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Chapter Text

Ino Takuma was running out of time. The elderly curse user with the weird eyes was just about done her strange ritual, and despite the strength difference between himself and her apparent grandson, the latter was proving to be a stubborn obstacle. 

He tried switching his attack patterns, and would even score several devastating hits; but somehow, the wall of a curse user just wouldn’t go down. Even when Ino scored a blow that pierced a hole directly through his arm. 

“For the love of God, just go down already!” He cried, smashing an elbow into the side of the man’s head, knocking him aside just long enough that he could make a lunge for the grandma-

Just to be tackled several feet away by that annoying fucking grandson again! 

With a grunt, he ripped the man’s arms off of his own, and sent him hurtling back with a haymaker infused with cursed energy. The man rolled to a stop next to his grandmother, spitting out teeth, yet still remained poised to fight.

It seemed he was just about to rush towards Ino once again, until the elderly lady paused her muffled chanting.

“Enough,” She spoke, “It is complete.”

Ino could only sigh. What a pain, he was willing to bet she had made some crazy binding vow and ritualistic combo that would strengthen her grandson. Cautiously, he put up his guard, unsure of what exactly to expect, until the grandma spoke again, drawing his eyes away from the younger curse user.

“There is no point. You will lose, now.” An ominous presence alerted him back to the blonde weirdo he’d been fighting, finding that his appearance had drastically changed. Without skipping a beat, Ino activated his cursed technique, propelling a deadly spinning drill to try and take out the curse user from down range. “Toji Zenin!”

The drill was caught from midair with blinding speed, revealing the grandson’s strange half-shifted state. It seemed down the middle, the man’s old appearance was merging with that of a narrow-eyed, raven haired man with sharp features. 

‘He’s… turning into someone else?’ Ino thought. ‘Just- just who is this guy? Some famous Jujutsu Sorcerer?’

The transformation was complete in seconds, and in the place of the sad-looking unimpressive curse user before, stood an intimidating man with a predatory aura. Muscles pulled the fabric of the curse user’s sweater tight, unveiling a powerful physique with broad, mountain-like shoulders. And his stance… It screamed of danger, Ino had to move first before this man could utilise his cursed technique!

Wreathing his fist in cursed energy, Ino moved to engage the enemy-

There was no chance to react. One second, the grandson was standing next to his grandmother, the next, his mask was violently ripped from his face; his cursed energy immediately decreasing into a weak hum.

‘What?’

Ino turned his head in order to react to the sudden rush of movement, only for a fist to clobber the daylights out of him. A firm grip took hold of his shirt before the blow could knock him off the roof. 

Then, a series of unimaginably powerful strikes barraged his face, each fist rattling his skull and brutalising his flesh in an unstoppable flood of punches. 

Ino was unconscious before he even reached the ground.

Ino’s bloodied body made contact with the roof with a quiet thud , before it was suddenly and inharmoniously kicked off the side of the rooftop .

“Grandmother, what do we do?” The curse user, now possessing the body of the legendary Toji Zenin, asked.

“W-what.. What d-do.. What do we do now?” A violent stutter overtook his speech, his head twitching minutely as if he were possessed.

The grandmother paid no mind to the occurrence, her gaze preoccupied with disdainfully looking at the bloodstains left by the sorcerer they were fighting just moments prior.

“With Gojo Satoru sealed, there will be no one capable of stopping you. Before the Jujutsu headquarters can coordinate a more powerful response, go down and kill as many Sorcerers as you can.”

A short bout of silence followed.

“...Grandson?”

“Huh? Where the- What the fuck is this?” The low, raspy voice of Toji Zenin spoke. He turned, facing her. “Who the fuck are you?”

The elderly curse user leapt several feet back, her hand flying up to her necklace of prayer beads as a cold sweat overtook her body. No. No, this wasn’t possible.

She specifically resurrected the body apart from the soul in order to avoid situations like this!

“Is this a dream?” The resurrected Toji spoke, turning his head to survey the skyline of Shibuya. “Huh, doesn’t feel like it…”

Then the sorcerer killer erupted into a fit of harsh laughter.

“Fuck! Of all things, this? This is where I end up? ” 

The curse user, Ogami, took a cautious step back. The worst case scenario, the absolute worst scenario imaginable! If this was the real Toji Zenin who had reawakened; her chances of survival were close to nil in a direct confrontation. Though, if she tried to attack him while he was in this state of confusion…

While Toji ran a hand through his hair, pacing and battling with some unknown mental turmoil, Ogami unsheathed a sleek, copper shaded ornate shortsword with a gilded hilt; The Small Fox Blade , a special grade cursed weapon. 

With a quick charge of cursed energy, Ogami utilised Toji’s distraction to launch the sword towards him, the blade spinning through the air in a parabolic trajectory at bullet speed; testament to its power. 

She withdrew a second, less flashy looking sword from her robes as she charged towards Toji with every ounce of cursed energy she could muster. 

As expected, Toji was aroused from his musings by the sword cutting through the air towards him, and he caught it without a second thought.

Ogami grinned. “Hah, you fool!” 

Cursed energy was channelled into her own blade, as she reached Toji and began swinging upward to separate his head from his shoulders. Toji had fallen for her trick.

Kogitsunemaru 小狐丸 , or the Small Fox Blade , was a special grade cursed item which granted its user the ability to cut the soul. Ogami’s technique was very closely intertwined with soul sorcery, yet despite the fact, she was still unable to perceive the soul itself. If a vessel were to ever be overtaken by the soul she resurrected, taking the enemy down without killing the body would be difficult without the ability to damage the soul. The sword was one of its kind, really, and worked in tandem with her technique. It would be the only way for her to revive her grandson while killing Toji Zenin, once and for all. Once she’d wounded him, she’d run him through the chest with the blade!

It also had a second, more passive ability. Once the sword had chosen a user, it would bind itself with their soul; anyone besides that user would be paralysed if their hand were to make contact with the sword handle. Its previous user had been killed by her, making her the Small Fox Blade’s newest owner. While its passive enchantment was more of an insurance so that the weapon could not be stolen, who would have known it would serve her now, in this roundabout way.

As her second blade cut through the air, on a straight trajectory for Toji’s exposed hide, the elder witch grinned with glee. Ogami would be the sorcerer to kill Toji Zenin for the second time!

CLANG!

Her blow was deflected, Toji using the Small Fox Blade to halt her swing.

“W-what!?” Ogami sputtered, frozen by shock. “The Small Fox Blade paralyses any who use it besides its owner! H-how, how-” With one hand, Toji cut off the older woman’s rambling by wrapping a hand over her mouth, large fingers wrapping around her skull and immobilising her. He appraised the blade in his other hand with an unimpressed hum.

“Guess it liked me more.” 

There was a flash of bronze, then Ogami knew no more.

“Naobito! Maki! Withdraw!” Nanami yelled, his powerful voice easily carrying throughout the vast domain. Next to him, Megumi stood in a crouch, standing on a bed of swelling shadowy mass as he focused all his energy in creating an opening in the Special Grade Curse’s tropical themed barrier. 

Closer to the shore, the second year martial arts expert Maki and the elder projection sorcery user, Naobito Zenin, immediately retreated in response to Nanami’s call.

The Special Grade curse they were locked in battle with, a tall, musclebound curse armoured in chitinous plates as if it were a macabre imitation of a crustacean, watched them leave with detached caution. It evaluated their movements, preparing for the dark haired sorcerer’s inevitable domain expansion.

Surely they didn’t believe that boy, weakened as he was, would be able to overtake Dagon’s own; perfected domain, right?

Then, Dagon felt it. A hole created in the impeccable barrier that encapsulated its domain. Those sorcerers were attempting to escape!

A sense of urgency overtook the curse, as it charged through the seawater of its domain. It could not let them escape, not after what they did to Hanami!

But the group of sorcerers did not leave, recoiling surprise at the opening they were moments away from entering was suddenly occupied by a mysterious figure. First came a set of muscular arms, draped in a loose fit grey sweater as they cut through the thick sludge created by Megumi’s technique. 

A head topped with a mop of black hair, atop an angular, intimidating visage. Broad shoulders erupted from the opening, followed by a wide torso; the baggy clothing failing to disguise the figure’s considerable musculature. Then the rest of the man followed, until the tall, taller than even Nanami , man stood among the sorcerers. 

The man had his arms raised, as if in celebration, and a deep rumble of laughter emanating from his throat.

Dagon halted its charge, appraising the new combatant wearily. They had summoned another sorcerer instead of escaping. Why?

“Huh? W-who the hell are you!?” Maki yelled, moving into a battle position only for the man to all but materialise in front of her. A powerful grip overtook her own, wrenching the Playful Cloud 遊雲 from her hands. 

“Gonna need that,” the man grinned, as he sent Maki flipping through the air with a simple wave of his arm.

As Maki grappled with the shock of the man’s superior strength, to her of all people , the mysterious sorcerer turned towards Megumi.

He held an awkward gaze with the black haired Ten Shadows user for a few seconds, before looking away. Instead, the man stepped off the raised platform the group stood on, choosing to taunt Dagon as he swung the special grade weapon in a lazy figure eight. “You got all expenses paid crab boil here? For me? You shouldn’t have. ”

“You think you can fight me? Alone?” Dagon spoke, its voice amplified by the ambient effects of his domain. 

Then, suddenly, the ocean was split between Dagon and the sorcerers, as the black haired man leapt forward with such speed and force that not even the Special Grade could react!

A resounding shockwave vaporised the surrounding water and turned it into fine mist, as the black haired menace spun a kick into the crustacean curse with such force that the creature was sent hurtling through its own domain. 

The crab-like curse had no chance to react, before its attacker seemed to materialise right above it, striking it down with the maroon coloured sectioned staff hard enough to create a crater in the beach.

The curseless sorcerer grinned something demonic, spreading his arms out as he fell back down towards the Earth.

Dagon, driven by panic by the unstoppable blitz of the zero cursed energy sorcerer- was that even possible? - thrust out its arms to command a wave of lesser sea creatures to barrage the sorcerer while he was airborne- only for them all to be eviscerated by a sphere of death.

The sorcerer whirled that cursed tool, the three sectioned nunchaku, with such speed and ferocity that any creature that’d entered the range of his wingspan was turned into red mist. Like a mass of rotating saw blades, the sorcerer fell through his army of sea creatures until he had reached the water once again.

Another laugh came from the sorcerer as he continued mowing away at the flood of Dagon’s onslaught. “Mmmn, I fucking love sea food!”

With an earth shattering BOOM , the sorcerer split the sea once more- turning both water and sea creature to mist as he appeared before Dagon. The special grade disaster curse, one of the strongest of its kind, recoiled in fear as the sorcerer swung his weapon with speed that it could not track!

An unstoppable barrage of blunt force assaulted Dagon, who could not defend itself from a full-body bruising that pulverised its chitinous armour head to toe- turning their surroundings into a salty ocean mist.

Dagon let out a monstrous, desperate scream as it summoned its largest apparition, a veritable sea monster borne of the tales of legend; a kraken, beyond the size of any creature on Earth. The ocean swelled with its arrival, submerging both Dagon and his assaulter as an eye the size of a building appeared before them both. 

Capitalising on the distraction, Dagon commanded the water to pull him away from the sorcerer, whilst the Kraken shot forth several titanic tentacles, large enough to wrap around skyscrapers, towards the attacker. Simultaneously, he channelled his cursed energy reserves to repair the damage the sorcerer had inflicted on him; any longer of an assault and he truly may have died just then!

The black haired man grinned, something wide and vicious, just as Dagon propelled himself clear of the water.

The special grade curse locked eyes with the group still on that boy’s strange technique, before commanding the water to propel him towards them at full speed. Whilst their strongest card was occupied, he would deal with the rest- to ensure that they do not seize the opportunity to give a second attempt in escaping his domain.

The kraken he had summoned would be enough to occupy that man, perhaps not for long, but enough for him to-

Water beneath Dagon, abyssal in its depth in order to accommodate the titan Dagon called upon, detonated outward in a shower of ocean water and massive purplish innards. Dagon dragged his eyes down at what felt to be a torturously long effort as he locked eyes with the black haired sorcerer once again, inches away from his face as the sorcerer somehow outran the explosion of kraken guts caused by the man’s own attack.

“Crack a crab, bitch!”

“You…!” The aquatic curse could only sputter, before the sorcerer’s bare hand wrapped around his neck, Dagon’s exo skeleton shattering under his outrageously strong grip. Then, one handedly, the sorcerer battered Dagon’s skull with the Playful Cloud , the special grade curse unable to stop the relentless assault.

Dagon could only choke out a wet scream, its arsenal of beasts depleted as each blow rained down on its face inflicted catastrophic damage, causing his titanium-like exo skeleton to crumple as if it were glass. 

Then, after several seconds of brutal beating that sent arcs of purple blood into the air, the tropical domain shattered- the surroundings melting into the subway station Dagon had first engaged the sorcerers. 

Naobito, Megumi, Maki and Nanami could only stare open-mouthed, as the special grade curse which was moments from killing all of them fell to the ground, straddled by the mysterious sorcerer who’d appeared from Megumi’s escape plan. A deep chuckle rumbled from the man’s throat, as he stood up from where sat on the curse’s abdomen.

Which raised the question…

Whose side was this monster of a man on?

His first thought, when he stepped off the disintegrating corpse of the special grade aquatic curse, Dagon, was ‘Man I am taking this reincarnation shit, really, really well.’

And he was, wasn’t he?

Well sure, initially there was a bit of confusion at first; and he hadn’t recognised the scene nor the old lady that was up on that rooftop with him right away, but he’d caught up to everything pretty quick.

When he had come to be on that rooftop, he was overcome with a sense of familiarity that probably was not very customary when body swapping, or world swapping, for that matter. His first instinct was of course to question whether he was dreaming or not, or maybe he’d just gone batshit insane.

The clarity of the world around himself, draped in a the dark cloak of night that his enhanced eyes saw through as if it was a thin sheet; the crisp autumn air tickling the inside of his nostrils with such saturation that it almost felt like he could taste the coming winter on the tip of his tongue. The breeze that came from this altitude tickled his bare skin, and despite its ineffectual chill against his strengthened flesh, goosebumps climbed up his neck from the tactile sensitivity he bore against its breath. 

Everything felt so real, realer and fresher than it's ever been. If that made sense, which it probably didn’t.

His senses then were just so alive that he didn’t think he could recall a time he’d ever been so… aware, of everything.

Toji fucking Fushiguro. Who would've guessed. In the middle of Shibuya too, like, really?

Strangely, when he thought of his life before he’d woke up in the flesh of Toji fucking Fushiguro ,  he could not put a face nor name to any of the figures in his life. Scratch that, he couldn’t even remember his family, if he had one. Really, despite the common knowledge, skills and habits one builds from living an urban lifestyle, he just couldn’t remember anything from his past life; not even what he was doing before he’d woken up in Toji’s body. (Had he died? It was chilling to think of, but he could not recall his latest moments in his previous life at all- it must have been something instant.)

Well, there was one thing he could remember with impeccable accuracy.

Jujutsu Kaisen. Basically the biggest anime hit in the world since Attack on Titan ended. Since the second season’s animation in late 2023, it was all the internet could talk about. Every second meme or post on any one of his social media feeds, back then, was about Jujutsu Kaisen. Even those who were completely averse to anime, had been touched by the biblical media flood that the show had inflicted upon the internet.

And really, how convenient that he remembered every detail; down to the manga’s long awaited ending. 

Now that he was in the universe itself.

Offhandedly, he decided not to question the circumstances of his arrival here too much. Maybe this was some obscenely well crafted hallucination, or reincarnation was real and some unfathomable cosmic law chose him of all people to be reborn here; not as a newborn but as the resurrected Toji Fushiguro; the one who left it all behind, the sorcerer killer.

Anyways, questioning his appearance here would sooner drive him mad than lead him to any answers. Which is, again, why he decided not to think about it; letting the overwhelming battle instincts of this body, which spoke to him clearer than his own thoughts , lead him to dispose of the grandma curse user (He’d never killed someone before. Wasn't it supposed to be heavy hitting? It really didn’t feel like anything special when he lopped her head off) and let the lust for battle lead him off that roof top and through the city streets. 

He used that granny’s sword to slice his way through hordes of transfigured humans, the amorphous creatures unable to stop his charge as he carved through them like a rabid bull through a kindergarten. Uh. Weird analogy. Again, weren’t these real people just a short while ago? It really shouldn’t be so easy to kill , it's not like he’d ever done it before.

Whatever. Heading down into the subway, he tried to hurry as he figured he was probably on his way to that crab curse’s domain expansion, as Toji had gone in the anime.

Uh. Wow, he was gonna be meeting with Jujutsu Kaisen characters. Like, soon. Cool.

‘ … One of them was Toji’s, er, my son.’

“Fret not, Megumi.” he had spoken then, his voice raspy and deeper than it had ever been before, just as he bisected a transfigured human blocking his path at the waist. “Your bum ass father is coming to save the day.” 

And he did get there, awkwardly standing at the edge of the void-like barrier, scratching his head as he waited for Megumi’s Chimera Shadow Garden to make an opening. But really, he hadn’t been prepared for the rush of emotion that swept through his body when he looked over Toji’s son. His son.

Megumi certainly hadn’t recognised him, understandably so as Megumi’s jackass of a father abandoned him when he was too young to remember. Though, Toji had certainly cared deeply for Megumi; as could be telled by the swell of affection and pride that pulsed within his chest just from looking at the Ten Shadows user. It was almost dizzying, to feel so strongly for someone he’d never met. What was it, that Kenjaku had said? The soul is the body, body is the soul?

Seems he was pretty much right on the mark.

Anyways, a crazy fucking battle later, where a wild, unbridling power that flowed through every cell in his body had all but taken over, allowing him to strike with enough force to turn an entire beach into a fucking crater. He was actually quite familiar with fighting from his previous life, that he was sure of, but certainly not to the extent of being able to dominate a battle between special grades. It was as if Toji’s body remembered how to fight, even with himself at the wheel.

He had beaten Dagon, the special grade disaster curse, to a pulp, with nothing but a pair of fancy nunchucks (without destroying them this time!). Absent-mindedly he wonders where that fancy bronze sword went- he must have dropped it somewhere along the way.

Stepping off of Dagon’s disintegrating corpse, he gave the Playful Cloud a quick flick of the wrist, dispersing the cursed blood from the special grade weapon. He could feel the gazes of the sorcerers he had inadvertently rescued burning into the side of his skull. Uh. What was he supposed to say? He had to play it in a cool, nonchalant, true Toji style.

Drawing in a deep breath, he formulated something of a script in his head. 

He turned his head towards the group, pointedly not looking at Megumi as he fixed them with a cocky grin. He wiggled the Playful Cloud in his hand. “You still want this back?”

Silence.

“...Er, that’s fine with me, wasn’ planning on giv-”

“How are you here, Toji?” Naobito bit out, not a trace of his drunken demeanour present. He locked eyes with the old man, some part of him impressed by his lucidity in the absence of his entire right arm, though he supposed he was probably stumping the blood flow with cursed energy, or something. His stance was tense, every muscle in his body wound tight. It seemed out of the entire group, only Naobito knew who he was.

Right. ‘Me.’ He is Toji, Toji is him.

He couldn't shake off the impostor syndrome no matter how hard he tried.

“You haven’t gotten any younger, old man.” The words rolled out of his mouth naturally, oozing confidence that didn’t reflect his internal freakout. “Y’look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

At that, Maki seemed to twitch subtly, her hands flexing in the absence of her weapon. Naobito’s eyes narrowed. “Because I am looking at one. You are meant to be dead.”

He stuck out his tongue, cocking a fist against his hip as he rolled his eyes. “What can I say? That six-eyed brat has lousy aim.”

“I saw your corpse. Half of your torso was carved out.”

“Nothing a band aid can’t fix.”

Suddenly, Nanami cut in.

“Naobito, explain! Who is this? What is your relation to this man? And why… Why can’t I sense any cursed energy from him?” 

“He’s dead is what he is!”

He tuned the group out, looking over his shoulder to face a short, pale skinned one eyed curse with a strange leopard printed cloak and a volcano-shaped head. The curse was on a knee, clutching the disintegrating hand of Dagon. Slowly, Jogo’s singular eye turned in its socket to lock with his own. Ah. 

“Pft, don’t look at me. ” He scoffed nervously. “It was er, like that when we got here.”

Jogo, the volcanic curse, was widely considered to be the strongest of the disaster curses. Besides Satoru Gojo, and Ryomen Sukuna, it was unknown if any sorcerer in Jujutsu Kaisen could withstand his sheer firepower and speed. As a matter of fact, he was fairly certain he was a really, really bad match up with this curse. Power and speed was its specialty. All he could do was hit hard. What could really he do against a volcanic blast? Against a meteor?

“These are the ones that killed you, Dagon?” The curse rasped, just as the last of its comrade’s flesh evaporated. 

“Oi, really I’ve no idea what happened to that guy, maybe he drowned or somethi-” 

Jogo then appeared in front of Nanami, whilst the blonde sorcerer was locked in an argument with Naobito. “One.”

In the official release of Jujutsu Kaisen, this was the moment Jogo torched Nanami Kento, crippling him and putting him in a heavily weakened state where he was easily killed one episode later.

In this moment however, where He, some ordinary man from the year 2024 had merged with the body of one Toji Fushiguro, Jogo did not have the chance to activate his technique- as his fist trucked directly into the curse’s wide face and sent it, or him, whatever, into the wall on the opposite end of the train tracks. 

He shook out his fist, now shoulder to shoulder with Nanami as he squared his back. “Focus up, sorcerers. This is a special grade goblin we’re dealing with.” 

Nanami stared ahead, wide eyed. “I… I didn’t see it move?”

Then, atleast to the others, Jogo suddenly appeared before him, his hands posed as if he were Goku charging a kamehameha. Hah, nerd. Wait, shit, that was probably bad.

He wrapped his arms around Nanami’s torso, bodily lifting him before shooting off from his place, just as a powerful blaze came alive in place of where Nanami and he had been standing a second prior. 

In the corner of his eye, he saw Naobito use his technique to try and move behind the curse. The older sorcerer’s movements were lagged, presumably due to his injuries, but he still moved at an erratic speed that was difficult to track. But not impossible.

He saw Jogo turn and nonchalantly raise a hand in Naobito’s expected trajectory.

Again, he found himself launching off the ground and tackling the older man away from the path from a four-way blowtorch finisher. He didn’t know what possessed himself to move when he did, since this guy was canonically a total asshole. He supposed that maybe somewhere in the inky void that was Toji’s chest, he still had something of a moral compass. 

Flipping in the air, he unceremoniously dropped the older Zenin onto the ground, turning to face the curse that had just then begun to move towards Maki, who was looking towards him- her mouth agape. Next to her was Megumi, every bit as awe-struck although his stoic expression hid it much better.

“Damn it, kids!” He kicked off a pillar, leaving Naobito in his dust as he shot across the room and drop kicked Jogo just as his hand raised itself a hair away from Maki’s face. No barbecued Maki in this timeline.

“The hell is wrong with you guys? You tryna fuckin’ die!?” He couldn’t help but yell, as he deliberately paced to ensure that he remained between Jogo and the group. Shit. This battle was truly beyond any of them. “If you’re just gonna stand around, get the fuck outta here then!” 

“You don’t have any cursed energy,” Jogo began, stepping out from the crumbling wall he had kicked him into. “Yet your power eclipses all other sorcerers in this room. How?”

Heavenly pact, dumbass.

“Blah, blah, I’m special or something, blah.” He groaned, unfolding the Playful Cloud as he spun it in preparation for battle. He began to regret taking his time with Dagon, as fun as that one sided beatdown of a fight was. He wasn’t really thinking, in the time between killing that cursed grandma and breaking into Dagon’s domain, but he’d somewhat hoped to get the hell out of dodge before Jogo showed up. How unlucky, he was there for maybe 30 minutes, tops, and he was already facing off against one of the strongest characters in the verse. This truly was our Jujutsu Kaisen. “Let’s just fight, man.”

When Toji was young, perhaps eight years old or even younger; he was thrown into the Zenin clan’s punishment pit after refusing to acknowledge a clan elder as his superior. The elders of the clan fully expected the civilian child to perish in the pit, as there was a particularly dangerous curse trapped within it at that time.

It was a curse with several knifelike appendages, each limb ending in a blade that glowed with searing heat. The entire curse’s body was draped with fire and steam, a testament to the intense temperature its body produced. It would be no issue for a trained sorcerer of course, but no child should have been able to survive it, alongside the rest of the horde also in that hole.

Toji, at eight years old, had slaughtered that curse with its own detached limb. 

It hurt a lot though. The heavenly restriction Toji, or he supposed He , was born with traded cursed energy in exchange for heightened senses, strength, speed and durability. Heat was a finicky element however, as there was only so much flesh could do to withstand it, even with superhuman abilities. 

So what did that tell him, when fighting a curse that could turn an entire city into a magma pool?

He narrowly leapt out of the way of the stream of fire which turned the wall behind himself into molten slog, his legs blurring as he fought to move faster than the wisps of flame that licked at his heels. He could see Jogo staring at him, almost concomitantly, as he waved a hand, to and fro, to command another searing blast of heat that would raise the subway temperature by several degrees.

It told him to not get hit.

In the corner of his eye, he noticed the sorcerers grouping together again, seemingly debating their next course of action; poised as if they were getting ready to rejoin the fight. Really, these guys treated this situation as if there was time to be sitting around talking!

If they wouldn’t leave, he only had one other choice. He’d have to take Jogo, and this fight, outside.

Fire curses were tricky to deal with, he knew that much. Not to mention, Jogo was mentioned to be the fastest of the disaster curses.

He wasn’t as fast as Toji though.

The volcanic curse raised both arms, presumably to summon another attack, but he did not give him the chance. Focusing a surge of strength in his legs, he crossed the service platform in only two long strides, before clocking Jogo across the face with the Playful Cloud , the special grade’s weapon, in conjunction with his natural strength, hit the poor curse with such power that he practically disappeared into the darkness of the subway tunnel.

He followed the curse’s trajectory, slamming as many strikes as he could into his body as the two combatants travelled at basically sonic speeds through the tunnel. He could see his eye widen, as he began to take the battle more seriously. The curse wrapped his arms with a cloak of cursed energy as he attempted to match Toji blow for blow.

Tha-donk! Another powerful slam of the Playful Cloud into that strangely shaped head of his, and Jogo seemed to have had enough. 

“Disaster flames!” A violent eruption shook the earth, and he only had bare moments to react. In the blink of an eye, concrete and mortar was incinerated with the activation of Jogo’s technique. There was nowhere to run.

His only defence against the unstoppable wave of magma was to spin the Playful Cloud at sonic speeds, creating a helicopter like shield beneath his feet as negative pressure sent him hurtling through the air. A blast of pure lava collided heavily with his back, sending a wave of furious agony through his body as it carried him through several layers of earth; until the ground itself collapsed, revealing the night sky above.

Midair, he adjusted to drive a heel into Jogo’s jaw, the curse moments away from hitting him with another heatwave. 

Utilising the volcanic curse as a spring, he hopped from one collapsing plate of asphalt to another, before landing in the middle of an open street. 

“Ah, shit.” he cursed, contorting his torso as he fought against the pain ravaging the flesh of his back. The back of his sweater was in tatters, edges singed or melted onto his skin in a gruesome fashion statement. “Fuck.”

“I can’t afford to waste time with you,” Jogo said, audibly popping his jaw back into place as he peeled himself from the car I kicked him into. “The longer I stay here… That idiot Mahito, if he gets to Sukuna’s vessel before me…!”

“Yeah, we both got places to be. Wanna wrap this up?” He bit out, the slightest hint of tears  threatening his eyes. Fuck. Toji’s body may have remembered how to fight, but it seems pain tolerance wasn’t something that carried over. His back burned something crazy, crackling with pain with every movement he made. The wind beat at the exposed skin of his back, burned raw from Jogo’s early attack. He had to end this, fast. He didn’t know how much more of that kind of punishment he could take, before the damage reached an untenable point.

Pivoting into a low stance, concrete buckled underneath his feet as he prepared to launch himself at Jogo with every ounce of strength he could muster. But then the curse made a sign with its hands, a demonic grin splitting its face in two as the curse uttered a single chant.

“Domain Expansion,” Jogo spoke, voice throbbing with such power it rattled the very Earth. “Coffin of the Iron Mountain! 鉄山の棺 !”

“Man, fuck this shit!” He swore, as he was suddenly enveloped by an enormously intense heat; his surroundings replaced the menacing glow of the inside of what seemed to be a volcano. Really, Jogo!? Weren’t domain expansions some kind of trump card, to use when your back was against the wall?

The heat distorted the air, draping Jogo in a wickedly menacing aura as the curse raised its spindly arms towards Toji. “Burn.”

Instantly, the spot where Toji stood was enveloped with an unstoppable eruption of lava, whilst molten boulders barraged the spot at once. 

