Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

"Why would you keep summoning me when you said it yourself that you exhaust too much cursed energy by doing so, Geto-san?"

Yuuji couldn't help but ask this question while looking at Amanai and Satoru playing on the beach. He couldn't understand why he would do such an exhausting thing when he couldn't even touch anything unless Suguru poured all his cursed energy reserves on Yuuji.

"I want to be alone with my thoughts for now, Itadori."

Yuuji turned to him at that, the salt-heavy breeze tugging at the silence Suguru had left between them. In the distance, Amanai’s laughter rose bright and unguarded as Satoru splashed water at her with all the childish persistence of someone trying too hard to keep the mood light, but Suguru did not look in their direction for long. His gaze stayed fixed on the horizon instead, as though the line where sea met sky might offer him an answer that neither sorcerers nor duty had ever managed to give.

“Do you really think this is the right thing to do?”

The question came so quietly that Yuuji almost mistook it for a thought Suguru had meant to keep to himself, but the slight turn of his head made it clear that he was waiting for an answer. There was none of Suguru’s usual steadiness in his expression now, only a kind of weariness Yuuji was beginning to recognize, the sort that had less to do with cursed energy and more to do with carrying convictions that no longer sat as firmly in his chest as they once had.

It was strange, seeing someone like Suguru who always seemed to know where to stand and what to protect look as though he had begun to distrust the ground beneath his own feet.

“You mean about the merging?” Yuuji asked, already knowing he did.

Suguru gave a small nod, his eyes drifting back to Amanai. 

“She’s still just a girl, no matter what title they place on her. Star Plasma Vessel, duty, balance, none of it changes the fact that everyone around her has already decided what her life is supposed to be worth. I keep thinking that maybe we tell ourselves it’s for the greater good because it’s easier than admitting we’re asking a child to sacrifice herself for the supposed greater good.”

Yuuji was quiet for a moment, watching Amanai kick seawater at Satoru while laughing hard enough to stumble backward. She did not look like a sacrifice or a key or some sacred component in a ritual older than either of them. She looked exactly as Suguru said—just a girl, trying to enjoy what little freedom she had left before the adults around her turned her fate into something solemn and irreversible. That, more than anything, made his chest tighten.

“I think…” Yuuji started slowly, his voice gentler than before, “I think it shouldn’t be up to us.”

Suguru finally looked at him then, and Yuuji met his gaze without wavering, even if he felt the weight of it settle heavily over his shoulders.

“If Amanai wants to go through with the merging, then that should be her decision. And if she doesn’t want to, then that should be her choice too. I don’t think anyone else gets to decide whether she has to give up her life just because jujutsu society says it’s necessary.”

For a moment, Suguru said nothing. The breeze lifted a few loose strands of his hair, and Yuuji could almost see the shape of the thoughts he was trying not to hear, the ones that kept driving him to summon him despite the cost. It wasn’t really Yuuji’s presence Suguru needed, he realized—it was the interruption, the break in that spiraling current of doubt before it swallowed him whole.

“That’s the problem,” Suguru murmured at last, a faint, humorless smile touching his mouth. 

“The moment you leave it to her, the entire logic of jujutsu starts to crack. Because if her answer is no, then what does that make all of this? What does it make us, for standing here and asking it of her in the first place?”

Yuuji had no answer to that, not one that would make the air feel any lighter. All he could do was look toward Amanai again, at the way she shone against the ocean as if she still belonged wholly to herself, and wonder how anyone could ask her to surrender that with a smile and call it salvation. 

The next day arrived with a quiet that felt almost unnatural.

After everything that had happened—the bounty on Amanai, the sleepless nights, the constant ambushes—it should have felt like relief to finally stand before Jujutsu High. The mission was nearly over. One more descent, one more decision, and then it would all be done. 

But Yuuji could feel the strain hanging over the three of them like a second atmosphere, invisible and heavy, pressing against skin and bone alike. Even Satoru’s usual arrogance felt thinner today, stretched over exhaustion he refused to acknowledge.

Amanai stood between them at the top of the stairs, her hands clasped behind her back as if that alone could hide the tremor in them. She had gone strangely quiet on the walk there, no longer snapping at Satoru’s teasing with the same easy indignation, no longer puffing herself up with the false confidence she had worn so stubbornly these past few days. The closer they got to Tengen, the more obvious it became, she was scared. 

Satoru noticed it too.

He glanced at Amanai, then at Suguru, and for once the smile on his face softened into something almost reassuring instead of playful. 

“Well,” he said, stretching his arms over his head as if this were no more than a stroll, “we’re here. Last chance to back out and become fugitives, Amanai-chan.”

Amanai gave him a weak glare. “That’s not funny.”

“No,” Satoru said lightly, “I’m being serious.”

The words made her blink, and for a second even Suguru looked at him in surprise. But before anyone could respond, the air behind them changed.

It was not cursed energy that warned them.

It was something colder than that. 

Something empty.

Satoru’s eyes sharpened first, his body tensing in an instant, and then a figure dropped soundlessly into the space behind them like a blade falling from the sky. There was no grand entrance, no warning shout, no dramatic flare of power. Only a man in black, moving with terrifying precision, a weapon already in hand.

“Satoru!” Suguru shouted.

Satoru spun, but he was too late.

The blade drove straight through him from behind with a wet, sickening sound, piercing through flesh before any of them could fully understand what was happening. Satoru’s breath hitched violently, his body jerking as the weapon burst through his torso, red blooming across the front of his uniform in a spray so sudden that Amanai let out a strangled cry.

For one frozen second, no one moved.

Satoru stood there impaled, blue eyes blown wide with shock as blood spilled from his mouth and down the blade lodged in him. It was impossible, so impossible that Yuuji’s mind rejected the sight even as it unfolded in front of him. This was Gojo Satoru. The strongest. The untouchable one. The person who should have seen everything.

And yet someone had gotten behind him.

The man yanked the blade free.

Satoru stumbled forward hard, catching himself on one knee with one hand braced against the stone. Blood splattered beneath him, vivid against the pale floor, and the sound of it hitting the ground was somehow louder than Amanai’s sharp cry, louder than Suguru’s curse under his breath, louder than Yuuji’s own pulse roaring in his ears. The man didn’t give him time to recover. He struck again immediately, a second vicious slash cutting across him before Satoru could properly regain his footing.

“Gojo sensei!” Yuuji cried inside Suguru's head.

Suguru surged forward, curses already spilling around them in a furious wave, but Satoru threw out an arm without looking back. The motion was abrupt, shaky with pain, but still unmistakably commanding.

“Take her,” he said, voice rough and wet. “Get Amanai inside.”

Suguru froze.

Blood was running down Satoru’s side in sheets now, staining his clothes red, but there was still that same impossible certainty in his expression as he pushed himself back to his feet. His eyes never left the man. He looked pale, and furious, and terrifyingly alive despite the blade that had just gone through him.

“Go,” Satoru snapped.

For one heartbeat, Suguru looked like he wanted to argue. Yuuji could see it plainly—the instinct to stay, to fight beside him, to not leave him alone with a monster that had just done the impossible. But Amanai was behind them, trembling, and the mission was Amanai. Amanai, who had been the center of all this from the start. Amanai, whose life was hanging by a thread while the man stood between them and any illusion of safety.

Suguru clenched his jaw.

Then he grabbed Amanai’s wrist and pulled her back.

“Come on.”

Amanai stumbled, still staring at Satoru in horror, her face white as the sleeves of her uniform. “But Gojo—”

“He’ll catch up,” Suguru said.

It was a lie, or maybe a prayer. Yuuji couldn’t tell which.

They retreated deeper inside while the sound of battle erupted behind them—stone cracking, steel shrieking, the violent rhythm of impact after impact echoing through the area like thunder trapped underground. Amanai kept looking back as if expecting Satoru to come sauntering after them at any second with blood on his face and some ridiculous joke on his tongue, but the only thing that followed them was silence once the distance grew too great.

By the time they reached the chamber before Tengen, Amanai was shaking.

The sacred stillness of the place only made everything worse. It was too calm, too untouched by the chaos outside, as if the world had decided that whatever happened to children and sorcerers in its name was none of its concern. 

Amanai stood at the threshold of the path leading to Tengen, staring at it with wide, glassy eyes. Her breathing was uneven now, panic held together by sheer force of will.

Suguru let go of her wrist.

For a moment, he said nothing. He only looked at her, really looked at her, at the fear on her face, at the tears she was trying not to let fall, at the fact that she was still just a girl in a school uniform being asked to surrender everything because adults had decided it was noble. Yuuji saw the exact instant something in Suguru settled.

“Amanai,” he said quietly.

She turned toward him.

“If you want to turn back,” Suguru said, “then we’ll turn back.”

Her eyes widened.

The words hung in the chamber like a fracture line splitting stone. Yuuji could feel how enormous they were, how dangerous. This was the mission. This was jujutsu society’s will, Tengen’s will, the reason they had fought and bled and nearly died to get her here. And yet Suguru stood before her and offered something no one else ever had: a choice.

“You don’t have to do this if you don’t want to,” he continued, his voice gentle but unwavering. “If you want to go back to Kuroi, to school, to your life… then say so. Satoru and I will protect you.”

Amanai stared at him like she had forgotten how to breathe.

Then her face crumpled.

