Chapter Text
Not once in the six months that he'd known him had Itadori Yuji ever seen Fushiguro properly relax. He couldn't even imagine it.
The closest he'd come to being genuinely unstressed was when they'd visited the beach with their upperclassmen. Kugisaki and Maki had taken their shoes off to splash around in spite of the cold, and Inumaki tripped while playing tag with Panda. Fushiguro stood on the sidelines the whole time, tense as a coiled spring, but his face was softer than Yuji had ever seen it, catching him every time he tried to get a candid photograph.
Kugisaki had been alive back then. Their upperclassmen had all been healthy and happy. There was no going back to that, Yuji thought.
Maybe it should have been no surprise that even with Tsumiki rescued from the Culling Games, Fushiguro wasn’t going to relax today either as he made angry sounding phone calls and tapped out even angrier sounding texts from the eerily abandoned hotel in downtown Tokyo they were taking refuge in, just a handful of minutes after finding their way out of the barrier of Tokyo Colony One. As far as they knew, they were the first people to escape it. They'd gotten Tsumiki out thanks to a few clever rule changes and some clutch fights, but the Culling Games were still raging on inside the barriers.
If they didn’t stop Kenjaku soon, Master Tengen and all of Japan would be in danger. Could they spare one night to relax at all before going back to all this fighting?
Fushiguro probably didn't think so. He was more tense than ever, and Tsumiki must have picked up on it because she put a hand on his shoulder that he only shrugged off, asking, “Megumi, is there something wrong?”
While he looked annoyed by her question, he stopped texting long enough to consider it. Standing up, he brushed Tsumiki off by saying, “It’s not something you can help with. Maki’s missing and I’ve gotta go make some calls.”
Maki was missing? That was worrying news. She was pretty strong but if Shibuya had taught Yuji anything it was that nobody was safe.
But as Fushiguro got up to make calls from the hotel kitchenette, he left Tsumiki standing there, worried and without any kind of outlet to help.
Yuji piped up with a suggestion for her. “We should cook something.” They’d been trapped in the barrier for so long and hadn’t had a proper hot meal in a while. “For Fushiguro.” He knew just the thing that Fushiguro would enjoy too.
Tsumiki visibly brightened at the suggestion. “Something with a lot of…?”
“Ginger.” Yuji knew Fushiguro would eat anything if it had enough ginger in it. “I’m thinking ginger chicken meatball soup.”
Fushiguro sighed, resigned to his fate of being doted on tonight, and went back to his phone.
When all this was over, Yuji wanted to make Fushiguro enough ginger chicken meatball soup to dunk him in it. Tsumiki could help. The small spark of hope that one day they’d all be able to laugh together again and sit down for a meal glimmered like a far away nostalgic memory - one he hadn’t felt in a long time.
Not since Kugisaki died.
For a moment guilt bubbled up inside him and he felt like maybe he could understand Fushiguro’s desperation to keep working. How could he be thinking of dinner after everything that happened? After Nanami, after Kugisaki. After Sukuna hacked thousands of innocent civilians to pieces and Yuji felt each and every cut as if his own hands had done it. How could he laugh over some ginger chicken meatballs tonight if he knew Kenjaku was still out there and the Culling Games were still running?
But he’d be a real buzzkill to bring it up now. Maybe Fushiguro would understand, but Tsumiki wouldn’t and she at least deserved some kind of peace after everything she’d been through.
So he swallowed his guilt down one more time, smiled, and said, “Should we go grocery shopping for ingredients?”
Tsumiki nodded enthusiastically and ran to get her coat on. “Megumi, want us to pick anything else up for you? Besides soup stuff.”
“Good luck finding a grocery store that’s still open. All twenty-three wards have been evacuated.” Fushiguro went back to his phone. “I’ll text you a list in-”
Yuji wasn’t watching Fushiguro when it happened. Neither was Tsumiki, but both of them looked up from where they were putting their shoes on at the door when Fushiguro’s voice choked to a halt.
That was when he saw it.
Two thorns of cursed energy pierced Fushiguro’s heart.
