kenjaku's plan - twenty minutes total, one minute in proximity to the Prison Realm - was still running.
A new memory surfaced: the planning session, weeks ago, Kenjaku's voice around a table.
"One minute. Once the Prison Realm's gate is opened, its sealing range is four meters. Keep Satoru Gojo within that range for one minute."
Jogo had almost laughed then. One minute? Against that? He'd said it out loud, he remembered. Even if we trade a thousand human lives, we can't buy one minute of his time.
He wasn't laughing now.
On the platform above him, Jogo could hear the distant sound of something moving through the tunnels - Mahito's Transfigured Humans, flooding in through the subway system, thousands of them, the backup plan activating.
The trap was entering its final phase.
From somewhere in the shadows, a small, cubic object began to move.
The Prison Realm was open.
[The box. It's the box. I have a bad feeling about this box that I cannot articulate but it is HEAVY.]
[Gojo is breathing. He's just standing there breathing. Someone tell him about the box. SOMEONE TELL HIM ABOUT THE BOX.]
Plz Drop Some Power Stones.
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