Chapter Text
“Are you not feeling well, Geto-san?” Haibara asks worriedly.
“Hm?” He blinks, resurfacing from his thoughts. “I’m fine. Why do you ask?”
“It’s just… you’ve barely eaten anything at all.”
Ah.
His junior is right. Geto’s meal arrived twenty minutes ago, but he has hardly touched it. The soup has gone from steaming to lukewarm, soggy noodles lurking near the bottom like frogs in a swamp. The others have long since finished their food—even Shoko, who is usually the slowest eater out of them all.
Under the low, golden light of the booth, the shadows under their eyes are even more prominent. They are all exhausted, most of them having just gotten back from a mission. Normally, Geto would be winding down in his bed, but Nanami’s birthday had come and gone. None of them had been available to celebrate. Tonight was the only day their schedules overlapped, and even Geto—who’d been scheduled to return from a mission that afternoon—had rushed from the train station to Nanami’s favorite ramen restaurant.
Geto is just… so drained. No matter how much he sleeps, the heaviness weighs him down. Some days, he thinks he’s sunk so low into the earth he will never be able to crawl his way out. Even when the cheery voices of his friends greeted him upon arrival, it took a monumental effort to smile back.
“The heat has been getting to me, that’s all. I don’t have much of an appetite these days,” Geto says.
“Can I have yours, then?” Satoru asks without missing a beat, already sliding Geto’s bowl towards him. They’re sitting side by side, knees knocking against each other’s occasionally. Geto feels it again, a warm spot on his outer thigh that doesn’t move away.
“You could have at least waited for him to answer,” Haibara says with a grin, previous worry sliding away like droplets on the side of a cold drink in summer. “It’s not like he ever says no to you.”
“He just wants to hurry up and eat the cake,” Shoko says with an eye roll.
Satoru doesn’t bother to respond, cheeks already bulging with a mouthful of ramen, looking not unlike a starving hamster. Laughter erupts from around them. Nanami makes a disgusted face.
Warmth crackles in Geto’s chest at the sight. He raises the cup of tea to his lips, the one thing he can stomach.
The two of them will be going on a joint mission in two days, Satoru’s ban having been lifted early due to understaffing. A stroke of luck had their destination be set in Nagoya, and both of them have already planned to check in on Riko and Yamamoto in secret.
The night drags on. Geto takes to reclining against the booth, tuning out the conversation around them. The restaurant ushers them out before they have a chance to give their gifts. The five of them end up in Haibara and Nanami’s shared dormroom, a picnic blanket laid on the floor with the last-minute cake Haibara had baked at the center.
It’s past midnight when they finish the birthday song Satoru insists they sing. Nanami is glaring at him, but the candles illuminate the redness on his ears and cheeks. Haibara cheers when he blows out the candle to the lopsided cake, and Satoru immediately tries to guess what Nanami wished for. Shoko just shoves them both out of the way so she can cut Nanami the biggest slice of cake, ignoring Satoru’s protest.
“Happy birthday,” Geto says quietly once they’ve all settled to enjoy the cake. Guilt roils in his stomach, almost as unsettling as the first grade curse he’s swallowed just hours before. The gift he has prepared is hasty and impersonal—bought at a tiny gift shop at the last second. He hadn’t even been able to arrive on time, his mission having dragged out longer due to a mistake on his part. Now, they had to celebrate on the floor of the school dormroom.
“Thank you, Geto-san,” Nanami answers politely, tone kind. “You didn’t have to come. I know that you’ve been busy.”
“You, too. I hope the missions aren’t too much for you and Haibara. Not that I’m saying you can’t handle it.”
Nanami stops the fork halfway to his mouth. He sets it down and turns to meet Geto’s eyes. “I understand. It’s been tough lately, that’s for sure, but you don’t have to worry about me or Haibara,” he says sincerely. “We’ve met nothing we couldn’t deal with.”
“That’s right!” his other junior pipes up from Nanami’s other side. His sleek hair reflects the glow of Nanami’s desk lamp, the only source of light in the room since Satoru claimed the overhead light would have ruined the mood. “We’ve had a lot of success with these second grade curses thanks to you and Gojo-san’s help!”
Our help? Geto thinks bitterly. Haibara had returned from his most recent mission sporting a fractured arm. With Shoko’s technique, it would take only a fraction of the time to heal, but he is regulated to a thick cast until then. All Geto’s ‘help’ can provide is a lucky escape from death. An endless cycle of missions in various states of injury or sleep deprivation.