Not just any cursed energy. Ever since hitting his first Black Flash, Yuji felt like he could experience cursed energy through all his senses, not just sight. He knew the taste of this cursed energy.
“Kugisaki?” He whispered, breathless.
The thorns disappeared as quickly as they’d come, but the holes in Fushiguro’s chest remained. He dropped to the ground, clutching at the front of his shirt in a desperate attempt to apply pressure to the wound as he gasped for air.
Tsumiki fell silent in panic, and if Yuji hadn’t had to push past her to get to Fushiguro he might not have even remembered she was there. “Fushiguro, what’s going on?!”
It didn’t make any sense. Kugisaki was dead, wasn’t she? Then where did this Resonance come from? And why was she attacking Fushiguro, her friend?
If she was alive, then where was she?
Why wasn’t she by their side?
“Itadori…” Fushiguro’s weakened voice cut through the thousands of questions that rattled around in Yuji’s head. “...I’m sorry.”
“Wha- What do you mean?” He was scared the apology was for dying. He wasn’t dying, right? Fushiguro couldn’t just die!
“When you asked... about what happened to her.” Fushiguro coughed, trying to bite back the blood he’d coughed up with it. “I didn’t say anything… I didn’t know how.”
Yuji knew instantly that Fushiguro was talking about Kugisaki, as his vision tunneled. Was he afraid that this final confession would leave Yuji fully alone or hopeful that his words meant Kugisaki really was alive? He couldn’t tell through his panic.
Fushiguro’s breath hitched, chest spasming from the pain. “Shoko said there was too much of her brain missing...”
Shoko! Maybe if they got to Shoko they could save Fushiguro! “Just breathe.” Yuji said, not taking his own advice as he gathered Fushiguro in his arms, prepared to sprint the rest of the way to Jujutsu Tech if need be.
Fushiguro looked up at him, meeting Yuji’s eyes for the first time since he’d been hit. “Kugisaki won’t remember us. Or anything at all… We’re just strangers to her now.”
“Strangers?”
The Resonance that pierced Yuji’s heart cut him off before he could say anything more.
----
“Anyone who keeps their room this clean is probably a serial killer.” Kugisaki Nobara tapped her foot, annoyed that this was taking so long. “What kind of teenage boy vacuums his room unless he’s hiding something?”
“Nothing in the pillow cases either?” The assistant manager Nobara had been working closely with these last few weeks ruffled the fur of her shikigami before setting the small creature loose under the bed to sniff around.
Nobara sighed. “Not a thing. They’re probably freshly laundered too.”
There was a four hundred page book on the nightstand called A Brief History of Chemical Warfare and Nobara couldn’t believe it when she saw a bookmark in the damn thing as if a real human being would actually read something so boring. So instead, she turned her one good eye away from it and watched the little shikigami roll around under the bed instead. It was a long snake-like rat creature with a head like a very inbred chihuahua. Nobara thought it was ugly when she first saw it, but it had grown on her while she’d been working with Kamo Yui, an assistant manager from one of the three Great Families.
It was uncommon to see assistant managers with their own shikigami, but in the six weeks of her life she could actually remember, Nobara figured out that Kamo family sorcerers were just built different. It made sense that even the Kamo kids that didn’t make the cut as sorcerers would still be pretty useful. Yui wasn’t much of a fighter, but her shikigami could sniff out even the smallest trace of cursed energy clinging to a flake of sorcerer dandruff, so as far as Nobara was concerned, they were the perfect team.
But unfortunately for her, the boy whose room they were searching didn’t have dandruff. The shikigami returned from under the bed, empty handed, and Nobara huffed out a frustrated sigh wishing a lifetime of baldness upon her target.
“Don’t worry too much. We’ve still got a whole bathroom to search.” Yui was a short woman, a little on the plump side, with dark hair and eyes that always betrayed when she was feeling nervous. She was nervous now, even though she was trying to hide it.
Nobara followed her assistant manager through the doorway, bracing herself for the horrors of a teenage boy’s personal bathroom, but it was just as tidy as his bedroom. “Can you show me his picture again?” Nobara asked.
“Of course,” the woman said, politely handing over the tablet that contained the information about her targets, before turning back to her shikigami.
