At least, as safe as you could get in a zombie apocalypse. The undead didn’t do well in the cold, limbs with no blood froze, fell off, slowed them to an essentially inert state.
But when you didn’t need to worry about horrifying, rotting, infectious dead people, you had to worry about starving.
When the news broke that the cold slowed them down, just about everyone migrated north. What that meant, though, was basically all of the stores were totally raided.
So here you were, in your fingerless gloves (that used to have fingers) digging through the wreckage of a 7-11 you’d been to before trying to find anything edible enough. You’d take something even technically edible at this point. The gloves catch on a broken shelf, sending your frustrations over the edge. You rip them off and throw them on the ground.
It was the fifth store you had tried today. You were getting desperate enough to start trying the same places again. In the summer, you could forage in the forest, maybe even catch something in a snare if you were lucky. But right now? The forest was deader than the zombies. You’d have to rely on something canned pre-apocalypse. Or you could die. That was looking pretty appealing right now.
Your doom-and-gloom thoughts were interrupted by a loud rattle by the door. On instinct, you ducked and pulled your knife from your belt, making yourself small behind a shelf. Sure, winter slowed them down, but that didn’t mean a persistent straggler wasn’t possible. You couldn’t let your guard down.
You were tense, ready for any scenario…until you heard voices. Accented voices—at least to you in mountain-town USA.
“Bloody hell, this place is a ghost town…”
They were human, but you still didn’t dare poke out. The apocalypse did nasty things to people. Made them compromise their morals for survival. Some people leaned into that more than others and there was no way to know.
“Just see if there’s anything salvageable, sergeant. Map says this is the last town for a while.”
Sergeant? Military? Last you heard, they were all wiped out in the initial push-back. Not to mention they were passersby, which was incredibly rare. People in general were getting rarer by the day, but most people clung to the safety of the cold, and towns they knew. Unknowns were dangerous. Trained ones, even more so.
As far as you knew, this place didn’t have a back door. But, if you could get to the front undetected, you could get the hell out of dodge, belly no less empty, but still very much alive. You’d take that trade-off.
As they rounded the shelves, you paralleled their movements, snaking around them to stay out of sight. Curiosity was a beast of its own, though, so you risked a peek.
There were three of them, all large men. One was older with mutton chops and a bucket hat, holding a gun—a large one—and looking around while the others dug through the mess. The other two were younger. One shorter, but no less built, with a Mohawk of all things. The other, very pretty with a Union Jack on his cap.
They all had guns (another rarity these days) and tac vests, clearly military and clearly not American. Definitely wanted to avoid them.
They seemed occupied with their search, which benefited you. They didn’t seem overtly concerned with their noise levels either, so it was easier to sneak away. By the time you made it to the front door, you almost felt like it was too easy. Still looking back to make sure they hadn’t seen you, you didn’t notice the hulking figure in front of you. But boy did he see you.
He grabbed you by the straps of your backpack before slamming you against the brick wall of the building. Oh…they left a scout. You realized a little too late. He was the scariest of them all, face fully covered by a skull mask. He had to have been well over 6 feet, and struck an intimidatingly muscular figure. You were so so so incredibly fucked.
“Captain!” His low voice cut through the silence of the outdoors, making you flinch. You can’t remember the last time someone had yelled in your presence. Frankly, it’s been a while since you’d seen anyone at all.
His comrades responded rapidly, flying outside with their guns up ready to defend him. They deflated at the sight of you, which…was sort of offensive. Sure, you probably didn’t look as intimidating as them, what with no gun, and you were clearly outnumbered, but still. They didn’t know what you could do.
“Well, what do we have ‘ere, Ghost?” Mutton chops—the captain?—asks.
Your brows furrow, “ghost…?” You can’t help but whispering inquisitively.
His gaze turns back on you, “got a problem?”
“No!” You speak louder, head shaking, “no problem…just…ghost?”
The one with a Mohawk snorts before Pretty Boy stomps on his foot.
You’re confused at the dynamic here. Are you in danger? You can’t tell. Ghost still has you pinned, but they all seem very relaxed and Mohawk even seems to find humor in the situation.
“Are…you gonna kill me?” You were always told that speaking your mind is best.
The captain lowers his weapon fully, hands coming to wrap around the front straps of his vest before rocking on his heels and smirking a little. You try to ignore the way it crinkles his eyes and how that makes you feel. “No, sweet’eart, we’re not that type of folk. Just needed to make certain you weren’t a threat.”
There’s silence for a moment. Your gaze sweeps from the captain to Ghosts hands, still wrapped around your backpack straps and pinning you to the wall, before back to the captain in a silent plea.
“Alrigh’, Ghost, release.” He lets you go, dropping you the inch he had you raised back to the ground, before backing up.
You fix your jacket and bag and clear your throat, wiping your hands down the front of your shirt. “Well…gentlemen…if that’s all…” you move to leave before the captain jerks you back by the hook on the back of your bag.
“Not so fast.”
This is getting old quick.
“What!” You flip to face him, exasperated and no longer caring, “what could I possibly do—“ you stop at the sight of a granola bar in his outstretched hand. You look down at it and then back at him. Was he really offering this to you? Food was so scarce and kind people even scarcer. What did he want in return?
Before you could ask or just grab it and run, the sound of a motorcycle revving in the distance interrupted your thoughts.
You flinch hard, looking the direction it came before backtracking rapidly. “Shit. Shit, shit—“
They’re confused but you’d be damned if you had another run in with him. You’re about to take off when you think about them. Clearly unfamiliar with the territory and kind enough to offer you food (…and not kill you). The least you could do is save them from this fate.
So, you grab Pretty Boy’s bicep and tug him along with a “come with me!”
“Hey, wait a second—“ Ghost is gripping his gun and taking a defensive step forward, but you don’t have time for his suspicion.
You’re still holding Pretty’s bicep when you swoop past Mohawk and grab him too, “if you want to die that’s fine by me!” The two in your hold are sharing a glance over your head but seem inclined to listen. You don’t spare a look to see if the other two are following, if not, it’s their funeral.
You’re pretty sure the gas station has a secondary building around back for overstock and snow supplies. Last you checked all the food was gone, but hopefully the door was still in tact. You had to be out of sight before they got here.
The sounds of motorcycles were getting closer, and your window was closing. Luckily, you could see the shed still standing with a door. You abandon the hold on the boys in favor of tugging the latch and opening the door to the shed. Looking behind you, the other two ended up following, both seeming more suspicious of you than they had when you were pressed to a wall. There wasn’t time to explain, though, so you just ushered them in before following and closing the door.
It was about a quarter of the size of the actual station, with some closets and nooks and crannies, but they stayed huddled by the entryway, reluctant to venture further into the dark unknown.
You turn to face them, feeling claustrophobic at the way they are towering around you. You take off your backpack, shoving it into the chest in front of you. “Hold this.”
You start to rummage through before Ghost interrupts, “are you going to explain anything?”
Your head whips up in the dark, “shh!” You pull out a flashlight and flick it on, zipping your bag up and flinging it onto your back.
You break out of the circle, giving the room a glance over to make sure no zombies had made this their hibernation home. When you’re certain it’s clear, you turn back around to answer.
“Listen, there’s only one group in town that have motorcycles and you don’t want to cross their path.”
They share a dubious look with one another before shouldering their guns higher. “I think we’d be set, love.”
You scoff, “you’re not the only ones with guns. And from the looks of it, you’re a lot nicer than they are.”
“We’re only nice to people who look on the verge of starving. It’s not like you pose much of a threat.” Ghost again.
They’re not getting it. “Just!—trust me. You’re passing through, right? Not from around here?” You’re looking at each of them in the eye, trying to impress upon them how serious you are. “These guys rolled up at the very start. People were making a community here. With walls and laws, trying to make something of this mess. They tore it all to shreds. Pretended to join the community and then opened the gates to a bunch of undead. The things that they did—“ you take a breath and look away before continuing, “they’re not good, okay? If they saw the gear y’all’re sporting, they’d never let you walk away.”
You can only hope you got through to them because the motorcycles are here. You turn off the flashlight and punch through their group again to peek out a gap in the door. Please don’t stop here, please don’t stop here, please—
They park the bikes in front of the 7-11.
“Alright! Split up, see if this fine establishment has what we’re lookin’ for!” His southern drawl makes you shudder, thinking back to how callous he was in the wake of the destruction he caused.
“His name is Graves.” You whisper, not taking your eyes off of him. “Was U.S. military before all of this…deserted when the shit hit the fan.”
They don’t ask how you know so much about him.
Suddenly you jerk back with a hissed “shit!”
Suddenly you’re turning around and pushing on their chests to get them to move. “Go, go, go! Someone is coming.”
You had seen plenty of hiding places when you were checking for undead, you just had to hope they wouldn’t check too thoroughly.
