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Scourge

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Chapter 3

Threshold

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A low, whistling breath of a laugh caught in the back of Sukuna's throat as he stepped from the treeline. His bare feet crunching the frozen, morning dew.

His upper eyes fixed on you.

The lower pair, split between Uraume's rigid posture and the open door of the shed, cataloged everything behind you. The tools lining the walls, the chain overhead swaying faintly, and the weapon embedded in the table.

The hunting coat's zipper dragged open as the heavy fabric parted to reveal the layers beneath.

"So."

The word settling into the space like you were checking a list, as you shrugged the coat off and hung it on a nail. Weight shifting to one hip, arms folded across your chest, leaning against the doorframe.

Your gaze passed over the expanse of tattooed skin, four arms, and a face that belonged to a bygone era—to settle on Uraume's decidedly meeker form.

"Sorcerers, I presume?"

Said as flatly as asking about the weather.

Sukuna's mouth opened, a cutting retort about perceptiveness of insects forming—

"I wasn't talkin' to ya."

Your gaze unshifting. It remained cold, locked on Uraume.

A moth's wing flicker of something sharper sat behind the amusement in his eyes.

You had just looked at the King of Curses and decided he wasn't worthy of addressing first.

Uraume's spine went rigid. Their chin lifted a fraction, pink eyes darkening as the insolence registered.

"Mind your tongue when you are speaking to Master Sukuna."

The words came out clipped, each syllable carved from the very ice they wield.

Your eyebrow raised, and a faint smirk settled into place.

"That name supposed to mean somethin' to me?"

Uraume's composure cracked as your insolent words sat in the air like campfire smoke.

Their jaw tightened, pink eyes narrowing to razor-thin slits as frost crept along their fingers.

"How. Dare. You."

The seething words came out low, each one forced through clenched teeth.

"He could kill you and that entire dingy hole you people call a village without breaking stride."

Your hand came up.

Turned over.

Fingers flexing once, examining them as if Uraume's death threat had been a comment about dinner plans.

A small, flat sound escaped your nose.

"Mhm."

Your voice carried no urgency, just the bone-deep certainty of someone who had been surrounded by worse. You slid one nail under another, scraping out a thin line of dried blood from the deer.

"So could just about anything nowadays."

Uraume's lips parted, breath hitching as they opened their mouth to snap back—

A laugh cut through the space.

The sound came from both of Sukuna's mouths. The one throwing it out in a bark, the maw on his stomach echoing it with a guttural, unholy harmony.

"I'll give you this."

Sukuna's lower eyes half-lidded, the upper pair bright with genuine amusement.

"You're at least entertaining."

He stepped forward until his frame blocked your view of Uraume.

The heat rolling off his body punched through the winter air and hit you like you'd opened an oven door.

Four broad shoulders nearly consumed the doorway.

One upper hand braced against the wood above your head.

He lowered himself until you were forced to finally acknowledge him.

His upper eyes held yours, looking at you like you were an amusing stray cat.

The lower set tracked everything else—

The tension that barely hunched your shoulders.

The position of your hands under your biceps.

The way your weight sat, seemingly, relaxed against the wall but leaning forward a little too far.

Every involuntary micro-movement your body betrayed told him one thing.

You know why he is here.

"Gojo."

His voice dropped, stripped of any pretense of performance.

"He was here. I can feel his presence all over this little hovel of yours. Where is he?"

Something shifted behind your eyes.

Not fear or recognition of his authority, but a flicker of rapid calculations.

"Maybe I know where he is."

You tilted your head a degree.

"Maybe I got an awful memory."

You shrugged with one shoulder.

"Or maybe I want to hear what I'm gettin' for that info."

Behind him, Uraume's breaths shortened.

Their hands, hidden within their sleeves, curled into fists.

The sheer audacity of this vainglorious woman, standing in a shed that smelled of blood and moldering wood. Haggling with Sukuna as if he were a simple merchant in the marketplace.

