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“…Vilemina? Is that you?”
Lauma never thought she would see Vilemina again. Not in the ornate halls of their clan’s estate, not in the neutral courtyards at Jujutsu Tech, not as passersby in the city streets, and certainly not in the thick of battle, surrounded by curses—special grades, mutilated humans, and everything in-between. The last time she talked to her childhood companion, Vilemina had been utterly worn down, unwilling to carry the weight of a sorcerer any longer.
Lauma understood. She mourned the way that Vilemina had drifted away, that Lauma had not been able to save her from that hardship, but she understood.
“I can’t… I can’t take it anymore,” Vilemina confessed, whispering in the moon-bathed garden of their home—the only place Lauma had ever seen as a sanctuary that extended to herself, when the world got too much. Yet that was the place where Vilemina revealed the cracks that tore her asunder. “We give and we give, for what? To die? And you— They expect even more from you.”
“Six Eyes means I have more to give,” Lauma sighed. “That’s all there is to it.”
Vilemina grabbed her hand, looking for a lifeline. Lauma wished with all of her heart that she could grant one. “It doesn’t have to be. What you were born with… You don’t owe them anything, Lauma. You once told me I didn’t. Why is it different for you?”
Lauma couldn’t answer the question.
For well over a year, she regretted that she never answered.
“Come with me. Together, we can be free. We can have a peaceful life. No curses, no clan, no destiny. We can just be… be people. Lauma, please. Think of yourself too, just this once.”
“I’m…” This, too, Lauma always wondered if she regretted. She did. She didn’t. She will never know. Just because the weight pulled on her shoulders did not mean that Lauma did not see some of it worth carrying. It did not mean that Lauma could not secretly want different things that were completely incompatible with each other. All she could do was choose one and hope the regret would not eat her alive. “I’m sorry. I hope your new life finds you well, Vilemina.”
The train platform remained utterly still. A few curses—the special grades included—were still scattered about the innocent civilians caught in this terrible mess. Lauma, for all of her ability, could only hope that she had not irreparably harmed the innocents with her domain, and that she would be able to determine a way to draw away the two special grades without harming them further. The new curse she had somehow missed in the chaos, solitary like the rest but with a moving eye on a sheet of flesh, sat behind her and only increased her inner anxiety.
For Vilemina to appear now would be something of a miracle. So much a miracle that Lauma had to be sure it was her, and not an apparition of Lauma’s desperate mind, but her Six Eyes determined Vilemina to be real. Worn, apprehensive, armed only with two of her knives in a white-knuckle grip, but real.
Lauma never would have asked anything of Vilemina. Not anymore. She had been Lauma’s dearest friend in the hallowed but often imposing walls of their clan home, the only one who dared to treat the blessed Six Eyes as a fellow child when she got overwhelmed. Lauma would have loved to stay by her side, and vice versa, but… Vilemina had not wanted the life of a sorcerer, so who was Lauma to force her into something she did not want? But… she was currently out of her depth, admittedly, and Vilemina had always managed to substitute her lack of cursed power with passion and determination, even if she didn’t always recognize it. Together, maybe, they could save this place with as few casualties as possible.
Vilemina nodded slightly, still several meters away. Lauma had the urge to close that distance, to embrace her despite the battle being waged, but in the time Lauma had taken to deliberate her own desire, Vilemina held up a hand. “Don’t move,” she said. “That thing behind you… It’s a trap. This entire attack is a trap for you.”
Despite herself, a dry chuckle escaped Lauma. “I figured that was the case.” They did not even need to spread her name to the lips of scared civilians trapped inside the district barrier; the moment there was a crisis of this magnitude, who else would they call, if not her? The elders would send her first, and even if they didn’t… Lauma lived her whole life knowing that her power she was blessed with meant it could be used to save those with less from dying to the same cause. Maybe it… wasn’t what Lauma would have chosen for herself, but neither could she choose to make others suffer when she had the ability to lessen that. Of course it made it easy to set traps for her… but that did not mean she would be underestimated. Doubly so on the rare occasions that the venerated Six Eyes was not alone.
Vilemina sighed. “And yet you went anyway? Never mind, it’s just like you.” She approached slowly, eyeing warily all of the remaining curses and the people that Lauma’s split second domain had left in a stupor. Mostly, though, she looked at Lauma and the curse behind her, clearly unwilling to get too close. “It responds to movement,” she said. “If you stay still, it won’t grab you.”
Lauma could not get a good reading on it past the pounding behind her eyes, but it did create an area of effect around itself that Lauma was caught in, waiting for something to change. Unfortunately, she could not afford to stall forever. “It will try. I can be fast when I want to be.”
“It’s faster than you this time,” Vilemina warned. “That thing… It’s made for Limitless users, you know. Hang tight, I might be able to de-activate it from outside its range.”