Jogo grinned, holding his domain a little longer to appreciate the charred form of his enemy, the curseless human, while his sure-hit attack died down. But there was nothing left in the space he’d incinerated the heavenly restriction user. The volcanic curse blinked, wondering if he had overdid his attack to the point the human had been atomised, only for a jaw crushing force to impact his jaw, again!

Without pause, the Playful Cloud slammed itself into Jogo’s head repeatedly, blinding the curse as his large eye all but exploded underneath the weight of the relentless assault. 

“How!?” Jogo screamed, forcing the black haired fighter back with an outward swell of fire. Impossible. Within his domain, all attacks should be guaranteed to hit! “You’re in my domain, how’d you not get hit? ”

“”Fuck, its hot in here,” Toji hopped from foot to foot, his face flushed as he wiped an arm against his forehead. “Dunno. Guess your aim is just ass regardless!”

With that, he charged towards Jogo once more, side stepping another eruption of rock and flame as he did his best to close the distance. If he was able to break Dagon’s domain by beating the shit out of it, the same should work for that bastard, Jogo!

He just had to get close enough to do it!

“Get over here you fuckin’ midget!” Toji bellowed, acrobatically manoeuvring through a series of flame attacks before he landed at Jogo’s side. The curse’s singular eye, now healed, widened as Toji drove a limb of the Playful Cloud into its stomach. He didn’t let up, immediately unleashing another barrage of attacks that sent magma and rock flying up from their position. 

The two chased each other, Jogo attempting and failing to meet Toji blow for blow as the curseless fighter dominated the battle in close quarters. The curse attempted to use a hailstorm of molten rock to halt Toji’s assault, only for the man to eviscerate the barrage with a blindingly fast series of swings of his cursed weapon.

Lava rained from the sky, debris from the destructive battle, and Jogo cried out in shock as Toji bodily restrained it; then used it as a shield from the onslaught of magma. In defiance, the volcanic curse slammed a curse infused fist into the side of the man’s head, rocking it back violently.

Then two gunmetal eyes met Jogo’s and the next moment- all it knew was pain.

Toji sent Jogo into the air with a sonic cone inducing hit to the curse’s jaw, breaking it for what had to be the tenth time in a row. Suddenly, the disaster curse’s flight was arrested as it appeared to levitate in place. Flame exploded from the craters on its head, a manic expression overtaking its face. 

Its arms glowed red like forged iron, as two massive limbs of molten rock materialised from the volcano’s walls and shot forward towards him. Toji’s heart raced as the fists rushed across the battlefield, so large and mighty in their power that it was impossible to dodge. 

With no other option, Toji clumsily stuffed the Playful Cloud into his waistband, before plunging both his hands into the plate of rock he was standing on. His muscles flexed powerfully, taut against the sweater he wore as he threw his arms upward with as much power as he could muster, blocking the two massive fists with an equally massive plate of igneous rock.

The ground swayed beneath his feet, the surface of the volcano disturbed by the massive force of the world’s largest and most destructive table flip ever, which collided with Jogo’s attack with such raw power that a blinding explosion erupted from the point of impact. The platform he’d thrown up exploded into a million pieces, but successfully neutralised Jogo’s special move; the aforementioned curse watching a dozen metres away with a look of total shock on its face.

The curse, in an exercise in futility, attempted to rain another barrage of meteors upon Toji’s position; only to cry out in surprise as the curseless Zenin appeared before him, dozens of metres in the air, within a fraction of a second.

Toji grinned like a wild animal, as he crossed the space between them in a single bound. “EAT SHIT!” He screamed, unfolding the Playful Cloud and all but caving in Jogo’s skull with it; in a blow so powerful it pulverised the Earth beneath them, sending an eruption of lava that spilled over the edges of Jogo’s volcano. Hundreds of metres of magma reached up towards the sky, as Jogo’s head deformed with a wet crunch under Toji’s immense strength.

The strength of the blow was so great, the molten surface they stood on deformed into a bowl shape; the contents of the volcano erupting all at once from the sheer force exerted by Toji’s finishing strike. Jogo’s head caved in similarly, the strange volcano-like structure of its crumpled into itself in a gross explosion of purple blood and flesh turned into mulch.

The domain around them rapidly fell apart, revealing the destroyed street the two were standing on no more than ten minutes ago. Toji noted that no trace of Jogo’s destructive domain was observed in the environment, affirming the fact that Jogo’s domain did not impose itself upon the real world the way Sukuna’s did. That was a relief, the volcano had looked rather large; Jogo could have immolated the entire district if that damage was reflected in the real world.

Toji cleared his throat, coughing out a few times as his lungs readjusted from sweltering, boiling temperatures to regular cool air. His skin stung uncomfortably, but the ambient temperature of Jogo’s domain hadn’t damaged him as much as the direct hit from earlier did.

Holy shit. Did he really just do that? Did he just defeat not one, but two disaster curses each within thirty minutes of each other? 

He supposed this was what it meant to be Toji Fushiguro . What a monster.

A hoarse noise could be heard from Jogo, a few feet away from where he lay in a bed of crushed asphalt. The curse hacked and coughed, its cursed energy swelling as it attempted to heal its grievous wounds.

Less than a second later, Toji was standing over it; roughly inserting one end of the Playful Cloud into its mouth.

“Y’move, or try anything,” Toji warned, his voice a low, dangerous baritone; the type of tone the Him from before never used, but Toji used with just about everyone he’d ever interacted with, “I’ll stir your brains, or whatever’s in that weird head of yours, like mochi.” 

A shaky exhale came from the disaster curse, as its teeth clacked against the special grade weapon. Toji took that as acceptance then.

“So,” He began, almost conversationally, “The fuck’re you guys tryin’ to achieve, with this shitshow? You can talk, and you’re smarter than your average pile of goo, so you curses have got some kind of plan, a reason for all this, right?”

Really, there was no point in interrogating Jogo. He knew the purpose of the Shibuya incident, he knew Kenjaku’s plans, and he knew why the disaster curses went along with it.

It was all for appearances. Because he could feel the cursed energy signatures from before watching. They must have caught up, then.

“This world…” Jogo began, its singular eye unfocused as it stared somewhere off into the space behind Toji. “It… it stinks! It stinks of rot, of dishonesty, of liars! You humans, you don’t understand just how, how disgusting, how revolting it is to watch you from the outside! An entire life, an entire civilization built on lying, cheating, hating and killing each other, it's a wonder any of you can even bear to look at one another!”

A sort of zeal glimmered in Jogo’s pupil, the temperature in the air rising dramatically as the curse began to ineffectually push back against Toji’s weapon. Toji just shifted uncomfortably. “Uh, wasn’t asking for an ideological monologue, dude.”

“That’s why, that is why…! You humans do not deserve this world! Us, the curses, we are the raw, unfiltered manifestations of man’s purest emotions, of the true face of humanity! We curses, we are the true humans.” Then, the curse gripped the Playful Cloud with both its hands, its palms glowing a rich orange as the ground next to the two began to melt and turn to slag. “Even if I am not there to witness it, in the end, the era of curses will come! For the most ultimate form of humanity to reign freely! Sukuna! Sukuna will see it through! ”

Uh oh. With his free hand, Toji ripped Jogo’s cloak open, seeing the tapestry that held ten of Sukuna’s fingers missing. ‘Shit!’

“Where are they!?” Toji yelled, knocking Jogo’s head against the concrete hard enough to fracture the ground. “The fingers; where’d they- Where did you put them?”

The curse only grinned, its charcoal teeth glinting as a dangerous light burned in the back of its mouth. Jogo’s body began glowing, a ray like the sun exploding from his eye socket as its immense cursed energy output shifted from trying to regenerate its wounds to outputting this massive, last ditch attack.

Fuck. Was Jogo really pulling a Final Flash on him???

He withdrew the Playful Cloud from Jogo’s maw, turning to run as far as possible from the blast radius until he made eye contact with Megumi, just across the street.

The Ten Shadows users’ eyes were wide, likely wary of the unknown man who’d brutalised two disaster special grade curses back to back, and his hands were poised to summon his shikigami in case of an attack, despite his obvious exhaustion. Toji, with his enhanced sight, could pick out the colour of Megumi’s eyes even from the distance between them. A rich, dark blue, oceanic colour; a colour that was directly reminiscent of his late wife, a spitting image of Megumi’s mother. What a beautiful colour it was.

Again, his chest throbbed almost painfully over the sight of his own flesh and blood, an affection that was so raw and real that it was confusing. It was as if he was incapable of separating Toji’s memories and experiences from his own, as if he had lived his whole life as Toji rather than only the past half hour or so. Megumi Fushiguro, his son , a blessing from the heavens on a soul undeserving. If he left Jogo here, Megumi would be caught up in the blast, alongside the other sorcerers not too far behind. 

He dropped the Playful Cloud , rushing back to pick up Jogo in both arms. The curse was boiling to the touch, as if he were hugging a burning log. He grit his teeth, his eyes unable to produce tears that didn’t evaporate instantly from the outrageous temperature generated by the curse.

Toji leapt off the street, reducing the ground to rubble as he bound up the side of a residential building; Jogo’s mere presence in his arms detonating glass and melting metal panels. His legs beat like an engine beneath his body, carving divots in the side of the building as he ran up several stories in a matter of seconds.

The flesh on his arms blistered, prompting Toji to clench his jaw as he summoned every ounce of willpower in his soul not to drop the disaster curse; who was now glowing a radiant yellow; like a light bulb. 

As he finally reached the final story of the residential building, Jogo’s body now torching the air with such intensity his luminosity illuminated the streets below.

Toji landed on the rooftop with his knees bent, an animalistic snarl on his face as he summoned every last inch of strength he could draw from this body of his. He spun once, clutching Jogo by the back of his neck, the sensation felt as though he was gripping a molten rod with his bare hand , then spun again. And again, and again, building more and more momentum as the contents of the rooftop were rapidly and violently torn from the it as a result of the wind pressure generated by Toji’s spin.

Then, with a pivot of the heel that fractured the surface of the rooftop as if it were a pane of glass, Toji pitched his arm forward with all his might; his muscles rippling as his arm swung forth with such velocity a sonic clap detonating from the point of which his hand released Jogo.

The disaster curse, harbouring the latent raw destructive energy of a nuclear bomb, almost disappeared with the speed of which it was flung into the sky; its glowing form punching a wide hole through every cloud on its way. In the blink of an eye, it seemed to join every other star in the night sky, a bright orange glint an untold distance away.

Then, Shibuya ward was consumed by a bright flash; blinding anyone unfortunate enough to have been staring directly up into the sky. Toji protected his eyes with both arms, the flash so bright he was certain for a fraction of a second he was able to see the bones through his own flesh.

Then, the flash died down, replaced by a supermassive orb of fire that eclipsed the night sky. It swelled menacingly at first, pulsing with an ominous, terrifying power, before a brief blast of heat ruffled Toji’s hair. Then came the sound.

At first, it was like a deafening clap of thunder, prompting Toji to smack his palms over his ears instead of his eyes, before a constant roar began to rattle every window within a dozen kilometres of the area. 

The explosion was massive , its brightness so great that the entirety of the city was bathed in an orange light. Distantly, Toji wondered if Jogo’s power was visible to non-sorcerers. They were quite visible to him, though he didn’t know if that was thanks to his acute senses or not. 

Something in the back of his mind rattled uncomfortably at that observation, as he recalled Toji was said to sense curses, not actually see them. But he saw Jogo, and Dagon, with pristine details; down to their very colour schemes. Could the original Toji see curses in such detail? Did it even matter if he did, or if he didn’t? Because, well, how on Earth was he supposed to know?

The curses he could remember in the vast bank that was Toji’ memories, he could also recall seeing them, visually, in their full glory. Though he wasn’t sure if that was how Toji had seen them- Ugh, how utterly confusing.

It was beginning to become difficult to differentiate the barrier between his, and Toji’s memories. Really, it was beginning to become difficult to know the difference between him, and Toji. Had they merged, in the instant he’d arrived in this body? Toji’s mannerisms, battle instincts, and strength had carried over without a hiccup; maybe he really was just the original character; with an additional set of memories.

He drew in a long breath, his sharp features illuminated by the ambient orange glow overhead. His arms stung something fierce, and the flesh of his palm was so devastatingly burnt he wondered if it would ever look the same again. The pain was there, but the rush of endorphins spiking his blood made the agony seem like some far off memory. 

It wouldn’t do him any good to continue like this. It wasn’t at all his decision to get dropped into this body, into this universe, into this situation , but what else could he do but just… roll with it? If he wanted to make good on his continued existence here, he had to come to terms with the facts. No more denial, or confusion; he had to nip such doubts in the bud before he split his head in two.

Taking in a deep breath, he squared his shoulders, the wind beating on the exposed flesh of his back, thankfully healed. Jogo’s explosion overhead had finally begun to die down, the last of the shockwave wearing itself out as the light of Shibuya flickered in the wake of its dying breaths. With Jogo gone, and the blast averted, he’d just prevented like, thousands of deaths, hadn’t he?

It wouldn’t do much good to gas himself up too much though. He was far from done, Jogo had somehow managed to send off Sukuna’s fingers without him noticing. What a pain. Two disaster curses was one thing, but Toji really couldn’t see a way to match up against a fifteen finger Sukuna. That was the kind of opponent that even He, Toji, probably couldn’t do much against.

Yeah. Toji. That was right.

“I’m Toji.” He exhaled. And an imaginary weight washed off his shoulders like water, and he’d never felt ever more comfortable in his own flesh.

Chapter Text

Scaling the apartment building without a cocktail of endorphins flooding his system was a bitch and a half. His half melted palms stuck to any surface he clung to, each touch peeling off a layer of dead skin. 

The agony had him cringing the entire way down, eyes crinkling uncharacteristically as he blinked tears out of his eyes. A pipe gave out beneath his feet, causing him to cling harder against the brick surface he was against; the effort was absolute murder on his hands.

“O-ow!” Toji hissed, feeling rough, sharp brick painfully cut against exposed flesh. If it were any consolation, the wounds should heal on their own, as Toji’s heavenly restriction included a superhuman healing factor as well; not at the same rate of Reverse Cursed Technique, of course, but still something.

It took maybe as much willpower as it did to shotput Jogo into lower orbit as it did for Toji to make it back down to street level without screaming like a petite schoolgirl. And well, if he did make a few questionable noises on his way down, it's not like anyone was there next to him to witness it.

As his shoes made contact with the ground, melted soles squishing against the asphalt, Toji uttered a prayer of thanks to whatever deity bestowed him the strength not to start bawling on the spot. Fuck, it hurt so much!

“Toji.” A grizzled voice spoke, just a few metres away.

Fuck!

“O-old man,” Toji cleared his throat, willing his eyes to stop watering as he turned his head, regarding the Zenin head with a cold glare. “You ain’t croaked yet?”

There was a terse moment, as Toji stared down the elder Naobito, who was now very noticeably pale and pallid. His arm was bandaged, at the very least, but Toji was honestly astounded that the guy could even stand after all the blood he must have lost. 

The elder Zenin was shadowed by Nanami, who was in a tense stance, though unarmed. Maki stood a few paces behind the two, shoulder to shoulder with Megumi, both teenagers posed awkwardly, as if they were wondering if it were even worth assuming combat stances against… Well, him.

Toji was about to break the ice with some stupid jab or joke, maybe insist that the group hurry to respond to the ongoing national tragedy , but Naobito cut him to it.

“Are you on our side, or not, Toji?” The old man bit out, the words coming out as if he were spitting vitriol. Yikes, must not have been easy to say.

Toji let an easy smile spread across his face, tilting his head back as he perfectly concealed the tightness in his chest from the close proximity to his son. “Sure. Can’t bet on horse races if these fuck ass curses destroy all the best tracks.”

“They… they don’t really run those anymore, these days,” Nanami muttered awkwardly, killing all of Toji’s hopes and dreams with a single sentence.

“Fuck. You guys are on your own then.” With that, he turned on his heel, examining the spot where he’d had Jogo dead to rights. Where the hell did those fingers go? Jogo was basically beneath his heel for most of the fight, so he certainly hadn’t handed them off to anybody… He could recall Jogo was able to summon some strange shikigami against Gojo in the first season of the show, had the curse used a similar tactic some time during the chaos of their fight? How the hell did he let such a cheap move get past his senses?

“O-oi!” Maki barked, stomping a foot forward, “You’re really just gonna leave!? Just like that!? You still have- that’s my weapon, you know!”

Toji halted a second, bending down to pick up the Playful Cloud that he had left behind with his abrupt dash for the highest building in sight. He thought a second, remembering that three of the four disaster curses were now dead; the only one left being Mahito, whomst a cursed weapon would be useless against. He supposed Uraume was somewhere, and he wondered how effective the weapon would be against massive glaciers, but he could only assume the winning move in that kind of scenario would be to not get hit. There was also Kenjaku, Sukuna too, but there probably wasn’t a cursed weapon in existence that could level the playing field against those two. One thing was for sure though, the Playful Cloud was fun as fuck to use, and wielding it bore a dizzying feeling of familiarity. Eh, he’d probably get to wield again some day, if everything went right.

Without further ado, he roughly tossed the nunchaku at Maki, who startled and barely managed to catch the oncoming projectile. 

“That volcano curse,” Toji grunted, blowing into his palm now that he’d aggravated his wounds again with that throw, “It had ten of that Sukuna’s fingers on it. Somehow, after I finished beating the shit out of it, those fingers were gone.”

He let his words settle upon the group, watching the gears in their heads turn. His mind ran incredibly fast, and the high stress situation didn’t exactly give his heart the chance to settle down- so the moment of realisation stretched on for a laughably long time to Toji’s point of view. Nanami and Megumi came to first, bearing the most outward reactions.

“You don’t mean-”

“-They’re after Itadori!?”

Toji blinked, the corners of his mouth twitching slightly ever so slightly. “That’s cute. You care about Sukuna’s vessel that much?”

Megumi clammed up, a weird twist between a cringe and lasting concern still on his face, though Nanami wasted no time, addressing the rest of the group. “The curses; this is the point of the attack. They wish to bring out Sukuna, whilst Gojo is sealed in the Prison Realm! If they get those ten fingers to Itadori, then…”

A chilling silence settled over the group, the air losing all its warmth as the sorcerers imagined a Sukuna at three quarters of his full strength left free to roam the city. Itadori thus far was able to handle a handful of fingers, but could he handle fifteen? And without Gojo to keep Sukuna in check… It would be a calamity, making what happened at Shibuya station look like a tea party in comparison. Of course, Toji knew that Itadori could handle all twenty of Sukuna’s fingers, though he could not ingest them all at once or Sukuna would temporarily assume control. Offhandedly, Toji thought of what kind of damage they expected from Sukuna’s awakening. 

Whatever it was, they were probably wrong. Shibuya gets turned into a fucking crater. Nobody could see that coming.

“Anyways, unless you want your guy to genocide the local population, it’d probably be wise for us to uh,” He made a show of tapping his wrist, as if he were wearing a watch. “Fuckin’ get a move on.”

With that he turned around, trying to calm his racing heart. As much as he’d love to sit down and talk things through with the sorcerers, there was sort of a ticking time bomb in that boy Yuji Itadori, that could make his efforts mean squat. “And old man, go see someone. Your heart’s gonna give out any second. Er, not like I give a shit, or anything.”

He heard the patter of footsteps behind him, causing his back to stand ramrod straight. 

“Maki!”

“Hey! Wait!” 

He found himself rapidly flanked by both Maki, and Megumi. Surprisingly, it was Maki who wore the stoic expression; whilst thinly veiled concern distorted Megumi’s otherwise nonchalant visage. 

Further behind, Nanami reached out an arm, calling them both back but remaining in place to support the elder Naobito, who appeared to be at his limit.

“You’re just like me,” Maki breathed, her eyes wide behind those purple rimmed glasses of hers. Offhandedly Toji thought Maki would look badass with round rims, something like Gojo’s. Shit, couldn’t she wear some kind of cursed aviators? Now that would be badass. “No cursed energy- You have a heavenly restriction. Like me.”

“Don’t get ahead of yourself, squirt.” The words rolled off his tongue, before his mind could catch up. “Lots more pushups before you can look like this.” He flexed an arm for emphasis, sticking out his tongue like a petulant child.

“That’s- That’s not what I meant!” 

“Maki!” Nanami called, his voice noticeably more stern. “We have no idea what that man’s intentions are! Come back! We have to retreat with Naobito now , or he won’t make it!” 

Maki looked over her shoulder, her eyes cold. “Go back then. I couldn’t care less about that bag of bones.” 

Toji’s eyes widened, the back of his hand raised to cover his lips as if he were a middle aged mother reacting to gossip. ‘Ohhh, yikes! Drama!’

Nanami recoiled out of shock, his mouth opening and closing as he stumbled over a response. Toji shrugged sympathetically at him, before turning around again, really hoping the ex-salaryman would take his own advice and seek out medical help. He was a practical man, surely he’d retreat- and with Mahito was somewhere in the metro below- as long as Nanami went and got treated, he would be fine. That said, he really did have to get a move on, before he lost the faint cursed energy signature that he was praying was Sukuna’s fingers.

He blinked several times, seeing Maki look back towards him, and immediately re-erected his composure. Maki opened her mouth to say something else, only to be cut off by Megumi.

“You’re going after Itadori, right?”

Toji’s shoulders jumped involuntarily, awkwardly craning his neck to keep the shorter Fushiguro out of his line of sight. “I guess. Don’t think I gotta spell out what’ll happen if those ten fingers get to that guy- who is he, by the way? Your friend or something?”

“Itadori is his classmate, and my underclassman.” Maki answered for Megumi, bless her soul, as Toji could not keep a straight face talking with his own damn son. So fucking weird! “Naobito called you Toji. Is that your name?”

“Naw, my names’ jackass.” Toji snorted, not elaborating on whether that was a joke or not.

Maki glared at him, thoughtfully jogging a few paces ahead so he could see it instead of feeling it in the back of his head. “What business do you have here? How do you know the old bastard? Are you on our side?”

Toji could feel the metaphorical sweatdrop sliding down the side of his face. Which question was he supposed to respond to? “Uh, I literally catapulted a special grade nuclear bomb into lower earth orbit just now. You want me to swear fealty to the Jujutsu Society, or somethin’?” 

“Itadori,” Megumi cut in again, his voice uncharacteristically unsteady. “We- when we find him, you have to understand. He’s the only person capable of suppressing Sukuna, he’s, he’s really important.”

Toji summoned the strength to look his own son in the eyes, and did it! For a second, before being forced to look away. Baby steps. “...Okay? What’s that to do with anything?”

Up ahead, Toji could spot another subway entrance. Curiously, there were the corpses of several transfigured humans, indicating that a sorcerer had already come this way. 

Megumi pulled a face. “It means, it- we can’t-”

“He’s saying don’t hurt his boyfriend,” Maki cut in helpfully, matching Toji’s hastened gait and keeping up to his long strides impressively. 

That managed to wipe off the concern on Megumi’s face, leaving it with the expression of a man who stepped on a slimy, mysterious substance in a public washroom. “Eugh, no, Maki-senpai. Just, no.”

Toji huffed through his nose, a smile threatening to pull at his face. “Hah. Fine kid, if you insist, I won’t exorcise the brat.”

Megumi’s tenseness seemed to lessen ever so slightly, and Maki turned her head to stare a hole into the side of his head. “Who are you?”

“Call me jackass.” 

“That- are you trying to be funny or something? If someone as strong as you was just sitting around, I’m sure we would have heard of you.” Maki said, walking backwards so that Toji was forced to look her in the eyes. Again, he couldn’t help but think she’d look so much more intimidating with sunglasses or the round lenses she wore in the prequel movie. “ Who are you exactly, and why are you helping us?”

He could feel Megumi at his side, just an arms length away- really, why was that kid so close? He didn’t even know who Toji was - and the curiosity oozing off the kid in waves, as he awaited for Toji’s response.

‘I’m helping you because it's the right thing to do. Your teacher is sealed away, and a plethora of evil spirits are dead set on traumatising and maiming you kids, and there’s no adult here strong enough to stop that from happening and none of you deserve what’s gonna happen and I don’t want any more kids to get hurt, or die-’

“Is it important?” Toji questioned tonelessly, his eyes half-lidded as they reached the subway entrance. Honing his senses, he could make out the vague traces of cursed energy, lingering in the air. He hastily descended the stairwell, forcing the two junior sorcerers to watch their step as they scrambled after him. “Neither of us want this city to fuckin’ explode, that not enough to make us allies?”

“Explode?” Megumi questioned, his voice heavy with suspicion as his stance got all tense again. By this point, he could only assume this individual was some curse user; someone who’d been in hiding all this time like those other sorcerers he and Itadori had fought earlier. “Who could possibly do that? What do you know about those curses, this- this attack?”

Toji’s mouth flattened into an unimpressed line. “That curse I fought just now probably coulda done it. Sukuna, if he woke up, easily would easily vaporise anything within, maybe like, half a kilometer.” And he would, if he woke up. “And I dunno, I got to the party pretty late.”

He tilted his head slightly, bringing a finger up to scratch his nose as he diverted the topic of the conversation. “So, that six-eyes brat is sealed, huh?”

Both sorcerers stiffened, and he could basically feel the nervousness oozing off from both of them. Abort! Abort!

“Relax, yeesh,” Toji whistled, stepping out onto a long sublevel of Shibuya station, a long hallway fraught with structural damage and transfigured corpses, lights flickering overhead. Damn, this place was massive. “You really don't have to worry about me. Me and that guy, we’re practically best friends.”

Gojo Satoru. The honoured one. Also, the same guy who put Toji Fushiguro six feet under. That was gonna be one hell of a reunion. He brought a hand up to scratch at his chin, reading the cursed energy signatures in the hall as he followed them down another set of stairs. Ah, Gojo, what was he to do about that guy?

In the manga they had required a very specific sorcerer with a very specific power in order to unseal him. He wondered if he could avoid that altogether, and punch the stupid cube enough times to spit Gojo out. Or, maybe, he could just just beat up Kenjaku until he started crying, force him to release the Prison Realm. Now that was an idea.

Megumi and Maki looked at him with flat, almost judgmental expressions. Affronted, Toji let out a drawn out “ Huuuhh? What’s that look for?”

The teenagers shared a glance with each other, their near identical grimaces making them look like actual twins. Toji couldn’t help but wonder what kind of story they put together in their heads.

“So, you’re here… to save him?”

“Uh, ehh? Maybe? I dunno?”

“W-what do you mean you don’t know?” Maki piped up, pointing an accusatory finger towards him. “Why else would you come out of hiding, if not to save your... best friend, the moment you heard he’s in trouble?”

Toji almost choked on his blood. He’ll ignore the sort of connotations the two were insinuating, and question more on the first part. “Who- what? Who said anything about hiding? What’re you two insinuating?” 

Megumi squinted at Toji, with a condemnatory look in his eyes. Youch. 

‘Don’t look at me like that, son.’

“You have zero cursed energy, yet exorcised two special grade curses alone.” Megumi pointed out, and fuck, Toji couldn’t even stand to look the boys in the eyes still! “Like Maki said, we would have heard of someone like you, if you were around.”

“Ah, would you look at that?” Perfect, a diversion! Toji’s gait graduated from a brisk walk into a bullish charge nearly instantly, as he spotted a swarm of strange, fiery shikigami sluggishly pulling a scroll through the air. His hand, quick like a viper, shot out and snatched the scroll from midair. He swung the tapestry, embroiled with immense cursed energy thanks to its contents, to swat the airborne shikigami; killing them like they were a swarm of mosquitos. 

He opened up the scroll, the pungent aura excreted from the unfiltered presence of ten of Sukuna’s fingers filling the room with a terrifying presence. This was not even Sukuna himself, simply fractionated portions of his power and soul. And yet, his presence was this intense; making their air itself feel as heavy as mud and as cold as ice.

Toji rolled up the aged paper, relieving the kids behind him of the immense pressure. Ah, what a relief. So, Jogo had his shikigami carrying the fingers away sometime during the fight? That could’ve gone really, really poorly, if he wasn’t able to track their path the way he was. Having a bloodhound’s nose was truly the best technique one could ask for in this universe.

“Yeesh, that guy smells bad,” He waved the scroll in the air a few times, as if to clear out the horrifying aura left by the fingers. “Guess they didn’t have showers in the Heian era, huh? King of Curses? King of Odours, more like.”

“Ten fingers,” Maki muttered, her bangs matted to her forehead with sweat. “You really weren’t kidding. I don’t think I’ve ever felt so sick in my life.”

Megumi grunted in affirmation, his skin somehow a shade paler than it usually was.

“Don’t sweat it, we got here in time.” Toji waived their concerns, taking a few steps away from where he picked up the scroll. “ Now, we need to figure out what to do with these. These fingers need to be locked up, somewhere far away from this place.”

