Okkoita: Frankenstein
The smell of Miyagi in spring was the same as it always had been.
Okkotsu Yuta had thought that enough time would have passed, that enough of himself would have changed between leaving and being sent back, that the prefecture's particular quality of light through cedar branches, or the specific texture of old shrine steps underfoot, wouldn't feel like a hand reaching through his chest and rearranging things without permission.
He'd been wrong.
It sat around him like a patient thing, Miyagi did, the way familar places always did when you'd left them behind for reasons you hadn't chosen. He'd grown up here. Lived here. Loved someone here who wasn't supposed to be loved the way he'd loved herâpossesively, desperately, in that hollow, consuming way that had tethered her spirit to his long past the point it should've dissolved.
Rika.
Her presence curled the at the edges of his awareness like warmth from a hearth on the other side of a wall. She was always there, always sensing him sense her.
She was the air. She was the weight pressing behind his sternum that never quite let him breathe all the way out.
Grade 2 curse. Abandoned warehouse district, Ishinomaki. Auxiliary Manager reports sightings over three weeks. No civillian casualties yet. Recommended two-man team: Okkotsu Yuta (Special Grade) and Inumaki Toge (Grade 2).
Recommend. As though Gojo-sensei had ever once followed a recommendation in his life.
Grade 2.
He could handle a Grade 2. He was getting better at calibrating. Gojo-sensei had been running him ragged on exercises designed to make him feel his own power in gradations rather than an one undifferentiated, terrifying mass.
"Tuna mayo."
The sound of Inumaki's voice, characteristically reduced to the vocabulary of onigiri fillings, pulled Yuta's focus back to the present with the practiced urgency of someone who had learned, in the past several weeks, that ignorance was how you ended up in immediate danger and worseâdead.
Right.
The curse.
It was big. That was Yuta's first thought. His second thought was that, this was wrong, that the mission brief had said grade 2 at the upper end, which was manageable. which was why they'd been sent and this was not grade 2.
He didn't know enough yet to put a proper name to what it was but he knew the way he knew wrong about most things in his life, which was by the feeling of ice settling in his gut.
The warehouse district smelled like salt and rust and the particular cold that came off water when the season hadn't quite decided to turn. Late afternoon light cut sideways through broken skylights, painting the concrete in long amber bands, and just ahead of them was something that was alive and not dead, thick and sweet that had nothing to do with rot and everything to do with malice made physical.
Curses were hatred. Yuta had learned that in theory, and he was relearning it now in practice, in his body, in how every fine hair on his arms had been standing since they'd descended the service stairs.
Grade 2 didn't feel like this.
The curse unfurled something in the darkâhe could only half-see it, which his mind told him was maybe a mercyâa mass of limbs that didn't move the way limbs were supposed to move, jointed in too many places, and a face that was more aperture than expression, a yawning hunger that kept shifting, kept almost resolving into something recognizable before collapsing back into wrongness.
Inumaki stopped a step behind him. The look they'd exchanged needed no words.
"I know," Yuta said, voice low and even despite everythingâhe'd been working on that, on not letting it crack. "I see it."
Inumaki had been extraordinary. He always was, even now, even visibly depleted, the curse marks stained with drying blood spiraling from his lips looking like they'd been cut into him fresh, the dark lines standing stark against skin gone too pale.
He'd used Cursed Speech twice already.
Blast away.
The first invocation had driven the curse back, bought them room to maneuver, and Yuta had used that room to pull them both behind the structural pillar that was, at this point, doing a truly heroic amount of work sheltering two people who were supposed to be in control of this situation.
The second had stopped the curse mid-charge and saved Yuta's arm from what would have been a very bad afternoon.
Yuta heard the word hit the air, and the curse shuddered, its form compressing inward like a body absorbing a blow. The cursed seals at Inumaki's throat flared faintly in the low light, a brief illumination, there and gone.
The curse recovered.
That was the part that made Yuta's pulse go jagged. Grade 2 curses didn't recover from Cursed Speech. The impact should have ended it, or at the very least driven it back far enough to give them room. Instead, it pulled itself uprightâor the nearest approximation of upright its shifting form could manageâand turned, and the quality of its attention landing on them was like stepping into cold water up to the neck.
