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Chapter Text

Yuji is hyperventilating. His vision is shrinking away into darkness and his head feels like someone’s squeezing it in their fist. His legs give out and he curls up right where he is, pleading under his breath to whoever might be listening that he won’t be caught.

“Don’t worry, you won’t,” someone says. A man.

It makes Yuji flinch. He whirls around, trying to find the owner of the voice, trying to see through the smoke. He expects to see piercing blue eyes, but there’s nothing. Oh, god. He doesn’t want to die like Sasaki or Iguchi. He feels selfish and cowardly for thinking it, but to just be blown to pieces, just like that—  

“Calm down and listen to me.”

Yuji is afraid, but he forces himself to speak. His voice comes out all croaky; the smoke is stinging his throat. “Who’s there?”

“If I told you my name right now, I doubt you’d remember it. Look at you, barely even capable of standing up.” The voice exhales sharply with aggravation. “It doesn’t matter. Do you want to live?”

There’s another loud rumble somewhere in the distance and the ground shudders. Air raid sirens wail to life. Yuji cries out in terror like an animal. Suddenly he becomes aware of the blood covering him. He frantically claws at himself to get it off, but it’s all over his hands and his face and his clothes and under his nails—

“Brat,” the voice snaps, “we’re on borrowed time. Do you want to live? If not, there’s no point in me wasting my energy on you.”

Yuji thinks about his friends. Just this morning they went to class together and hung out during lunch break. They spent an hour or two at their occult club. They huddled together and filled out a quiz to see what kind of spirit they were being haunted by. There were laughs. Yuji remembers feeling warm and safe when he looked into their eyes.

Now they’re both dead, just like grandpa. Just like all those faceless masses on the news every single goddamn week. It’s been this way ever since he was six but the pain and fear are still fresh every time he turns on the TV. He always wished, more than anything, that things could be different. It was his grandpa who told him to keep his head down and keep pressing on.

“Yes,” Yuji says, realizing the strength of his conviction as he admits it. He sucks in a breath and yells before he can stop himself, “I want to live!” 

The sound is swallowed by the chaos, but the owner of the voice hears him, and when it next addresses him, there’s a smile in its inflection. “Good. Now, I want you to follow my directions exactly. I will help you escape this place. First, get up. Stand straight. You’re my vessel now, so stand straight!”

Yuji is shivering, but he manages to get his feet under him. He uses the broken parts of the wall to pull himself up. There’s another distant impact and a quake that threatens to send him back down but, miraculously, he keeps his footing.

“Turn right,” the voice says, then, “walk forward, slowly.”

Yuji obeys, even though he’s blind. The smoke is blotting everything out, smothering him. Every now and then a current of fire swells against the darkness like blood pumping beneath skin.

“Short breaths or you’ll choke.”

“Okay—”

“Don’t speak.”

Yuji opens his mouth, then closes it again. He walks, trying his best to ignore the sounds — screams — around him until a bright blue light flashes too close for comfort. He stiffens instinctively.

“Do not stop moving,” the voice says sternly, but without anger. “I’ll tell you if you’re standing in the wrong place. Trust me.”

Despite everything, Yuji completely trusts this person right now. He follows the man’s extremely specific directions, stopping and starting when prompted. At one point he orders Yuji to get down low on the ground and breathe in through the soil, since the smoke is so thick.

It can’t be more than five minutes before Yuji starts to get overwhelmed. The heat on his skin stings, there’s sweat dripping into the cuts he got from flying rubble, and the brief surge of adrenaline he experienced is already starting to dwindle.

“Stop,” the voice says suddenly. “Wait. Hold your breath.”

Yuji stops in his tracks, terrified of what might require him to do this. There must be something just ahead. He feels like an ant waiting to be crushed. He counts the seconds, using all his willpower to stop himself running and hiding, wishing fervently for it all to be over.

“The smoke clears just ahead. When I say run, you run, without hesitation. Do not stop running.”

Oh, god. Yuji nods.

The wait is torture, and when the voice finally snaps at him to move, he surges forward like a horse being loosed from a pen. The smoke peels back, revealing the crater where his school used to be. The sirens are twice as loud out here, and there’s some kind of creature circling languidly overhead. A dragon? Its distant head turns to him.

“Keep going!” the voice snaps.

Yuji pushes himself harder than he ever has before, even as tears blur his vision. He vaults the fence and breaks into a dense crowd of trees, slashing branches out of his way. They cut his skin, but he barely notices. He swears he can feel that creature breathing down his neck, right at his heels the entire time, so he keeps running.

He comes out the other side, crosses a thin stream and finds his way back to the city streets before he notices the voice barking at him, telling him to stop. The moment he does, his exhaustion catches up to him and he collapses in an alleyway, unable to catch his breath.

“You’re fine,” the voice says. “You made it. I doubt they’ll give up their search to hunt down one insignificant little brat, and I don’t think they noticed that the object they seek is within you now.”

“Why is this happening to me?” Yuji curls up. It doesn’t matter how filthy the ground is. He’s covered in blood anyway. His friends’ blood. Their bodies popped right in front of him like they were nothing but insects to be swatted away. He’ll never get the image out of his head— their organs, their shattered bone—

The voice becomes a little quieter, warmer. It’s nice, in a dangerous kind of way. It rumbles like the growl of a protective tiger. “I suppose we should introduce ourselves now. My name is… Sukuna.”

Doesn’t ring a bell, even though Sukuna’s saying it like it carries weight. “I’m, uh, Yuji.”

Sukuna laughs a little. “You haven’t heard of me, have you? Well then, this is my opportunity to make a good first impression, wouldn’t you say?”

You already have, Yuji wants to say. He sniffs and swipes the tears out of his eyes, but flinches when he realizes all he’s done is smear more blood on himself. “What do I do now? My grandpa’s gone and now the school… I don’t know what I’m doing. Where do I go?”

“I’ll direct you, just like I did before, Yuji.”

“Right. Um, where are you, anyway? I can’t see you.”

“Go home and go to bed, then I will reveal myself. It’ll be easier to talk then.”

Yeah. Yeah, that sounds good. Yuji wants to go home. He wants to hide under his bedsheets. He takes some time to recuperate, then slumps out of the alleyway. As he walks through the city streets people give him a wide berth. They turn away and walk faster. 

It’s obvious he’s been targeted by a sorcerer, and there isn’t a single person in Japan who would dare interfere with a sorcerer’s business. 

He wakes up kneeling at the foot of a strange shrine. He’s submerged in a warm, dark liquid. Blood, he realizes. His mind flashes back to Sasaki standing right in front of him and then— not. He whimpers and grabs fistfuls of his hair.

“Yuji, calm,” someone says.

There’s a man approaching him. Yuji is too afraid to look, so he slams his eyes shut and waits for the pain to begin. On the backs of his eyelids he can see the split second snapshot his mind took of Sasaki’s head splattered across the tarmac of their track field, looking like an angry smear of oil paint. Her detached eyeball was bright white, the nerve coiled around it like a cat's tail.

“Take it slowly. Nothing can touch you here. This is my domain.” The man puts a hand between Yuji’s shoulders. It’s large and warm, and it doesn’t cause him any pain. It just stays there, reassuring him. 

Yuji forces himself to open his eyes. The man standing in front of him looks like an older, sharper version of himself with a very ornate kimono. There are markings on his face and he smells of almonds and honey, which is unexpected.

“Sukuna?” Yuji asks.

“Yes, that’s me.” He offers a hand.

Yuji takes it and is pulled to his feet. Sukuna is taller than him. “Thank you. For saving me back there. I don’t know why you did it, but…”

“I didn’t have much of a choice. You forced the matter when you ate my finger.” Sukuna is eyeing him intently. “Honestly, it’s nothing short of a miracle that you survived, and I figured it’d be a waste to let you die without first finding out what makes you so different from the rest.”

The finger? God, he’d forgotten about the finger. 

This all started when Sasaki brought a cursed object into the clubroom. She popped off the lid to reveal it and Iguchi freaked out. He tried to make her take it back, because curses were sorcerers’ business and people like themselves shouldn’t interfere. Yuji didn’t say much because he was intrigued. 

He couldn’t help it. His whole life he’s been following sorcerers’ rules, watching that guy on TV with his fancy outfit and his smooth voice; with his live audience that eats up everything he says and the people who call in to praise him. The strongest get hurt for you, he says. The strongest suffer for you. Yuji keeps his head down when sorcerers walk by in groups, trying his best to look appropriately ashamed of himself. Even when they spit at him or select a random victim to shove around, he’s never done anything to retaliate because he knows all he’ll do is get himself and everyone around him killed. 

Just once he wanted to see what made sorcerers so damn special, and all he found was a stupid old mummified scrap of flesh that just sat there in its case uselessly, like an old halloween prop. Yuji expected to feel some kind of dark energy emanating from it, but no, nothing. He picked it up and turned it over in the light, despite Iguchi’s spluttering, and then put it back. He thought to himself, is this really the only thing that makes sorcerers better than me?

An hour or two later, the curse appeared and tried to eat him, so Yuji swallowed the finger. Then those sorcerers appeared, attracted to the commotion. 

And then— Sasaki and Iguchi—

Yuji struggles to breathe.

Sukuna sighs and shakes his head. “It’s typical that the first thing I see after sleeping for one thousand years are sorcerers abusing their power to torment the weak. Nothing has changed.”

“A thousand years, huh? You look pretty good for your age.”

“I’ll take that in the spirit it was offered.”

“Uh, right.” Yuji steps back anxiously. “So, I don’t get it. Are you a sorcerer?”

“I’m the strongest thing to have ever walked the earth,” Sukuna says. He doesn’t say it like he’s bragging, just like a simple statement of fact. “My goal today is the same as it was one thousand years ago. I will break this world apart and eradicate every last sorcerer that stands in my way. And you... You are my vessel.”

Yuji watches him with amazement. The way he talks and the way he holds himself, it’s impossible not to believe that what he’s saying is true. “You wanna kill the sorcerers?” he asks, because that’s the thing that intrigues him above all else.

Sukuna’s eyes sharpen, which stokes the hungry flame in Yuji’s chest.

“It’s the only thing I want to do,” Sukuna says simply. Unembellished and without shame. “And what about you? You were there when I woke up, covered in blood and quivering like a lamb. What did those sorcerers do to you?”

“What they always do. They just kill anyone and anything all the time! Like my friends. They— they never hurt anybody and now they’re dead just because— what? They weren’t born the right way?” He imagines their faces in their yearbook photos, smiling cluelessly, unaware of how mercilessly their lives would be cut short.

“You’re angry,” Sukuna observes.

“I hate it!” Yuji shouts. “I hate how we’re all too weak to do anything about it! They just kill us like we’re ants in a pile whenever they want and we can’t do anything about it!”

“They can’t, but maybe you can.”

Yuji looks up at him desperately. Sukuna holds him firmly by the shoulders, keeping him grounded. His nails are sharp and the tips prick against Yuji’s skin.

“The path I’d take you on will be full of pain,” Sukuna says seriously. “You’ll lose a lot of blood, and most likely you’ll see your friends die before your eyes many more times than you can count, but we’ll win. In the end, when it comes down to me and the sorcerers, I’ll be the stronger one and this world you know will end. Without a doubt, I will win.”

This satisfies something savage inside Yuji. He doesn’t entirely understand what’s going on or what he’ll be expected to do, but he’s single-minded in his determination. He accepts immediately. “I want that world. A world where they’re all gone.”

Sukuna’s hands slide off Yuji’s shoulders. He nods once with satisfaction. “You need rest, so I’ll leave you here. When you wake up, we will begin our long journey forward. Prepare to leave your old life behind, but be discrete and don’t take anything that might indicate to any investigating sorcerers that you are still alive. Only the essentials. And remember that I’ll be at your side even if you can’t sense me.”

The rubble is beginning to settle. Sukuna’s fingers are the only thing in this world capable of withstanding Satoru’s hollow purple, so obliterating everything around it was simply the fastest and most efficient way of retrieving one. Unfortunately, they’ve been here for well over an hour and they have nothing to show for it. 

Well, not exactly nothing. A whole school of monkeys has been flattened, so they’ve tidied up the area at the very least. Less subhumans running around underfoot, less cursed energy polluting the world. It’s not necessarily what they came here to do, but all the same, it’s a decent outcome. Suguru’s eyes trail up the length of the massive column of smoke towering a mile into the air.

“You always go overboard, Satoru,” he teases.

Satoru lands without a sound beside him. The ash on the ground barely shifts. “Hey, I’ve only got one setting.”

“Imagine how it’d look if you accidentally hit one of our own? There’d be no end to the complaining. I’ve already got people pestering me to keep you on a tighter leash.”

“If there were any sorcerers here, I would’ve noticed and cleared ‘em out, but there weren’t. This whole area is a dump.”

“Yeah, it is.” Suguru shakes his head, mildly amused, and links his arms together within his sleeves. “We should probably head back. Remember, we told Nanako and Mimiko to meet us for lunch.”

“Oh, right.” Satoru looks at the school with concern. Suguru has no idea how something with such a powerful aura as one of Sukuna’s fingers could’ve slipped by his six eyes, but it happened. Nothing they can do about it now.

“You probably just caught it at a bad angle and blew it to the next prefecture,” Suguru says to comfort him. “Forget it. It’s not like those fingers are going anywhere on their own.”

“I guess so.” 

Suguru retraces his steps to exit the premises. Some lovely land here with very nice trees. Cherry blossoms. He threads his fingers through the frothy pink petals hanging in his path. He’s distracted, so he doesn’t realize that the corpse on the ground before him is actually still alive. It lurches forward and latches onto his ankle.

“Please,” the monkey croaks, blood bubbling from its lips.

Satoru quickly obliterates it, turning it into red vapor. Once the smoke clears there’s nothing left except a few drops of blood on the grass.

Satoru is at his side immediately. “Did it get you?” he asks.

Suguru checks his sandals. There’s a speck of blood, there, too. He sucks his teeth and tries to rub it out, but the material is stained. He’s so disgusted he removes the whole thing and tosses it aside.

“Sorry, I should’ve seen,” Satoru says.

Suguru’s fists tighten. “It’s fine. I think I left a pair of sneakers in Ijichi’s car.”

“No, I wasn’t paying attention.”

Ah, it’s hard to stay mad at him. Suguru releases his anger in a sigh and runs a hand through his hair. Dealing with monkeys is dirty work. Always has been, always will be. The blasted things were all over the place when he first got here. A few of them got in his way as he searched for the finger, but he cut them down easily with the help of his cursed spirits. One girl in particular had produced a spectacular amount of blood. 

Suguru had congratulated himself at the time for dodging the spray, but now he’s gone and lost his favorite pair of sandals anyway. What a waste.

“I’ll buy you new ones after lunch,” Satoru says enthusiastically. “I’ll buy you as many as you want.”

Suguru laughs. “Now you’re just spoiling me.”

They leave the school together. The smoke settles and its hollowed-out carcass stands in utter silence, like a tombstone.

Chapter Text

Yuji’s school makes the news the next day, but it’s treated like a natural disaster; some random force outside of anyone’s control that was always going to happen anyway. Whatever. TV is pretty much just for sorcerers nowadays, and it’s like the only thing they’re entertained by are monkeys getting what they deserve.

He takes one last look at the apartment he shared with his grandpa a lifetime ago. He has everything he needs in a single bag. “I’m ready,” he says.

“Be cautious,” Sukuna says. “A sorcerer with good enough eyes will see through you immediately. Take the back roads.”

Sukuna can form mouths and eyes on Yuji’s body. Yuji was a little freaked out at first, but he’s already used to it. When Sukuna is present, he feels less alone.

He pulls up his hood and sneaks out, taking a detour along the way, because he needs to pay his respects to Sasaki and Iguchi before his whole life changes. There are sorcerers climbing about on the ruins of his school, though, so he’s unable to approach. Young ones, school kids themselves. Five or six of them. They seem to be having fun. One finds a skull burnt black in the rubble and prods it with his shoe, so it crumbles into ash.

Trainee sorcerers always follow like vultures in the real sorcerers’ wake, it’s disgusting. Yuji wishes he could go over there and beat their brains in, but he’d be executed on the spot.

“Don’t get ahead of yourself, brat,” Sukuna says. “You’re already taking a big risk by coming here at all. Let’s move on, now.”

For some strange reason, being angry feels good, so Yuji is reluctant to leave. He commits the sorcerers’ faces to memory, resolving to kill each and every one, then follows Sukuna’s directions into the sewers. He doesn’t mind the filth so long as he’s working towards their goal.

“We’ll be meeting an old acquaintance of mine. He’s unusual, so try to keep an open mind.” Sukuna’s voice echoes down the chasmic tunnel, mingling with the rumble of running water.

“Right.”

Yuji expects some kind of creepy old man to be waiting for him, but when he turns the corner, there’s a young woman with bright blue eyes already fixed upon him, as if she sensed him coming. Her dark hair is tied into a braid and she has her hands clasped sensibly in front of her.

“Yuji,” she says, her smile becoming wide enough to crease her eyes. “And Sukuna.”

“Kenjaku,” Sukuna says cordially. “You’re looking…”

“Young,” Kenjaku supplies.

“We’ll go with that.”

Kenjaku laughs, covering her mouth. She approaches, her leather shoes clacking against the brick. They’re school shoes. This girl can’t be any older than Yuji is, but she holds herself with a kind of ageless grace. She takes Yuji by surprise when she gathers his hands together and clasps them within her own.

“Uh, hey,” Yuji says awkwardly. “It’s nice to meet you.”

“We’ve already met.”

“Have we?”

“A long time ago. Try to remember,” Kenjaku says eagerly.

“Ah,” Sukuna cuts in. “You have a lot to show him today and I’ll be honest, he’s not the sharpest. You’ll overwhelm him.”

“Hey,” Yuji says, offended.

Despite his protest, Kenjaku just nods and begins leading him through the winding sewer tunnels by the hand. Her pace is a little bit faster than Yuji’s, so he stumbles, trying to keep up. They reach a sturdy brick wall that’s covered in a thin fuzz of… mold? No. Yuji steps closer. Hair. The wall is warm to the touch and has a faint pulse.

Kenjaku taps on a brick and several eyeballs open up, startling Yuji. They flick about frantically, trying to find the source of the sensation they felt. One of them bulges at the sight of Yuji, thick veins pulsing around a dilated pupil.

“This is a friend, Mahito. He’s with me,” Kenjaku says, raising their interlocked hands.

There’s a muffled groan of pain as the wall gives way, folding in on itself, revealing its red innards. It’s alive, Yuji realizes, swallowing down the bile. A young man springs out — Mahito? — and hops a circle around Yuji like an excited puppy.