The tears came all at once, spilling over before she could stop them, and she covered her mouth with both hands as if ashamed of the sob that escaped anyway. For so long she had tried to be brave, tried to wear acceptance like armor, but now that someone had finally given her permission to want something else, it all collapsed.

“I want to live,” she choked out.

The confession was small, but it struck Yuuji harder than any scream could have.

Amanai’s shoulders shook as she cried openly now, no longer trying to hold herself together. 

“I don’t want to merge,” she said, voice trembling so badly it almost broke apart.

“I want to stay with Kuroi. I want to go back. I want to live with everyone else. I don’t want to disappear.”

Something in Suguru’s expression softened with such painful tenderness that Yuuji had to look away for a second. This was the answer he had been waiting for, maybe even hoping for, ever since the short vacation, proof that his doubts had not been misplaced, that the person in front of him wanted to remain a person and not become some sacred function of the system.

He stepped toward her and held out his hand.

“Then let’s go home.”

Amanai looked at him through tears, and for the first time since entering, she smiled.

It was small and shaky and full of relief so pure it hurt.

She took one step toward Suguru.

Then, a gunshot split the air.

Amanai’s head snapped sideways.

For one impossible second she remained standing, eyes wide, that fragile smile still lingering on her lips as blood blossomed from her forehead in a bright, terrible spray. Then her body collapsed sideways onto the stone with a sickening thud, all warmth and movement extinguished so abruptly it felt unreal.

Suguru stopped breathing.

Yuuji could not even hear Amanai hit the floor over the ringing in Suguru's ears. She lay motionless on the ground, eyes still open, blood spreading beneath her hair in a dark halo. The hand she had been reaching toward Suguru with fell limply to her side.

One second ago she had been crying because she wanted to live.

Now she was dead.

A pair of footsteps echoed into the chamber.

Suguru turned slowly.

The man who was fighting Satoru earlier stood at the entrance with the gun still in his hand, his expression as calm as if he had merely finished a chore. There was no strain on him, no excitement, no thrill of victory. Only that same cold indifference, the look of a man who had just erased a life because it was convenient.

“Sorry,” The man said, voice flat. “I’m in a hurry. You can collect your friend's corpse outside.”

The cursed energy around Suguru exploded.

It came out of him in a violent surge, curses pouring into the chamber in numbers that made the air feel black with malice. Grief and rage hit all at once, too fast and too brutally to separate from one another. Satoru was still outside, bleeding and alone and possibly dead. Amanai was dead at his feet after choosing to live. And the man responsible stood there like none of it meant anything.

Suguru attacked with everything he had.

The man moved to meet him without hesitation, slipping through the swarm of curses with terrifying efficiency, every motion clean and deliberate. Suguru fought like someone trying to tear the world apart with his bare hands, but the other fought like a man who had already decided the outcome before stepping into the room. Their clash shook the chamber, curses shrieking as they were cut down, stone cracking under the force of impact.

But even through the fury, even through the violence, Yuuji could see it happening, and something clicked in his mind.

Why does he look like Megumi? 

Yuuji heard this once, when Maki kindly explained such things during Shibuya. The sorcerer killer, a Zen'in. 

No, he wasn't a Zen'in anymore. 

He was a Fushiguro. 

Fushiguro Toji. 

Amanai’s body lay only a few feet away, her blood still fresh on the stone, and everything Suguru had been taught to believe in had failed her in the cruelest possible way. The system had asked for her life. He had chosen to defy it for her sake. And still, she had died before she could even take his hand.

There was nothing righteous in this.

Nothing noble.

Only grief, and helplessness, and a hatred so sharp that Yuuji could feel it forming inside Suguru like the birth of a curse.

And Yuuji could feel himself being influenced by Suguru's emotions. It only heightened when the man who killed Amanai... and Satoru was Megumi's biological father. 

But... Satoru survived and became his teacher, didn't he? 

So he's alive, he got to be alive. He can't easily die just like that. 

Suguru was losing ground the moment he heard Yuuji's thoughts.

Not badly enough for anyone else to notice at a glance, perhaps, but Yuuji could feel it from inside him. The minute shifts in Suguru’s breathing, the way his muscles tightened a split second too late before each dodge, the faint drag in his cursed energy whenever he summoned another spirit to intercept Toji’s attacks. 

Yuuji had no eyes of his own in the physical sense, no body standing separate from this fight, but through Suguru’s senses, the battle was all jagged motion and blood and stone, every impact reverberating through the body they shared.

Toji would not let him think.

That was what terrified Yuuji most. It wasn’t just that Suguru was being overwhelmed by someone monstrously strong, it was the way Toji fought like he understood exactly how to suffocate a sorcerer from the inside out. He gave Suguru no room to breathe, no room to grieve, no room to hear anything except the whistle of steel and the shriek of dying curses.

Every attack arrived before the last one had properly ended, forcing Suguru to stay rooted in the present second by second, as if Toji knew that a single pause would be enough for everything Amanai’s death had done to him to come crashing down at once.

“Geto-san! Switch with me!”

Yuuji pushed the words through Suguru's mental space as hard as he could, voice ringing inside the dark. It felt wrong to call it shouting when there were no lungs involved, no air to carry the sound, and yet desperation gave it weight all the same. If Suguru would just let go for a moment—just one moment—Yuuji could take the body, buy him time, force Toji back even for a second.

But Suguru didn’t answer.

A curse with three jaws lunged at Toji from the side, only to be ripped apart before it could sink its teeth in. The recoil jolted through Suguru’s arms, through his ribs, through the whole body Yuuji was trapped inside, and he felt Suguru grit his teeth around the pain of it. Another strike came immediately after, and Suguru twisted just in time to avoid the worst of it, though the blade still sliced across his shoulder. The sting of it flashed through their shared nerves, hot and sharp.

“Geto-san!” Yuuji tried again. “Let me out!”

Still nothing.

Suguru heard him, Yuuji knew he did. He had to. The bond between cursed object and its vessel was too intimate for anything else. Yuuji had spent enough time tucked behind Suguru’s consciousness to know the rhythm of his thoughts, the texture of his silence, the way emotion distorted the space they shared. But hearing and answering were two different things, and Toji was making sure Suguru couldn’t spare enough of himself to do the latter.

Another impact.

Suguru stumbled back a step, and Yuuji felt the jolt of it all the way through him, as if the floor had shifted beneath his own feet despite not having any.

Amanai’s body was still there, he could feel Suguru refusing to look and looking anyway, that awful awareness lodged in the back of his mind no matter how viciously the fight demanded his focus. One second she had been reaching for his hand, crying because she wanted to live. The next she was dead on the stone, and Suguru had been forced to watch it happen.

No wonder he was unraveling.

“Switch with me,” Yuuji said again, more urgently now. “Geto-san, please.”

Toji’s chain cracked through the air.

Suguru blocked with a curse and then another, their bodies bursting apart one after the other under Toji’s relentless assault, but the force of it still drove him backward. Yuuji felt the strain in Suguru's body like it was his own. The ache in his arms, the bruising force in his side, the way his heartbeat had sped into something dangerously uneven. Suguru was still fighting well. Still adapting. Still throwing curse after curse at a rate that would have crushed most opponents outright.

But Toji was not most opponents.

He was closing in.

“Damn it,” Yuuji hissed. “If you can hear me, then let me take over!”

Nothing.

No, not nothing.

A flicker.

It was small, barely more than a crack in the flow of Suguru’s concentration but Yuuji felt it, a momentary shift in the shared space of their consciousness.

Recognition. 

Suguru had heard him. The realization shot through Yuuji so fast it almost hurt.

“Geto-san!”

But the second that flicker appeared, Toji exploited it.

He moved with brutal speed, slipping past a curse Suguru had sent to intercept him and driving in close before Suguru could recover. The strike came too fast to fully avoid. Suguru twisted, but not enough, and the blow tore across his side with a wet sound that made Yuuji’s stomach drop. Pain exploded through the Suguru's body, so much that it hurt him, so blinding and immediate that for a second even Yuuji’s thoughts scattered.

Suguru sucked in a sharp breath.

If this sensation Yuuji had felt was diluted the moment he receives it, he couldn't imagine the pain Suguru must have felt. 

The shared space between them wavered with it, unstable for just an instant, and Yuuji lunged for that opening on pure instinct.

“Let me handle him!”

This time the response came. Not in words, not at first, but in a violent shove of refusal that nearly knocked Yuuji back into the dark. It carried anger, grief, and something rawer beneath both, a protectiveness so fierce it almost felt misplaced in the middle of all this bloodshed. 

Suguru was refusing him. Not because he hadn’t heard, not because he didn’t understand, but because he was still trying to keep Yuuji away from this.

“Are you insane?” Yuuji snapped back, his own panic flaring into frustration. “You’re injured, Amanai’s dead, Gojo sensei's not here, and you still won’t switch with me?”

Suguru didn’t answer directly. He couldn't, not with Toji still pressing him from every angle, not with curses shrieking around them and blood running warm down his side. But Yuuji felt the shape of his intent anyway, pressed through the shared mental space between them with grim, stubborn clarity.

"No." 

Yuuji went still in disbelief.

Toji attacked again, and Suguru met him head-on.

It was reckless now, Yuuji realized. Suguru was fighting like someone who had already accepted that pain no longer mattered, that all that remained was to drag this man down with him if he could. Amanai’s blood was still fresh on the floor. Satoru was somewhere outside, possibly dying the longer they delayed. 