But Inumaki was already breathing in the labored way that Yuta had learned, through concerned observation and Shoko's blunt medical explanations, meant there was blood in his throat. He'd stopped responding to Yuta's murmured questions three minutes ago.
Conscious. Barely.
Which left Yuta.
Yuta, who was cataloguing his options with the desperate efficiency of someone who'd been told by his sensei, his teachers, and arguably his own common sense that none of his options were good ones.
He could run but he dismissed it immediately. Inumaki couldn't run, and he wasn't leaving Inumaki, end of consideration.
He could call for backup.
He was reaching for his phone even as he thought it, had it in his hand, and then the curse lurched sideways in a movement that sent a shockwave of displaced air rolling through the basement. The pillar between them shuddered.
Three bars of signal became zero.
He could theoretically do more with what he had.
He had a katana. He had the foundational swordsmanship that Maki had been drilling into him with the particular intensity of someone who had decided to fix him and wasn't going to be deterred by the fact that he was a genuinely disastrous student.
He had weeks of training that his body was only beginning to understand at the muscle-memory level, and he was improving, he knew he was improving, but the curse was almost certainly out of his current range withoutâ
Without Rika.
The thought came quietly, the way it always did, dressed up in practicality so he wouldn't immediately argue with it.
She could handle this. She could handle anything. She handled everything before you had any idea what you were doing, and all you did was let her out.
The weight behind his sternum pressed harder.
Rika.
He could feel herâhe always could, that was the nature of what they were to each other, the nature of what she'd becomeâa pressure and a presence and a terrible love that had no outlet except violence.
If he let her out fully, she would destroy the curse.
She would destroy whatever was between her and the curse, most likely, but the curse would be gone, and that wasâ
Do not release her. Gojo-sensei's voice, from three weeks ago, in the training ground, patient in the particular way that meant he was being very serious despite how laid-back he appeared.
Not in an actual mission context. Not yet. When she's fully manifested she'll try to protect you from things that don't need protecting from, and that includes the other sorcerers around you, and that includes innocent bystanders, and that includes me, and I would prefer not to deal with that today.
It's the kind of thing that gets reviewed by the higher-ups, and I'd rather you didn't give them any more reasons to consider you a liability before you've had time to prove you're not one. You understand?
So. Not Rika.
And yet his hand had drifted to his chest without his permission, pressing against the ring hanging from his neck.
Yuta.
Not a real voice. Just the shape of one. The familiar shape.
I'm not going to, he thought at her. Don'tâdon't worry. I'll figure it out.
The curse turned toward them.
It could sense them. Of course it couldâthe overwhelming depth of Rika's contained presence was the metaphysical equivalent of lighting a signal flare in a dark room, and the malice in this place was old enough and near enough to fully realized that it knew what it was sensing.
The thing moved. The limbs that weren't limbs arranged themselves in a way that was unmistakably purposeful.
Yuta shifted his grip on the katana handle and made himself breathe, and thought, with the clarity that tends to arrive when options are exhausted, that he was going to release her and deal with the consequences later. That Gojo-sensei was going to react someway Yuta can't predict, and that he'd apologize properly afterward, and that Inumaki being alive was more important than the rule being intact.
He was reachingâ
Something hit the curse from above with a sound like the earth disagreeing with itself.
The impact was wrong in a way Yuta's brain took a moment to categorize.
It was too heavy. Too physical.
The acoustics of that mass hitting that mass sent a shockwave through the concrete floor that he felt through his knees, through his hand pressed flat to the ground, and the curseâthe curse that had taken two invocations of Inumaki Toge's Cursed Speech to shiftâstaggered.
Yuta's head snapped up.
There was a person crouched on top of it.
Not inside a technique. Not wrapped in cursed energy that Yuta could see.
Just a personâa kidâperched on the curse's shifting mass like it was as good a surface as any, knees bent from the landing, and the curse was visibly off-balance, which was not something it had been in the twenty-three minutes since they'd found it.
Pink hair. School uniformânot Jujutsu High's, some other school's, navy and a white hoodie replacing the standard undershirt, peeking out at the collars, completely unsuited to what was happening.
A face Yuta caught in profile: young, round-cheeked, wearing an expression of mild interest in the way someone might look at a puzzle they'd seen before.
