Jujutsu Kaisen: Reincarnated as Hajime Kashimo Chapter 34 34: Strength and Solitude

"Can this feeling be called love?"

As Fuka's words settled into the quiet of the woods, Kashimo stopped moving. He didn't turn around, but he watched her from the corner of his eye. The twilight cast long shadows across his face, making his usually detached eyes seem deeper and more distant.

"What is love?"

He spoke the words softly, as if asking her, or perhaps asking himself. Whether in his previous life or in this one, Kashimo had never understood the concept.

He rembered his first seventeen years. The sterile silence of a cancer ward. The sharp, biting scent of antiseptic. The pale, unforgiving white of the walls. The tired, hollow faces of his parents. What was love in that world? Was it the als delivered on a schedule? Was it the sight of his father's red eyes after signing the papers for his final notice? Was it the sound of weeping at a funeral he couldn't attend? He rembered the sights and sounds, but the aning eluded him.

After his reincarnation, it had only beco more foreign.

Four years of slaughter. Four years of being the strongest. From the day he left ho at thirteen, he had never given the question another thought. In his current world, the strong could not afford to seek love, and they could never escape solitude. To be powerful was to be alone. No one could stand beside you, no one could surpass you, and no one could truly understand you. He had lived in that vacuum for four years.

How could a man like that understand love?

Fuka stood where she was, as still as a statue. Tears still tracked down her cheeks, but she had forgotten to wipe them away. She watched his profile, looking at the mask of his face and the eyes that seed both deeply thoughtful and entirely empty. She opened her mouth to speak, but her voice failed her.

"You might not understand this," Kashimo said. His voice drifted through the twilight, flat and clinical, as if he were discussing soone else's life. "Because I have never known what it is to be weak, I don't know how to connect with others."

He paused. "Because I have never known what it is to be weak, I don't know how to feel what they feel."

He raised a hand, pointing dismissively toward the cooling corpse a few yards away, and then toward himself. "Everyone else is just a collection of at to . A slight push, and they collapse."

Fuka didn't move.

"I believe that strength is synonymous with solitude," Kashimo continued. He looked past her, his gaze lost in the deepening dark of the trees. "To feel the void in the pursuit of power. To be lonely. To feel the grief of having no one who can stand at your side."

He turned his head slightly. "That is the price a strong man must pay."

The forest was silent, save for the dry rustle of the wind through the dead leaves.

"Many strong n have challenged ," Kashimo said. "They all wanted to find their place, to prove they were the best of their era. But they were all slaughtered before they could even show what they were capable of."

The corner of his mouth twitched, though it wasn't quite a smile. "Arashi Gojo was a lucky man. He found love, and for a while, he wasn't alone. But he still couldn't stand beside ."

He fixed his gaze on her. For the first ti, there was sothing unnaable in his eyes. A question he never asked, a search for sothing he never expected to find.

"What about you, Fuka?" he asked softly. "Can you stand beside ?"

He waited a beat. "Can you teach what love is?"

Fuka stayed silent, her tears shimring in the dark. She had no answer. Kashimo watched her for two seconds before the light in his eyes dimd. He turned away, his shoulders relaxing back into their usual, lazy posture.

"Let's go," he said. "Get so rest."

***

December 22.

The mountain road in Izumo was blocked.

It wasn't a barricade or a line of soldiers that stopped the Zenin clan's caravan. It was three corpses. They were the bodies of headless sorcerers, arranged in a grotesque formation in the middle of the path. The blood at the stumps of their necks had already dried into a dark, bruised crimson. Their heads were nowhere to be seen. They were just mounds of discarded at left in the dirt.

The caravan fell into chaos. The sound of steel being drawn echoed through the pass. Horses whinnied in alarm, and guards shouted orders as they instinctively retreated.

"And so it begins."

The voice cut through the panic. Zenin Sawara stepped out of his carriage. His hair was short, and his black-and-white robes swayed as he walked. The guards parted for him, finding their courage the mont their master appeared.

Sawara walked to the front of the line and looked up.

A figure stood on the jagged rocks above the road. He was silhouetted against the morning sun, a looming, oppressive outline. He carried a staff over his shoulder, and arcs of blue-white electricity snapped around his fra like a living storm.

Kashimo.

Sawara narrowed his eyes. An instant later, the figure vanished. A second after that, Kashimo was standing on the road, three paces away from the Zenin master.

He was too fast. The guards hadn't even seen him move. By the ti they registered his presence, the man in the white robes was already staring Sawara down.

"Protect the Lord!" soone scread.

A dozen blades were leveled at the intruder. Kashimo looked at the points of the swords and let out a dry, bored huff.

"I'm not the type to do ambushes," he said. He looked past the guards, his gaze settling on Sawara's face. He bared his teeth in a sharp, mocking grin. "But you and I are going to have to settle this. Na the ti."

The guards hesitated. They realized he hadn't co to kill them, but to issue a challenge. Sawara raised a hand, pushing down the trembling sword of the guard nearest him.

"Arrogant brat," Sawara said, a slow smile spreading across his face. "You think three dead, third-rate sorcerers are going to scare ?"

He paused, looking Kashimo over. "I'll give you your duel. December 24. Does that work for you?"

Sawara's voice was calm, but it carried to every man in the clearing. Kashimo's grin widened.

"Perfect."

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A/n: Thanks everyone who voted with power stones. Your bonus chapter is here! New goal 500 power stones let's smash the power stone button!!

For early access to 15 chapters ahead: p@tre~~/Demonic_Fiction (Link is in the synopsis and my profile).