Chapter Text
Itadori Yuuji was having an existential crisis at a summer festival.
It was not because of the heat, though his yukata was starting to feel heavy. And it wasn’t a cheap rental 3,000 yen you get at the station. It was custom-tailored, with high-grade silk the kind his manager insisted he wear after he became a national athlete at sixteen.
When your grandpa dies at fifteen and you suddenly have to live alone, you found that finally giving your PE teacher a chance to make you an athlete can change your economic situation. When your sixteen you’re on national TV hitting home runs so hard you break the scoreboard and by eighteen money stops being a problem. People throw expensive things at you.
Which made it even more ironic that he was currently using his nationally-famous, abnormal physical strength — no powers, just pure, stupid, abnormal human genetics that let him bend a solid steel bat over his knee and run 50 meters in under 6 seconds — to haul boxes of 500-yen love amulets for the local shrine.
“You see this, Jii-chan?” he muttered to the sky, carrying a box labeled FRAGILE – BLESSINGS OF LOVE. “This is ‘helping others.’ You said ‘be surrounded by people,’ not ‘become an unpaid shrine intern while being rich.’ Very fulfilling.”
His Occult Club friends said this shrine was the best place to find horror stories. They were right. The horror was his schedule. You see, when you’re a national athlete in the summer, that literally means you have a job. Like, a home-run-hitting job. But at the same time, being a popular rising baseball athlete means Yuuji needs to do publicity. This time, the publicity his manager thought would be good was this: helping a small shrine in his hometown. Which would actually be okay for Yuuji, if it wasn’t for three full days here and then goes straight to Tokyo because he needed to fly to the Netherlands for Haarlem Baseball Week 2018.
Then he saw the cage.
It was small, rusted, and tucked behind the takoyaki stand. Inside, a Japanese Scops Owl was pressed into a corner, feathers messy, chest heaving. Three guys were poking it with used takoyaki skewers, laughing every time it flinched.
Yuuji recognized the uniform. Same black gakuran as his old high school.
His juniors.
His brain, which operated on a very simple system of Is Someone In Trouble? -> Help Them, short-circuited.
“Oi. What are you doing?”
He didn’t shout. He didn’t need to.
The three first-years turned, saw Itadori Yuuji the Yuuji-senpai whose poster was still in their baseball club room, 178cm of muscle in an expensive silk yukata that probably cost more than their combined monthly allowances, holding a box of love charms.
Their faces went pale.
“Ah! Itadori-senpai! We were just— we thought it was— sorry!”
“Get lost,” Yuuji said.
They got lost. Very quickly.
Yuuji sighed and crouched down. The owl stared at him like he was just another, bigger predator.
“Hey, it’s okay. They’re idiots,” he whispered, lowering the box he was carrying and opening his waist bag, cracking open his water bottle and pouring a little into the bottle cap. He slid it into the cage. The owl didn’t move.
Then his stomach growled. And he remembered the food he had already prepared. As he grabbed the plastic container at the very top to get the protein bar located directly beneath it, Yuuji heard a small, sad sound.
The owl sniffed the air. Its eyes locked onto the plastic container.
Inside were six perfect cubes of A5 wagyu, marbled like a work of art. He had saved his premium athlete meal allowance to buy all temple workers a A5 Wagyu as a token of appreciation and this container holds his share. The plan: grill it at the festival, eat it with them, surrounded by people, feel happy.
Yuuji looked at the wagyu. Looked at the owl.
“This is... this is my dinner, you know?”
Hoo. A small, miserable, hungry hoo.
And that was it. Wasuke’s voice activated in his head like a cursed autoplay ad: Help others, Yuuji.
“Damn it,” Yuuji groaned. “You better not have cholesterol, okay? This costs more than my good cleats.”
He pushed a cube through the bars. The owl snatched it. In one second, the stressed, dying bird from before was gone, replaced by a very focused, very greedy eating machine.
Later, between asking him to carry another box, the shrine priest told him that it had been caught by one of the shrine’s followers. A hamster farmer. The owl had apparently discovered an all-you-can-eat hamster buffet and had been living its best life until it got caught.