“Not so fast!” Maki yelled, putting herself in Toji’s way, again. Man this was really getting old. “You- can’t you just explain yourself already?”

“What do you want? ” Toji groaned, exasperated. “We’re in the middle of like, I dunno, the most devastating attack on Japanese soil since the Americans dropped the sun on us twice. You really wanna sit around and talk while this shit goes on?”

Absent-mindedly, he noticed that the cursed energy in the room as a result of the fingers in the scroll he held had begun to slowly die down. Must’ve been why the kids felt so talkative.

Maki’s mouth was pressed into an uncertain line, a bead of sweat travelling down the side of her face. “I- I… How did you get so strong? ”

Huh?

“I’m sure of it now! You have a heavenly restriction, trading all of your cursed energy in exchange for strength, right? I… I have something similar, but I’m not as strong as you!” Maki seemed to trip over her own words, her voice uncharacteristically timid as she continued. “There has to be a way, right? I could- I can become as strong as you, right? ”

Toji remembered then, Maki must have lived through the same conditions he’d experienced. A childhood fraught with abuse, degradation, neglect and humiliation. Toji, as he’d grown throughout the years, eventually overcame his oppressors; reaching a height of strength that set him head and shoulders above anyone else in the clan. Despite all what those elitist sorcerers would say about him, and his curseless, worthless self; Toji had reached a point where he was untouchable. Where he was able to turn his back on the clan, and instead of retaliation the elders had sighed with relief that he hadn’t sought a pound of flesh for vengeance.

Right. Toji may have had nobody, but in the end, he had his strength. Maki didn’t, forced to bear the unforgiving and relentless harassment her clan must have inflicted unto her and her sister. She must have spent her entire life pouring more sweat, blood and tears into her training, only for some stuck up brat, that Naoya, to exceed her in all regards. He wondered how unfair it must have felt for her. That even after she had left the clan behind, they still had the audacity to meddle in her life, to drag her down and stomp on her merits despite all her efforts. If she had his strength, nearly all her problems would be washed away. She’d asked him if it was possible for her to reach Toji’s level of power, and the thing was…

‘You can,’ Toji thought sardonically in his head. ‘All you’d have to do is kill your own twin sister first.’

Maki’s eyes seemed to glimmer with hope, as if she was able to sense that he did have an answer. Ever so slightly, she seemed to lean in, her face so… so expectant that it sent a lurch of pain through Toji’s heart. 

“...Nah,” He replied, his voice flat. No, Toji would not let things progress the way they were meant to. This wasn’t just some story any more, strength wasn’t everything. “Your condition isn’t the same as mine. You still got some cursed energy in you, I got zero. That’s the difference. It isn’t something you can change so easily.”

And he broke it off there, unwilling to continue, and unwilling to look at the utter disappointment that must have crossed Maki’s face.

“Not easily, huh?” Then Megumi appeared in front of him, directly in front of him, as in, he could not avoid the full force of the boy’s gaze. “So there is a way. You’re just not telling her, right?”

His eyes danced around Megumi, mouth twitching as he drew in a heavy sigh. Observant kid. “Bullseye.”

“Why won’t you tell her, then!? Is this really the time to be withholding information, with our lives on the line? And- why do you keep looking away?”

His head whipped back towards Megumi, the blood leaving his face in an instant as Megumi’s teenage visage was replaced with that of a woman; with deep blue eyes, soft and inviting, as opposed to her untamed, spiked raven hair. “Toji, why won’t you look at me?”

Toji took an involuntary step back, his heart feeling as though it were being crushed within the arctic grasp of some cursed spirit, his diaphragm refusing to respond to his orders to breathe, breathe, take a deep breath, get it together!

Megumi recoiled, put off by Toji’s unsanctioned reaction; the taller man pale, dark eyes glaring down upon him with immense weight. It was the sort of look, an intensity that he would never want directed at himself, not from a man as strong as him . 

“I… I…” Toji stammered, trying to wipe away the image of his dead wife from his sight. Fuck, wow, he really wasn’t expecting this. “Aw, sorry, I just remembered my favourite gambling stall is probably gonna be out of business now.” He pressed a thumb to the corner of his eye, cursing internally at the wetness building there, as he forced the tension to bleed out from his shoulders. “That shit hurts the heart, y’know?”

Megumi and Maki shared another look, clearly discomfited as they each took a few steps away from the seemingly unstable man. Yikes, he was doing a real bad job at keeping it all together. And here he was, thinking he was doing so well. 

Was now really the time to talk this through? Surely there were more pressing matters to attend to. Honestly, how was he even supposed to put it? ‘Hey, Megumi. I’m your father, who died back in 2006, after trying to murder your teacher and current father figure. I’m back now though, don’t really understand how, but I really wanna make it up to you and every other kid in this fucked up cursed society, and that's pretty uncharacteristic of me right? I guess I feel that you all don’t deserve what’s coming, you deserve to be kids, not weapons. I want you to let your old man make himself useful, and make right on some wrongs; you can rest. Just leave it all to your dad, let me take it from here. I love you.’

“Megumi,” Toji breathed, letting the tingling feeling in his palms ground him, as he forced his eyes to look at his son. His son, who he would not abandon- not again, not like the idiot bastard who did so before. 

The son in question jumped at the usage of his name, surely wondering when Toji must have heard it. Why it rolled off his tongue so smoothly, as though he’d said it before.

“I’m…” Toji coughed into a fist, wondering why on Earth it was so hard to spit out the words, as if he were hacking up a ball made of lead. 

Then suddenly, Megumi jolted, dashing past Toji. “Itadori! That’s- That’s his signature!”

Just like that, the trance seemed to be broken, and Toji felt as though he could finally breathe again. He placed a hand against his chest, feeling the spot above his heart to see if it had begun to beat again. The blood in his ears was so loud, he couldn’t make out whether it had stopped altogether or was beating so quickly he couldn’t tell one beat from the other.

He glanced up to see Maki was staring at him weirdly. Yeah, whatever aura he’d built up from thrashing two special grades in a row; he’d definitely lost it all just then

‘Ah… All my aura, gone.’

“The old man recognised you. You’re a Zenin, aren’t you?” The moss haired girl spoke, and man, what an astute observation. I mean, it wasn’t as if all three of them looked the exact same.

“What makes you think that?” He croaked, his voice raspy for some reason. Ah, come to think of it, he could really use a drink. That fight with Jogo must have evaporated, like, at least half of his body’s water content. “Heavenly restriction doesn’t run in the family, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

She seemed to flush at the insinuation, a tick appearing on her head as she shook her head. “That’s not what I- you! I already know who my father is! You keep dodging my questions!”

Toji took in a deep breath, pondering a second before thinking ‘fuck it.’  

“I used to be. Then I met a girl, took her last name, had a kid and never ever looked back at that shitty place. He's grown up since last I've seen him.”

Maki’s eyes blinked rapidly, seemingly not expecting the answer she received. Toji stayed silent awhile, tilted his ever so slightly back as he gave the shorter sorcerer the most shit-eating of grins while Maki began really, really examining his face; the familiarity of it. He could basically see as the gears of Maki’s mind turned. And turned. And turned…

“No…” The Zenin girl paled, her eyes practically bulging out of their sockets. “No way! No, you- You aren’t, there’s- there’s just no way!”

Her reaction was so comical that if didn’t feel as though there were a fucking boulder in his stomach, Toji may have burst out laughing. Seems she put two and two together before Megumi did. 

“You… You’re Fushiguro's DAD!?” She all but screamed, pointing a finger towards him. 

Toji jumped, his head snapping over his shoulder towards the staircase Megumi had gone down, before throwing his index finger to his lips. “ SHHHH! H-hey! Not so loud!”

“Where the fuck have you been!?” Maki yelled, aggression seeping into her tone as a vein bulged on her temple. “You know- you know Megumi’s spent his entire life without parents? Him and his sister, they were abandoned when they were kids! You left two kids to fend for themselves!?”

Yeah. Yeah, he did do that actually.

Regardless, he raised his hands in surrender, the grin completely wiped off his face as he attempted to amend the situation as best as he could. “O-oi, hey hold on… Wait, you’re really jumping to conclusions here, I-”

Maki grabbed onto the front of his sweater, her iron grip tearing the fabric at his seams as she gestured violently, as if she were ready to slug him across the jaw. “The fuck are you here for, huh, you fucking deadbeat? Decided to finally be worth a shit for once?”

Taking a step forward, Toji decided to assert himself. “ Yes! I have!”

Maki certainly didn’t expect the outburst, momentarily stepping back as Toji loomed over her menacingly. She put her fists up, assuming a combat stance, until Toji seemed to slump over; his face losing its hard lines and becoming… weary.

“Yeah. I’m… trying. Something.” Weakly, he stared down to his feet. No matter what way to look at it, Toji’s sins were his. That was just a matter of fact. He had inherited this body, this life , and all the power- and consequences that come from it. He was Toji. And Toji’s sins were his sins. “Do some good, maybe, for once.”

The girl in front of him regarded him with a merciless glare. “You don’t deserve anything from Megumi.”

“Yup.”

“In fact, I’ll beat the shit out of you if you try talking to him, now!”

“Sure.”

“He has a teacher who raised him properly, he has friends that care about him!”

“I’m glad.”

“You think you can just- Megumi doesn’t need you!”

Toji took in a deep breath, that statement like a blow to the gut. Maki was justified in her ruthlessness, in the sense that he wasn’t entitled to any part of Megumi’s life after what he’d done. He didn’t deserve to insert himself into his son’s life after being absent for twelve, or more, years of it. He didn’t deserve anything , not after what Toji- not after what He had done. 

But Toji… Toji was selfish. He was always an evil man, doing whatever fulfilled himself , uncaring to whether it was fair to others- uncaring of what he deserved, uncaring of the karma that would inevitably build from every life he ruined in favour of his whims. He would seize his own ambitions, his wants and his needs against the wishes of others, even if that included his own son.

Because… Toji wanted to help Megumi. Wanted to do good on his part as a father, even if it were a whole fifteen years too late. It didn’t matter if he himself didn’t deserve that redemption, because there was no kidding, he didn’t, but Megumi deserved a father. It didn’t have to be a father he loved, shit, it didn’t have to be a father he could even bear to look at- the way he couldn’t look his own son in the eyes.

Megumi, he deserved to be protected. To be nurtured, mentored, taught; he and his friends deserved the freedom and the security to learn, live and grow without the weight of the world resting solely on their shoulders. Gojo without a doubt had picked up the slack where Toji failed to deliver on his responsibilities as a guardian, but a man at the top of the world probably couldn’t see the importance in ensuring that these kids reserved the right to be… kids.

Toji was probably the worst fucking father there ever was. But he was still a father, regardless. And, brought back from the depths of hell, would he even be considered human if he didn’t turn back; fall to his knees in front of his child, beg for forgiveness, for a chance , a chance to do right, and protect his boy from the worst this world had to offer, of what was to come? To, for once, be a good father?

Maki didn't know what was coming for Megumi, for them all. Megumi deserved a father. Megumi needed his father.

“No,” Toji rasped, his voice leaving him alongside the last sliver of doubt he had in his heart. “He needs his father.”

A hand collided with his cheek, with the same effect as a sponge thrown against a wall. Maki’s expression was absolutely livid.

“Fucker. You stay away from Megumi. What makes you think you deserve to see him again?”

“I’m going to be a good father.” Toji said, feeling a little bit of strength return to his voice. The words spilled out from his mouth like an unstoppable flood, a fire lighting itself in his chest; melting away the ice at the edges of his ribcage. “Don’t care if I don’t deserve it. I’m here to stay, to protect my boy, non-negotiable.”

Maki seemed ready to fight him there and then, strength difference be damned, but then Megumi announced his presence; rapid footsteps filling the stairwell as he appeared before them, with an unconscious and bloodied Yuji Itadori in his arms.

“Itadori is in critical condition!” Megumi cried, his face pallid with effort and worry. “We have to get him to Shoko, now!”

Toji and Maki stood as still as statues, as the subject of their confrontation stood just a few feet away. Awkwardly, Toji cleared his throat. “U-uh, yeah, that’s uhm, that's an idea.”

Maki looked up at him, her eyes wide and yet still so full of fury. “You, you’re still- you really gonna-”

“What do you want me to do!? ” Toji cried, his arms outstretched as he turned back to face Maki. 

"I want you to fuck off!"

Megumi’s face contorted with confusion. “What the- What’s going on here?‘

Toji opened his mouth to say something, anything, but Maki spoke quicker; “Megumi, come on! We’re leaving! ”

“Oi, wait!” Toji called out, as Maki put a hand on Megumi’s back and began to usher him through the hall. “It’s, it’s dangerous out there you know! Hold on!” 

He took a few steps forward, and Maki fixed him with a glare so full of hatred it might as well have been a bullet through the heart. Yeesh. That poor boy Yuta, Toji could only empathise with the boy.

“Maki, what’s going on?” The subject of the argument piped up, utterly confused as he pulled away from Maki and faced Toji instead, the unconscious Itadori still in his arms. “What’s with you two?”

“It’s-”

“Megumi, I’m-”

“Enchain.”

Chapter Text

She didn’t see either of them move. One moment, she’d heard that chant, uttered by something dark, ancient, and evil; making the very air itself thick with cursed pressure with its mere speech, the oppressive aura left by those fingers seeming like an unpleasant scent in comparison.

The next second, no, the next moment in time, Toji- who was just then, slouched over, his face creased with worry and posture like a kicked puppy- had disappeared, Megumi staring with wide eyes as his father’s fist ploughed ahead just inches away from his own nose, Toji’s fist driving itself into the underside of Yuji Itadori’s jaw, .

No. Not Yuji Itadori. In an instant, Itadori’s casual, spikish aura had been replaced with that of a timeless evil , a dark, horrid cursed energy all but exploding from every orifice of his body in constant, violent bursts, like the uncontrolled spray of blood from a severed artery. Ryomen Sukuna’s tattoos had not even finished manifesting before Toji punched him clear across the room, his teenage vessel obliterating the tiled floor with each violent bounce.

“RUN!” Toji roared, the veins in his neck bulging as he immediately assumed raised his fists for battle; placing himself between the ancient curse and the two teenagers. Maki’s mouth hung open, her loathing for the man forgotten in favour of thinking would she still be alive, right now, if Toji hadn’t moved? 

“S-Sukuna!” Megumi acted, spinning on his heel as his cursed energy swelled. He raised his arms, the idiot making the hand signs to summon his shikigami as if that were of any use against the King of Curses! “That’s- no, Itadori can suppress him, how-”

Maki sprung into action, clapping a hand over Megumi’s shoulder as she yelled in his ear. “You want to fight him!? Run, you idiot!” With that, she roughly tugged the younger Fushiguro by the arm, making for a staircase that led deeper into the metro as Toji had, ever so thoughtfully, decked Sukuna in the direction of the exit.

The moss haired teenager suddenly felt the immediate threat of death hovering over her, its frigid teeth tickling the sides of her neck; like a jaguar’s jaws on the jugular of its prey. She looked over her shoulder, and wondered how that goofy, unserious pink haired boy in the year below her own could ever wear an expression so terror inducing; features draped in an impenetrable shadow, except for its two eyes, pin-prick dots of blood red piercing through every layer of composure and security she had. That face, that demonic visage that had to have been taken from the depths of hell because nothing in this world was capable of instilling such terror into the human heart, was not even focused on her, but the boy next to her. 

Though, that demon did not make it any closer, a large, powerful hand clutching its ankle with a grip that could press iron, arresting its momentum midair. Toji’s eyes were two narrow slits between a curtain of raven hair, slanted so dangerously she could only liken it to the gaze of a viper; with its prey trapped within the unforgiving clutch of its jaws. 

Then, Sukuna was thrown in an arc, Toji slamming him into the ground once, twice, thrice, before throwing him into the wall with enough force to flicker the lights; sparks exploding overhead as the structural integrity of the tunnel was threatened by his power. 

“RUN!” Toji reiterated, his voice low and guttural; that scroll of fingers clenched tightly in one hand while the other wound up another destructive blow.

How many fingers had Itadori eaten, leading up to that point? Maki faintly remembered that it was something like three, or five at the most.

The fingers. Ten of them, right there- if Sukuna ingested those fingers, it was over. Shibuya would be lost. His aura, the unfiltered stench of his power, filling the room with such terrible miasma each step felt like trekking through molasses, was this awful at only the fraction of power he had now. There was no doubt in her mind, Shibuya- no, Japan would be lost, if Sukuna obtained an additional half of his full strength.

Maki could not find it in herself to feel ashamed, when she impulsively thought that maybe the higher ups were right. Maybe the order to postpone Itadori’s sentence was foolish. Maybe the pink haired boy, all bright and sunshine, unable to hurt a fly, should have been executed the moment he allowed that ancient, terrible evil to reincarnate.

Would Toji be enough to stop him, even at this state?

Now it was Megumi pulling Maki along, the Ten Shadows user now realising that this fight was way beyond them. “R-run,” the teenager rasped, his breath stolen by the horror induced by Sukuna’s mere presence. “We- we have to run.”

The sound of battle erupted behind them, sending violent gusts of wind throughout the hallway that was much too small to contain the ferocity of the clash between two legendary sorcerers. Dust and debris fell from the ceiling, each collision of force between the two behind them sending a tremor through the entire underground itself. Megumi and Maki did not dare to look back, running at full tilt as both teenagers placed all their faith in the hope that Toji could, at the very least, hold Sukuna back long enough for them to… to…

…to do what? Was it not just a matter of time, now?

“This has happened before,” Megumi coughed out, once the air was easier to breathe. Maki’s head snapped to her side, engaging the shikigami user with an intense stare. 

“Elaborate.”

“When we were sent on that mission, the detention centre where Itadori had… died, Sukuna managed to seize control of him that time too.” The words came out like a confession, like something Megumi had hidden away, presumably to protect his friend. In any other case, Maki would find it honourable. But now, her veins laced with ice and terror raising every hair on her body, Maki could only respond with anger.

“Y-you, you didn’t think to tell anyone that!? We have all been operating under the pretence that Itadori could keep a handle on Sukuna, with- with no issue! That’s the only reason they have not executed him yet!” 

“No! They, no, they wouldn’t understand!” The black-haired sorcerer exclaimed, his brows set into a fierce expression. “Listen! Itadori lost control back then, but that was only when he was beaten to the verge of death! Any other time, his handle over Sukuna is absolute!”

Maki blinked her eyes a few times, her irrational rage dying out before resurging once again. “Why didn’t you START with that, you dramatic idiot!”

Ignoring her outburst, Megumi continued. “Just now, where I’d found him; he was battered to a pulp; just like he must have been at the detention centre. I think… I think Sukuna is able to assume control at times that Itadori has been beaten into unconsciousness.”

The Zenin swordswoman stayed silent, waiting for Megumi to present the good news to this; if there were any. If Sukuna had gained control of Itadori’s body back during that mission, and Megumi Fushiguro was still here to tell that tale, then surely, surely, that meant that there was some upside to this revelation. “...Well? How did you get out of that situation the last time?”

“Itadori.” Megumi said, his tone laden with surety. That was how Megumi survived Sukuna at the detention centre, afterall. “It’s all on him. He has to wake up.”

The two teenagers ran through the winding maze that constituted Shibuya’s underground transit network. They rushed past obvious signs of battle; blood coating the walls, transfigured and ordinary corpses alike, alongside the countless grievous fractures in the ground, structural damages that would cost the public billions of yen.

The pair charged past a row of commercial booths and kiosks, desolate in the wake of the catastrophe wrought by those curses.They passed some photo booth, its curtains tugged closed, Maki’s mind racing as she questioned the greater purpose of this attack.

Was it all meant to draw in Gojo Satoru, and seal him? Was all this destruction, and the losses that group had incurred, all to seal the strongest? Or was there some deeper, underlying goal behind the seemingly senseless destruction? Toji had terminated two of the four disaster curses, whilst the plant one she and Megumi had fought at the exchange event was also reported to have been exorcised by Gojo before his sealing. That only left one, right?

Chances were, with all but one of the disaster curses exorcised, the group behind the attack had already cut their losses and retreated with their sensei in tow. Leaving the sorcerers with the mother of all shitshows to deal with, here in Shibuya.

Maki did not at all envy what administrative elements of the Jujutsu world were going to be responsible for dealing with the aftermath of this attack.

So, if Megumi was correct, and Itadori could regain control over his body in just a matter of time… Then one way or another, they would win, right? Sure, they’d be down the strongest sorcerer to date , but would that group be capable of ever striking them again, down to a single disaster curse and whatever curse users were pulling the strings of the attack?

Maybe not, but Maki let the optimism lift her spirits regardless; the stress of multiple near death experiences back to back was beginning to wear on her.

And Toji. Where the fuck did that man come from?

Megumi Fushiguro wasn’t a very open man, and very few knew of his family matters; but Maki was somehow within that select few. She knew that Megumi’s mother had died when he was young, just a baby, and his father was barely present in the first few years of his life, at some point marrying Megumi’s step mother before they both had suddenly disappeared without a trace, leaving Megumi under the care of his step sister.

Both children had spent a matter of years alone, supported only by the kindness of an elderly woman who lived in the flat across from their own. Until Satoru Gojo had decided, seemingly on a whim, to whisk away Megumi and his sister once the Zenin clan had made the move to incorporate the two into their ranks. 

The Zenins had been furious with the Gojo clan over it. The Ten Shadows technique was to the Zenin clan, what the Limitless and Six Eyes was to the Gojo. And Satoru Gojo, already the strongest man on Earth, had decided to steal away that talent that they believed was their bloodright. 

That was something she could personally testify to. She could remember it even then, the tension that thickened the very air at the Zenin compound, as the upper echelons of the clan bickered on the issue; on whether the Ten Shadows technique was worth challenging the Honoured One over. It was a very close thing.

Maki butt heads with their immature sensei at just about every chance she got, yet she could begrudgingly admit; taking in Megumi Fushiguro and his sister, saving them from a lifetime of clan misery and manipulation, was perhaps one of the most admirable things she’d seen from anyone in her life. 

So, Megumi’s useless dad. He was back. Why?

Maki had once pressed Gojo on the whereabouts of Megumi’s father, wondering where that heap of trash must have fled to after abandoning his children. If he would try coming back if he ever found out the value of Megumi’s technique. Gojo had laughed then, saying the man was “long gone,” and “not a problem anymore at all, really!”

That man had appeared in the wake of the most catastrophic cursed incident recorded in modern Japan, a whirl storm of power and violence as he easily eviscerated half of the enemy’s powerbase on his own. He certainly did not seem like the unremarkable, unimportant figure Gojo had said he was.

How does a man like that stay under the radar of Jujutsu society for years?

For a while, Maki had half-suspected that Gojo had actually killed Megumi’s father. That would certainly explain whatever sense of responsibility he felt he owed to Megumi and his sister, enough to risk war with the Zenin clan over.

Well, seeing as the man was alive and kicking, she couldn’t have been further from the truth.

So, why? Why did that man abandon Megumi, if he cared so much? Was that whole show just some kind of charade, carefully crafted bullshit that was so expertly executed that Maki, despite all her unforgiving rage towards this monster of a father who had abandoned his children when they were hardly babies , feel… Jealous? Of what?

“Don’t care if I don’t deserve it. I’m going to protect my boy, non-negotiable.”

(She couldn’t help but envision some faceless father speaking that way about her , seeing her as something more than a curse, a blemish on the clan record. As if she were a precious treasure, a blessing worth protecting. She wished she had a father that cared half as much as Toji was able to pretend.)

Whatever it was; it didn’t erase the fact that Toji had abandoned his children. It wasn’t as if he could erase the childhood he was absent for, the years he’d missed from his childrens’ lives. Megumi didn’t owe the man his mere attention, nevermind anything else.

A bead of sweat suddenly trickled into Maki’s brow. Megumi, despite his faults, was a very astute, and capable sorcerer. He was competent beyond his years; eventually… Eventually, even he would see the visual similarities between himself and his father.

It was disconcerting actually, how alike the two looked now that she thought of it. Maki had been so absorbed of her awe of the man, upon his vicious entrance, that she hadn’t stopped to think how the guy really did look like a bigger, meaner Megumi Fushiguro with more agreeable hair. They actually looked… really, uncannily similar; how old would Toji’s dad be again? 

At least in his late thirties, right?

Toji hadn’t looked a day over twenty five.

“Say…” Megumi spoke, for the first time in several long, uninterrupted minutes. “What was with you, back there? I left to go check on Itadori’s condition, and when I came back, you both were at each other’s throats.”

Then Megumi swallowed, fixing Maki with a serious expression. “What did that man say? Is he… Is he an enemy? ”

‘He’s your shitty deadbeat excuse for a father,’ Maki wanted to say, but the words stuck to the back of her throat. “U-uh.” She said intelligently, unable to come up with… anything.

Luckily, she was saved from that awkward topic, as the two had made it to the bottom of a stairwell; an army of the transfigured humans left behind by the patchwork curse filling the sublevel. “Look alive, Fushiguro!” Maki yelled, unfolding the Playful Cloud as she let the heat of battle thaw the ice in her veins. 

The shikigami user clicked his tongue, expanding his shadow as his Divine Dog: Totality emerged from the inky darkness generated from his technique. Without further ado, the two sorcerers leapt into the fray, Megumi using his shikigami to carve his way through the horde with Maki utilising her superior athleticism and strength against the mundane transfigured foes. She was a whirlwind of death, the Playful Cloud in her hands brutalising the soft, inflated flesh of the transfigured. 

She thought of Toji’s unstoppable strikes, his attacks so unnaturally fast that there was nothing his enemies could do but watch as they were reduced to red mist. Maki was physically incapable of blitzing her enemies the same way, forced to bob and wave through the net of limbs that stretched out to end her comparatively fragile life. Each monster required multiple blows to destroy, the Playful Cloud , while powerful, unsuited to cutting down a horde of creatures set on trapping her within their mutated grasp.

The sensation of her weapon bludgeoning her enemies was unnerving, but Maki could not let the hint of revulsion tickling the back of her throat slow her attacks, each carefully calculated movement the difference between an enemy down or being grabbed by an oversized monstrosity, and killed. 

Speaking of the devil, a massive hand wrapped itself around her lower leg while she was midair, prompting her to curse out loud as the monster swung her into the ground with tremendous force. The tiled floor shattered like glass under her back, driving the breath from her lungs as she fought against the flood of limbs suddenly falling down upon her.

Then, in a flurry of movement, Megumi’s summon had reduced the crowd around her to ribbons- red blood exploding outward in a gory display as the Divine Dog swept Maki from the ground and placed her at Megumi’s side.

“Maki-senpai! Are you injured?”

Maki swung a fist into her ribs, forcing her diaphragm to do a forced reset as she took in a pained breath. “Just fine,” She choked, cursing her body, her weakness, her lack of cursed energy, everything!

“You have to focus, there’s still half of them left!” Megumi raised his fists, rushing forth with his summon to mow down the crowd with twice the damage Maki had inflicted; even with the same cursed weapon Toji used to shred two special grade curses in a row. 

Was this all just a pipe dream? She could count several instances in this night alone where she would have been killed, if it weren’t for the narrow intervention of a stronger, more capable sorcerer each and every time. Was Maki… Was it really possible for her to become a sorcerer, with neither the raw strength nor the cursed technique necessary to protect herself?

With a start, Maki moved; strafing to the side as she narrowly avoided the tackle of another amorphous creature, its flabby arms catching the ends of her hair as she dodged another sudden attack. With no choice, Maki spun the Playful Cloud with furious speed, building centrifugal force until she was able to pummel the transfigured humans charging her one by one.

No time to think, no room to breathe, Maki swung the special grade weapon with a focused fervour, each crippling thud against soft flesh, every crunch of bone erving to heighten the strength she forced into her limbs; an involuntary yell tearing itself from her throat as she pushed the unrelenting horde of mutated monstrosities back with nothing but cursed nunchucks and sheer spite.

The final monster of the pack charged towards Maki on six bovine limbs, trampling the bodies of its deceased brethren as its carnivorous mouth, splitting its still human head in two at the frontal lobe, opened wide in attack.

Maki met its charge, ducking underneath biting jaws and throwing her shoulder against the muscled chest of the monstrous creature. Her feet dug into the floor, pulverising it beneath her heels as she forced the monster to halt.

Then, she wrapped her arms over and around its long, gross neck. The monster strained itself against her hold, but Maki’s grip was ironclad- another hoarse battlecry announcing her attack as she lifted the transfigured human, ten times her size, and suplexed it into the floor. 

Spiderweb fractures exploded from the point at which she buried the creature, its limbs flailing as it failed to remove itself from the Earth. Without skipping a beat, Maki spun the Playful Cloud, wrapping its chains around the creature's neck, and pouring all her strength into the most brutal choke she could muster- the roar she produced sounding less human than the monster’s own grotesque grunts and squeals- until the thing’s head exploded like a melon under a hydraulic press.

She shoved the creature’s upper half off of herself, her chest rising and setting with exertion as she detachedly stared at the ceiling. 

