Jujutsu Kaisen: Tickless

"Not every voice in your head is yours."

Akira twitched.

Then again.

Muscles convulsed, cursed energy leaking in pulses across the bed frame, shorting out the monitoring equipment. One of the nurses had to call Shoko three times — by the time she arrived, the hallway was already coated with static.

She didn't even flinch.

"Sedation's not working," the nurse whispered.

"It's not supposed to," Shoko muttered, pulling gloves on. "We're not treating his body."

The heart monitor showed a consistent BPM of 63.

But his eyes were moving rapidly under closed lids.

He wasn't asleep.He was elsewhere.

You are not Akira.

The thought echoed from within. But also from behind.

From beside.

Every time he closed his eyes now, there were versions.

One pacing barefoot in an endless corridor.One sobbing into his hands in a temple garden.One sharpening a cursed stake — and glaring at the original.

"You shouldn't be the one alive," it said.

Akira recoiled in the dream, but the version followed.

"You left me in the broken second. You rewound. You ran. You let her die again."

The dream began to burn at the edges — then another voice, softer.

"It's not your fault."

Another.

"No, it is."

Then laughter.

Then silence.

Then a door opened — in the middle of the void.

From it, a soundless scream.

Akira bolted upright in bed — nose bleeding, breath like shrapnel.

Shoko caught his shoulder as he nearly fell out of bed.

"Good morning," she said."You're being executed."

In the HQ chambers, Silence wore a suit.

The Directorate's ruling had come swift. Two cities destabilized. Dozens hospitalized. Unknown Domain expansion incidents registered. Echoes replicating out of control.

"Subject Akira Rensetsu is classified as an Anomalous Temporal Threat."

The recommendation?

Erasure. Not sealing. Not exile. Total CE nullification.

Kido didn't attend the vote. Neither did Gojo. 

Atop a rooftop in Shibuya, Gojo Satoru stood alone — coat flapping. He'd seen everything. Akira's energy had spiked mid-fight during Jogo's Tokyo incursion — enough to warp the veil itself.

He lit a cigarette. Didn't even smoke. Just liked the pause it forced.

"I'm supposed to protect them," he whispered.

"But I didn't protect Geto. I didn't protect Riko."

He exhaled through his nose.

"If I save him, and he becomes the end…"

He let the thought hang in the wind.

"Maybe I'm not the one who gets to decide anymore."

He turned his phone off.

And vanished from the board.

Inside a collapsed shrine outside Aokigahara, Dagon and Jogo knelt.

Kenjaku wasn't there — not physically. But the smoke coiled with his residual presence.

"The operation succeeded," Dagon rasped. "Kyoto was destabilized. Multiple echoes observed. The boy's psyche is fractured."

"Also," he added, eyes narrowing, "Miwa Kasumi said a name."

He looked up.

"She said: Geto."

Silence.

Then a low chuckle pulsed through the cursed smoke.

"Interesting. She doesn't remember why. But she sensed me."

The voice wasn't Geto's. It wasn't Suguru's. But it wore his mouth like a familiar jacket.

"Accelerate everything," Kenjaku said."Before time rewinds again."

Back in Tokyo, Shoko handed Akira a scroll — sealed in four layers of paper and jujutsu script. Burn marks dotted its edge.

"We found this in a failed vault retrieval. Along with… this."

She held out an old, glitching VHS tape — black market tech cursed by CE decay. She clicked it on.

Grainy footage.

A sorcerer during the Heian era.

Their face — blurred by cursed static — stood at the heart of a crumbling mountain.

And behind them, an impossible Domain: dozens of echoes spiraling like clock hands, each one chanting the same phrase in a different tongue.

"Let this second shatter."

Shoko didn't say anything. She didn't need to.

"This isn't new," Akira whispered. "Someone had it before me."

Shoko nodded. "But no one knows who."

She didn't say Kenjaku.

But the tape's cursed signature had the same residue as that voice heard during Geto's body desecration.

A scar worn by timelines, not time.

That night, Akira slipped out.

The wards were designed to stop curses, not someone whose very nature broke linear movement.

He stepped between seconds, bypassed detection, walked into Tokyo's streetlight silence.

And saw her.

Momo Nishimiya.

Leaning against the gate.

"You're not subtle," she said.

"You followed me?"

"I've been watching you since Kyoto."

She looked at him — not angry. Just exhausted.

"You scare them. And they're right to be scared. But I think you're needed."

"Why?"

"Because you remember the deaths they tried to rewind."

He stared.

She pulled something from her sleeve — her old school patch. Ripped in half.

"This was a gift from Utahime. She told me to 'follow my curse, not my fear.'"

She tossed the patch into the gutter.

"I'm following it."

Akira blinked.

"You'll be hunted too."

"I know."

She extended a hand.

"So what now?"

He took it.

The second shattered.

They vanished.