Jujutsu Kaisen: Tickless

Tick.

A soundless tick — not mechanical, not real — echoed through the cracked ribs of time itself. The Temporal Sinkhole wasn't a cursed zone. It was what remained when time gave up.

Stairs led nowhere. Lanterns bled shadows in reverse. Clocks, broken or half-melted into the walls, ticked before the sound came. It was impossible to say when this place was built — or will be built. It just was.

Akira stood at its center — shirtless, his skin soaked with dried sweat and streaked blood, his ribs blackened from recoil. His cursed stake, Regret, floated beside him — pulsating faintly. The weapon had a voice now. Not speech, not language — but intention. It ached to be used.

He hadn't slept in two days. Not fully. Echoes of himself kept appearing in the corners of his vision, finishing moves he hadn't yet made, whispering warnings he hadn't yet heard.

Time Split Reaction Training — TSR — wasn't about reflex anymore.

It was about believing two different outcomes at once.

Akira focused.

Kneeling, he laid five cursed stakes in a circle, each connected to a delayed time-anchor. Around him, black wax candles melted upward — a sign that the Sinkhole was deepening again.

"Let this second split."

He moved.

To the left: dodge.

To the right: parry.

To the center: rewind, strike, recoil.

The moment fractured — one version of him was slashed through by a cursed phantom's tail. Another struck too early. Another hesitated. Only one managed to catch the stake mid-air and throw it back into the phantom's eye — anchoring a clean kill.

But he felt all five failures.

Pain bloomed across his chest and legs — psychosomatic residue. His Temporal Nerve Synapses couldn't keep up.

He vomited blood. His nose cracked. Regret hummed louder.

Still not enough.

Again.

He repeated the sequence. Eight more times.

Each repetition drained his cursed energy faster. His lungs clawed for breath like time was vacuuming it away. Reversed Cursed Technique wouldn't activate. Not anymore. Not without help.

His hand trembled over his heart, and the stake in his grip grew heavier.

"Split... again," he hissed.

Research Division, Osaka

Momo flipped through forbidden scrolls sealed in triple-laced sutras. Her left eye twitched every time she read too long — like the letters were peeling her memories from the inside.

She'd come across a term once dismissed as theoretical:

"Reversed Thread Anchors."

Supposedly created by a monk during the Heian Era — a cursed concept that allowed one's psyche to be manually re-threaded along time, instead of relying on natural healing or RCT.

Most believed it was madness. To stitch your identity across moments? It was like sewing memory onto fate.

But Akira needed a crutch. The Rogue Echo inside him was gaining ground — eating seconds of his personality like termites in a clock.

She scribbled notes in the dim library light.

Reversed Thread Anchors must be tied to trauma.

They can only be formed if someone else binds them.

It must be a living memory, not an artificial one.

"I have to become his anchor," she whispered. "One thread… at a time."

Outside the archive, she saw the mirror glitch.

For a split second, Akira was standing behind her — not the real one. An echo. Its eyes were closed. Then open. Then bleeding. Then gone.

Her skin crawled.

Back in the Sinkhole

Akira now fought three phantoms of himself — each armed with a copy of Regret. They didn't speak. They just attacked, again and again — in his blind spot, across his own movements, anticipating his rewinds.

Time stuttered around him. The ground cracked under paradox.

One phantom sliced deep into his ribs.

"Let this second shatter."

He forced the moment back — but his soul screamed.

The stake in his hand changed — no longer glasslike.

Now? Bone.

It pulsed.

A whisper entered his mind:

"This one… shouldn't have lived."

He turned — and one of the echoes had spoken it.

That's when he realized — it wasn't a hallucination.

The rogue echo had breached the Sinkhole.

Akira collapsed. His stake dissipated. His energy bottomed out.

Then…

Momo landed beside him — her broom snapping against the ground.

"You're done for today."

He couldn't lift his head. His teeth clattered from the time-fracture chill.

"I didn't… finish…"

She knelt beside him, unrolling a cursed-thread scroll and carefully placing her palm to his temple.

"You won't finish anything if you shatter before you're ready."

Thread symbols danced in the air.

A soft red glow seeped into his skull — not healing, but preserving. Momo's version of the Reversed Thread Anchor didn't erase pain. It just held identity in place — like stitching a soul into a mold.

He blinked.

His own voice echoed from a corner of the sinkhole:

"Don't let her see what I did…"

Akira gritted his teeth.

"She already does."