A deep, dark, withered part of Geto wishes suddenly that Haibara hadn’t made it. That his junior could rest at last.
The thought startles him. He quickly sets his untouched cake down and hides his shaking hands. “When are your next missions?”
“Next week, if you can believe it,” Nanami says in a tone hinting he can hardly believe it. “Yaga-sensei managed to get it pushed back.”
“He’d better have,” Shoko mutters from across the room. She’s perched on a backwards desk chair, resting her arms and haed on the seat. “There’s no way you’re going on missions with a bruised rib and a fractured arm.” She glances at Haibara, who gives her a guilty grin in return.
“A lot of success, you say?” Geto says pointedly with a raised brow. Even Nanami refuses to meet his eyes, which makes Geto feel worse. What injuries is the blond hiding underneath his uniform? What other wounds is he enduring alone? It make his stomach roil, turns the sickly sweet frosting sour.
It must be all the curses. They are poisoning him from the inside out. Infecting him. Turning him into a twisted, despicable being underneath the hollow shell that was once Geto Suguru. What will his parents think of their son now, he wonders. Did they know that by sending him off to Tokyo, they have doomed him? That he now wishes of death upon his closest friends?
It’s not my fault, Geto argues desperately. It’s them. The higher ups.
Do they even care that their next generation is being tortured? The answer is obvious: they don’t. A simmering, bubbling rage punches through his chest, kickstarting his heartbeat.
And then Satoru cuts through all of it like a knife. “Well… they didn’t die. That’s a success in my book.”
“Satoru,” Geto warns. “You shouldn’t be joking about these things. It’s not funny.”
Satoru scoffs. “I’m trying to lighten the mood, and you’re really bringing it down, you know? Even back at the restaurant.”
“That’s not true—” Haibara tries to cut it.
“This isn’t something to joke about. Do you know the mortality rates, Satoru? Jujutsu sorcerers have a higher chance of getting hit by a car on the street than making it to the age of forty.”
“Why are you being so serious about this all of a sudden—”
“Someone has to be,” Geto snaps. The silence in the room grows heavy. “Nobody else seems to care. We could die on any mission. We almost did last time.”
They both nearly lost their lives. I nearly lost my life. Geto has the scars to prove it. They stain his eyes every day in the mirror, and he has taken to changing in the dark. Yet Satoru gained something from that encounter—the perfection of his technique. It is hard not to be envious, even though Geto is happy for his friend.
“But we didn’t,” Satoru retorts flippantly. Geto feels as if he has been slapped.
“Not that time. Maybe not the next two or three, but eventually—”
“There won’t be an eventually. We’ll just need to get stronger.”
Easy for you to say.
“Not all of us can be the great Gojo Satoru,” Geto says, trying for teasing, but it comes out sour.
“Of course nobody else can be me,” Satoru says, clearly aiming for levity as well, but the joke falls flat. It instead cuts sharp like a knife. Geto wants to rip those ridiculous sunglasses off his face. “And that Sorcerer Killer has been dealt with—also by me, by the way.”
Geto grits his teeth. The frosting on his tongue does little to drown out the bile that rises at the mention of Toji Fushiguro. “The number one cause of death to Jujutsu sorcerers is curses, Satoru. Do you think killing off one man will prevent anything?”
“Well, it’s not like we can get rid of all the curses in Japan. It’s impossible!”
“How arrogant, Satoru. You could, couldn’t you?” The words come out. A flood breaking through the dam. Geto can’t, of course. He is, above all else, practical. Well aware of his own limits. But Satoru is a well of limitless—ha—potential. They all know it. Satoru could bring Japan to its knees if he so chooses.
“Hey. If I could, I would have by now. And even if I got rid of all the curses now, they’ll just keep coming back.” Satoru shrugs. “We just need to be strong enough to exorcise the ones we meet. Easy!”
Easy.
Easy?
“Do you really not care if any of us live or die?” Geto asks quietly. “How can you still be so callous?”
Geto had thought that after Riko, Satoru would have understood the importance of the strong protecting the weak. Of feeling compassion for those that were weaker than them.
Suddenly, Geto is thrown back to that day he woke up in the infirmary. The first time he saw Satoru after the Six Eyes had mastered hollow purple, Geto had been hit with the inexplicable feeling of something other when he looked at his friend. He hadn’t thought much about it since then, but it is now crystal clear. Geto doesn’t know Satoru as well as he’d thought anymore. This person in front of him has changed. There was a chasm growing between them, and Satoru’s words shattered the mist that had alluded it from him. Or maybe he’d chosen to delude himself.