You all scrambled for a place to hide, silently directing them to places you had spotted. Everyone squeezed into gaps or took closets, and then it was just you, standing in the middle of the room, spinning helplessly. Footsteps approached from outside, about to reach the door, when someone stuck their hand out and jerked you into their spot.
Ghost squeezed you into the cabinet he was in, chest pressing to yours, before shutting the door and plunging you into darkness.
“I—“ you try to whisper, but he just brings his hand up to cover your mouth as the door to the shed creaks open.
Your breathing picks up as someone enters to room, sweeping a flashlight back and forth, momentarily illuminating the crack in the cabinet. You can hear his boots scrape the floor and the click of a gun as he leisurely makes his way deeper into the room.
Eventually he stops in front of your cabinet. Your eye flickers from the crack to Ghost’s eyes. His gun is nuzzled between the two of you. He brings his finger up to his lips before reaching down to your thigh holster for your knife, not yet pulling it out, just hovering with his hand pressed against your thigh and waiting for the door to open.
“Walkowski!” You hear Graves yell from the main building. The man retracts his hand from the handle of the cabinet and runs back to his master.
Ghost drops both of his hands from you and you finally feel like you can breathe again.
You all give it a moment before emerging from your hiding spots. You approach the door that is still ajar, looking out to find no one in sight.
You look over your shoulder and gesture for them to follow before shooting out and jogging for the back of the gas station.
As you all take refuge behind the back wall, Graves finally re-emerges with his crew.
“Any clues on our little deflector?” He asks his goons as they flood back to him.
“Not sure, sir, but we did find this.” One of them holds up two gloves—your gloves.
Graves chuckles and takes them from his hands. “Well I’ll be!” He holds them up and waves them at his other comrades, “looks like we’re on the right track, boys!”
Your head drops, eyes squeezing shut at your stupidity. A barely audible fuck leaves you. The boys share a look, starting to put some dots together.
You all stay silent as they all get back on their bikes and start up the road. The tension only minimally leaves your shoulders, you honestly look on the verge of tears as you stand.
“Well…it was nice meeting you. Thanks for the granola bar. If you’re trying to get out of town you’re going to want to follow the highway so you don’t get stuck in a snowed-out overpass.” You point in the direction of a large road, not turning around to face them before staring the opposite direction Graves went.
“Come with us.” Ghost stops you before even fully considering what he’s saying. He spares a look at John, forgetting chain of command for a moment. All he’s thinking about is that he knows what it’s like to be running from something. To be scared. But John doesn’t protest, in fact they all look to be in agreement.
That does get you to turn back. “What?” You say incredulously.
“We could use a guide.” He offers.
“I’m—“ you look around like you’d find someone to protest, “I’m not just dropping everything I have here for…for some strangers I met 30 minutes ago…” despite your arguments, you look contemplative.
“Everything you have here? Like what? The lack of food and a sociopath on your ass?” Tough love it is.
You scoff and shake your head. Of course they caught that. Your brain tells you that there’s no argument, that obviously you can’t go with them. But…but…
To tell the truth, you had nothing here. Just the memory of what was before Graves took everything. He was right. You were starving and terrified Graves would find you everyday. You were sick of watching your own back, sick of having no one to talk to, and sick of Graves looming over you.
You open and close your mouth a couple of times. “…okay.”
You’re not sure how, but you felt like you had just irreparably changed something.
Author note: it’s been like…15 years since I last wrote anything, but Sukuna has me in a chokehold right now. So here we are 😭 this is very much self indulgent, I won’t lie. A lot of this is how I grew up and actual plans that my family has in case of a apocalypse or any type of world ending situation as well as genuine conversation, I have had with my family.
Banner’s up, but mdni! This gets pretty dark and deals with some heavier themes. I’ll include content warnings at the start of each part, and I’ll also link the ao3 version whenever i post an update.
But please enjoy!
•————————• preview •————————•
In only a matter of weeks the world ended.
People got sick, and then they didn't stay human. They turned quick, and by the time anyone could understand, there wasn’t anything left to contain. Countries fell, systems failed, and the dead stopped lying in the ground.
Grandma and Grandpa taught you to recognize the signs of a societal fracture and what would happen from there. Family is the only safe option. You managed to make it back to your family's land before everything finished collapsing. Your boyfriend came with you but when you arrive no one is there. Weeks pass and they don't show up. You have to accept they're likely gone…
Time passes and a white-haired man from Japan shows up. That's when everything tilts. Your boyfriend, the man you've known since childhood, lived with, slept next to, is a sorcerer. A whole part of his life you were never let into, that you didn't have the context to understand, and now some stranger was explaining it to you like you were the outsider.
They sit down and explain everything to you: Jujutsu, techniques, curses, everything. He said he came to ask your boyfriend for his help as his technique could be useful. Like a starstruck teen, your boyfriend agreed. Your vision tunneled, barely hearing his explanation, something about the greater good and priorities like you were supposed to understand why you weren't on the list.
The white-haired man, Gojo you had learned, said you were more than welcome to stay at their HQ in Washington D.C., but you flat out refused vitriol spewing from your mouth at the two sorcerers. They back away leaving you with the knowledge they will come back once a year to check on you but if they don't see you for two years they will assume you are among the dead. As they leave it sinks in.
You are alone.
In a fucking zombie apocalypse and they left you like that. Because you're not important.
The forests now feel more empty than ever. On occasion you make your way back to the closest town, they know you and remember you from your childhood. They always ask about your, now, ex-boyfriend, he grew up here too after all, but you can never give an answer. What would you even say that they'd understand?
The isolation and depression start to tsink deeper into your psyche, and you start making mistakes. Grandma always told you, "women will be the first currency once things devolve" so why you even remotely believed the hunter in the woods about a group of people needing assistance can only be chalked up to the lurch those two sorcerers left you in.
You followed; grabbed as soon as you crossed the gate. A trade for some gasoline.
So started your time as "motivation" for the troops of the militia. They started rounding up women early, calling it necessary. You lasted a year. One year of being kept alive for the whims of vile creatures and learning exactly how little you needed to stay that way.
Then you ran.
You thought that was the worst thing that was going to happen to you, escaping one group of monsters in a world already full of the dead.
You were wrong.
Something in the woods noticed you. Saw the raw fear of recapture override everything else. It's not one of the dead even though it's rotting. The cold and an insatible hunger follows it. But now it follows you.
You make it back to your family’s land anyway, or at least what’s left of it. You fortify what you can, ration what you have, and try to turn it into something that might hold.
Two more years pass.
That rotting, obscene, thing in the woods hovers, and a strange camaraderie forms. The fear of it never leaves but it has never attacked. Gojo and your boyfriend stay true to their word and check-in every year on the 1st of November.
You grow gelid to the world because surviving between the dead and the thing in the woods means making decisions others can't seem to understand is a mercy.
The soft deserve to die gently.
The townspeople you grew up with decide what you are and cut you off as much as they can, unfortunately for them, you've become contingent on their survival but also a recalcitrant misanthrope. If captivity and the state of the world taught you anything, it’s this: death would let them pretend they were right for what they did to you; and you’re nothing if not a spiteful bitch.
So imagine your surprise when they end up sending something your way anyway.
Another problem…with too many eyes and arms. One that the fuckers who left you three years ago warned you about.
Author note: if you read this far thank you so much! I’ll be dropping the first and second chapter on the same day in two weeks and then post the coming chapters bi-weekly as best I can. But this will be quite long so buckle up.
I can make a tag list for this so comment if you’d like to join 😊
Dividers-
@kodaswrld
@cafekitsune
Photos:
Background - myself
Don’t go in the woods - I can’t reliably figure out who to credit it too but the oldest is a movie Bloodsprayer
Moon knight/Steven Grant/Marc Specter x reader (smut)
Sum: When waking up in his alter's bed, with his alter's girl, Marc has to get you back to sleep to make his escape. There is only one way to do that properly...
AN: A quick blurb between reader, Steven Grant and an unknown Marc Specter. Wrote this quickly without really thinking after the second episode. So not edited and not really thought out.
Also, I'm aware Moon Knight isn't the best representation of DID. That being said; I'm writing based on the context of the show.
Your relationship with Steven can best be described as sporadic. Mainly talking through texts, a phone call every now and then. Every blue moon you can arrange a lunch meet up or dinner after work. It took planning and rescheduling to get this date in place.
Around seven you broke new ground by coming to his apartment to meet. Before it’s always been at your place or ‘neutral ground’ of a coffee shop or restaurant.
He opened the door at your first knock. Likely waiting by the door but you’d never call him out on it. Especially when he looks at you like that with a smile that couldn’t typically be found during his day to day. Instead you simply say; “Hi.”
“Hi, uh, come in!” His arm motions towards his apartment in a grand gesture.
There were no hard plans laid out for the night. Steven had made dinner and you brought desert, both of which were finished within the hour. Steven only chewing faster when you made the joke about “the cobblers’ not the only dessert on the menu.”