And Suguru—

Suguru, who had spent the last day doubting everything, who had offered Amanai a choice because he couldn’t bear the thought of forcing her into that fate, was trying to shoulder all of this alone even now.

“Geto-san,” Yuuji said, quieter this time, voice tightening, “if you don’t let me out, you’re going to die.”

For the second time, Suguru answered him.

The response came strained and low through the bond, almost drowned out by the sound of curses tearing themselves apart around them.

“Stay back, Itadori.”

Yuuji’s breath caught.

Another blow landed. Suguru grunted, forced sideways, and Toji came after him mercilessly, not allowing even a heartbeat of recovery. The body they shared shook with the force of it, and Yuuji could do nothing except feel every impact, every ragged breath, every pulse of pain as if he were trapped behind glass inside his own body.

And all the while, Toji kept attacking so relentlessly that Suguru couldn’t hear anything anymore except the fight.

Suguru staggered back another step, shoes scraping against blood-slick stone, and Yuuji felt the balance of the body lurch with him. Pain kept blooming through their shared nerves in violent bursts—his side, his shoulder, the bruising shock of blocked blows traveling up his arms—and each one made Yuuji’s frustration curdle further into panic. 

Toji was not slowing down. 

If anything, the sight of Suguru still standing only seemed to sharpen him, every strike landing with the same cold, efficient intent to break him apart piece by piece.

“Geto-san, enough.”

Yuuji pushed the words through harder than before, no longer trying to sound calm, no longer pretending there was time to reason this out. He could feel Suguru’s cursed energy flaring and snapping under the strain, curses rushing forward only to be torn down, replaced, torn down again, and it was obvious now that sheer endurance would not be enough.

Suguru was fighting through rage and grief and pain all at once, and Toji was exploiting every bit of it.

“Please,” Yuuji said, voice tightening. “Let me take over.”

Suguru gave him nothing.

A curse burst from the floor beneath Toji’s feet, jaws opening wide enough to swallow him whole, and Toji killed it in a single motion before the ambush could even finish taking shape. He moved through Suguru’s technique like someone dissecting it in real time, stripping away options one by one until all that remained was Suguru himself, bleeding and cornered and still too stubborn to hand the body over. 

Yuuji could feel the tremor in his vessel’s breathing now, the split-second catches where pain tried to drag him down and Suguru forced himself upright through sheer will.

“Geto-san!” Yuuji snapped. “You can’t keep doing this!”

Still no answer, only the sensation of Suguru bracing for another impact, of cursed spirits screaming into existence around them, of Amanai’s body somewhere just behind their left shoulder like a wound neither of them could stop touching with their thoughts.

Yuuji hated it. 

Hated that Suguru was trying to carry all of it alone.

Hated that he could feel exactly how badly he was hurting and still couldn’t do a thing unless Suguru let go.

Another slash. 

Another shock of pain.

Suguru hissed through his teeth as the strike opened his side further, warm blood running down his waist, and Yuuji felt something in himself snap.

“Stop being stubborn!” he shouted into the dark space between them. “I’m begging you, let me help!”

The plea echoed through Suguru’s consciousness and came back to Yuuji warped by fury, grief, and resistance so fierce it made his own chest ache.

Suguru still refused to yield, but this time Yuuji caught more than just the refusal. He caught the fear under it. Not fear of Toji, not even fear of dying, but fear of what would happen if he let Yuuji see too much, feel too much, become part of this moment in a way that could never be undone.

As if it wasn’t already too late for that.

“Geto-san…” Yuuji’s voice dropped, rougher now. “I already saw Amanai die. I already saw Gojo sensei get stabbed. You can’t protect me from this anymore.”

Toji’s chain cracked across the chamber again, and Suguru blocked on instinct, but the force of it rattled through every bone they shared. Yuuji felt him stumble, felt the brief wash of dizziness that followed, and panic surged so hard it almost drowned out everything else.

“If you keep this up, you’ll die. Don't you remember? I'm a cursed object that you swallowed,” Yuuji said, the words spilling out too fast now, desperation making them sharp. “I'm way older than you, I've seen so much horror that I couldn't keep count. And if you die like this without even trying to let me fight, I’ll never forgive you. Do you hear me? I’ll never forgive you, Geto-san.”

That made Suguru flinch.

It was only a crack in concentration, only a heartbeat’s worth of hesitation, but Yuuji seized on it immediately, forcing his presence against the barrier of Suguru’s control with everything he had. 

He wasn’t trying to wrestle the body away, but he wanted Suguru to feel him there, to feel how serious he was, how terrified.

“Please,” Yuuji whispered, and this time there was nothing left in the word but raw pleading. “Please let me do something. I can’t just stay in here and feel you getting torn apart.”

Suguru’s breathing turned ragged.

For one strange, suspended moment, the fight outside them seemed to blur, not because Toji had stopped, but because Suguru’s attention shifted inward just enough for Yuuji to feel it fully. 

The grief. The anger. The crushing guilt of Amanai’s blood still drying on the floor. The image of Satoru standing between them and Toji, already wounded, telling them to go. Suguru was carrying it all like broken glass under his skin.

“You don’t have to do this by yourself,” Yuuji said, softer now, because anger wouldn’t reach him the way this might. 

“I know you’re scared of what’ll happen if you let me out. I know. But I’m not asking because I want to see blood, or because I think I can magically fix everything. I’m asking because you’re hurt, and you’re grieving, and I can feel you slipping.”

Toji struck again, and Suguru barely evaded the worst of it.

The pain of the near miss tore through them anyway, enough to make Suguru’s control waver harder this time, and Yuuji lunged for the opening not to steal it, but to hold it open. To keep Suguru from sealing him out again before he could finish.

“Let me carry this with you,” Yuuji said, almost breathless despite having no lungs of his own. 

“Just for a little while. Let me take the hits, let me buy you time, let me be useful. Please, Suguru-san. Please.”

The use of his name, stripped of the polite distance Yuuji usually kept, hit something deep in the space between them.

Suguru froze.

Not physically, not enough for Toji to capitalize on it immediately, but inwardly Yuuji felt the pause like a door cracking open in a storm. Yuuji had always kept some distance between them, even after being summoned by Suguru over and over again to drown out the thoughts he couldn’t bear to hear. 

He let Yuuji speak, let him argue, let him keep him company in the quiet hours, but this was different. This was Yuuji pressing both hands to the worst wound in him and asking to be trusted with it.

“Please,” Yuuji said one last time, voice shaking now with urgency and helplessness and something perilously close to tears. 

“I don’t want to lose you too.”

For a heartbeat, Suguru said nothing.

Then, at last, Yuuji felt his vessel’s grip on the body falter. 

The instant Suguru’s hold on the body slipped, Yuuji forced his way forward.

The transition was violent.

One moment Suguru was still standing there, blood running down his side and his curses screaming around him in a desperate attempt to keep Toji at bay, and the next the cursed energy inside his body lurched so sharply that even Toji paused. Suguru’s knees nearly buckled as Yuuji’s presence surged up through the body like a flood breaking through a sealed dam, swallowing his consciousness whole until Yuuji stood at the forefront instead.

And then the change became visible.

Suguru’s black hair began to lighten at the roots first, dark strands shifting rapidly into a vivid, unnatural pink that bled through the rest of it in seconds, as if Yuuji’s presence was staining the body from the inside out. At the same time, markings surfaced across his face, the familiar scars Yuuji had carried for so long, carved into Suguru’s skin now as proof that the one looking through those eyes was no longer him.

Toji stilled.

The bloodied boy he had been pressing back moments ago straightened slowly, and with that simple motion the entire atmosphere of the room changed. The grief-soaked desperation that had clung to Suguru vanished. In its place came something colder, heavier, and far more unsettling. 

An oppressive calm that did not belong in a teenager’s body, let alone one that had been cornered and wounded seconds ago.

Yuuji exhaled through Suguru’s lungs and rolled his shoulders once.

The pain was immediate. Suguru’s body had taken too much damage already. Cuts torn open across his side and shoulder, muscles strained from forcing out cursed spirit after cursed spirit, bruises blooming under skin where Toji’s attacks had slipped through.

But Yuuji had expected that. 

Before Toji could move again, he brought a hand to Suguru’s stomach, fingers curling lightly against blood-soaked fabric, and let cursed energy reverse its flow.

Reverse Cursed Technique flooded through Yuuji's vessel.

Toji’s eyes narrowed as the wounds began to close in front of him. The torn flesh along Suguru’s side knit itself back together, blood slowing and then stopping altogether as Yuuji forced positive energy through every damaged part of the body with brutal efficiency. The ache in the shoulder faded next, then the deeper internal strain left behind by repeated impacts. 

It wasn’t perfect. Suguru was still exhausted, and Yuuji wasn’t arrogant enough to think a few seconds of healing could restore him completely, but it was enough. Enough to turn a half-dead body back into a weapon.

When Yuuji lowered his hand, the blood was still there.

But the injuries were not.

Toji’s gaze sharpened.

“Well,” he said after a beat, voice quieter now, “that’s definitely not the brat I was beating up.”

Yuuji smiled.

It was not Suguru’s smile. Suguru’s smiles, even the sharp ones, still held restraint to them, some trace of civility. This one did not. It cut across his face with a kind of ugly delight, too wide and too knowing, made worse by the pink hair and scars that turned Suguru’s familiar features into something uncanny.