“I did it,” She whispered, not to anyone specific.

“We did it, Maki-senpai,” Megumi, ever the tone-deaf man, appeared before her, his hand raised in offering. There was the slightest of smiles on his face, some kind of pride making itself visible there. Maki wished she could feel the same way, yet the victory felt hollow. The dark blood on her hands and face stuck to her skin uncomfortably, filling her with a sense of discomfort rather than glory.

Nonetheless, Maki raised her hand to take Megumi’s in her own, before she raised her eyes to the figure behind him.

Without warning, Maki tossed Megumi several feet away, before detonating the floor beneath her as she too, took the air.

Megumi, to his credit, didn’t admonish Maki or make any unnecessary remarks- immediately landing on his feet and assuming a battle stance as his upperclassman landed right at his side. Maki spun the Playful Cloud, building momentum as she appraised their newest opponent. Shit. She was completely wrong, before. “Itadori told me about this one,” Megumi murmured, under his breath. “No matter what you do, do not let it touch you. Or its game over. ”

A sickening blast of cursed energy rolled off the fourth disaster curse in waves, embroiling it with a menacing aura that stunk of rot and death. The patchwork curse, its greyish blue hair tied off into three, pompous strands. Stitches criss crossed its face, separating its multicoloured eyes; one a metallic silver, the other a deep, soulless blue.

The curse giggled, its voice a wretched noise; she could liken it to nails on chalkboard. “Oh! I thought I’d suppressed my cursed energy just then! I guess you can see curses, even with that little bit of cursed energy! My bad!” And then, like a child, the curse rubbed the back of its head; looking genuinely apologetic.

Megumi and Maki shared a glance, both their faces stricken with anxiety. The shikigami user was nearing his limit; his cursed energy reserves expended from the non stop fighting he’s had to endure since the night had started. Maki was not in any better state, the physical exhaustion beginning to wear at her muscles even despite the rush of adrenaline generated by her fight or flight instinct. And of all the curses they could fight, they had to fight the one with a lethal one hit technique. 

“Huh, you’re weird!” The curse spoke again, holding its chin in its hand as it assumed a pose that was so human it unsettled her. “Barely any cursed energy, but you’re way stronger than you should be! And your soul, it's even weirder! I haven’t seen anything like it! Why’re you missing half of it?”

Maki blinked. What?

“Hah, I wonder if it’ll snap quicker than the others? I’ve never experimented with half a soul before!” 

And with that, the patchwork curse lurched forward with terrifying speed, its limbs moving erratically, beyond what should be organically feasible. Two blades sprung out from its arms, each heralding the promise of death upon contact. Maki brought the Playful Cloud up to parry the barrage of slashes Mahito launched, each blow forcing her a step backward as she fought to keep the curse’s skin from touching hers.

Megumi shot into action, his toad shikigami binding both of Mahito’s arms while the sorcerer himself dove forward, slamming his heel into its stomach while Maki swung her weapon into the side of its head, a loud crack! reverberating throughout the subway; the dual attacks forcing it several feet back.

Maki stumbled back, standing at rank next to her underclassman as they both observed the curse, pressing a hand to its temple, chortling grossly as it shook its head like a dog. Then, it stared both of them in eyes, sticking out its tongue as it shook jazz hands towards the pair. “Bleh! No damage! You guys are really weak!”

Then it rushed them again, seemingly with the same arm-blades; only to rapidly metamorphose mid-charge, its limbs becoming long, deadly chains that tore ridges through the walls and ceiling as they whipped towards Megumi and Maki. Both sorcerers hardly managed to dodge, leaping out of the way of the destructive whip just before it reduced their previous position to rubble. 

Maki flipped through the air, calculating her landing only to watch as a massive, worm-like creature hurtled through the subway; its massive maw opened in preparation to swallow her whole. “What the FUCK!?” She screeched, curling up as she braced for impact; just for Megumi’s toads to rip her from the air- saving her from sudden ingestion.

She had no chance to even thank him, the pair once again pushed back as the patchwork curse charged them with a diverse arsenal attacks; its limbs constantly changing and shifting between different tools of murder; rendering their surroundings into debris whilst it extracted small nuggets from its clothing, rapidly transforming them into grotesque objects of destruction to control the battlefield. 

Maki dashed under the swing of a giant arm, rushing towards the patchwork spirit to deliver a blow- only for a wall of flesh to explode outward from nothing on her right, sending her flying into the opposite end of the room. Her head slammed into the wall, stars exploding in her vision while she fought to retain her senses, forcing her legs to instinctually dive forwards, narrowly avoiding a chainsaw-like appendage from bisecting her where she last stood.

Megumi attempted to pressure the curse to relieve Maki of its offensive, sending his Divine Dog: Totality to harass it with a barrage of slashes. The shikigami’s claws ripped through the curse’s array of organic weapons, momentarily keeping up with it physically as the curse responded to the attack with exhilarated laughter.

The Ten Shadow’s user rushed to Maki’s side, pressing her against his side as he helped her stand. “Can you move?” He queried, his voice belying the undercurrent of stress despite his best efforts.

Maki groaned, attempting to respond only for an unintelligible slew of words to come out instead. She grit her teeth, willing her mind to get itself straight before trying again. “Ugh, I- Yes, yeah I can move.”

The pair looked up, watching in horror as Megumi’s summoned was impaled against the wall by another one of the curse’s miniature weapons (a part of Maki wondered, what significance those small multicoloured objects bore to the curse’s technique), forcing the shikigami user to release the summon lest it be permanently destroyed.

“Awwwhhh!” The curse whined, its lip jutting outward in a childish pout. “I was so close to figuring it out! Hey, did you know those creatures you use have a soul? Isn’t that crazy? Hey, hey! Doesn’t that make you some crazy, evil puppet master?”

The pair of sorcerers assumed battle positions again, realising with dread that the curse had blocked all exits with those strange, worm-like creatures it was capable of releasing.

“Ehh, it's okay! I don’t judge, I’ve done way worse!” And with a wave of its arms, several shifting masses of flesh detonated outward from the walls, gyrating rapidly as they tore grooves alongside the subway’s flooring. 

The two sorcerers could only flee, leaping and dodging the continuous assault of massive creatures; one so large it took up the entire train track as it barreled through the subway tunnel Maki and Megumi intended to use for escape. The two narrowly dodged its charge, landing onto the platform, just as the patchwork curse began walking up to them, almost casually.

Around the combatants, a ring of transfigured worms circled incessantly, each rotation bringing them closer and closer; a wall of flesh that marked the boundary of battle. 

Maki’s heart thundered in her chest, exhaustion making her limbs feel as though they were made of lead. She could only assume Megumi was in no better state, no, he was likely worse; having fought against that special grade’s domain twice earlier. 

There was no way they could win. Not against this special grade, with an instant-kill technique and immense reserves of cursed energy. No escape, no plan, nothing.

She wondered then, should she tell Megumi of his father? The fact that he met the guy who abandoned him and his sister back when they were babies, like, ten minutes ago?

No, she shook her head, even as the curse neared, the solemn reminder of death hanging over her head. What point would it serve? To grieve him now, when they were pushed to the brink?

Honestly, Megumi didn’t quite seem the type to find solace in closure, or anything like that.

“Maki-senpai,” He said, his eyes hidden behind a drape of black hair, his mouth set in a firm line. “I am sorry. I... I will try to create an opening for you, but I can't guarantee...”

Ah. So he was going to use that. She'd admonish him any other time, but truly, at this point she saw no other course of action.

“Go ahead,” She muttered, hanging her head back. “Damn it. Didn’t think it was going to… end like this.”

“Do you two need a moment?” The curse chimed in, interlocking its hands as it rocked back and forth on its toes, mocking them as it drew closer. The ring of worms was closing in, drawing closer with each second. 

Megumi raised his hands, assuming a summoning pose as his cursed energy began to surge exponentially. “There hasn’t ever been… a single sorcerer in jujutsu history whose managed to subjugate this one.”

Maki breathed. In, and out. She wondered what Mai was doing right now.

The curse spirit only seemed to smile with glee, its eyes gleaming as it waited to see whatever ace Megumi had up his sleeve.

“With this treasure… I summon…!”

Then suddenly, a gross noise erupted from behind the wall of rotating worms; the unmistakable sound of gore splattering against the walls and floor. The noise stopped Megumi’s chant cold, Maki pausing her final thoughts as she watched the wall of rotating flesh halt.

Another gross squelch came from the other side, and the worm visibly lurched, deformed under the force of whatever attacked it from the outside. 

“Oh?” The curse grinned, all teeth as it too watched the occurrence with excitement.

Then suddenly, without warning and totally unlike the previous blows, the worm was totally eviscerated in an explosion of dark energy, crimson lightning igniting the very air itself as sparks flew across the air alongside a massive shockwave, reducing the patchwork curse’s worm summon into bloody chunks and sending the patchwork cursed spirit, who had been closest to the attack, hurtling head over heels several metres away.

Gore rained from the explosion, sticking to the walls and ceiling as it came down in pieces. Maki felt her heart soar at the sight of an ally, the special grade breaking out into loud laughter as it pointed towards the new arrival.

“ You! It's you again!”

A broad, dependable figure, bandages bound to his head and his arms, stood under the spilling carnage wrought by his Black Flash, utterly unshaken. The man’s normally well kept blonde hair was in disarray, ruffled and messy- whatever strands not slicked down by blood stuck out randomly in a wild visage- serving as curtains that shadowed his dark eyes menacingly. His blue dress shirt, worn and torn by prior battle and sleeves rolled up, was utterly ruined by the mess made from the worm’s remains. His cleaver, dripping with blood, was clutched tightly in his dominant hand, the other wrapped in his yellow polka dotted tie as cursed energy swelled off of that tightly clenched fist with boiling intensity. Angry veins ran like wires over his exposed forearms, showcasing the impressive power contained within as the man’s cursed energy pulsed off of his form with ferocity .

Maki and Megumi cried out in unison, their voices filled with hope ;

“Nanami!”

Every cell in his body was filled with lightning. There was no stillness at any point since he’d heard that chant; his body had moved before he’d even mentally registered the words. It was as if it were certain that he would die if he halted, for even a second. 

Once the kids had run far enough away, Toji had flung himself at Sukuna with just about everything he had; his flight tearing up anything that wasn’t welded to the floor. His hand, only one free as the other held ten of Sukuna’s fingers, took in fist-fulls of Yuji’s, or rather Sukuna’s, collar, tearing him off the floor before pitching him into the ceiling with such raw force it caused sections of the Earth above to collapse into the subway, the lights exploding as the sublevel’s electric grid was rendered utterly destroyed.

Toji launched himself from the ground, collapsing the floor beneath him as well as he bodily rammed into Sukuna, driving them through another floor all together. He slammed his fist into Sukuna’s face in a rapid barrage of blows, not letting up even as the two tore through an entire slab of Earth, the neon lights of yet another sublevel washing over his form as he blasted the King of Curses into a wall with a vicious backfist. 

The lights flickered, the damage caused by the pair’s entrance threatened the electricity on this level as well. Toji took the moment to breathe, for the first time since Sukuna had assumed control. His kid, his kid is safe, Megumi got away, Megumi is safe. Breathe.

His heart didn’t slow at all. Sukuna, a terrible presence surrounding him like a thick miasma straight from the depths of Hell itself, as if the King of Curses were himself a glimpse into the infernal resting place for sinners. A promise of death, of destruction, of torture. But none of it mattered to Toji, his heart racing not from fear, but from vicious, overwhelming parental instinct.

The blood rushed through his veins with such ferocity each beat of his heart felt as if it would take him off his feet. His chest felt it could explode with the amount of raw energy pulsing through every muscle in his body, running through him like an electric current. 

The King of Curses seemed to almost disintegrate into thin air, with the speed he moved to engage. Tiles from the floor and ceiling were torn asunder by his movement, his claws outstretched as he made a leap for Toji. The taller man met the charge, fisting Sukuna by his collar and burying him into the Earth with the mother of all overhead throws. Then, he felt a palm touch his leg, and for a moment Toji remembered Sukuna’s Shrine technique. He pictured its activation in his head, a spike of panic surging through his chest as he imagined his leg being severed at the thigh.

With a split second reaction speed, his leg blurred forward to make contact with Sukuna’s stomach, carving a long trench through the room as the strongest sorcerer in history’s body was blown into the other side of the sublevel.

‘He could have lopped off my leg, just then,’ Toji realised, both horror and confusion racing through his head at the fact. ‘Why didn’t he?’

It wasn’t even a second gone by, but Sukuna had reduced his previous spot to dust as he rushed towards Toji; his speed so great it took genuine concentration to track. Toji stood his ground, squaring his shoulders and widening his stance with a roar as he cocked a fist back.

But Sukuna did not target Toji, rather, the King of Curses lunged for the scroll clutched tightly within the grip of his right hand.

‘Oh. OH. ’

Almost nonchalantly, Toji ripped the scroll away from Sukuna’s flight path, sidestepping him entirely as the curse slid several metres away in a desperate bid to halt his momentum. Toji looked over his shoulder, his gaze utterly cold as he waited and observed Sukuna’s next move.

The King of Curses clicked his tongue, before raising an arm and uttering a chant.

“Dismantle.”

Toji stood perfectly still, as a flurry of slashes, terrifying in the way they instantly and totally tore through his surroundings, reducing any and everything they spawned upon to nothing. Not a single scratch appeared on Toji himself.

“Hah,” Toji huffed, a manic grin slowly pulling at the corners of his mouth. “Hahah, hah,” 

Then suddenly, a hysterical laughter ripped its way from his throat, exploding outward as he failed to contain the boisterous outburst. Hysteria blurred the edges of his vision, making him throw his head back to laugh even harder, each insane belt of laughter louder than the last.

‘He can’t hurt me,’ Toji remembered, the terms of Sukuna and Yuji’s binding vow returning to him in a sudden burst of clarity. ‘He can’t touch me.’

And just like that, the murderous haze that had wrapped itself over Toji’s sight and had his heart in a chokehold seemed to disperse. 

“What’s wrong, oh King of Curses!?” Toji all but screamed, tears of laughter building in the corners of his eyes. “All those years as a finger made your aim rusty or something!?”

The curse, wearing Yuji Itadori’s face, stiffened; his eyes narrowing into a positively intimidating expression. Toji’s heart soared. 

“I’ll give you this one chance.” Sukuna stretched out an arm, his hand opened expectantly. “Hand over those fingers, and I’ll let you live.”

“Huh? These fingers?” Toji queried, unfolding the scroll to reveal that assortment of ten mummified fingers, spilling a pungent aura into the air like crude oil into water. Sukuna’s pupils constricted into two, bright red pinpricks, as Toji stuck out his tongue, one finger tugging down at his eyelid in tease. “Come and get ‘em.”

Sukuna seemed to reappear in front of him the next moment, again reducing that half of the room to rubble and debris as the air pressure fought to catch up with his insane speed. In one move, Toji rolled the parchment shut again, before catching the King of Curses by his neck and slamming him into the ground with tremendous power once more.

Not letting go, Toji pushed a knee onto Sukuna’s chest, before rocking him with a punch that utterly destroyed the ground they lay on, a web of cracks erupting from their position. Sukuna’s arm snapped outwards, reaching for the scroll in Toji’s grasp and receiving another blow to the jaw for his troubles. 

“Dismantle!”

The ceiling suddenly began to collapse, as Sukuna’s technique tore through layers of concrete and Earth. Toji leapt off of Sukuna, narrowly dodging falling debris as he jumped and punched his way to the surface; his single fist reducing any oncoming projectile to dust.

He clung to a slab of falling debris, leaping off of it with such force that it broke into several pieces as he shot through the rain of concrete, breaking through the Earth as he once again made it back to street level. Toji hung in the air for a moment, turning his eyes downward to see Sukuna’s form whistling through the air on a straight trajectory for himself.

Toji grinned viciously, bunching up his fist and hammering it into Sukuna’s head, an explosive shockwave erupting from the point of contact as he sent the King of Curses flying into an office, an entire story’s worth of windows shattering from the impact.

He adjusted himself midair, hopping from streetlight to streetlight and jumping through the window he’d broken, landing in an empty office. Sukuna stood at the other end of the office, standing menacingly with his fists bunched up and two crimson eyes piercing through the darkness. He looked extremely angry.

“Yikes, look at all these damages.” Toji huffed, examining an entire street collapsed into the metro below as a result of their brief scuffle. “You know the public’s taxes are gonna have to pay for this, right? You truly are the enemy of the common man, how evil.”

Sukuna appeared before him again, but was sent hurtling away with a disrespectful kick to his stomach, several cubicles destroyed in his wake. 

“Ahh, it's a real ego booster kickin’ you around like this, but y'know, you haven’t landed a single hit on me!” Toji scratched his chin, tilting his head mockingly as he continued to berate the King of Curses. “Yeah… Yeah, I’m good but I’m not that good. So, I’m thinking that maybe the brat has a tighter leash on you than I thought.”

Sukuna pulled himself off of the pile of destroyed desks he was laid on, a positively livid  expression contorting his face.

“Let me guess- Kid got you to agree to not putting your hands on anyone when you take over?” Toji smirked, one thumb pressed against his chin as he bared his teeth. Sukuna's eyes widened minutely, an imperceptible twitch to anyone other than Toji Fushiguro. A cocky grin overtook his face. “Oh? Was I right on the mark?”

Those eyes, unblinking in the darkness of the abandoned office space, seemed to narrow into slits, pupils trembling ever so slightly with rage. Perfect, he was losing his composure.

“...Also, if you ask me? A guy livin’ inside another guy? Kinda suspect.” 

And somehow that did the trick, as Sukuna launched himself from the other side of the room, his index and middle finger pointed outward towards Toji as he blew up every piece of furniture in his path. Was he trying to use that forced unconsciousness move that Gojo had once used on Yuji?

Toji snapped his hand out to grab Sukuna by the wrist, intercepting the oncoming hand, before catapulting him outside the open window with blinding speed. He then blasted off the carpeted floor, broken glass billowing from his leap as he landed a whip-like kick to Sukuna’s form, launching the ancient sorcerer up even further up into the city skyline. 

‘How exhilarating,’ Toji thought, the wind in his hair as his inhumanly powerful legs carried him further and further up a skyscraper, heels carving into steel as he rapidly pursued the King of Curses. Glass buckled and shattered under the power of his dash, somehow quick enough to catch up to the King of Curse’s flight path. ‘How invigorating!’

Then, with another leap that reduced a sizable radius of glass and steel into broken shards , Toji appeared in front of the King of Curses, greeting him with the heartiest of smiles as he wrapped a large hand around Sukuna’s face. 

Sukuna’s eyes were wide and furious between the gaps of his fingers, as he then began to plummet dozens of metres towards the open rooftop of yet another office building. The two, with the built up momentum of a bullet train, crashed through the rooftop and then all of its stories; each layer of concrete and metal collapsing under the force of Toji cushioning his descent with Sukuna’s head. Every window of the building was blown out by the severe force of the meteor-like impact, the very Earth itself shaking as they impacted the final floor. Moonlight streamed into the blown apart office lobby, the moon shining directly overhead through the continuous hole carved by Sukuna’s body.

Debris lay around the two, Sukuna’s battered form- healing, because of that broken ass Reverse Cursed Technique, strewn over the rubble whilst Toji stood over him, looking at the King of Curses from below his nose, hands in his pockets. 

There was a lot of humour, an irony that only he could recognise, to be seen in this position, Toji realised. And with a deep, throaty chuckle, he decided to bring the scene to life .

“The moonlight’s illumination…” He began, grinning sharply as Sukuna rose to his knees, staring into space with quiet wrath. “...Makes it easier to see how pathetic you are. ”

Sukuna did not move, and somehow that sort of indecipherable, invisible rage was much more terrifying than having the King of Curses actively lunge at him with malicious intent and murder written across his face. 

“Forget the white haired shit.” Sukuna seethed, his voice flat yet guttural, carrying a menacing promise of hurt in his tone. “When I gain control of my vessel... I’ll sever all your limbs and have you paraded ass to mouth on a pike.”

The threat was spoken so seriously, with such unshakeable certainty that Toji, despite his superiority over five fingered Sukuna, felt a chill travel through his spine.

“Putting your pole through another man? Yikes. You’re, like, freaky freaky , you know that?” Toji shivered, disguising the impending sense of doom with revulsion of the mental imagery generated by his joke. 

Sukuna did not grace him with a response, his suffocating presence beginning to fade as Toji supposed his sixty seconds had expired. 

A whole minute passed, really, really slowly when you were fighting at sonic speeds, Toji realised. As Yuji Itadori came to, his previous wounds healed from Sukuna’s possession, Toji waited patiently, wondering if Sukuna could spam enchain as many times as he wanted. As the King of Curses did not resurface, he breathed out a sigh of relief.

Really, what a power trip. Bullying the King of Curses like that, and all it cost him was putting himself at the top of Sukuna’s kill list.

“Huh?” Yuji suddenly spoke, standing up suddenly as he whipped his head left and right. “Where- what the heck!?”

Toji sniffed, alerting the boy to his presence; the aforementioned boy jumping several feet into the air with a girlish shriek at his ‘sudden’ appearance. Right, no cursed energy.

“Who- Where did you come from!? Where am I!?” The poor kid yelled, a hand slapping itself against his head as he struggled to catch up to the situation. “I was in the- Did I hit my head, or something?”

“Nah.” Toji piped up, deciding to spare Yuji the dementia allegations. “Sukuna took over. You don’t remember anything?”

“He WHAT!?” The teenager screamed, his jaw hanging open. “But- he can’t, I have a handle on him! He can’t come out unless I let him, and I- No, I’d never do that!”

“You sure?” Toji frowned, leaning his head side to side to sort out the crick that had been there since Jogo got that one lucky hit in. “He said a chant, enchain , or whatever, and took over. Thought you two had a binding vow, or something, I dunno.”

Yeah, maybe using his meta knowledge was cheating, maybe he was even being painfully obvious about it. But who gave a shit. It wasn’t like he was here to change nothing after all. Canon was destined to a bloody, horrible death the moment Toji had incarnated into this world, reborn a new man. He was going to twist fate with his bare hands.

Yuji looked horrified at the implication. “No- I never made any sort of agreement with him! He’s evil! ”

“Calm down kid, not accusing you or anything. And he didn’t hurt anyone, relax.” Toji waved the scroll in his hand then, drawing Yuji’s attention with the horrid aura it produced. “He was after these.”

“Are those…” Yuji pointed timidly at the parchment, able to tell its contents simply by the presence they exhumed. 

“Yup.” Toji confirmed, before shoving his hand- scroll and all, these jeans had some crazy deep pockets-  back into his pocket. “Guessin’ he thought taking them from me would be easy pickings, no cursed energy and whatever, maybe he thought I was some civilian. Bleh, what an idiot. You can tell I’m a badass just by how I look, right?”

Toji squared his shoulders, standing up straight and smirking as he flexed his physique a bit to impress his presence upon Itadori. Though, with the state of his ripped up clothing- half his backside exposed to the elements- ruffled hair and burnt arms, he just looked like he was homeless, lest that fact be known to him.

Yuji gave him a flat, disheartening stare. “Uhh… Who are you by the way?”

‘Ow,’ Toji had never felt so unimportant in his life, ever. Actually, no, he’d felt pretty unimportant for most of it actually; the innocent Yuji just had a way of really making the sensation sting. ‘The main character doesn’t know who I am! How unimpactful and insignificant of a person I must be!’

“Toji Fushiguro,” he introduced himself, his mouth running itself before his brain could catch up. Yuji looked up at him in clear confusion. Oh, fuck, well that was one way to drop the bomb. “Nice to meet you, Itadori.”

“F-Fushiguro has a brother too? Why does he never tell us these things!?” 

How flattering, did he really look that young? Ah, he might as well clear things up now before a misunderstanding springs up later. 

“Not a brother, he does have a father though.”

Yuji’s eyes bulged out of their sockets, and unlike earlier where Megumi’s presence had stolen the humour from his heart, Toji belted out a boisterous laugh at the pink haired boy’s expression. 

“Y-you? You are- but I thought- Fushiguro’s father is- huh? What?” Yuji sputtered, shaking his head like a dog as Toji folded in half, wheezing at the reaction. 

“He never told you guys about me?” Toji gasped through the laughter, “That boy- Always forgetting about his old man! Least he could do is send a text, y’know?”

Not that they had cell phones in hell.

“I- I see it!” Yuji’s eyes bulged further, as he raised a finger to point to Toji’s face. “You two’s faces, you look the exact same!”

“Duh,” Toji grinned, puffing his chest out with pride. “He’s my boy after all.”

“That guy- He really doesn’t tell us anything! I’m sorry sir, I had no idea!” Yuji bowed at the waist, causing Toji to sputter in shock. “Forgive me for my disrespect! I assumed you were a non sorcerer because of your lack of cursed energy!”

“Oi, hold on- Stand straight, quit bowing!” Toji insisted, his face flushed. “I’m uh, I’m similar to that upperclassman of yours; Maki. A heavenly pact, no cursed energy in exchange for being a total badass, and all that.”

“Oh! I see!” Yuji stood up straight, a finger coming up to his chin. “So that’s why I couldn’t sense your presence! Wow, now that I think about it, you’re pretty much invisible!” 

“It's pretty nifty, huh? Anyways,” Toji took a few steps forward, placing a hand on Yuji’s back as he began leading the kid through the heaps of rubble surrounding them. “There is still an ongoing terror attack, so you and I had better get back to the fight. Your friends are probably somewhere nearby.”

It could be said that Toji was not looking forward to talking to Maki again, jeez.

They climbed out of the wreckage made of the first floor, Yuji’s jaw dropping as they made it out onto the open street. “Holy crap! What the hell happened!?” He yelled, seeing an entire canyon in place of a street, as well as two skyscrapers turned into hollowed husks, steel and glass debris resting on the obliterated street.

Huh, and this was only one city block; void of civilians. If only Yuji knew the scale of destruction that could’ve been unleashed if Sukuna had ten more of his fingers. ‘No,’ Toji concluded, stone-faced as he set his jaw. This was exactly why he was here; to spare these children from the trauma and injustice they faced, to save them from the unfair hand they had been dealt.

Fate wanted these children to suffer. Toji didn’t. And Toji could probably beat Fate in an arm wrestle, so it looked like things were gonna go his way.

“Erm, not my fault,” Toji lied, scratching the side of his head. “That Sukuna- he was really tough, our glorious battle was hard to contain to one spot.” The less said about the compulsive urge for the destruction of public property, and the dopamine rush induced by collapsing a skyscraper with another guy’s body, the better.

“So you really- you fought Sukuna, alone?” Yuji’s eyes sparkled with admiration, which sent a stab of guilt through Toji’s heart. He did not deserve that look. He didn’t deserve the uplifting joy it gave him. “You must be really strong!”

“U-uh,” Toji replied smartly, “Yeah uh, he really isn’t all that- he’s only at what, a quarter of his power right now? That volcano head probably coulda taken him at this point.” A blatant lie, Jogo at his fullest strength had been much less intimidating, much less terrifying, and much less capable than facing Sukuna at five fingers. And that was with Sukuna unable to actually attack him. He may have dominated the battle simply on account of his superior speed and power, but if Sukuna had been able to use his Shrine offensively… 

Really, was anyone other than Satoru fucking Gojo able to counter that?

“So uh, where are the others?” Yuji asked, stepping over a block of debris as he ooh’d and ahh’d over the carnage left by Toji’s throwdown with Sukuna. 

The aforementioned musclehead scratched his chin. His senses were sharp , extremely so, that he could faintly pinpoint concentrations of cursed energy from far distances. He could tell there was a sickly, rotten, pestilent-like stench emanating from Shibuya station, in the underground labyrinth below; and he could guess that was Mahito.

His eyes widened with the realisation that the kids had retreated deeper into the subway tunnels, meaning their meeting with Mahito was imminent. 

Shit! How much time had he wasted just then? No more than two minutes, right? Surely he could catch up in time… He only had to scour, what, several kilometres of metro to find them?

“Itadori,” Toji spoke, his severe tone shocking the younger boy. “The patchwork curse, you’re familiar with it; correct?”

The pink haired boy’s expression hardened into something made of stone, fury lighting itself within his eyes. “Yeah. Yeah, I am.”

“It's somewhere in the metro below, I can sense it.” Toji hastened his step, searching for another transit entrance further ahead on the street. The way they’d come had been fully collapsed and likely untraversable, meaning they’d have to use a different entrance. “Your senior, Maki, and my son are somewhere down there. We’re going to have to split up to find them; both just got out of a very exhausting battle and are in no state to battle that curse, if they come across it. I’ve heard you’re a perfect match against the patchwork cursed spirit, so if you find it, I want you to rock it’s shit. You understand?”