“Hey! What do you mean by that? No—what’s gotten into you lately?” Satoru says, affronted. “Of course I care—”
“Really?” Geto cuts in, voice as cold as ice. “Because you sure as hell don’t sound like it.”
The atmosphere nose-dives so quickly Geto can almost feel the air chill. Or maybe it’s just him. Maybe only he doesn’t expect their exchange to knock the breath out of his lungs. What’s gotten into him lately? How dare he? When Satoru knows that Geto has been taking on the brunt of their workload because Satoru was out of commission?
He can see the moment Satoru regrets his words—or perhaps he doesn’t. Geto reminds himself that he can’t read Satoru anymore. Maybe their brush with death or Satoru’s enlightenment has changed them on a fundamental level. Maybe the furrow of white brows and the thin line of his mouth mean annoyance, not guilt. Maybe Satoru is so above it all that it hasn’t even occurred to him that their next mission could be Geto’s last.
Then, he has a horrifying thought—Satoru doesn’t care. Maybe he has finally gotten tired of Geto lecturing him constantly.
The brief satisfaction of shutting Satoru up shrivels up immediately.
Geto can’t bear to be in this room any longer. He can’t breathe. Abruptly, he stands and does what can only be described as running away, his tail tucked between his legs.
“Good night, guys. Don’t sleep too late,” he says over his shoulder. There is a series of stilted ‘good nights’ and ‘you, too’s.. Geto forces himself not to leave quickly like he very much wants to, waiting for Satoru to say something, though deep down, he knows he won’t. Not when it matters.
Geto wilts a little as the door snicks shut. More shame tears through him. Unexplainable and frustrating. Why should he be the one feeling like they are in the wrong? He storms up the stairs and to his floor, muscles burning at the sudden exertion. His hand is on the knob of his door—
“Suguru, wait!”
His heart thunders. Geto masks his surprise first and glances up carefully.
He actually followed me. Not Nanami or Haibara or even Shoko.
The moonlight illuminates Satoru’s hair, making it almost glow. Even with the worried crinkle on his forehead and the ashen-colored skin, the strongest sorcerer is a sight to behold. There have been many times where Geto thinks his friend could be an angel—though any suspicions have been quickly doused the moment Satoru opens his mouth. Now, he still can’t help but think that his friend is beautiful. Annoyingly so.
“I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that,” he says immediately before Satoru can. There is a smidge of frosting on Satoru’s upper lip. It almost makes him grin—almost makes Geto want to tease him—but he doesn’t have any strength to do so. “I took my anger out of you, and that was out of line.”
“What are you sorry for?” Satoru snaps. His blue eyes, depthless and infinite, are dull. “I… ugh, I shouldn’t have said that,” he mumbles with effort.
Oh? Geto does smile faintly then. Satoru sees it, and his shoulders sag in relief.
“Is the great Gojo Satoru trying to apologize?” Geto asks with amusement. He likes this side of his friend almost too much. He would deny it until his last breath, but he adores every other aspect of Satoru’s vibrant personality, and his vulnerability especially makes his heart race. Makes Geto want to give in to his every request.
“You know what I mean,” Satoru grumbles, scowling. The dollop of frosting stretches as Satoru’s lips do.
“Do I? I’m not a mind reader, Satoru.” Geto reaches out. He stops himself halfway and quickly moves his hands to his own face, pointing at his upper lip. “You’ve got something here.”
“Huh?” Satoru licks over his mouth with his tongue. When he gets to the frosting, he eats it up with a happy noise. “Mmmh. Sweet.”
“Haibara did a good job, then?”
“Eh. He should have made a chocolate cake, though. It’s better than fruit.”
“Of course you’d ask him to make your favorite flavor,” Geto says with a shake of his head. “It’s Nanami’s birthday, not yours.”
“Who even likes fruit cake?” Satoru mumbles under his breath.
Geto chuckles. The sound comes out stilted, as if his body is unused to the motion. It drains him of his remaining energy, but he feels lighter than before. He reaches out and squeezes Satoru’s bicep. “I’m tired. We can talk more tomorrow… if you want.”
“I…” Satoru’s gaze flickers over Geto’s face. He lets him. With the newly awakened Six Eyes, his friend’s brain works at levels that nobody else can comprehend. Geto waits patiently for him to come to some type of conclusion, but all he gets is a quiet, “Have you lost weight? Are you okay?”
“What?” Geto is taken aback. He narrows his eyes, looking at Satoru oddly. “What makes you think I’m not okay?”
