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There are so many of us.
Yuuta can’t stop that refrain from repeating in his head as he moves through the packed Miyagi Colony, brushing past people he might have to kill someday or might never see again, close enough to touch. He’d thought sorcerers were supposed to be rare. Apparently they’re not.
Apparently they all want his points, and as his count racks up entirely against his will, throngs descend on the Miyagi Grand Hotel to make a bid for Special Grade Sorcerer Okkotsu Yuuta’s fifty-eight points. He should relocate, he knows, stop using the hotel as a base before it gets worse and there’s even more damage to repair after the curtains are lifted, but then decides it’s better to concentrate the damage where it’s already been done. Countless rooms are in disarray and the plush lobby carpet has already been torn up by countless such battles - best not to do that to every hotel in the area.
It’s a week before the Miyagi Grand Hotel has a reputation: no one who steps through its cracked glass double doors walks out alive. But some are willing to risk even that, and on the ninth day of his confinement in the Miyagi Colony, and after his sixty-eighth point, Yuuta has a visitor who doesn’t seem to have any idea what she’s getting herself into.
At first, he doesn’t even see her. He’s up in a suite that was probably meant for honeymooners in its previous life, eating his way through a bag of katsu sandwiches because he hasn’t had time for a meal in over a day, and she sneaks into the lobby, then behind a set of doors that take her to a service elevator. She takes it to the top floor, admires the view for about ten seconds before she bolts because she’s learned that the worst thing she can be in these Games is exposed, then finds a room and stays until she forgets what time it is, charging her phone, playing Tetris because she can’t browse without signal - it’s as good a way as any to pass the time. She doesn’t know a damn thing about this place except that everyone here is trying to kill her, has no clue what to make of any of it, and she’s only here to hide. Any day she can do that for at least a couple of hours is a good one.
She wonders if life is going on as usual outside. She wonders if Tomoya is undressing another classmate with his eyes in Physics again now that she doesn’t sit in front of him. She wonders what her mother thinks of her absence, though she’s pretty sure she’s barely noticed. She wonders if Mrs. Abe at the nail salon wonders why she hasn’t come in this week, or if she knows what’s happening - if everyone does. But mostly, she wonders why she’s here at all.
She doesn’t know what this place is, and she’d never even heard the word “jujutsu” until a man in monk’s robes woke her in the night and some freaky sci-fi portal spit her out in the middle of a deserted Miyagi street that didn’t stay deserted for long. The best she can gather is that this is some sort of magical-people showdown and she’s been thrown into the mix because - improbably - she has it, too.
Which is stupid. Unless she’s been portaled into some sort of magical girl isekai manga (she doesn’t even like magical girl manga!), there is no scenario in which any of this makes sense. Because if there’s anyone in the world who would never receive magical powers of any kind for any reason, it’s Fukunaga Mitsuka.
Right?
Because these sorts of things don’t happen. Lonely small-town girls with fathers who never came back from the konbini and mothers who spend middle school uniform money on botox and boyfriends who never stay and friends who don’t see past the facade don’t have powers. Delinquents who’ve never really done anything bad save for failing English who bench for the track team and smoke to tell the world they can take a knock when all they want is for the knocks to stop don’t find out they have superhuman abilities. Losers who wish they could drink to forget but can’t stand the taste of sake and hide the Korean boy band merch and Final Fantasy posters and pulpy shounen manga that make them happy because happiness is always taken away from them don’t end up in places like this.
But here she is - Fukunaga Mitsuka, aged seventeen, totally unaccomplished, totally alone, and, apparently, endowed with some freaky sorcery power she can’t even begin to understand.
She’d smile - my anime protagonist awakening, she’d joke if she didn’t move through the kinds of social circles where saying that would get you roasted into the stratosphere - if it didn’t mean she was running for her life in between long games of Tetris. (Her record is at 300,000 points now.)
And long story short: Mitsuka has no idea that the Miyagi Grand Hotel, which she’d ducked into because the doors were broken open and it looked like a big enough place to find a hiding spot, has a reputation. And she still doesn’t when she descends to the lobby to try to find something to eat (maybe it has one of those little hotel stores? The one she’d stayed at with her track team last year had) and freezes in her tracks because there’s someone here.
He doesn’t look threatening, except for the katana on his back. He’s tall, lanky, and has bags under his eyes that would send Mitsuka’s facelift-addicted mother into an early grave, and he moves about nervously, like he’s afraid to be seen. Mitsuka decides it’s probably a good idea to do the same and hides herself next to a potted plant, grateful that she’s barely five feet tall for once. It doesn’t work, though.
She can smell the sauce from a Family Mart katsu sandwich on the boy’s breath and braces herself.
“Um,” she murmurs, nervous because there’s no one to seem cool for here. “Please don’t stab me with that.”
“What?”
She opens her eyes. The boy looks as scared as she does up close.
“N-nice katana?”
“Wait, what?”
“I…I don’t want to die,” Mitsuka elaborates, scared out of her wits. No wonder she isn’t making any sense. “I…I don’t know what’s happening here and I didn’t know there was anyone else around and I’m sorry-”
The boy takes his hand off the hilt of his katana. “You didn’t know I was here?”
Mitsuka shakes her head, hoping it’s the right answer.