“Look at this one!” Mahito chirps, ducking down and stretching up to get the measure of Yuji’s entire body. “It’s so nice to meet a new friend! I get plenty of corpses to play with, but rarely any new friends.” His eyes are oddly intense and it makes Yuji’s skin crawl.

“Mahito isn’t much of a teacher, so he spends most of his time keeping the place secure,” Kenjaku explains, planting a hand on Mahito’s shoulder to keep him still, though he still rocks on his feet, vibrating with energy. “You’ll probably be seeing more of him than you’d like.”

“You’re here for training, right?” Mahito asks Yuji.

Yuji nods, trying to stay confident. He can’t get freaked out over every new person he meets. “Yeah. I’m, uh, a new hire, I guess you could say.”

“That’s wonderful. It’s great here. All I have to do is kill people and I get praise for it! Come in, come in, don’t stay out in the cold.”

They enter a hot and narrow tunnel and the wall seals shut behind them, trapping them in. The air inside is humid. It’s like traveling through someone’s esophagus. Yuji tries to ignore the moisture beading up on his skin. There’s a man with stringy black hair and sunken eyes standing guard at the other end.

“Hey, bud,” Yuji says, swinging a hand up in greeting.

The man ignores him, staring relentlessly forward.

“Hey,” Yuji says, annoyed.

Mahito pinches the man’s cheek. “Sorry, Usami hasn’t been very talkative since he died.”

“Wait, he’s dead?” Yuji joins him and stares up at the man’s eyes. They’re open but empty, and his face is slack like he’s asleep.

Mahito nods. “I make use of all the corpses I receive, especially the sorcerer ones. Sometimes there’s enough soul left behind that I can still make them utilize their cursed techniques. You’ll see these guys all over the place, but yeah, they’re all dead, so don’t bother trying to talk to them.”

“Gross!” Yuji says appreciatively. He prods Usami with fascination. “Did you kill this guy, Mahito?”

Mahito grins proudly. His eyes scrunch into little crescents. “All by myself. You should’ve been there.”

Yuji wishes he was. A small, dark part of him is satisfied to see a sorcerer reduced to an empty husk capable of doing nothing but following orders. It bolsters his spirits, confirms to him that his goals are achievable. This is proof of mortality.

Kenjaku claps her hands together. “Thank you, Mahito, for that explanation. Yes, Yuji, we have a wonderful selection of puppets at our beck and call, and they have such a wide variety of interesting techniques. Challenge one of them to a spar sometime, won't you?” 

"Yes, ma'am!"

"Before we continue, can I ask you something?"

"Oh, uh, sure. What's up?"

Kenjaku inclines her head. "Mahito makes entering this place very convenient, but it goes without saying that if any sorcerers found out about his tunnels, we'd be in big trouble. Make sure you're alone if you ever ask him to bring you here."

"Got it," Yuji says seriously.

Mahito hums. “Kenjaku, I'm careful enough on my own! Once I collapse a tunnel, there's no trace it ever existed! I’m sure you’ll agree that between myself, Jogo and Hanami, I’m the best you’ve got.”

“Oh, well, I don’t want to pick favorites.”

Yuji expects more horrific flesh constructions, but he’s pleasantly surprised when a hole opens up into an ornate room with sliding doors and freshly laid wooden flooring. It’s kind of like an inn Yuji’s grandpa took him to once, years ago, when it was a little safer in the outside world. Welcoming orange light shines through the paper, which has been painted to depict a school of swimming fish.

“Mahito,” Kenjaku orders, “erase that entrance.”

Mahito gives a quick salute and then the tunnel collapses behind them, the muscles contracting and swallowing both Mahito and Usami. The wall closes up and the sound of pained groaning fades away somewhere into the distance, leaving no evidence that a tunnel ever existed.

Sukuna scoffs. “You make the most disgusting friends, Kenjaku.”

“That’s a very bold thing to say, seeing as you’re one of them,” Kenjaku says. Then she beckons Yuji and shows him around the building.

To his left there are shutters pulled wide open, revealing a dense forest churning in the breeze. The building is set on an incline, so Yuji can see it rolling on for miles.

“Hanami grew the entire thing,” Kenjaku says. “Any sorcerer attempting to reach this place will first have to find their way through it. I tried, once. The moment I lost sight of the edge, I became hopelessly lost, and the strangling vines tried to… well. Hanami had to rescue me.”

Cool. To his right there’s a row of rooms nearly identical in shape and size. Yuji tries to squint through the paper to see the interior.

“You’ll be staying in the third one along,” Kenjaku says.

Yuji whistles. “This place is really fancy.”

“What can I say? I’m a traditionalist.” She’s still holding Yuji’s hand. If Yuji had a big sister, he can imagine it’d be like this.

It’s quiet so their footsteps sound loud and important. He stops when he notices another person. A girl with insane back muscles. He’s about to say hello but is surprised when she suddenly steps into his personal space.

“Don’t stare,” the girl says sharply. “Some people take it as a challenge.”

"I wasn't—"

She’s about the same height as Yuji but she’s glaring at him like he’s a tiny insect at her feet. Her hair is roughly chopped short and she’s covered in scars. Yuji gets distracted, following the path of a particularly brutal one that starts at her shoulder and follows her arm all the way down to her fingertips. Her fist tightens at his scrutiny and she tenses like she’s going to punch him.

Yuji quickly apologises, ashamed of himself. "Sorry, sorry, I'm stupid!"

“Maki,” Kenjaku scolds her, “be patient with our newest student.”

Her eyes keep flicking down to their interlocked hands. “He’s a student?” 

“I’m a student?” Yuji blurts.

Kenjaku laughs loudly. “Oh, dear, Sukuna isn’t the sharpest either, is he? I bet he explained nothing! Tell me, did you really follow his directions into a sewer without knowing where you were going, or why?”

Yuji flushes and lies. “Well, I sorta had a vague idea.”

“I should give you a rundown of the curriculum.” Kenjaku places a hand over her chest, all formal. “Yuji, allow me to formally welcome you to our little academy.”

“It’s not an academy, but I guess that’s the closest word,” Maki interjects.

Kenjaku spares her a wry glance. “Within these walls, we educate students such as yourself in the art of flipping the tables!”

Yuji stares at her uncomprehendingly.

She continues, seemingly amused by him. “If you take all our lessons on board, together with your classmates you will be like hyenas flocking a lion. You will be the lone crow calling to distract the cat while its allies swoop in to steal its prey. Here, Yuji, we train the weak to defeat the strong. To defeat sorcerers.” She laughs softly. “To kill sorcerers.”

This is now Yuji’s one and only life goal. He can no longer graduate with his friends or get hitched or get a job as a firefighter or whatever dumb shit he once dreamed about. This is the only thing he has left. He barely restrains himself from jumping up with excitement.

Better try to make a good impression with his new classmate, even if she’s a hardass. He bows and introduces himself and throws in a polite, “I’ll do my best!”

Maki’s voice becomes dark and dangerous. “God, what’s with the—  look, don’t get the wrong idea. If you’re not cut out for this kind of life, you’ll be thrown out the door faster than you can blink. I won’t waste any of my time with you until you can prove to me that you won’t slow me down.”

She barges past Yuji hard enough to send him stumbling back. He winces and holds his aching shoulder. Whoever that girl is, she’s built like an ox and could probably fold Yuji like paper, which is why it’s important for him to start training ASAP.

“We won’t really throw you out the door,” says Kenjaku genially.

Yuji is still brimming with his new sense of purpose when Kenjaku takes him to meet his senseis in another wing of the building. They exit onto the pavilion and cross a carefully trimmed garden to get there. There’s a pond beneath their feet that catches Yuji’s attention and Kenjaku has to call to him to make him catch up.

“Don’t touch the water here,” Kenjaku says. “It might look welcoming, but it’ll boil the flesh off your bones in an instant. Jogo — that’s one of your senseis — has developed quite a sizable magma chamber beneath this place. A failsafe, in the unlikely event that anyone actually manages to outmaneuver both Hanami and Mahito.”

“No baths, I guess.”

“The water at the bottom of the hill is a good temperature. You’ll need to haul it up if you want to use it, and you’ll need to ask Dagon nicely.”

“Who…?”

Yuji doesn’t get his answer because they arrive at an expansive communal area with plush sofas and a low table with coffee cups and cakes and sweets spread across it. Two— creatures? Are sitting there together.

Yuji’s first instinct is to run, but Kenjaku squeezes his arm firmly. “They’re only curses. Nothing to be afraid of. They owe their very existence to non-sorcerers, so it stands to reason that they’d oppose the sorcerers’ plans to eradicate them all. They’re on our side, Yuji.”

Jogo, the old cyclops stooped over a cane, grumbles just like Yuji’s grandpa. “This boy looks a little frail, don’t you think?”

The creature beside him is huge, with bark growing out of her eye sockets. “Eno eht si siht,” she says. The words seem to go right into Yuji’s skull. This is the one.

Jogo’s eye widens. “This is…?”

Hanami nods. They both regard him with what seems like interest.

It makes Yuji a little nervous. He’s already a little off-center because they’re curses. He’s had it drilled into him his entire life that curses are dirty, evil creatures produced from the negative emotions of monkeys. They’re a stain on Yuji’s species and the very reason he gets kicked around by sorcerers.

But, no. Yuji swallows those bitter thoughts attempting to rise up. He won’t allow himself to play by the rules of sorcerers anymore. If sorcerers say curses are bad, then they’re Yuji’s best fucking friends. He plasters on a bright smile and thrusts out his hand to shake.

“Nice to meet you!” he says to Jogo.

Jogo doesn’t take his hand, but he does laugh. It’s a harsh sound, like grandpa’s was. “Wasn’t expecting that. You don’t have any self-preservation skills, do you? That’ll be the first thing we work on.”

Work on. Training. Great. Yuji nods, all serious. “I’m ready for anything,” he says earnestly. “When do we start? Now?”

Jogo laughs again.

“Easy, Yuji,” Kenjaku says fondly. “Let’s get you settled in, first.”

“But I’m here and ready to learn right now! I’ve got a ton of sorcerers I wanna beat and every single day they go out there and kill more people. I wanna stop them. Let me prove to you than I can be an asset,” Yuji insists.

“You’re proving yourself to be an annoyance, currently,” Sukuna says.

Yuji swats his mouth away like a mosquito. Jogo and Hanami lurch back in shock, as if expecting Sukuna to explosively retaliate for the disrespect, but nothing happens and they’re left sitting in stunned silence.

“In any case, you’ll have to reconvene with Maki before you start any form of training whatsoever,” Kenjaku says. “It’s her responsibility to take measure of the newbies.”

Oh, right, the hardass…

Yuji deflates.

Megumi prods through the wreckage with his shoe, not wanting to dirty his hands. The thought of accidentally touching a rotting corpse makes him shiver. It takes him a few moments to realize he’s unearthed a skull because it’s been burnt so badly.

“I don’t understand what we’re supposed to be learning from this,” Mai says. She’s standing off to the side. She never does the dirty work even when they’re supposed to be a team. She should, because her sister was a non-sorcerer and her own cursed energy is diminutive. She’s on thin ice. 

“We’re not learning, though. That’s the thing,” Momo says sullenly. “We’re doing chores.”

“Builds character, I guess,” Miwa says. She sighs with exertion after shifting a particularly large chunk of rubble and collapses to take a break. The fall seems a little painful, but nobody goes to help her.

Noritoshi is completing all his duties with an almost mechanical detachment, like he’s sorting laundry or something. He notices Megumi kicking things around uselessly and climbs to the peak of the pile to stand by his side. “At least pretend you want to find something.”

Megumi’s frown deepens. Noritoshi means well, but Megumi’s heard this lecture a thousand times. “I’m trying.”

“I appreciate that your head is in the right place, but it’ll reflect well on you if you actually kill someone.”

“I know.”

“I’m saying this as your friend.”

Megumi sighs reluctantly. “I know.” Noritoshi really is his best friend. Almost like a brother. There must have been a time before (they were raised in different clans, and didn’t meet until they were old enough to properly conduct themselves) but they were young enough when they met that Megumi doesn’t remember it, and it feels like he’s known Noritoshi his whole life. They did archery together, practiced calligraphy together, all that boring stuff. Lounged around in hot springs the one time they had a free afternoon, although neither of them were very good at it. Lounging around, that is. Megumi was there when Noritoshi got his first kill. 

“It was quick,” Noritoshi had said over and over, nodding to himself, gaining faith in the words as he said them. Megumi agreed. He saw the corpse. One cold, clean and precise hole through the head. You couldn’t ask for a better way to die, especially as a non-sorcerer.

Megumi said so, and Noritoshi smiled for once. Then the smile didn’t shift for several days. Megumi was there for him after that too, when he was rigid and wild-eyed and flighty to the touch.

And Noritoshi returned the favor tenfold. In fact, the only reason Megumi was able to tame Orochi was because Noritoshi encouraged him to try. Between the two of them, the enmity between the Zenin and the Kamo clans might not last past their parents’ generation.

“Why don’t you use your dogs? They’ll make short work of this,” Noritoshi suggests.

Noritoshi was right back when he told him to summon Orochi, so Megumi sighs and conjures his demon dogs. The two of them sniff around, crossing back and forth over the rubble, almost at random. A while passes and Megumi starts to think he’s wasted his time, but then both dogs come together and start digging eagerly at the same spot.

Noritoshi pushes Megumi forward with a hand on his lower back. “You can do it,” he tells him. “It’s just a monkey.”

He wishes he could call them monkeys with the same dismissive cruelty as Noritoshi or the same vehemence as Geto-sensei. He always trips on the word when he says it out loud and he’s pretty sure others have noticed.

Everyone’s watching him now. His brain hurts from constantly making calculations about how he looks and what people think of him, and what he should be doing to secure his standing among the others. He waits for his dogs to clear a space, revealing a broken and bloody student buried a meter deep. The dogs are wagging their tails hard enough that they’re whipping Megumi’s legs.

The student is too weak to say anything, but they’re roused slightly by the sunlight beaming down on their face. They squint up at him, trying to lift their hand. They’re so badly injured that Megumi can barely see where they begin and end.

Megumi hates the fact that he hesitates when he tells the dogs to devour. He hates his own weakness. He forces himself to watch every brutal moment, hoping it’ll strengthen him. So he can fit in better.

“It’s a little hard the first time, but you get used to it.” Noritoshi lays his hand on Megumi’s shoulder, and doesn’t move it until the dogs’ muzzles come up.

Chapter Text

One day, ten years ago, the world changed overnight, though for Junpei nothing changed except the date on the calendar.

He never had any friends when he was young. He was the quiet loser kid always hanging around on the edge of the school yard, and when the teachers asked someone to play with him, he’d always ruin it by saying something weird or just freezing up in fear until they walked away. He always wore weird shirts when he was out of his school uniform and he was greasy because he hated having his hair washed. And he always smelled faintly of cigarettes, because even if mom made sure she always took them outside, the smoke clung to her, and so did he.

Then the sorcerers revealed themselves. Some people went from the top of the food chain straight down to the bottom. Junpei didn’t move at all. 

The bullying got worse as he got older. Now that the popular kids had someone punching down on them, it felt even better for them to do it to Junpei in turn. They were angry about not being the strongest and wanted to make themselves feel better, or something. He took the cigarette burns and the taunting and the being shoved into lockers and bottled it all up.

Because, through all of that, he had his mom. Nagi loved him— she was the only person in the world Junpei was sure loved him. She didn’t understand him, but what parent did?

That was Junpei’s plan. Call it sad, but he wanted to stay with Nagi forever. If he survived high school (he was increasingly sure he wouldn’t), then he’d get a job at a video store or the theater, help her pay the bills, save enough money to buy all the movies he wanted. Once he’d had some mad fantasy of him and all his class working at the same company, of himself walking in and sitting behind the CEOs desk and firing them all one by one, leaving them with no money, no reference, knowing he’d condemned them to at least a few weeks of hunger and stress. 

But he wasn’t CEO material. He wasn’t anything material. His only vision of the future was their little house by the canal, chiding his mom for smoking, living exactly as he had forever. 

These are the thoughts in his mind as he comes home after school one day. 

He can see the smoke from a distance. It registers with him but not properly. He keeps walking at a normal speed because he keeps thinking, no, surely it’s someone else’s house, it can’t be mine, it can’t be mine. And it’s true, it isn’t his. It’s several of them. There are scorch marks on the grass and half the ceiling is missing from his neighbors house. Dead fish are floating on the surface of the canal, and this is what spurs Junpei into a shaky run. In the back of his head, he's terrified of what he might find. He makes it to his door and what he sees—

His mind goes totally blank.

Until now, Junpei hasn’t cared a bit about sorcerers. They’re not the ones beating him down every day. He used to wish he could be one, so that he could get up and strike back for once. Sure, maybe Shota and the others hit him harder because they couldn’t go up and hit a sorcerer, but that was never the sorcerers’ fault. 

But it isn’t Shota standing in the ruins of his home. It's a tall woman with white hair, her head tilted to press the phone to her ear. Her hands are busy with an axe that she's resting on.

At first all Junpei can hear are his own breaths. Quick and sharp. They have the edge of a sob to them. His eyes are welling and his vision is blurring. He knows he should run, but it's just not sinking in. It slides off his mind like water off a duck.

Distantly, the sorcerer says, “yeah, all done. I chased it through half the city.” She laughs to herself. “I’ll be expecting the transfer tonight. Oh, and as you'll recall, I earn a commission for each monkey I kill, too. How many? I counted five hundred and... mm, forty?”

Junpei begins to take trembling steps backwards.

She spots him. “Five hundred and forty one.”

He runs.

He ends up in the sewers. Getting underground and out of sight felt important. The destruction to the city has proven there’s no safety in a crowd.

He thought he knew what fear was before, but he was wrong. Every time he found somewhere to hide on the way here, he'd think that he could hear that woman's axe dragging across the floor towards him, and he'd run again. He’d take a thousand school days with Shota kicking him back against a fence if he could only wake up from this nightmare that he’s found himself in. Why did he never fear sorcerers? Why did he never see beyond highschool? If he had his head on straight, he’d have dropped out, found a cash in hand job, made enough money somehow to get him and his mom out. Out of the city, out of Japan...

But he hadn’t. And now she’s dead. He squeezes his eyes shut, but that just makes the image worse. The image of her, sprawled on the floor, a slack look to her face and her jaw shaped all wrong somehow. She’d been smoking and had dropped the box when she fell. There were cigarettes scattered on the floor around her. Now when they find her body she’s going to be known as chronic smoker, late thirties, living alone, and not his mom. Not the woman who let him skip school if he was too anxious to go. Not someone who still tried the “here comes the airplane!” technique on a fourteen year old. Not someone who dragged him to youth clubs and tagged along with him, embarrassing him the entire time, because she wanted him to have a friend, even just one.