The curse recoveredâit always recovered, that was the relentless problem, it kept reconstituting itselfâand it threw the intruder off with a motion that should have sent him into the far wall hard enough to end the situation immediately.
The kid tucked, spun, and landed on his feet at the far edge of the room in a way that genuinely hurt to watch if you were Okkotsu Yuta, who had been working very hard on his physical conditioning and was still several painful months away from moving like that. Twenty meters if it was an inch.
He landed like it cost him nothingâlike the concrete and the distance and the force of what had thrown him were all just mild suggestions he'd chosen not to follow.
He turned to look at the curse, and he had his hands in his pockets.
"Shit," he said, conversationally, to no one in particular.
The word arrived with a kind of easy, unselfconscious candor that somehow made it feel less like an expletive and more like an honest assessment.
"My bad. I'm still getting used to classifying these guys, y'know?" A beat. He tilted his head at the curse in a way that was almostâalmostâappraising. "It's usually just weak or strong for me."
The curse lunged.
Yuta screamed a warningâhe would remember that later, the embarrassing strangled sound that tore out of his throatâbut the kid was already moving. Not running. Flowing. His body shifted like water finding its level, dodging a clawed swipe by millimeters, and when he struck again, there was something different.
Cursed energy.
One moment the kid had none that Yuta could registerâor nearly none, a flicker, a candle where most sorcerers were lanternsâand then it was simply there, coating the kid's frame in a thin film that shimmered faintly at the edges. And he was moving into the curse's lunge instead of away from it, stepping inside the reach of whatever it was using as limbs, and the first strike landed at what appeared to be a joint.
Yuta had never seen anything like it.
Each punch was surgical. The kid didn't waste energy on wild swings or flashy techniques. He hit the curse where it hurtâjoints, the spaces between armored plates, the seams where its energy pooled densest.
And he never stopped moving.
Every dodge flowed into an attack, every attack flowed into repositioning, and the curse's increasingly frantic strikes passed through empty air every single time.
Like a particularly annoying fly you can't catch, Yuta thought, and the analogy felt almost insulting to the kid's skill.
The curse screamed.
Curses screamed in ways that weren't sound, exactly. The vibration lived in your teeth and in the soft tissue behind your eyes, in the parts of you that recognized wrongness before your conscious mind caught up. Yuta had learned this. He'd learned a lot of unpleasant things in the past several months.
But this scream was different. This was pain, not aggression, and the curse faltered.
The kid was already moving again.
There was nothing reckless about itâthat was what Yuta's mind fixed on, even holding Inumaki's unconscious weight against his side, even trying to simultaneously track the fight and assess whether he needed to intervene and also understand what he was seeing.
And yet...
The pink-haired kid moved like he found the whole thing mildly interesting at best, a slight furrow to his brow suggesting concentration but not urgency, and every single strike was placed in exactly the right spot.
He knew the curse. Not this curse specificallyâhe'd said himself he'd misjudged the thingâbut he knew how curses were structured, where the mass of malice concentrated, where a hit would land differently than anywhere else.
He hadâYuta searched for the wordâeconomy.
For someone moving at that speed, almost nothing was wasted.
Every trace of his limited cursed energy was deliberate, placed with a precision that felt almost surgical, and combined with the physical capability underneath it, the effect was that the curse kept losing ground, kept being pressed back, kept screaming that not-quite-sound.
It should not have worked. Not with those reserves. Not against something this close to fully realized.
Yuta thought of Maki.
The first time he'd watched Zen'in Maki moveâbefore he'd understood the full scope of what Heavenly Restriction meant, what it had cost and what it had built in exchangeâhe'd had a similar sensation.
The cognitive dissonance of watching someone succeed at something they shouldn't have been able to, watching capability rewrite his assumptions about how jujutsu worked.
Maki had no cursed energy at all.
Maki moved like she'd been constructed from stubbornness and physical mastery so complete it had become something else entirely, something past the point of strength and into the territory of principle.
He thought of her often in the context of recalibration: she had been one of his first real shocks since arriving at Jujutsu Tech, this compact, precise, spectacularly unimpressed person who had absolutely no cursed energy and absolutely no patience for the idea that this mattered, who had informed him on day two of training that she was going to hit him until he learned to be hit and that he should stop trying to feel bad about the enormous cursed ghost following him around and start learning how to use his legs.