Nobara studied this boy’s profile carefully. He looked oddly familiar - more so than the other targets - but Nobara couldn’t quite figure out where she’d seen him before. The info she’d been given said he was fifteen, but he looked a little older than that in Nobara’s reckoning, with a serious, haughty expression as if he disapproved of whoever had taken the picture. His hair was a mess though, and that was what Nobara was looking for in this mission. They needed to find black hairs, around five or six centimeters long, so that Nobara could use them for her technique. Any biological material would do, but given how clean he kept his room, a stray hair was probably the best they could hope to find.
Nobara handed the tablet back, all zoomed in on the picture of his face. “Tell me that’s not the face of a boy who sets oil-slicked seagulls on fire.”
This elicited an undignified snort from her assistant manager, who immediately tried to cover it up with a more seemly sounding laugh. “How would you know what someone who sets oil-slicked seagulls on fire looks like anyways?”
“I don’t know, honestly. The words just kind of came out.” Nobara admitted. “Like I put my brain on auto-complete and that’s the sentence we got.”
Yui gave her a warm smile as she fiddled nervously with the edges of the tablet. “Well, I think your brain auto-complete might be onto something. Maybe we can try to plumb the depths of your hidden memories...” She trailed off to glance at where her shikigami was wriggling around in the bathtub excitedly, smiling with her eyes a bit. “... Just as soon as we plumb the depths of this boy’s shower drain.”
Nobara brightened and rushed to the edge of the tub. “He found something?!”
Yui nodded, hands on her hips. “I should have known the shower drain would be our jackpot.” She said, sounding like a proud mother.
“Honestly, if he had a clean shower drain too I would start to wonder if he really was a serial killer.” Only someone who has to worry about disposing of bodies would be that thorough. “Here, I think I can pry the drain up.”
Nobara crouched down in the tub, hooking the claw end of her hammer as far as she could into the grill of the drain. They had to be quiet because even though they were here on official business from the higher ups, the Tokyo Metropolitan Curse Technical College was allegedly swarming with rebels who’d turned against Jujutsu society. So far ‘swarming’ might have been an exaggeration - aside from a few crows digging through a trash bin, they hadn't seen a soul since getting on campus. But if they did, their cover story was that they were just picking something up from Nobara’s room. Apparently she used to be a student here. But obviously that cover story wouldn’t work if they were caught in the boys dormitories. So Nobara tried to be gentle as she pulled on the drain, sensitive to any creaking or clunking sounds the metal might make if it broke. Finally, with a little leverage and a lot of cursed energy to augment the strength of her limbs, the drain popped out of the tub with little more than a faint thud.
Sure enough, trapped in the internal spokes of the stopper were several black hairs, around five centimeters long. They were coated in a scummy sort of grease that was probably just soap, but Nobara still was grateful she'd put on nitrile gloves beforehand. “Gross.”
“Oh, don’t be so hard on him. Besides, you said it yourself that if his shower drain was clean, he’d be a serial killer.” Yui said, laughter in her voice as she held her shikigami’s head up to the hairs so it could confirm the identity of whoever had lost them. “Yep, these all belong to Fushiguro Megumi.”
Nobara got to work untangling the hairs from the drain and wove them one by one into the fibers of a straw doll. “Serial killer or not, this one’s no good. We’re executing him for a reason, after all.” What she was about to do to him would be a lot worse than any insulting words anyways.
Yui scratched her shikigami soothingly behind the ears, glancing back and forth between the zoomed in student ID of their target and Nobara herself, before finally asking a strange question, “What kind of guy is your type, Nobara?”
“Huh?! How the hell would I know?” Nobara tried to laugh, but it came out a little dryer than she intended. She tried to make her next words sound more relaxed to compensate. “I don’t remember liking any boys, so I can’t exactly look back and find a pattern in them.” For all she could tell, she might not even like boys at all. Every guy she’d met that she could remember had been gross and annoying, in her opinion.
“Ah, sorry. I shouldn’t have brought it up.” Yui said, returning the text on the tablet to a normal size.