“No,” Yuuji said, flexing Suguru’s newly healed hand.

“It isn’t.”

Toji shifted his grip on his weapon, the Inverted Spear of Heaven.

Yuuji noticed the movement, noticed the tiny change in weight distribution that came with it, and almost laughed. Even with all his confidence, Toji had finally decided caution was necessary. 

Good. He should have. 

Yuuji might not have Sukuna’s personality, but he had inherited too much from him—too much knowledge, too many techniques burned into his soul after being steeped in that cursed existence for so long. His body might be Suguru’s right now, but the thing driving it forward was something Toji had never prepared for.

Yuuji vanished from sight.

The stone beneath Suguru’s feet cracked as he launched forward, speed exploding through the chamber so suddenly that Toji barely got his weapon up in time. Their bodies collided with a metallic shriek, and Yuuji’s grin widened when he felt the force of it travel cleanly through Toji’s arms. He didn’t pull back. He stayed in close, too close for the spear to be comfortably wielded, forcing Toji into hand-to-hand range where every movement had to be precise.

A palm strike slammed into Toji’s ribs.

A knee followed instantly after, driving toward his stomach before Toji twisted away, only for Yuuji to pivot with him and rake his nails across the side of the pillar beside them. The stone split open with a violent screech.

Cleave.

The slash tore through the pillar like paper.

Toji’s eyes widened for the first time as the top half of the stone structure slid apart and crashed down behind him, shattered cleanly by a technique he had never seen before. 

Yuuji didn’t give him time to process it. He stepped into Toji’s blind spot and drove his elbow toward his jaw, forcing him to duck, then swept low enough to break his balance and send him skidding across the bloodstained floor.

“You’re fast,” Yuuji said, voice light, almost conversational as he stalked after him. 

“I’ll give you that.”

Toji came back up immediately, expression sharpened into something colder than before. 

“And you talk too much.”

He lunged.

The spear flashed toward Yuuji’s throat, and Yuuji tilted his head just enough for the blade to miss by a hair. The movement was almost lazy, but there was nothing casual about what came next. He caught Toji’s wrist, twisted, and drove a punch into his sternum hard enough to force the older man back a full step. Before Toji could recover, Yuuji snapped his fingers.

Dismantle carved through the air.

Invisible slashes ripped across the ground between them, splitting the stone open in jagged lines that raced toward Toji’s feet. Toji jumped back instantly, but not fast enough to avoid all of it; one of the cuts sliced across his side, opening his shirt and drawing the first real line of blood Yuuji had managed to land on him.

Toji looked down at it.

Then he looked back up at Yuuji with a smile that was all teeth and no humor.

“Now that,” he murmured, “is interesting.”

Yuuji rolled Suguru’s neck, pink hair falling messily into his eyes. Behind him, Amanai’s body still lay on the floor, small and motionless in a pool of red, and Yuuji felt Suguru stir faintly in the back of his mind at the sight of her. The grief was still there. The rage was still there. Yuuji had not erased any of it by taking over. He had only moved it aside long enough to fight.

"I’ll handle him," Yuuji told Suguru silently.

Suguru did not answer, but Yuuji could feel him watching.

Toji attacked again, this time without holding anything back.

The Inverted Spear of Heaven cut toward Yuuji in a blur of lethal intent, and Yuuji met it head-on, weaving through the strikes with a fluidity that did not belong to Suguru’s usual fighting style at all. 

He fought like a curse wearing human skin. Too comfortable in violence, too instinctive in the way he adapted, every movement economical and cruel in ways that made it impossible for Yuuju not to think of Sukuna. He slipped inside Toji’s range, forced the spear wide, and slashed downward with Cleave the instant his palm brushed Toji’s shoulder.

Blood sprayed.

Toji hissed and sprang back, one hand flying to the deep cut carved across his upper arm.

Yuuji grinned.

“Didn’t dodge that one.”

The room trembled around them as cursed energy thickened, dark and suffocating, gathering at Yuuji’s fingertips like a promise of worse things to come.

Suguru’s body was handling it now, really handling it, no longer on the verge of collapse, no longer barely surviving. Yuuji had healed enough to make this fight fair.

Unfortunately for Toji, fair was the last thing Yuuji intended to be.

He raised his hand, and the air around it seemed to tighten.

“Come on then,” Yuuji said softly, scars cutting sharply across Suguru’s face as his smile turned vicious. 

“Let’s see how long you last.”

Toji came at him again with that same brutal efficiency, the Inverted Spear of Heaven flashing toward Yuuji’s throat in a clean, killing line.

Yuuji slipped to the side, letting the blade pass close enough to feel the air shift against his skin, and smiled when Toji immediately adjusted course. He was fast, faster than almost anyone Yuuji had ever fought. But speed alone stopped being impressive when you’d spent too long living in a future where curses wore it like a second skin. 

Toji pressed in with another strike, then another, forcing the spear through angles meant to herd him backward toward Amanai’s body, toward the wall, toward anywhere his footing could be limited.

Yuuji let him think it was working.

He gave ground in measured steps, never enough to look in control, just enough to bait Toji into committing a little more force, a little more certainty, a little more confidence in the idea that close quarters would still favor him. 

Suguru’s body moved with uncanny smoothness beneath Yuuji’s control now, pink hair swaying with every shift of balance, scars standing stark against skin still smeared with drying blood. The pressure in the room tightened with each exchange, cursed energy gathering not just in his limbs now, but somewhere deeper.

Then Yuuji bit into the inside of Suguru’s cheek.

Toji noticed the blood first.

Only a little at the corner of Yuuji’s mouth, but enough to make his eyes sharpen. Yuuji tasted iron, then rolled it over his tongue with the same calm deliberation Sukuna might have used if he wanted to make a point. The blood never reached the floor. It hovered instead, suspended in the air beside his face in glistening red beads.

Toji’s expression changed.

“What,” he said flatly, “is that?”

Yuuji laughed under his breath.

“Something I picked up from my Aniki.”

His fingers twitched.

The droplets shot forward like bullets.

Toji jerked aside on instinct, but Yuuji had never aimed for a killing blow. The blood curved midair with a precision that should have been impossible, twisting sharply and whipping around Toji’s flank before slamming into the stone pillar behind him hard enough to crater it. The impact splashed crimson across the rock, and then the blood hardened at the edges like sharpened glass before dispersing.

Toji landed lightly, but there was a split second of genuine surprise in his face now.

Yuuji saw it and pushed.

Blood Manipulation answered him more easily than it should have in a body that wasn’t his. Choso had drilled it into him in a future that hadn’t happened yet. Patiently, stubbornly, with that older brother intensity that made every lesson feel like both training and an act of devotion. 

Yuuji still remembered the sting of failed attempts, the way Choso corrected his control, the hours spent learning how to shape blood without wasting too much of it, how to keep the flow clean, how to think of it as an extension of intent rather than merely a weapon.

Suguru’s body wasn’t born for it.

But Yuuji’s soul remembered.

A thin line of blood ran from his palm now, drawn from a shallow cut he’d opened himself with a nail. It spiraled around his wrist in tight, controlled loops, gleaming under the dim light of the chamber. Toji’s eyes tracked it carefully, and for the first time since entering the room, he looked less like a man toying with prey and more like someone trying to solve a problem before it bit him.

“You’re a cursed spirit manipulator,” Toji said, voice low. 

“You’ve got shrine techniques, reverse cursed technique…” His gaze flicked to the blood circling Yuuji’s hand. 

“And now Kamo clan techniques too?”

Yuuji tilted Suguru’s head.

“I told you,” he said, smile widening. 

“You have no idea.”

He snapped his fingers.

The blood shot outward in branching streams.

Not wild, precise. Surgical. One line lunged for Toji’s eyes, another for his wrist, two more splitting low to cut off his footing. Toji moved instantly, twisting away from the upper strikes while vaulting over the lower ones, but Yuuji had expected that. The blood changed direction mid-flight, curving with vicious obedience and forcing Toji to block with the shaft of the spear. 

The impact rang through the chamber.

Toji slid back three steps.

Yuuji was already on him.

He closed the distance in a blur, blood coiling around his forearm before hardening into a jagged red blade over his knuckles. Toji raised the spear to intercept the punch, but Yuuji didn’t follow through. He let the feint draw Toji’s guard high, then slammed his other hand down to the floor.

“Flowing Red Scale.”

Blood surged through Suguru’s body in an instant.

Toji’s pupils narrowed as Yuuji’s speed spiked.

It was not the exact same as Choso’s or Noritoshi’s. Yuuji used it rougher, more violently, less elegant and more explosive, forcing circulation, muscle tension, and reaction time beyond their natural limits all at once. Suguru’s body lurched forward under the sudden boost like a snapped bowstring, and Yuuji drove a knee into Toji’s ribs before the man could fully adjust.

Something cracked.

Toji’s heel gouged into the floor as he was forced sideways, and Yuuji didn’t let him breathe. He pressed forward with a flurry of strikes that switched seamlessly between styles. One moment hand-to-hand, the next a flick of blood slicing for tendons, then next a Cleave hidden in the motion of his palm. Toji blocked the first two, narrowly evaded the third, and took the fourth across his shoulder, blood spraying from the shallow but ugly cut.

That made him grin.

Not pleasantly.

“Oh,” Toji said, rolling the injured shoulder once like he was testing the damage. 