She was one of the best fighters he'd ever seen. She would have made most sorcerers look careless.
This was not Maki.
This was more than Maki, which was a sentence Yuta would not have believed he could think, and the part that made it more was the part that made it confusing: this boy had cursed energy.
He doesn't have a Heavenly Restriction to trade away something intangible for something physical.
He was justâhe was just this.
He was fast and strong and skilled in that baseline way, and he had cursed energy on top of it, and what he'd done with that small amount was more precise, more intentional, more expert than Yuta had managed to do with an amount that made his teachers look nervous.
This kid had cursed energy. Justânot much. And no restriction forcing the trade. No divine imbalance demanding compensation, no bargain struck with his own body. And stillâ
Still.
The thought sat heavy and uncomfortable in Yuta's chest, next to the awareness of his own training.
He thought of himself running drills at three in the morning, gasping, falling behind Maki and Inumaki and even Panda on runs that weren't supposed to be a competition, thinking: I just have to catch up, I just have toâ
Maki watched his swordsmanship form with an expression of fond professional disappointmentâand the vast, formless depth of cursed energy he carried that he still didn't know what to do with, and the very large cursed spirit that loved him too much to leave, both of them fumbling toward something that worked.
He was working toward something. He knew that.
He just hadn't expected, on a mission in Miyagi, to see what it looked like when someone had already arrived.
This kid. In a junior high school uniform. Who apparently classified curses on a spectrum of weak or strong and showed up to near-evolved special grades and thought nothing of them.
Junior high school uniform.
The last strike was different.
Yuta felt it before it landedâfelt the air change, the way it changed before something significant, a compression that had nothing to do with weather and everything to do with the quality of intention concentrated in one place.
He pulled Inumaki closer by instinct and tucked behind the pillar, eyes squeezed half-shut against he wasn't sure what, because the energy gathered in that small frame in a way that was almost violent in its containmentâa split second of absolute stillness, of the kid's whole body aligned behind a single pointâ
The impact was black.
That was the only way Yuta's mind could categorize it: not darkness, not shadow, but a flash of black light, which made no sense and was exactly what it wasâa color that didn't belong to the visible spectrum arriving in a visible spectrum, a crack of radiance that ran backward.
The sound that came with it wasn't the acoustics of a physical blow but something deeper, something that resonated at a frequency Yuta felt behind his ribs, past the breastbone, in some register of his body that existed specifically to recognize things it had never encountered and file them under significant.
The curse came apart.
Not dramatically. Not like how Yuta had seen curses dispelled during training demonstrations, with an explosive, showy release.
It simply stoppedâthe way a held breath stops, the way a dream stops when you try to focus on the details.
The malice that had been making the air thick and sweet unraveled without fanfare, and the shape that had held it dissipated, and the basement was just a basement again: old concrete, standing water, the distant hum of the city above going about its afternoon.
Yuta stayed where he was for three full seconds, breathing.
Then he looked.
The boy straightened up.
He slid both hands into his pants pockets, unhurried, shifting his weight back on his heels. The nonchalance of it was not a performanceâYuta had been around Gojo-sensei long enough to recognize performed nonchalance, and this wasn't that.
It was just how he stood. Just how he occupied space after a fight, apparently: easily, like the fight had been mildly interesting and now it was done and he was ready for whatever came next.
He turned.
Found Yuta against the pillar with Inumaki's arm across his shoulders, Inumaki unconscious, and looked at the two of them with an expression that was mostly unbothered and a littleâ
Surprised? Not alarmed, not apologetic, not the expression of someone who understood they had just inserted themselves into a situation that wasn't theirs.
More like: oh, there were other people here.
His eyebrows went up. His head tilted maybe fifteen degrees to the side.
There was a pauseâa beat in which the kid registered what he was seeing, which was Okkotsu Yuta braced against a structural pillar holding up the unconscious form of a white-haired boy whose curse marks had spread further than they should have and whose breathing, while present, was far too shallow for comfort.
The kid's brow rose, incrementally.
His expression shifted from unbothered to mildly, briefly, genuinely surprisedâthe expression of someone who had not particularly expected to find that anyone had been here before him.
He tilted his head.
