Nobara's eye visibly twitched. "I am trying to accurately categorize your level of degeneracy," she hissed. "Answer the question before I use Resonance on your shadow."
Ren sighed, letting his shoulders drop in exaggerated defeat. "Fine. You want the anatomical breakdown."
"Yes."
"A tight waist," Ren started casually. "Something to hold onto. And as for the chest and the ass..." He paused, acting as if he were genuinely pondering it, even though the image was permanently burned into his brain. "Exactly like Maki's."
Nobara froze.
Her grip on his jacket went completely slack. Her brain visibly stalled, trying to process the sheer, suicidal audacity of the sentence that had just left his mouth.
"Maki," Nobara repeated, her voice suddenly devoid of all emotion. "Our senior. Maki Zen'in. The one with the naginata who kicks holes in concrete."
"That's the one." Ren said cheerfully.
Nobara stared at him. She looked left toward the dorms, right toward the training fields, and then back at Ren, fully expecting Maki to materialize out of thin air and decapitate him on the spot.
"You're a dead man," she whispered, taking a slow step back as if his stupidity were contagious. "If she hears you say that, Satoru won't even be able to find your teeth."
"Good thing she's in Hokkaido, then," Ren grinned, stepping around her and continuing down the dirt path. "Like I said, Kugisaki. I like women who can kill me."
Nobara stood frozen on the path for another five seconds, staring at his back. She gripped her hammer tightly, shaking her head.
"Absolute psycho," she muttered to herself, finally jogging to catch up.
Nobara matched his pace, though she kept a cautious three feet of distance between them, fully acting as if his death wish might spontaneously explode and take her out with it.
They walked in silence for a solid minute. The gravel crunched under their boots.
Despite her best efforts, her brain absolutely refused to drop the conversation. Maki's.
Nobara frowned. Without thinking, she subtly brushed her hand against her own waist, smoothing down the dark fabric of her uniform skirt. She was in great shape. She swung a heavy hammer daily, ran drills, and took care of herself. But Maki... Maki was a literal biological anomaly.
Nobara's gaze flicked downward for a fraction of a second, mentally weighing her own assets against the senior's surprisingly generous proportions that usually hid under layers of tactical gear.
Wait.
Nobara stopped walking.
What the actual hell am I doing?
Why was she comparing herself to Maki based on the idiotic standards of a Harajuku retail worker?
She slapped both hands against her own cheeks with a loud, sharp smack.
Ren paused, glancing back over his shoulder. He raised an eyebrow at the red handprints rapidly forming on her face. "You good, Kugisaki? Was there a mosquito?"
"Shut up!" Nobara barked. Her pride flared up instantly, her face burning with aggressive, entirely unwarranted embarrassment. She pointed an accusing finger at him. "You! You infect people with your stupid, degenerate brainwaves! Stay away from me!"
Ren just looked at her. "I literally just answered the question you forced me to answer."
"I don't care! I'm going shopping!" she announced loudly, pivoting on her heel and marching in the exact opposite direction toward the main campus gates. "I need to look at imported leather to cleanse my soul of this entire conversation! Don't call me, don't text me, and definitely don't die before you pay me back for my coffee!"
Ren watched her storm off, her hammer swinging wildly at her side. He let out a quiet laugh, but once her silhouette shrank toward the main gates and she was fully out of earshot, the teasing smirk dropped completely from his face.
It was instantly replaced by a cold, flat calculation.He pulled his phone from his pocket and tapped the screen.
5:00 PM.
The sun was already starting to dip behind the Tokyo skyline, casting long, sharp shadows across the campus courtyard. If his memory of the timeline held up, Kenjaku would drop the first curtain over the Shibuya crossing sometime between 7:00 and 8:00 PM.
He had two, maybe three hours left.
Ren turned on his heel and headed straight for his dorm. It was time for a final inventory check. He needed to recheck all his preps.
As he walked up the concrete stairs to his floor, his mind ran through the logistics of the night. The temptation to just walk up to Gojo right now and tell him everything—Kenjaku, the Prison Realm, the disaster curses' ambush—was always there in the back of his mind.
But he crushed the thought instantly.
Saving Gojo tonight was entirely out of the question.
If he stopped the sealing, he would completely shatter the timeline. Satoru Gojo remaining free meant Kenjaku's master plan failed, and a thousand-year-old mastermind forced to improvise was the most dangerous variable imaginable. It would introduce unprecedented outcomes that Ren couldn't predict.
Right now, his greatest weapon wasn't his Heavenly Restriction or his System. It was his meta-knowledge. He knew exactly where the enemies would be, who they would target, and how they fought. If he altered the core anchor of the timeline, he would be flying completely blind into a war zone.
Ren pushed his dorm door closed, throwing the deadbolt with a sharp clack. In the pitch-black room, a holographic blue window flickered to life, casting harsh, sterile light across his face.
...
The scramble crossing outside Shibuya Station was a suffocating sea of bodies.
Plastic devil horns, cheap synthetic wigs, and heavy coats pressed shoulder-to-shoulder under the blinding neon glare of the billboards. The noise was a physical weight—thousands of overlapping conversations, the blare of traffic horns, and the endless loop of idol pop music blasting from the QFRONT building.
The digital clock on the massive screen flipped. 6:59 PM.
"I literally can't move," a girl in a blood-splattered nurse costume yelled into her phone, covering her other ear to drown out the noise. She stood near the edge of the Tokyu Department Store, standing on her tiptoes. "No, I'm by the subway entrance! Just stay at Center Gai, I'll try to push through!"
She lowered her phone, letting out a frustrated breath. She bumped shoulders with a salaryman in a rumpled suit, muttered a quick apology, and took a step toward the crosswalk.
The digital clock flipped again. 7:00 PM.
The sky above Shibuya simply stopped existing.
It didn't look like a storm rolling in or a sudden power outage. A curtain of absolute, impenetrable black washed down from the atmosphere like ink spilling through water. It curved perfectly over the towering skyscrapers, cutting off the moon, the clouds, and the distant blinking lights of passing airplanes.
The massive dome silently slammed into the asphalt, completely enclosing a four-hundred-meter radius around the station.
The overlapping roar of the crowd faltered.
The girl in the nurse costume stopped walking, looking up. The neon lights from the billboards were still flashing, but the light didn't reach the sky anymore. It just reflected off the pitch-black ceiling that now hung over the city.
"What is that?" someone muttered nearby.
"Is it a drone show?"
"Did the power go out in the next block?"