Chapter Text
Seven--six--eleven--five--nine-an'-tw enty mile to-day --
Four--eleven--seventeen--thirty-two the day before –
It hurts.
A dragonfly reaction. A last ounce of survival instinct. A will to live.
It hurt, it hurt, it hurt it hurt– No it didn’t. You are alive, aren’t you? Under rubble but alive – I will kill you.
Kill me? You need me. I am the one keeping us alive. You are mine. I don’t know how you took over. But I will fix this. The skies above us are in flames.
(Boots--boots--boots--boots--movin up an' down again!)
There's no discharge in the war!
Shibuya was sealed off and surrounded by foreign aid. Mangled flesh was slowly being stitched together by the Reverse Curse Technique. It was painfully slow despite the invader in his skin. One would think that regeneration for such a boastful demon would be quick.
Suguru found very quickly that Kenjaku’s RCT was draining not only the parasite’s cursed energy but Suguru’s reserves. A year of being subdued. A year of watching his life slip away while he was locked in his skin. This monster had played Suguru uncannily well. His daughters, Nanako and Mimiko, were the only ones who noticed.
Kenjaku was a cuckoo with their nails dug into Suguru’s life. But it was the little details that Kenjaku either didn’t believe needed to be mimicked that caught the attention of Nanako and Mimiko. The way his body did not close his eyes when he smiled. The way Kenjaku neglected his daughter’s attention. It was only then that, somehow, amidst Nanako’s many selfies, that she saw it. Stitches.
Don't--don't--don't--don't--look at what's in front of you.
(Boots--boots--boots--boots--movin' up an' down again);
The civilian relief team sent down into the wreckage of Shibuya Station was mostly foreign Red Cross volunteers—stretched thin, running on caffeine and shock. None of them was sorcerers. None of them was prepared.
They had just finished pulling three survivors from the southern tunnel when the call came—faint banging. Not mechanical. Not rhythmic. Erratic. Animal.
Metal shifted. Stone scraped. Then: nails. Bleeding, split-down-the-middle human nails dragging through concrete.
They followed the sound.
A nurse named Yuliya was the first to spot the motion—a hand emerging from between broken tile and rebar, blackened with blood and smeared with dust. At first, she thought it was postmortem twitching. Then the arm moved again. Then a face pressed through the gap.
The head shouldn’t have been intact. The neck was broken. Jaw lolling to the side like wet paper. But the eyes—clouded gold, too human and not human enough—locked onto her.
And it
spoke
.
Not words. Not yet. Just wet, shredded breath rasping out a sound that
almost
resembled “wait.”
Someone screamed. A second nurse vomited.
Then the whole wall of rubble moved. He clawed his way out like something that shouldn’t be walking anymore. Skin is regrowing too fast in some places and not fast enough in others. Strips of muscle fluttered like kelp from his ribs. An eye bulged out from a cracked orbital, healed halfway over with rough scar tissue that peeled back in a wet blink.
The corpse was alive.
It
shouldn’t
have been.
“We need a doctor!” someone shrieked.
“We need a fucking exorcist!” someone else yelled.
Men--men--men--men--men go mad with watchin' em,
An' there's no discharge in the war!
The concrete gave way with a sickening snap.
Gloved hands, trembling with adrenaline, reached down into the cracked open earth of Shibuya Station’s lowest level, guided only by faint heat signatures and the pulse of a cursed presence too strange to ignore. A mass of skin, hair, and half-knitted muscle twitched in the debris—barely human, barely alive.
“He’s breathing!”
“God—he clawed his way up . Look at the nails—”
“Get a gurney now!”
Suguru’s fingers, blood-caked and worn to the bone, twitched violently as the air hit his face. Not the stagnant, dust-thick air of entombment, but open sky—sunlight burning through eyelids long unused. Everything was too loud. Too loud.
He couldn’t understand the words. They spilled around him, a swarm of voices too fast, too bright, too alive.
“Can you hear me? Hey—can you—can you see us?”
White coats. Gloves. Steel. Blood that isn't mine. No. It is. It's all mine.