“Now I get it.”

Yuuji paused for half a heartbeat, blood still orbiting his wrists like red halos.

Toji wiped at the cut with his thumb and looked at the blood there, then back at him.

“You’re cheating.”

Yuuji barked out a laugh.

“Yeah?” He spread Suguru’s arms slightly, pink hair falling over scarred eyes, blood curling around him in slow, deliberate rings. 

“You stabbed Gojo sensei, shot a fourteen-year-old girl in the head, and ambushed us after wearing us down for days.”

His grin sharpened.

Toji moved first again, but this time there was less confidence in it, less of that effortless inevitability he’d carried from the start. He was still dangerous, still terrifyingly fast, but now he was thinking around Yuuji instead of through him, recalculating every time the blood shifted in the air. 

That hesitation was tiny, almost invisible.

Yuuji pounced on it anyway.

He sliced open another line across his forearm, ignoring the sting, and fed more blood into the technique. It spun outward, condensed, and then snapped forward in a piercing stream.

“Piercing Blood.”

Toji’s eyes widened.

He barely got out of the way in time. The attack tore past his cheek, close enough to graze skin and leave a bright line of red, before punching straight through the wall behind him with a shriek of shattered stone. 

The room shook from the force of it.

For the first time, Toji looked genuinely rattled.

His gaze flicked from the smoking hole in the wall back to Yuuji, then to the blood still suspended around him like a loaded weapon waiting for another command. The realization settled over his face slowly, unwillingly. 

This was no longer a fight he understood. The boy in front of him was wearing Geto Suguru's body, impossibly having the King of Curses' techniques, and the Kamo clan’s blood techniques all at once, like some grotesque joke the world had made at his expense.

Yuuji could almost hear Choso in the back of his mind correcting his stance.

Keep the blood moving. Don’t let him read the next shape.

He obeyed.

The blood behind him split into multiple hovering spheres, each one spinning faster and faster until the air around them began to whine. Toji took one measured step back, spear shifting in his grip, and Yuuji’s smile turned vicious at the sight.

There it was.

Surprise.

Real surprise.

“Aw,” Yuuji said, voice light and cruel through Suguru’s mouth. 

“Don’t tell me you’re finally getting nervous.”

Then he lifted his hand, and every drop of blood in the air aimed straight at Toji Fushiguro.

Every crimson sphere suspended behind Yuuji shot forward at once, tearing through the room in a shrieking storm of compressed force. Toji dodged the first wave by a margin so thin it barely counted, twisting past one projectile only for another to curve sharply toward his blind spot. He brought up the Inverted Spear of Heaven to deflect it, but the impact still drove him back, boots carving deep lines into the stone floor as the rest of the barrage shredded the pillars around him into exploding fragments of rock and dust.

Yuuji didn’t stop there.

He was on Toji before the debris had even settled, Flowing Red Scale still roaring through Suguru’s body, blood wrapping around his forearms like living blades as he drove strike after strike into Toji’s guard.

Cleave flashed through the gaps between punches, Dismantle split the ground beneath Toji’s footing, and every time Toji managed to escape one angle Yuuji was already closing the next. There was no rhythm left for Toji to control anymore. No comfortable pace, no clean opening to exploit. Yuuji had turned the fight into something ugly and overwhelming and impossible to predict.

Toji’s breathing changed.

It was subtle, just a little rougher now, a little less perfectly measured but Yuuji caught it immediately.

He saw the way Toji’s eyes flicked between the blood in the air and the body he was inhabiting, recalculating faster than most people could think, and knew exactly what that look meant. Toji, who had entered this space with all the certainty of a man collecting a paycheck, had finally reached the point where instinct was telling him the same thing Yuuji already knew. 

He wasn’t going to win this.

Not anymore.

Toji retreated another step, then another, parrying a slash of blood with the spear while narrowly avoiding a Cleave aimed at his ribs. Yuuji pressed him mercilessly, forcing him toward the far side of the chamber, smiling through Suguru’s face as the older man’s options dwindled. 

Behind him, Amanai’s body remained where she had fallen, half-hidden by shattered stone and blood, and for a moment Yuuji forgot that Toji had never really cared about victory in the dramatic sense. He only cared about the job.

That was his mistake.

Toji’s eyes shifted. Not to Yuuji’s hands, not to the blood, not to the opening Yuuji was trying to bait him into taking.

To Amanai.

Yuuji’s stomach dropped.

Toji moved.

He didn’t attack. He vanished sideways, cutting sharply out of Yuuji’s line of pressure with a speed that was almost desperate now, abandoning the exchange altogether and bolting straight for Amanai’s body. Yuuji lunged after him on instinct, blood whipping forward to intercept, but Toji had already reached her. He bent, one hand catching Amanai under the knees and the other at her back, lifting her limp body as effortlessly as if she weighed nothing at all.

For half a second, the chamber went dead silent.

Then Suguru saw it.

The reaction was immediate.

Yuuji felt it before he understood it. An explosion of horror and rage from the back of their shared consciousness, so violent it slammed into him like a physical blow. Up until now Suguru had stayed back, letting Yuuji drive the body, letting him heal it, fight with it, force Toji onto the defensive. But the instant Toji laid hands on Amanai, on her body, on the proof of her death, on the girl Suguru had promised he would take home—something inside him snapped.

“NO—”

The voice tore through the mental space between them like a scream.

And suddenly Suguru was there.

He surged forward with a force Yuuji had not expected, wrenching control of the body back so abruptly it felt like being thrown out of his own skin.

The pink bled out of Suguru’s hair almost as fast as it had appeared, black swallowing it strand by strand, while the scars on his face flickered and vanished beneath skin no longer answering to Yuuji’s soul.

Yuuji barely had time to brace before he was shoved backward into the dark recesses of Suguru’s mind, the world of stone and blood and cursed energy ripped away from his hands.

“Geto-san—wait!”

Too late.

Suguru had the body again.

He came back into it like a man drowning and resurfacing in the same instant, lungs dragging in a ragged breath, eyes locked not on Toji’s weapon or stance but on Amanai hanging limp in his arms. Her head lolled against Toji’s shoulder, dark hair stained with blood, and the sight of it seemed to strip away whatever restraint Suguru had left. Yuuji felt his grief slam shut around the body like a vice.

“Fushiguro Toji.”

Suguru’s voice did not sound human.

The cursed spirits around the chamber shrieked in answer.

Toji’s gaze flicked over him once, taking in the returned black hair, the vanished scars, the shift in presence, and his mouth curled into something coldly satisfied. He had gotten what he wanted. Maybe not the clean victory he’d expected, maybe not without being forced to retreat from a fight he no longer liked his chances in, but he had the Star Plasma Vessel’s body, and that was enough. Enough to collect payment. 

Enough to finish the job.

That's what this is, a job. 

“Sorry,” Toji said, adjusting Amanai’s weight in his arms. 

“This part’s non-negotiable.”

Suguru moved like he’d been shot.

Curses exploded toward Toji in a black wave, filling the chamber from wall to wall, but Toji was already turning away, making for the exit with Amanai’s body still in his grasp. He no longer had any interest in fighting. That much was obvious now. The job had changed from kill to retrieve, and Toji was practical enough to abandon pride the second survival and money aligned in the same direction.

Yuuji slammed against the inside of Suguru’s consciousness, furious.

“Geto-san, let me back out! He’s running!”

But Suguru wasn’t listening anymore.

Or maybe he couldn’t. Grief had swallowed everything else. Yuuji could feel it coursing through him in brutal, incoherent waves. The horror of seeing Amanai taken even in death, the humiliation of having failed to protect her twice over, the unbearable image of Toji carrying her away like cargo. Suguru wasn’t thinking tactically now. He wasn’t measuring cursed energy, wasn’t weighing options, wasn’t considering whether giving Yuuji control again would be smarter.

He was just trying to get her back.

“Give her back!” Suguru roared.

The sound echoed violently through the room as curse after curse hurled itself at Toji’s retreating back. Toji cut through the first one, ducked the second, used the third as a stepping stone to launch himself farther down the corridor. Even carrying Amanai, he moved with terrifying speed, body streamlined around the burden like he had done jobs like this a hundred times before.

Suguru chased him.

Yuuji could feel the body straining under the sudden shift in pace, muscles still fresh from his own techniques now forced into a completely different rhythm by Suguru’s desperation. They flew through the corridor in a blur of black cloth and curses, broken stone cracking underfoot as Suguru pursued Toji with the kind of single-minded fury that bordered on self-destruction.

“Geto-san!” Yuuji shouted again from the dark, trying to force his voice through. 

“Listen to me—if you fight him like this, he’ll use it against you!”

No response.

Ahead of them, Toji glanced back once over his shoulder.

Just once.

It was enough for Yuuji to see the calculation in his face, the way he had already understood exactly what Suguru taking the body back meant. Yuuji had been a problem, an unknown variable, a monster wrapped in a Special Grade curse user vessel.

Suguru, for all his strength, was something Toji understood. A grieving sorcerer. A furious teenager. A boy who had just watched the girl he chose to save die in front of him and now couldn’t think past the need to keep her from being stolen away.

Toji knew how to fight that.

And Yuuji, shoved helplessly into the back of Suguru’s mind, could only watch as Suguru ran straight after him anyway.

Suguru chased him all the way out of the chamber.