“Don’t worry about it.” She stuffed the last of the hairs deep into the doll and double checked that the nametag on it matched the sample.
Yui led her into the next room down the hall - the room of their final target - in a sorry kind of silence. Nobara wished she hadn’t sounded quite so upset about it when she’d answered her question. She actually wasn’t all that upset and she didn’t want to make her assistant manager (and, if Nobara was being honest, her friend) uncomfortable thinking she was. So even though she didn’t particularly care about finding out who her type was or whatever, she figured she’d play along with it just to lighten Yui’s mood. “Maybe I should try using that brain auto-complete thing again.”
“Hmm?” Yui looked up from where she’d sent her shikigami under the door to unlock it from the inside. The little rat-worm seemed to fold his skull in impossible ways to fit.
“Like I could say something like ‘I like guys who are...’ and then just fill in the rest of the sentence with the first things that come to mind. Or maybe ‘girls.’ I don’t know.”
“Oh. That is a good idea.” Yui sounded more comfortable now that she knew Nobara wasn’t upset. “It could help you get to know yourself better.”
The shikigami opened the door and the two of them stepped through the threshold. “I like…” Nobara began. Either guys or girls seemed to fit into the sentence, so she figured she’d try the process with both. “...Girls who are...”
Once she’d said it, nothing else was really standing out to her though, and she glanced around, hoping to find some inspiration to fill her brain’s auto-complete. Her eyes finally landed on one of the dolls she’d made earlier and the name tag on it. “Zen’in Maki.”
Yui looked at her, biting her bottom lip with concern. “Are you sure you don’t like serial killers?”
“No, forget it. I just saw the nametag and it influenced the results.” Nobara said, waving the statement away. “Let me try again. I like guys who are… just… like… Oda Nobunaga.” She finally said, looking back up at Yui to see what her reaction was.
Her assistant manager was looking even more concerned for a moment, and then suddenly burst out with undignified laughter. It was a warm sound even as she tried to hold it back with one gloved hand.
“What? What is it?” Nobara asked. “Who’s Oda Nobunaga?”
Yui regained some degree of composure and delicately wiped at her eyes with a tissue. “Well if both of those statements are true, then you truly have the worst taste.”
“Who is Oda Nobunaga, Yui?” Nobara was confused. Suddenly a flash of an idea hit her. “Is this Oda Nobunaga’s room?”
The woman only doubled over laughing again, leaving Nobara without an explanation. She looked around the room, desperate for answers, but found only a few trashy posters of western actresses in bikinis, and a mess of clothes tossed on the floor. Ugh, she hoped this wasn’t her type of guy’s room - the bed sheets were flung everywhere, the trash bin was full, and she was fairly certain she’d just stepped on some popcorn.
“Nobara,” Yui said, biting back her laughter as she tried very hard to keep a professional expression on her face before gently placing her hand on Nobara’s shoulder. “I don’t know how to tell you this, but Oda Nobunaga is dead.”
“Did he die in Shibuya too?” Nobara asked, still not understanding what was funny.
Yui’s laugh sounded a bit more nervous this time before she answered. If he really did die in Shibuya, it probably wouldn’t be good to laugh. “No, he’s like a historical figure. He died over four hundred years ago.”
“Oh, well, what kind of guy was he then? I gotta figure out my type.” Nobara made it sound like a demand, putting her hands on her hips, but her assistant manager would know she was only joking now.
Yui moved on to where her shikigami was digging around in a pile of clothes, writhing like a worm dropped on dry coffee grounds with either excitement or pain - it was really hard to tell with that miserable little thing. “Let’s just say you’d get along really well with my father.”
Nobara spluttered. “I hope you don’t mean it like that.” The head of the Kamo family had seemed normal enough when she’d met him, and he’d even given her a cute eye patch which she was currently wearing over the gaping hole in her head where her left eye used to be. But the whole time throughout the meeting, she’d felt that he was somehow tasting her cursed energy, and it gave her the shivers. Besides, he was in his sixties or something, and older men were the grossest type of guy there was.
“Anyways,” Yui mercifully changed the subject by holding up her shikigami, which was proudly carrying a crusty-looking sock in its mouth. “This looks like it’ll be a much easier job than the last room.”