He still had the wide-eyed look when you came around the table.
“Can I kiss you?” You asked, innocently.
“Of course, Love. Of course.” He says and closes the distance to a kiss.
You laugh between the kisses. “Bloody hell,” You say, mocking his accent. Hand sliding down his chest.
Steven stops to look at you. “Actually, since we’re in England, you’re the one with the accent.”
Your hand reaches its destination between his legs. “I’m also the one your cock is gonna be inside of.” You say as if you weren’t the one to start the conversation.
His kisses are more rapid pecks than full on making out. He stands from the table to start moving. Holding your face with both hands, thumbs rubbing over your cheeks. One sliding to the back of your neck as if you may slip away like a dream.
He keeps some kind of hold on you before, during and after sex. Hold your face and breasts at the beginning. When he lays down on the bed he insists on at least one hand intertwining with yours when you ride. Little dents from dull fingers nails can be found on your back when he cums. Holding you so close you may as well be apart of him.
The cuddling only stays that way for a few minutes before he’s up and moving.
You didn’t want to be presumptuous in spending the night, but both of you were thinking it before you even arrived. That you brought a little travel toothbrush meant nothing. What did mean something was how he went about his nightly routine in front of you.
Blue tape on the door, feeding Gus, and walking a circle around the bed with a little pallet of dirt. He looks at you with what can only be called embarrassment. He had told you about his disorder, about his routine, and about everything. But having you be there while all this is being done was a whole other ball game.
You tried to do your own routine while he does his. Brushing your teeth. Taking meds. Putting on your t-shirt and pajama pants. All that before getting back into the bed. Flipping open whatever book was closest in reach. Of course it was something about Egyptology. Not the worst subject but Steven could have told you everything you’d ever want to know about it better than a book could.
“Would you like some water or pop or…?” Steven says, finishing his circle of sand.
“A spot of tea?” You ask, using the mocking accent again.
Steven stops his short walk towards the kitchen. Turning back around towards the bed.
“Well now you’re not getting anything.” He says, the bed dipping as he climbs back in. “Nothing at all.”
Of course you got something later on that night.
Steven sleeps facing you, his arms around your back, holding you firmly. To retaliate your leg was placed firmly on his hip. Come summer, when things heat up in a whole different way, you’ll probably have to find a new to cuddle.
You’re stirred awake in the wee hours of the morning by Steven’s shifting. Softly touching your arms to try and unwrap them from his neck. Out of instinct you pull him closer, getting a groan out of him when he’s pulled tight.
With your leg still around his hip it’s impossible to ignore the erection pressing against your core. It brings your own groan that stops all of Steve’s movements.
“Mmm, mornin’.” You whisper, nuzzling closer.
“Hey…Baby.” He replies.
His voice is laced with sleep but it’s different in another way. Your hands cup his face, rubbing over his cheeks and forcing him to look at you. He’s looking around your face when you kiss him softly.
“You okay?” You asked.
“Yeah, yeah, I’m good.” He says, moving his leg and a distinct jingle in heard.
He leans up and over to the chain around his ankle. You taking the chance to stretch with all the extra room. Glancing at the clock and finding it to be barely three in the morning.
Sitting up with him you press against his back. A hand on either of his forearms while you kneeled up to kiss his neck. He doesn’t respond to your attention until the chain is completely off. Turning his head towards you and catching your mouth in a kiss.
“Where you going?” You asked.
His hand covers one of yours on his forearm. Thinking for a second before talking.
“Nowhere, Staying right here with you.” He says. Turning around to take you into another, deeper, kiss.
His kisses were harder, like biting onto your lips. It pushed you down until you’re flat on your back. Steven becoming more aggressive as his hands slide up under your shirt. His hands are cold when they each cup and grip your breasts.
Although his grip is hard and your hips are pushing up against him, you couldn’t help but laugh. Gripping his hair and tugging it until he looks up at you.
“You’re American accent is bloody brilliant.” You say, mocking his original accent while doing so.
His eyebrows tilt ever so slightly but quickly return to normal. “Been practicing.” He says, the British accent barely making an appearance.
You laugh again and he kisses again. He so suddenly and with enough force that you moan at the dominance pressing you into the bed. Only lasting long enough for his hand to find the back of your thighs and turning you right over.
It’s been near impossible to find this level of…aggression out of Steven. He’s usually the gentle sort. Who kisses kindly and asks permission to squeeze your ass. Only once had you done it from behind, Steven explaining that he liked seeing your face. When he did take you like this, on all fours and facing away, he stayed pressed to your back. Refusing to get any further away then was needed to penetrate properly.
“Love the excitement but can we-oh.” Your request for more foreplay was interrupted by his tongue.
Spreading your thighs wide Steven delved into your pussy like a starving man. Flat tongue sliding between your lips and to your entrance. Without hesitation he penetrates with tongue and finger, not giving you enough time to think let alone breathe.
All you had time to do was lean forward into the bed. Face down, ass up that you had yet to experience with Steven.
“Steven…” You whispered and he heard. Going faster with his fingers until the room was almost echoing with the wet sound of your pussy getting the appreciation it deserved.
How could the man last this long without air? There was no point in asking, so long as he kept going. Especially when the abuse on your entrance is matched with three fingers sliding slopping circles over your clit.
Attention and spit and movements created cool feelings through your legs and arms. It built behind your pelvis. Growing and growing with your moans and thanks and calling of Steven’s name. It pressed your face into the bedsheets with an open mouth. Gasping out and wanting more but not able to ask the right question.
Instead of asking you used what little willpower you could manage. Supporting your torso with one arm while the other reached back to those dark brown locks. Tangling them in your fingers and pulling.
The fingers inside are gone. They grab the wrist holding his hair and force you to let go.
“Stay down,” He ordered, only continuing when you resume the position.
The pleasure and pressure builds again as his three fingers become two. Sliding through your soaked lips to massage your clit more precisely. His tongue leaving your hole as he kisses one cheek. And then the other. Deciding which side would be better before biting onto the left.
This definitely wasn’t normal Steven behavior, not that you were complaining at the moment. Making a sound that can only be compared to an animal when he bit down.
The orgasm wasn’t an explosion behind your eyes or a fire in your belly. It was a cold celebration that squeezed out into your arms and legs. It rocked with his fingers until you were whining into the bed, reaching back to warn him that you were already spent.
He doesn’t caress your back or ask how you are like before. He retracts from your body. Only his hand on your backside remained. That only doing so to guide you over and onto your side.
“Shit…” you said, as what else was to say?
“Go to sleep,” he said, that one hand staying until you unintentionally obeyed.
You slept for at least three hours. Long enough for Steven to take his place back at your side. Long enough for your pajama pants to become annoying around your ankles. And long enough for Steven to jolt awake. Something he apologizes for every time. This time being no different.
“It’s okay,” You mumbled, pulling him back down to your arms. “Last night is gonna make it okay for a while, babe.”
“I do make a good dinner.” He says, nuzzling into your embrace.
After so many years of searching—all that effort, all that time wasted sifting through this world's rot— this is how he finds out?!
A faint twitch of disappointment pulled at his mouth.
Sukuna had barely touched the floor, crashing through the sixth story window of the long-abandoned office tower, before the sorcerer dropped to the ground and began spilling his guts before Sukuna could do it for him.
The fool curled in on himself like a kicked dog.
Fingers gouging his scalp.
Arms covering his head in an attempt to shield himself from the danger standing in front of him.
Sukuna inhaled with deep exaggeration.
The smell of stale rot from moldering, long forgotten files, the sour ammonia of fear-sweat, and the new coppery tang of piss.
All swirling in his sinuses.
His crimson eyes drifted downward until they settled on the heap of a man trembling at his feet.
The upper pair remained half-lidded and utterly bored, while the lower eyes narrowed to slits. The right side tracked the tremors that wracked the man's shoulders. The larger left one counted the frantic fluttering beneath the thin skin of his throat.
His head tilted a fraction, much like a spider observing a fly stuck in its web.
The maw on his stomach twisted into a sneer with a low growl.
The coward's pulse echoed in the King of Curses' ears.
Tch. This worm holds no thrill at all.
He shifted his weight, one massive foot nudging the sorcerer's side with his toe, drawing a whimper from the man.
"P-please! I've already told you every—everything I know!"
His confession hitching in wet, ugly gasps. His shoulders shook violently enough to disturb the thick layers of dust beneath him, forcing it up into the air where it coated the maw's tongue with its bitter grit.
"H-he said he was in America!"
A restrained sound vibrated low in Sukuna's chest before it escaped as a deep sigh.
His jaw tightening, the tendons of his neck standing out sharply beneath tattooed skin. The lower right hand flexed once at his side, nails digging lightly into his palm as if testing how much patience he had left in him.