The area blurred around them in streaks of shadow and broken stone as Toji sprinted ahead with Amanai’s body in his arms, never once faltering under the weight of her. Suguru’s curses flooded the corridor after him in a black tide, mouths shrieking, claws scraping against ancient walls as they lunged for Toji’s back, but Toji moved through them with maddening efficiency even while carrying her. Every spirit Suguru threw at him was cut down, dodged, or used as a foothold to gain more distance.

Yuuji let out a shrill cry inside Suguru's mental space again.

“Geto-san, stop chasing him like this!” he shouted, voice ringing uselessly through the dark. 

“He wants you angry! He wants you to tunnel on Amanai and forget everything else!”

Suguru did not answer.

He barely seemed to hear him anymore. Yuuji could feel how narrow his thoughts had become, how violently focused they were on one thing and one thing only. 

Amanai. 

Not her death, not the mission, not even Satoru somewhere outside. Just Amanai in Toji’s arms, Amanai being taken away like an object, Amanai slipping farther from his reach with every second Suguru failed to catch up.

It was that single-mindedness that made the trap work.

Toji burst out into the open corridor above and immediately cut right, disappearing behind a row of pillars. Suguru followed without hesitation, curses surging ahead to intercept and found nothing. No strike waiting for him, no direct ambush. Just an empty stretch of stone and silence.

Yuuji felt the danger a second too late.

“Above—!”

Toji dropped from the ceiling.

He came down with no cursed energy to warn them, no murderous flare in the atmosphere, just pure killing intent sharpened into motion. Suguru jerked backward on instinct, but he was still half a beat behind, still looking for Amanai first and Toji second.

The Inverted Spear of Heaven slashed across his shoulder before he could fully evade, cutting deep enough to send a burst of pain through the body and a spray of blood across the wall.

Suguru hissed and staggered.

Amanai’s body was no longer in Toji’s arms.

Yuuji’s eyes widened inside the dark.

Toji had set her down somewhere, hidden her just out of sight before doubling back. The realization hit Yuuji like a punch to the throat. Of course he had. He’d known Suguru would chase. Known he would follow the body without thinking. Known that if he dangled Amanai in front of him for long enough, Suguru would run straight into whatever position Toji wanted.

Yuuji shouted.

“He baited you—stop looking for Amanai and focus on him!”

This time Suguru reacted, but not cleanly.

His gaze snapped around the corridor, trying to locate both Toji and Amanai at once, and that split-second indecision was all Toji needed. He drove forward again, forcing Suguru to block with a curse at point-blank range. The curse burst apart instantly, and the impact still knocked Suguru sideways hard enough that his shoulder slammed into a pillar.

“You’re making this easy,” Toji said.

Suguru’s curses exploded outward in answer.

They poured from him in a furious swarm, filling the corridor with writhing bodies and shrieks sharp enough to split the air. Toji clicked his tongue and leapt back, cutting through the first wave with the spear while using the second to vault higher onto the broken stone overhead. Suguru attacked again before he even landed, one curse after another launched with enough force to collapse sections of the corridor around them.

But Toji was smiling now.

Yuuji gritted his teeth.

“Geto-san, listen to me,” he said, trying to keep his voice steady despite the panic clawing up his throat.

“You’re not going to get Amanai back if you let him control the pace. He wants you like this. He wants you divided.”

Suguru’s breathing came raggedly now.

"Please shut up, Itadori." 

The injury in his shoulder had reopened, and Yuuji could feel the warm slide of blood under their uniform, the body already beginning to protest the pace Suguru was forcing on it. 

But none of that mattered to Suguru. 

Then Toji spoke again.

“You know,” he said, voice carrying lazily from somewhere above them, “if you’d just handed her over quietly, everything wouldn’t have made to such a mess.”

Suguru froze.

It lasted less than a second.

Less than a heartbeat.

But Yuuji felt the exact instant those words landed, the exact instant Suguru’s fury sharpened into something much uglier and much more reckless.

Amanai’s blood, Amanai’s tears, Amanai saying she want to live—all of it collided with Toji’s mockery in a way that obliterated what little strategy Suguru still had left.

“Shut up.”

The words came out low and shaking.

Then Suguru did something reckless enough to make Yuuji’s stomach drop.

He stopped chasing with individual curses and opened his technique wide.

The air around them darkened as a mass of cursed spirits surged into existence all at once, not in a controlled sequence but in a flood, dozens upon dozens of them clawing their way into the corridor with shrieks that rattled the stone. Some were huge enough to scrape the ceiling, others small and fast and vicious, but all of them were driven by the same thing pouring off Suguru now. 

Raw, blinding rage.

“Geto-san, don’t—!”

Too late.

Suguru sent them all.

The corridor became chaos.

Curses crashed through pillars and walls in their attempt to reach Toji, tearing the place apart from the inside out. Stone split under their weight. Dust and rubble exploded into the air. For one brief, terrible moment it almost looked like enough, like even Toji wouldn’t be able to slip through a barrage that overwhelming while still trying to keep track of Amanai’s body and the path out.

Then Toji disappeared again.

Yuuji felt Suguru’s shock before he saw why.

Toji had dropped below the collapsing floor.

One of the curses crashed through the stone and vanished into the lower level, and Toji used the opening instantly, diving through the gap before the rest of the swarm could close around him. Suguru lunged after him without thinking, curses still flooding the space, and Yuuji’s panic spiked so hard it almost drowned out everything else.

“Wait!”

Suguru jumped down.

The landing jarred through the Suguru's legs, pain shooting up his body, and for a split second the dust was too thick to see anything. Then it cleared just enough for Suguru to catch sight of Amanai’s body propped against a broken wall several yards away and Toji standing directly between them, spear in hand, exactly where he wanted to be.

The trap had closed.

Suguru took one step forward.

Toji moved first.

The Inverted Spear of Heaven flashed toward Suguru’s throat, and Yuuji felt the world narrow into that single instant of horror as Suguru realized, far too late, that he had chased Amanai straight into a kill box.

Suguru twisted at the last possible second.

It was the only reason the spear didn’t take his throat clean through.

Instead, the Inverted Spear of Heaven tore across the side of his neck and shoulder in a savage diagonal line, carving deep enough that Yuuji felt hot blood burst down the front of Suguru's uniform all at once.

The impact drove Suguru off balance immediately. He crashed to one knee, one hand slamming against the floor to keep himself from falling flat, and Toji was already moving before the pain had even fully registered.

A kick to the ribs.

Suguru’s body lifted off the ground and slammed into the broken wall hard enough to crack stone behind him. Breath fled his lungs in a ragged, wet gasp, and Yuuji felt something in his vessel’s side give under the force of it, either a fracture or worse. 

Cursed spirits that had still been swarming the lower level shuddered with their master’s loss of focus, several dispersing outright as Suguru’s control wavered.

Toji didn’t waste a second.

He crossed the distance to Amanai, bent down, and scooped her body back into his arms in one practiced motion. The sight of it, Amanai limp against him again, blood dried in her hair, one arm hanging uselessly over Toji’s elbow sent another violent surge of fury through Suguru, but his body refused to obey it. He tried to stand and nearly collapsed instead, blood spilling from his mouth this time as pain lanced through his chest.

“No—”

The word came out broken.

Toji glanced back at him.

There was no triumph on his face, no cruelty sharpened into a grin, just the same cold practicality he had carried from the beginning. Suguru wasn’t a threat anymore. Not in this state, not with his body failing under him and his technique destabilizing around the edges. 

Toji saw it instantly and adjusted the job accordingly. 

No need to finish him. 

No need to linger. 

He had the vessel’s corpse. He had completed the assignment.

And now he was leaving.

“Should’ve stayed down the first time,” Toji said.

Then he turned.

Suguru lurched forward on instinct, one hand reaching out as if he could still grab Amanai from across the ruined area, but his legs gave out beneath him after a single step. He dropped hard to the floor, coughing blood onto the stone, vision blurring at the edges. 

Yuuji felt everything. The tearing pain in the neck wound, the burning throb in his ribs, the horrible weakness settling through limbs that had been pushed too far and then punished for it.

“You bast—!”

Suguru’s voice cracked.

It didn’t matter. Toji was already moving.

He vaulted over the rubble with Amanai cradled against his chest and disappeared into the broken corridor above before Suguru could summon a single curse strong enough to stop him. A few spirits still answered the frantic pull of his technique, surging after Toji in a final, desperate chase, but their movements were sluggish and disorganized now. Toji cut through the first, dodged the second, and by the time the third reached him he was already too far away.

Then he was gone.

The silence that followed was unbearable.

Suguru stayed on the ground, one arm wrapped weakly around his middle, the other braced against the floor as blood dripped steadily from between his fingers. 

He was breathing, barely. Every inhale came shallow and wrong, like his body no longer knew how to pull in air without hurting itself. Yuuji could feel his heartbeat stuttering under the damage, too fast and too thin all at once.

And Amanai was gone.

Taken.

Not just killed, taken, as if even in death she could not be left in peace, as if the world intended to strip every last bit of dignity from her before it was done.

“Geto-san,” Yuuji said, panic shredding his voice now.

“Suguru-san, let me out. Let me heal you.”

Suguru didn’t answer.

Yuuji cries, trying to force his voice through whatever haze of pain and shock Suguru had fallen into. “Suguru-san, listen to me! You’re bleeding too much. If you stay like this, you’ll die!”