Nobara took the sock from the shikigami’s mouth and turned it over in her gloved hands. “I’m not sure a sweaty gym sock will be enough to make Resonance work.” It was a very sweaty sock though, Nobara had to admit. It was stiff enough to practically stand up on its own.
“Nobara...” Yui was chewing on her lower lip again, eyes widened with concern. “That’s not sweat.”
Nobara flung the sock away in horror. “No way! No way! No way! Ew ew ew!” She turned to the little shikigami to chide him, whining. “How could you let me just pick that up?!”
The shikigami recoiled away from her in some mixture of fear and shame, slithering off to retrieve the sock.
“Do you think it’ll be enough to hurt him?” The assistant manager asked, trying to change the subject to soothe Nobara’s stress. “We don’t have to kill him outright in a single shot.”
“Oh, it’ll be enough alright.” Nobara snarled, picking the horrible sock out of the shikigami’s mouth again between two mercifully gloved fingers. She took out the last straw doll and made a little nest inside its torso before wedging the offending sock as far inside as it would go.
Nobara readied her hammer. “Are we doing this?” She said through gritted teeth. She wanted to get this over with fast.
“Let me call my brother first. That way he'll know exactly when we need his technique.” Yui pulled out her phone and swiped through her recent calls. Her shikigami wriggled its way back out into the hallway to scout for anyone who might interrupt them.
Now Nobara had three dolls, fully primed with material from their targets. She laid them out on the bed in front of her while her assistant manager talked on the phone.
The first was labeled ‘Zen’in Maki’ and Nobara had used a dozen long hairs found in a hairbrush in her dorm room for it. The file on her was fairly sparse, since she didn’t have a cursed technique or even any cursed energy. It contained a picture of her school ID, and Nobara had to admit she was pretty, although a footnote in her file said that her appearance had changed greatly after a fire in Shibuya burned off much of her hair. She was being executed for mass murder, apparently.
The second was labeled ‘Fushiguro Megumi’ and it contained the drain hairs they’d found earlier. He apparently had a really strong cursed technique or something, and his file listed out everything about the many shikigami he could summon, the myriad weapons he had stored in his shadow, and what little was known about his Domain Expansion. It was everything she’d need to know if she was going to fight him, but if this plan worked out the way she intended it to, there wouldn’t be any need for that. He wasn’t actually a serial killer (at least not that the higher ups knew of) but it was believed that he was the brains of the operation and that he was coordinating the other curse users to eventually free Gojo Satoru, the most dangerous curse user alive today.
This last one was labeled ‘Ryomen Sukuna’s Vessel’, and not ‘Oda Nobunaga’ thankfully. He’d committed the most murders of them all, with thousands of victims in Shibuya and thousands more from the Heian era.
Killing them - even just one of them - would mean her mission was considered a success, and she would continue onto the next step in her promotion process towards becoming a grade one sorcerer. If she killed Sukuna's vessel in particular, she would become a semi grade one just from that. Apparently before she’d lost her memories, she’d already been partially through the promotion process, so it hadn’t been too hard to pick that up where she’d left off. If she really could kill one of them, she would be succeeding where a special grade sorcerer and several of the strongest grade one sorcerers had failed.
That had been an intimidating bit of info to receive.
But laid out in front of her like this, the dolls didn’t look intimidating at all. They looked so helpless and the threat posed by the curse users they represented seemed so far away. She had no reason to be intimidated by any of them or her mission at hand, yet she still felt a little uneasy. Perhaps it was her lack of memories - if she used to be a student here, would she have known these people? She couldn't imagine getting along with murderers and curse users and the vessel for the King of Curses himself, so she'd probably been miserable at the college, just like her grandmother said she was. But she just didn't remember. In any case, she’d heard that if you start thinking about the people you’re going to kill as, well, people, then it gets a lot harder to go through with it - and she did intend to go through with it. So she tried to ignore the idea that these might have been her former classmates and thought of them as just dolls, ready to have Resonance used on them.