A scream built in his throat, but couldn’t make it out. His lungs seized as oxygen flooded tissue not meant to exist anymore. For a moment, he forgot how to breathe.
The hands grabbed him. They meant well, maybe. They touched his ribs, his shoulder, his jaw—trying to orient, stabilize, rescue. But in Suguru's mind, they were desecrating a corpse. His corpse.
“Vitals are erratic—holy shit, is that regeneration? Is he a sorcerer?”
His eye rolled open on instinct, bloodshot and milk-glazed from disuse. It met the gaze of a young woman, a field medic too new to the job, too soft for war zones. She staggered back, choking on a scream that sounded like it came from underwater .
“His skin—God, his skin’s moving!”
Beneath the surface, veins twitched with cursed energy, dragging dead nerves back online with agonizing slowness. Regeneration didn't feel like healing—it felt like violation. Tissue seals together like wax over flame. Bones creaked into place with a wet snap that made more than one responder gag.
Suguru convulsed. Not from pain—he’d forgotten what pain was—but from awareness . Awareness of being , again. Of light. Of noise. Of people .
The stretcher felt wrong under him. The air smelled wrong. Everything was too fast, too fluid, too alive . They strapped him down, whispered comforts he could barely parse. They didn’t know. They didn’t know .
They didn’t know they were strapping down a man who had once been a god.
Did they know what his hands had done? Did they know that Kenjaku had worn his body like a mask? That the man they were trying to save was a war crime given shape and breath?
He tried to speak. What came out was a choked, wet sound—half a word, half a sob. His mouth was full of dirt. His throat was lined with rot.
One of the medics leaned close. “It’s okay. You’re safe now.”
Suguru stared past her—eyes clouded, hollow, ancient. Safe?
There was no safety in being alive.
There was only the horror of coming back to it.
One of the medics tried to wrap his arm, but the bandages slid off as the flesh moved underneath, reknitting the wrong way. Suguru collapsed halfway out of the tunnel, vomiting up black sludge that reeked of cursed rot.
He whispered something.
“…where…are they…”
His mouth filled with blood again before he could finish.
The medics panicked—no equipment on hand could stabilize a body healing wrong.
His vital signs were
all
wrong.
Pulse irregular. Skin temperature fluctuates in seconds from feverish to corpse-cold. He should’ve been dead six times over. But he clung to the edge of life like a parasite himself.
And the cursed energy—
Every time someone touched him, it
bit.
The rescue tent was cleared in less than an hour, cordoned off by sorcerers from Kyoto who’d finally arrived to assist the civilians. One look at the man bleeding out into the concrete—and yet somehow refusing to die—and they called for immediate quarantine.
They didn’t recognize him at first.
No one did.
Not until someone leaned close enough to wipe the dried blood from his throat.
Not until they saw the faint outline of where the stitches used to be.
Not until Suguru Geto’s voice rasped out one word like a curse:
“…Satoru…?”
He didn’t know where he was.
But he knew he wasn’t alone in his skin.
For once in a decade, he managed to reflect on his life. He was childish. He lived his life like it was free when his fate had been sealed the moment he burned that village down. Tears could not even come to his own eyes from burned tear ducts. But one echoing thought lingered.
“Did I do enough, Mama?”
Suguru closed his eyes, exhaustion raking over his healing form.
“Baby, you did everything you could do.”
A faint, comforting voice, Suguru thought he would never hear again, lulled him into a slumber. He wasn’t twenty-seven…. No twenty-eight? How long has it been? But it didn’t matter. Mama was here, and he was fifteen once more, his mother combing his hair for one final time before he would be sent off to school. His village was small in the Tokushima Prefecture. It would have been easier to have been recruited to the Kyoto school branch of Jujutsu High, but visiting the campuses beforehand, Suguru had felt more at home in the Tokyo branch. Maybe it wasn’t the overwhelming incense…. Or maybe it was the training grounds that reminded him of home. But maybe….. Just maybe he could live normally again.
Once the morphine was administered, the nurses let the recovering corpse dream for the first time since his death.