“It’s just…” Satoru glances away in discomfort. “You’re… acting weird.”
“I’m acting werid?” he repeats faintly. Geto feels like he’s been thrown off his feet. When did the conversation take such a turn?
“I know that this—” Satoru gestures between them awkwardly “—isn’t what we usually do, but… you’d tell me, right? If something’s going on, or-or you’ve been feeling sick. I had a talk with Yaga and Shoko while you were away, and…”
There is something about the way Satoru stumbles and hesitates over his words that makes Geto’s chest cave in on itself. At the same time, this new side of his friend makes him want to hide. To act like they never had this conversation. Has he been acting so obvious that even Satoru has noticed? So concerning that the strongest sorcerer of this century feels the need to intervene? And since when did Satoru have ‘talks’ with Yaga-sensei? Shoko, he can imagine, but their teacher?
Suguru shifts his feet, gaze focused on the toes of his boots. Satoru has gone silent off, too, hands clenched as they make aborted movements in the air.
“I’m fine—” Geto says at the same time Satoru blurts out, “Never mind! Ha ha. See you tomorrow. I’ve got your slice of cake to finish.” He waves awkwardly, already fleeing back to Nanami’s room.
Geto stares at where Satoru had stood. then dismisses it. Satoru’s strange behavior is nothing new.
He’s looking forward to their mission together, though. It almost manages to bring a smile to his face.
“Why would they send the both of us to get rid of a grade two cursed spirit?” Geto wonders aloud as he and Satoru go over their mission files in their hotel room. “Where’s your file?”
“Maybe they just wanted me out of the way? I have been doing my best to drive Yaga crazy,” Satoru guesses. He’s sprawled on the opposite bed, Suguru’s newly acquired flame-spitting curse on his stomach. “And I didn’t bring mine. I figured I’d just read yours. So… what do you think of Cece?”
Geto raises a brow. “Cece?”
“It looks like a Cece,” Satoru says defensively, one hand patting the curse’s long neck. It’s bat-like wings are tucked into its side, but the curse is still nearly as large as the sorcerer’s torso.
“Whatever you say,” Geto says. He flips to the next page of the assignment details. “Careful. It could burn your hair if you’re not careful.”
“Cece would never! And it can’t bypass Infinity anyway.” Satoru gently holds the end of both wings and spreads them wide. The curse makes a strange squawking noise—almost like a crow—but doesn’t wiggle away.
“It’s not a pet, Satoru.” Geto feels a small kernel of nausea in his gut. That fire-spitting curse had given an infant second degree burns. The baby’s mother—the curse’s progenitor—had been addicted to smoking and worked two jobs to get by. She had been diagnosed with lung cancer not long before. From what information Geto had been given prior to the assignment and what he’d found out on his own later, the woman had not been fit to take care of a child.
Her curse had been larger back then, not the cat-sized creature Satoru is playing with now. It had been lingering on the rooftop of the woman’s apartment, making the air uncomfortably warm. When Geto had tried to approach, it shrunk down to the size of a pigeon and squirmed into the apartment building. Without access, he’d been unable to exorcise it until the building had caught on fire and all the tenants rushed onto the street. In the middle of the night, nobody had noticed him slip through the door and burst into the apartment building.
Now, the curse sits harmless in Satoru’s lap, cooing as if it hadn’t nearly killed an entire building of non-sorcerers. It had taken the firefighters nearly two hours to put out the flames and assess the damage.
“I don’t know why you keep saying that,” Satoru says with a mock sad face. “Sure, Cece has done some awful things, but she’s a changed curse now. Isn’t that right?”
The curse wags it’s long, snake-like tail. Unlike when it had nearly bitten his finger clean off upon being summoned, it’s almost puppy-like with Satoru.
Geto sighs inwardly and turns back to the files. The sooner they finish, they sooner they can go check on Riko. She’s called them once to make sure when they’d arrive, but due to their concern of her location being found out, they’d kept conversation to a minimum.
“We’ll need to get there on foot,” Geto decides after a few minutes. There are no buses to take. The mountain trail where people had been disappearing from wasn’t well known enough.
Satoru plops himself beside him, their arms and legs touching. A head of white hair obscures his vision. The strands tickle his neck and cheek. “Or… I could just teleport us there,” Satoru suggests.
“We’re not doing that unless it’s at night, and we have to go during daytime. That’s when all the people were reported disappearing.” There isn’t an exact protocol for dealing with curses, only suggestions at best. Curtains are a must to conceal their actions, but other than that, how to exorcise the curses themselves is specific to the sorcerer’s cursed technique.