Her technique really was perfect for situations like this. It was unblockable, undodgeable, untraceable, and could hit from any distance away. A few stray hairs might not be enough to kill a person, especially if they were stronger than her, but it would still hurt them, and Nobara could keep doing it for as long as she had nails and cursed energy.
“Alright, he says he’s ready.” Yui was still on the call with her brother, but she was speaking to Nobara here. “Make sure you have the seals on or he won’t be able to warp what you’re carrying.”
Nobara nodded and glanced at the small stone bracelet that one of Yui’s many brothers had given her. He'd told her it was part of some prerequisite condition he needed to use his technique on others and it was covered with intricate carvings that might have meant something to Nobara if she could actually remember what all those weird Jujutsu symbols meant.
She grabbed the first doll, labeled ‘Zen’in Maki’, and used her cursed technique to hold a nail steady above it, filling it with as much of her cursed energy as she could muster. She took a deep breath in, closed her one eye, and brought her hammer down.
Somewhere, far far away, she felt her cursed energy detonate. Not bothering to open her eyes, she pointed towards it.
Her assistant manager would have her compass app open by now and had unfolded a large map of Japan on the desk. “North by northeast,” Yui murmured, drawing a line that would follow the direction Nobara was pointing. “And how far?”
“Really far.” Nobara answered. “A few hundred kilometers, maybe? It’s hard to get a good estimate at distances like that.”
“That’s fine.” Yui said, reassuring. “We’ll narrow it down eventually.”
Opening her eye again, Nobara moved Zen’in’s doll away and pulled Fushiguro’s forward. Again, she poured her cursed energy into another nail, feeling the prickle and the sting of her cursed energy swelling around her, then closed her eye and swung.
“This one is closer.” Nobara said, as she pointed in the direction that she felt her Resonance detonate. “Maybe around forty or fifty kilometers.”
“East. Hmm, and the smallest bit northeast.” Nobara heard the scratch of pen on paper as another line was drawn out on the map. “That would put him right in the heart of Tokyo.”
“I hear there’s a lot of people in Tokyo.” Nobara said, grabbing the last doll.
Yui shook her head. “Not anymore.”
Nobara took a deep breath, preparing to strike the last doll.
“Wait!” Yui hissed, eyes suddenly wide. “Someone’s coming.”
Nobara glanced at the door to the hallway behind her. There were actually two doors in this room - one that led to an indoor hallway and another glass sliding door that led to a courtyard on the other side of the building. The floor plan gave Nobara the feeling of being trapped out in the open, open to attack from all sides. It would be easy for someone to see her from the courtyard looking in, but a sufficiently strong sorcerer wouldn’t even need to do that since they could probably just sense her cursed energy.
After waking up in the hospital after Shibuya, Nobara met only a handful of sorcerers who were stronger than her, but she also had her assistant manager with her, who would need her protection if it came to a fight. “How strong are they?”
"Strong." Yui swallowed nervously and looked back and forth between the last doll and her map, listening to something her shikigami was communicating to her intently. She recalled her shikigami back to the paper charm she kept it in and looked back up to meet Nobara’s eyes, the urgency plain on her face. “Hit the last one and we’ll get out of here.” Her voice was low and quiet. “I don’t know if it’s a curse or a sorcerer, but it’s far enough away that even if it can sense us, it would have to be crazy fast to get to us in time.”
“Okay.” Nobara whispered, closing her eye again. At first her cursed energy poured out a little more weakly than normal, as if she were feeling timid. But she told herself to not worry about whether or not they could be sensed and just send it. Besides, out of all the dolls she’d made today, she wanted this one to hurt the most.
So she let her cursed energy blossom around the nail, stretching her output to its limit. She inhaled and let it burn her lungs, feeling alive as the pinpricks sharpened all her senses.
She exhaled and let it all release.
The nail pierced the doll right through its filthy sock with a ‘ping’ that echoed through the room. “He’s definitely in the same place as Fushiguro.” Nobara said, opening her eye.
“Who is?”
Nobara felt a huge, cold hand clamp onto her shoulder, its grip immovable. She looked up to see a tall man with nasty, caked-on makeup that made him look like a corpse in the earliest stages of decomposition, along with some kind of weird tattoo over the bridge of his nose. Was this one of the curse users rebelling against the higher ups? He looked a little too old to be a student. But whoever he was, he was strong. Stronger than any sorcerer she could remember meeting, aside from Yui's dad.