He sinks down on the slimy floor of the sewer and grips his hair in his hands. The pain gives him something else to focus on. His body is shaking so badly that there could be an earthquake and he wouldn’t notice.

Someone sits down next to him. Junpei is too paralyzed with fear to look up from where his head is pressed against his knees, but he does make a wretched noise without meaning to. The sorcerer has found him. This is it. He’s about to be a cold case. A sewer skeleton.

He has to face it with some bravery. He looks up. It’s not the sorcerer at all. 

It’s a man that looks maybe a year or two older than him. He’s got grey hair despite his apparent age. His face is riddled with scars. He’s throwing a ball — a small one that fits in his palm — against the wall of the sewer. Catching it, throwing it, with a rhythmic squishing noise.

That's the only sound. This part of the sewer is silent. There's not even any water dripping. Junpei tries to listen for the sound of the axe, but there's nothing.

In the midst of Junpei's staring, the man looks up at him. His eyes are striking colours. One blue, one brown.

“Who are you?” Junpei blurts.

The man wags his finger. “I’m asking the questions!” He throws his ball again. Squish, thunk.

Junpei’s face feels wet and cold and uncomfortable. He wipes his eyes with his sleeve. “Oh.”

“First,” says the man, “how did you get in here? This is my part of the sewer. You shouldn’t have gotten in here at all.” His eyes narrow into mean lines. “Are you a sorcerer?”

“No!” exclaims Junpei. The thought disgusts him like it never did before. “No. No. I was running from — there was a sorcerer chasing me. I was trying to get away…”

The thought of the sorcerer alarms him. He scrambles up and looks around for the exit, expecting her to be stalking towards him down the tunnel, but the exit he came in through is nowhere in sight. The skin on the back of his neck prickles.

“Then you’re a monkey!” the man exclaims, lurching towards him with sudden interest. “And a special one at that. I can feel your potential, just waiting to be brought to the surface.”

Junpei has no idea what he’s talking about, but the proximity frightens him, so he backpedals. The man grabs his hands, locking him in place.

“Whoops, sorry,” the man says, “I forgot that’s not how new friends talk to each other, is it? We need to introduce ourselves first. I’m Mahito.”

“I’m, uh, Junpei.”

Mahito’s smile widens. He brings Junpei’s hands to his face with unusual affection, like a house cat. “Junpei. I like that name!”

“Th—thanks.” Junpei realises that the thing the man has been bouncing against the wall, which is now rolling out of sight, is actually an eyeball, bright and glossy like it’s still part of a living body. Not the worst thing he's seen that day, so he doesn't bother to react.

“You’re lucky, Junpei," Mahito says. "You’re my first friend, which means you’re automatically my best friend. I take good care of all my friends, I promise.”

This new school is different. The entrance exam is something else, but he's not bullied. Nobody takes his food or makes fun of him. Mahito sometimes climbs through the window of Junpei's new room to watch movies (he never uses the door), or takes Junpei on walks to introduce him to any new zombies he's made that day.

Also, he has Moon Dregs now. Junpei had balked at the idea of becoming a sorcerer at first, disgusted by it, but then he'd looked down at his hands. He'd never managed to stand up to Shota and the others, who were just humans. Without his own cursed technique, how is he ever going to defeat the woman with the axe? Sometimes, at night when everyone is asleep, he can still hear the sound of it scraping towards him. He wants it to stop.

Moon Dregs becomes his friend too, so then Junpei has two friends, which is two more than he's ever had in his life. He gets used to being a sorcerer, though he never gets used to thinking of himself that way.

"A sorcerer is something you're born as, and, increasingly, someone you act like," Kenjaku, who is kind of like the principal, tells him one night over dinner. "But there's no need to use the word. Rogue sorcerers, those who went against the regime, used to be called curse users."

Curse user. Junpei likes that better. A normal human can't kill a sorcerer, but a curse can.

Two months later, another new student arrives.

Yuji is being forced to prove his worth through hard labor before he’ll be allowed to join the other students. Under Maki’s guidance, he hauls buckets of water up and down a steep hill. He’s always been unusually athletic, but the workout is starting to take a toll on him and by the eighth lap his legs begin to quiver and his knees threaten to buckle.

“Keep moving,” Maki snaps. “If you can’t manage this, it’d be a waste of time to teach you anything.”

The thought of being sent home to live the rest of his life under the thumb of sorcerers makes Yuji want to vomit. With the sun beating down on his back, he forces himself to keep moving. By the end of it, he has completed a grueling twenty laps and he’s gasping for air on the ground, drenched in sweat.

There’s an odd expression on Maki’s face. “Alright, good enough,” she says haltingly. “You’re not done yet, though. You’re going to need more than strength to get anywhere around here.”

Second chore of the day is tidying up the dorm. He wheels a cabinet full of fresh sheets along as he visits each room in turn, rolling up futons and stuffing them into the closets. He also mops the floors and, ugh, cleans the toilets.

After that’s done he goes to ask Maki for a break, but instead he’s made to mend clothes and bedsheets. He’s never touched a sewing needle in his life, so his first attempts are a mess of pricked fingers and crossed eyes as he tries and fails to get the string through the hole. He ruins a couple things with his blood and is smacked over the back of the head by Maki.

“You’re gonna wreck more things than you fix!” she snaps.

“When will I ever have to do stuff like this if I’m fighting sorcerers?” Yuji demands, frustrated, throwing down the haori he tried and failed to mend.

“It’s not about the clothes, it’s about your ability. If you can’t see that, you really are hopeless.”

Wanting to prove a point, Yuji tries again with renewed determination, even though a part of him wants to tear his hair out. He just cannot force his body to be as precise as he needs it to be. His hands shake no matter how hard he concentrates.

His last few attempts are a little better than his first and that’s the most positive thing he can say. She grabs him by the ear and drags him to his next trial. A trial of patience. He’s forced to stand out in the yard while the rest of the students break for lunch, and it really does smell delicious. Whoever they’ve got cooking is a genius, because the fragrant rice and the smoky meat have Yuji’s mouth watering.

All he gets is a small cup of plain rice and a sad looking piece of mackerel though, and his stomach growls. He’s achy and exhausted from the morning workout and his brain’s fried from the sewing. His first day at this new school is turning out to be terrible, but he refuses to let it weaken his resolve.

“I see Maki is being quite hard on you,” Kenjaku says in good humor. “No sauce either? Oh my.”

Maki’s plate contains a perfect ratio of all the important food groups, with crunchy seaweed on the side. She eats robotically and when she’s done she leaves her chopsticks perfectly parallel to her bowl. “He can eat better food when he produces better results.”

Kenjaku sighs and shrugs at Yuji.

It makes him a little angry, like he’s being made fun of, but he doesn’t want to make a bad impression on the lady who kinda owns the place. He forces a smile and laughs it off, and Kenjaku returns to her meal.

Evening rolls around after more horrific workouts. Yuji pushes his body more than he ever has in his life and by the end of the day, all he wants is to curl up in bed. He isn’t allowed to do this, though, as Maki directs him out onto the pavilion.

“The dorms are for students,” she says.

“Does Kenjaku know you’re doing this to me?”

Her eyes harden like steel. “She asked me to make sure you were ready to begin training, and that’s what I intend to do. It’s not my fault if you’re incapable.”

“It kinda feels like you’re trying to drive me out of here.”

She scowls and whips the door shut, then the lights go off inside, leaving Yuji in darkness. He sighs and lies down on the ground. The wood is cool and it saps his energy. Usami is patrolling the grounds in slow, repetitive circles, like a shambling zombie.

He wakes up to more of the same the next day, and the next day. If Maki’s trying to wear him down and make him break, she won’t succeed. He keeps hauling water and he keeps failing to sew and he keeps staring at good food while eating military rations.

Maki probably would’ve preferred to let him go hungry, but luckily, while he’s hauling his seventh bucket of water, a guy creeps up alongside him, all shy. The guy’s name is Junpei and Yuji vaguely remembers being introduced to him the day prior, but he quickly put it out of his mind on account of Junpei acting so small and forgettable.

“She’s being a little hard on you, huh?” Junpei says with an awkward laugh. “I hope you’re feeling alright. We haven't had any new students since I arrived... people usually give up by this point.”

Yuji turns away from him. “I’m not giving up. I want to train here. I have no other options right now.” He plows on ahead.

Junpei glances around to make sure they’re not being watched and jogs to catch up. “You know, I actually got accepted even though I wasn’t strong enough to carry any water at all. I think they’re looking for something else, some other quality in you that’s not immediately obvious.”

This information is mostly useless since Yuji has no idea what that quality might be. He frowns, frustrated.

“Here,” Junpei says.

He hands Yuji a chocolate protein bar he must’ve nabbed during lunchtime and it’s like a balm to all of Yuji’s aches and pains. He drops the water immediately and consumes the thing in two bites, thanking Junpei with his mouth full and crumbs flying everywhere.

Junpei’s going to be his first friend when he gets accepted. He’ll make it happen.

After Yuji’s done hauling water, Maki gives him a rag and tells him to mop the floors with it. He snatches the damn thing off her and goes to work, cleaning every corner until it’s sparkling.

“This is a sad sight to behold,” Sukuna comments when Yuji is left sprawled out with exhaustion on the pristine floor.

“Screw off,” Yuji croaks. “I’m gonna stay here. I’m gonna train. You’ll see. I’ll be just like you.” He’s keenly aware that all of his actions are being closely observed by Sukuna and the last thing he wants is to lower Sukuna’s estimation of him.

He wants to be impressive. He wants to be useful. He wants to be a key piece in creating that world Sukuna was talking about: one without sorcerers.

Sukuna hums and leaves him to it.

The next time he’s made to clean the dorms he pays special attention to Junpei’s room. It’s the one on the far left and it’s dark as hell because Junpei taped his curtain to the corners of the window to get a full blackout effect. The floor is covered in scattered DVDs and a laptop has been left playing Earthworm 3 on endless repeat. Makes the whole thing ten times worse, ugh! Such a shitty reboot! It'll be a struggle for Yuji to pretend he likes it when they start becoming friends, but he's pretty sure he can pull it off.

On the third night, when the time comes to lock Yuji out like a sad dog, Maki hesitates in the doorway. Her hand is white-knuckled around the frame and her lips are tight with fury.

“What’s it going to take to make you give up?” she asks, momentarily losing her composure.

Yuji bites back, even though he’s barely able to get up off the ground. He’s using his rolled up hoodie as a pillow. “I’m not gonna, so forget about it.”

“You’re just some guy off the street. You don’t know anything about the world of sorcerers. It’s merciless and it’ll chew you up.”

This sparks the anger lying dormant in Yuji, like magma beneath a hidden volcano. “Who the hell do you think you’re talking to? I saw my friends die because of sorcerers. They just disappeared like they never existed, right in front of me!”

Maki squares her feet, ready to fight, even though Yuji is lying beneath her helplessly. “You don't understand. It's not easy doing this. You can't take a break. The weak do not get to take a break. The weak get hunted. The strong can kill us easily, and nobody stops them. On missions you'll probably go hungry because you can't carry that much food. You'll have to learn to deal with the feeling. You'll have to do things you don't want to do, even if it makes you bleed. On the battlefield against sorcerers you have to follow orders and you have to quit fucking complaining and you'll be starving and aching and you'll want to go home, but you can't! You can’t.”

Then her face falls and she steps back, as if Yuji is the one who said those last words to her. 

Yuji stares at her, stunned. 

Maybe sensing his sympathy, Maki becomes incensed. “I tried my best to fit in, but they chased me down. All of them against me, just me. Trying to prove to everyone they hate monkeys just the right amount, even their own. I didn't think they'd go that far, but I was wrong. If it weren’t for Kenjaku…” Her eyes flash. She realizes she’s revealed too much. “I don’t want you wasting our time. You won’t be the first person I’ve weeded out and you won’t be the last.”

The door shuts. Yuji slams himself back down with frustration.

Chapter Text

Satoru will probably never say it out loud, but sometimes Suguru makes him feel like a monkey. Whenever he’s watching on TV or from backstage, he gets caught in the exact same spell as all the rest.

The huge barn lights they’ve got glaring down at the stage would make anyone sweat. Their clothes would stick to them and their skin would go blotchy and they’d start slurring their words like a fool. When Suguru steps out it just makes his dark hair shine, and it silhouettes him, giving him an ethereal glow. Like an angel at the farthest reach of your vision. 

“You, at home, are our first concern,” Suguru says. “We sorcerers protect you. You know we do. When you are happy, there are less curses, and we are all happy with that.” His voice is melodic, almost musical, and even Satoru believes what he’s saying. He laughs to himself at the thrill of falling for the trap.  

He can imagine himself among the clawing masses; the animals braying at the edge of their pen, trying to clamber onto the stage. They get so damn excited when Suguru starts talking, all the time, every time. Because even though there must be a thousand people in the crowd, his eyes are always clear and sure and piercing, seeming to look straight at you, only you, through you, to the core of you.

Manami sorts calls, and she pulls one through. “Chiyo, from Saitama,” she says. Her bored voice momentarily snaps Satoru out of his trance. A little bit of mundanity to bring him down from his high.

“H-hey,” Chiyo from Saitama says, her voice trembling. You can tell she is, too. Suguru’s eyes have settled onto the camera, unmoving, as if he can actually see her through it. “My friend, she works at this big office building. They sell stationary and, um, office supplies? She’s always saying stuff about how her boss treats them all so unfairly, and the problem is, there’s non-sor— there’s monkeys working there. I think they’re causing so many negative thoughts there and— maybe curses, too.”

Exactly three seconds pass. Satoru counts them because he knows Suguru is counting them too. Then his face settles into a solemn, concerned expression.

“It sounds like your friend’s workplace is at high risk of curse activity,” he says gravely. “Hopefully some sorcerers can go over there and check it out. In the meantime, please try to avoid this place and everyone connected to it. You’ve done something good by telling us and everyone at home about this. Manami, if you would, please forward that call so we can get the details.”

Then he smiles, just wide enough to wrinkle his eyes. He runs his fingers down the mic and over the cord. This is a private, intimate moment for himself and the viewer; they’re not just one of thousands, but one of one, the only one. If Satoru didn’t know what was going on in Suguru’s head right now, he might’ve gotten all jealous. 

Suguru moves onto the next caller. His face becomes neutral again. 

“Akari from Osaka,” says Manami.

“I’m worried about the monkeys in my area,” says Akari. “I just moved in and I feel like they’re all going to be creating curses non-stop.”

“It’s reasonable for you to worry about that, Akari. Are you a sorcerer yourself?”

“I don’t have a technique, but I can see curses. That’s why I’m so worried. I don’t want to react to one by accident and have it notice me, or see them all the time—”

“If you aren’t a sorcerer yourself, then please try to support us sorcerers. I promise, you won’t regret the money you put towards this. When you see the difference it makes, you’ll thank me for convincing it out of your pocket.” 

“Isamu from Hokkaido.”

“I’m a sorcerer but my cursed technique is weak, so I can’t fight. I just wish I could do more, and I know that’s a negative feeling, but—”

“If you are a sorcerer, then you don’t have to worry about your negative feelings.”

“Haruto from Tokyo.”

“My school is full of monkeys. I saw a curse last Tuesday. I get sick of living this way sometimes, you know? I know people who got killed by curses, and the fact that I have to sit in class with the people that make them? It just pisses me off sometimes. I wanna kill some of these people. It all makes me sick. My parents are monkeys too. I’ve got nobody on my side, ‘cept for you.”

“You have my sympathy, but you have to understand that, the more pain you cause them, the worse curses they create. You say your school is full of them? You sound young, Haruto, and a young sorcerer needs training, not to be left alone in a forest full of monkeys. Manami, forward that call. Haruto, we’ll see what your options are.” 

“Thank—” 

“Takada from Kyoto.” 

“Geto,” Takada says. Her voice is decidedly male. “I’m a big fan of your show.”

Suguru’s smile doesn’t crack. His face is like marble, perfect and unaffected. “That’s nice of you to say. I’m glad you find me entertaining.”

“I wanted to congratulate you on your recent work in Sendai.”

“Oh? What work are you referring to? You’ll have to be specific, I’m a very busy man and I do a lot of work. Some of it’s a little above my paygrade.” He glances at the audience, who laugh with him.

“Sugisawa high school,” Takada says. “You know the one. Miyagi prefecture. Recently went up in flames.”

Manami goes to end the call. Suguru holds up a hand to stop her.

“I welcome any and all discussion,” he says, before leaning forward slightly. He sits in a chair to take viewer calls because it gives the impression of something more intimate. “What happened to that school was a terrible tragedy. A powerful cursed object was being stored there, and unfortunately, we arrived too late to prevent disaster. It is a shame that those without any knowledge of cursed energy continually put their youngest and most vulnerable at risk.”

“I wonder how long everyone will keep buying the shit you say?”

Suguru’s eyes intensify. Until him, Satoru has never known someone with the ability to cut into a person with their eyes alone. “I’m afraid I might have to ask the audience.” And he tilts the mic towards them, inviting them to join. “How about it? Will you keep buying the shit I have to say?”

Satoru would’ve screamed right alongside them. Down beneath that stage with Suguru elevated above you, it creates a sort of atmosphere. You feel like an insect. The lights sear your eyes when you look up at him and you have to squint, like he’s simply too much to behold. You feel like you’d be the luckiest creature on earth if only you could be good enough, useful enough, to earn a place by his side. 

So, the audience screams and cheers and screams some more, drowning Takada out.

Suguru laughs, resting his chin on his hand. He swings the mic back up to his own lips. “As you can see, unlike Takada-chan, my show won’t be getting cancelled anytime soon.”

The show ends as it always does. With the memorial section. Most of the names are meaningless to Satoru, but he bows his head like all the others when Suguru reads out Haibara Yu’s.

The days start to blend together. It’s maybe the fifth or sixth when Kenjaku calls Yuji over to give him a "surprise". Yuji is exhausted, so he can’t help but quake at the word.

Kenjaku leads him further away from the school itself than he's ever been before, down a winding path into the forest, through a gate and up into a shrine. It’s in pristine condition, clearly very lovingly maintained. A deer drinking from a fountain startles at their approach and bounds off. Kenjaku insists that Yuji be on his best behavior.

“I’ll get into trouble with Uraume if you aren’t,” she says with a smile. “Somehow they always seem to know whether you’ve bowed or not, so… please remember to bow. And if you would, take off your shoes before you enter.”