“How long will it take to walk there?”
Geto checks the map. “I think about thirty minutes?” If they leave early, they might be able to avoid the scorching heat.
“Any hope that we’ll finish the assignment in one day?” Satoru sits back, ignoring the curse clinging to his chest with its claws.
“If it attacks, maybe. But the reports say that every disappearance has a few weeks of interlude. We might have to camp out there if we want to finish quickly. Maybe the curse only feeds on people when it needs to?”
Geto closes the file and tucks it into his backpack. There isn’t much inside, since they aren’t allowed to bring any forms of entertainment with them on missions. Only their phones are allowed. Satoru had managed to sneak in a manga or two, but Yaga had quickly found out and kept a close eye on them before missions.
“Can I put it away now?” Geto asks, looking pointedly at Cece. The curse wails viciously at him, snapping at his fingers.
Satoru laughs as Geto recoils. Long, pale fingers smooth down its ruffled mane before the creature disappears with a sizzling pop.
“You’re always going on and on about respecting my elders, so why don’t you treat your curses with the same respect?” Satoru teases while brushing away the soot on his shirt.
“A curse isn’t my elder. They kill people. They aren’t supposed to be respected.”
“They could kill people,” Satoru corrects him. “The elders are sending us out on missions that could kill us, too. Why should I respect that? Cece, on the other hand, has been nothing but kind to me.”
Well… he does have a point. Still. “Fundamentally, curses and people are different. Curses are born from cursed energy as a result of the negative emotions of non-sorcerers—they are made of bad things like hatred and jealousy and fear—”
“They’re born from that, but they’re not made up of any of those emotions. Nobody knows what curses are really made of,” Satoru argues back with an unusual amount of seriousness, any levity having gone up in smoke. “We’re made up of cells or whatever, but we can also be born out of negative emotions. Not every child was conceived with love. Sometimes it’s a necessity—like how I was made. You can’t call me a bad person just because my parents despised each other when they were creating me.”
And Geto… has nothing to say back to him. Satoru never talks about his parents. He always addresses his family as a whole. As a bloodline. But never individually. It throws him off kilter.
“I see your point,” Geto agrees after a pause. “Let’s go with: no living creature is fundamentally good or bad. So, we determine them by discussing their actions. ‘Cece’ burned two people alive in their homes. The curse is a killer. Would you treat a murderer with respect?”
“That’s… pretty bad,” Satoru agrees reluctantly. He flops onto the bed. “But from what you tell me about non-sorcerers, even murderers are given some respect. They’re allowed food and water and shelter, stupid as it sounds.”
“From what you tell me, those who took a life of a clan member would be executed in the exact same fashion. So, a curse should be exorcised according to those jujutsu law codes.”
Satoru gives him a disappointed face. “Do you really want to use those outdated, shitty rules as an argument? Then according to those laws you mentioned: you, Suguru, would be my slave regardless of how powerful you are, because you were born from a family of non-sorcerers. You’d have no status in jujutsu society.”
Geto gives him an unamused frown. “Why would I be your slave?”
“Because I’m Gojo Satoru, of course. But don’t worry. I’ll just kill anybody else who wants to buy you, not that anyone else in the jujutsu world has more money than me.”
Of course he’d resort to those measures, Geto thinks helplessly. “That would make you a murderer, no? You’d be executed in the same fashion.”
“Eh, but that’s using outdated sorcerer rules!” Satoru pouts. “What about the non-sorcerer murderers? They’re allowed food and water and even shelter in a fancy dungeon!”
Geto scoffs. “I told you it’s not a fancy dungeon. It’s called a prison, and it’s where all those who committed crimes are locked away. They have humane facilities to make sure none of the inmates die.” He lays on his stomach beside Satoru, feet dangling off the bed. The stretch on his back is welcome. “I’m surprised you were listening.”
“I always listen to you!” Satoru says vehemently. He shoots Geto a mock glare and turns his face away with a huff.
Satoru misses the pleased smile that flits across Geto’s face. It’s gone as quickly as a rainbow after a summer shower. Tiredly, Geto relents. “Okay, Satoru. Then you win. I’ll treat ‘Cece’ with the modicum of respect all living creatures deserve, happy?”
“And the rest of your curses, too, right?”
Geto nods. He finds it perplexing—and, admittedly, a bit amusing—that his friend acts more agreeable to curses than regular humans. But he supposes that it has to do with Satoru’s upbringing. He won’t fault him for that.
