Chapter 166

Having pleaded guilty himself, Yuji draws a death sentence from Judgeman. Higuruma sets about executing it, but the sight of someone being falsely prosecuted brings his origins rushing back to him.

Back in his law school days, Higuruma was approached by an acquaintance he called Mr. Yoshizawa. Expecting talk of a proposal he had submitted, Higuruma instead found Yoshizawa urging him to take up the bench as a judge. Back in the present, Judgeman piles a death penalty on top of the confiscation. Under that ruling, the gavel Higuruma carries morphs into a blade known as the Executioner's Sword, a weapon able to slay its target in a single stroke.

To Higuruma, empathizing with people means seeing all their weakness, and he cannot help finding that fragility ugly. Yuji included, everyone strikes him as weak and ugly no matter how they aspire to improve; he believes there is nothing deeper to people and likens it to casting light into darkness only to reveal more emptiness. Yuji tries to keep distance by flinging theater chairs, then tosses his Jujutsu High jacket to throw the lawyer off and slips behind him, hurling his hoodie to blind Higuruma for an instant. A sweeping kick is hopped over, and as Yuji drives an uppercut up from below, the lawyer brings the Executioner's Sword slashing down toward him.

In the remembered talk with Mr. Yoshizawa, Higuruma had declined to become a judge, feeling he lacked ambition; he had always seen people as weak and ugly but once prized that as something uniquely human. Yuji's confession to a crime he did not commit jogs this memory, because evidence entered into Higuruma's domain is shared with him before he even opens it, and the retrial's evidence concerned Sukuna, so Higuruma knows Yuji was not the culprit and cannot fathom why he would confess. Choosing to switch off the Executioner's Sword, Higuruma lets the uppercut connect and is sent crashing into the seats, baffling Yuji. Without bothering to rise, he says the lack of reason or control marks non-components, adds that Sukuna held the body and Yuji never surrendered control willingly, and therefore deems him innocent. Yuji rejects this, still claiming the blame and believing all that death happened because of his own weakness. When Yuji asks why he shut off his cursed technique, Higuruma rises and answers that he remembered why he entered law in the first place, and that with other weak people still needing help, he will let Yuji use his points. Inviting Yuji to sit once he is dressed again, Higuruma asks whether he has ever killed of his own will; Yuji grimly admits he has. Remembering how he had killed both the judge and the prosecutor tied to the trial of Keita Oe, the man wonders aloud whether that act felt awful to Yuji as well.

Logged as installment 166 of the Gege Akutami manga, this nineteen-page Culling Game Arc entry appears in Volume 19 and adapts as anime Episode 56. It concludes the Yuji versus Higuruma battle, introduces the Executioner's Sword, and uses flashbacks to Mr. Yoshizawa, the unnamed Judge, and the Prosecutor to reframe Higuruma's outlook.