They make their way down a staircase. The further down they go, the colder it gets. By the time they reach the bottom, the walls and floors are frosted blue, and Yuji can feel mist prickling on his skin. He rubs his arms.

Just ahead, beyond a curling trail of incense, is a block of ice with a large dark shape in the centre. When they reach it, it becomes clear that the shape is actually a body preserved within like a saber-toothed tiger in permafrost. Yuji squints and leans closer. The skin’s all leathery with age, but it sort of looks like Yuji’s grandpa. That is, if his grandpa was younger and bigger and broader and covered in tattoos like a badass biker. The second set of arms isn’t an illusion made by reflections from the ice, as Yuji initially thought. They’re real, and each arm is probably as thick as Yuji’s torso. This guy’s huge!

“Bow now,” Kenjaku says. She has already done so.

A little awkwardly, Yuji copies her.

“Terrible form,” says a cold voice.

Yuji whirls around. He’s not sure how to describe the person he’s looking at, but they’re definitely glaring at him something fierce. “Sorry?” Yuji asks.

The person is carrying a broom. They swiftly approach and knock it against the back of Yuji’s head, causing him to double over. Then he feels their hand wrap around the back of his neck.

“You should bow as if you’re begging for your life,” they say.

“Thank you, Uraume, for that advice,” Kenjaku says amicably. “I’m sure Yuji will take that on board. If you’d be so kind…?”

Uraume sniffs disdainfully and releases Yuji, who clutches his aching neck. Uraume’s skin was so cold that it stuck to Yuji’s, and when they let go it was like getting a strip of tape torn off him.

“I’d appreciate it if you’d complete whatever business you have here swiftly,” Uraume says. “Your body heat is melting my ice.”

“Right, the ice!” Yuji continues gawking at it, stretching up on his toes to try and get a vantage point. “This is crazy cool. Look at this guy! I bet he could fit my whole head in his hand! They don’t make ‘em like this anymore.”

“You’re embarrassing me,” Sukuna says. 

Not expecting to hear his voice, Yuji jumps back, sucking in a breath of freezing cold air. Uraume’s eyes go wide with horror and they practically collapse, pressing themself against the ground in a very helpful demonstration of a proper bow.

“Please forgive me for laying a hand on your vessel, Sukuna-sama,” they plead.

“Uraume,” Sukuna says fondly.

Uraume dares to lift their head from the ground. Their eyes are shining with something that goes beyond admiration, respect, love, all of it. They’re staring at the eye and mouth Sukuna has formed on Yuji’s face with utter reverence.

Kenjaku laughs. “Don’t get overwhelmed, now.”

“Huh? What’s going on? What is this? Who is this creepy dead guy, anyway?” Yuji asks.

Uraume looks mortally offended, so Yuji hides behind Kenjaku.

“Hazard a guess,” Kenjaku says.

“Don’t, we’ll be here all night,” Sukuna says. “It’s me, brat. My mummified corpse. Strange. I always saw myself as being taller.”

“Dehydration of the corpse likely shrank you just a little bit,” Kenjaku says charitably.

Yuji breathes, staring down at the corpse with amazement. “This is you?” He presses his fingers to the ice. It’s cold enough that it hurts, and when he pulls back, his hand gets momentarily stuck, as if teeth have been sunk into him. 

Uraume clasps his hand within their own immediately, inspecting the extremely mild abrasion with concern. “Did that hurt?” They manipulate his fingers carefully, checking they aren’t frozen.

“Uh, no.” Yuji is a little overwhelmed by their sudden change of attitude. “I’m fine, thanks.”

“What do you think, Sukuna?” Kenjaku asks. “Mahito has been begging for my permission to turn your corpse into a puppet.”

“Mahito is not welcome in this shrine,” Uraume says stiffly.

“It would certainly be a wonderful addition to the school’s security.”

Sukuna laughs. “Don’t tease Uraume.”

“Then, how about returning to it yourself? Now that you’re awake, maybe there’s something you can do.”

“I can’t enter that body in my current state. Not while my soul is fragmented. The effort would likely be wasted, and Yuji would die in the process.”

Yuji isn’t frightened by this. He believes in Sukuna’s strength, because it’s impossible not to once you’ve felt his presence and heard his self-assurance when he talks. If there’s a way to resurrect him fully, then Yuji will do anything he can to help, even if he doesn’t survive the process. He’d like to see the sorcerers die with his own eyes, but it’s enough to go out knowing that Sukuna will kill them all. He tells himself this so firmly that he almost believes it.

Kenjaku seems disturbed, however. “I’m afraid that Yuji’s death isn’t an option for me.” She grabs Yuji’s arm and squeezes it for a long moment, as if needing to confirm his presence, before slowly prising her fingers away. “Oh, well. I only brought you here out of curiosity. It was worth asking.”

“We should start gathering my fingers immediately,” Sukuna says.

“Once Yuji is able to defend himself—”

“We start collecting them now and Yuji will learn in the meantime. I don’t appreciate being helpless within this brat’s body.” Sukuna’s tone leaves no room for argument. He’s not being aggressive or forceful, but he speaks as though his word is the simple truth.

Kenjaku closes her eyes and takes a deep breath. “In that case, we had better iron a few things out. If my informant is to be believed, eight of your fingers are somewhere within Tokyo Jujutsu tech, where Satoru Gojo spends most of his time with his students. It wouldn’t be a good idea to challenge him directly, so we can consider them lost for the time being.”

“But you’ve thought of a way to challenge him indirectly, yes?” Sukuna asks.

“Oh, all in good time. I have some plates spinning.”

“How about the other fingers? I don’t need all of them to tip the scales in my favor. If I had, say, five, I could at the very least take a more active role in Yuji’s education.”

Yuji straightens up with interest.

“When I heard that you awakened within Yuji,” Kenjaku shoots Yuji a warm smile, “I sent a few small strike forces out to collect several that I already knew of. The sorcerers will realise that someone is gathering the fingers, but they shouldn’t be able to trace it back to this school. All will be well.”

Sukuna exhales sharply. It might be a laugh. “Hear that, brat? You’re getting nothing but the best. If you fail despite that, you really are hopeless.”

“I won’t fail.” Yuji is sure of it. If it takes hauling water and sewing clothes and eating rations to earn the right to train under Sukuna, then he’ll do it without complaint. He’s ready to get back to it right now, in fact. He jogs on the spot to unfreeze his blood, then runs outside to find Maki.

“Oh, dear,” Kenjaku says to herself. She follows him.

Despite a long stint hauling water, Yuji is given no reprieve. He’s made to demonstrate his patience by enduring the scorching sun, which is beginning to burn his skin. Junpei is a godsend. He sneaks Yuji another protein bar, then hides himself in the shade. Junpei is extremely pale from years spent indoors and might actually burn up if he sits in the sun too long.

“So, why are you here, anyway?” Junpei asks. “Sorry if that’s too personal. It’s just, it’s not like this place is open to the public or anything, so I guess I’m curious.”

“My school got destroyed and all my friends died,” Yuji says, unguarded. He’s not afraid of this fact. It’s his driving force, and in a strange way, he’s proud of it. The memory of his friends will be what leads him to dismantling the sorcerers and their social order.

“Ah, sorry,” Junpei says meekly. “That’s horrible.”

Yuji appreciates his attempt at commiseration. “What about you?”

“Huh?”

“Why are you here?”

Junpei rocks in his seat and is quiet for a while. “A sorcerer killed my mom. I don’t really know what happened, but one day I came home and she was just…” He gestures. It’s a similar gesture to the one Yuji would make if he ever tried to explain the way Sasaki looked, so he understands. “Mahito is the one who brought me here. He’s a curse and he saved me, and he’s the only one that ever understood me. Makes you think, right? That the way we’re supposed to see people — and sorcerers, and curses — is all messed up.”

"We'll get payback. For everyone." Yuji reaches into the shadows and pats Junpei once on the shoulder.

Junpei recoils, looking at him with confusion, as if he expected to be hit. When he realizes that Yuji is just trying to comfort him, he smiles shakily. “I guess you and I aren’t all that different, huh?”

“Well, we’re here because we wanna kill sorcerers, right? That’s a pretty specific goal. Makes sense that we have similar motivations.”

“I guess so, yeah.”

Just as Yuji’s forgetting the pain he’s in, Maki comes over to ruin everything. "Making friends, huh,” she says as she looms over Yuji.

Yuji sits up defensively. “That a problem?”

She glances between them, measuring them. Her eyes are calculating, like she’s plotting something. “Yeah,” she decides. “It is, actually. You know, in the real world, if you cheat off someone else during a test, you get disqualified.” 

Junpei is already apologizing, though. “S—sorry, uh, it’s just—”

“I don’t want to hear excuses,” she says. “You know how important this is, Junpei. Giving him hints, sneaking him food. Yeah, I’m not stupid. You’re not as slick as you thought you were.”

“It was just something small,” Junpei says frantically. “He looked like he was gonna pass out.”

Yuji stands. “Stop picking on him.”

She raises an eyebrow. “Picking on him? Is that what you think this is?”

“I’m the one that ate the stuff he gave me, so if you wanna punish someone, punish me.”

"Yuji, this is a school for the weak, in case you forgot. If we slip up even once, we die. There's no room for mistakes. If I'm going to be fighting alongside you, I need to be able to rely on you." She shakes her head with disappointment. "Unfortunately, if you're going to go behind my back like this, I can't see myself doing that. You're out."

Yuji's stomach drops. "Wait, that?"

"I said, you're out. You're done."

“You’re bluffing. Kenjaku wouldn’t kick me out. She said she wouldn’t.”

“Oh, sure, you’re Sukuna’s vessel alright, but if I say you aren’t tough enough for training, you’ll just be kept here in the dorms to watch TV and play videogames all day. Wouldn’t you like that? You’ll waste the rest of your days away on a sofa, watching the rest of us change the world around you.” She turns and briskly walks away.

Yuji scrambles after her desperately. He refuses to believe this is happening to him. It's coming completely of the blue. It's unthinkable that he could put so much work into something only for it to fall apart in an instant. "Wait, wait, you can't do this to me! I've got so much more to give! Give me one more chance and I swear I'll land on my feet! I'll surprise you!" he pleads.

She stops. The bright sun casts her face in ominous shadow. "You know, I wasn't going to tell you this, but you were doing pretty good up until your stupid mistake just now. If you get your priorities straight, I can see you becoming a great curse user. Yuji, I'll be merciful just this once and give you one chance to redeem yourself. Just one."

Yuji nods frantically. "Okay, just tell me what to do and I'll do it!"

She smiles and folds her arms expectingly. “Kick the shit out of Junpei to teach him a lesson."

Junpei makes a strange noise and fumbles backwards.

Yuji’s jaw drops. “You’re kidding. No way, he didn’t do anything wrong.”

“He broke the rules, actually. This is your trial, Yuji. Nobody else’s. I can’t gauge your abilities if you’re getting help.”

“Well, I’m not hurting Junpei. No way.”

“Yuji.” Maki’s eyes are cold. “Kick the shit out of him or I’ll never let you begin your training.”

Yuji hesitates, but only for a moment. “I don’t care. I’m not doing this.” Junpei seems like a nice guy and Yuji already swore to himself that they’d become friends. He’s not going to hurt someone who didn't do anything to deserve it. That's something a sorcerer would do, and the thought of resembling scum like that even momentarily makes Yuji sick to his stomach.

“Uh, Yuji, it’s really okay.” Junpei smiles awkwardly. “It’s my fault. I shouldn’t have snuck you anything. I’m used to it anyway, so—

“No.” Yuji splays his hand out, warning him back. “Screw this, this isn’t happening.”

“Yuji,” Maki warns him.

“Make me,” Yuji snaps. “Go ahead. Show me how you want me to do it. I'm a hands-on learner. Teach me!”

They stare at each other. Yuji doesn’t shy away from Maki’s intense stare. There’s electricity between them and their bodies slant towards each other as if drawn magnetically. Maki is the first to disengage and Yuji is left a little dazed, like he’s been shaken awake from a strange dream.

“You pass,” she says.

“Huh?”

She sighs and presses her fist against her forehead to compose herself. “Why do I always have to explain things in small words? I said, you pass. I’ll let Kenjaku know that you can begin training.”

It takes Yuji a moment to compute what she’s saying and then he jumps up with excitement, all his aches and pains forgotten. “Really? That’s amazing! I told you I could do it! I never gave up! What— what did I even do?”

“You proved you have the mindset,” Maki says, then walks away.

Smooth, mysterious and brooding. Yuji can’t take his eyes off her back. He wonders to himself just who exactly she is beneath that tough shell.

Junpei laughs, drawing his hand over his face. “I tried to give you a hint before. They’re looking for a certain quality. It’s not about muscles or anything like that. Congrats, by the way.” He offers his fist to bump.

Despite being mentally exhausted from the chaotic and confusing encounter, Yuji has just enough strength to bring up his own fist, too.

Yuji gets treated to an amazing dinner that night. Uraume creates an elaborate three course meal just for him that outstrips anything he’s seen before.

It’s clear favoritism, but Yuji doesn’t think for a second about rejecting it. “Uraume, seriously, you’re the best. If you ever need me to do anything for you—”

“Nonsense.” Uraume forcefully pushes his chair in and whips a pristine napkin across his lap. Then they remove the dome covering his plate, revealing the perfectly seared steak within. It looks expensive, like something you’d get at a fancy restaurant. Yuji can no longer hold himself back. He grabs his knife.

“You know, brat, you’re traditionally supposed to eat that sort of dish with your fingers,” Sukuna advises him before he can take a bite.

“Oh, really? Well, you’d know, since you’re old.” Yuji goes to tear into it.

Sukuna creates a mouth on his hand and swallows the whole thing. Then he sighs with satisfaction. “I’ve missed you, Uraume.”

Yuji suddenly gets the urge to cry.

Uraume bows their head. “Thank you for that, Sukuna-sama.” Then their tone switches to something slightly less deferential. “Itadori, you can rest assured that, from this day forth, I will not allow you to go hungry even for a moment. You are my master’s vessel, after all.” 

They produce another steak. It seems they’ve come prepared.

“Oh,” Sukuna says with interest.

“Hell no! This one’s mine!” Yuji shouts, slapping his hands together so Sukuna can’t materialise in his palm. Sukuna’s mouth appears on the back of his hand instead. Then they compete over the steak like two wild dogs.

Kenjaku sighs as she watches them. “Bribing him with food? Now, that’s just cheating,” she complains.

Maki rolls her eyes. She dodges a spot of oil that comes flying at her and tries to finish off her meal in peace. 

Chapter Text

Nanami, can you take this mission?

This question feels like a joke, but for some reason they keep asking it, perhaps to sustain the illusion that he has a choice.

The truth is, it doesn’t matter what grade the curse is. It doesn’t even matter if he’s strong enough to defeat it. As a sorcerer, it’s his job to go out and fight. If he fails to kill the curse he’s been pitted against, he won’t get paid, and he needs the money because he’s an adult with an apartment to pay for and groceries to buy.

There’s nothing else to it.

Nanami, can you go and investigate some unusual curse activity in a tunnel by the highway?

Nanami doesn’t respond, because this isn’t a genuine question. He hangs up, receives the location and makes his way to it. The cab driver looks at him uncertainly when he asks to be dropped off by the wayside, but accepts his payment and disappears.

A section of the barrier is crumpled, perhaps due to a collision. Nanami hops it and slides down the incline, arriving at the mouth of the tunnel at the bottom. Headlights bloom and fade as cars pass.

Inside it’s dark and chasmic and his flashlight barely cuts into it, so he walks around blindly. The air is somewhat oppressive, but this is nothing unusual when you’re in the presence of a curse.

Something that he initially thought was an inanimate object turns around. Nanami can see nothing of them except their dark silhouette, and light shining off a pair of mismatched eyes. Their body is an unusual shape, but not in any way Nanami can put his finger on. It’s a gut feeling— a sixth sense he has as a human which warns him against creatures unlike himself.

“I knew someone would come running,” they say. Young. Male.

“I’m assuming you’re the one I’ve been sent here to exorcise,” Nanami says.

“Who, me? No, you’ve got the wrong guy. I’m just passing through, but hey, I’ll play with you for a little while if that’s what you want.”

“Step into the light.”

The curse emerges. He seems to have taken the form of a human, albeit an unusual one with gray hair. He’s holding a hand behind his back, which makes Nanami suspicious. “We only just met and you’re ordering me around. That’s not how new friends talk to each other. We have to introduce ourselves first. I’m Mahito.”

Then he bows. Not the polite kind of bow that Nanami got so tired of after years of working in the office, but a fancy one with a flourish that you might perform at a curtain call.

“Nanami,” Nanami says politely, remaining upright.

Mahito laughs. “There, see? I knew it! Not all sorcerers are as stupid as they look! Now, what do you want to play?”

Nanami brings out his blade, which should be a good enough answer. He can’t gauge this curse’s strength based solely on the feel of his energy, so he’s going to play it safe and prod it for a while before going in for the killing blow.

“Oh!” Mahito says, his eyes wide with childlike curiosity. “Really? Are you sure? I’m very, very good at this game.”

“So am I.” Nanami lunges forward, looking to chop a fraction off Mahito’s arm.

Mahito dodges, his whole body curving to the side with unnatural flexibility like he’s made of soft clay. His fingers extend into claws that almost gouge out Nanami’s eyes. They both glance off once another and come to a stop at opposite ends of the tunnel, like the first round of a joust.

In the brief moment they made contact, Nanami was able to see what Mahito was hiding behind his back. He almost doesn’t believe it at first, but there’s nothing else that fits the description.

Mahito has removed one of Sukuna’s fingers from its resting place.

“What are you planning to do with that?” Nanami asks.

Mahito laughs nervously. “Oops, you caught me! Nobody’s supposed to know I’m doing this, but… oh well! You can’t snitch if you’re dead!”

They collide again. Nanami gets a read on Mahito’s abilities as they fight. Looks like he can morph his body at will, and he’s tactile enough with his technique that he can use it in a variety of creative ways. His reaction speed is quick, but Nanami is marginally quicker.

At one point Mahito lunges for his face. Nanami prepares to deflect, but the attack doesn’t land. Mahito stops short, his hand extended towards him almost tenderly, as if waiting for Nanami to lean into it like a stray dog hungry for affection.

“Sometimes I think sorcerers are even easier to kill than monkeys,” Mahito says. “I don’t really know how it used to be, but every single sorcerer I’ve met so far has been so confused! None of you know the shape of your soul! It’s like you guys barely have any idea why you get up in the morning.”

Nanami is so bewildered that he actually stops to listen. “What?”