The chilled wind picked up again, carrying distant moans and shrieks from the streets far below.
One of his upper hand wrapped around the man's nape, lifting him up to eye level. Under his thumb the sorcerers pulse accelerated to an unruly staccato. The muscles tightening as he swallowed slowly.
Sukuna's eyes bore through the man.
Up close, the sweat gleamed on his forehead. Beading and trickling into his eyes, forcing frantic blinks that in turn forced tears to cut paths down his grime-streaked cheeks.
"I've been aware he's in that cesspool."
His voice was level in a way that could only spell danger.
His upper eyes narrowed further. The others flicked to the man's throat again.
"Give me specifics."
Snapping his hand away, dropping the sad excuse of a sorcerer to the floor.
All four arms crossed over his chest.
Four eyes focused on a different physicality of the wretch's terror.
The way his ribs heaved erratically with each rasp.
The piss soaking darker through his tattered suit with each icy gust of wind.
His fingers gripping the filthy carpet, trying to ground himself.
And the glimmer of resignation that filled his eyes as he dropped his head. Pressing himself closer to the ground, muttering out apologies and pleas for mercy.
The man's voice vomited forth into the room, raw and shaking.
"T-the Northeast!"
Sukuna's finger twitched.
"No—no, wait! The l-last we heard from him was three years ago! He mentioned going to collect a sorcerer in Tiona! That's the last report he sent, I swear!"
His words tumbling over themselves in their haste.
The slow, choking smoke of tension thickened the air of the room.
Every second stretching, ready to snap.
The man looked up again, face pleading.
Only this time, Sukuna didn't see him.
His gaze cut past the man's bowed spine toward the broken glass of the window he entered.
Cold wind slid across his face, stirring strands of pink hair.
For a moment, his eyes unfocused.
NOVEMBER 2018
Two weeks after stealing Fushiguro's body, it happened.
Sukuna reclined against one of the scarred walls of his temporary abode.
One knee drawn up, forearm draped across it, spinning Kamutoke lazily between his fingers. Its cursed energy hummed faintly against his borrowed skin as he watched the razor sharp tip glint in the low light.
At least that desperate woman was good for something.
But his millennia's worth of exhaustion, wrought by Yorozu's relentless hounding, was not the thing gnawing at his mind.
That was the recent vanishing of Gojo and the other sorcerers of worth.
He had felt the snap.
That hollow void wrenching open when Satoru Gojo's cursed energy disappeared from the country with that pathetic brat.
Even distance failed to mute that boy's grating presence.
Yuji's body was the first prison ever capable of holding him.
Annoyingly resilient with every moment being a clash of wills.
Megumi's body, on the other hand, yielded without a whisper of defiance.
Lean muscles and sinew coiled under black-inked skin at a whim.
When he curled his fingers, the response was immediate.
Obedient and better in every way.
A violent rattle of the door in its frame refocused his attention to the space around him.
The wood clattered as it was violently thrown open, hollowly echoing through the room.
His eyes lifted. Upper pair snapping up sharp and immediate. Lower pair trailing with predatory leisure, lashes half lowered as they recognized the intruder.
Uraume strode through the door. Their immaculate monk robes swishing with their quickened pace.
The hitch in the rise and fall of their shoulders betraying their, poorly, concealed tension.
A rare break in their glacial composure.
One he had only witnessed a handful of times since they devoted themselves to him.
His gaze deliberately dragged over them once.
A faint crease appeared between his brows.
"Have you forgotten how to enter a room?"
The words drawled in a low, mocking voice.
Uraume lowered to one knee without hesitation. Head bowing low, one palm pressing flat against the tatami's woven fibers.
"My apologies for the intrusion, Master."
Their voice was controlled, but a fine tremor hid beneath it as they lifted their head just enough to meet his gaze. Pink eyes, sharp and unsettled, with a tightly leashed urgency.
Interesting. They're barely able to keep themselves together today.
"But something is wrong."
Sukuna huffed through his nose.
His right hand drummed against the floor, the rhythm echoing off the walls.
Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap.
Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap.
Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap.
"If it is another rumor from this city's infestation..."
Lower eyes settled on his servant's bowed form.
"...choose your next words with care."
Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap.
Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap.
Uraume's fingers tightened briefly against the floor.
"No, Master."
Their chin lowered further, acknowledging his warning.
"I witnessed it myself. I would not have disturbed you for mere rumor."
Tap. Ta—
The drumming stopped abruptly.
One corner of his mouth curved up.
Leaning back on one palm, Sukuna made a wide sweeping motion with his hand.
"Well. You already have the floor."
Uraume straightened slightly from their deep bow, but held the kneel. Their hands settled on their thighs.
Breathing consciously evening out again as their expression settled back into its usual composed severity.
Their voice steadied as they recounted the scene.
They had been out, among the non-sorcerers, gathering food supplies.
Shibuya had been as it always was.
Suffocating.
Bodies packed too close together. Voices overlapping. The air heating from the sheer number of people breathing in one place.
A delirious man stumbled into another pedestrian. He turned to them, an apology half formed on his tongue.
It was never delivered.
He dropped to the ground with a heavy thud. His body slamming down as all his strength failed him.
Convulsions tore through the man, arching his back against the rough, gritted pavement that shredded his shirt as he writhed.
His hands clawed desperately at the air.
His feet flailed wildly, heels pounding into the concrete, sending small vibrations through the bystanders' shoes and up their legs.
His teeth snapped together with a crushing pressure.
Enamel splintered, shattered bits flying from his mouth.
Thick pinkish foam spraying past his gnashing jaw. Spilling in sticky clumps that clung to his stubble and wet collar before leaking back into his sweat-damped hair.
Around him, humanity acted as it always did.
Phones lifted, laughter-shaken recordings catching every one of the man's violent jerks.
A few knelt to help because, of course, they would. Soft creatures compelled to uselessly intervene despite the metallic stink filling the space.
The woman he had run into dropped to her knees. Her shaking fingers fished through his pockets till she found his wallet, shoving it in his mouth.
She turned his rigid, convulsing body on its side toward her.
"SOMEONE CALL AN AMBULANCE!"
Then…
the convulsions changed.
The contractions became strange. Jerking his body like a marionette controlled by a child who yanked its strings with far too much violence.
Each movement pulling the muscle taut against the bone.
Eyes wide and bloodshot.
Blood made its way to the surface.
First from the nose.
Then the ears.
The mouth.
Last, the eyes.
It started as a trickle. Then it poured in hot, thick streams down his neck and face.
The convulsions intensified.
The sounds of bones cracking and choked sounds echoing from deep within his body.
Blood splattered onto the horrified woman's knees and hands as he choked around the thick leather of his wallet.
Then the thrashing stopped.
His limbs collapsed against the blood-wet pavement. Dropped like the child pulling his strings grew bored and walked away.
Sukuna's brow quirked upward at this. A glimmer of amusement in his eyes.
"You burst in here because a human convulsed in front of you?”
He chuffed.
“You disappoint me, Uraume."
"No, my lord."
Closing their eyes as their spine bent deeper into their respectful kneel.
"I would never deign to disturb you with something so trivial."
They continued recounting.
A screech akin to rusted metal dragging against bones tore from the dead man's throat before he grabbed onto the woman who had tried to assist him.
Bloodied fingers sank into her shoulders, yanking her closer
His jaw stretched open, blood and foam stretching between the jagged remnants of his teeth.
Teeth sinking into her neck with a crushing bite before ripping away. The tendons of her neck snapped audibly as strands of her muscle stretched and gave way.
Bits of flesh hung between the feral mans teeth in strips. Blood pulsed into his mouth and soaked his once-pristine button-down.
Then the screams erupted as the sounds of her tearing flesh spilled into the space.
The woman had fallen, choking on her screams and the blood that flooded her throat. Her body jolting as it filled her lungs.
Pandemonium.
People ran in every direction, shoving each other out of the way, bodies colliding hard enough to knock the breath out of their lungs. Shoes tracking the unfortunate pair's blood up and down the street.
The woman rose, unsteady, joints locking and jerking as if they forgot how to function.
Her head twitched.
Then she became a tornado of movement. Attacking and adding more to the spreading scourge.
A gray haze filled her eyes until they were completely clouded over. Veins ink black and stark against her now pale, graying skin.
Sukuna rose.
The motion carried the deliberate weight of something that had never once needed to hurry.
Hands sliding into his pockets, a lazy grin curling his mouth as he stepped past Uraume.
So this is what called Gojo away seven days ago.
His jaw clenched faintly at the thought as he threw the doors open.
He stalked through the streets. Drawn out to witness the newest addition to the world's vermin.
When the first of them staggered too close, eyes milky and limbs jerking, he spared it barely a sideways glance from his lower left eye.
Hmm. No pulse.
The veins beneath its gray skin were stagnant and dark.
So these are walking rot.
A casual flick of a finger sent a razor-thin slash whistling through the air.