Sukuna's expression didn't change, but something behind his eyes recalibrated.

The smirk stayed in place, but his eyes went flat and cold. The stray cat was no longer amusing and he was going to drown it, just to watch the ripples.

The wood of the doorframe cracked faintly under his grip.

His body leaning into the space, close enough that the individual striations in his irises were visible and the way crimson bled into darker rings at the edges.

"I'll make your death mercifully faster than you deserve."

The words came out conversational, but the promise behind them was absolute.

Still you didn't flinch.

Not when his face was a finger's breadth from yours.

Not when his warm, suspiciously metallic, breath stirred the strands that had escaped your braids.

Not when the sheer size of him blocked out the gray morning light and replaced it with his shadowed silhouette.

Your lips twitched upward.

"Anyone ever tell ya that ya ain't a very good negotiator?"

Both sets of his lips curled back, showing canines sharper than any human should possess.

"You misunderstand your position."

The words wrapped around you tight like a silken noose.

His lower left hand released the frame and gestured—

At the shed.

At you who had backed themselves into a corner.

At the fact that there was nowhere to run.

"This was never a negotiation."

Behind you, the blood had slowed to a drip. The contents surface dark and reflective, the smell of iron dense enough to coat the back of your throat.

The seconds ticked by as you silently held his gaze.

Then your shoulder left the frame—your body pivoting back toward the interior of the shed.

"Mm."

Dismissive, the kind of noise you might make at a dog that had barked too many times on the street to be threatening.

"Well, as lovely as y'all have been."

Slowly pulling your sleeves up over your elbows, revealing old burns and pale jagged lines, criss-crossing the skin in varying sizes and depths.

"That deer's dry 'nough."

Without a backward glance you walked toward the carcass.

Heavy boots tracking through the blood-darkened patches on the wooden floor, leaving prints that would never be fully scrubbed out.

You crouched, balancing on the balls of your feet, and settled your steady gaze on the bucket of blood.

As if the most dangerous thing to have ever existed wasn't standing six feet behind you, now seething.

A snarl ripped through Sukuna's teeth, low and grinding like tectonic plates shifting against each other.

She needs to learn.

He thought as he stepped forward into the doorframe—

And stopped.

His foot, mid-stride, met the threshold and found it occupied by something that was not wood or air.

It pressed against his chest.

Not solid.

Or visible.

But there.

A resistance that met his forward momentum and pushed him back.

The air inside the shed shimmered faintly, a barely perceptible distortion, like the haze of heat rising off blacktop.

His eyes snapped to the workbench.

Sneaky rat.

Still embedded point-first in the wood, handle upright. The knife's position—not thrown or dropped—placed, precisely and deliberately. And where the metal met the grain, a faint trace of something that pulsed with a heartbeat rhythm.

A conditional barrier with activation triggers after placement.

The realization settled cold and clear.

Ready to react to—

His eyes narrowed.

Malediction.

He pressed a hand against it, feeling the texture of the construct woven into the very architecture of the shed.

Elegant in its design, the veil had sat dormant for years, yet it remained perfectly stable.

No cursed energy leak, no visible or tangible tells.

It was work that required not just power, but considerable skill.

Gojo's presence was all over this place, clinging to the walls like mold, but he didn't create this.

Not with this level of subtlety.

A low chuckle slipped from you as you turned your head slightly, just enough for him to see the curve of your cheek and the edge of a grin that didn't need to be as wide as it was to be infuriating.

Sukuna's eyes cut toward the sound.

"Oh, yous were gonna try your luck killin' me, weren't ya?" Your voice shifting to a mocking lilt.

Uraume stepped forward, hand outstretched, palm flat against the invisible wall.

The barrier responded to them differently.

The shimmer intensified, brightened, and then pulsed outward.

Uraume's arm was flung back as if struck, their body stumbling a full step before they caught themselves.

Sukuna brought his hand to the barrier and flexed his fingers against the shimmer.