“You twist up in my hands like you were never there to begin with. Sometimes when I’m done, your souls just sit there waiting for the next cage. You’re all so strange. How about it? Will you be different?” Mahito smiles. “Do you know why you get up in the morning?”

Nanami begins to speak without knowing the answer. “I…”

“Mahito,” someone new says.

Mahito flinches. He turns and smiles nervously. “Choso! I was just finishing up!”

Another — curse? — appears from the other end of the tunnel. He looks just as unusual as Mahito and his features are set into a heavy scowl. “You shouldn’t be here.”

Mahito sulks and stomps his foot like an infant. “Why not? It’s so unfair! This finger was so easy for me to grab and nobody asked me to help even though I offered! You guys treat me like I’m expendable!”

“Maybe you are, if this one sorcerer is giving you so much trouble.” Choso glances over at Nanami disdainfully. “Why is he still alive?”

Mahito pouts. “I was just gonna kill him! We were talking, that’s all.”

Choso strikes before Mahito has even finished his sentence, clapping his hands together and shooting a razor-thin stream of pressurized blood at Nanami. Nanami reacts a split second too late, taking the blow to his side. The pain flares up like fire and he clutches the wound.

Two completely unknown curses against one sorcerer. Though Nanami had been confident in his ability to kill Mahito, he’s not sure about this new Choso, and he doesn’t have time to create a plan. Choso keeps pushing forward.

Nanami retreats.

“Oh, now look what you’ve done, he’s getting away!” Mahito complains. “Ugh! I’ll go after him.”

Nanami rounds the corner. The last thing he hears is Choso scolding Mahito: “not with the finger, you idiot! Give me that!”

It’s raining now. Nanami keeps running. He checks the blood pooling in his palm and winces at the amount. His waist is soaked in it. This is the first time he’s failed at his job in a while, which means he won’t get paid. His budget will be tighter this month. He’ll have to go through the math when he gets home.

He’s been off his game recently. It’s been weeks since he’s killed a curse and much longer since he killed a non-sorcerer. People notice things like that. There is always collateral, and if Nanami doesn’t produce collateral then it becomes obvious he’s intentionally avoiding it. The ratio should be roughly 3/10. Three humans for every seven curses.

He climbs the crumpled fence lining the highway. Someone’s car has broken down. They’ve popped the hood. Nanami leans on it to catch his breath and is taken off guard by the woman that appears from the other side with her phone in her hand.

She purses her lips to say something starting with a “w”, maybe “wait” or “what”, but Nanami’s body has already reacted without his input. Her expression stutters like she’s been stung by an insect, and then she falls to the ground, dead. Her lips are permanently frozen into that pursed shape, that one word trapped in her mouth forever.

A voice in the back of his mind says, two more and then I’ve hit my personal quota. 

With some effort, Nanami wrenches his eyes away from her face and staggers off.

“Idiot.” Choso smacks Mahito over the back of the head.

“Ow! Stop doing that.”

“There’s a reason you weren’t put on a strike force. You’re not cunning enough.”

“Hey, I got the finger, didn’t I?”

“Yes, and you got caught by a sorcerer!”

“So what?” Mahito folds his arms petulantly. “They’re going to know something’s up anyway, so who cares if I got caught in the act?”

Choso peers down at him with disgust, before scoffing and rolling his eyes. “Forget it.” Then he turns to the far end of the tunnel and calls out with a much bouncier tone, “Sanso! Were you watching?”

Sanso, one of his brothers, emerges from his hiding place with a wide grin. He has a patchwork body much like Mahito, but it’s strangely proportioned, as if assembled from a variety of different corpses. His eyes are dark and reflective, like glass. 

“You were cool, aniki,” Sanso says. “I wish I could be like you.”

“So long as you pay attention and practice diligently, you will be,” Choso says encouragingly. 

Mahito scoffs, earning himself a brief glare from Choso.

“Anyway,” Choso says, “we should contact groups A and B to let them know we’ve gathered our assigned fingers. You know what this means, Sanso? We can head home now.”

“Aw, but I want to train with you more, aniki.”

Choso laughs, pleased with this. “We’ve been away from home for quite a while now. Don’t you miss the rest of your brothers? Tanso and Kotsu? I know they’re missing you.”

Sanso sulks for a bit, but grudgingly accepts. 

Mahito waves a hand to open up one of his tunnels. A thick, dark red stain blooms from within the wall, beads of blood swelling up through the concrete. Moisture gathers on the ground, slowly pooling outwards. Usami greets them in the opening, staring beyond them.

Choso’s phone starts ringing, the sound filling the tunnel and startling them all. He stays behind to answer it.

“Choso,” Kenjaku says brightly.

“Mother,” Choso says. “We have acquired all of the fingers we were sent to retrieve. On the way home now.”

“That’s wonderful news. Is Sanso still okay?”

Choso holds the phone tighter against his ear, ignoring the way Mahito is impatiently tapping his foot. “Everything is fine, mother. Sanso is learning a lot and we’re both unharmed.”

“That’s good! I bet he’s missing all his brothers here at home. I know they’re missing him.”

Choso laughs slightly. “I’m sure.”

“Choso…” Kenjaku’s voice becomes unusually serious. “I have something I need to tell you.”

“What?” Choso starts to worry. He tries to remember the state he left each of his brothers in; they were all fit and healthy and if they had any plans to leave school grounds, they would’ve done so with an escort. “What happened? Is everyone okay?”

“Everything’s fine. It’s good news, Choso. Very good news.”

“Okay…” He’s still preparing himself for the worst.

“Do you remember when I told you a long time ago that you had one more brother who wasn’t yet with us?”

“Yes.” Choso has always felt that there was something missing even before she revealed this to him. He always felt the gnawing gap, the empty chair at the dinner table. Every now and then he wonders with longing what that missing brother is getting up to.

“Well…”

Choso’s heart starts to race. “Do you— do you mean to say—?”

Kenjaku only laughs. 

“Mother!” Choso cries. “Please don’t lie to me about this! Is this real?”

“It’s real, Choso. He’s here with us! I’m looking at him right now. He’s eating with everyone else.”

Choso is overcome by an unusually fierce wave of excitement. He hops in place like he’s psyching himself up for a workout. “I can’t believe— is he healthy?” He only realises he’s begun to cry when his voice cracks.

Both Mahito and Sanso are looking at him strangely now.

“Aniki?” Sanso asks.

“Healthy as a horse!” Kenjaku says. “With a healthy appetite, too! We, ah, need to discuss some things first, you and me. Will you come see me as soon as you get home?”

“I will, I will.”

“I’ll see you, Choso.”

“S–see you.” Choso sniffs and swipes his nose with his sleeve. “Ahem, see you.”

“Nanami!” Gojo says loudly, pulling out a chair and inviting Nanami in.

Nanami joins them at the table. He seems to have arrived in the middle of a deep discussion about hair and nails, spearheaded by Nanako and Mimiko who are gesticulating enthusiastically. A menu is placed in his hands.

“You’re looking a little peaky,” Gojo says, playfully fanning him with a wad of napkins. “Did the mission go okay?”

“It went fine,” Nanami says faintly.

“Kill anyone?”

“Satoru, not at the dinner table,” Geto scolds him.

“Yeah, yeah, like we don’t already know what Nanami’s gonna say?” Gojo slings an arm around Nanami’s shoulders, not noticing the way Nanami flinches. “Kids, Nanami here is a pacifist.”

“It’s a good thing,” Geto says encouragingly.

Gojo gives him a firm pat. “Good old Nanami. His heart’s in the right place, you know?”

The girls look disinterested. The restaurant is mostly empty, probably because Geto called ahead. Nanami has always thought it strange that they come here at all when the place is owned by non-sorcerers. A husband and wife. They’re both standing to attention by the kitchen doors, visibly nervous.

“Hey, do you want a drink?” Gojo asks. He snaps his fingers. “Hey, hey, we need another drink over here!”

“I’m fine,” Nanami says under his breath.

“Nah, come on, what do you want?”

One of the non-sorcerers fumbles over. On the way he drops his pen and paper and scrambles to pick it up. When he arrives at the table, he stares at Nanami, wide eyed and terrified. The sight makes Nanami feel sick.

“Water is fine,” he says curtly, wanting him to go away.

He does.

Meanwhile, Nanako is getting worked up, swiping through several photos on her phone and displaying them to everyone present. “This one would suit me, right? But this one is so cute, too! Ugh, I don’t know which one to pick!”

“Get the second one,” Mimiko says.

“You think? I dunno…”

“Just don’t get anything too crazy. You keep getting written up for disobeying the dress code,” Geto says. He’s running his finger around the rim of his glass, which contains something dark and rich. Probably alcoholic. Nanami checks his watch. Yes, it’s a good time to drink. Certainly not unusual. Maybe he should’ve ordered a real drink, too.

His water is placed in front of him, but the waiter is trembling so much that some of it spills.

Geto’s eyes narrow minutely. He sits up straighter like he’s about to say something.

“The second one,” Nanami says abruptly.

Everyone turns to him, bewildered.

He hides behind his glass. “I think it would suit you.”

“Really?” Nanako looks pleased with Nanami’s rare compliment. She pulls on her lip. Her nails are already finely manicured, but she changes them frequently. “You know, it’s kinda annoying that I can’t find anyone to work on my nails who’s a sorcerer. But I guess if you’re a sorcerer you don’t get to sit down for a job like that.”

“No,” Geto agrees. He looks somewhat displeased.

“Monkeys get it way too easy—”

Geto now looks very displeased. “Nanako, what have I said about using language like that in the right company?”

“Oh.” She glances at Nanami. “Sorry.”

Unfortunately, Gojo chooses that moment to try and help parent. “Just bear in mind that not everyone has the same, uh, constitution.”

“Eh? What do you mean by that?”

“Some people are pacifists and we love them. Don’t we, Nanami?”

Nanami grits his teeth and tries to bear with the sensation of Gojo jostling him excitedly. He’s starting to get frustrated with all of the touching and everyone’s voices. “I’m not a pacifist.”

“It’s a good thing,” Geto says again.

There’s a lull. They make their orders and wait for their food. They don’t even make it to the first course before they’re talking about monkeys again, and Nanami finds himself clutching the arm of his seat.

“It’s not going to be shut down,” Geto says dismissively.

Gojo is picking some bread apart. “It definitely is. Do you know any sorcerers who can cook like this?”

“Because none of us have time to cook. All of our lives revolve around curses. Ten years without curses and everything will change. Satoru, it’s like you don’t listen to me.”

“I listen to you all the time, I’m just saying, this food is one-of-a-kind.”

“I’d say it’s an even trade,” Nanako jokes. “Curses exist, but so does this restaurant!”

Geto sighs. “Don’t be silly.”

“Admit it.” Gojo leans into him. “You’d let a couple monkeys run around if you could keep eating their curried sea bass.”

Geto laughs, embarrassed. “Well…”

“See? He admits it!”

“You love monkeys!” Nanako teases.

Geto’s face turns red. “Nanako,” he says in a warning tone.

Nanami tries to focus on his bread. It’s not working. His hands are starting to tremble. When he tries to pick up his glass, it quivers, so he puts it down and hides his hands in his lap.

“Suguru loves monkeys,” Gojo sings. “Man, I should call the waiter over and tell him that! Maybe then he’d stop sweating into all the drinks.”

“All of you, enough,” Geto snaps with uncharacteristic heat.

“Your face is going red. Wow. Do you have something to tell me?” Gojo prods him. “You wanna break up with me for a monkey?”

“Stop it!” Nanami explodes. “Just stop! Stop talking about monkeys for one god damn second!”

The whole table turns to gawk at him. Humiliated, he wads up his napkin and slaps it down on the table before rising from his seat.

“Woah, wait, Nanami! Look, I’m sorry,” Gojo says.

“Nanami.” Geto sighs sharply and tugs on Nanako’s arm. “Girls, apologize.”

They apologize earnestly, but Nanami’s ears are ringing so he doesn’t even hear it. He shakes his head and retreats.

The cool air outside prickles on his overly-sensitive skin. His chest feels tight. He loosens his tie, trying to draw in a breath, but he still feels like he’s suffocating. Someone passing by asks him if he’s okay, but he ignores them. He hides himself away down an alley and leans heavily against the wall, bearing with it, trying to bring himself back down to earth.

This is happening more frequently lately. Maybe he’s going insane.

He feels someone’s steadying hand on his shoulder. Geto has followed him out to offer his calming presence. It works and Nanami slowly regains control of himself.

“Bad day?” Geto asks.

Nanami has no response for this.

“It’s okay if you find it difficult. It doesn’t make you a bad person.” Geto smiles earnestly. “It’s always a good thing to have people like you in this world, Kento. You don’t have to prove anything to me or anyone else.”

His words take some of the weight off Nanami’s shoulders. He allows himself to be pulled into an embrace. 

“It’s fine, it’s fine.” Geto’s hand roams across his shoulders in a way that feels calculated. “Don’t worry about your results. Don’t worry about whatever happened today. None of us will look at you differently no matter what you do.”

“I…” Nanami’s throat is dry. He swallows. “I failed to kill a curse today. Backup came. The two curses seemed to know each other. They took Sukuna’s finger from its resting place. I think— I think they went there specifically to retrieve it. I should’ve tried harder to find out why.”

He doesn’t mention what happened after that. Even though he knows Geto will be pleased, he doesn’t want to verbalise it and make it real. 

Geto’s grip tightens abruptly, but he regains control of himself a moment later and pats him on the arm. “That’s… strange. Ah, but don’t beat yourself up about it, Nanami. All that matters is, you’re alive. I’ll… talk to Satoru about this. You don’t have to worry. Take the day off tomorrow. Everything will be handled.”

Nanami feels impossibly cold, so he clings to Geto to sap what little warmth he’s being offered. 

Megumi is meeting a new trainee today. Her name is Nobara and she comes from a “good family”, which means she’s a true, trustworthy sorcerer. She’s the right kind of person for Megumi to hang around with.

But she’s been living in the countryside where the ratio of sorcerers to non-sorcerers is abysmal, so Megumi will have a lot to teach her. He’s very serious about doing this right, because once he takes her under his wing, her behaviour will reflect on him.

He waits at the train platform with his shoulders back and his head high, like he’s more important than everyone else. Like there’s a sword at his neck. The fact that he’s a sorcerer is obvious and people are giving him a wide berth. This is how it should be, Noritoshi would say. We’re the wolves and they’re the rabbits, and we’re all at peace so long as we’re all sharing the same waterhole. 

He’s been standing here for twenty minutes already because he arrived early. This mission came directly from Gojo, so Megumi wants it to go perfectly. 

“Shouldn’t be too hard, just get her up to speed,” Gojo had said casually, as if oblivious to his own importance. “Teach her how things work around here.”

Nobara is the last to get off her train because she’s taking a video with her phone. She spins in a slow circle, capturing the scope of the train station, before accidentally landing on Megumi. Megumi bristles at having a camera in his face.

“Oh, you must be Fushiguro,” she says, putting her phone away. She looks disappointed. “I seriously have the worst luck.”

Megumi isn’t sure what that’s supposed to mean. “I’m here to show you around the city and then take you back to the dorms. Curses are most common where there are large amounts of people, so you’ll be doing most of your work here. We’ve been assigned to a mission together tomorrow, so let’s use this time to get to know each other. Most importantly, you might not know this since you come from the countryside, but there’s a lot of attrition between sorcerers and— monkeys, so try not to talk to any.”

“Monkeys?” Nobara sighs and rolls her eyes. “Oh, man, you’re one of those. Whatever, let’s go.”

She strides past him at a brisk pace, essentially taking the lead. Startled, Megumi scrambles to catch up to her and try to reassert control.

“Um, right now we’re in Dogenzaka,” Megumi says. “There are a few restaurants here, so consider coming down if you have spare time in the evening. We’ve been having repeat occurrences of curses in an abandoned mall just—”

“Shut up for a second.”

“...Huh?”

Nobara has stopped to take a picture of a large storefront for designer clothes. She takes several from several angles, then picks a direction and moves on without Megumi’s guidance.

“Hey,” Megumi complains.

“You’re still here? You’re not my babysitter.”

“I got told to show you around.”

“Who by? Your dad?”

Megumi bristles at the mention of him. “No, by Gojo Satoru.”

“Hm.” Nobara seems only mildly impressed. Without another word she turns away from him to give the city her full attention. 

There’s nothing else Megumi can do but follow behind Nobara. She checks out several food stores before settling on a place that sells iced tea. She gets in line and buys one, then turns to Megumi.

Megumi is surprised by the sudden silence, with both Nobara and the cashier waiting on his response.

“Well?” Nobara asks. “What do you want?”

Megumi wouldn’t ordinarily eat outdoors, but he’s been taken off guard, so he picks something at random. A while later, he and Nobara have their drinks and they look like a normal pair of teens hanging out in the city.

“Am I really…” Megumi cuts himself off, but the rest of his sentence would’ve been, “allowed to have this?”

“Are you really what?” Nobara asks. “Really stupid? Yeah, looks like it. Pampered clan bastard like you, I bet you have servants at home making ice tea with stupid ingredients. Traditional iced tea. Bet you have to stick your pinkie out when you drink it.”

“That’s not true.”

“Hm. No iced tea at all, then. Sucks to be you.”

“It doesn’t suck to be a— to be—” Megumi can’t put his finger on what exactly Nobara is insulting him for, but there’s something derogatory in her tone. “It only sucks because of the curses. I’m proud of who I am and the work I do.”

She laughs. “Who cares about pride if you can’t even go out and buy a drink? Please.” 

“I can drink whatever I want.” Megumi frowns at his drink because Noritoshi would’ve frowned at it. Then he would’ve wiped the rim clean with his sleeve, because a monkey touched it. It would’ve been a subtle gesture that didn’t draw attention to itself, but Megumi knows from experience that those are the things that get noticed. He dutifully replicates.

“Oh, too dirty for the princess?” Nobara asks.

Megumi jolts. He wasn’t actually expecting to get called out on it, because isn’t it the most natural thing to do?

Nobara rolls her eyes at his questioning look and slurps on her ice tea without hesitation. No wrinkle on her nose, no sneering look, no performance. “Rich kid,” she mutters around her straw.

Unable to help his temper, Megumi rises to the challenge and does the same, just to prove he can, though it feels strange to drink something in public without a guideline on how to do so. It’s pleasantly cold with a mild yet sweet flavor. He pauses to savor the first taste, then realizes how thirsty he is and keeps drinking.

They continue roaming around the city. Nobara is endlessly amazed by all kinds of things that seem unremarkable to Megumi and she gushes over it out loud. This is amazing, I’ve always wanted to go here, woah, no way!