Still nothing.

Not because Suguru was ignoring him.

Because Suguru was barely conscious.

Yuuji could feel it now. The way his awareness kept slipping, dragged under by blood loss and exhaustion and whatever internal damage Toji’s kick had left behind. The grief was still there, enormous and suffocating, but it had gone strangely distant, blurred by the simple fact that Suguru’s body no longer had the strength to carry it properly. 

He was fading.

Yuuji’s chest tightened in terror.

“Don’t do this,” he whispered, and then louder, more desperately, “Suguru-san, please. Please, I can fix this much, just give me control of your body—”

A weak tremor passed through Suguru’s hand.

It was tiny. Barely noticeable. But Yuuji felt it in the shared space between them like a crack opening in stone. Suguru was still there, somewhere beneath the pain and the darkness closing over him, still hearing enough to react. Not with words. Just that small, broken falter in his grip on the body.

Yuuji seized it.

He forced himself forward again, not waiting for permission this time, shoving against Suguru’s collapsing control until the connection gave way under sheer desperation. The world slammed back into focus around him in a rush of pain. Blood, broken ribs, the sticky warmth running down his neck and Yuuji nearly choked on it, but there was no time to panic. He dropped immediately to both knees beside the ruined wall, one hand pressing against the worst of the neck wound, the other bracing over Suguru’s sternum.

Reverse Cursed Technique.

“Come on,” Yuuji muttered through gritted teeth.

“Come on, come on—”

Positive energy flooded through Suguru in a rush.

The bleeding slowed first, then shuddered as torn flesh began to knit itself back together under Yuuji’s palm. It was harder this time than before. Suguru was far more damaged now, and Yuuji had already burned through a considerable amount of cursed energy fighting Toji, healing once, and maintaining techniques that didn’t belong naturally to this body.

But he forced more into it anyway, dragging the body back from the edge inch by inch because the alternative was unthinkable.

The gash at the neck began to close.

The fractured ribs shifted back into place with a sickening internal ache that made Yuuji’s vision swim, but he didn’t stop. He kept pouring energy into the body until Suguru’s breathing eased from ragged gasps into something steadier, until the blood flow finally slowed to a manageable trickle, until the immediate threat of dying on this floor had passed.

Only then did Yuuji sag back.

The area was quiet now, littered with rubble and dead curses and too much blood.

Amanai was still gone.

Toji was gone.

Yuuji sat there in Suguru’s half-healed body, hands trembling and chest heaving, staring at the corridor where Toji had vanished with Amanai in his arms.

Behind him, deep in the back of the recesses of his mind, Suguru’s consciousness stirred faintly again

Alive, but silent, and so full of grief that Yuuji could barely stand to feel it.

They had lost her.

And there had been nothing either of them could do to stop it.

For a long time, neither of them moved.

Yuuji stayed where he was in Suguru’s body, slumped against the broken wall with one hand still pressed weakly to his side, breathing through the lingering ache of half-healed wounds and drained cursed energy. The worst of the damage was gone. He had stopped Suguru from bleeding out on the floor, not restored him to full strength, and the exhaustion settling into their limbs felt heavy enough to drag them both under if he let it. In the back of their shared mental space, Suguru had gone frighteningly quiet.

Yuuji hated that silence.

It was not the silence of sleep, nor the irritated withdrawal Suguru sometimes used when he didn’t want to answer. It was hollower than that. The kind of silence left behind after something inside a person had been torn open and was still trying to understand what shape the wound had taken. 

Yuuji could feel him there, awake, feeling everything, but he wasn’t speaking. Amanai’s last smile, her body in Toji’s arms, Satoru left behind at the entrance, those thoughts just sat inside him like rusted blades.

Eventually, Yuuji tilted his head back against the stone and closed his eyes.

“Let's go, Suguru-san,” he said softly into the shared dark.

No answer came at first.

Only the distant drip of blood somewhere in the room, the settling of broken stone, the stale sacred quiet of a place that had watched too many people be offered up in its depths and had never once cared.

Yuuji swallowed hard. He didn’t want to force Suguru back out yet, not after everything that had happened, but he knew Suguru would never forgive himself if he woke up later and learned Yuuji had dragged him somewhere important without his consent.

So he waited.

And after what felt like an eternity, Suguru finally stirred.

The shift was faint, but unmistakable. Not enough to seize control, not even enough to truly push forward, just enough for Yuuji to feel the first movement of a mind surfacing from deep water. 

Grief came with it in a crushing wave, followed by a tiredness so profound it almost made Yuuji’s own eyes sting.

“...Itadori,” Suguru said at last, the word rough and barely there.

Yuuji exhaled slowly.

“Yeah,” he said. “I'm here, Suguru-san.”

That, more than anything else, seemed to anchor Suguru back into the present.

Suguru pushed forward.

The transfer back was slower this time, less violent than before. Yuuji let him have the body without resistance, easing his grip until Suguru’s consciousness rose fully to the front again. 

The pink faded from their hair, black swallowing it strand by strand, and the scars across his face dissolved until only Suguru remained, pale and bloodstained and hollow-eyed. He sat there for another second after taking control, shoulders bowed slightly, like the weight of the body had become secondary to the weight of everything else.

Then he stood.

Not gracefully. Not steadily. 

But he stood.

Yuuji could feel how badly the body still hurt under Suguru’s control, the stiffness in his ribs, the lingering weakness in his shoulder, the faint dizziness that came whenever he moved too fast.

Suguru ignored all of it. He didn’t even bother brushing the dried blood from his uniform. He simply turned toward the exit and began walking, every step too quiet.

They made their way back up through the ruined corridors in silence.

The place looked different now on the return trip, less like a sacred place and more like the scene of a slaughter. Chunks of broken stone littered the path, gouges carved into the walls by Toji’s weapons and Yuuji’s techniques still visible in jagged lines, and here and there the remnants of Suguru’s curses had dissolved into ugly stains of residual cursed energy.

When they finally emerged outside, the sunlight hurt.

Suguru flinched at it almost imperceptibly, and Yuuji realized with a start how long they had been underground. The air outside was warm, bright, painfully ordinary. Birds still sang. Wind still moved through the trees. 

Somewhere far off, people laughed. The world had not changed at all, even though Amanai was dead and Suguru’s chest still felt full of broken glass.

Suguru walked in a staggering manner, his mind completely blank and Yuuji couldn't find it to himself to talk to him. 

Yuuji doesn't know how long it took for them to arrive at Time Vessel Association's headquarters, but they arrived despite it all. 

Then they saw him.

Satoru was walking toward them.

He was covered in blood. Some dried, some fresh, all of it stark against the black of his uniform, but he was upright, alive, and carrying Amanai’s body covered in white fabric in his arms. 

For one impossible second, Yuuji’s mind refused to process the sight. He was moving with a strange, eerie calm, Amanai held carefully against his chest as though she were merely sleeping.

Suguru stopped dead.

“Satoru,” he breathed.

His best friend looked up.

His face was different.

Not physically. He was still Satoru, still seventeen, still too young and too bloodstained all at once, but there was something in his expression Yuuji had seen once before, something almost detached in the way his eyes met Suguru’s. 

Not empty. 

Not cold. 

Just distant, like part of him was still standing somewhere else entirely, in the aftermath of something only he had lived through.

“I got her back,” Satoru said.

The words were simple. Too simple.

Suguru stared at Amanai’s covered body in his arms, at the way Satoru was holding her so carefully after all this, and Yuuji felt Suguru's breathing hitch.

Amanai’s head rested against Gojo’s shoulder, the peeking hair dark with dried blood, the skin pale in the most terrible way. She had been stolen from them, then returned like this, as a body passed from killer to survivor, as though that were any kind of mercy at all.

And then the clapping started.

It echoed through the open space in a slow, deliberate rhythm.

Suguru’s head snapped toward the sound.

Members of the Time Vessel Association stood gathered nearby, watching them. 

Smiling. 

Hands coming together in applause as if this were some performance they had paid to see brought to its proper conclusion. Their faces were bright with relief, with celebration, with gratitude that the Star Plasma Vessel was dead and Tengen had been spared the “trouble". 

They looked at Amanai’s body and saw success. They looked at Suguru and Satoru, bloodied and exhausted and carrying the corpse of a girl they had sworn to protect, and still they clapped.

Yuuji felt Suguru go still.

Not the stillness of shock this time.

Something worse.

The applause filled the space between each heartbeat, each clap neat and cheerful and unbearably human, and Yuuji could feel every single one of them landing inside Suguru like a nail being driven deeper into wood. 

Amanai had cried because she wanted to live. She had reached for Suguru’s hand. She had died for nothing, shot down before she could even leave. And these people, these weak, ordinary people with no cursed energy and no stake in the blood spilled for them, were smiling.

Celebrating.

Because the girl who wanted to live had died in a way convenient for them.

These monkeys are celebrating for an innocent girl's unfair death. 

Gojo turned his head slightly toward the sound.

There was a look in his eyes then. Sharp, strange, almost luminous in its detachment. Yuuji knew immediately what he was thinking even before he spoke.

“Should we kill them?”

The question landed in the air with horrifying casualness.

No one else seemed to understand the weight of it, not at first. The cult members kept clapping, still too caught up in their own relief to notice the shift in the atmosphere, too blind to recognize how close death had just come to standing in front of them and smiling. But Yuuji felt Suguru’s entire body go cold.