It was somewhat risky to allow Yuji to roam about, free, but if Sukuna knew what was good for him- he’d know that the very moment he’d repossessed Yuji, Toji would come running and rock his shit a second time. Knowing the fraud’s pride, he would spare himself the embarrassment of getting kicked around again until he was able to secure more of his fingers. Which were stashed safely in his pocket, Toji keeping a constant hand in there to ensure no accidents.

Toji scanned the rooftops carefully, unable to recognise any cursed energy signatures around them. Uraume, Sukuna’s loyal aide, should have sensed Sukuna’s presence earlier; but they had not appeared at any point during the battle. That, and Kenjaku- no matter how much he extended his senses, he could not pin any single greatly unique presence. He couldn’t sense any significant aura other than Mahito’s below, ingraining the very Earth with the scent of pestilence.

The fact only filled him with unease. But, at this point there were no further precautions that could be taken. Honestly, he could probably scour the entirety of the metroline on his own in a matter of minutes if he pushed it, but it was best to give Yuji something to do. This was meant to be a turning point in his growth, right? It would be good to give him that; with the clear exception of the deaths of his friend and mentor, of course.

Toji would make sure of it. No one was dying tonight, not under his watch.

The teenager snapped upright, kicking his legs together and throwing up a stiff military salute. “Sir! Sir yes sir!” 

Toji wanted to cry. This kid, this kid…!

‘He’s just a cutie patootie!’

Chapter Text

There was only one thought bouncing through Nanami’s head at that time, whilst a massive wall of flesh rushed towards him; its meaty mass obliterating the structural integrity of the subway.

‘I fucking hate overtime.’

With a powerful swing reinforced by cursed energy, he lunged forward. His technique drew a numberline on the wall of flesh, his cleaver striking the point that was seven tenths along its length. The result was the creature splitting into two, an ocean of gore parting for Nanami as he rushed forward to engage Mahito.

The blue haired curse laughed, its hands morphing into two grotesque flails which it swung towards the ex salaryman. He strafed from side to side, narrowly avoiding those lethal swings as they came for him. A flail embedding himself into the ground next to his foot, and Nanami seized the opportunity to sever the limb- cutting Mahito’s assault in half. 

It was no use however, the curse instantly regenerated the weapon, then creating four more, laughing maniacally as they then wrought havoc upon the environment. Nanami was forced into movement once more, blurring as he leapt from pillar to pillar, ducking weaving through the deadly storm of chains.

His eyes tracked Mahito carefully, through the whirlwind of blades, flesh and destruction, tracking its movements; observing, waiting for an opening until…

There it was. Mahito dropped the transformation in his arms, his additional limbs falling off like clay as he began to morph some other weapon. Nanami didn’t give him the chance.

Leaping from pillar to pillar like a pinball, Nanami dropkicked an oncoming transfigured beast, changing his trajectory and landing in a slide right next to the cursed spirit. It certainly hadn’t expected his sudden blitz, eyes wide as his arm swung outward in a wide arc, his cleaver carving a path through the air itself until it struck Mahito’s jugular; right at the point that was seven increments of ten along his neck, blowing the patchwork curse’s head straight off. 

Nanami, led by his intuition, hopped off the ground and kicked out both his legs into Mahito’s chest, sending the curse’s decapitated body flying away just as it detonated itself in a destructive blast. Shards of bone and glass-like matter shot out towards Nanami, scraping his skin superficially thanks to a wreath of cursed energy, cloaking his body like armour.

“You’re a lot tougher than you look, huh?” Mahito’s decapitated head piped up, spider-like limbs springing from its scalp and carrying it across the ceiling in a macabre display of its technique. Nanami hardened his jaw, a harsh sigh exiting his nose. 

Nanami’s technique was without a doubt powerful, firmly setting him ahead of most of his peers in the realm of Grade One sorcery; considered the peak of what a jujutsu sorcerer could achieve. (Special grades were the exception; not a class of their own.) Aside from his technique which levelled the playing field against enemies that were leagues stronger than himself, as he had already completed a number of Special Grade missions on account of his strength relative to his rank, Nanami also had a unique composition as a sorcerer.

His cursed energy output and reserves were impressive, though not legendary, just barely above what could be expected of a Grade One sorcerer. However, the manner of which his cursed energy interacted with his body was unique; granting him a durability and athleticism beyond what most sorcerers of his level could achieve. Some of his coworkers, as insane and totally irrational as they all were, had sparred with him; likening striking Nanami to “punching a brick wall”. Apparently it was an effect great enough to intrigue even Satoru Gojo, the man keeping in contact with Nanami even after he’d officially left, then rejoined the world of sorcery. 

“They weren’t kidding, wow!” Gojo had told him years back, in their secondary school days, during a spar that had really just evolved into the white haired brat turning him into a punching bag. “You’re really sturdy, for a Grade Two at least, haha!”

When all was said and done, Nanami was a highly capable sorcerer; armed with a powerful, almost lethal technique, a sharp and tactical mind, and a unique constitution regarding his cursed energy, as well as an extensive mastery and understanding of it.

None of that meant jack shit against Mahito, who could not be harmed unless a blow was capable of hitting the soul. And while Nanami’s innate durability may have saved him all those months ago in that sewer against the curse’s Idle Transfiguration, he was unsure of the potency of its technique now, with the months it must have had to refine it. When all was said and done, he could not risk the curse touching him, even for a moment. 

“Good grief,” He muttered, glancing over his shoulder to see the students rushing to his side. He fixed them both with a stern glare, his eyes narrowing and smugness flickering within his chest as he saw them shrink under his gaze. “Didn’t I tell you not to run off? With some suspicious, unregistered curse user as well- Why can’t you teenagers be bothered to behave even somewhat rationally?” He admonished harshly, clicking his tongue.

The two at least had the sense to look ashamed. “N-Nanami-san,” Megumi interjected nervously. “Itadori told me once; this curse can only be harmed via attacks to it’s soul, how do we-” 

“Where is Itadori?” Nanami questioned, wiping off his cleaver on his forearm as Mahito’s severed head rapidly regrew its body, giggling all the way as it ran circles around the group. It dispatched an assortment of transfigured humans, the mutants charging the group and forcing them to respond. 

“He… He turned… Ah…” Megumi tripped over his words, utilising his Rabbit Escape to command a swarm of rabbits to control the crowd of transfigured humans, allowing Nanami and Maki to cut them down as they came.

“Sukuna took control of Itadori.” Maki finished for him, bashing in the skull of a transfigured beast with a half-yell. “Megumi’s- Er, the black haired sorcerer, fought him off and told us to run away.”

Nanami had already figured that Sukuna had appeared at some point, he’d felt that sickening aura flare up suddenly from nowhere, maybe six or seven minutes ago? It was the whole reason he’d left Shoko’s medical encampment after depositing Naobito- the older Zenin having gone unconscious from blood loss- before praying that he could find the two Zenin children before the unthinkable happened. 

He’d just barely made it in time. 

“You probably can’t tell because of the saturation of cursed energy in this area,” Nanami began, cratering a transfigured human’s rib cage with a single punch, hardly breaking a sweat. “But Sukuna’s presence faded away approximately five minutes ago.” A punctual man he was, always knowing the flow of time even in the thick of battle. “We can only assume that… Toji,  as the Zenin head called him, has found some way to incapacitate Sukuna, and hopefully resuscitate Itadori.”

Despite the incessant twinge of suspicion that came from an unknown variable in the midst of this shitshow, Nanami had accepted that at the current point; the sorcerers were so undermanned he should be relieved to have any help, nevermind a veritable special grade capable of facing Sukuna at a quarter of his power. That did not stop the irritation that throbbed behind his skull at the teenagers’ impulsive action, following a special grade combatant, who could’ve been an enemy, running off and abandoning the adults. Naobito had for some reason expected Toji to be dead, implying that the curseless fighter faked his death at some point, only to decide to show up now to help contain the attack, for whatever reason. It was… Also implied that Satoru Gojo was the one to execute Toji. 

“You are meant to be dead.”

“What can I say? That six-eyed brat has lousy aim.”

Ordinarily, Nanami would never dream of allowing the two to run off like that with such a painfully suspicious individual- but he was forced to choose between his distrust of the sorcerer who’d saved them twice, or Naobito’s life.

A poor set of choices to begin with, and Nanami’s luck was shit in all cases, as seen in the current situation. Such was life.

Megumi’s swarm of rabbits encapsulated a titanic transfigured beast, forcing it to its knees where Nanami executed it with a one-handed decapitation, almost casually. The ex-salaryman clicked his tongue, seeing the naked Mahito hopping on one foot as the disaster curse tried to wiggle into its ripped up clothing. The army of underlings had been meant only to stall the group for time to regenerate its body, an annoying tactic. 

“...You asked what the plan was against this curse.” Nanami ground out, gritting his jaw. He couldn’t quite pin it down, but something about the patchwork cursed spirit just got on his nerves; making him irrationally angry. His fist tightened, “Itadori will be able to sense its cursed energy. We wait until he comes to us , regroup, then attack the cursed spirit together once we join forces.” 

The Zenin sorcerers, one to each of his sides, hardened their expressions and nodded, raising their fists in preparation as Mahito faced the group, two twin hammers growing from his forearms as it teased them with its tongue. 

“...Nanami, what is the course of action if the cursed spirit opens its domain?”

The aforementioned spirit suddenly raised an arm, dropping its hammer as its limb transformed into a hollow tube. The sorcerers split, leaping in different directions as Mahito fired deadly projectiles from the cannon-like appendage. Maki and Megumi quickly regrouped at Nanami’s side, the sorcerers taking cover behind a large slab of uplifted concrete caused by the destruction of the previous battle. 

“...It appears to feel secure in its ability to battle us, likely on account of its invulnerability. Judging based on this curse’s childish personality and its taste for battle and violence, it most likely won’t activate its domain unless it is pushed into a corner.” The curse appeared above them, its head suspended from an elongated neck. Mahito smiled widely at them, before regurgitating several purplish balls, prompting the sorcerers to scatter once again as the orbs detonated upon contact with the ground. Nanami rushed Mahito’s main body before his head could return to its normal spot, battering it with several bone-shattering blows then knocking it back with a concussive strike to the spine. Megumi and Maki shortly joined his side once more, waiting for the rest of his explanation. “So it is important we maintain a balance, in which we ensure the battle does not reach a point where the cursed spirit finds it necessary to open its domain. However, in the case that I am wrong, and the curse expands its domain regardless…” Nanami fixed Megumi with a hard stare, freezing the shikigami user in place. “...You are our only hope, Fushiguro. You will have to hold off its domain expansion whilst I and Maki force it to withdraw its technique.”

“It's rude to whisper with someone else in the room, didn’t you know!?” Mahito screamed, charging the group; this time with no weapons. Nanami stiffened, his grip on his weapon tightening as he prepared to engage.

Mahito appeared before them, a hand whipping out to try and strike at Nanami’s torso, only for the man to skip back. The curse’s overextension earned it a broken arm, shattered at the elbow as Maki swung down the Playful Cloud with bone crushing force. It tried to slip back, only to be forced to protect its face as Megumi hammered a fist wreathed in cursed energy into its forearms. 

Mahito’s hand glowed menacingly, a purple cursed energy ignited from its palm as its hand suddenly blurred forward towards Megumi’s chest. The Ten Shadows user swiftly ducked under the attack, Maki punishing it with a swing to its stomach whilst Nanami severed its arm at the elbow. 

The curse, with both its arms useless, leapt backward. “Oh, oh wow!” It gasped, its broken arm snapping back into place as the other regenerated itself. “It's kind of hard to fight all three of you at once! Fun!”

Then its arms morphed into blades once more, and it rushed forward for another clash. Maki took the forefront, stopping its blades with the metal bars of the Playful Cloud , whilst Nanami hammered a fist into Mahito’s ribs with such force the curse’s rib cage collapsed inward, sending it soaring into the air.

Megumi didn’t skip a beat, clasping his hands together. “Nue!” He yelled, electricity coming alive in the air as his avian summon materialised, crashing into Mahito’s airborne form and convulsing it with a powerful electric charge. The curse, dazed from its frying, fell directly within Maki’s range, the Zenin girl assaulting it with a frenzied barrage of strikes. 

Mahito, despite the attacks bruising its flesh and breaking its bones, grounded a foot into the ground; its muscles growing exponentially as it suddenly became a hulkish creature. Maki leapt back, narrowly avoiding Mahito swinging a massive limb in her direction, sending her hurtling away in the wind generated by its attack. 

Nanami then lunged forward, landing a kick onto Mahito’s broad torso and sending his titan form stumbling several steps back. The curse giggled like mad, raising both fists and slamming them into the ground where Nanami stood a second prior- the man now in the air above its ahead.

With no emotion but thinly disguised irritation, Nanami swung his cleaver directly into Mahito’s dome; his technique taking effect as the critical strike detonated the upper half of the disaster curse’s body. The titanic construct melted like goo, causing Nanami to click his tongue as he parried an oncoming blade from behind; just as a second appeared from nowhere and slashed his side. The strike, which would have been enough to disembowel any other sorcerer, was rendered a superficial cut by Nanami’s hardy constitution, as Mahito’s true form spun out from behind a concrete pillar.

Suddenly, Mahito tripped forward, his leg sinking into a bed of shadows generated by Megumi’s technique. The sudden distraction granted Nanami the opportunity to slam his fist into its nose, distorting its facial structure in a satisfying fashion as it flew within Maki’s path again, the girl unloading yet another fierce variety of blows into its body, each strike like a gunshot in both speed and power. 

Nanami rushed forward, removing both of Mahito’s arms with two heavy handed swings; both limbs hitting the ground with twin thuds . The curse lurched forward, its back bent grotesquely as Nanami drove his heel into its spine with a brutalising kick reinforced with cursed energy.

Maki ducked out of the way to make room for Megumi, who in a zone of absolute concentration lunged forth; his fist sailing through the air in an underhanded arc; glowing vibrantly with energy until it struck Mahito’s stomach.

A monstrous blast of dark energy erupted from the blow, branches of crimson lightning exploding from the point of impact as black sparks flew through the air. Nanami narrowly dove to the side just as Mahito’s form blurred past, sent flying from Megumi’s first ever Black Flash .

Maki and Nanami turned to Megumi, their eyes wide in shock. The Ten Shadows user was also frozen, his jaw hanging open as he stared at his fist; still outstretched. A few red sparks buzzed in the air around it, the fading remnants of his last attack. 

Further ahead, Mahito climbed out of the crater in the wall formed around its body, concrete dust sprinkling off its limbs as it dramatically gasped for air. “Oh, oh!” It heaved, placing a hand on its stomach, which was a terrible shade of purple. The should be fatal internal bleeding began to repair itself however, the purple shade disintegrating. “That really hurt, ow! Now- now I’ve got to be the only one here who hasn’t hit that yet- the human girl excluded!”

The curse stretched out its limbs in a gruesome display, joints popping out of place and extending outward comically before snapping back into place. 

“I wish we had time so I could congratulate you properly, Fushiguro,” Maki huffed, her bangs ruffled from the explosive shock wave generated by Megumi’s blow. The boy was still staring at his fist, eyes wide as he studied it like it contained the secrets to jujutsu itself, and with the latent effects of a Black Flash, he may as well have . She couldn’t help but ask, “How… How does it feel?”

“It feels as though I’ve been using my cursed energy wrong this entire time.” The boy spoke, flexing and unflexing his hand. “It feels like I’ve just figured out how to stop using it so inefficiently, how to make it last, how to make it hurt.”

Maki couldn’t help the envy that spiked through her heart then, no matter the guilt it inflicted within her gut. Megumi continued, “And beyond that… I feel that my cursed energy reserves have been rejuvenated!”

Ah, so she was the weak link now.

As if reading her thoughts, Mahito dropped into a charge; its legs morphing as it blurred forward with vicious speed. “Watch out, it's coming!” Nanami called, swinging his cleaver to intercept its charge, only for the spirit to slide underneath his slash, springing up in between all three sorcerers.

“You guys were really fun to play with!” The curse bubbled, as it interlocked its fingers together. Nanami and Maki’s eyes widened, both sorcerers moving to try and desperately interrupt Mahito’s next move. A miniature set of limbs appeared within Mahito’s open mouth, throwing up their own hand signs as the cursed spirit chanted;

“Domain Expansion-”

“-Domain Expansion!”

“Self Embodiment of Perfection! 自閉円頓裹 ! // Chimera Shadow Garden! 嵌合暗翳庭!”

The group's surroundings bled into nothing, a void appearing around them for a split second before it was suddenly attacked by a ruby coloured realm, the massive amalgamation of hands behind Mahito clashing against a flood of inky sludge. Mahito’s domain expansion was unable to fully manifest, as Megumi stood with his hands raised in activation of his own domain, pouring his rejuvenated reserves into cancelling out Mahito’s surehit technique.

Nanami and Maki wasted a second frozen in awe of the battle between domains, watching as the violent hellscape of the Chimera Shadow Garden clashed for dominance against the abyssal void that was Mahito’s Self Embodiment of Perfection.

“Go!” Megumi choked out, a vein bulging in his neck as he fought to maintain his unperfected domain. “Attack it! Now!”

The two sorcerers snapped themselves out of the haze, springing off from the void to rush Mahito. The curse didn’t appear to be nearly as affected as Megumi, laughing with glee as it jumped and weaved between their attacks. “A domain clash! There really is a first for everything, isn’t there! I wonder how long you can keep that up?”

Nanami spun his cleaver into a reverse grip, the weapon thrusting through the air and forcing Mahito to duck underneath the attack…

Only for it to be a feint, Nanami’s unoccupied fist slamming itself into Mahito’s temple. The curse sputtered, its concentration broken just enough for Megumi’s domain to ever so slightly progress in its struggle against Mahito’s. 

The curse attempted to refocus its efforts in pushing Megumi back, only for Maki to slam one end of the Playful Cloud into its head again, immediately following the blow with a blindingly quick, nose crushing nunchuck strike. 

Megumi’s domain inched forward again, Mahito suddenly redoubling its efforts as it materialised an additional set of arms; Nanami and Maki forced to withdraw as Mahito’s array of appendages slashed desperately at the air around itself.

The moment the attack ceased, Nanami sprung forward once again, burying his fist into the curse’s stomach. Its flesh collapsed underneath his fist like styrofoam, and Nanami realised with horror, as the clone fell apart like it was made of sand, that Mahito’s presence was somewhere directly behind him.

Maki, her arms raised as she prepared to swing into the clone, was wholly unprepared as Mahito appeared at her side; its eyes bulging out monstrously as it grinned something devilish, all teeth from ear to ear. 

Megumi’s domain may have neutralised the sure hit effect, but Mahito’s technique was still able to be used via its usual hand activation.

A panicked yell tore itself from Nanami’s throat, the experienced sorcerer exploding off the ground as he ripped through the air itself, rushing for Mahito- but too far away, and too late, as the curse tapped its palm against Maki’s stomach.

“Good fight!” The curse beamed, and Maki could only think;

‘Oh. I’m dead.’  

The thought crossed her mind with a chilling serenity, the surge of panic racing through her heart dissipating as she felt Mahito’s technique activate; that rotten, revolting cursed energy taking hold of her very soul.

“Useless daughters of mine,” Her old man, Ogi, had once said after returning home after a training exercise with the Zenin clan’s Hei squad. The young Maki, just a grade schooler, ushered her twin sister behind herself; in the hopes that she could somehow shield her from the slew of insults uttered by their own father. “You’ve ruined everything for me. You’ve cursed me. Why did you have to be born? What sin have I committed for my woman to bear not one, but two worthless children?”

In the end, it didn’t matter, the hours upon hours she spent training herself in the clan’s courtyard when the higher level sorcerers had finished their sessions. The times she hid herself away, watching with crucial attention to the techniques and martial arts used by the clansmen, replicating them in private in a tireless pursuit of her own strength.

It didn’t matter even when she had left the compound behind, prepared to face the brunt of the world of sorcery, so that she could return to the clan as an unstoppable sorcerer; and force the clan to acknowledge her, cursed energy or none. 

It didn’t matter then, despite her efforts, despite the strength she had wrenched from the depths of her cursed existence with her own two bloodied hands, the skills shed honed to a perfection to ruthlessly cut down cursed spirits that she was incapable of even perceiving if it weren’t for her enchanted glasses. 

It didn’t matter, as Zenin had personally interfered in her sorcery career, stumping her at Grade Four though she was among the strongest students of her grade.

Maki Zenin, the black sheep of the Zenin clan, the girl disgraced by the heavens, the girl that tried and struggled and fought even when heaven itself had cursed her very existence;

Her efforts didn’t matter, they were all for naught, because here was a cursed spirit with a one-shot technique that she was incapable of defending against without a technique of her own. 

Maki Zenin would die here.

Then came an overwhelming rage beyond anything Maki had ever known. It was a lava-hot fury, a fire that filled her veins and blocked out her hearing over the rush of the blood in her ears.

Disgraced by the heavens; what kind of handicap or label could that possibly amount to her when she had only minutes earlier witnessed a man with no cursed energy defy the very laws of nature and eradicate two unfathomably powerful beings with sheer strength alone. A man, with her same condition, standing amongst Gods with no technique, nothing but a will made of steel . That level of strength was possible , Toji Fushiguro was living, breathing proof.

Maki could not die here, not when she had finally seen a glimmer of her true potential; the strength she’d dreamed of, the power that she needed in order to spite every elder, every sorcerer, every man who’d stepped over her dream.

Mahito’s Idle Transfiguration coursed through the point of which his palm made contact with her ribs, and she could feel its gross fingers grasping at the edges of her soul; a sensation she could never imagine nor put to words before first handedly experiencing an involuntary tampering with her most inner self. As if in response to her rage, her righteous fury, a violent tempest of power surged from the deepest recesses of her gut, forcing its way through her limbs and exploding outward from every orifice; the wild, uncontrollable energy coalescing in her fist with such ferocity her uniform’s sleeve was obliterated from the mere flex of her arm.

As Mahito poured energy into his technique, his accursed energy flooding into Maki’s very soul, Maki seemed to focus her own energy into her fist; concentrating her strength as she swung upward; her eyes wild and her mouth open as a beastly war cry ripped itself from her throat like the blast of gunpowder from a cannon shot. 

Maki’s fist met the flat of Mahito’s stomach, her entire body turning into the blow as her knuckles sunk into the curse’s flesh- time seeming to halt as an odd light flashed from the point of contact for the briefest fraction of a second.

Then; a veritable explosion erupted from the blow, black and crimson lightning fulminating from where Mahito was bent over Maki’s fist. The energy, in all its overwhelming enormity, burst apart and lit the air itself like a gas explosion, red sparks flying whilst vaporising the tar around the two. The inky sludge generated by Megumi’s domain was repulsed from the blast, exploding outwards in a perfect circle as Maki’s fist drove itself even further into Mahito’s gut, the continued blow seeming to only increase in its output as Maki pulled upon power she didn’t have to unleash the single most devastating Black Flash all three sorcerers had ever seen.

Mahito’s eyes rolled into the back of its head, its domain forcibly deactivated just as Megumi appeared to lose control of his own; their surroundings shattering into the same subway the group had been in prior, just in time for the shockwave from Maki’s blow to pulverise the ground and ceiling. Tile and cement turned to dust as Mahito was thrown through numerous pillars in a violent tumble. The ceiling shook, the tunnel’s very foundations threatened from the force generated from Maki’s punch, as if the station itself was shaken by the depths of her power.

The air was alive with electricity, the after effects of the explosive release of cursed energy lingering. 

Megumi gaped at Maki, his mouth wide open from where he was half-hunched over, his blatant surprise visible even through the overwhelming exhaustion present on his face. Nanami had a similar expression, still mid-stride with one arm reached out as the ex-salaryman remained frozen in place, those normally impartial eyes blown wide with shock. 

The moss haired teenager stared at her own fist with shock too, steam emanating from it as her knuckles throbbed from the aftershocks of the blow. 

It was impossible for any human being to control their cursed energy unless they had crossed a certain threshold of it in their natural reserves. Maki, in exchange for heightened physical capabilities, was born with an amount of cursed energy that was even lower than the average non-sorcerer. No matter what the situation was, no ordinary human could draw out their cursed energy unless they were a sorcerer- as the meagre amount they possessed could never coalesce into a power great enough to exit the human body.

Black Flash was a phenomenon observed when raw cursed energy was delivered within a trillionth of a second of a blow. The result was an unprecedented increase in cursed energy output, a critical strike that was so powerful, landing one was normally considered enough to end any battle, as well as bestow the sorcerer with a momentarily heightened understanding of their own cursed energy and technique. It was an extremely rare feat, the vast majority of sorcerers in all of history having gone their entire lives without hitting it once; as not a single being in history was capable of inflicting one on command. 

It had been a welcome surprise when Nanami had entered the battle accompanied by the destruction wrought by his Black Flash. Maki had been filled with both astonishment and jealousy upon seeing Megumi land his own, performing a strike on Mahito so powerful the curse saw it necessary to deploy its domain. 

But Maki did not possess the cursed energy necessary to reinforce her strikes with it, nevermind even manipulate it to do anything. She was blind to cursed energy, unable to draw any meaningful amount from her infinitesimally small reverses, so by all means a Black Flash was absolutely, unequivocally, inarguably impossible for her to accomplish.

“How?” Maki gasped, her breath coming out in short huffs from exhilaration rather than exhaustion. An unfathomable clarity seemed to spread outward from the centre of her vision, the world gaining a fourth dimension as she sensed the echoes of foreign power resonating through her arms; its source coming from a heat in her stomach that rumbled like a furnace. “How?”

“Oh no!” Mahito cried out, kicking a massive slab of concrete off of itself before placing both its hands on its ruffled hair in a fit of genuine frustration. “No, no! You barely have any cursed energy, ugh, how in the world did you do that!?”

Maki clenched her fist, Megumi rushing to her side as he handed her the Playful Cloud she must have dropped. “M-Maki senpai…” Megumi stuttered, his eyes still uncharacteristically wide. “Did I imagine that? Did you… just…?”

The Zenin girl clutched the Playful Cloud in one hand, regarding it carefully before looking at her other fist. That ominous, turbulent power that swirled in her gut had begun to die down, and Maki watched with wide eyes as the last sparks of her Black Flash dissipated into the air .

“For whatever reason,” Nanami interjected, his broad form appearing behind the two teenagers. “The cursed spirit appears to have misused its technique against you.” the alternative fate that could have befell Maki went unspoken, chilling the air. “...How do you feel, Maki?”

“...It's gone.” She muttered, confusing both men. She then continued to elaborate, “The cursed energy I had just then, it’s… It's disappeared. ”

A swell of excitement came alight within her heart, as she thought of what Toji had said earlier.

“You still got some cursed energy in you, I got zero. That’s the difference. It isn’t something you can change so easily.”

Did this mean… Was this the key? Was hitting a Black Flash, despite the sheer impossibility of such a feat by a non-sorcerer in an all-or-nothing attack the key to depleting her useless cursed energy reserves, to fulfil her heavenly restriction to its highest capacity?

…She really didn’t feel much different though, aside from the heightened awareness of her surroundings, rejuvenated stamina and the sudden clarity of which she could observe her own cursed energy. Or current lack thereof.

“How did you do that!?” Mahito screeched, stomping towards the group; prompting all three sorcerers to assume battle positions once more.

“Don’t know,” Maki ground out, unfurling the Playful Cloud as she felt a trickle of satisfaction watching the curse lose its composure for the first time. “Can’t say I ever hit one of those before.”

“No- Not that,” The curse whined, sticking out its arms as its brows slanted upward. “How did you guard your soul? With- with so little cursed energy?”

Maki flinched for the second time, shock coursing through her system. ‘What?’

First, the cursed spirit claimed she only possessed half of a soul; now it claims that she had… What, guarded her soul? Was it just trying to mess with her? She’d assumed that the curse had just simply not known how to transfigure her as it had shown some kind of infancy with its technique before when it was battling Megumi’s summon; so she thought maybe her unique composition would have confused the curse long enough for her to land that blow.

But it had instead failed the transfiguration ? Because of an effort on her part?

“Ah, I see.” Nanami spoke, a deathly low intonation in his voice. “I too did something similar, in my first battle with this curse. The curse’s technique targets the soul, but it was possible for me to negate its technique back then by instinctively reinforcing my soul with cursed energy. That said… It seems you got off a lot better than I did, Maki.”

“That’s not it at all!” Mahito cut in, a few metres away. “Her soul was-”

Nanami seemed to have flickered from his place, reappearing in Mahito’s stead with his fist outstretched. The said curse was flung away from the resulting thunderclap of a punch, bouncing and destroying the ground in its path as it rebounded until it reached the furthest wall. 

The blonde hair man carried a severe expression, his eyes narrowed into dangerous slits as angry veins bulged on his forehead. “Maki, Megumi. It's time for you two to withdraw. This battle is no place for students.”

Mahito burst from his place in the wall before the two could even begin to protest the decision, its arms two massive clubs as it spun towards the sorcerers. “Like I’d let you leave!”