“So it is an object…” Lauma muttered to herself. The line between cursed objects and curses could be awfully blurry. Did the special grade curses have the means to discover and use it? Or were those rogue sorcerers truly working with curses? It was troubling, either way.
Then it unfolded in the blink of an eye. Lauma had not moved. Her control of her cursed energy was immaculate through years of practice and necessity, so Lauma knew she had not moved. Nothing had changed between herself and the object, yet still, its conditions had been met.
It tangled her faster than even the Six Eyes could blink, and now Lauma couldn’t move. Neither could she maintain or summon Limitless. Six Eyes assessed it once more with anxious fervor, screaming danger, danger all the while she saw how absolute the sealing properties of the object truly was… and that it activated precisely because she had not moved.
“It’s called the Prison Realm,” Vilemina said, approaching Lauma now that she trapped. Vilemina was the same as she ever was, except, perhaps, that the darkness in her expression had grown in the years she had been away, instead of regressing, like Lauma had hoped. No, it was much worse.
Vilemina had not come to Lauma’s rescue despite her desire to leave this life behind. The opposite, in fact.
“You lied,” Lauma realized, voice thick with the terrible truth that unfolded. Vilemina, her old friend… had been in on the trap.
Vilemina grimaced, but that was as far as her remorse went. “I’m sorry, Lauma. It couldn’t be helped.”
“Couldn’t be helped?” she repeated. Vilemina, who often wore her heart on her sleeve, hardly reacted, so evidently it meant that all of Lauma’s well-tempered emotions came rushing to the surface in lieu of infinity. Anger and despair, loss and remorse… How could Vilemina do this? Had… Had Lauma failed her more than she realized? “Mina, whatever is going on, we can work this out.”
“No!” There was Vilemina’s anger—a familiar sight except for the fact that it was fully directed at Lauma. “There’s no working this out! I didn’t want it to turn out like this, Lauma, but you gave me no choice!”
“Me? I gave you no choice? Vilemina, what are you talking about?”
Lauma had leveraged everything she could to get Vilemina out of the clan, out of jujutsu society, without getting her put on any blacklists. For all of her power, it had not come with that kind of authority, but Lauma tried. She even thought she succeeded, but…
“Did you really think I could get away from it all by myself? Maybe I thought that too, once, but as soon as you’re gone, everyone comes knocking at my fucking door. People like me aren’t allowed to leave. You, though—you would have been strong enough. But you wouldn’t come with me, you didn’t want to, and I understand that now.”
“That doesn’t make us enemies, ‘Mina.”
The Prison Realm’s grip was absolute, nearly to the point he could cut off the circulation of her limbs that it had ensnared. Lauma fought it anyway, driven by primal desperation. How much of that desperation lent herself to her need to be free, and how much of it was her desire to get through to Vilemina… she could not say.
“Maybe it didn’t,” Vilemina allowed. “But I can’t put my neck on the line for you. These people have every intention of turning this damned country into a war zone, and I want no part of it! If you handing you over is the price I need to pay to get out of here in peace… then so be it.”
Lauma gained an inch against the restraints; this time, anger fueled her. “So you would betray all of humanity?! Just to… what? Have a new life handed to you on a silver platter? I never, ever blamed you or judged you for being tired, for being afraid… but I never took you for a coward, Vilemina. A cruel one, at that.”
If her anger had just been directed towards the clan, Lauma might have understood it. As much as Lauma had sworn to protect them too, the damage they caused their own children was not without consequence, and it was not always the thing that could be forgiven. But to align herself with this group that would endanger thousands of innocents? That tried to murder students in cold blood? That crowed about their desire to destroy all of humanity? That was too far.
The Six Eyes could look at Vilemina and see the same woman they had always known. Lauma, however, could no longer see the girl that would sit with her in the garden, distracting her with catching bugs or giving the stars new names, nor the sister-in-arms that pulled Lauma out of a pile of her own blood when Limitless had failed, nor the fierce soul who would declare that all lives should be cherished, no matter their bloodline. That Vilemina was gone.
“Not all of us can afford to be brave,” Vilemina said. “For what it’s worth… I’m sorry it came to this. If you ever get out of this, I would understand if you came to kill me yourself. I’d let you.”
“Vilemina—!”
“Gate: Close.”
The Prison Realm began to swallow Lauma whole, wrapping her in darkness and chaining her to its confines. It was the despair, however, that truly crushed Lauma—and that was all her own.
“Goodbye, Lauma.”
Why is it different for you?
The truth was, it wasn’t a question that Lauma could have answered at all. It was different for her because everybody wanted something different, in ways that Lauma could never begin to satisfy. She would try her best, she would follow her heart when there was doubt, and yet Lauma would always fail somebody. It was a truth she had come to accept.
It didn’t make it any easier.
In the abyss of the Prison Realm, Lauma despaired that there would never be an answer that would not hurt in some way.