It seems to be. The boy’s eyes soften; she can’t tell but Yuuta feels almost sorry that he’d thought he would have to kill this poor girl who really looks more like a frightened little bird with storm-ruffled feathers than a threat. But he can’t afford to underestimate her, either. “Do you have any idea who I am?” he tries.
She shakes her head and looks like she thinks he’s still going to stab her. If she’s lying, she’s doing a damn good job of it.
“And you’re not after my points?”
“Your…points?”
Okay, either this girl is an Oscar-worthy actress or she really shouldn’t be here. “You don’t know about the points system?”
“N-no, I do,” she hastily reassures him. “I just don’t know how many you have and…and even if I did, how would I kill you? I’m unarmed.” Mitsuka laughs nervously. “Do you have a lot of points?”
Yuuta dodges the question. “I’m guessing you don’t have any.”
“No,” she admits. “Do you?”
“Do you know about the rule?”
“Which?”
“That you get your cursed technique removed if you don’t get a point within a certain window of time?”
Mitsuka’s eyes widen. “What’s a cursed technique?”
“Wait, wait, do you know anything about this?”
“Look, I don’t know what you’re on about, but if something bad is going to happen to me, can you at least tell me what it is?”
Something clicks in Yuuta’s brain, then.
He’s never seen this girl anywhere. He’d remember: she’s memorable with her pretty, delicate face and stringy, unwashed sapphire hair, her tiny stature and surprisingly big voice. She seems about his age, and she knows next to nothing about how the Culling Games work. She knows the lay of the land here well - she’s probably a local like him - but she’s not familiar.
There’s almost no way this girl knew she was a sorcerer before the Games.
“You just found out about all of this, didn’t you,” he says.
She nods.
“You didn’t know you were a sorcerer?”
She shakes her head.
Yuuta’s mouth rounds into an O and his eyes widen with pity. “That must’ve been really hard.”
“Eh,” she says, waving him off with a dismissive flap of her hand. She might as well try to salvage a little of her dignity in the face of his pity. “At least I haven’t had to hear my mother talk about Botox in a week and a half.”
“Well, it still must’ve been really hard.” Yuuta doesn’t seem to buy it and it seems like that surprises her.
“Well, I’ve kinda just been hiding,” she admits. “No one knows who I am and I don’t have any points, so if I stay hidden, no one ever comes after me.”
“Well, yeah, but you’re going to have to be able to defend yourself eventually,” he tells her, his voice gentle. Something about this boy who’s got a good foot of height on her makes Mitsuka feel like she can trust him without hesitation. “Do you have any way of doing that?”
She shakes her head and knows exactly where this is headed.
**
He learns that her name is Mitsuka.
There’s a lot he doesn’t remember about his early sorcery training, but he does his best to impart what he remembers upon his new ally. She’s a gamble - there isn’t much she can do for him - but she’s a second-year like him with absolutely no idea what she’s doing, and besides, he likes her. He’s not just going to leave her to die.
So he helps her harness her cursed energy when he can, and when he can’t, he learns that her name is Fukunaga Mitsuka, and she’s from Sendai. She’s a second-year at a high school he might’ve attended if he hadn’t gone to Tech, she’s on the track team, and she runs with a crowd that probably would’ve made Yuuta’s life miserable if he’d stayed but it’s obvious that she’s nothing at all like them. She smokes and hates the taste, and she’s embarrassed when she tells him that she loves Final Fantasy and a k-pop band called FIYAH whose singles she plays for him off her phone - she sways her head along to the music, and he smiles, because he knows loneliness well enough to know that she hasn’t been able to dance like that without fear of judgement in front of someone else in ages. She’s funny. She gives the impression of a hollowed-out shell on purpose because she’s afraid people won’t accept its filling. She’s not too powerful, but she’s a quick learner. He shows her a picture of Maki, pre-Shibuya, and she agrees that yes, Maki is hot, and yes, Maki probably looks even hotter with her face covered in scars, even though he doesn’t have a recent picture to show him.
That worries him, because the way she looks at that picture, it really seems like she’s going to try to steal her. So he zooms the group picture out. “My class,” he tells her, zooming in on Gojo in the back because she ought to know who Gojo Satoru is if she’s going to be a sorcerer now, and then on Panda, and then on Inumaki, and explains them all.
“Nice tattoos,” she comments. “I vibe.”
“He doesn’t talk,” Yuuta offers.
Mitsuka snickers. “I double-vibe.”
“He would like you,” Yuuta says.
“Cool.”
“You would like him.”
She smirks. “Not gonna lie, yeah, I’d hit that.”
Yuuta’s face reddens and she bursts out laughing hard enough that she needs to lean on Yuuta’s shoulder for support.
He never thought he would like this strange little bird so much.
**
“Y’know, this curse thing might just be the only marketable skill I have.”
“You can paint nails,” Yuuta points out.
“Yeah, but I hate the smell.” Mitsuka chugs half a bottle of watermelon Ramune - her first since the curtain lifted - in one sip. “I like this better.”
“Does that mean you’ll come to Tech?”
She tucks her hair - washed, finally, with a little of its natural bronze beginning to show through at the roots where the blue dye hasn’t touched it - behind her ear. “Maybe?”
He leans his head on her shoulder, which looks slightly ridiculous at her height, but he chooses to ignore that. “I’d like that.”
Mitsuka puts her arm around his waist and pats his back indulgently, though he knows she’s being genuine, too. “It’s a school full of magical hot people where they don’t care about your grades. How could I not?”