Megumi and Maki sprung back into position, even as Nanami lunged in front of them and prepared to bear the brunt of Mahito’s attack, until-

Three massive spikes suddenly emerged from Mahito’s chest, the curse choking out blood as its cursed energy pulsed erratically. Megumi’s eyes widened, recognising the technique instantly.

“Kugisaki!”

Elsewhere, in the alleyways above Shibuya station, Nobara grinned ear to ear, her stance tall and confident as she stared down the patchwork cursed spirit just a few paces away.

“Well?” She taunted, her amber eyes glimmering with conviction. “Your move.”

The curse cackled, transforming its arm into a giant mace as it charged towards the nailpin sorcerer. Nobara pivoted on her heel, darting out of the way just as Mahito’s attack rendered the concrete into a web of cracks.

She didn’t halt, launching herself backward in a series of acrobatic flips as Mahito’s limbs extended to insane proportions, weaving upward and swinging down, ripping up the alleyway and sending dust plumes into the air as the very asphalt was eviscerated under the curse’s assault. 

Mahito’s arms whirled again and again, reducing the entire road to rubble, before it withdrew its overextended limbs. The curse scanned the alleyway, running forward to press the offensive against the maple-haired sorcerer, only to be suddenly struck by a sharp projectile.

A metal nail impacted Mahito’s forehead with the force of a bullet, blood spilling over its eyes and obscuring its vision of the sorcerer who stood on the rooftop, a cluster of nails clutched between her fingers. 

“Eat this!” She yelled, imbuing the nails with her cursed energy before swinging a hammer; a loud clang resounding from the impact as a hailstorm of projectiles flew towards the patchwork curse. Its hand morphed into a metallic disc, shielding its head from the slew of projectiles, before it detached the appendage and swung it with monstrous force at Nobara’s position.

The disc crashed into the balcony she’d been positioned in just a moment prior, the teenager springing from one railing to the next as Mahito bombarded her path with a barrage of metal projectiles. She returned fire where she could, those nails of hers hailing down towards Mahito; most were blocked, while those that landed appeared to carry no effect.

Mahito laughed with glee as Nobara suddenly sprung down from the rooftop, darting through the destroyed alleyway to engage in close quarters. She strafed left and right, narrowly avoiding the sharpened appendages Mahito had generated to constantly harass her movement. 

With a final dash forward, Nobara swiftly slid underneath the swing of one of Mahito’s many spear-like limbs, slamming a handful of nails into his stomach with her technique. The nails, imbued with her cursed energy, broke through the curse’s skin but didn’t do much else.

“Is that all!?” Mahito yelled, one of its limbs snaking around a billboard sign and slamming it into the Earth where Nobara stood, just a second prior. The girl darted to Mahito’s side, firing another series of nails towards it; only for the projectiles to be blocked, falling uselessly to the ground.

A maniacal giggle bubbled its way out of Mahito’s throat, as its arm swelled to a monstrous size; forcing Nobara to leap into the air to avoid its massive swing. “Nowhere to go!” The curse cried out with glee.

“Take this.” Nobara uttered, snapping her fingers as she gazed down at Mahito with an apathetic gaze. “Hairpin.”

At once, every nail that was embedded in Mahito’s body, as well as the ones littered across the ground, glowed a vibrant blue as they channelled Nobara’s cursed technique. Mahito blinked in shock, as suddenly a barrage of spikes exploded from the ground and its own body. Its torso was impaled from just about every direction, arms raised to its sides, momentarily immobile where they were impaled gruesomely by the lethal barbs spawned by Nobara’s attack.

‘All those missed hits,’ Mahito's mind raced, taken off guard by the sudden turn of battle. ‘They were on purpose? Still, this damage is nothing, I can just-’

Then Nobara surprised Mahito again, by kicking off the wall and planting her feet into each of its shoulders. The sudden force of her descent forced the curse into freefall, the teenager’s eyes wide in the dim light of the alleyway as her teeth glinted in a terrifying visage.

“Itadori told me you’re immune to anything that doesn’t damage your soul.” Nobara stated, a glimmer of madness flashing in her eyes as Mahito was powerless to stop her technique. “That makes me the perfect match up for you; this technique should work.”

A straw doll was suddenly pushed roughly against its forehead, before a nail punched it into place right between the eyes.

“Straw Doll Technique: Resonance!”  

With a bold proclamation, Nobara slammed her hammer into the nail; and all Mahito knew was agony.

Cursed energy lanced through both body and soul, wreaking havoc on the cursed spirit and spewing blood from the head wound. Blood exploded from its throat, the sorcerer narrowly getting away from the splash zone as Mahito profusely vomited blood, gore running freely from its mouth, nose and eyes. 

“F-for real?” Mahito croaked, chuckling despite the devastating damage. “Not just Yuji Itadori… I have two natural enemies…?”

“Yup!” Nobara sing-songed, jutting out her chest as she cocked a fist against her hip. She stuck out her chin, appraising the curse from under her nose in a taunting manner. “You haven’t used that special move of yours, so, I’m guessing you're not the real thing. A clone perhaps? Incapable of using your cursed technique?”

“Teehee,” Mahito giggled, even as blood ran from every orifice in its face. “Bingo.”

“Oh well, I’m not one to look a gift horse in the mouth.” Nobara shrugged. “Just makes things easier for me; since I can kill your original body right here even if you’re the fake.”

With that, Nobara plucked another handful of nails from the pouch secured to her waist, grinning menacingly as her hammer glinted in the dim light.

Mahito smiled innocently, standing up straight. Before turning on its heel and dashing away. “No thank you!” The curse chortled, its gangly legs carrying it away with frightening speed.

“Huh!?” Nobara exclaimed, affronted as she charged forward in a full sprint after the retreating curse. “Hey, come back here! You piece of shit!”

The moment Megumi had recognised Kugisaki’s technique, Nanami rushed forward like a bull. The ex-salaryman had foregone his cleaver entirely, seizing Mahito’s sudden stun to throw a fist into the curse’s cheek. Blood jetted from its mouth, splattering across the floor along with the gore pouring from the grievous chest wound inflicted by Nobara’s technique.

‘It's vulnerable,’ Nanami realised, as the damage inflicted from his punch failed to heal. ‘Nobara’s technique has impacted its ability to recover from physical damage!’

Without a beat of rest, Nanami’s second fist slammed into Mahito’s nose, his technique’s activation hurtling the curse into a half-crumbled pillar. The curse hadn’t a second to react, before Nanami appeared before it, laying down a unforgiving combination of slams and punches which decimated their surroundings, each strike threatening to collapse the pillar and ceiling above.

The students appeared at his sides, somehow finding openings in his ruthless barrage to inflict their own attacks onto Mahito. There was not a single area on the curse’s body except in which a super-powered, bone breaking hit had struck; Mahito’s limbs contorting grotesquely as blood arced through the air from the one-sided beatdown.

Nanami hurried his attacks, his heart beating hard as he wondered if they would be able to exorcise the curse before it regained control over its technique. 

Suddenly, in a puff of steam, Mahito’s broken and bloody body separated into a group of pint-sized, cartoony clones; the group scattering with goblin-like speed. ‘Can’t ever have good things.’ He thought bitterly, opening his mouth to bark out another command, his previous order forgotten.

“Its soul has to be in one of the clones; pinpoint the real one and stop it from escaping!”

The three darted in different directions; Megumi chasing the clone with the greatest concentration of cursed energy, Maki the clone with the least and Nanami darting after the one that ran for the exit.

Each sorcerer destroyed their respective clones, the constructs exploding into gorey messes upon death.

“Haha!” Mahito laughed, the three remaining clones morphing together and coalescing into its original body. “Fooled you all!”

Without skipping a beat, all three dashed after the patchwork cursed spirit, their movements powered by superhuman energy as they raced after Mahito’s fleeing form. 

Mahito’s legs blurred with speed that was inhuman, skittering along the walls like a spider and making a break for the stairs that led to the higher sublevels. The curse’s inhuman speed forced Nanami and Megumi to pour more cursed energy into their limbs to compensate; whilst Maki pushed her muscles to their absolute greatest extent on order to keep pace with the two sorcerers. 

Their shoes squeaked against the polished marble floors, Mahito giggling like a child as it morphed its arms into hooks and digging them into the ground to spin on a dime, turning corners without losing any speed unlike the sorcerers behind who slid and stumbled behind its path. 

The subway opened up into a large corridor, Shibuya station’s exit one corner away at the furthest end of the hall. Mahito’s cartoonishly evil laughter bounced off the walls as it accelerated further, the trio of sorcerers falling behind. 

Suddenly, around the corner, an identical clone of Mahito rushed forth; shocking the trio as it passed its original counterpart. Confusion clouded Nanami’s mind at the sight, before it was swiftly replaced with horror.

“No!” Nanami roared, the marble under his feet reduced to rubble as an overwhelming pulse of cursed energy surged through his legs- leaving his junior sorcerers in the dust. 

The clone appeared in his path, grinning ear to ear as its limbs mutated into twin morningstars, forcing Nanami to halt and block the attack with his cleaver. The clone giggled like mad, exerting more force into the swing whilst it brought down a third mace in an overhead swing for Nanami’s head. The ex-salaryman’s spare arm shot upward, reinforced with cursed energy as it caught the blow; the ground crumbled beneath the two.

In the meanwhile, Mahito’s original form had reached the corner, Nanami’s heart dropping as he watched it lunge up the stairs; where Nobara- because it was Nobara, she’d been the one to use her technique on Mahito, evidently through the cursed spirit’s clone- would not be expecting the original. Flashes of a familiar face from years ago raced through Nanami’s mind, a youthful visage with wide, passionate eyes under a bowl of dark hair, and a handsome, undying smile. A boy, thrust into this cruel war against curses, forced to die young, too young, just a child. 

“NO!” Nanami roared again, his cleaver swinging in a wide arc as it severed all three of the clone’s limbs with a rapidfire activation of his technique, the quickest he’d ever done it. His fist cocked back, the air crackling with energy as he charged a monstrous blow. But it was too late- Mahito was on the stairs now, out of sight, he was too late.

Another dead child.

Right before then, Mahito’s grin was all teeth, its face contorting grotesquely as it raced towards the corner. It could feel her; the hairpin sorcerer’s cursed energy signature that lay just there, running down the stairs on a direct course for itself, and its arm sprung forward as it prepared to mutilate that girl in front of her comrades.

Ah, what a wonderful turn of events! No physical attack could compare to the mental blow a human sustained upon the horrible, violent death of their comrade. After the fact, the group would be easy pickings; and victory would taste oh so sweet!

Mad laughter bubbled from its throat, hand wrapped in purple energy as it spun the corner- lunging for the hairpin sorcerer’s face.

A clap, somewhere far away.

In place of the girl; a flash of pink hair, accompanied by wide brown eyes appeared in the cusp of Mahito’s vision. 

Yuji Itadori’s fist was already cocked back, the air around his arm fizzling with energy as he took a step forward to meet Mahito’s own charge. The curse froze in shock; no, no! The hairpin sorcerer was there just then, he felt it, he felt her cursed energy, he sensed her soul!

Where on Earth did Sukuna’s vessel come from!?

“Black…” Yuji began, his fist flying through the air with brutish power, bending the air itself with its power as Mahito recoiled away from the imminent blow. It came to him then, a warning, a sort of prophetic tell, of an oncoming critical strike.

No… That move wasn’t one a sorcerer could pull off on command, it wasn’t something one could predict, what kind of premonition was this? It- no sorcerer in history was able to initiate it at will, that was- that was impossible-

“FLASH!” A shockwave exploded from the point of contact, Yuji’s fist seeming to push itself further and further into Mahito’s solar plexus. The curse’s body seemed to become suspended in space for a moment in time, as once again, black and red energy burst from the blow and licked at the walls and ceiling, sparks flying from Yuji’s fist where it dug deeper and deeper into Mahito’s torso, Mahito’s soul. Eventually, the laws of physics seemed to resume, and the curse disintegrated into thin air, reappearing where it was suddenly encased within an obliterated bed of concrete, the lights flickering as Mahito’s body cratered and collapsed an entire wall.

At the same time, Nanami’s fist struck the clone, a similarly massive wave of dark energy announcing his second successful Black Flash , which coupled with his ratio technique reduced the upper half of Mahito’s body double into a plume of red mist.

A wave of relief crashed into Nanami with such force the man stumbled, feeling his vision darken at the edges as his heart almost failed to deliver blood to his head. 

Yuji Itadori jumped down from his place on the stairs, coming into view as the boy shook his hand, still sparking with red energy.

“Mahito!” The boy yelled with vengeance in his voice, rolling up his sleeves as he stormed towards the incapacitated curse. Nanami marched through the puddle of gore left by the Mahito’s clone, Maki and Megumi at his heels.

“Itadori!” They called out, catching the vessel’s attention.

“Huh? Oh! You guys are here too?” Then Yuji did a spit-take, unused to seeing both Megumi and Nanami in such roughed up condition; both with wild, ruffled hair and blood drenching their clothes. Maki looked similarly vicious, her normally straight and mild hair spiking out in an unruly strands, a dried trickle of blood creeping out from her hairline, whilst one of her uniform sleeves was entirely gone, revealing her impressively muscled arm. “W-whoa! Nanamin! Fushiguro, Maki-senpai, what happened to you guys!?”

Unbeknownst to the pink haired boy, the trio thought the exact same thing when looking at the state of Yuji’s clothing. His hoodie was severely torn, ripped at its ends with loose threads spilling from just about every one of the fabric’s contours. The boy’s uniform had several holes in it, the whole thing either ripped or wrinkled to oblivion everywhere. Amazingly, the boy himself seemed to be completely free of injury; his wounds from before completely vanished.

“...It's been a long night for everyone, I imagine.” Nanami opened up, sliding a hand over his cleaver to rid it of the coat of blood. “Itadori. Did you see Kugisaki? We were certain she was the one coming down the stairs, not you.”

“Oh, uh, no not really! I’m going to be honest, I was fighting a transfigured corpse outside of the subway just a second ago, then I just randomly appeared in front of Mahito!” 

The group blanked for a moment, realising that Yuji hadn’t even expected to appear before the patchwork cursed spirit and somehow managed to land a Black Flash on sight.

“What about Sukuna?” Megumi queried, stepping before the group. “You were possessed by him- What happened?” Itadori blinked a few times, before lighting up like a miniature sun, sparkles in his eyes. 

“Oh, that’s right! Fushiguro, I met your-”

“-It was not in fact random, brother!” A boisterous voice called out, bouncing off the walls in all its baritone. Heavy footsteps announced the arrival of a new sorcerer, his cursed energy pulsating through the air in thick, powerful waves, like the reliable ocean tide. “We are two sorcerers linked by fate itself! Just as the waning winter patiently awaits the coming spring, I will always wait for you. Just as the very moon itself acts an eternal companion for the sun’s journey over the horizon; I will follow you to the ends of the Earth! Our bond is so deeply engraved into the very fabric of destiny itself , that I could find your presence even if it were on the opposite side of the world, my besto friendo!”  

Aoi Todo’s open-topped shoes clacked with the marble floor as he reached the bottom of the staircase, the mountain of a sorcerer tugged on his open uniform jacket as he addressed the group, his chin jutting upward with righteous pride. Yuji paled upon the man’s entrance, sweating slightly.

“H-hey, I really don’t know you like that…” 

“You!” An indignant, female voice called out from above. The group looked past Aoi Todo, watching as Nobara rushed down the stairwell. “You, ugh- that’s so nauseating- It was you who teleported me out, wasn’t it? I was so damn close to catching that stupid curse, what’d you do that for!?”

“My acute senses detected the curse’s true form rushing for this very exit! You were the closest to its direct path, so I, in my immense wisdom and tactical genius, exchanged your position with my brother’s, so that he could deal a decisive blow to the heinous foe! And my judgement was, as always, immaculate!”

“I didn’t ask for your intervention, musclehead!”

“Indeed! I intervened anyway!”

“Whoa, you two! Come on, don’t fight!”

A heavy wheeze cut the argument short, six sorcerers all directing their attention to the patchwork curse struggling to pull itself out of the wreckage of an entire collapsed wall. Mahito rose to its feet, blood running freely from its nose and mouth; injuries that unlike the others did not heal immediately. “Hah…” The curse breathed, a shadow of a grin on its face. “No way, that’s way too many sorcerers for me! I’m out of here!”

The curse, unpredictably, leapt upward and transformed its arms into an organic drill; digging through the Earth in its escape.

“It's getting away!” Maki yelled, lurching forward, only for Todo to clap his hands. Nobara let out a distorted scream before she disappeared; Mahito, with its mutated drill raised towards the sky, appeared next to Todo instead.

Todo and Yuji didn’t even blink, the bulkier sorcerer walloping the curse in its stomach before Yuji grabbed it by the hair and threw a knee into its nose. A mess of blood splattered messily onto the floor, Mahito letting out a nasal noise before Yuji pulled the curse along by its hair away from the stairwell. Nobara made an affronted yell as she fell from the tunnel Mahito had carved, landing on a bed of concrete.

“I told you, Mahito!” Yuji yelled, eyes alight with rage. “I told you I’d kill you!”

The pink haired boy yanked on the curse’s hair, expecting to throw it to the ground- only for its head to pop off fully. Yuji looked down at Mahito’s decapitated body with confusion, only to see a goofy snail looking face looking back at him. “What the hell!?”

Mahito’s severed head slipped out of Yuji’s grip as the curse’s hair melted into goop, a pair of tiny legs sprouting from the bottom of its head as it scurried away. The sorcerers, distracted by Mahito’s sudden escape, failed to notice its decoy body regurgitating a dozen or so purplish orbs. 

In a moment, twelve musclebound transfigured humans sprouted from seemingly nowhere, the group pushed to action as the freakish brutes fanned out. Yuji growled as a duo of transfigured humans several heads taller than himself lunged forth, their fists narrowly avoiding his head as they buried themselves into the wall behind. 

The pink haired vessel ducked low, his leg swooping back and upwards as he slammed a heel into the nearest beast, detonating its stumpy head in an explosion of blood, teeth and bone. He ducked under the wide swing of the second creature, its fist causing a distortion in the air that ruffled his hair, skipping forward as he weaved under another punch like a boxer, before a cursed energy infused divergent fist reduced its heavily muscled torso into mulch; the beast’s ribcage resembling a crushed aluminium can.

Around Yuji, his fellow sorcerers fought against the sudden onslaught. Todo released a powerful war cry, hooking two of the monstrous creatures in each of his arms before slamming them down with tremendous force, cratering the ground under the force of his clotheslining blow. Nanami reacted quickly, lunging forward with speed that defied his accumulated fatigue, his cleaver a brush of gore and violence as each activation of his technique reduced the glass cannon transfigured humans into chunks. Maki and Megumi tagged with each other, utilising Maki’s superior physical prowess and Megumi’s summons to single out stray titans and beat/slash them to a pulp. Despite the number advantage, Mahito’s bodyguards were promptly cut down by the overwhelming power wielded by the group, the sorcerers making short work of the brutish beasts.

Mahito had nonetheless regenerated its body fully, void of clothing as it ran for the other end of the corridor; hoping to gain enough distance against the sorcerers so that it could plan its next move. 

The hairpin sorcerer stood before the patchwork curse’s escape, standing over the remaining lower half of its deceased clone. Her bangs shifted slightly, casting an ominous shadow over her face that only showed the half-lidded orange eyes that seemed to glimmer with irritation.

“This night has been just one headache after another,” Nobara ground out with a long groan, and Mahito’s eyes glanced down, with muted horror, spotting a straw doll laid against the clone’s thigh. “What I need is a nice bowl of watermelon, a foot massage, and copious amounts of paracetamol. Anyway.”

She slammed her hammer into the straw doll, which had a cursed nail already embedded into it.

“Resonance!”

“FUCK!” Mahito swore, perhaps for the first time in all its cursed existence, as yet another bolt of cursed energy lanced through its soul. Blood exploded outwards as a massive spike erupted from its ribcage, the gore splattering against the floor as the curse fought to collect itself despite the mind-numbing agony. The spikes burst out of its body, accompanied by a blast of crimson lightning and sparks, signifying Nobara’s first Black Flash as the critical strike rendered Mahito totally immobile, scrambling to recompose the shape of its soul. The curse looked up to see the maple-haired girl had stepped towards him, a totally blank expression on her face before she kicked her heel into its stomach. The curse, unable to defend against the attack, was sent tumbling backwards, painting a long smear of blood against the marble floor.

Mahito looked upwards, to see the upside down Yuji Itadori standing directly above itself. 

The curse barely managed to roll out of the way of the boy’s punch, Yuji’s fist embedding itself into the floor with a thunderous slam. Driven to desperation, the curse slammed both its hands into the floor, dispatching its entire arsenal of transfigured souls at once; multicoloured worms erupting from the ground and multiplying in both size and numbers.

The explosive eruption of biological mass dealt the finishing blow to the structural integrity of the tunnel, the ceiling collapsing as a multitude of massive worms rampaged in the cramped space. Mahito’s legs blurred, its eyes frantic as it searched for an escape. The sorcerers, even occupied with the activation of its last ditch soul multiplicity technique, had spread out. The night sky offered no comfort as the sorcerers closed off every direction the curse could have taken to flee.

Before Mahito, Yuji stood with his back turned- arms outstretched to physically halt Mahito’s body repulsion construct. With nowhere else to go, the curse raced forward, each step cratering the Earth as it swung its fist into Yuji’s lower back with every ounce of strength it could muster. The electric buzz in the air announced the successful Black Flash, lightning and sparks flying from the blow as Yuji was sent flying into the air from the blow. 

No. Its fist had landed, but it had not touched Yuji Itadori. 

Mahito had obliterated one of his previous puppets, as the last surviving musclebound transfigured human had taken Yuji Itadori’s place. Because of that meathead’s technique, at the very last second, the transfigured beast had absorbed the hit in his stead. 

A flare of indignant frustration lanced through the curse’s veins, clouding its judgement. Every time Mahito got close to killing that insufferable brat, someone always got in the way! Still; that was still a Black Flash it had landed…

Mahito felt clarity unlike anything it had ever seen fill in the blanks of its technique, an enlightened understanding of its own cursed energy flooding its mind. The world itself seemed to slow for the curse, and it reared its head back and choked out a laugh, even as the sorcerers mopped up the last of its transfigured army, their focus returning to exorcising the sole remaining disaster curse.

It was so close now. So close to understanding the shape of its own soul, and its truest, purest, most lethal form.

It just had to land another Black Flash.  

“Hahahah!” The curse laughed hysterically, eyes blown wide as both its arms stretched out to its sides. Its wounds began to close, the Black Flash assisting Mahito in recomposing the shape of its soul despite the sustained damages. “Six versus one isn’t very fair! Cut me some slack!”

With a soft thud and cloud of dust, Yuji Itadori landed before Mahito; arms raised in a boxing stance. Todo appeared next to him, switching places with an unseen projectile. 

Mahito immediately took the initiative, serrated blades springing from its arms as it unleashed a flurry of slashes towards the pair. Yuji sprung backward to avoid the onslaught, but Todo took a more direct approach; intruding into the curse’s personal space and palming both its limbs outward- leaving its torso open.

The curse cackled as a third palm sprung from its bare chest, inches from making contact with Todo’s torso, before a clap announced the switch between the musclebound sorcerer and Yuji Itadori driving a fist into Mahito’s side without a moment of hesitation.

The curse barely managed to contort its torso in time, a network of crisscrossing fabrics absorbing Yuji’s blow and preventing critical damage. Mahito sensed a presence behind itself, turning to see the blonde sorcerer swinging that blunt cleaver of his directly for its head. Mahito’s hand blurred through the air towards Nanami, only for another clap to swap his position with the ratio sorcerer. The cleaver struck his back, a concussive blast of sheer brute force sending Mahito flying head over heels and tumbling through several large piles of shattered debris.

Mahito kipped up, narrowly avoiding a head full of Playful Cloud, as Maki surged forward with a lightning speed, the nunchucks flying in her hands as they came at the patchwork spirit from all sides. The curse was forced on the back foot, as suddenly a frog’s elongated tongue punched it in the nose, disorienting it long enough for the girl to slam unforgiving steel up against its chin, sending Mahito flipping through the air once more.

There was no second of rest, as another clap signified Yuji’s sudden appearance in the air above Mahito; fists raised before the vessel spiked Mahito back down into the crater left of Shibuya station as if the curse were a volleyball. 

‘No,’ Mahito realised with creeping hysteria. ‘They’re too many- and that musclehead sorcerer’s technique is impossible to predict with this many sorcerers attacking me all at once. No, at this rate, I won’t be able to land another Black Flash… I won’t be able to land a blow at all!’

Maki’s leg swung into Mahito’s side, launching the curse off the ground. It readjusted midair, digging its heels into the Earth to halt its momentum, only to be clotheslined by Todo’s outstretched arm. Todo rained a series of monstrously powerful stomps to Mahito’s body, the hairpin girl joining him and cackling like a witch as the pair kicked the living shit out of the grounded Mahito. The curse had just begun to attempt to raise itself off the ground, before its location was suddenly swapped with whomever had been next to Yuji, the boy again not sparing a single moment’s hesitation before slamming a punch into Mahito’s chest, sending the curse back into the ground.

The ground was cratered underneath the force of the blow, blood spewing from Mahito’s open mouth. The curse transformed its arm into a projectile cannon, forcing the boy to flip backwards to avoid a rapid onslaught of explosive pellets.

“Brother!” Todo yelled, leaping from his place. Mahito spun in the man’s direction, anticipating the brute’s charge, only for the sorcerer to vanish.

As Aoi Todo, disciple of none other than the mighty Yuki Tsukumo, activated his technique with a clap of his hands; he felt the gaze of the universe itself watch as his body left the waking world, travelling through space and time. He felt the watchful eyes and judgement of the heavens appraising him, as his cursed energy raged through his body like an unstoppable hurricane. Todo was no senseless fool, his technique relied on the constant awareness of cursed energy around himself, its flow, its position relative to himself and the state or flow of any being or object’s cursed energy. He’d felt, and knew from their cursed energy, that the valiant sorcerers who’d been locked in battle with the patchwork cursed spirit prior to his courageous entrance had each landed a Black Flash , surpassing the limits of the common man and entering the league of champions; even that Zenin girl with the Heavenly Restriction had landed one! 

With his beloved brother, and the very curse itself having landed its own Black Flash, Todo only had two choices. ‘It seems now, the one being left behind is me. You have grown so strong, fated brother of mine.’

The stars themselves began to race past the Kyoto High senior, their brilliant lights washing over his body as the beat of his soul resonated with the universe itself. ‘Are you willing to allow the current status quo to remain as it is, Todo Aoi?’ Rings of pure power began to ripple through the continuum of space, Todo’s sheer conviction breaking the barrier between reality and human spirit as he tilted further towards his spiritual conclusion. ‘Are you going to leave Yuji Itadori all alone again; Todo Aoi!? ’

As his soul shattered the boundary between reality and fiction, the possible and the impossible, Todo’s eyes flashed open with unyielding resolve, his fist closing around the locket around his neck. The beat of his soul filled his body with an energy that raced through his veins like electricity, an energy that seemed to spark off of his form even in the vacuum between relativity and existence itself!

The patchwork cursed spirit, its hair in wild disarray and all traces of cockiness wiped from expression, was frozen in space as Todo cut a path through the universe; the sorcerer’s unshakeable dogma overwriting the very laws of reality, replacing the stone thrown by Yuji Itadori with his own muscle bound form; arm cocked back, the indomitable strength of brotherly love clutched within the palm of his fist!

“Black Flash!” Todo roared, just as his leg snapped upwards and drove itself into Mahito’s sternum. The curse was then struck by a monstrous blast of cursed energy, lightning washing their surroundings with black sparks as a shockwave sent Mahito bouncing and tumbling dozens of yards away.

Mahito rolled to its feet, a waterfall of blood spilling from its open mouth as it struggled to recompose its body from the shape of its soul. The curse dashed forward to avoid the curseless girl’s brutish slam where it lay a moment prior. The black haired shikigami user chased the curse, a flurry of bare handed blows forcing it to retreat as Megumi launched it back with a kick; interlocking his hands as he called out “Nue!”

That hulking bird emerged from a puddle of shadow, arcing through the air and crashing into Mahito; frying the curse with a blast of electricity. Nanami stepped behind the patchwork spirit as it convulsed, his cleaver crashing against his side and striking the 7:3 ratio along its ribs, a shockwave announcing Mahito’s departure as the patchwork spirit was embedded several feet into the Earthy wall of the crater.

The curse wheezed, panic beginning to cloud its mind as it realised the severity of its situation. It could not flee with that meathead sorcerer capable of exchanging its location at will, and it could not keep up with the unrelenting assault of not three, but six high level sorcerers- each with unreasonably powerful, annoying to deal with techniques. 