The body sliced clean through the torso. Decaying blood oozing forth in reeking, half-coagulated thick streams.
Another barreled toward him.
Body pitched forward heavily, head angled out above its hips as if it was uncontrollably sprinting downhill. Strides stretched long and reckless, feet striking the road violently.
Its jaw lolled at a grotesque angle. Blackening blood staining its teeth and chin. Head snapping with each footfall.
The thing showed no pause or thought. Only raw hunger and full-tilt acceleration at the nearest object to satiate it.
Mild annoyance prickled Sukuna's mind.
Never breaking stride, he sent another slash through the air severing the head from its neck.
The head hit the ground. Jaw still biting at the air, as it bounced twice before it rolled into the gutter.
These husks have a severe lack of reverence.
He watched one lunge and take down a man, slamming him to the concrete with a jarring thud.
More piled in, running full force into walls and each other as they swarmed toward the man's last moments.
Wet, tearing sounds intermixed with a cacophony of screams. Filling the air as the infected feasted on the thrashing form.
A low vibration rumbled in Sukuna's chest as his lips curled at the corners.
"They have good taste, at least."
Keh keh keh.
"Master Sukuna."
Uraume's voice drifted quietly from behind as they surveyed the feeding frenzy.
"These are not curses. Are they?"
His eyes narrowed with sharp irritation at the stupidity of the question.
"No,” he stated flatly. “They are not."
Just decaying remains making their way to the top of the food chain.
"It's clearly a pathogen."
His carmine eyes tracked the way one of them dragged itself toward the group despite missing half a leg. Ripping into the now-silent man.
"Transmitted through blood and saliva, if your account was accurate. Centuries of progress and they still fall to illness."
Another of the diseased sank its teeth into the man's forearm, ripping away a chunk of flesh. Blood sending steam into the chilled air.
Death animated by gluttony.
His tongue pressed to the inside of his cheek.
Tch.
No architect.
No enemy worthy of challenging.
The randomness grated at his psyche.
No cursed energy signature. No ritual. No binding vow. No intellect—though that is hardly new.
He continued walking toward Shibuya.
Sirens wailed.
Smoke curled, thickening the air the closer he got to the overturned car it poured from.
The pavement, tacky with the blood of the masses who tried to flee.
Shibuya Crossing, where Uraume said it had started, was abandoned—save for a few more of the infected stumbling mindlessly.
Then a surge of cursed energy pulled his attention to the alley down the street.
He approaches unhurried, hands loose in his pockets.
The sounds reached him first. The impact of flesh, the crack of cursed energy meeting bone.
A group of sorcerers, one older and two younger, fighting back a small swarm of infected.
They saw him and, for a split second, recognition flashed across their faces.
Then—
Their gazes snapped past him as more of the creatures careened toward them. Bodies slamming into each other with meaty thuds. Teeth gnashing, limbs tearing and whipping wildly through the air.
The roar of the swarm built as it mixed with their dragging, slamming feet as they forced their way down the alley.
Terror replaced the sorcerers' recognition.
"Behind you!"
One of them screamed to him, their voice cracking.
The other young one stepped to the side to angle their next attack around him. Cursed energy streaking past him in a blazing rush.
Treating him as if he were just an object obstructing their view.
An afterthought.
Or more insulting…
That he required their help.
The realization settled like sand between his teeth.
Baring them in indignation, he and Uraume jumped up onto the rooftops overlooking the space, landing on the gravel and loose concrete.
Below, one of the things lunged at the nearest sorcerer with another screech. The boy incinerated it mid-air. Heat searing the flesh and fat popping.
More poured in, scrambling over the charred remains. Their fingers ripping through the burned tissue, smearing ash under their grip.
The group panicked.
The youngest looked up at Sukuna.
"You're a fucking coward!"
His upper lip twitched as he glared down at them.
Their staring contest with the King of Curses proved to be their undoing.
An infected lunged and sank its teeth into their shoulder. Teeth shredding through fabric and muscle before catching on bone with a nauseating scrape.
A scream ripped free.
The others recoiled in fear. Not fear in the way someone in their line of work would normally have.
Animalistic fear.
They lost coordination.
Firing off random attacks. Cursed energy lashing wildly. Hitting walls, pavement, and bodies indiscriminately.
"Don't let them bite you!"
The older one screamed as more closed in. The situation turned disconsolate, collapsing in on them.
Silence filled Sukuna's skull.
All four eyes shifted from the swarm to the two remaining sorcerers.
They didn't fear him.
They weren't even acknowledging him now, just this—
Filth.
He slowly unfurled.
Releasing a dismantle at an infected. The body splitting in three equal pieces, spilling organs and blood across the alleyway.
A cleave removed the arm of the oldest sorcerer in a violent arc that sprayed through the air.
He stepped off the building, dropping into the fray.
His hand met the ground in less than the blink of an eye.
"Cleave."
The technique split out in a radial burst. Concrete fractures, lifting chunks free as dust and debris flew into the air. The shockwave threw bodies into the surrounding walls, striking the brick with cracking impacts.
Before they could hit the ground, he was on them.
The younger one turned to face him. Full attention finally on him.
With a feral grin, he released a diagonal slash.
KRSCH
The pieces sliding apart as they dropped in opposite directions.
The oldest tried to stand, gaze locked on Sukuna. Holding his shoulder where his arm should be, blood pouring from between his fingers.
No recognition of the threat before him. Only the recovering creatures behind him.
Displeasure coiled deep in Sukuna's chest.
A growl ripped through him.
"Ridiculous."
A final flick of his fingers and the sorcerer's body bisected at the chest. Splitting clean as the upper half shifted and spilled what remained of the sorcerer across the pavement.
The infected continued to tumble toward him before a wall of ice cut off their path.
Sukuna looked up at Uraume as the creatures threw themselves against the wall.
"My apologies, Master, for the interference."
Inclining their head in a bow, their gaze lowered to the roof.
"No."
Sukuna leapt back up, walking to the other side of the building. Watching as the swarm ran back out into the main streets, tackling the few scattered people trying to run to the ground.
"They were not worth my time."
Emergency alerts streaked across anything capable of displaying them. Televisions flickering in shattered windows. Phones still clutched in the stiff hands of those who didn't turn. Shibuya Crossing's billboards.
All flashing between evacuation orders and messages of symptoms to look out for.
EMERGENCY ALERT
Unknown pathogen detected
Avoid contact with the infected
SYMPTOMS INCLUDE:
Fever
Hemorrhaging
Loss of pain response
Extreme aggression
DO NOT ENGAGE
DO NOT APPROACH
Follow evacuation guidelines
"Uraume."
Eyes tracking the flashing messages as they stuttered across shattered screens. The emergency banners pulsing beneath smears of blood.
"Acquire one of those devices the Jujutsu brats carry."
Uraume disappeared without a sound. Steps swallowed up by the distant sirens and wet tearing of flesh below.
Not much time passed before they returned. A spray of blood marking the hem of their robes, darkening around the edges. They extended the phone toward Sukuna with both hands, unsure of how delicate the object might be.
It vibrated faintly in Sukuna's palm as he picked it up.
Reports crashed through the sorcerers' channels. Not meant for him to hear, but panic made people sloppy.
Overlapping voices, too fast and shrill, cutting in and out over static that crackled and popped like fat spitting in a pan.
"—Northeastern United States—lost—"
"—entire regions, no—"
"Comms down—not responding—"
One calamity replaced by another.
A virus versus a force of nature.
Amusing.
…
At first.
Days smeared together.
He began marking the time not with the sun but with the screams of the dwindling survivors tearing across the sky.
They ran until their lungs burned.
Jumping from buildings when the world became too much. Hitting the concrete with wet thwaks.
Clawing at locked doors and each other, fingers breaking and nails ripping up from the roots.
Bloody smeared handprints, dry and flaking away, decorated nearly every surface.
Fires ate through storefronts. Looted the second society devolved.
Hospitals became breeding grounds for curses. Overflowing not just with bodies, but with fear and resentment.
Children dragged away from their mothers mid-convulsion.
Fathers pinned beneath the children who could no longer recognize them.
One spouse having to put the other down before they could forget them.
New curses took shape faster than the remaining sorcerers could adjust. Entire apartment complexes pulsed with a hatred and fear so dense it stained the walls.
Dormant curses swelled. Small ones gorged on the suffering, molting into larger forms overnight.
Special grades clawed themselves into existence from the wreckage of mass hysteria.
Barriers strained.
The city groaning beneath the pressure.
Sukuna watched over the passing days, relishing in the chaos.
A corpse twitched as its ribs ground beneath his heel.
"Look at them."
Its fingers scrape weakly at his ankle, nails biting against his skin. A flick removes the offending hand at the wrist. It flopped against the ground, blood oozing from the stump.
His arms stretched up behind him. Vertebrae shifting with a deep popping as his shoulders rolled back into place.
