That Day When Suzuki-kun Wasn't the Mob-B!

”Yuji Itadori, if you can hear me, suppress your roommate and pull him back inside, or I am going to beat the shit out of you right now,” Suzuki commanded, taking a calm, measured step forward.

”Ah, yes, Sir!”

Strangely enough, Yuji’s earnest voice ripped from the throat of the King of Curses, proving he was still entirely conscious beneath the surface.

”Hey, hey. Are you so terrified of me that you have to beg the brat to seal me away?” Sukuna mocked, a wide, sadistic grin splitting his face.

”I think you’re the one who should be embarrassed, King of Curses,” Suzuki replied, his tone utterly flat.

”Ha?”

”You can’t even take full control of a teenager’s body. How can you be arrogant enough to think you’re ready to face me?” Suzuki sighed, shaking his head.

A cold, heavy silence instantly fell over Sukuna.

No matter how overwhelming his pride was, the inescapable truth was that he was trapped. He couldn’t override Yuji’s will permanently, nor could he break free. It was as if this body had been meticulously crafted solely to serve as his prison.

If Suzuki had cared to share his thoughts, he would have confirmed Sukuna’s exact suspicion. Yuji was a living cage, perfectly crafted to contain the King of Curses until a certain ancient sorcerer’s master plan finally bore fruit.

Kenjaku.

Suzuki briefly wondered if the millennium-old brain would ever dare to approach him. He highly doubted it. Kenjaku was inherently cautious; he knew perfectly well that standing in front of Suzuki would only result in immediate execution or permanent mind control.

Far away, hidden deep within the shadows of an abandoned facility, a man in a monk’s attire with a strange, stitched scar across his forehead violently sneezed.

”Achooo!”

”What’s wrong with you, Kenjaku? It’s weird seeing you sneeze like that,” a one-eyed curse grunted from the corner. ”Can you even get sick?”

”I am currently inhabiting a human body, after all. Isn’t it perfectly normal for a human to catch a cold?” Kenjaku answered leisurely, rubbing his nose. ”But rather than a virus, I suspect someone is just thinking about me.”

Even if someone was actively plotting his death, Kenjaku didn’t particularly care. He didn’t even fear the wrath of Satoru Gojo. He knew his own physical limitations—straightforward combat was not his forte. As long as he avoided walking into suicidal confrontations, the plan would proceed perfectly.

”Do you actually believe in human superstitions like that?”

”Regardless,” Kenjaku smiled, his dark eyes glinting. ”Sukuna has finally awakened in the modern era. We can now officially begin the next phase of our plan.”

”Dismantle!”

Sukuna swept his hand outward. Several invisible, razor-sharp blades of cursed energy instantly materialized, flying forward to cleave Suzuki into pieces and level the entire estate behind him.

Furious at being casually mocked, Sukuna wanted nothing more than to butcher this arrogant modern sorcerer who failed to understand the absolute gap between them. Yet, even in his rage, Sukuna’s peerless combat intellect was actively analyzing his opponent. He knew Suzuki wasn’t weak.

His primary weapon was speed.

Sukuna had already deduced that Suzuki’s absolute advantage lay in his speed. Every time Sukuna twitched to launch an attack, Suzuki was already dodging, predicting the trajectory before the cursed energy even manifested.

Or rather... wasn’t this guy just too fast?

Before the invisible blades of Dismantle could even cross the distance between them, Suzuki bypassed them entirely. He closed the gap in a fraction of a millisecond, materializing directly inside Sukuna’s guard.

A merciless, blinding barrage of punches rained down on the King of Curses. Tens, then hundreds of strikes blurred into a continuous storm of kinetic force. And terrifyingly, Suzuki’s precision was so absolute that every tenth strike inevitably triggered a spatial distortion.

Crackle! Crackle! Crackle!

Explosions of pitch-black lightning continuously erupted across the courtyard.