Mahito had no choice. Its cursed energy was nearing the limit; and although it had already deployed its domain earlier, it was pushed into a corner. The situation was do or die, it had to pick off the teleporting sorcerer as well as the hairpin girl, then it could regroup and deal with the rest. There was the issue of Sukuna’s vessel, that infuriating pink haired idiot and the demon king he housed, but Mahito had already observed the phenomenon of a domain expanding without exerting any effect beyond its sure-hit technique.

0.2 seconds. Mahito had to open its domain for 0.2 seconds, enough to focus its technique and transfigure the most dangerous of the group, before withdrawing Self Embodiment of Perfection before Sukuna could register Mahito’s touch against his soul. 

With that, as the six sorcerers raced towards the weakened curse, backed against a corner, Mahito clasped its hands together. The shikigami user’s cursed energy would be too little to resist its domain at this point, even if the boy tried, Mahito would overpower his incomplete domain easily. 

“Domain Expansion!” Mahito screamed, hysteria in both its eyes and voice. A spare set of arms materialised within its mouth, performing hand signs as the curse’s energy exploded outwards. “Self-Embodiment of-”

Fingers that did not belong to Mahito pried the curse’s mouth open in an instant, before the curse felt a set of powerful fingers crush the miniature set of limbs within its maw. Mahito had no heart, but it felt a stone drop in its chest regardless, as a foot pressed itself against its spine and violently kicked it to the ground- keeping hold of Mahito’s arms and tearing them from their sockets with enormous strength. 

The beginnings of Mahito’s barrier withered into shards, the curse’s energy expended in a failed attempt to open its domain. Ice filled the curse’s body at the realisation, its technique unable to be activated directly after even the failed domain expansion.

Mahito’s head turned, ever so slowly, to address the tall figure looming from behind. It had no presence at all. The figure towered over the patchwork curse, dressed in little more than rags; tattered clothing snapping in the wind menacingly as two narrowed eyes peered down at the curse from the impenetrable shadow cloaking the man’s face. A wide smirk broke the abyssal darkness, splitting the man’s face with a truly demonic grin.

“Mmn, mmn, mmn.” The raven haired man hummed as if he were scolding a child, his voice thick with derision. “What do we have here?”

“W-who…” Mahito’s quivered, its lips dry as it stammered and failed to conceive a sentence. Its cursed energy was almost totally expended; it needed to end this battle now, but its technique wouldn’t activate-

“Black Flash!” The man yelled suddenly, loose rubble suddenly thrown into the air as the mere swing of his fist uprooted loose Earth before it collided with Mahito’s jaw, sending the curse cartwheeling spectacularly into the air. A shockwave followed Mahito’s ascent from the blow, however the punch lacked the distinctive explosion of dark energy that accompanied a Black Flash. The raw, brute force behind the blow still sent the curse flying; Mahito carving a deep trench in the Earth where it fell.

Mahito gasped, the curse convulsing where it lay in the ground it felt its soul split at the seams. Normally, it had no issue reversing or outright negating any damage done to its physical body; but the accumulated damage from Yuji Itadori’s soul punches, the hairpin sorcerer’s Resonance, and the consecutive Black Flashes of every FUCKING sorcerer there had begun to finally overcome its ability to regenerate. A physical punch, no matter how powerful, would normally be nothing to Mahito, but in this state…

‘I almost died!’ The curse hacked and coughed, propping itself up on its the stumps of its elbows as it fought against the jitter violently overtaking its limbs. It tried, and failed to stand, the strength leaving its limbs with each attempt. ‘Just then, if he’d punched me any harder, I would have died, right there!’

“Aw man, that was just a regular ass punch...” The tall, curseless combatant spoke, his voice tinged with disappointment. “Dunno what I was expecting… But that still sucks.”

“Oh!” Yuji piped up, raising a finger from where he stood on the opposite end of the battlefield. His eyes seemed to light up, as he excitedly waved at the newest arrival to the battle. Maki and Nanami both had opposite reactions, stiffening at the imposing sight of Toji Fushiguro. The man in question had a hand stuffed in his pocket, his pants- and the rest of his clothing for that matter, in absolute tatters. Yuji started waving both of his arms in the man’s direction. “You’re back! Hi mister Fushiguro!”

Toji froze where he stood, looking like a robber caught on CCTV. Maki’s head snapped towards Yuji, her eyes wide and mouth hung slightly open. Nanami had a similar look of surprise, where Nobara’s jaw seemed to have dropped to the floor as she fixed Megumi with a look of betrayal. The rest of the group of sorcerers turned to face the salmon haired boy, who wore a mask of total innocence.

Megumi Fushiguro blinked rapidly, wondering if he’d simply misheard Yuji in the heat of battle, only for the boy to address him directly. “Your dad is so freaking cool, Fushiguro!”

“...My what?”

Chapter Text

As Toji jogged through the desolate halls that extended throughout the egregious expanse of the Shibuya metro, the adrenaline and cortisol that had been coursing through his veins throughout the entirety of the night began to slowly wear off, leaving the ex-sorcerer killer heavily worn out. 

His legs began to feel heavy and clumsy, the after effects of the overwhelming jitters that arose during his short bout with Sukuna leaving him feeling frail. Toji paused in his search, prying the glass screen off of a vending machine and stealing an entire stock of energy drinks.

Without pause, he began chugging them one by one, blinking his eyes rapidly as he prayed the caffeine hit his system quick, preferably within the next minute because damn if he hadn’t ever felt an adrenaline crash this hard before.

He desperately fought the exhaustion that weighed his limbs down like cinder blocks, trying to reawaken a sense of panic by reminding himself of Sukuna’s early awakening. Why had Sukuna chosen to use his binding vow then? Was he expecting to kill Toji, Maki, and Yuji in one fell swoop after possessing Megumi’s body- as well as the ten fingers? But then… Why had he decided to go for it so early?

In the series he could remember, Sukuna at three quarters of his strength did in fact have the opportunity to transfer himself to Megumi, at the beginning of his fight with Mahoraga. But he chose not to, then- even though it shouldn’t have been an issue even with Mahoraga there. Why?

When presented with the opportunity to gain ten fingers at one, Sukuna had decided to use the chant. So perhaps the King of Curses had weighed the risk of moving early, against being unable to gain possession of his fingers at a later date due to Satoru Gojo’s sealing? That would make sense, considering the Jujutsu Government’s first action post-Shibuya incident would be to reinstate the execution order on Yuji Itadori’s head. 

So, Sukuna had decided he may as well take out two birds with one stone then, huh? And the thing was; the gamble would have paid off if it were anyone else carrying the ten fingers. The only reason Yuji and Maki weren’t dead, and Sukuna wasn’t free, was because he was there. Sukuna severely underestimated Toji’s strength, thinking him just another irrelevant sorcerer.

But to think Jogo’s shikigami were so close to getting those fingers to him… Jeez. How scary.

His arms felt full of lead, hurting just with the effort of holding them in a crooked position, so as he downed his last drink, Toji decided to be greedy and broke into yet another vending machine, throwing as many caffeinated drinks into his ridiculously deep pockets as possible. 

Another issue. Once he was able to think clearly again, the pain set in. 

His body was riddled with aches and muscle pains, the result of accumulated fatigue which could not be repaired by his healing factor, making him pinch the corner of his eyes with each stray rock or debris he’d accidentally tripped over. Whilst the more serious damage left behind by Jogo had already healed over, leaving some ugly looking scabbing on his hands and forearms, the echoes of fire still tickled the exposed flesh of his back, as well as the back portions of his legs and… Well, uh, Toji wasn’t exactly too decent at the current moment.

‘I should’ve just looted a clothing store before coming down here,’ He clicked his tongue, before chugging down his umpteenth energy drink. His face twisted in response to the unpleasantly sour flavour, bringing the can to his face where he read the label to be lemon flavour. ‘Some lemonade. Shit tastes like battery acid and sugar mixed together.’

He tossed the half-full can over his shoulder, rubbing his thumb into his nose to try and stave off the sudden sleepiness. 

It was alarming, actually. When Toji had first come to, his body was stricken by a senseless desire for violence and fighting, so much so that seeking out the strongest opponent in the area seemed almost instinctual. He hadn’t been thinking about it then, hell, he hadn’t really been thinking at all, until he saw Megumi Fushiguro for the first time.

Somehow, seeing his own flesh and blood (and it was his flesh, his blood, he repeated in his head, like a mantra) had shaken off the bloodthirsty haze left by that old hag’s technique.

Still… Was this form even permanent?

What if the sudden, bone deep exhaustion permeated throughout all of his limbs was because he was nearing the limit of that old woman’s technique? What if the ‘glitch’, the infinite feedback loop that occurred when the seance that was supposed to feed off of his cursed energy only to find that he had none, was beginning to fizzle out, bound by the limits of jujutsu?

What if he sank back into death now, so soon, before getting to sit and properly meet his son?

The idea caused a lump to form in the back of Toji’s throat, anxiety taking hold and chasing away with sleepiness that threatened to pull him under, maybe for good. No, no he couldn’t afford to duck out now, not yet- there was still so much to do. The simple thought of dying again, and leaving his kid behind a second time was almost too much to bear; casting a bruising, crushing sensation on Toji’s heart.

First, he quickened his step, eager to find the scent of the kids through the thick, poisonous miasma that was Mahito’s trace energy. But then Toji halted, the blood in his face going cold as he looked down to his feet.

Why did he care so much? He never personally knew Megumi, except for when he did; afterall, he had held the boy when he was just a newborn babe, cradling that precious treasure in the crook of his arms as his wife- his strong, beautiful wife, the woman who had saved him - wept soft, joyous tears. His woman, his everything , asked him for a name, because the two of them were so swept up in the passion, the discovery and the love they shared for one another, that neither of them had planned a day ahead of the current moment.

‘Me? Pick a name?’ He’d thought, then. Why should he be the one to choose it, surely she, his everything, could pick when all this emotional shit had never been his strong suit?

“Megumi.” He had said, the fruit of him and his wife’s affections, everything good and beautiful that Toji had ever brought to this world, contained within a single bundle of cloth and flushed skin. His grace, his blessing. His son. Megumi.

See, the things about memories from a life you didn’t live was that one could not simply access the vast bank of human experiences as if it were some orderly catalogue- if only it were so simple. 

Toji’s past memories came to him in bits and pieces, and required a stimulus, some trigger that would cause him to think back to a specific moment of time that could be linked to whatever it was he was looking at or thinking of. He couldn’t just read through Toji’s old memories like a book, but he could see the brand of energy drink in his hand and remember a harsh winter where Toji crashed from one dilapidated apartment to another, one night stopping to buy energy drinks from a vending machine whilst a harsh blizzard raged outside- desperate to stave off the sleep and stop those awful dreams from haunting him.

Toji could trace a finger over the scar on his lip and remember the night he got it. The night he was thrown into a pit of curses by the same clan elders he’d, for a foolish moment trusted; them and their honeyed words leading him deep beneath the clan’s catacombs, only to throw him into a colosseum of horrors he could only barely sense, the monstrous creatures flaying his flesh wherever they could, clawing open his face and marring the corner of his mouth for life. The pain of the continued fury of a hundred, bloodthirsty curses who could come close but not quite strong enough to kill him, paled in comparison to the cold loneliness, the crushing, poisonous betrayal in seeing his own kin turn their backs and leave a child to die in the closest approximation of hell man could produce.

He could think, why was it that he hated alcohol so much? And one part of him would remember that his superhuman body filtered even the strongest of ales, reducing every drink to nothing more than a harsh tonic that stung his tongue with none of the warm buzz. Or maybe he could trace his hatred of it back to the way his father used to act, the man fallen who had fallen into a deep spiral of cruelty and violence when his useless wife was unable to produce any more children other than a single worthless, blasphemous stain on the bloodline, a boy that would be better off dead yet failed to die after each attempt on his life. The old idiot would come home late at nights, and drag a pre-pubescent Toji from his room, thrashing him with a drunken rage until the boy was a black and blue mess on the floor.

The ex-assassin could ask himself why birthdays felt uncomfortable for him, and he’d remembered the child who was his past self, who would watch old, fizzy looking cartoons and celebrate his birth date with an array of silly characters on the other end of a screen. He would sneak sweets for himself from the clan’s eatery, sitting alone late at night and thinking that maybe if he dreamed hard enough- he could imagine others around him, who would shower him with kind, gentle words of praise and love rather than venomous insults and hurtful blows. 

He could dig further into the dark recesses of his life, when did he stop celebrating his birthday? It was his twelfth that he’d woken up one night, to the gruesome sensation of a knife plunged into his ribs; the cold, unforgiving steel nothing against the bitter vitriol contained within that woman’s gaze, glaring down at her own child with nothing but the most sheer hatred. Toji survived that night, that grievous injury, as he always did- he was always so hard to kill after all- but he, despite the walls upon walls of indifference he built between himself and his family, could never understand why they treated him with such cruelty, such contempt. Because even though he inherited no technique, brought no merit to the clan, was born with a restriction that was widely considered a curse on the bloodline, and had nothing to show for the resources invested into him other than his organic strength and hardy constitution-

What child deserved to be hated? To be neglected?

“Where the fuck have you been?”

An unstoppable wave of sickness swept through Toji, feeling like a ghostly hand wrenching through his insides before the contents of his stomach were violently expelled, the man bending at the hip and clutching the wall for support as he heaved whatever he’d had to drink within the past few minutes. 

The attack didn’t stop, involuntary spasms continued to wrack his belly as he fought himself from falling over entirely. He hurled until there was nothing left in his stomach, and continued, gagging as his torso and throat seized painfully. 

He fought to draw in breath, darkness creeping in at the corners of his vision, but no matter how much air he inhaled none of it seemed to be getting to his brain because Toji wasn’t thinking straight, he inhaled but he could not breathe and the fault and sorrow was crushing his heart and he felt like he could die and these memories weren’t even his memories so why should they affect him so much? Shouldn’t he instead mourn his old life, the lifetime he lived and presumably died, before he found himself here- the person he was before?

But he couldn't mourn whatever life there was before, as he did not remember it- all there was to remember, to mourn, was the tragedy that was Toji Zenin, who’d lived a lifetime of misery, cruelty, loneliness and heartbreak. And he had inherited not just the memories but the sorrow, the self-loathing, but most importantly; the guilt , because when Toji was at his lowest- a dead man on his feet, living only from one bloodstained cheque to another, another life snuffed out to satisfy his bottomless existence, an angel had appeared in his life and pulled him from the dregs of hell.

That angel was love, she was healing, she was life, she was everything. Toji had never known beauty, he had never known happiness until the moment he felt that soft touch of her gentle hands upon his skin, the murmured comforts and the unquestionable safety that her arms- small and short as they were against his massive frame- offered to a broken man like him.

And that angel had given him a treasure, something beautiful, a blessing so luminous Toji had thought that if the sum of all his suffering had amounted to this being of goodness and light, then Toji could suffer a thousand more lifetimes and it would not equal the measure of warmth and love that flowed through his being when he held that gift from heaven within his arms. And his wife, the joy of his everything, had told him then;

“Take care of our son, Toji.”

The man wretched, slipping off the wall and landing on his elbows and knees as his throat constricted against his will, only a few feet away from falling head first into the train tracks. 

What a bad father he was. What a horrible, terrible man he was. But- but nobody could truly understand the depth of Toji’s grief, the irreversible damage it had wreaked upon his soul when Toji’s wife had passed. They would never know- Nobody could understand, except for Toji himself, that before she found him, he was trapped at the absolute lowest point possible for a human being, resorting to chemical vices; every drug under the sun- ineffective as they were against his inhuman immunity to poisons and intoxicants- while gambling what little wealth he procured in an attempt to drown himself in distractions. Distractions, distractions, distractions, piled on top of each other in a desperate attempt to block all feeling, all thinking. They could never understand, because to him she was everything that was good in this world, and when she passed, she took everything that was good with her.

Except for one thing. Except for Him. 

But how could Toji raise a child, when he was a man shattered into a million pieces? He was incapable of taking care of himself, how could he be placed in charge of the most valuable treasure in the world? No- the clan, as much as they despised and loathed Toji, they loved and valued cursed techniques, and Toji knew his boy was born with a prodigious technique, his cursed energy oozing in such a way it promised a latent, tremendous power, even when he was just a toddler. 

The monsters who had tormented Toji, who had tried to kill him time after time, would treasure Megumi’s technique. The boy would be able to live a healthy, full and meaningful life as a sorcerer- a life that Toji himself couldn’t hope to offer, not when he was a mess of a thousand miseries and a thousand more regrets.

No child deserved to be neglected, and if Toji failed his son in any way more than he already had- he may have just as well gone ahead and took a blade to his own neck.

‘What am I even saying?’ He questioned himself, his breath coming out in short huffs, the oxygen in his lungs failing to saturate his blood. ‘What morals do I have? I was- I was a fucking murderer by trade, what high ground do I have to stand on?’

What was it he thought, before? No child deserved to be neglected?

A gunshot. A schoolgirl, hardly in her last year of middle school, hit the ground as a fractal of red spread from below her head. Her eyes stared out blankly ahead, still wet with tears as the shadow of a smile was gruesomely marred by the blood running freely from the gaping bullet hole perforating her cranium.

Toji killed a little girl. He did that, a girl with hopes and with dreams, who was ready to throw away the responsibilities impressed upon her by an emotionless society that had no qualms pressing the weight of the world onto the shoulders of children.

He took that all away, for some measly change.

“You had a kid.” Toji whispered with horror at the reflection of his face on the wet tile below him. “You- you were a father, and you, you… How… How could you?”

His answer was silence. It didn’t help, the accusations he pointed towards the Toji of before fell on no one, because there was no ‘other’ Toji. There was only him, and the sins that his past self left behind. What a crushing weight- No wonder the Him of before didn’t bother thinking, didn’t bother confronting the overbearing, hulking burden of being an emotionally stunted asshole who destroyed anything he touched. 

Because damn, it all hurt so much.

Ahh… He stilled for a moment, realising he suddenly understood the novelty of immersing himself into the thick of battle, rather than sit around to confront the weight of his past. What was he doing here anyway, he had a fight to get to- there wasn’t time to dawdle and suck his thumbs like some baby, couldn’t he be anything other than a self victimising asshole for once?

Before Toji could spiral deeper into a pit of self-loathing and regret, he heard the shuffle of clothing just a few paces away from himself. He raised his head, his vision blurred with fatigue, or maybe it was tears, and saw a lone figure huddled in a hollow within the subway pillar. 

Tired, sunken in eyes with deep bags beneath them stared thoughtlessly into his own, framed by wild strands of black hair that fell haphazardly from two messy twin buns on either side of the guy’s head. A dark line interrupted the glossy sheen of his pale skin, crossing over his nose, the glisten of faded tear tracks printed down his cheeks. His nose was red and his eyes were puffy with the telling signs of a previous meltdown. His loose, white robes were splayed against the concrete as he hugged his legs to his chest, giving the kid, because that was what Choso looked like just then, just a kid, a heart-wrenchingly vulnerable visage.

The 150 year old Death Painting stared at him duly, eyes unfocused.

“A-ah…” Toji laughed weakly, pushing himself off of his hands and knees and getting into a properly seated position, away from the mess he’d made on the floor. Wow, no wonder he hadn’t sensed Choso’s presence. His stuffed sinuses aside, the poor kid’s cursed energy was quiet, withdrawn, hardly even there. Clumsily, Toji withdrew a caffeinated beverage from his pocket, his face scrunching up. “These things hurt my stomach so bad. Eugh, wouldn’t recommend- Not easy on the gut, haha.” 

Choso certainly wasn’t buying it, as those two weary-looking eyes seemed to slightly narrow with irritation. “...Cozy spot to have a breakdown, huh?” Toji joked half-heartedly. It was not well-received.

“Go away, human.” The half-curse grumbled, hiding his lower face behind his knees. “I’m in no mood to fight you.”

“Who said anything about fighting?” Toji grunted, tossing the can aside as he shuffled over to lay against the wall adjacent to Choso. He blinked the stinging out of his eyes, wiping away any wetness there that had accumulated during his… lapse of composure. And he really, really thought he was doing well with this whole second life thing. “How about we just talk?”

“...I have nothing to talk to you about.” Said a voice with a slightly off-pitch that most definitely had a lot to talk about.

“Man, you just saw me lose my lunch and totally embarrass myself, why not let us get even?”

He received a blank stare in return, and winced. “Think you can keep that a secret, actually? It’ll really fuck up the whole tough guy shtick I got goin’ on.”

“What are you?” Choso asked quietly with a flat monotone, a question with no curiosity in it- a simple diversion. “I’ve never heard of someone having zero cursed energy before. Do you know what that is?”

Toji decided to oblige. “It's called a heavenly restriction. I was born with no cursed energy at all, in exchange for heightened physical attributes.”

“So not just a regular human, then.” Choso shifted, a hand snaking around his leg to grab at his other elbow. 

“Nah. Neither of us are.”

The half-curse gave him a flat stare. Toji met it, his own gaze unyielding. “...Can’t you tell? I’m a curse.”

“You look pretty human to me.” Toji huffed, crossing his arms as he rested the side of his head against the wall. “So, what’s up?”

Another blank stare, and maybe Choso was trying to look intimidating but his puffy eyes and slouched posture made him look like a lonely child. The sight twisted something in Toji’s heart. “Uncanny. You kinda remind me of my kid.” Toji intoned, his eyes wandering as that roused a reaction from the half-curse in the form of a series of rapid blinks. “You two even got that same pouty look! That boy, always tryin’ to put up a tough face, wonder who he got that from, even when he’s way over his head. The little idiot doesn’t realise how much trouble, how much shit he could avoid if he just… Relied on others a little more.” His eyes moved up to meet Choso’s own. “You don’t look like you rely on others very much.” 

“I do not even know who you are.”

“Hah, yeah, you don’t.” The large man chuckled, crudely spitting to the side to try and rid his mouth of the foul taste of vomit. “So you don’t gotta care what I think, right? Sometimes, somethin’ happens that really shakes you up inside and the only way to get your thoughts straight is to voice them to someone else- No, no, I’m serious. Helps you get to know how and what you’re feeling-” What was he doing? Was he really trying to give Choso some emotional peptalk? Some deadbeat to half-curse therapy? “Even if it's to a weird stranger who was puking his guts out in front of you a few seconds ago, but hey. Beggars can’t be choosers.”

To be perfectly honest, Toji wasn’t expecting Choso to indulge him. The kid had just gone through the world shattering realisation that he had almost killed his only remaining brother, after all. Why would he open up to some odd stranger, who’d puked his guts out and tweaked out in front of him?

“...I have made a grave mistake.” Choso began, ducking his head as he looked to his feet. Toji blinked, before leaning in to imply an open ear. “I was tricked into doing something terrible. I had thought… I thought I lost everything. Then, I almost did truly lose everything.”

Toji hummed, listening intently, but Choso didn’t seem to care; the rant seemingly for his own sake rather than seeking any sort of external opinion. Yeah, Toji definitely wasn’t expecting the half-curse to open up to him, but shit, may as well coast off of the stroke of good luck so far. He usually fucked up any and all emotional interactions, so if he pulled this off- it’d be a literal first in all of his life.

“Everything I’ve known so far is a lie.” Two pale hands snaked out of those willowy robes, slender fingers sinking into the crows nest that was Choso’s hair as the half-curse’s eye began to stare out into nothing. “I had… a family. A family who relied on me, on my judgement, and my judgement failed them . And while I was blinded by my sense of retribution, I- I almost, I… My… My little brother…!” In the most emotion the kid had shown so far, Choso choked on his words- his hands bunching into fists as they pulled at his scalp.

Immediately, Toji reached out an arm to halt the self-destructive action- halting his movement once Choso jumped at the sudden movement. Cautiously, slowly, he placed a hand on each of the half-curses forearms, and gently guided them away from his head.

“You’re just a kid,” Toji voiced, forcing his normally gruff tone into something uncharacteristically soft. “We all fuck up sometimes. It's okay, just breathe.”

“I am an older brother.” Choso hissed, swatting away Toji’s hands as he directed a glare filled with loathing towards Toji. But his cursed energy did not fluctuate with the activation of a technique, so clearly the half-curse didn’t want him dead- the anger did not seem to be pointed towards him. Self-loathing, then? “They were my responsibility!”

“I don’t know the full details here-” a lie, because he did, “-but I can see what’s going on. Caring for your juniors, for your family, that's the most admirable thing in the world. Why are you blaming yourself for trying your best? What more can you do than that? You aren’t being very fair to yourself.”

The corners of Choso’s mouth seemed to quiver in place, turning downward with a deep, childish frown. And God, he really did just look like some kid, in clothes way too big for him. Playing a role too heavy for his shoulders, responsibility that didn’t belong to just a boy. Choso may have been 150 years old organically, but all of that existence was while within the torturous confines of a jar- with only the telepathic link between him and his brothers to keep him company for the length of a century and more. This was just a child, trying to play the part of a stoic older brother.

“My mistake got them killed!” The half-human cried, cursed energy swelling outwards in a brief burst whilst tears just began to well in the corners of his eyes. Toji smoothened out his expression as best as he could, hoping he looked less like some questionable homeless asshole and more the part of a caring father. Regardless of whatever his visage was, Choso continued, the words spilling from the boy’s lips like in an unstoppable deluge of emotion. “I was… I was the older brother, the eldest of us. They trusted me. They trusted their older brother! I thought- I thought if we were to live our lives as humans, my brothers would never be happy- I didn’t want them to suffer as humans. I thought the world that would be best for them was a world of curses, so I chose the path of less resistance, and they- they died for my decision!”

Choso screwed his eyes shut, hands clamping down on his head once again as he cried out. “I messed it up! I tried to take the easy way- and now- now they’re gone! They’re gone forever!” He sobbed, all composure lost.

The emotionally constipated Toji teetered in place awkwardly, mouth slightly hung open. 

‘Uh,’ He thought smartly. ‘What the FUCK do I do!?’

“How could it be your fault? You couldn’t have known any better...” Toji asked quietly. He wondered if Choso had even heard him, no reaction as the boy slinked back whilst he sobbed quietly. Time to try another tactic then. “...You said you had a little brother. How is he?”

Choso’s eyes shot open, red and puffy from another round of Toji-induced crying. “A-ah…” The boy breathed, his head tilting backward slightly.

“Ah… Him and… Eso, and Kechizou would get along so well… I…” He choked again, the words caught in his throat. “If I killed him too, I don’t- I would, if I messed it up again- I think I would just die- ”

“Hey, come on. Look at me now.” Toji scolded, his lips set in a firm line as he forced the blood manipulator to look him in the eyes.

“You and I are human, y’know, it's our whole thing to make mistakes.” Choso opened his mouth to cut him off, but Toji continued. Out with it. “After my wife died I devolved into a degenerative spiral of gambling, cheating, and murder. The demons that haunted me throughout my whole life, the ones that I thought were gone after I’d married her- they moved right back into my mind the moment she was gone and they turned me into a miserable wreck. Hardly even human. I was such a mess back then, that even I knew I was in no shape to be a father- not for my son, who deserved the world. I thought that he deserved better than some shitty excuse of a dad who was barely home all of the time, so I wasted no time in signing him off to a group of people I despised.” 

Toji looked up to meet Choso’s eyes, seeing the Death Painting holding his gaze with a perplexed expression, utterly confused by the sudden blast of information. “Honestly, I can hardly call it a mistake- because unlike you, I knew exactly what I was doing, but I just didn’t care about anything. That’s how much of a shitty father I am. I knew what I was doing was nothing more than an abandonment of my responsibilities as a father, running away from the promises I’d made to my dead wife, but I was too self-absorbed to think of anything beyond my own suffering. That boy spent his earliest years fighting to survive, alone with only the daughter of the woman I fooled around with and his life only turned out well because of the mercy of a man who stepped up in my stead. That boy lived a good life, but only because it was void of me.”

Choso stared at him, his previous expression of distress replaced by one of bewilderment. Trauma-dumping; it seems the move was effective! 

“It sounds like you made the right decision.” Choso mumbled blankly, and fuck if that didn’t feel like a sword to his heart.

“No,” Toji said with a hint of something fragile in his voice, and he wasn’t sure what his expression was but it must’ve been something pathetic if a damn Death Painting was looking at him with pity. “It was the biggest mistake of my life. If I had anything resembling a backbone, any semblance of respect for the responsibility left to me by the love of my life, I would fulfil my duty as a parent; and beat my shitty self into shape to provide my son with what he deserved. He deserved a father, and I stole that from him, forever.”

Choso blinked a few times, shifting awkwardly in place, but he wasn’t crying anymore so Toji took it as a sign to keep on. “The regret is crushing me. It’s a mistake I can never reverse, that will forever have consequences and I just can’t seem to get the guilt out of my head no matter what I do, but I can’t run away from it like I used to before. Because despite what I’ve done, the mistakes I’ve made, I’m still here, alive. And I still have a duty to fulfil.”

He looked up to Choso, seeing the kid’s eyes widen minutely.