A bolt arced across the veil as his arm was thrown back, skin singeing to black before he healed it just as quick.

The barrier increases its reaction to each action against it.

The distinction was maddening and fascinating in equal measure.

Clever.

A short, derisive laugh bubbled up from you as you turned your head back to the bucket.

"Ya know," you said, conversationally, "he said people'd come lookin' for him."

You stuck your arm into the bucket. Blood sloshed, wet and heavy, coating your forearm to the elbow.

"Said they'd be dangerous."

When your arm pulled free, crimson ran in thick, slow rivulets to the floor.

You balanced your forearms on your thighs, blood staining the fabric of your pants, dripping from your fingertips onto the stained floor.

Your back still to them.

Still to him.

The laughing quality of your voice was a violence all its own.

"Said I'd needa go with him and Roland if I wanted to survive."

Sukuna's patience thinned.

Not the theatrical kind he wore like armor. The real kind, one that had been eroding for years across oceans and dead cities and empty sorcerers who couldn't tell him what he needed to know.

His breath came sharp through his nose, nostrils flaring.

You turned your head, looking over your shoulder.

The movement was slow, deliberate, and carried the weight of someone who found this deliciously fun.

"Looked pretty shocked when I told him to shove his protection up his ass."

Sukuna's lower left hand came up. Two fingers extended, cursed energy coiling at the tips, the familiar tension of a dismantle loading the air like a breath before a scream.

"If I cared about dyin'," you said, your voice cutting through the gathering energy, "I woulda gone with the jackasses."

The words landed in the silence like a stone in water.

A deep chuckle rumbled from your soon-to-be assaliant and as his mouth opened—

Your hand slammed to the ground.

The motion was fast. Your palm struck the wooden floor with a metallic crack, and when you pulled it away, something remained.

A stake.

Iron, wrapped in blood-stained talisman paper. The characters inscribed on its surface were not Japanese nor English, but something else entirely.

You had driven it into a pre-drilled hole in the floor with enough force to seat it deep, the wood around it splitting in hairline fractures that radiated outward like a spiderweb.

The air changed.

A pressure shift that hit Sukuna's skin like he'd fallen straight through the atmosphere.

A second barrier formed visibly. It didn't creep or build. It erupted, pouring outward in a wave that raced past the shed, past the blood-soaked drag path of the deer, past the rusted outbuilding and the reeking shed, until it encompassed the entire property in a dome of shimmering distortion that caught the weak morning light and turned it prismatic for half a beat before settling into black.

The forest beyond went quiet.

Not the held-breath quiet of his arrival, but a sealed one.

Like a bell jar had been dropped over this tiny section of the forest.

The barrier humming at a frequency that made Uraume's teeth ache and Sukuna's skin prickle with the recognition of craftsmanship he had never seen in his lifetime.

His eyes burned into yours.

Not with the bored half-lidded contempt he had offered the sorcerer in the office tower.

Not with the flat dismissal he had given the sorcerers who offered no information.

Not how he had looked at you mere minutes ago.

Not with the predatory amusement born from the fascination that he reserved for Gojo, Mahoraga, or Megumi.

This was something rawer.

With a grin on your face you stood and walked to a rag hanging from a nail by the door.

Something took a seat behind those four crimson irises—rage, yes, but threaded through with something deathly close to being impressed.

"Now."

Your voice was clean, steady, and carried the unmistakable weight of someone who had just changed the hierarchy of the present company.

You began wiping the blood from your arm, the towel darkening.

"Let's discuss my terms for that info ya want."

The deer's swaying from the barrier eruption stilled. Blood dripped from its nose onto the floor in a rhythm that might have been a clock, if clocks still worked in this timeline.

Tap…

"Terms."

He repeated.

The blood dripped behind you, like sand in an hourglass. Each drop a measure of something slipping through his fingers.

Time…

Patience…

And through it all, you waited.

And for the first time in longer than he cared to admit—

Sukuna had absolutely no idea what would happen next.

Dividers:

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