"You should probably get him treated." His voice was easy, unhurried, with the cadence of someone who had decided a long time ago to be calm about things and had been keeping to that decision consistently.
Yuta stared.
The kid continues.
"The curse wasn't that strong, anyway. It wasn't a fully realized special gradeâthose guys are monsters, I swear." He looked at the space where the curse had been, and the expression he made was somewhere between thoughtful and dismissive.
"This thing was⊠a baby. But it was about to mature!" A faint shift in his expressionâsomething almost like retrospective surprise, directed at the empty air. "Man, you guys were about to get into some big trouble if it finished evolving."
Yuta stared at him.
His mouth was open. He was aware of this because he was aware of the specific quality of silence that came from having nothing to say, which was different from choosing to say nothing.
You guys were about to get into some big trouble.
He wanted to explainâwanted to point outâseveral things simultaneously, and none of them were reaching the stage of sentence formation, so what came out instead was:
"âŠWho are you?"
The question arrived with the particular grace of someone dropping their keys outside a locked door.
The kid blinked at him. Something passed across his faceânot quite consideration, more like a brief, private calculationâand then it was gone, and the unconcerned look was settled back into place like a coat he'd taken off momentarily.
"Ohâa window, I think. That's what the guy on the phone called me." He glanced at Inumaki again, and the expression he made was one of genuine, mild concern that sat oddly next to the rest of him. "I reported the curse. They said someone would handle it."
His gaze moved back to Yuta with a slight, not unkind tilt of his head. "Seems like the someone who came to handle it kind of got handled. No offense."
No offense.
Yuta's mouth closed.
His brain, which had been running in the flat-affect mode he'd developed for crisis situations, was now attempting to restart several processes at onceâand failing at all of them, because there were simply too many things wrong with what this kid had just said, or not wrong exactly, butâ
A window.
Jujutsu High classified civilians who could see curses as windows, as a matter of protocol. They reported sightings. They did not engage. They certainly didn'tâthey were not supposed toâthey had no business exorcizingâ
You need cursed energy to fully affect a curse. Everything Gojo-sensei had explained, everything Shoko had stated flatly in medical orientation, everything that functioned as foundational truth in the world Yuta had spent the past several months trying to understand.
Even Maki needs cursed tools to make contact that matters.
Yuta had seen it with his own two eyesâthe cursed energy was real, not a trick of his perception. But it had been so little. Less than anyone at Jujutsu High that Yuta had encounteredâeven students who struggled in practical courses, even first-years he hadn't met yetâcarried at baseline. A fraction of what any recognized sorcerer possessed.
And the kid had used it like he had abundance.
Like every unit was an entry in an economy he'd mapped completely and could spend precisely, combined with the physical capability underneath it that had staggered a near-special-grade curse on the first strike with no cursed energy at allâ
And then there was the black flash, which Yuta didn't have a name for but could still feel in the space behind his ribs, the frequency of it, the sense of something significant having passed through the room.
He didn't know what it was. He'd never seen it demonstrated.
He couldn't explain what he'd witnessed and he wasn't sure he was meant to be able to, not yetâ
The kid had used it on a reflex. Like it was something his hands already knew how to do.
He said he was still getting used to classifying curses.
Which implied he'd been doing this. For a while. Long enough to have a classification system of his own, however idiosyncratic, however reduced to its most elemental terms.
Long enough that the auxiliary manager who took his calls had given him a label.
Long enough that a near-special-grade curse hadn't frightened himâhad not even, apparently, interrupted his default expression of mild interest.
Was he even in high school yet?
The uniformâstandard junior high, not Jujutsu High's, navy and white with a school emblem Yuta didn't recognizeâsaid not.
He couldn't be more than a year younger than Yuta himself, but a year put him in middle school still, and middle school meant he wasn't enrolled, which meantâwas there an age threshold for formal recognition?
Was there some process of being taken in, being assessed, being designated, that this kid had simply never been through? Could you exorcize curses and not be a sorcerer, in the official sense? Was the title the thing that made it real, and this kid existed in some gap in the bureaucracy, calling the auxiliary line from what appeared to be his personal phone and walking into near-special-grade curses alone in condemned warehouse, on whatâon a lark?
Was the auxiliary manager who took his calls aware of what they'd been routing him toward?
Was he skipping school?