It was an astronomical anomaly. Chaining multiple Black Flashes was near-impossible, yet Suzuki was treating the pinnacle of jujutsu mastery like a metronome. Even Satoru Gojo, watching from the safety of the ruined engawa, lowered his sunglasses in sheer, dumbfounded awe.

”So he’s going for quantity over quality, huh? No, wait... the quality is absolutely perfect, too,” Gojo muttered, shaking his head in admiration as he watched the entirely one-sided beatdown. After all, if the quality was bad, could one even create the black flash in every ten hits?

Unless Sukuna could find a way to outpace Suzuki, he was helpless.

But Sukuna was not dead yet. Yuji’s physical constitution was absurdly durable—built like a heavy tank designed to absorb punishment. Even so, the sheer volume of Black Flashes was rapidly turning his bones to powder. To survive, Sukuna seamlessly applied the Reverse Cursed Technique at a high level.

By taking negative cursed energy and multiplying it by itself, Sukuna generated positive energy, flooding Yuji’s shattered body with it to instantly knit flesh and bone back together.

”You really do have a perfect grasp of every technique in the book, don’t you?” Suzuki commented dryly as Sukuna regenerated a crushed ribcage in real time.

Sukuna gritted his teeth, desperately trying to launch a counterattack. He attempted to weave the hand signs for Cleave, but the moment his fingers moved, Suzuki struck. His speed was so absurdly oppressive that he left residual afterimages scattered across the garden. Every single time Sukuna gathered cursed energy to attack, Suzuki physically battered him out of his casting animation.

Shit!

This was exactly why Sukuna despised fighting speedsters. Their methodology was painfully simple, but the execution was suffocating. Usually, the speedsters eventually slipped up, allowing Sukuna to catch them and sever their limbs. It was only a matter of time before Suzuki made a mistake—

”Huh?”

Sukuna suddenly froze, his eyes widening in genuine shock. He could feel the bottoming of his cursed energy reserves.

”Ah, you finally noticed. It took a while. You really do have an abnormal amount of cursed energy,” Suzuki noted calmly, coming to a halt a few feet away.

Usually, a sorcerer’s cursed energy was finite. But Sukuna possessed the highest total reserves in recorded history, coupled with a hyper-efficient combat IQ that arguably surpassed even Gojo’s. Suzuki had never underestimated the King of Curses. He knew that Sukuna’s true lethality lay in his ingenuity, not just his raw destructive power.

”So that was your plan all along, huh?” Sukuna snarled, wiping a stream of blood from his chin. ”You’re so soft it actually sickens me!”

When two sorcerers clashed, there was an inevitable collision of wills—a burning fighting spirit, or at the very least, a suffocating killing intent. Yet, throughout this entire barrage, Sukuna had felt absolutely nothing from Suzuki.

Initially, Sukuna assumed Suzuki was just a master at masking his emotions to hide his next move. But as his cursed energy bottomed out, he realized the humiliating truth. Suzuki never viewed him as a legitimate threat.

Suzuki was treating the King of Curses like a toddler throwing a violent tantrum. He wasn’t trying to kill Sukuna. He was just exhausting him until it was time for his nap.

It was the ultimate humiliation.

By utilizing the 24-frames-per-second rule of Projection Sorcery, Suzuki had subtly forced Sukuna into hundreds of predetermined, unnecessary micro-movements. Every time Sukuna unconsciously resisted or failed to adhere to the physics of the predetermined frames, his body suffered a micro-stun, forcing him to expend massive, inefficient bursts of cursed energy just to break free and repair the resulting cellular damage.

Suzuki had simply bled his gas tank dry without Sukuna even realizing it, as his mastery of Projection Sorcery was so perfect it was unbelievable.

Looking at the panting, utterly exhausted King of Curses, Suzuki dusted off his sleeves. ”Yuji. Put him back in his box.”

”Yes, Sir!”

The black tattoos instantly receded from the boy’s skin. With Sukuna’s cursed energy completely depleted, Yuji easily seized control of his own body, forcefully locking the exhausted King of Curses back into the deepest recesses of his soul.