Megumi is only half listening. He keeps his eyes on his cup, watching it steadily deplete. When he throws it away, he stares at Nobara’s back instead, wondering why she’s so different. Once it starts getting dark, they catch a train back to the dorms. The only available seats are two narrow ones sandwiched between a bunch of non-sorcerers.

Noritoshi absolutely would not sit down under these circumstances, so Megumi doesn’t either. He’s surprised when Nobara walks past him and takes a seat.

“Nobara,” Megumi says, trying to subtly warn her.

“Yeah?” 

“You can’t…” He glances around, not wanting to be heard. “You’re going to get in trouble.”

“With who?” She quirks a brow, then rolls her eyes. “Oh, I get it. Princess wants me to put a napkin down on the seat ‘cause it’s too dirty.”

“That’s not it,” Megumi says angrily.

“Then sit your ass down.”

Megumi sits down with his ankles and knees locked firmly together. He’s trying to make himself small so he doesn’t brush up against anyone, but the non-sorcerer on his left gets uncomfortable and leaves anyway, which makes something unpleasant coil in his gut. Nobody says anything to him, but he swears he can sense a million eyes on him, scrutinizing him. 

He wonders irrationally if they know about the person he killed last week. Maybe someone witnessed it, maybe someone knew them, maybe they want revenge—

He calms himself down, like how Noritoshi taught him. 

Nobara is not scrutinizing him. She’s on her phone. It’s like she couldn’t care less what Megumi’s doing. The non-sorcerer beside her hasn’t moved an inch and doesn’t seem to have even noticed her presence. 

Maybe it’s easy for her, because she comes from a “good family”. Even if she acts wrong, she’ll always have that to fall back on. A part of Megumi resents her for it.

The train ride passes without issue. He plays on his phone to try and distract himself, and it actually works. Their stop arrives faster than he expects it to and they get off. 

“There, that wasn’t so bad, was it?” Nobara teases him.

The answer is an obvious “no”, but Megumi is too prideful to say it. He scoffs and heads to the dorms. His hands long to fidget with something so he ends up tugging on a strand of his hair for the whole journey. 

Nobara’s room is across from his own. She’s about to enter it without saying goodbye, because Megumi didn’t say goodbye either. Should he say goodbye? They’re both sorcerers, so it wouldn’t look weird.

“Goodbye,” Megumi blurts. “I’ll see you for the mission in the morning.”

Nobara seems surprised. Then she snorts and a laugh bubbles out of her that increases in intensity until Megumi is left staring at her in a daze. 

“Damn, did that hurt to say? The look on your face!” She exhales with exertion, clutching her stomach. “Fushiguro, you’re funny.”

“Thank you?”

She smiles and says, “see you in the morning, princess,” before pulling her door shut.

Megumi fumbles with his keys for a while, trying to find the right one. He drops it a few times. There’s an unusually light sensation in his chest and something tugging at his lips. 

Chapter Text

Yuji’s first lesson occurs within a small, cozy room. There’s a single table in the middle with a pair of chairs pulled up to it and nothing else. The window has been propped open, allowing the sweet honey smell of the trees to roll in. The air is full of birdsong and the sunbeams on the wood make it warm to the touch.

Kenjaku is his teacher. She sits with her back to the window, seeming to emanate a soft glow. She smiles and presents a cute stuffed animal to Yuji with a flourish. “Happy Birthday!”

A little startled by her enthusiasm, Yuji awkwardly accepts it. It’s a sleeping bear with boxing gloves and there’s a decent weight to it. “It’s not my birthday, though.”

“I missed all fifteen of them, so consider this the beginning of my journey in making up for it!”

Yuji waves her away frantically. He doesn’t want to be a burden, especially when she’s giving him such a precious opportunity to learn. “Oh, no, uh, you don’t have to do that!”

Her smile widens. Her eyes are attentive, eagerly absorbing every small movement he makes. It’s a little overwhelming, to be honest. “Nonsense, Yuji. You’re a precious student here, like my very own child.”

She says this last word with intent and Yuji can feel the depth of her devotion. He feels even more safe and secure in her school than before, and he’s invigorated to begin learning.

“Perhaps you can already sense it, but this is no ordinary toy,” Kenjaku explains, gesturing to the bear in Yuji’s arms. “This is a cursed corpse created by the late Masamichi Yaga. It’s a shame that I only briefly knew him. He firmly opposed the new order, and so, naturally…”

Yuji understands the implication. He looks down at the doll with conflicting emotions. It’s the lasting legacy of a sorcerer, yes— but a good one. One who stood against the others and died for it. “I’ll take good care of it,” he promises.

“See that you do! The mechanism behind it is very simple. It should help you develop a better understanding of your own cursed energy and how to use it.”

“This is nonsense,” Sukuna says. “When I was a boy, I honed my skill against curses. Throw him at a few and he’ll get the hang of it sooner or later.”

Kenjaku frowns. “That’s rather harsh, don’t you think?”

“It’s the fastest way to strengthen him up. It did me no harm back in the Heian era and curses were far stronger back then.”

“Well, it’s no longer the Heian era, is it? Yuji, ignore him.”

“I’m down to fight curses,” Yuji chirps, wanting to impress Sukuna.

“No, Yuji.” Kenjaku pushes the bear into his chest, forcing him to keep his grip on it. “Channel your cursed energy through that and learn safely. My goal is to provide you with the basic building blocks you need to make yourself a formidable curse user. The fancy things will come later.”

Sukuna says nothing more after that, so Yuji obeys. As he holds the bear, his thoughts wander.

Kenjaku gave him some assigned reading a week prior, and even though he usually sucks at keeping his concentration on a book, he was so eager to start learning that he devoured the whole stack in a single sleepless night.

He knows now that there are intelligent curses like Jogo, Hanami and Mahito, and that there are other, lesser curses who behave more like hungry animals. He struggled for a while with the idea of killing them, not wanting to jeopardize his relationship with his future senseis, and ended up tentatively broaching the topic with Jogo.

“What? Don’t bother me with this nonsense,” Jogo said gruffly, annoyed at being interrupted from his reading.

“He only wants to learn,” Hanami admonished him. The words appeared in Yuji’s mind as always, like they were stamped on the surface with ink. It was weird at first, but he’s used to it now.

Jogo scowled, but for her, he acquiesced. “It doesn’t matter who you kill, brat. We curses don’t hold the same types of grudges as you humans. If someone is threatening you, then kill them. It doesn’t matter who they are.”

Hanami nodded.

Yuji nodded, too.

“Despite all our disparate backgrounds, we are united by our hatred of sorcerers,” Kenjaku explained later. “It’s a beautiful thing! In that same vein I have some very important advice for you, dear Yuji. When you go into your lessons, imagine that every obstacle is a sorcerer. Channel that wonderful hatred within you into a powerful driving force.”

“I will,” Yuji said solemnly, wanting her to know how serious he was.

Hanami’s lessons occur outdoors. The heat is still punishing, but Yuji appreciates the opportunity to stretch his legs. He also enjoys the social aspect; rather than being one-on-one, he walks down to the training ground with an assortment of other students. The path is narrow and winding, but the view is amazing. His heart feels light when he gazes at the lush green mountainside, dappled with flowers and plunging smoothly into Dagon’s crystal clear lake. It looks pillow-soft and the temptation to roll down it is almost irresistible.

“This is my least favorite part of the week. Hanami’s the worst,” Junpei sulks. He’s already out of breath. A bug lands on his arm and he frantically swats it away.

Maki scoffs, perhaps in disagreement.

Trailing behind the two of them, Yuji tries to think of a middle ground to appeal to both. All he comes up with is, “the forest’s nice.”

Maki frowns at him like he said something strange, then picks up the pace and walks briskly ahead of the group.

Yikes, cold.

There’s someone unfamiliar bringing up the rear. He seems perfectly ordinary aside from his unusually gray and waxy skin, though Yuji can’t shake the feeling that he’s standing in the presence of something inhuman.

Not that it matters! Yuji’s not going to turn his nose up at the possibility of a new friend. “Hey, how’s it going?”

The guy startles, like he didn’t expect to be addressed. “Fine,” he says cordially. His lips don’t move precisely in time with his words and his voice seems to emanate from somewhere deep within him.

“I’m Yuji. What’s your name?”

“Tanso.” His body lurches like his insides have curled up and changed position, and suddenly Yuji feels like he’s being inspected much more closely.

He takes it in stride. “Well, it’s nice to meet you. This is my first time working with Hanami, so do you think you could give me some tips?”

“Hanami-sensei’s lessons are tiring. She’s a monster if you damage her favorite plants. We probably won’t be back in time for dinner, so I hope you ate breakfast.”

Yuji grins brightly despite his ominous warning. “Yeah, a lot of it. Can’t get enough of Uraume’s food right?”

“Right.”

“Right. Well, thanks, Tanso.”

Tanso’s eyebrow creeps up his forehead. “You’re welcome.”

They arrive at the meeting point. It’s situated at the cusp of the forest proper where the trees abruptly increase in density. Their branches intertwine, creating an impenetrable canopy overhead that completely blots out the light. The shadow on the ground clearly marks a boundary between what is safe and what is not.

Hanami is standing before them. There’s a small dandelion puff hovering in the air. She beckons it and once it lands in her palm she mercilessly crushes it.

“The forest must be maintained,” she says in that unusual way of hers. “Invasive plants keep growing. The losers of today’s game will stay behind to pull them up.”

From the school the forest looked endless, so Yuji doesn’t even want to know how long it’ll take to tidy it. He swallows nervously.

The rules are simple. They’ll be released into the forest with the objective of evading Hanami, who will enter ten minutes afterwards. Those who survive for a total of sixty minutes will achieve victory and go home to a hearty dinner while the rest will be forced to endure their punishment.

Hanami adds, “show me that you deserve greater.”

Yuji is confident in his speed and stamina, so he starts warming up. Can’t roll an ankle, right? As soon as Hanami counts them off, they all scatter into the undergrowth. Yuji quickly loses sight of the others and is left to fend for himself.

He knew it’d be dense, but what meets him is a whole new world of pain. Every step of the way he has to fight through clinging branches and vines that hang in his path and snag on his clothes. The ground is treacherous, riddled with pitfalls and sharp rocks that jut up dangerously.

Some of the plants are alive, too. Yuji mistakenly puts a hand on one as he’s trying to regain his balance, only for its petals to stretch outwards, revealing a barbed tongue that coils all the way up to his elbow. He feels it prick holes in his skin and start gulping down his blood. Frantically he shakes it off, clutching his arm, which is now bleeding freely and covered in some kind of greasy nectar.

Significantly weakened, he continues to stumble on with his vision swaying. He doesn’t realize he’s losing consciousness until he wakes up back at their starting point covered in mud and spiky seeds. He shivers at the sensation of something crawling up his back and unearths a dangerous-looking red centipede from his sweater.

Hanami is stooped over him. Without even giving him the chance to recover, she hands him a pair of thick gloves. “Begin your work. Cultivate patience and forethought. Most importantly, do not touch my orchids,” she says mercilessly.

Yuji looks around. Junpei, Maki and Tanso are all hard at work already, pulling up invasive plants with miserable grimaces on their faces. Guess they lost the game, too. Yuji joins them and they continue toiling until midnight. When it’s finally time to head up to the lunch hall together, sweat-drenched and exhausted, all they’re given are some cold leftovers.

“This is ridiculous, call Uraume,” Sukuna says.

“No way,” Yuji hisses under his breath, not wanting anyone to notice. “I’ve gotta take the punishment with the team! I don’t wanna be that guy who gets special treatment.”

“What team? You all embarrassed yourselves individually. I see you’ve already forgotten Kenjaku’s advice.”

“What advice? She gave me a bunch of advice. I’ve got a lot rolling around in my brain lately, okay?”

“You were to imagine all of your obstacles as sorcerers. If Hanami were a sorcerer, then you’d be one very dead monkey right about now, wouldn’t you agree?” Sukuna drawls.

It stings to hear that word uttered so casually by someone he admires. Yuji shakes his head to get rid of his negative thoughts, worrying irrationally that Sukuna might be able to read them. He resolves to try harder.

Once Maki is done, she lays her chopsticks down in that perfunctory way of hers before getting up and leaving without saying goodbye. There’s an angry glint in her eyes.

Junpei makes a nervous humming noise. “Ugh, I’m not looking forward to seeing her again in Hanami’s next lesson. She’s so competitive…”

Yuji can’t help the desire he feels to get to know her better. “Hey, being competitive isn’t a bad thing.”

Junpei shudders and begins to vent about what gym class was like back at his old school. Yuji listens attentively. A part of him wishes he could’ve been there, because he’s certain he would’ve picked Junpei first.

“Alright, does everyone have a pen?” Kenjaku asks, linking her hands together beneath her chin. She’s wearing her hair loose today. It makes her look older and more elegant.

It’s becoming more and more apparent that Kenjaku prefers the informal approach to education. They’re in the lounge today — perhaps the whole student body — spread out across sofas and beanbags, with some sitting on the plush carpet. Not too many people, but definitely enough to fill out a classroom. Yuji tries to count heads, but it’s difficult because there are humans blended with curses, as well as creatures who seem to be a mix of both.

They’ve all been given plenty of time to acclimatize to their surroundings, with drinks and snacks laid out on the table in the center. Yuji is halfway through a cocoa and he’s desperately restraining himself from eating any more marshmallows, since he (and Sukuna) have already depleted the communal bowl to the dregs.

The fireplace is hot. When Yuji first entered, he and a few other students stood in awe before it, realizing that it contained no flame despite its warm amber glow and was simply an enormous brick chute that plummeted into the school’s sleeping magma chamber miles below. Jogo must be powerful as hell for them to feel the heat of his creation at such a great distance.

“I want you to write your motivation for being here on the piece of paper in front of you,” Kenjaku explains. “Don’t be shy, just be honest. I’ll give you ten minutes to dig deep. And don’t sign it, that’ll defeat the point.”

There’s a hushed murmur among the students, then total silence as everyone lowers their heads to concentrate. Yuji’s sheet of paper only has enough room for a few lines, so he’ll have to condense his motivations into something fairly brief.

…Which should be easy. Yuji has never been a wordy guy. He doesn’t embellish things. He puts pen to paper faster than everyone else, writes his motivation with absolute certainty and sets it aside.

To kill sorcerers, he wrote. He’s not going to delude himself into believing that he has any grand purpose. Grandpa always told him he had a bunch of marbles for a brain— he’s not a philosopher or anything, and that’s fine. Right now he’s just a tool to progress Sukuna’s goals and there’s nothing wrong with that.

Once ten minutes have passed, Kenjaku roams around the room collecting everyone’s papers. She straightens them by smacking them once against her palm, then shuffles them like a deck of cards and disperses them once again at random.

Yuji receives a piece of paper with someone’s precise and formal handwriting on it. Whoever they are, their “ts” are a little taller than their “ls”. Yuji feels like he’s spying in on something intimate by noticing this. The text reads, to carve a place for myself where I belong, to make the pain stop, to get stronger.

“Uh, Kenjaku?” Yuji asks. “Are you allowed to write more than one thing?”

Kenjaku smiles pleasantly. “Yes, if you have more than one motivation.”

“Ah. Okay.” Damn. If Yuji knew that, he might’ve also written, to avenge my friends.  

“While I’ve got you talking, Yuji, why don’t you get us all started? Tell us what’s written on the paper you’re holding.” When he dictates it to the class, her smile widens. “What do you think of that, Yuji?”

“It sounds good to me,” Yuji says earnestly. “They’re, I dunno, good motivations. They’re not things you’re gonna waver on, that’s for sure.”

“Good, good. Can you sympathize with the way this person feels?”

“Yeah, ‘course. I feel the same way, so…”

She nods and moves onto the next student. “Maki, would you please read out what you have?”

Maki is sitting at a distance on a hard wooden chair that’s angled away from a small table bearing a pitcher of sunflowers. She reads out what miraculously happens to be Yuji’s motivation.

Yuji flushes, hearing it from her mouth. She makes it sound way more serious than it seemed in his head.

“And what do you think of that?” Kenjaku prompts her.

“It’s too simple,” is Maki’s verdict. “Whoever wrote this needs to think deeper. We aren’t just killing sorcerers for no reason.”

Yuji grumbles with embarrassment and tries his best not to correct her, because all that’ll do is expose him in front of the whole class.

“But, can you sympathize with their feelings?” Kenjaku asks.

Maki's lips press into a tight white line.

"Maki," Kenjaku says, "we're all allies working towards the same cause, but we're all unique people with different backgrounds, too. Everyone has their own story." She doesn't speak admonishingly, but her words hold power all the same. She has a mysterious sort of allure that reminds Yuji of Sukuna. Though the effect is much less powerful in her case, she is someone who commands respect with her presence alone.

"Alright fine,” Maki says reluctantly. “I can sympathize. We’re all here to kill sorcerers, so it’s not like I’d blame anyone for looking forward to it.” It might just be Yuji's imagination, but her eyes seem to flick over in his direction to momentarily affix him with a frigid glare.

Yuji tries to pretend he doesn't notice it.

Kenjaku is nodding. “Anger makes one’s thoughts very simple. This isn’t always a bad thing.” She continues, picking on each member of the class in turn. Yuji has fun trying to match motivations with faces, even though most of them are unfamiliar.

The next time he sees Hanami, he schools himself into believing that she is the enemy; a sorcerer just like Gojo Satoru. He jumps into the game with even more fervor, bowling through obstacles and gritting his teeth despite the pain. He dodges any suspicious-looking plants, keeping his arms close to avoid brushing up against anything.

It’s no use. Out of nowhere, Hanami appears like a ghost, grabbing him around the neck and shoving him to the ground with force. The overgrown grass consumes him and in seconds he’s unable to move. His blood is drained just like before and he wakes up back at the start with a half-empty glass of water in hand that he doesn’t remember drinking from.

“I know what you’re thinking,” Tanso says while they toil in the dirt, since they all lost once again. “Stop thinking it. We’re never going to beat Hanami.” His face is all swollen, probably from some poisonous thorns or something.

Yuji is annoyed. “Huh? What kind of an attitude is that? So what if it’s hard work? We’re weaker, so it makes sense that we have to struggle a lot to get on the same level as sorcerers. You can’t give up halfway.”

“You’re not understanding me. We’ll lose because it’s an unwinnable game. Unless you’ve got a good cursed technique, you’ve got no hope.”

