Jujutsu Kaisen: Tickless

The tribunal room of Jujutsu Headquarters was cold. Not just in temperature — the very cursed energy clinging to its walls made it feel like history itself refused to die here.

Six figures sat on a raised platform, the Directorate. Cloaked in ceremonial robes. Faces hidden behind wooden masks carved with old clan seals. Their voices echoed unnaturally — enhanced by cursed tools to strike fear, not deliver clarity.

Below them, Gojo stood silent, arms crossed, blindfold unwavering. Next to him, Shoko Ieiri reviewed a cursed medical dossier in silence, and Kido Sougen, handler of Akira, stood to one side — posture like a man with a blade at his neck.

The central voice boomed.

"We have reviewed the footage from Kyoto. From Tokyo. The corrupted Echoes. The Domain fluctuation. The abnormality that is Rensetsu Akira."

Gojo said nothing.

Another voice joined in, female, colder.

"We acknowledge the interference of the disaster curses… but we also acknowledge the uncontrolled effect of the Echoes during the Kyoto and Tokyo incidents. This is no longer a matter of surveillance. Rensetsu is a destabilizer. An unpredictable variable."

The third spoke — older, laced with venom.

"He is a broken thread on the loom of jujutsu society."

Gojo raised a brow. "You're scared of him."

The tribunal didn't reply. One voice simply said:

"Another execution is scheduled in three days' time. Should he resist, he is to be purged on sight."

Shoko finally spoke, her tone sharp. "You're condemning a student with PTSD caused by your own damn system."

"His trauma is irrelevant. His technique violates time. We cannot risk what he may become."

Gojo turned. "And what if what he becomes is exactly what we need when Sukuna rises again?"

Silence.

The central judge spoke again.

"Then pray he reincarnates on the right side."

And just like that — it was decided.

Kyoto Jujutsu Tech – Medical Wing

Renji Inomaki lay still.

Wrapped in cursed silk, IVs of slow-drip CE entering his veins. His throat had been torn — not physically, but from inside, after his command technique backfired in proximity to Akira's fractured domain state.

Miwa sat nearby, her hands tight in her lap.

"He's stable," said the healer. "But we don't know if his voice will ever return."

Miwa didn't cry.

But she did look out the window, where clouds had gathered, grey and heavy.

"Geto," she remembered whispering when Dagon twisted into the temple. The thing had laughed. Not just laughed — it had recognized the name.

None of them understood what it meant.

But they all felt something was moving behind the scenes — something old.

Akira twitched in his sleep.

He saw versions of himself — walking, breathing, speaking in tongues. One sat at the edge of his bed and whispered.

"You shouldn't be the one alive."

He snapped awake.

Momo was already seated at the far corner, sharpening a blade not meant for combat — a surgical knife, small and wicked.

"You were muttering again," she said softly.

Akira wiped his face. "Was I?"

"You said… 'He broke the law of seconds.'"

He stared into nothing. "It's not just me anymore."

Momo stood and walked over, handing him a sealed scroll.

"I stole it from a dead collector. Black market stuff. I think it's about the thing inside you."

Akira unsealed it. The letters twisted — cursed, aged, vibrating. It spoke of a time-based Domain Expansion — one from the Heian era, belonging to a sorcerer whose name had been erased. A being that bent causality to rebirth itself, using time as sacrament.

"This thing... it's not just a fluke," Akira said. "It's ancestral."

"And now it's waking up inside you."

A long silence.

Then Momo added, "They want you dead. I didn't come here to stop them."

"Then why?"

She met his gaze.

"Because I saw you survive when time didn't. I saw the Echo watching you from the trees. And I knew they were wrong to fear you."

He lowered the scroll.

"So what now?"

"We run," she said. "We learn how to kill what's growing inside you. Or control it."

He looked down at his hand. It was trembling — not from fear. From pressure.

Inside, the cursed stake pulsed, waiting.

"You know they'll hunt us."

Momo smiled thinly.

"Let them."

Beneath the Earth

Jogo knelt inside a charred shrine — his flames dimmed but steady.

Kenjaku, wearing Geto's skin, listened patiently.

"Kyoto fell as ordered," Jogo said. "Dagon's appearance caught them off guard. That girl — the one who said 'Geto' — he nearly broke form laughing."

"And Akira?" Kenjaku asked.

"Broke. Again."

Kenjaku nodded.

"Good. The seed is ripening. Let the curse bloom."

He turned to a rusted wall where records of old sorcerers were etched in ash.

"Let him struggle. Every timeline where he suffers brings us one second closer to the womb."

Tokyo Jujutsu High – Training Grounds

As the news of Akira's fugitive status leaked through whispers and silence, life did not pause for everyone else.

Yuji Itadori stood on the edge of the sparring field, arms folded, watching Nobara hammer a training dummy's face into paste with her hammer. Megumi sat cross-legged nearby, his shikigami resting in the shade behind him.

"She's pissed," Yuji muttered.

"She's scared," Megumi corrected. "She just hides it better."

"Think we'll be next?"

Megumi gave him a long look. "No. We're not... like him."

"But we could be," Yuji whispered. "If they think you're too strong or too weird — they just pull the trigger."

Gojo appeared behind them like fog, arms folded. "That's exactly why you're all going to train harder."

They turned.

"Harder how?" Nobara asked.

Gojo smiled behind the blindfold. "In hell."

That afternoon, he laid out the plan:

Nobara would undergo anti-domain training with cursed barriers to push her reaction time, forcing her to wield her technique under heavy psychological pressure.

Megumi was assigned to Tokyo's underground shrine where the Zennin clan once sealed failed Ten Shadows. He would spar with "failed" shikigami—beasts born without control.

Yuji, however, would be tested differently. Gojo would take him alone to Shizuoka's ghost valley, where the cursed spirits of sorcerers who failed their reincarnations roamed. "They'll mistake you for one of them," Gojo said. "Let's see if Sukuna flinches."

Yuji grinned, but his fists trembled just slightly.

"Akira's story isn't done," he said.

Gojo turned away, serious now.

"No. But yours is just beginning."