Nobara gave the man her best innocent smile, intent on avoiding a fight if her assistant manager might get caught in it. “Oh, sorry I must have gotten a little lost. I’m Kugisa-”
“Kugisaki Nobara. I know who you are.” The strange man said, his expression unreadable.
Had this been someone she knew before she lost her memories?
He didn’t seem like someone she’d hang out with. In addition to his terribly overdone eyeliner, he was wearing ¥130,000 Prada combat boots with a fit that totally didn’t match them. If you’re going to flex like that, at least make sure it pairs well with everything else you’re wearing, otherwise all it tells people is that you spent a lot of money on clothes.
Yui was frozen with fear in the corner, eyes wide and hands in the air in surrender. Nobara tried to remove the man’s hand from her shoulder to put herself between Yui and him. It was the sorcerer’s job to protect their assistant manager, after all. But her best efforts at channeling her cursed energy into her fingers couldn’t give her the grip strength needed to pull his hand away.
He looked down at the dolls she had spread out on the bed, and then, in the same cold monotone he’d been using with her all along, asked, “Why are you doing this?”
“Doing what?” Nobara tried to play dumb.
He didn’t buy it.
Slowly, the man started dragging her out of the dorm room and towards the courtyard outside. With one hand on her shoulder and the other on her hammer, she couldn’t do a whole lot to stop him. But at least he was leaving her assistant manager alone.
Not that Nobara exactly liked being moved around. “Hey, where are you taking me?!” Nobara tried to drag her feet to make it at least a little more difficult for him, but it didn’t do much. Sure, he might be pretty strong, but that didn’t give this guy the right to be a jerk too. “You can’t just drag people around wherever you like!”
“I’d prefer not to make a mess in my brother’s room.” He said, cold rage bubbling just beneath the surface.
“A mess…?” Nobara really didn’t like where this was going. She quickly channeled her cursed energy all over her body, but particularly around her vitals, hoping to defend herself if this weird goth got violent. But a part of her almost wanted it to come to a fight now. With how rude he was being, he'd earned himself a few hits from her hammer!
“I gave a lot of thought about what I would do if I ever met you, you know.” The man looked down, meeting her eye with a cold stare. “For a long time, I just wanted to kill you.”
So they hadn’t met before?
The tattoo-like marking on his face started to change, fraying out into feathery lines that criss-crossed over his eyes. “But when you got hurt, my brother feared you were dead, and unnumbered tears were shed over the life you lost that night. I thought that if you survived, it would hurt him if I killed you straight away again. So I decided to leave the choice to you.”
“What the hell are you talking about?!” If she hadn’t met him before then she didn’t have to pretend to be polite. Anyone would be upset about getting manhandled like this, anyways, and her patience was wearing thin. So she floated three nails up to her free hand, brandishing them like claws. “Let go of me, you jerk!”
They were well away from the dorms now, surrounded by trees and a little ways off from a multi-story building with traditional architecture that had a feeling of looking both new and abandoned at the same time. The man stopped pulling her along but didn’t let go of her hand with the hammer, giving her a long, cold look that oscillated between disappointment and disgust. “Your choice is simple: The day you break Yuji’s heart is the very same day I'll stop your heart from beating. Now I’ll ask one more time - what were you doing with those dolls?”
But Nobara had no desire to answer him. If he wanted a fight, then a fight is what he’d get. “Who the hell is Yuji?!” she snarled.
The strike from the back of his hand made her vision flash white before cutting out entirely, but she managed to regain consciousness before her body stopped rolling. She tried to scramble to her feet, but suddenly she was dizzy and found that there was blood running into her one good eye. She managed to make it on to all fours and wiped her sleeve on her face - a little undignified but she didn’t have time to worry about what any etiquette youtubers would say about it.