“He’s right, Yuji,” Junpei says apologetically. “Hanami can feel every step we take. If we so much as brush up against a leaf on a cobweb, she’ll know. I hope she gets tired of this game soon and gives us an easier assignment…”

Yuji isn’t going to let their attitudes affect him. “Screw cursed techniques. If it was impossible, Hanami wouldn’t be making us do it in the first place! There must be a way, we just haven’t thought of it yet. Hey, Junpei, what’s your best time?”

He laughs bashfully. “Uh, maybe twenty minutes. Moon Dregs is kind of… bioluminescent? If I summon her, she lights the way and I see Hanami coming. Not that I’m fast enough to outrun her.”

Yuji turns to Tanso next, who says, “twenty-five.” The expecting silence afterwards forces him to elaborate. “It’s hard to explain if you haven’t seen it, but I can break myself into smaller parts. She has to catch them all, which takes her some time.”

“Gotta catch them all!” Yuji can’t help but add. Tanso blinks at him in confusion.

…Nevermind.

When it’s Maki’s turn, she says, “forty-five.”

They all recoil with surprise. Weeding is now the last thing on their minds.

“Maki, you’ve been holding out on us!” Yuji exclaims.

She seems annoyed to have everyone’s attention. “Like Junpei said, the plants of the forest are an extension of her, so of course she can feel everything they can feel. You can’t just storm in and expect results. You need to watch your step.”

“So it’s about, like, stealth and subtlety?”

“That’s only part of it. There’s pollen. Dust in the air. She can feel that, too, to an extent. The forest is inescapable and everything that steps foot within it becomes her prey. You’ll be tracked down no matter what, so as well as stealth, you need speed and power to survive the final leg. Of course, if you think all that matters is having a good technique” —she spits this word disdainfully— “you may as well surrender before you even begin.”

She leaves them to go uproot plants elsewhere. The silence after that is sobering and Yuji finds his eyes wandering to her repeatedly.

Even though he only gets a few scrapings of rice that night (which annoys Sukuna), he wakes up the next day eager for another attempt. This time, in the forest, he picks through the trees quickly but carefully, holding his breath through several particularly tight squeezes. He clocks out at exactly ten minutes when he accidentally touches one of Hanami’s orchids, which summons her to him in a vengeful rage. It’s his best time yet.

Their gardening hours are starting to become routine, so he speaks comfortably while they work together. “I’ve got an idea,” he says. “Hanami didn’t say we weren’t allowed to team up or anything, right? Let’s go in as a group.”

Maki frowns. “Wouldn’t that just make us a bigger target?”

“I mean, it’s the only thing we haven’t tried.”

“What about not entering the forest at all? Maybe it’s a trick,” Junpei proposes.

“Already tried that, failed,” Tanso says. “Split myself and tried to head back up the mountain. She found me even easier.”

Yuji’s even more sure of it now. “Teamwork makes the dream work.”

Maki seems doubtful of Yuji’s leadership ability, but reluctantly agrees. Junpei and Tanso fall in line afterwards, swayed by her.

Saturdays are their off-days. Lazing around makes Yuji feel anxious, like he’s running out of time, so he decides to give his cardio a boost by jogging several times around the perimeter of the school.

He meets Maki along the way. She’s dressed down in her gym wear and is jogging on a slightly different route, which briefly overlaps with his own. Just to be friendly, Yuji catches up to her and keeps in pace for a while. When she realizes he’s there, he smiles widely, but she recoils with disgust from him and abruptly makes a turn in the opposite direction.

Yuji is kind of offended, even though he tries not to be. He keeps working out until he’s exhausted and sweating, then he heads into the lunch room for a quick drink. Unfortunately, Uraume is there so it’s anything but quick.

“You exerted yourself without first eating,” Uraume says accusingly.

“Oh, yeah. Whoops, I guess I forgot.”

Uraume clamps a savage hand down on his shoulder, forcing him into a seat. They procure several dishes in quick succession, overloading the table he’s sitting at. There’s curried spinach, chickpeas with a tasty herb dressing, a dish of eggs with bright golden yolks and several slices of fried tuna steak, each as thick as one of Yuji’s schoolbooks. The moment he clears off one dish, Uraume rushes to replace it with another. 

By the time it’s over, he feels too sluggish to do any more solo training. He goes straight back to his dorm and collapses on his bed without bothering to slide the door shut. This is a mistake, because when he next opens his eyes, he’s face to face with Tanso, who has entered his room without invitation to loom ominously over him.

Yuji yelps, lurching up off the bed. Then he clutches his racing heart, trying to catch his breath. “Dude, you almost made me shit myself.”

Tanso’s eyes widen. “Seriously?”

“Uh, no, it’s a figure of speech.” Yuji stares at him curiously. “You need something, man?”

Tanso confesses that he came to “get to know him better”, since they’ll be teammates in the near future. Yuji is delighted to hear this and immediately invites him down onto the bed while he goes to rifle through his DVD stack. Junpei helped him hook up an old DVD player since the school doesn’t have WiFi (and is in fact completely disconnected from the outside world). Apparently Junpei asked Mahito to steal a specific model for him but he kept getting the wrong one, so he has plenty of spares.

They spend the afternoon watching anime together. Yuji carries the conversation since Tanso is so quiet. He seems like a “back of the classroom” kind of guy who broods and stares mysteriously off into the distance when girls try to talk to him. He’s blunt and his tone is discomfortingly flat, which makes him seem mildly angry at all times. He also sits very still, like a spider on the wall, and his fingers flex in his lap like an insect’s feelers.

Yuji’s never had trouble making friends with any type of person though, so he takes it all in stride and works tirelessly on making Tanso open up. By the end of the day, Tanso has a favorite Pokemon and has promised to stop by next week to continue a box set they’re both hooked on.

It’s their eighth run, and Yuji is determined for it to be their last.

Hanami counts them off and they push through the boundary together as a unit. After the initial sprint, they find a place to group up.

“Alright, let’s do this,” Yuji says. He’s not exactly a natural leader, but he’s always been great with people. He was the teacher’s first pick whenever there was a new kid that needed a buddy to coax them out of their shell, and Yuji was so good at it that he’d always have them smiling by the end of the day.

Maki’s hand is tight on her sheathed sword. “I hope you have a plan.”

Yuji does. Or, a vague one at least. He asks Junpei to put Moon Dregs at the head, and he gets Maki to lead the way and demonstrate to them how she’s been doing it up until now. She picks through the underbrush expertly, bending her body gracefully to avoid the myriad plants that reach towards her. The rest of their group follow suit, straining to mimic her movements.

“Watch the plants carefully,” she says. “Some are more aware than others. Those are the ones you need to take special care to avoid.”

“Right,” Yuji says. He ducks beneath several pitcher plants with yawning mouths that seem drawn to his presence. A drop of acid leaks from one of them, splattering on the floor with a sharp hiss. “Tanso, if Hanami catches a piece of you, can you feel it?”

Tanso tilts his head. “Yes. Each piece has its own consciousness and— forget it. You’ll understand it if you see it.”

“Leave a few pieces behind as we go. Then we can gauge how far Hanami is from us, what direction she’s coming from and how much time we have left before we need to start hauling ass.”

Tanso hitches up his sleeve, exposing his arm. Several thin stilt-like legs unfurl from beneath his flesh, which breaks up into segments of hard carapace. It detaches fully, skittering to the floor and disappearing beneath the grass. It has long probing feelers and several black eyes inlaid like gemstones on the top of its head.

Yuji whistles, impressed. “Nice, dude! That’s gnarly as hell!”

Tanso seems surprised at the compliment. His gray face flushes to a sickly purple with embarrassment. “Thank you.” His voice is so quiet Yuji barely hears it.

They trek on, careful to make their presence in the forest as unobtrusive as possible. Thirty minutes pass. Then thirty-five. This is a personal best for Junpei, Yuji and Tanso, and Yuji knows that all of their hearts are beating fast in anticipation. Meanwhile, Maki continues at the head with the same stoic determination as always.

“I wonder why you are the leader and not her,” Sukuna says. “She is certainly better suited for it.”

Yuji shushes him urgently, but unfortunately Maki hears anyway and glances back at him with a raised eyebrow. After briefly measuring him, she scoffs and returns her attention to the trail. 

“Sukuna,” Yuji complains under his breath, “you’re embarrassing me.”

“Oh, my. Trying to impress the girl?”

“What?! Man, you don’t get it. Go back to sleep or whatever it is you do in there.”

Sukuna rolls his eye and disappears.

“My arm,” Tanso barks. At this point he has left behind three separate bugs; the two others came from his midsection, and now he’s walking at a slight slant. “Coming from the east! Hanami just flew right past!”

Junpei makes a strange noise. “Oh, she’s so fast! What do we do? W—we still have” —he checks his phone— “twenty minutes!”

“Let’s pick up the pace.” Yuji runs to the head of the pack, matching stride with Maki. Up until now she's been limiting her pace to ensure that Tanso and Junpei can keep up, but now it's time to run.

Her expression is severe, illuminated an ethereal blue by Moon Dregs. The light seems to dance in her eyes— a bright but controlled flame whose power seems to course throughout her whole body. She powers on ahead like there’s a sorcerer just out of arm’s reach who she can catch if she pushes herself just a little bit harder.

Yuji knows then that Kenjaku gave her the same advice that she gave him: to imagine that every obstacle ahead is a sorcerer. He feels kinship with her and he’s comforted to know that her hatred runs just as deep as his own. He focuses on running, bolstered by her presence. His heart is pounding in his chest. This is the final stretch. His blood is pumping so hard he’s almost enjoying it and an involuntary grin spreads across his face.

“Twelve minutes!” Junpei cries. “Are you kidding?! Are we— we’re actually gonna make it!” Moon Dregs is bouncing and swirling above him as it ricochets erratically from branch to branch.

“Watch out for the orchids,” Maki warns them, not even sounding out of breath. She’s trained her body much more rigorously than any of them if the muscles are anything to go by. Orchids sway in their path like landmines, peering up from beneath carpets of ivy.

“Message from another bug, she’s close,” Tanso warns them. “Maybe a mile out!”

Junpei chokes. “I— I can’t— keep—!”

He begins to fall behind, but Maki slings an arm around his and practically carries him alongside her like a bundle of lumber. Junpei flails helplessly in her grip. Just then, Moon Dregs gives out a rattle, the electric pulses in its tentacles flashing rapidly. When Yuji pitches a glance over his shoulder, he spots Hanami quickly gaining on them. The dense forest obediently parts for her, giving her a clean runway.

“Not a chance,” Yuji says. If this were a sorcerer rapidly gaining on his allies, he already knows how he’d handle it.

Maki curses, whirling around in confusion to figure out what he’s doing.

He digs his heels into the ground and turns on the spot, running back in Hanami’s direction. He snatches an orchid on the way, snapping its stem, which oozes sticky fluid. She seems appalled. It’s hard to tell with her inhuman face, but the way her jaw drops can’t be faked. He just barely ducks under her reaching arm, scrambling behind her and continuing in the opposite direction from his teammates.

Hanami doesn’t even hesitate to follow him in her rage.

Sukuna laughs loudly. “What an adorable trick!”

Yuji can’t reply because he’s breathing too heavily. He pushes himself so hard his vision bleeds purple and several times he has to make like a rabbit and abruptly dodge in another direction to escape capture. It’s fun while it lasts, because even though Yuji is weaker — especially because he’s weaker — it makes him feel strong to torment Hanami. It’s over all too soon, though. He’s still a newbie and he gets caught before the timer hits zero, waking up at the starting point as the sole loser.

He feels satisfied, despite that. He achieved his own form of victory. He stares tiredly up at the faces peering down at him.

“Pretty good, right?” he asks.

“Why?” Maki begins interrogating him immediately because she can’t just accept a good thing for some reason. “Was it your plan from the beginning to forfeit the match for us? What, do you think we’re weak or something? I didn’t need your help to win!”

“Nah, it was just instinct, I guess. I really thought we could all win together, actually.”

“And yet, you lost, Yuji,” Hanami says haltingly. The broken orchid has been affixed to her body, which it draws lifesaving nutrients from. She helps Yuji upright and points him to a patch of invasive flowers somewhat regretfully.

Ah, well. Yuji gives his teammates a small smile to reassure them that he’s okay before limping over to his work post. He uproots a plant dutifully and sets it into a basket. It’ll be a long night, especially since he’s working alone now.

A pair of hands come to join him. He looks up. It’s Maki.

“Uh, Maki, you won, you don’t have to do this crap,” he reminds her.

She flushes slightly. “Just shut up,” she snaps.

Confused, Yuji rummages through the leaves for another plant and is surprised when Junpei joins him next, followed by Tanso.

Yuji makes a dumb sound.

Junpei smiles softly, hesitantly. “You picked me for your team, Yuji. That means we lost together and— and we’ll win together, too! We just need to keep trying.” It’s sort of cute, in a baby bird kind of way.

Tanso’s body is fully reformed. He nods along, his cheeks a deep purple. 

“You three earned your victory according to the rules of the game, and yet you reject the reward?” Hanami asks.

“You heard Junpei. We lost together,” Maki informs her. 

Hanami stares at them for a while in thought, before approaching and kneeling beside them. She’s much bigger and heavier than them, so there’s a loud creak like a tree being felled when she bends her knee. With nothing but a small gesture, the invasive flowers uproot themselves and skitter away in terror like insects.

“Woah, Hanami!” Yuji whoops, always impressed. 

She puppets one of the plants to crawl up his arm and across his shoulders before sending it back to the ground. It tickles, and he laughs. 

For the rest of the night Hanami stays with them, helping them to complete the chore. Thanks to her, they wrap things up so quickly that they make it back in time for dinner. 

Chapter Text

The way it works is, trainee sorcerers get periodic “assessment checks” from their superiors, just to make sure they’re developing at a good pace. If they aren’t, someone will tweak their training regiment to try and put them back on track. Since fighting curses is so dangerous, every effort is made to ensure trainees are equipped to defend themselves, which includes rooting out any bad or possibly deadly habits they may have developed along the way.

Some trainees don’t get checks as frequently as others, and some only get checks from certain sorcerers. 

In Megumi’s case, his checks are always done by Nanami and nobody else. They’re perfunctory and Nanami rarely shares more than a few unembellished observations. Afterwards, Megumi is left to continue his work without many changes. This is because he trains obsessively — no, desperately —  and his reviews are always glowing. Even when he’s not out in the field, he spends his nights rewriting Nanami’s mild corrections in a notebook just to make sure they’re at the forefront of his mind at all times.

He never feels particularly proud of his achievements for very long though, since everyone else gets more praise from better people for doing less. He knows it’s shallow and greedy to want more than Nanami can give, but he can’t help the way he feels. 

Noritoshi complains about his checks every now and then. Sometimes Geto does them for him, which is an honor. He’s always made to explore new avenues, train new muscles and pursue new tactics. A lot of work gets put into expanding his arsenal of techniques, or at least that’s how Megumi sees it. Noritoshi would prefer to hone one singular talent to perfection rather than waste his time and effort being an average all-rounder, but he doesn’t disobey and he always follows his sensei’s instructions to the letter.

Today is Nobara’s first check and Megumi has escorted her to the meeting point, because that’s his job. He’s gotten used to the routine. They’ve killed a few curses together now and though they’re hardly friends for it, Megumi feels a little bit more comfortable in her presence. It’s a dangerous thing. She still isn’t absorbing Megumi’s lessons on proper conduct, so she’s kind of a loose cannon. A bad influence. If he starts acting as comfortable around non-sorcerers as she does, he might forget himself at a crucial moment when he’s with someone more discerning, like one of the older sorcerers.

In the end, it’s a battle of willpower. He just has to have stronger convictions than her. 

This check will be more of the same; she will kill a curse in front of an observer and they will make notes on her conduct. How she found it, how she secured the area, her speed, her precision. Megumi thinks she’ll get a solid B, if not an A-.

“Lame, lame, lame,” Nobara says, shading her eyes from the sun and trying to absorb herself in her phone. She isn’t really dressed for battle and Megumi told her so when they met in the hallway, but she insisted on being “cute” anyway. Megumi is starting to regret fully covering up in his usual black sorcerer’s uniform, because the sun really is intense today and he’s starting to feel overdressed. He refuses to admit it to Nobara though, because he knows she’d laugh at him.

Gojo appears without a sound right by their side, as he always does. It makes Nobara jump, but when Megumi gets shocked his reaction is always to freeze. Nanami has persistently made note of this, but Megumi is still struggling to train himself out of the habit. Gojo is also dressed for the weather, making Megumi feel even more excluded. He tugs on his collar self-consciously.

“Looks like we’re the first ones here! You settling in okay, Nobara?” Gojo asks brightly. He’s got a habit of jumping straight to first names and insisting on the same in return, whether you’re comfortable with it or not.

“Been fine,” Nobara says, mildly annoyed but not at all intimidated, as if Gojo is just an ordinary guy. Megumi watches their exchange from a small distance, wincing at her bad manners. He has summoned one of his demon dogs, since he finds its presence comforting. His fingers trace the markings on its forehead with increasing rapidity. It looks up at him with something akin to worry.

Thankfully, Gojo doesn’t seem offended by Nobara’s impoliteness. If anything, he seems amused. “Suguru’s a busy guy, but he likes to keep track of you kids. Word is, you’ve already chewed through a decent amount of curses!”

“Yeah, ‘cause the pay’s so shitty you need to kill five to afford a decent lunch.”

He laughs. “Uh-oh, sounds like dinner’s on me.”

“Oh, I know what your salary is. Dinner is most definitely on you.”

“Alright, alright. I hope you like sushi. Suguru — er, that’s Geto-sensei — has been dying to go to this fancy sushi place. I think they do steak, too, if you’d prefer that.”

Nobara gasps. “Wagyu steak! You’re gonna get me a wagyu steak, right?”

“If today goes well. If it doesn’t, you’re getting a side of fries and that’s it.”

“Oh, I’m gonna kick this curse’s ass. What have you got lined up? Give me anything and I’ll kill it.”

Geto finally arrives and enters their circle. Megumi hadn’t noticed him approaching, so he’s taken off guard. By accident, he squeezes the back of his demon dog’s neck a little bit too tightly and it nudges him with a small whine of concern.

“Shh,” he hisses at it, sweating now.

Nobara is the only one who notices him, fixing him with a brief, questioning frown. Megumi shakes his head urgently and she thankfully returns her attention to Geto.

“I looked at your records,” Geto says appreciatively. “Five curses already, and you only started last week. That’s wonderful progress, Kugisaki.” He seems honestly pleased. You can tell because the smile on his face is slightly crooked and his eyes are crinkled. It hasn’t been meticulously practiced to perfection like that plastic one he wears for TV.

“I was just telling her,” Gojo agrees.

Nobara is still frowning. “Yeah, thanks.”