A faint smirk curved up one side of his face.
"Still scrambling about like rats."
He moved his foot to their face adding steady pressure. Eyes glinting as he looked down.
"Just as pathetic as they've always been."
A snap.
The skull gave and brain matter engulfed his foot.
Uraume remained behind him in composed silence, eyes forward. New robes untouched by the filth of this new world.
Somewhere in the distance, a child's scream was cut short.
Weeks dragged by.
The amusement soured as, piece by piece, news filtered through.
Foreign voices shouting through broken connections, broadcasts interrupting one another. Grainy helicopter footage of highways filled with unmoving cars.
Refugees, like fleas carrying the infection, pouring across borders that no longer meant anything.
Governments held assemblies while the blood of their citizens soaked the streets.
Leaders attempted speeches over sirens and gunfire.
The Jujutsu elders preached about containment, barriers, and cooperation on an international level.
Underneath it all, he could hear it. That little tremor buried beneath all their forced authority.
The outbreak tore through the United States with impressive efficiency.
Mexico and Canada followed like dominoes tipped by infected's hands.
Europe didn't last long. Collapsing under indecision.
How very human.
His gaze flicked over the screen.
Attempting to negotiate their extinction.
His tongue pressed to the back of his teeth.
But Death did not negotiate where its cold-handed embrace would settle.
It spread and took what—and who—it pleased at will.
Through hollow cities, glass hung in its frame like jagged teeth. Fires burned, painting the night sky a sweltering orange.
And humans?
Humans reverted back to baser instincts. Turning on each other the second the opportunity presented itself.
Then something changed.
The screams shortened. The living stopped crying over the dead and calling names into empty streets. Their hope started dying. Grief calcified. Shock became baseline.
The emotional current that once flooded cities began to recede.
Curses hovered in intersections where riots once raged, waiting.
No one came.
The dead now outnumbered the living.
The emotional ecosystem the curses thrived on began to collapse.
With Gojo away and the others deployed—or dead—the sorcerers' long-maintained vigilance faltered.
Seals began to weaken.
And Sukuna noticed.
One evening, his eyes lifted to the darkening sky. Pupils dilating as he inhaled, his fingers flexing against his palms.
"…Interesting."
"Master?"
Uraume's calm voice lifted slightly as they turned their gaze to him.
"Tengen's wards…"
The words left him slower than his usual cadence.
A quiet snicker slipped free.
"They're fading."
The air tasted less oppressive. That sad excuse of a school was now exposed.
"Uraume, go—"
Sukuna turned, to see empty space.
A faint displacement in the air was the only sign they were ever there.
They returned not even fifteen minutes later.
Sukuna felt the pull before his eternally faithful servant presented it to him.
Resonance.
Sharp and undeniable.
"Tch."
His lips curled slightly.
"You're slower than usual."
Uraume knelt. Head bowed low as they held up a pale hand.
The severed digit rested dead-center upon their palm. Its base crusted over with a maroon substance that flaked slightly at the edges. A deep maroon tinged the weathered and twisted skin.
"My deepest apologies, Master Sukuna. There were… lingerers at the facility."
"No matter. You performed adequately."
He graced them with a rare, genuine grin.
Raising their head, a smile touched Uraume's lips. Faint but unmistakably pleased.
Sukuna gingerly lifted the finger out of their hand.
Caked with dried grime from the passing millennium. He turned it once between two fingers, examining his former appendage. The flesh, leathery and rough, carrying a faint acrid smell of char.
If the boy's soul had screamed, he simply didn't care to notice or register the echo.
He brought it toward his mouth.
Swallowed it whole.
The digit slid down his throat.
Energy detonated violently, slamming through him like molten steel poured directly into parched veins. Igniting every nerve with a blistering heat.
His spine snapped upright with a series of splintering cracks. Vertebrae grinding together audibly as they lengthened and grew thicker.
The friction sparking pains that drowned in his euphoric power.
His ribs expanded with violent, successive cracks.
Muscle redrew itself over the new frame in brutal bands that bulged and knotted. Fibers snapping into place amid the slide of reforming tissues.
Two additional arms ruptured free beneath the first pair. Punched through the epidermis in an explosive spray of blood and steam. Tendons like industrial cables whipped into place, drawn impossibly tight.
His fingers clenched. Muscles flexing beneath the flesh, rapidly bubbling into existence and stretching taut over all twenty knuckles.
Black bands and lines scarred across his skin in perfect symmetry.
The skin of his abdomen ripped open in a horizontal gash. Abdominals parting with a wet SCHRRRIP as the layers prolapsed outward.
A torrent of steaming red waterfalled down his legs in thick sheets that puddled on the pavement under his feet, carrying chunks of ruptured tissue.
The flapping flesh at his abdomen bubbled. Forming a thin line that pulled back in a vicious grin. Splitting wider to expose rows of serrated ivories dripping with thick, rope-like saliva.
The massive maw opened to exhale a humid, carrion-sweet breath it had been holding since the Heian era.
A monstrously sized tongue unfurled forward with an obscene slap, tasting the air as drool fell from it.
The plate-like deformity along the left side of his face calcified. Rising from the skin in bony protrusions. Two larger vermilion eyes forced themselves open within it. Lids peeling back slowly, separating with a reluctant tear. Irises flaring bright as they blinked.
Sukuna rolled his shoulders. The motion rippling through his newly bulked traps.
Four arms stretched outward, veins pressed taut to the skin by the raw muscle beneath. He ran his two upper hands through his pink hair. Thick fingers combing the sweat-slick strands.
One of the lower hands came up. Pausing at his sternum. Feeling the war drum that was his own energy's unrestrained pulse.
His eyes closed.
Then snapped open.
A gravelly chuckle rattled in his chest. Swelling into something darker, maniacal, and satisfied that ricocheted off the surrounding buildings.
What remained of Megumi Fushiguro's body was overwritten completely. Every trace of the boy, pulverized under Sukuna's reformation.
And the boy…died.
Really, he had died long ago. Sukuna couldn't even recall the last time he'd felt the quiver of the soul's resistance.
Fushiguro simply ceased to be.
His soul did not linger or pass on.
He extinguished.
Like a flame snuffed between two fingers.
With time, he would acknowledge—briefly—that the loss of the Ten Shadows Technique was a bit of a disappointment. Nothing more. He had known from the moment he took the boy's body that he would not retain the technique forever.
Vessels were temporary, after all.
No matter.
Sukuna was whole again.
And the world?
The world was ending without his permission.
All this destruction.
All this chaos.
And still—
It was boring.
No challenges.
The country decayed through a number of seasons he did not bother to count.
The leaves fell.
Returned.
Fell again.
The boredom settled heavier against his bones with each one. He had, on occasion, thought of killing Uraume just to have a battle worth having.
They'd put up a decent fight.
Hmph.
His gaze lingered on them a fraction longer than necessary as they presented his dinner. The suspicious cut of roast, seared to a perfect char.
Uraume, impassive as ever, bowed slightly.
Sukuna sank his teeth into the meat.
As it gave under his molars, that familiar iron-rich tang flooded his mouth. He chewed slowly, savoring the flavor of whatever herbs they had managed to scavenge.
But finding another person with their cooking skills would be a pain. None of the morons of this worthless era could prepare flesh half as well.
He took another bite.
His eyes focused into the distance as he chewed.
I suppose their usefulness preserves them once again.
Nothing and no one rose to meet him.
But one tried.
The sky above the abandoned district darkens, not with clouds. With pressure.
Windows along the street fractured in thin, webbing cracks.
The air grew thick and metallic.
It had once been massive.
Born in the first weeks. When hospitals drowned under pressure and entire families burned alive in stalled cars. A curse formed from collective panic and claustrophobic terror.
Now…
it was gaunt.
The torso caved in as if its ribs were trying to devour what it could from the remaining body. Limbs stretching too long. Joints swollen and unstable. Skin hanging loose in dark sheets, peeling at the edges.
Multiple faces pressed weakly against its surface. Mouths opening and closing.
It was starving.
The curse hovered above a passing horde of infected stumbling about. Jaws slack, eyes gray and empty.
Tendrils unfurled from the curse's abdomen. Brushing against the crowd.
Nothing happened.
No spike of fear.
No sustenance.
The tendrils recoiled sharply. The curse shuddered. Its mass flickered.
Then—
All of its fractured faces swiveled toward Sukuna. Standing alone in the street. Radiant with cursed energy in a spiritually malnourished world.
"Aren't you a big one."
An amused smirk on his face.
The curse charged at him. Not in challenge. In hunger and raw desperation.
It crashed downward with a guttural distortion. The ground cracking under its impact asphalt caving as it lunged. Its skeletal fingers stretching toward him. Tendrils snaking through the air.
Sukuna did not step back.
One brow lifted.
"That's how you open?"