Yuta thought about Maki again, unbidden. The first time he'd seen her fight, he'd felt this same stunned disbeliefâthis same sense that the rules he'd been learning didn't apply to everyone the same way. But Maki had no cursed energy. Her strength came from a binding vow written into her very body, a trade that had cost her everything.
This kid had cursed energy. Small reserves, maybe, but present. He'd used it. And he was stronger than anyone Yuta had trained with exceptâ
Except Gojou-sensei, and that comparison felt almost sacrilegious.
The black flashâwhat was thatâ?
He was still too new. Too green. There was so much he didn't know, and today had proven it in the worst possible way.
Inumaki groaned softly, stirring against his shoulder, and Yuta's attention snapped back to him. The blood from his mouth had dried into a dark crust, his face was pale, and his breathing was shallow.
You should probably get him treated.
Right. Priority one.
The pink-haired kid shifted his weight. His gaze moved toward the stairwell in a way that was unmistakably preparatory.
"You guys gonna be okay?"
The question was perfunctory in the way that meant he'd already decided the answer was yes and was asking anyway because it was the right thing to do, and he was already turning, already movingâ
"Waitâ"
The boy's eyebrows rose a fraction higher. He opened his mouth to respondâand then paused, his gaze flicking to something over Yuta's shoulder. Listening.
Other sorcerers coming, Yuta realized. Backup.
The mission clock must have triggered when Inumaki and I went silent.
The boy must have sensed them too, because he suddenly straightened, pulling his hands from his pockets and rolling his shoulders like he was preparing to leave.
"Later," he said simply.
And he walked past Yuta.
Not ran. Walked, with that same unhurried, laid-back stride, his school shoes crunching softly on the dead leaves. Yuta twisted to follow his movement, craning his neck to keep him in sightâ
But by the time he'd turned his head, the clearing was empty.
No flash of pink in the trees. No fading footsteps. Just the quiet rustle of autumn wind and the soft, steady breathing of Inumaki's unconscious form.
Yuta looked at the space where he'd been. Then he looked at Inumaki.
Then he made a decision that was, practically speaking, the correct one, and carefully laid Inumaki down, checked his breathing, and crossed the room to the stairwell at the fastest pace that carrying someone's unconscious body briefly and then moving alone allowed.
Two flights of service stairs. A door that opened to the street.
Miyagi. Spring. The smell of cedar resolving into exhaust fumes and the distant suggestion of food stalls opening for the evening.
Ordinary afternoon light coming through the ordinary gap between ordinary buildings, and no pink hair, and no school uniform, and no one standing with their hands in their pockets and an expression of complete unconcern wearing the residue of a black flash like it was nothing particularly worth mentioning.
Yuta stood at the top of the stairs with his phone in his handâtwo bars of signal, up hereâand the first call he made was to the school, and he reported the curse as exorcized and Inumaki as needing medical extraction, and he gave their location in a voice that stayed even, that didn't crack, that he was relatively proud of under the circumstances.
Then he stood there a moment longer.
Inumaki would want to know.
Gojo-sensei would absolutely want to knowâYuta could already hear the particular quality of interest his sensei's voice would take on, the way delight and calculation would mix in his tone when he understood what had happened here, and he both looked forward to and dreaded that conversation.
Someone with that capability walking around in a junior high school uniform, reporting curses to the auxiliary line for whatâpocket money?
Thrills?
Because he'd looked at things that terrified trained sorcerers and decided they seemed like an interesting problem?
The person who had given him the same first impression Maki had given himâexcept somehow past it, somehow furtherâexcept without the Heavenly Restriction that made Maki Maki, without the divine trade, with actual cursed energy beneath everything, however small, however precisely spent, and it hadn't mattered because he was strong without it, strong first and then additionallyâ
Unlike Yuta, who was still fumbling toward physical capability that should have been foundational.
Who had the vastest pool of cursed energy his teachers had seen in recent memory and no idea yet what to do with it.
Who had to ask Rika for help because he couldn't handle things on his own yet.
Yuta met the approaching auxiliary manager when he saw them, aware of how Panda and Maki herself were trailing behind, leading them back down to the warehouse where Inumaki waited, explaining what had happened in blunt and straightforward details again like he had on the phone.
And the boy. He didn't forget to mention the boy.
Especially the boy.