“Being a sorcerer is a difficult and dangerous job, which is why it’s so important to celebrate achievements like this,” Geto says.

Gojo nods. “Enjoy life while you can.”

“That’s a bit dark, Satoru.”

“Just saying.”

Geto shakes his head with bemusement. “Ignore him, Kugisaki. He doesn’t think before he speaks. It might be genetic.”

Nobara finally puts her phone away. “Hey, it’s not just me killing these curses, you know. Megumi’s been stuck to my hip the whole time.”

Megumi’s whole body goes cold. The atmosphere drops like a rock. Unable to speak, he grabs her sleeve in a desperate attempt to make her shut up— to make those words go back into her mouth.

“Oh,” Geto says. “Well, I knew that.”

There’s no outright anger, disdain or disapproval in his voice, but it’s still a completely different voice to the one he’s been addressing Nobara with up until now. Megumi can’t put his finger on what exactly has changed, but there’s a certain quality to it that makes Megumi want to melt into the floor and disappear.

“His shikigami are pretty interesting. The dogs have got to be my favorite. So cute,” Nobara continues, cluelessly digging the hole even deeper.

Geto’s eyes slide over Megumi without seeing him and settle on the dog pressed close to his side. “Right. And why is it summoned right now?” He laughs sharply. “Is there a curse somewhere nearby?”

Gojo smiles like it’s a funny joke, but the effect it has on Megumi is like being stabbed in the gut. He doesn’t know why. He hates himself for his weakness, for feeling pain at nothing. He opens his mouth, but no response comes out, so he silently dismisses the dog instead.

Except Geto frowns, which is not what Megumi wanted. “I didn’t say you had to get rid of it.”

“Oh.” Megumi wonders if he’s supposed to apologize.

“Are you going to summon it back?”

Megumi links his fingers, unsure if this is an order disguised as a suggestion.

“It’s fine, I wasn’t asking you to,” Geto says dismissively, swiftly steering the conversation away from him. “Anyway, Nobara, I deliberately picked a curse that seems to prefer fighting in close quarters. I want to challenge you with this one. I understand that you work best at a distance, but you can’t always rely on your opponents to give you space to use your techniques.”

There’s a challenging glint in Nobara’s eyes. “Oh, well, I think Megumi’s got me covered on that. He’s great at getting up close."

Geto nods. “That’s good, I’m glad you’re watching out for each other. This is your assessment, though, not his.”

“What if I don’t wanna solo hunt? Then there’s no point in me having a solo assessment.”

“Fushiguro’s going with Nanami, right?” Gojo cuts in loudly. “They’re a cute little pair, they’ll be fine together. It’s not like Nanami to be late, though. Maybe someone jumped on the train tracks?”

“Satoru,” Geto scolds him.

“Just saying.”

“That’s a completely inappropriate joke to make.”

“Aw, it was just a joke.” Gojo huffs and puts his hands on his hips. “Fushiguro, you’re fine with that, right? Good old Nanamin will be here in a second, so just wait around or grab a drink or something.”

Megumi prefers to keep a respectful distance between himself and his superiors, but it stings nonetheless every time Gojo refers to him as Fushiguro when he’s so much more open with everyone else. With mostly everyone else. The stupid name has weighed on him like a boulder his entire life, but he forces himself to nod.

“Hold on,” Nobara begins.

Megumi tugs Nobara’s sleeve again. “Don’t, it’s fine,” he whispers under his breath.

“See? It all works out fine this way,” Geto says.

But Nobara just doesn’t know when to quit. She keeps fighting back, keeps digging her heels in. “Aw, this is lame! I don’t wanna hang out with a bunch of old people all day. Even if Fushiguro’s a princess, he’s still in my age group!”

Geto sighs. “It’s hardly individual training if there’s more than one person.”

“Then screw the individual stuff and make it a group lesson. It can’t hurt, right?” Nobara raises an eyebrow challengingly. “Or, is it because you don’t want to?”

“Kugisaki,” Megumi snaps, unable to bear the embarrassment any longer. “Just stop it, I’m going with Nanami, alright? I don’t want to be with you all the damn time.”

Her eyes widen and she recoils at the insult, honestly surprised. Megumi regrets it as soon as it leaves his mouth, but he assures himself that this is for the best. He bottles his emotions when Nobara’s face goes cold and she turns away from him, departing with Geto and Gojo. He barely even registers their farewells, if they even said anything at all.

Overwhelmed, he picks a random direction and rushes off to find some privacy. He moves through the dense crowds of people like he’s in a dream until finally he escapes into an alleyway. He starts crying almost before he gets there, feeling stupid and weak and rejected. He doesn’t even know what he’s crying for and he roughly swipes away the tears, resenting each and every one.

He cries until his soul feels wrung dry, and then he finally picks himself up, sniffs and prepares to face the crowd again.

Nanami is standing beside him. For a fairly large man, he can be silent when he wants to be and it always surprises Megumi how he blends into the background of every room. After the shock wears off, Megumi remembers himself and tries to tug his collar over his nose to at least hide some of his face.

“It’s fine, don’t be ashamed,” Nanami says quickly. 

His reassurance is pointless. Megumi shakes his head. “Just ignore me, this is stupid.”

Nanami considers him. “Let’s go eat something and we’ll start your assessment afterwards. It’ll give you time to recover. If you aren’t focused, it’ll skew your results.”

Megumi is relieved that Nanami is obscuring his generosity behind a veneer of practicality. It makes Megumi feel less weak to accept it. He follows Nanami out of the alleyway in silence. For a moment he considers summoning his dog again, but he’s not sure if it would comfort him anymore. He’s embarrassed to have ever done it in the first place.

They eat something small and nondescript, and it doesn’t reflect poorly on Megumi even though they’re surrounded by monkeys because Nanami is the one who chose the location. Afterwards, on the way to their mission, they pass the iced tea place Nobara introduced Megumi to.

They went back there a few times between missions. Nobara took a liking to it, so she made it a habit. With each visit, Megumi lost some of his nervousness until walking through the door felt completely natural and he no longer questioned if he belonged there. Now all of that progress has been easily undone and he stares up at the sign anxiously.

“Do you want one?” Nanami asks.

Megumi jolts. “No. No, it’s— there are monkeys in there. I don’t like eating food at random places. I’m okay with whatever you pick.”

For a while, Nanami doesn’t say anything. Megumi silently dares him to call it a lie— to claim that Megumi is being insincere in his hatred. He doesn’t have any proof and Megumi can always call upon Noritoshi to back him up. He’s certain that his friend will help him, even at his own expense, even if Megumi doesn’t deserve it.

“Megumi,” Nanami says.

Megumi’s reply is sudden and defensive. “What?”

Nanami puts a hand on his shoulder and Megumi flinches, expecting pain to follow, but all that comes is Nanami’s warm voice. “You have the ten shadows. Nobody can do anything to you that you don’t want them to do. Our system is based on power, and your technique is powerful. If you want iced tea from a monkey, then go get one.” His hand slips away and his voice goes tired. “Just don’t get attached, because you’ll have to keep killing them no matter what.”

As Megumi is staring up at him, he tosses his head in the direction of the door, gesturing for Megumi to enter. So, for the first time, without Nobara, he goes and buys himself a drink.

“Ready to go?” Nanami asks once he’s done, and they continue to the location of Megumi’s assessment.

Megumi feels like Nobara has been stolen from him before he even had the chance to get to know her, but he doesn’t understand why he feels that way. There’s no guarantee they ever would’ve become friends. In fact, he knows logically that they wouldn’t, because it wouldn’t be the right way of things. Noritoshi would raise an eyebrow. 

He clutches the drink tightly as if it were one of his dogs. It actually does comfort him a bit.

Suguru isn’t a heavy drinker, but he dabbles a little when he’s stressed. It seems like a matter of principle more than anything else. ‘I’m angry and angry people drink.’ Satoru sometimes thinks he does it to broadcast the fact that he’s angry without having to demean himself by actually saying it.

Anyway, he drinks at dinner while Nobara is despondently nudging a steak around. It’s quality wagyu, but she isn’t as enthusiastic about it as she was earlier on in the day. Even though she aced her assessment and made it out the other side with hardly any notes, she has had the same miserable look on her face the whole time.

Suguru is annoyed by it, Satoru can tell. He’s paying for this dinner out of his own pocket and he’s been nothing but polite, so yeah. Nobara’s definitely not going to be his favorite student. She barely even says goodbye to them when they step out into the cold evening air. Just a quick “thanks” tossed over her shoulder before she marches off.

“This generation,” Suguru mutters to himself.

Later in the night, Satoru tastes that liquor in his mouth, somehow sweet and bitter in equal measure, and gets drunk just off that. He holds Suguru beneath him, comforted by his firm body and his warmth. The only light in their bedroom comes from a single dimmed lamp, which makes Suguru’s skin glow enticingly like a dark amber honey.

Satoru tries to pull Suguru down into the sheets every night, because it’s a total mental reset for both of them. It might be crude, but it’s the only surefire way to shed the stress of the day and begin anew, fresh and bright and motivated. Most of the time it’s all Satoru can think about and he’s always looking forward to it. Suguru knows it— knows he can tease Satoru and leave him wanting and get him barking like a dog out of desperation.

It’s great.

Thankfully, tonight is one of the nights where Suguru is in the mood to indulge. His hair falls through Satoru’s fingers like liquid, silky and intoxicatingly perfumed. He breaks the kiss just to bury his face in it and inhale, trying to put himself under its spell.

“You’re strange tonight,” Suguru says, embracing him. His smooth voice makes Satoru shiver.

“Am I?”

“What’s wrong?”

“Nothing’s wrong. I just want you to work your magic on me.”

Suguru laughs pleasantly. It’s his real laugh and it’s music to Satoru’s ears. He takes control of Satoru from below, touching him all over and guiding his hands, guiding his hips. When their naked bodies connect, he sighs with pleasure, and that’s when things are ordinarily supposed to speed up, but tonight this doesn’t happen.

“Satoru, really, what’s wrong?” Suguru asks, holding him back.

Even though Satoru is in his favorite place with his favorite person right now, he just can’t get rid of that one little worry in the back of his mind. “It’s nothing,” he says, not wanting to insult Suguru with it. Suguru deserves his wholehearted attention whenever they’re together and nothing less.

But Suguru doesn’t fall for it. “Don’t treat me like an idiot. Just tell me what’s on your mind.”

“I think you made poor Fushiguro cry today.”

Suguru seems offended. “What?”

Satoru grins. “Think he had tears in his eyes when he ran off.”

“How is that my fault? I didn’t even say anything.”

“You can be scary when you want to be.”

“I’ve been nothing but kind, this is ridiculous.” He sucks his teeth. “Is that really what’s on your mind? You just wanted to scold me for not being careful enough with the overly-sensitive?”

“Hmm.” Deflecting never works. Better try the half-truth. Satoru presses kisses up Suguru’s neck, then meets his ear and whispers. “I’ve got a nice surprise for you, Suguru. Wanna hear it?”

“Oh? Tell me.”

“Remember that finger we missed? I was mad all night that it slipped by me. I kept thinking it made no sense that it just disappeared, and now, with you talking about these curses collecting more… sounds like we’ve got a developing problem on our hands, doesn’t it?”

“You think those two events are related? Well, I suppose it wouldn’t be beyond the pale. Some curses are more cunning than others. Maybe they think they can bargain with us, since fighting obviously won't work out in their favor. It might cause us some trouble down the line, but it’s nothing we can’t plan for.” 

“Down the line? Suguru, really, who do you take me for? I’m the strongest.”

Suguru pauses. “Don’t tell me you’ve already seen to it?”

“I went to that tunnel Nanami got caught up in and I found some interesting residuals. Very faint, barely there at all. Like veins beneath the earth, branching off into a thousand capillaries— pathetic little attempts to throw me off. If I didn’t already know something suspicious occurred in that location, I wouldn’t even think of wasting my time looking for the source, but I did. Took me hours.”

Suguru sits upright, forcing Satoru to move aside for him. “And?”

“I stopped at the edge of a forest containing a large concentration of cursed energy. Pretty interesting, wouldn’t you say? Makes you want to go and snoop, like there’s a treasure chest at the end of the trail!”

“Oh, that’s good.” Suguru is nodding with interest. “When are you thinking of going in?"

"Depends when I get Nanako and Mimiko's assessments done. They always keep me waiting."

"Well, you know how young girls are."

Shoko wasn't like that, Satoru is about to say, but he thinks better of it. "I'll probably get around to it sometime next week."

"You should take some of the trainees with you! A more complicated mission would do wonders for them, and with you at their side they’ll no doubt learn a lot."

“Really? Might be more dangerous than usual.”

“How bad could it be? You'll be there to protect them.”

“I don’t know, they might end up getting their hands a little dirty. There are monkeys.”

Suguru’s expression goes flat. “What?”

“I sensed monkeys in the forest, too. Likely place for them to be, right? Thought it was rats at first, but I’d know that monkey stench anywhere.” Satoru wiggles his fingers playfully, but Suguru recoils from him like his hands are a pair of disgusting insects.

“You know, Satoru, this is the one thing I don’t like about you,” he snaps.

Whoops, went too far. “Sorry, sorry.”

“You always, always bring up monkeys when we’re having a nice dinner or we’re trying to be intimate. You’re deliberately trying to upset me.”

“Hey, they’re always on my mind.”

“It’s not funny. You do this one more time and I’m going to stop having sex with you entirely.”

Satoru laughs. “I’m sorry!”

Suguru throws his hands in the air. “I’m not even in the mood anymore.” He slings his leg off the bed to get up.

“Sorry, sorry!” Satoru piles onto him, trying to wrestle him back down. He smothers Suguru’s face with kisses even as he’s trying to push him off and they’re both fighting laughter. “You always react, I can’t help it!”

“I don’t care if killing them gets you off, it makes me uncomfortable. It’s disgusting.”

“Woah, that’s too far! Who said it gets me off? Gross!”

“Well, what am I supposed to think if you can’t shut up about them? Oh my god, can we stop talking about it now?”

“Sure, sure. I’ll kill them all, so don’t worry.” 

“I know you will.”

“I’ll kill them all. I’ll kill them all, Suguru.”

Like a hypocrite, Suguru moans. Satoru presses the next kiss to his lips. It’s an earnest one this time, slow and sensual, and just like that the mood has been rekindled. He presses Suguru down again, running a hand up between his legs.

He doesn’t mention monkeys again, but he’s still sort of thinking about them. Feels like he’s missing something important. Call it an instinct. He likes to share his worries with Suguru because he has a knack for making them go away, but he’s also respectful of the fact that there are some topics Suguru hates to dwell upon. Oh well. He tries his best to ignore it and simply enjoy himself for this short space of time. It’s what they both deserve.

“Hey, princess.”

Megumi stops with his key in the hole of his dorm room. He turns, and there’s Nobara leaning up against her door frame. She hardly looks happy to see him. She’s dressed down in her pajamas with a set of headphones hanging around her neck drumming a tinny beat. In the background, her TV is beaming light into her otherwise dark room.

“What?” Megumi asks stiffly, keenly aware that he has lost her friendship. He doesn’t want to be insulted by her. He’s had enough for one day.

“What was all that about, huh?” She steps out. Her poise is loose and casual and it reminds Megumi of a gangster from a movie or something. She’s brimming with confidence, like she has seen into the future and already knows Megumi will crack under pressure.

“What was all what about?”

“You getting your panties in a bunch and pushing me away.”

“You were annoying me.”

“Why do you let them talk to you that way?”

Megumi’s face burns. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. They were perfectly polite to me. What did they say that was so wrong? You can’t think of anything, because they’ve been nothing but kind.”

“And there you go again, making excuses, acting like nothing’s wrong. I’ve noticed a thing or two about you, Megumi. You make this face when you’re upset.” She imitates the face, pursing her lips and narrowing her eyes, before returning to normal. “And believe me, you get upset a lot.”

“No I don’t.”

“If you don’t like the way someone’s talking to you, tell them to shut the fuck up. It’s easy. Try it right now. Shut me up.”

Megumi shakes his head. He jerks open his door and steps inside, but there’s something about Nobara that prevents him from cutting her off mid-conversation. He stays to hear the rest of it, stuck with one foot through the doorway.

“There it is,” Nobara mocks him with a grin. “There’s that face.”

“I’m not making a face,” Megumi snaps. He can feel his anger boiling up, ready to break free.

“It’s right there! I can see it! You look constipated. You're mad because you know I'm right and you wish I wasn't."

“You're not right. I don’t care about what you’re saying. I don't care. Why would I care? It’s not true.”

“Oh, you care. You care a whole bunch. Look, there’s nobody around. Just you and me. Tell me to shut up. I’m the only one that’ll hear it.”

Megumi remembers what Nanami said, because it’s been knocking around in his head all day. You have the ten shadows. “Shut up,” Megumi blurts. There’s something tentative about it, something experimental.

Nobara seems delighted. “Great! That was easy, right? It felt good? So, why can’t you do that with Geto and Gojo?”

“Just leave me alone! Shut up!” he says with more confidence. It’s something of a revelation that his mouth can even form these words, and, invigorated, he joins Nobara in the middle of the hallway instead of retreating to his room, his keys fully abandoned in the lock.

“You shut up!” she yells back.

“You shut up!”

She laughs, and, by accident, Megumi begins to laugh, too. He catches himself, remembering that he’s supposed to be angry.

Is he angry?

“Shut up! Shut up!” he says like a broken record. He doesn’t really care if it sounds stupid, because he enjoys the way it sounds too much. He likes the way it feels to shout.

“Ooh, the kitty has claws!”

“Oh, look, the bitch has a bite!”

“Bitch?!”

Megumi meant it in the dog-sense, but upon realizing he’s issued a deeper insult than he intended, he doubles down. “Bitch!”

“You’re the bitch, Megumi! You’re a stupid doormat bitch who can’t even drink iced tea!”

“I can totally drink iced tea! I’ll eat and drink whatever I want and I’ll go wherever I want! I don’t care what you think! I don’t care if there’s monkeys there or not, and I’ll call them non-sorcerers if I want to! I'll call them whatever I want! If you don’t like it, you can go screw yourself!”

“I like it, princess!” Nobara cheers and slings an arm around his shoulders.

Megumi can’t tell if they’re arguing or not anymore. All he knows is, his heart feels like it’s exploding out of his chest in the best possible way. The smile on his face is wide enough that it hurts. He feels stupid, but it’s not something negative like it normally is. For just this small moment, he doesn't care about anyone's judgment, and he loves the way it feels.

Nobara is still his friend. The fact that they’re even friends in the first place is such a relief.