A tendril slapped down on his shoulder. Trying to feed.
The curse convulsed violently, like an animal biting into a power line.
Energy surged into it. Overloading it. Its spidery limbs split open at the joints. The faces embedded in it stretched into silent screams as its structure destabilized.
Still it clung on.
Sukuna exhaled through his nose, his smirk fading.
"Starved and brainless. Bad combination."
More of its body slammed into him, attempting to envelop him. Its disgusting body smearing ichor across his torso, seeking anything.
"Tch."
One lower hand closed around a tendril, ripping it free from its abdomen with a fibrous snap.
The now detached tendril, flinging fragments across the street.
He glanced at it in his hand.
"You grew all this."
His fingers tightened.
"And still can't wield it properly."
It writhed as he crushed it in his grip before dissolving into black vapor.
The creature shrieked, high and fractured. Cracks spiderwebbed their way through its torso. It lunged again. Two of its skeletal hands slammed toward him.
"That's more like it!"
His pupils contracted to pinpricks. A malicious grin flashed his razor-sharp canines.
"Come on, try a little harder!"
His upper right hand drove forward like a truck. Slamming straight through its sternum.
His fist sank into its chest. Punching through layers of cursed flesh that parted like soaked paper.
He gripped something. Dense, knotted, and pulsing weakly.
"Is this all that's left of you now?"
His arm wrenched backward in a spray of black fluid. Tendons snapping, the curse's body convulsing as he tore it from sternum to groin.
"What a pitiful remnant."
Faces peeled away from each other, stretching grotesquely before snapping apart. Limbs thrashed blindly, striking pavement hard enough to shatter the already weakened asphalt.
It tried to compress around him again. Trying to swallow him whole. Its remaining limbs wrapped around his back, nails dragging across reinforced muscle.
Sukuna's jaw ticks as his brows pulled down together.
"You were not worth the time."
He slammed one palm into the creature's abdomen.
"Cleave."
The attack sheared the upper half away along a horizontal axis. The lower half staggered blindly, as if its nervous system hadn't quite caught up to reality.
He shoved one foot against the curse.
The body split further. Joint sockets ruptured. More limbs tore free. The embedded faces smeared together, screaming without sound as they shredded apart.
The core he had torn free convulsed in his lower hand's grip. A wet, irregular thrumming vibrated through his palm, beating against his fingers like a second heart trying to outrun its death.
He tightened his fingers, until the thing screamed.
Then he crushed it, bursting like an overripe fruit.
Ichor and shards of cursed matter spraying across his forearm and the street, dissolving into nothing. He didn't even look down.
What remained of the curse shrunk and folded. Cursed matter imploded like a star. The faces compressed in on each other, smashing into a single warped mass before detonating outward.
What once loomed over districts now just a pile of clumps that crumbled and dissipated against the street.
Silence returned quickly.
The asphalt beneath smoked faintly where residual cursed energy had burned it.
Sukuna tilted his head. Leaning over the burns.
"Disgusting."
He shook his hand once. The gore disintegrating before they reached the ground.
"How disappointing you've all become."
A once-special grade reduced to scavenging and foolishly attacking the only viable source left in a dying ecosystem.
Sukuna exhaled slowly.
The boredom sinking deeper now.
Resting against the soul.
In due time, he discovered the Six Eyes had been dispatched to America. No one he interrogated could give more than that. No specific locations.
Just bloodied hands and broken teeth.
This brought a few problems to the forefront of his mind.
One—
That was the clear other side of this infested rock.
Two—
Not having a specific location would be like trying to find a specific grain of sand on a beach.
And three—
The language.
An ugly, inelegant thing, with words piling onto each other. No respect for structure and cadence.
He'd have to learn it to navigate once he managed to deduce where the bastard was.
A snarl ripped from his throat, brows furrowed.
"What kind of language requires seven syllables on one worthless term?"
He repeated the word with utter disdain until every bit was clean. The sounds grinding out over his tongue.
Uraume paused to look up, mirroring his irritation.
"A mongrel mix of several tongues," they reply with a flatly.
They learned it anyway.
He listened to crackling, repeated broadcasts. Clicking his tongue at every misplaced emphasis. Uraume gathered instructional texts, arranging the mildew stained books methodically by aptitude.
"This word has three meanings all with the same pronunciation."
He snapped one evening. The page between his massive fingers wrinkled slightly.
Uraume nodded, glancing at it once, then returned to work.
"Correct, Master."
His tongue clicked. Grinding his teeth audibly in the silence.
"An utter waste."
"Context seems to shift it."
Their voice steady as they murmured the clarification unprompted.
He exhaled sharply through flared nostrils. The frustration sat in his chest. Fingers drumming a heavy rhythm on the floor.
Broadcasts droned on. Voices mangling words that felt filthy in his mouth when he mimicked them, sneering at the inefficiency.
Uraume stood ever the silent sentinel. Stacking another tome. Eyes fixed ahead without a flicker of impatience.
He flipped the page. Another word assaulting his brain.
Layers upon layers piled inelegantly. No poetry in their form. Just bloated noise.
His lower hand clenched into a fist, knuckles popping. His upper arms crossed tight over his broad chest.
"Repulsive."
As the years bled, he stopped needing to translate in his head. No pause between the languages. When he realized it, it only served to remind him he had extended enough patience on this Gojo matter.
He began to rip answers from any sorcerer left. Lesser beings hiding within half-formed barriers and basements. They tried to fight but broken bones and severed hands eventually led somewhere.
Someone named Ui Ui.
And a teleportation technique.
Interesting.
PRESENT DAY
His tongue pressed against the back of his teeth, tasting old irritation.
He slowly inhaled through his nose.
The stale scent of the man's fear no longer interested him.
America.
Northeast.
Tiona.
His lower left hand curled at his side. A finger drumming once against his thigh in thought.
If this was the last thread, he would follow it.
And if it snapped…
someone would hang for it.
"Tiona."
He repeated the name slowly, raising a slitted eyebrow. Jaw ticking at the unfamiliar name.
"Yes! It's in— It's in Pennsylvania!"
Another unfamiliar name. This only served to increase Sukuna's irritation.
Pennsylvania.
Sukuna's hand engulfed the smaller man's throat and lifted him effortlessly off the ground, glare narrowing.
"The teleporting brat. You have access to them?"
"Yes! Yes I know Ui Ui!"
He threw the man to the ground.
"Contact them. Now."
The sorcerer's shaking hands fumbled to pull out his phone.
A thin rectangle of plastic, glass, and metal, thrumming softly with cursed energy. Not sustained by infrastructure but rather that all too human desperation.
A clever thing, really. One he could admit had been invaluable.
The call connects and a child's voice answered.
"What is it, Ijichi?"
Ah. So that is this weak excuse of a sorcerer's name.
"Ui Ui! I need a transport to HQ im-immediately. Please."
A small huff could be heard on the other end.
"I'm in the middle of a transport right now. You'll have to wait five minutes."
The call disconnected abruptly.
"Five minutes?"
Ijiri, or whatever his name was, locked his eyes on the floor.
Sukuna looked down at him with open boredom. Lower arms crossed over his torso.
"They're really rushing to help you, driver."
The man shook.
Sukuna turned to address his silent attendant.
"Ensure he doesn't run."
Uraume inclined their head.
As Ui Ui dropped into existence, frost flooded the air. Ice surged instantly, climbing his body, encasing him from the neck down. Locking his joints.
Alive.
Conscious.
And helpless.
A thin, predatory smile snaked across Sukuna's features.
Perfect.
He grabbed Ijichi by the collar and sent him careening through the window.
He caught on a large piece still moored that sliced down his arm. Leaving the blood to drip onto the office floor. Soaking into the ugly gray carpet.
He'll die on impact. Or the dead will finish the job.
The sounds of the approaching horde roared through the empty city, drawn in by the sound.
He’s served his purpose.
Crouching down brought his tattooed face to Ui Ui's eye level.
"Tiona. Take me there."
The small boy shook his head. Refusing.
"No! My sister will find me. She always does."
A pause. His voice wavered, but he forced it steady.
"And when she does, you'll regret touching me, old man."
Sukuna's gaze lingered on him. The tremor in his voice. Defending his sister—exactly the same as Uraume had defended him, a millennium ago, when no one else would.
Loyalty like that… I know its shape.
An eyebrow raised. The smirk deepened just enough to show teeth.
"Oh, that crow-controlling witch?"
A tick in the boy's jaw elicited a huffing laugh from the man.
"Her name is Mei Mei!"
Ui Ui said sharply.
"Regardless."
The massive man tilted his head.
"I'll just dispose of her if she comes for you."
His voice lowered a shade.
"And you will still take me."
Ui Ui's breath shook despite himself.
After a beat.
"If I do this… you have to let me come back to her."
A low laugh rolled through him, genuine in its contempt.
"You want a promise?"