“Can I release it? On the back mountain, far from the farms?” Yuuji asked.
The priest waved his hand. “Sure, boy. Just don’t fall into a ditch and die. We need you to carry boxes again tomorrow.”
So Yuuji became an owl taxi.
He ditched the cage “You’ll be more comfortable if I just hold you,” and carried the owl in his arms like a weird, feathered baby. He walked up the path behind the shrine, into the back mountain. To keep it calm, he kept feeding it.
“One last piece, and that’s it. Just for you know that’s my protein for tomorrow’s practice. Ugh, Coach is gonna kill me.”
The owl, now stuffed with probably $60 worth of wagyu, looked smug.
Extremely smug.
But suddenly Yuuji’s geta caught on a thick, gnarled root.
Which, his abnormal strength did absolutely nothing to save him from gravity.
He pitched forward. His arms flew open.
Time slowed down. “OH—“
The owl, with the survival instincts of a creature that just ate expensive beef for free, SCREECHED and EXPLODED into the sky, flying deeper and deeper into the forest.
“HEI!!”
He scrambled up and ran.
The deeper he ran, the stranger the forest became. It was still late afternoon when he started, but the trees here were so old and dense that they swallowed the sunlight. Within minutes, the dim light faded completely. It looked like night. The air turned cold. The cicadas went silent.
That’s never a good sign in any horror story his Occult Club ever covered.
And then, between two giant cedar trees, he saw it.
An abandoned shrine. Identical to the one he volunteered at, but swallowed by vines and moss. A line of torii gates led into darkness, broken and leaning like rotten teeth.
The owl flew straight through them, vanishing into the black.
Yuuji stopped at the first gate. There was absolutely no logical reason to follow an owl into a clearly haunted, abandoned shrine at dusk. But then again, there was no logical reason for him to be scared when he had the strength to bend a steel bat either.
“Okay. This is how people die in horror movies,” he told himself. But another part of Yuuji was telling him that it was still so close to the city and he had already promised to release that owl deeper in the mountain. Itadori men don’t make promises they don’t keep. With that resolution in mind, he stepped in.
One gate. Two gates. Three gates.
With each gate he passed, the air got heavier. Quieter. Darker. He reached the last one. The biggest one. Completely collapsed on one side, the wood black with age.
The owl was perched on top of it, looking down at him.
Yuuji reached out.
The second his foot crossed the threshold of the final torii gate...
The world shattered.
It wasn’t an earthquake. The sound, the wind, everything was sucked away into silence. And then, from the ground, from the old wood, from the darkness itself, thousands of lights erupted.
Fireflies. Hundreds of them. Golden, warm, swirling around him in a silent storm.
It finally made sense why the forest was so dark. It was night here. True night. And the fireflies were the only light.
He closed his eyes against the brightness. When he opened them, he wasn’t in the dark forest anymore.
The shrine in front of him was... perfect. Its vermilion pillars glowed as if freshly painted, their lacquer shining under the moonlight. Its roof was immaculate. The stone lanterns were all lit with warm, flickering flames. And everywhere, surrounding it, were sakura trees in full bloom, petals falling like pink snow under the night sky.
The silk of his own yukata -high-grade, smooth, heavy- suddenly didn’t look out of place at all. In fact, in this moonlit shrine, its quality rivaled that of a Heian noble’s garment.
The owl was gone.
Yuuji stood alone, holding an empty wagyu container, covered in dirt, looking like an idiot who got lost on the way to a festival.
And then, a voice spoke.
It wasn’t from behind him. It was right next to his ear, as if someone was leaning in to whisper a secret.
It was not modern Japanese. It was old. Archaic. The kind of Japanese he had only heard in historical dramas at the shrine -elegant, courtly, and completely unfamiliar. And yet, his soul understood it perfectly.
“Yo wo sukuhe. Negai wo hitotsu kanaen.”
Save the world, and one wish shall be granted.