“Yes, and the rest of my curses, too.” He nudges Satoru’s side. It’s warm to the touch. “And to be fair, you should treat every person with respect.”
“Ugh. Even those ugly old toadstools that keep nagging me about random shit nobody cares about anymore?”
Geto leans his cheek against his hand, staring unabashedly as frost lashes flutter open, revealing azure eyes that are brimming with disbelief. “Yes, Satoru, even them.”
Satoru gives a dramatic sigh. “Fine. Fine. It’s a deal. But you really have to be nice to Cece, okay? She’s scared, sometimes, too. I know it’s her nature to be all that, but it’s not something she can always control.”
“And how do you know a curse is scared?”
Instead of speaking, Satoru raises a hand and points at his eyes.
Any words Geto plans to say get stuck in his throat, not unlike a curse. The Six Eyes. Of course.
“Well, maybe describing it as scared isn’t the exact term, since curses at these levels can’t feel emotion like we do. But it’s the equivalent for her, okay?”
It’s times like this where Geto feels as lost as driftwood in the ocean. Satoru’s technique is so fundamentally different from any other sorcerer’s that not even statements from Satoru himself can fully describe it. The functions—the basics and logic of how it works—are complicated, but not impossible to comprehend. But there is no way to encompass the feeling of countless information and senses and cursed energy bombarding one’s mind infinite times per second. Geto sometimes can not understand how his friend hasn’t gone mad. It’s like another barrier between them, pushing them further and further apart.
What does it matter? Geto laments in his head.
“Any news about our curse?” Geto asks instead.
His friend pauses, gaze now very, very far away. It will never cease to amaze Geto how many colors are actually swirling in Satoru’s eyes. From afar, they are the brightest cerulean he has ever seen. But up close, it’s like staring into a crystal clear lake. There are so many depths of blue he doubts there are enough words in the world to describe them.
“Nah,” Satoru says after a long moment of silence. “The situation seems to be kind of hush-hush right now. The police don’t seem to want the villagers to panic.”
Fair enough. “You hungry?” Geto asks instead. He pushes himself off the bed and onto his feet, stretching languidly. “I saw a noodle shop around the corner.”
“Are you paying?”
“Didn’t you just say you there wasn’t any other sorcerer with more money than you?.”
Neither of them expects the sudden shift of the mountain side. A grade two curse would be challenging at best—maybe throw a few trees at them, which is what the two of them were prepared for. However, Geto doesn’t anticipate the earth sliding out from underneath his feet, sending him crashing into a tree that is caught in the landslide.
Geto calls out Cece, her lithe body knocking away tree branches as she weaves through the plunging forest. Anything that gets into her path turns brittle and black, crumbling with a mere brush of her wings. Sharp talons wrap around his outstretched arms, lifting him up right before the ground he has been standing on disappears.
“Satoru?” he calls, Cece’s harsh wingbeats roaring in his ears.
“I see it!” The Six Eyes shouts.
Beneath them, it is as if the earth has come alive. Trees topple and slide as if they were nothing but sticks stuck into a mound of sand. There is a great groaning sound, something that Geto isn’t quite sure is coming from the landslide or the curse itself. It rings in his ears, almost painfully so.
“Where?” He scans the entire landscape, but the cursed energy is wild and slippery. He can’t pinpoint it’s exact location for longer than a second. New trees sprout from the ground and are hurled at their faces. Rocks the size of a fingernail bulge and expand into the size of houses and bombard them from all sides. Satoru’s Infinity keeps the attack at bay. For now.
Satoru’s next words make his stomach churn.
“This whole mountain is the curse!”
Now Geto knows why he couldn’t locate it. The curse is intentionally trying to throw them off it’s track, spreading itself thin and enveloping as much ground as possible. Whenever Satoru uses red to burn away one section, it regenerates itself just as quickly.
It’s not just driven by instinct. There are signs of rudimentary cognition. Of a cursed technique. This is no second grade curse.
“Suguru? How about I just destroy these mountains.”
“Better not,” Geto says calmly. “This curse is unpredictable. It might survive even if you turn this city into dust. We need to be discrete, remember?”
That’s the irritating thing about low-level curses. Some of them are astonishingly resilient.
“Awww, you sure? I haven’t used hollow purple in a while.” Satoru pouts. “I could weaken it enough for you to exorcise it.”
“I’m sure. I have a plan.”
Satoru concedes with a nod.
“You might want to step back.”