“My duty is to my son, to make up for a lifetime lost being the father I deprived him of. What’s yours?”

“My little brother,” Choso breathed, his eyes widening as his dark brown eyes glimmered with purpose. “My duty is to my little brother.”

Toji shuffled out of the hollow space the two were inside, giving the blood manipulator space to move. Choso scooted forward, pulling himself out of the hole he’d huddled into as he stood to his full height- and damn, why were all these freaks so tall? Wasn’t the average height in Japan like, 5'7? He’d thought he’d tower over everyone with his 190 centimetre frame, but it looked like every second person here was either just as tall or even taller than himself, as Choso stood at just barely above Toji’s eye level. 

‘How did you get so big?’ Toji thought, abashed, feeling like a bear watching a human double its size by waving its arms. How the hell did his lanky self fit into that small hole in the wall?!

“You’re hardly decent.” Choso pointed out helpfully, as if Toji wasn’t aware he was basically wearing rags- courtesy of Sukuna’s dismantle, even if the cuts hadn’t reached his flesh they certainly didn’t spare his clothes any favours. Shame really, it was such a comfy sweater. And pants. Was… was his derriere exposed? He was scared to check, and Jogo’s disaster flames had numbed all sensations on his rear side.

“Yeah, I’m aware.” He grumbled, before eyeing Choso’s velvet chest piece. “...You uh, attached to that sash around your chest?”

The half-curse regarded him with another one of his signature blank stares, and Toji sighed. Worth a shot. He was pretty sure his underwear were still in one piece at the very least, small mercies.

“Your little brother wouldn’t happen to be Yuji Itadori, would it?” Toji asked, and the Death Painting in front of him blinked with surprise as his eyes suddenly narrowed with suspicion. Ah, was that a mistake?

“How did you know?” Choso questioned, his voice thick with apprehension. Toji could feel that cursed energy of his, that had been so withdrawn and weak before, begin to bleed outwards in a menacing pulse of power. Oh yeah that was a mistake.

“I’m acquainted with him, and you two uh, look alike.” Toji blurted in a blatant lie, rushing to rectify whatever suspicion he roused. “I think it's something in the nose- you could be twins, really, if it weren’t for the hair.” Fuck! Yuji and Choso couldn’t look any different, how was he gonna buy that?

Choso blinked, his intimidating aura dissipating instantly. Then, against all logic, the kid’s cheeks flushed, a hand coming to his chin as he fell deep into thought. “Yes… Yes, I am his older brother after all, and I suppose we do look very similar, naturally…”

“Yup.” Toji affirmed robotically. ‘No fucking way.’ “Only makes sense.”

“Yuji Itadori is indeed my little brother, but why do you ask?” Choso dropped his hand, those tired looking eyes fixing themselves upon Toji once again. “...And who are you, really?”

“Call me Toji,” He sniffed, before gesturing for the Death Painting to walk with him. “I ask because, as we speak, Itadori is either looking for or battling your former allies.” He paused. “Former ally. I think I killed just about the rest of them, sorry.”

“I don’t care about any of them.” Choso declared, and Toji breathed a sigh of relief as he realised Choso completely brushed over the fact that Toji accidentally revealed that he knew his former allegiances , the half-curse’s steps suddenly gaining a lot more pep as he began marching forward with purpose. “All that matters now is that I must go assist my brother.”

Toji grinned. “And I have to go assist my son.”

The half-curse regarded him from the side, a question written in his eyes. “...A question. Why now? What made you choose to atone for your failures now?”

Ah, what the hell. Choso had laid it all bare to him, and so had he; may as well go all the way. “Oh, you’re not gonna believe this.” Toji laughed. “I died in August of 2006, when my boy was barely four, courtesy of one Satoru Gojo. Deserved, honestly, since I sort of killed the guy back when he was a teenager.”

Choso blinked, certainly not having expected that answer, yet curiously, he did not outright exclaim disbelief, so Toji continued. “I say killed, but I actually sorta botched the job since I didn’t… Uh, how do I put this, kill him thoroughly? Apparently the brat had an epiphany on the verge of death and learned Reverse Cursed Technique. So, when I wasn’t expecting it, he tracked me down and… That was that..” He folded his middle finger inward, showing Choso the gesture for Gojo’s ultimate technique; Hollow Purple. He even was so considerate as to provide Choso a better visualisation of what did him in, flicking his finger and mouthing the boom that came with getting blasted by infinite imaginary mass.

“But you’re here, alive. And I sense that your heart is beating, so you are not some reanimated corpse.” Choso intoned, and had he really bought his story so easily? It was true, but man, this kid was really too trusting for his own good- no wonder Kenjaku manipulated him so easily. The fact cast a damper on his thoughts, the semblance of rage building somewhere deep in his chest at the realisation. Choso, for all he acted the part of a mature, stoic older brother, was naive. Too quick to trust, too easy to fool. And why wouldn’t he be? He was, essentially, a child.

“Yeah. Some curse user brought my body back with her technique by sacrificing her own grandson, and the funny part is- it was completely accidental on her part. So I’m back here now, and shit, is it just me or has Shibuya gotten a lot brighter since ‘06? There's so many more big screens on buildings now. Ah, how would you know, you’re just a youngin’.”

Choso ignored his ramblings. “Your body… What about your soul? Are you just a walking husk?”

“Couldn’t tell ya.” Toji hummed, and yeah, he felt like he was a person but honestly he’d been going off of little more than instinct the whole night- it wouldn’t surprise him if that was all he was, the echoes of a dead man in a hijacked body, driven by nothing but impulse. Though… that didn’t feel quite right. “But my body’s always been special, done things it shouldn’t have. I’ve resisted possessions before, come back from injuries I shouldn’t have survived, and any mind or body-altering techniques never seemed to work on me. Maybe all it took for my soul to find its way back from hell was for this body of mine to get some blood pumping in it again. Or maybe it's just flesh and bone in here, dead set on doing what the soul failed to do. I already died once with more regrets than I could count- And I must’ve been really stupid back then, to think I could just go ahead and do something like that, ugh. Believe me, dying with unfinished business is the worst thing in the world.”

“Your son means that much to you?”

“He’s everything. Kickin’ the bucket really changes the way you view things, y’know.” He was conveniently leaving out the part where he was not just Toji, but someone who’d lived an entirely separate life from him- someone who knew and recognised Toji’s past and mannerisms were both sickening, things that had to be addressed. “I can’t do it all again, but if I could… I’d really like to watch that kid grow up. Maybe take him to his first day of school. Watch his junior ball game, host him and his teammates’’ after party. Listen to him tell me about all the new friends he’d made at some after school club, maybe blubber on about a girl he liked, about a fun new aspect he discovered about that crazy technique of his. I’ve missed… So much of his life. I’m gonna carry that regret for the rest of my life.”

A brief silence followed, before Choso spoke again. “...I think I know how you feel. I, too, missed much of my little brother’s life.”

“Something tells me you didn’t have much choice in the matter,” Toji grumbled, tilting his head down as he regarded the floor with shame. “I’m a deadbeat dad coming back to his kid twelve years later because he got reanimated out of sheer luck. My situation is one that is solely out of my own doing, I can’t claim the same innocence you can. No matter how things turned out, the reality is I forfeit my right to his life the moment I threw away the responsibilities entrusted to me as a father and husband- and here I am trying to come back anyways, like some bastard. He’d probably be better off if he never saw me again.”

“But you did what you did, because you care about him, no?”

“More than anything.” Toji answered resolutely, and there was nothing in this world he was more sure of.

“Then I think you are an admirable man, Toji.” Choso said, and Toji froze midstep. The words had entered through his ear and quite literally locked his limbs into place, and it was as if a spell were casted onto his body- he could not move. 

“T-think I may have given you the wrong impression here.” Toji stammered out, as Choso turned a head over his shoulder. “I’m a deadbeat father who missed most of his son’s life, of his own choice. You should not find me admirable.”

“But you care for your son, you said so yourself, and you believed that distance would protect him. As I believed the actions that I took would protect my brothers. Caring for your family, didn’t you say that’s the most admirable thing in the world?” He questioned, and damn it the kid looked genuinely confused why he would think otherwise, and that fragile uncertainty had returned to his face- so Toji couldn’t outright say no .

“Uh… You see, well… You still have to consider other…” And Toji was suddenly reminded that, despite his childish naivety and lack of knowledge about the world, Choso had killed innocent people. Albeit, it was due to the moral ignorance that came from living 150 years inside of a jar, but still. As much as he loved the guy, aside from his pure affection felt towards those he considered his family, Choso was objectively not a good person. But the last thing the kid needed right now was to be told that.

“...I cared about my son, but that doesn’t change how I neglected him when he was barely old enough to walk, how I fully intended on abandoning him completely once his cursed technique developed. I just died before I got around to doing that.”

“But despite that, you’re here to fulfil your duty still, no? That’s what you said.” And how the turn tables, because now it was Choso being the voice of morality. 

“Yeah. Yeah, that’s what I said.” He sighed. “Gotta get my shit together, finally step up and be a father. For real this time.”

“And I have to step up and be Yuji’s big brother. I must uphold my duties.”

For lack of a better word, Toji replied with an affirmative “Eyup.” 

An awkward silence stretched on, as the two hurried through the subway.

“...Do you think Yuji will call me onii-chan?”

Megumi's heart skipped a beat. The battlefield fell into an eerie silence apart from the faint echoes of Mahito's pained gasps fading into the wind. He stared at Yuji, who was grinning with his usual brashness, oblivious to the shock he'd just dropped on everyone. "Your dad is so freaking cool, Fushiguro!"

The words felt like a slap to Megumi’s face, though his body didn't react immediately. His mind, however, scrambled for answers, for clarity. His breath hitched for a moment. His dad? The world seemed to tilt, and for a brief second, he wasn’t even aware of the chaos around him—the battered form of Mahito still twitching on the ground, the remnants of a failed Domain Expansion curling into nothingness. His mind held onto nothing but the words that Yuji had blurted out, echoing in the confusion of the battle.

‘My dad?’

Dad? The word felt foreign to his ears. What? Was it a mistake? He hadn’t heard anything about his father for as long as he could remember. His father had abandoned him when he was just four years old—vanished without a trace, leaving nothing but empty memories. There was no one to tell him what his father was like, no stories, no recollections of love or connection, not even Tsumiki could spare any more than a few brief recollections of the ghost that haunted their earliest years. The man had been a non factor in Megumi’s life, someone who hadn’t mattered, which was why he never asked Gojo to elaborate on wherever the man must’ve run off to.

He blinked rapidly, trying to piece things together. Had he really just heard that correctly? Yuji had been looking at the mysterious man in ragged clothing—who, for all intents and purposes, had torn through the fearsome Mahito’s defences with nothing but a casual uppercut—and called him his dad ?

No, there was no way. His dad? The man standing there, in tattered clothing, a menacing shadow warping his face, casually standing over the kneeling figure of Mahito’s broken form? That… that wasn’t possible.

His stomach churned as he glanced at the figure again. There was something about him—something that didn’t fit .

The man was too imposing, too unnatural. There was no mistaking it: the way he moved, the way his very presence distorted the battlefield, it was the aura of someone otherworldly . Not just the way he had obliterated Mahito with a single punch, but the way he had demolished Dagon and Jogo before—those fights, if they could even be called such. Megumi had watched, utterly out of his depth, as this person had torn through cursed spirits with terrifying efficiency. There had been no effort. No sweat. Only laughter. Immense cursed energy vs a total absence of it.

It was like watching the natural order of things bend and break in an instant.

‘What is this guy?’

The steel in Toji’s eyes sent an uncomfortable shiver through Megumi. This was the man Yuji had just referred to as his dad . Megumi’s jaw clenched. He didn’t know what to feel. Should he be angry? Outraged? Shocked? Wait, why was he even entertaining the prospect of this being anything other than some ill-mannered joke?

He hadn’t heard a single thing about his father. Not a single word .

The memories that remained of the man were few. His mother had died when he was young, and his father had abandoned him when he was just four years old. A faceless figure that scarcely appeared in his earliest years, the memory so distant it was little more than a shadow. He hadn’t been there to raise him, hadn’t been there to guide him, only a scant few fleeting memories lost to time. Megumi had grown up with no real recollection of the man who was supposedly his father. Though he didn’t catch their brief exchange in the aftermath of the crustacean curse’s domain, Toji was the name he’d heard Naobito call, the name of someone who had never mattered to him.

Toji. This person. The one who had wiped out two Special Grade curses without breaking a sweat. A man who was capable of holding his own against Sukuna, he who had somehow survived long enough to come back from a bout against the King of Curses, and stand in front of him. A living nightmare on the battlefield.

No. There was no way.

Megumi’s mind reeled. There was no way this could be his father. The hollow excuse of a man who had abandoned him all those years ago—if this was even the same person—had little presence within the quiet, often bitter memories Megumi had of his early childhood. While he was under the impression that the man had run off so long ago, along with Tsumiki’s mother, to live carefree lives away from their children, a bastard through and through, the act of procreation; of having children was a human one. And the man hadn’t abandoned him immediately, he knew that much, so there must have been some semblance of responsibility, maybe even love, in those earliest years.

The savage of a man in front of him didn’t seem capable of love. He barely seemed capable of human emotion at all, other than malevolent jest— comedy embroiled within the thick of violence. This man may have been an ally, but he was only one out of convenience. By all rights, he was an unfeeling killing machine, a monster.

‘This man isn’t my father.’

Megumi’s thoughts were sharp, almost defensive.

He had no frame of reference. No understanding of the person who’d sired him. He wasn’t a child anymore. He was a sorcerer, a fighter, someone who could stand on his own two feet. He wasn’t some lost kid waiting for an explanation. The anger he felt was fleeting, replaced by something else—something darker, harder to define. This figure before him, this Fushiguro , didn't belong in Megumi’s life, father or not. The years he had spent growing up without a father were enough to prove that.

But then…

Megumi’s gaze shifted back to the man, standing now, with a comical expression on his face— as if he too, were utterly shocked by Yuji’s sudden claim. That was maybe the first bit of emotion, if it could even be called that, which he observed from the man. Afterall, even with the group stunned by Yuji’s outburst, Toji still half-regarded Mahito's struggle to rise from the ground from the corner of his eye, almost lazily . Yes, it wasn’t just the power that unnerved him—though that in itself was a terrifying thing. There was… Something else. The way Toji carried himself, the indifference in his posture, as if none of this mattered to him. The fight, the curses, the destruction—it all seemed so... insignificant to him, little more than a joke .

He and Maki’s brief exchange with the man on the way to retrieve Sukuna’s fingers seemed to solidify this image in his head, as Toji hadn’t bothered taking either of them seriously. And really, it made sense that this was a man secretly and personally embroiled with the monster that was his teacher, Gojo, because both of them shared that uniquely terrifying characteristic of detachment from the rest of humanity— utterly unrelatable in all regards, leagues above everyone else. Both he and Maki were bluntly brushed off with every second question, and Megumi had half-feared that suddenly the man’s patience with them expired— When he had looked down at Megumi with wide, animalistic eyes, as if he were affronted by Megumi’s simple existence. For a moment, he’d thought that they’d have to deal with the monster who dispatched several Special Grade threats immediately one after the other. He was saved by the faint presence of Itadori’s cursed energy further into the subway station, seizing the moment to escape the awkward interaction with Toji.

This wasn’t just any sorcerer. This was someone who didn’t care. Someone who saw this world as little more than a stage for his own personal destruction. The way Toji moved, the way he dominated the flow of battle, it was all too… clinical . Too precise. It felt like he wasn’t even trying. That’s what had struck Megumi the most when he’d watched Toji utterly dismantle Dagon and Jogo—there was no over the top theatricism in his strikes, no grand gestures, only overwhelming power, toying and animalistic whim. Toji didn’t care about anything.

And that had to be what made him so dangerous. So… alien.

Megumi’s mind thought of his past thoughts and experiences on his own techniques—his own struggle to control his power, to grapple his place in this cursed world. He guessed, bizarrely, that Toji didn’t need to understand. He didn’t need to struggle. He was above it all.

Inhuman.

No. This definitely wasn’t the man who had abandoned him.

But…

The name still lingered in the air. Fushiguro . How common was that of a surname?

The confusion gnawed at Megumi as he finally tore his gaze away from Toji. He couldn’t focus on that now. He couldn’t afford to be distracted. Mahito was still alive. The curse’s twisted form was still trying to heal itself, its limbs twitching like a broken marionette’s. It had been a powerful foe— had been. Now, it was barely a threat, battered and bruised by the combined efforts of Maki, Nanami, Yuji, and the others. Megumi had contributed his part, landing his first ever Black Flash in the heat of battle.

Earlier, when it had been just the three of them—Maki, Nanami, and himself—against Mahito, Megumi had felt something deep within himself shift . It wasn’t just the usual building of tension before or during a fight. It was the pressure. The constant, looming pressure of having to keep up with warriors far more skilled and experienced than he was. Maki, even without cursed energy, had been leading the charge, her Playful Cloud dancing through the air as her ruthless assault beat through Mahito’s defences. Nanami, despite his injuries, had been his usual self; calm, measured, and calculative of every move, demonstrating tremendous damage with each of his strikes. Megumi had kept close, trying to read the flow of battle from the rear, summoning his shikigami wherever he could, desperately trying to anticipate Mahito’s next move, but he was always one step behind. 

The curse was powerful, no doubt. With its malleable body and the terrifying ability to essentially kill anything it touched, Mahito was a force to be reckoned with. But Megumi had seen enough. He had fought enough.

The battle wasn’t just about surviving anymore, this was about not falling behind .

It wasn’t like he’d been aiming for it, or expecting it to come. It was just… there , suddenly. That feeling of everything snapping into place, the power coursing through his body, the moment of absolute focus when time seemed to stop and everything fell into alignment, and the world had never looked so clear. Then he landed it. He actually landed it- His cursed energy flaring as he pushed himself forward, drawing on his techniques, channelling all his focus into the moment, into the strike. The Black Flash.

It wasn’t something he’d been able to do until now. He had been training towards it to no avail, but in battle, with the heat of it bearing down on him, it was different. One couldn’t think, couldn’t force it to happen. You had to feel the connection, feel the power surge through you within an instant stretched on for impossibly long, as if everything around you slowed down for a fraction of a second. A fleeting period in time where everything in the world aligned perfectly, where everything in your body screamed to strike, and you did, with computer-like timing.

He could feel it as he drew his shikigami back, as his cursed energy spiralled into his limbs with a tempest of power, condensing into an impossible measure within his fist. Time seemed to stretch just for that split second, the air vibrating with the force of his focus. And then— Black Flash .

The impact was different from anything he had felt before. A sharp, searing pain shot through his fist, and then a violent shockwave rattled through the air, through his bones. For a split second, it was as though the world around him had shattered. Mahito’s body all but exploded into a momentary blur as Megumi’s punch connected, the energy flashing into a perfect burst of dark, raw power. He could see the curse’s distorted face, twisted in agony as the Black Flash tore through its defences in the split second before it was sent flying away.

Megumi’s eyes widened as Mahito’s body jerked violently. It was a feeling he hadn’t experienced before. That surge of energy had been perfect. The Black Flash. He did it.

He’d at last caught up with Itadori and Kugisaki. And that invisible pressure that had settled over his shoulders seemed to dissipate somewhat, as whatever expectations that were set on him were met- in the form of a special grade patchwork cursed spirit sent bouncing violently throughout the metro.

For that moment, it felt like he’d proven some previously unseen point to himself.

But in front of Toji, this utter monster with zero cursed energy, he suddenly felt like an invalid.

The silence in the air was deafening. 

“...I can explain.” Toji began, his voice carefully monotone. No, that wasn’t right, he sounded almost… unsteady. 

“Fushiguro!” Nobara screeched out of affront, stamping her feet into the ground. “You- the way you always acted, I just assumed your entire family was dead, or something! First its your sister and now- Ugh! Why don’t you ever tell us these things!? Wait-” Then she jutted an accusatory finger towards Yuji, “You! Itadori you traitorous idiot , how come you didn’t tell me, huh!? Now both of you are keeping secrets from me!?”

“Ehhh!?” Yuji exclaimed, recoiling from the sudden accusation. Then he pointed a finger back towards her, crying out in his defence; “I-I only found out like fifteen minutes ago! I thought the exact same thing, actually!”

“Cheap chance!”

“You think I’m lying!?”

“Don’t talk back to me dickhead!”

“That is not my father.” Megumi said flatly, causing both the teenagers to choke on their words, spinning back to face him. Maki gave Megumi a strange look, that anger coming over her face again as she regarded Toji in the corner of her eye with red-hot disdain. “I don’t know him.”

“Huh? But he said-”

“Itadori is not lying.” An interjection shot through the conversation, where Toji stood almost casually over Mahito’s half-dead form. Those two eyes, a steely grey from this distance, were pointed in his direction, but they didn’t seem to lock with his own— as if they were staring off into the space behind him. As if he weren’t even there. 

Toji’s face was… Blank, eerily so. Megumi couldn’t read it at all, what was the point of this? Was this guy delusional or something? Or was he trying to screw with them, for whatever reason? Then the man took a step forward, and the sound his shoe made as it pressed into the gravel below him seemed to reverberate through the battlefield. 

The air became thick, and every sorcerer on the scene seemed to freeze as a heavy tension stuck them all into place in anticipation of the curseless man’s next words.

“Megumi Fushiguro,” Toji began, his voice a deep and powerful baritone as it were in preparation for a grand reveal, gunmetal eyes rising to meet the Ten Shadows user’s own. “I am your fath- ”

The ground fractured, Mahito’s wounds transmutated as the curse burst off of its feet at eldritch speeds—not to escape, but to rush directly towards Toji himself.

He hadn’t even the chance to finish his sentence, as the patchwork curse launched itself towards him with a last ditch attack, a burst of speed summoned with the very last of its strength as it cocked a fist back in preparation for its final strike. 

Toji watched the fist hurtle towards his stomach, his lips still open in mid-speech. And he could only think one thing, in the moment that the patchwork curse rushed towards him with the very last dregs of its strength, arm poised for a deadly blow.

‘THANK YOU, MAHITO!’ 

The cursed spirit in front of him seemed to move in slow motion, and the sorcerers gathered around had only now begun to react, their eyes widening minutely from where they must have watched Mahito turn into nothing but a blur. They were focused on Mahito, not him, and fuck he could KISS the disaster curse right now! Nice save!

Ugh… All that talk earlier, and he still…! Just... Just how the fuck was he supposed to break it to Megumi— Hey kid, I’m your dead dad of twelve years, sorry for abandoning you and your step sister when you were both children! Heard you started making it big these days, how about some time with your old man?

Fuck! And after all that pep he was giving Choso, even! It felt like he was gonna faint from the stress, just a few seconds ago and he had somewhat mustered up the spine to come clean to his own flesh and blood, but that sudden look of disbelief that crossed Megumi's face when he validated Yuji's words crumbled his resolve into ash— ‘ Damn it Yuji, couldn’t you wait just a little longer!?’

He’d much prefer to explain his unique circumstances and failures as a father without the added stress of a watching crowd, thank you very much!

The cursed spirit’s arm was wrapped within a tight wreath of cursed energy, and somehow deep within his gut, Toji could sense the Black Flash that would come from that fist if it reached him. And that belied the question;

Should he let the blow land? Or not?

In all honesty, he had not expected the situation to evolve as it had. He’d been approaching the scene with nervousness curling in his gut as he hurried to where Mahito’s presence felt heaviest, whilst Choso had gone off to complete the assignment he’d roped the half-curse into. Toji ended up reaching the battle only to be utterly baffled by the one sided beatdown that was going on. He hated Mahito, for sure, that annoying little shit always got on his nerves when watching him on screen—but it's hard to say if anyone deserved the Shinjuku-level jumping served to the curse. Like holy shit, at some point they just started kicking and stomping him while he was on the ground! Give the guy a chance to breathe, damn!

Point is; the only positive of Yuji and Mahito’s battle in canon, which was Yuji’s refinement over his control of cursed energy as well as his growth; both ideologically and as a sorcerer, was… largely avoided as a result of there being hardly anything of a battle in the first place. Mahito, to Toji’s knowledge, hardly managed to land any hits at all. Nanami was bleeding from a wound underneath his blue dress shirt (though he didn’t bother binding it, so it must not have been as bad as it looked), a thin trickle of blood ran down the side of Maki’s face, and Megumi looked a little bruised up, but otherwise it seemed no one else had sustained any meaningful injury. Whereas Mahito, one of the most fearsome antagonists in the show, was practically in pieces. The fight was that one-sided.

So. Mahito’s True Form, yes or no? Was there any point to it? Maybe Toji could wear it down, reduce the stakes somewhat, and give Yuji the final blow? Ahh… In all honesty, Yuji was able to somewhat keep pace with it on his own in canon; so Toji doubted that the technique would turn the tides of battle here.

Unless…

Toji’s eyes met with Mahito’s own, those two mismatched irises surrounded by rings of hysteria. He could feel the electricity in the air, the energy buzzing in the space between Mahito’s fist and his stomach, only an instant away from impact. 

If Mahito landed the Black Flash on him, would it change his true form? Maybe into something more dangerous, to account for the increase in opponents? What would it look like? Would he in the end turn out to be stronger and more formidable than the other two disaster curses, perhaps…?

Ah, the blow was about to land. Truly, the responsible thing would be to strike Mahito before he could land the hit… But then…

With a clap of noise that rattled the earth, Mahito's fist connected; a storm of dark energy violently spiralling outward from the point of impact as the surrounding area was washed with flashes of crimson light, the sheer volume of the Black Flash eclipsing the moonlight above.

But then the distraction would be over, and he’d have to explain himself to the kids! (And adult!)

Electricity seemed to dance up Toji’s arm, causing his muscles to lock up uncomfortably and spasm, even as he encased Mahito’s smaller fist within the palm of his hand. Steam rose steadily from the point that the transfiguration curse struck him, and his lip curled inward as he bit back a hiss. Shit, that stung a lot more than he was expecting, and he of course had the bright idea of blocking it with his burnt up palms, making it hurt even more . The bones of his hand creaked painfully, an inflamed sensation throbbing from where Mahito's fist met his palm.

Broken concrete, debris, and anything that was secured fastly to the ground was blown outward in a dramatic cloud of dust. Toji wiped any sign of pain off of his face, forcing his expression into a mask of total apathy as he glanced down towards Mahito. The curse stared back up at him, and Toji was expecting glee from landing the decisive blow, or maybe even fear from his stopping the attack with a single hand.

The curse’s face was contorted with utter confusion, in turn confusing Toji because that wasn’t what he was expecting. Mahito's mouth had fallen open with what seemed to be shock, as if in disbelief. Its discoloured eyes were wide, staring deep into his, sparkling with… something. 

As the last echoes of force ravaging their surroundings dwindled down to nothing, he was suddenly reminded of one aspect of Mahito’s technique; the ability to directly and clearly perceive the shape of the soul. Toji suddenly entertained a very worrying, very distressing thought.

Was Mahito able to tell that he was not of this world?

…He’d just made a horrible mistake. 

His other fist blurred forward, colliding with the curse’s face and causing Mahito to forcefully tumble and blow apart several stray blocks of collapsed asphalt in his wake. Toji should have just killed the curse then during his initial appearance, with the first strike. He shouldn’t have given it the chance to live a second longer, not after seeing him, not when it could oust him this early— he shouldn’t have even given it the chance to SPEAK!

‘Your soul.’ Mahito had mouthed back then, voice breathless with awe in that fleeting lapse in time before it was sent flying. Toji realised his error. He just gave an extended lease of life to the only being in this world who could reveal the truth of his existence here to everyone else. That would complicate things—

No, that would ruin everything.

The transfiguration spirit was nonetheless never given the chance to verbally voice its discovery. 

Toji sprung forward, the ground beneath him shattering as he raced towards the patchwork curse, quicker than anyone could register, all Earth in his way reduced to powder . His leg smashed into Mahito’s side, nearly snapping the curse in two before launching it to the opposite side of the crater. Around him, the sorcerers were still in midstep, finally reacting to a sequence of events that had occurred within the span of milliseconds.

From the plume of dust generated by the curse-turned-missile, Mahito began to stand once more, swiftly recovering from Toji’s bare handed attacks— which lacked the cursed energy required to deal a decisive blow. ‘Ah, shit, forgot about that part!’

“Hahaha! That was close!"  It cackled, locking eyes with himself. Just as the ground below him began to fracture under the force of Toji’s impending charge, the curse threw up a palm to clutch its own head. An eruption of sick, wretched laughter continued to bubble up from Mahito’s throat, whilst a tremendous pulse of cursed energy and malevolent intent exploded from its position. “But I get it now! The True Essence of my soul!”

Toji had already been soaring through the air, but Mahito’s technique activation was almost instantaneous.

“Instant Spirit Body of Distorted Killing! 遍殺即霊体!”

...Seemed like Yuji was getting that boss fight after all.