Her vision was swimming, the world seemed too bright, and while her depth perception wasn’t great even on a good day, she guessed she was about twenty meters away from the man with a trail of broken trees and uprooted underbrush between them. Had he seriously hit her that hard? Nails littered the ground from where her nail box had burst open, and the teleportation bracelet charm was shattered to dust.
She watched him toss her hammer backwards over his shoulder, and casually say, “Oh? Still alive? I guess that makes some sense...”
Maybe she lost consciousness for a split second again or maybe he was just that fast, but the man seemed to cross the distance between them almost instantly and Nobara only just barely rolled out of the way of his kick. Sprawled on the ground again as the world spun, she watched the solid tree trunk that had been behind her just a fraction of a second earlier splinter in half and topple over at the impact, sending a pair of crows scattering as it fell.
But Nobara didn’t have time to psych herself out over it. She pulled a few nails out of the dirt and sent them flying towards him. Without her hammer, they’d have almost no power behind them, but she just needed something as cover to put more distance between them.
The first nail missed, as her spinning head threw her aim off.
The next one he caught in his bare hand, unimpressed.
He was definitely a lot stronger than her. But if that guy thought he could underestimate her and get away with it, he was wrong! “Hairpin!”
The nail burst with her cursed energy, and Nobara scrambled further in the direction of her hammer.
“Ah, that’s not bad either.” The weird guy said, not sounding as impressed as his words would imply.
Nobara made the mistake of glancing back at him, hoping to see some sign of damage, at least if only for her own satisfaction. But his hand was unharmed, and the only change seemed to be that one of his flowing white sleeves was a little shorter now. That was irritating!
“My turn.” He said, bringing his hands together as if steepled in prayer, but with his fingertips pointed straight at her as she ran away. “Convergence.”
Even if she couldn’t see what was going on between his hands, Nobara felt it. His overwhelming cursed energy that reeked of wrongness, feeling halfway between a human’s energy and a curse’s, began falling in towards his hands. Mirrored by a twisting revulsion in Nobara’s stomach, it condensed into a single point that grew in intensity the smaller it got.
Whatever came out of those hands would kill her. Nobara knew it with the same instinctive certainty that she knew an object thrown in the air would eventually come back down.
No. That wasn’t quite correct.
It would kill her if it hit her.
Spinning on her heels (and fighting back another rush of dizziness) Nobara faced the attack head on, and maximized the output of her cursed energy to put everything into defense. But this was all a deception. If she made him think she was going to try to block the hit, he wouldn’t be prepared for her to dodge it instead and her odds of evading drastically went up!
The intensity with which he met her gaze made Nobara think he’d fallen for the ruse.
“Su-” he began.
But he was cut off by a strange barking sound.
For the smallest fraction of a second, his concentration was disrupted as he turned, seemingly to run away. This was all the distraction needed for the attack in his hands to spill out, half-formed, as a diffuse splash of blood.
No longer the lethal shot Nobara had been expecting, she kept her defenses up rather than follow through with the plan to dodge. The spray of it absolutely ruined her clothes, and there were hardened (or maybe high pressure, Nobara couldn’t tell for sure) droplets that hurtled past her with enough force to cut her through her cursed energy and break her skin, but none of them cut deep enough to be dangerous.
Wiping at her eye, she found he'd regained his concentration and was readying another Convergence. Of course he’d be strong enough to spam them, she thought. Could she make it to her hammer in time before it charged up? If need be, she could still-
Yui tackled her before she even finished the thought. “WARP US OUT! NOW!” She screamed into her phone, panic and tears soaking her voice.
The world faded into a bright white light as Nobara felt herself pulled along to their next destination, crashing onto the floor of one of the Kamo family safehouses. Yui was sobbing and hyperventilating - clutching the three dolls as if they were a life vest in stormy waves - and as Nobara tried to hold her, she felt her own knees go weak. Too disoriented from the warp and her injuries to stay standing, the two of them collapsed in a pile as Nobara felt her consciousness fade.
----
Somewhere far far away, Maki's heart skipped a beat.
Arrhythmia? She thought. At my age?
The feeling in her chest passed as suddenly as it had come, of no more consequence than rose petals blowing by in the wind. But it left Maki with a strange reminder that somewhere inside her, there really was something still beating.