Because Satoru wasn’t joking.

And the worst part was that Suguru understood exactly why he was asking.

Yuuji felt the thought form inside him before Suguru ever gave it words. These people had put a bounty on Amanai. They had funded the chaos that exhausted Satoru and Suguru for days, made them bleed, pushed Amanai to the edge, and ultimately left her dead on the stone floor. And now they stood here applauding because the outcome had favored them. There was no grief in them. 

No guilt. 

No shame. 

Just satisfaction.

What was the point of protecting people like that?

Suguru’s fingers twitched at his side.

The question was no longer abstract now. It was no longer a passing doubt buried beneath duty. It stood here in broad daylight wearing human faces and clapping over a dead girl’s body. 

It asked him, with every cheerful pair of hands and every relieved smile, why sorcerers were expected to die for people who would celebrate the result so long as it served them. Why Amanai’s life had been treated as a necessary sacrifice while the ones who benefited from it never had to stain their own hands.

Yuuji could feel it happening.

The way Suguru’s thoughts began rearranging themselves around the ugliness in front of him. Grief sharpened into disgust. Disgust sharpened into something more dangerous. These weren’t just strangers anymore. 

They were proof. 

Proof that the world of jujutsu consumed children and called it duty. Proof that non-sorcerers could profit from that suffering and still sleep soundly at night. Proof that Amanai had died in a world full of people who would clap over her corpse and call it a blessing.

Monkeys. 

Satoru’s voice cut through again, quieter this time.

“If you want,” he said, “I can do it.”

Suguru looked at him.

At Satoru, drenched in blood and holding Amanai’s body like she still mattered enough to be carried gently. At the brightest, strongest person he knew, asking if he should massacre an entire area of civilians—monkeys— because right now, in this moment, he genuinely could not find a reason not to.

Yuuji felt something twist deep inside Suguru at the sight.

Because he couldn’t answer right away.

Because a part of him wanted to say yes.

His gaze shifted back to the cult members, still clapping, still smiling, still blind. And Yuuji, trapped once more in the back of Suguru’s mind, felt the exact moment the question lodged itself in Suguru’s soul so deeply it would never truly leave.

Why are sorcerers the ones who have to protect them?

The applause did not stop immediately.

It only began to falter once the silence from the three of them stretched too long, once a few of the cult members noticed that the atmosphere had shifted into something far colder than celebration ought to allow. Hands lowered one by one. Smiles dimmed, uncertain now, as if they were only just beginning to understand that the blood staining Satoru’s uniform and the blood dried across Suguru’s collar were not decorations for their relief. 

Amanai still lay in Satoru’s arms, small and still and heartbreakingly human, and yet even then some of them looked more uncomfortable than ashamed.

Suguru stared at them and thought, 'They really don’t understand.' 

Not what they had paid for. Not what it had cost. Not what it meant that a teenage girl had died because grown adults with money and faith decided her life was less important than the shape of their god. They had hired killers, set a bounty, turned the last days of Amanai’s life into a hunt. And now they stood there in neat clothes and clean hands, clapping because the “problem” had resolved itself.

Yuuji felt nausea twist through him.

Not because he disagreed with Suguru’s disgust. He didn’t. Looking at them made something ugly rise in his own chest too, something furious and hot and difficult to swallow. But he could also feel the way Suguru’s thoughts were moving now, and that scared him more than the applause ever had. It was not just anger. It was logic starting to form around anger. A structure being built around grief.

Satoru shifted Amanai slightly in his arms.

He still looked almost eerily calm, but Yuuji could feel that it was not calm at all. It was overstimulation sharpened into clarity, the kind that came after surviving something that should have killed you and finding the whole world suddenly too bright and too thin. Satoru's blue eyes swept over the crowd once more, and when he spoke again, his voice was lighter than it should have been.

“I’m serious, you know.”

The words made several people in the crowd go visibly pale.

Satoru smiled at them, and it was not a kind smile.

“They’re the reason Amanai-chan is dead,” he said, as if explaining something obvious to children. 

“They hired killers. They kept the bounty going. They’re clapping because it worked. So if we kill them here, who exactly is going to say we’re wrong?”

No one answered.

Not the cult members, who had gone still as prey. Not Suguru, whose breathing had turned so quiet Yuuji almost couldn’t feel it. The area seemed to hold itself between one heartbeat and the next, balanced on the edge of something irreversible.

Yuuji wanted to say something.

He wanted to force his way through Suguru's spiraling mind and tell him to leave, to take Amanai and walk out and not let this become the moment everything changed shape. 

But he couldn’t. Not without tearing control away from Suguru in front of Satoru and a space full of witnesses, not without turning this already impossible day into something even worse. So he stayed where he was, trapped in the back of the mental space, and watched the question sharpen inside Suguru instead.

Why shouldn’t they die?

If a sorcerer killed a curse, it was called duty. If a sorcerer died protecting people, it was called sacrifice. If a child was offered up to Tengen because they demanded it, that too was called necessity. There was always a word, always some clean shape of language to make cruelty sound inevitable. But what word was there for this? For monkeys applauding a dead girl? For people who would never know the taste of cursed blood in their mouths deciding that children should be the ones to pay for their peace?

Suguru’s fingers curled.

Yuuji felt it like a warning bell.

Satoru noticed too. Of course he did. His gaze flicked to Suguru’s hand, then to his face, and something unreadable passed between them, something old and instinctive, the silent understanding of two people who had spent time side by side and could tell, from the smallest shift in posture, when the other was nearing the edge of something dangerous.

“Suguru?” Satoru asked.

His tone changed.

Not much. Just enough to make it clear he was asking for real now, no longer taunting the cult or making an abstract point. 

He was asking Suguru to choose. To say yes, and let him erase the entire place in the next breath. Or to say no, and drag them both away from the thought before it rooted any deeper.

Suguru looked at Amanai.

Not the crowd. Not Satoru. Amanai.

At the dried blood in her hair. At the way Satoru was holding her with absurd gentleness, as if careful hands could apologize for a bullet wound. At the stillness of her face, where there should have been irritation or laughter or tears because she wanted to live and they had all heard her say it and none of that had mattered.

Then he remembered the beach.

Amanai laughing in the surf while Kuroi chased after her. Satoru complaining about the heat. Yuuji’s voice in the back of his mind asking questions Suguru hadn’t wanted to answer because answering them would mean admitting he was already beginning to doubt. He remembered Amanai in Okinawa, Amanai at the aquarium, Amanai smiling through the selfishness of finally choosing herself, and then Amanai about to be sacrificed like a lamb, looking at him with wet eyes and saying she wanted to go home.

The cult kept watching.

Waiting.

Yuuji could feel the answer forming in Suguru before he spoke, and it was somehow worse than if he had simply given in to the rage. Because Suguru was not saying no out of forgiveness. He was not looking at these people and deciding they deserved mercy. 

He was looking at Amanai and deciding that staining her death with a massacre would not bring her back, would not fix anything, would not answer the question burning a hole through his chest.

It would only prove how rotten everything already was.

“...No,” Suguru said at last.

The word was quiet, but it hit the place harder than a shout.

Satoru’s expression did not change immediately. He studied Suguru for a second too long, as if checking whether that answer was real or merely delayed.

Then slowly, the sharpness in his gaze eased. 

Not completely. Just enough.

“Okay,” he said.

The cult members sagged with visible relief, and that, more than anything else, made Yuuji want to be sick.

They were relieved. Relieved not because they regretted what had happened to Amanai, but because they had just realized how close they had come to dying for it. Even now, fear for themselves outweighed grief for the girl whose corpse had been delivered into their place.

Suguru saw that too.

Yuuji knew he did, because the disgust in him deepened into something cold and enduring, no longer a flare of emotion but a sediment settling at the bottom of everything else. 

He would remember this. Not just the applause, but the relief afterward. The way they flinched from death only when it was finally pointed back at them.

Satoru turned away first.

“I’m taking Amanai-chan to Kuroi,” he said, voice flatter now. 

“She shouldn’t be left here.”

Suguru nodded.

That was all he could manage. His throat felt too tight for anything more, and Yuuji suspected Satoru knew it. Satoru shifted Amanai’s weight in his arms and started walking, leaving the cult members to part around him in terrified silence. 

No one clapped now. No one smiled. They simply moved out of his way and stared at the ground as if refusing to meet the eyes of the boy carrying the body they had wanted to kill so badly.

Suguru did not follow immediately.

He stood there a moment longer, staring at the crowd until they began to look away one by one, unable to hold his gaze. The question inside him had not gone anywhere. If anything, it had only settled deeper, sinking past the shock and grief into something more permanent. Yuuji could feel it turning over and over in his mind, not as a passing bitterness but as the beginning of a fracture.

"If these are the people sorcerers die for, then what exactly are we protecting?" 

Yuuji remained silent at Suguru's question to him.

“...Suguru-san,” he said quietly.

Suguru finally moved.

He turned from the crowd of monkeys and followed after Satoru, footsteps slow and uneven from his injuries, but steady enough to keep going. 

He did not look back at the Time Vessel Association.

He did not speak to Yuuji. 

He simply walked after his best friend and the dead girl in his arms, blood drying on his skin under a sun that was far too bright for a day like this.

And with every step, the silence inside him grew heavier.

Yuuji could only close his eyes in resignation.