He smirked. Eyes narrowing.
"From me?"
The tiny sorcerer tilted his head up. Squaring his shoulders—or at least as well as he could encased in ice.
"A binding vow. You can't lie in those."
Ah.
All four vermilion eyes gleaming with interest.
Of course the boy would bring up the only thing that would make him keep his word. Something he thought would bend even a monster like him.
"A vow."
He repeated. Savoring the words on his tongue with unrestrained glee.
"Very well."
Meeting Ui Ui's eyes again.
"State the terms."
The boy takes a steadying breath.
"You, Sukuna, will allow me to return to my sister, immediately, after transporting you."
The grin on Sukuna's face split wider, dangerous and measured. The vow was simple.
Naive, foolish child.
His eyes flicked once to Uraume. Red eyes met pink in a silent acknowledgment before they returned to the boy.
"And you will transport myself and this one to Tiona."
Hooking one of his upper thumbs lazily in Uraume's direction.
"Alive."
Cursed energy coiled. Tightening, as if the air was recognizing the words.
The vow sealed.
With relief wracking through him, Ui Ui exhaled.
"On to business."
Sukuna straightened smoothly.
"Uraume. Release him."
The ice dissipated.
A massive hand closed around the back of Ui Ui's collar.
"Take us to America, boy."
"Now."
AN: Thanks for reading!! Chapter 2 will be dropping here in a few hours there was just some formatting issues I wasn't happy with 😬 and yes you didn't meet the reader yet. I promise they show up in the next chapter 💚
Dividers-
@cafekitsune
@bhavihelps
Photos:
Background - myself
Don’t go in the woods - I can’t reliably figure out who to credit it too but the oldest is a movie Bloodsprayer
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…
Tap…
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:
@kodaswrld
@cafekitsune
Photos:
Background - myself
Don’t go in the woods - I can’t reliably figure out who to credit it too but the oldest is a movie Bloodsprayer
Sukuna - @aiiana_0 on instagram
A/N: Chapters 1 and 2 have been updated because I was half asleep when I posted them.
Ui Ui's technique surged as he wrapped his cloth around the three of them, cursed energy splitting the seams of reality.
The abandoned office warped, collapsing in on itself. Glass sheets bending without shattering, dust motes forming eddies toward the chasm centered around the child in Sukuna's grip.
The room's stale stench was suddenly cut through by a rush of late-winter air tinged with pine resin and damp earth.
Their bodies lurched through the tunnel, the world blurring into streaks of color as they rocketed across oceans and continents in a heartbeat.
They dropped hard, slamming into the new environment. Snow bursting outward on impact.
Towering pines loomed above, branches heavy with frost, shaking brittle needles loose that pattered to the ground like rain.
Sukuna landed, flattening the ferns beneath his bare feet. The crushed stems giving off the odd aroma of freshly cut hay.
Uraume fared less gracefully. Their body pitching forward onto a thick pad of moss that squelched under their weight.
The bright mid-afternoon sun broke through the thick canopy to reveal a cloudless cerulean sky.
His eyes fixed on that small sliver of sky with a smirk.
As blue as the eyes I'm going to rip out.
Ui Ui stumbled as Sukuna dropped him. His knees buckling under exhaustion from the long space jump, muscles quivering as sweat trickled down his temples.
The hum of the forest—crickets, beetles, and spring peepers—filled the air around the trio for a fleeting moment.
Then silence enveloped them, as if the forest itself recoiled from the presence of an apex predator.
Wings froze and folded in on themselves. The peepers' whistles stopped half-completed.
The space hung heavy with an unnatural hollowness that twisted Ui Ui's stomachs with its watchful stillness.
But it only served to invigorate the King of Curses.
A fresh canvas.
Devoid of the monotony Japan had offered.
Eager to escape his temporary captors, the boy regained his footing and immediately went to rewrap himself with fumbling fingers. Wide eyes darting between Sukuna and Uraume.
"This is the outskirts of Tiona."
He snapped, voice cracking from fatigue but refusing to let go of its defiant bite.
"I've taken you as far as I need to."
The boy's cursed energy surged to life again as relief warred with weariness. His breath coming in sharp, crystallizing puffs.
"Eager little runt, aren't you."
He murmured, the words slithering out low, laced with a chuckle like stones grinding in a pit.
"I suppose I should hold up my end too."
The binding vow coiled tight around Sukuna's cursed energy alone. An invisible noose hung irritably around his neck, its restrictive pulse a fleeting annoyance he allowed for the amusement of watching the little sorcerer squirm one last time.
Uraume rose smoothly from the moss pad. Their pink eyes locked onto Ui Ui.
"Uraume. Let the boy leave."
Sukuna commanded, dripping mockery as thick as the tree sap that tinged the air.
"We did make a vow, right?"
"No."
Uraume's expression as cold as ice.
"The vow states you will let them return. I have no such intention."
Ui Ui frantically activated his technique as Uraume's cursed energy gathered in a frigid pulse.
For the first time, they disobey a command—a fracture in their eternal loyalty.
The tear ripped open again. Ui Ui's feet lifted from the ground, body half gone when Uraume struck.
Frost erupted from their palm in a razor-thin lance, honed to surgical lethality. It sliced through the fissure's edges, unimpeded, needling through Ui Ui's neck with a sickening schlick.
The boy's flesh giving way as the frozen point shattered vertebrae.
His eyes widened in shock. Mouth opening in a silent gasp beneath the cloth.
The lance expanded, ripping his head from his shoulders.
The portal snapped shut with a thunderous clap, severing the boy's body mid-transport.
Somewhere in Japan, Ui Ui's torso and head rolled across the ground in a skid of blood and frost. Eyes glassy and staring up at a screaming Mei Mei.
The body left behind slumped, twitching once, before going as still as the forest.
The vow fulfilled to the cruelest letter. Sukuna and Uraume delivered. And Sukuna never raised a finger to stop him.
The poetry of betrayal sealed without his hand.
Uraume lowered their hand. The frost dissipating in wisps that melted into the snow, leaving only a faint crystalline residue on their skin.
They dropped into a deep bow.
"Forgive my disobedience, Master Sukuna."
Both sets of lips curled back. The one on his face rumbled with a deep laugh, the maw on his stomach echoing with guttural glee.
"Don't go making a habit of it, Uraume."
The forest's silence broken only by the whisper of wind through branches.
Gojo's trail ends here.
Irritation flickered beneath the amusement as the hunt renewed, sharper now. Years of sifting through vermin for a trace of the sorcerer, and this forsaken wood would be the stage.
He shifted his weight, throwing his black haori over his shoulders. Striding forward toward the pressure gathering deeper in the trees.
One of his upper hand gestured lazily toward the deeper woods where the terrain rose into hills shrouded in mist.
"Come. I've wasted enough time already,”
As the sky bled from sharp blue to a dull, pale orange, painting the jagged snow-dusted mountain peaks, Sukuna and Uraume crested the ridge.
Pink hair tousling in the crisp wind that whipped up the slope, carrying the faint, acrid bite of woodsmoke.
Below, to the northeast, Sukuna spotted an austere town nestled in the valley. Surrounded by a—
"Is that… supposed to be a wall?"
Uraume muttered with faint disbelief, eyes narrowing into a squint.
"It's certainly trying to be one."
Sukuna clicked his tongue sharp against his canine as his eyes roved over it.
The wall in question was junk slapped together. Screaming of how hastily the residents had thrown it together.
Chain-link fencing fused crudely to rusted farm gates and disformed bed frames. Bright orange road signs—SLOW, CAUTION, DETOUR—graffitied and slapped over the gaps, edges melted unevenly. Bent rebar threaded through seams holding it together like sutures, buckling where the weight had become too much, melting snow dripping off into puddles that stank of rust and oil.
The welds were an atrocity.
Slag frozen mid-fall dripped, seams scorched black and blistered. Barbed wire strung along the top in sloppy loops, razor tips glinting in the orange light of the receding day. Where it ran out, braided extension cords replaced it, twisted viciously tight and fraying where they had been cut.
Ugly.
Sukuna snorted, a derisive huff, beginning his unhurried descent toward the town.
"An inspiring use of trash."
From behind him, Uraume's shoulders shook as they held back a laugh.
Sukuna's grin pulled wider, upper right hand slicing a lazy dismantle through an overhanging branch in his path.
At the edge of the treeline, just out of sight hidden amid the eastern hemlock, he stopped abruptly.
Upper arms crossed over his broad chest, pectorals flexing taut. The lower pair fisted against hips.
"Scout ahead, Uraume."
His posture thrumming with anticipation, muscles coiling beneath tattooed skin.
"Find signs of sorcerers. Try to find out who he was here for. And where he slunk off to."
The words mocking. But the subtle quickening of his breath belied his eager energy.
"You mean not to enter yourself, my lord?"
Their head tilting up at him, pale brows knitting together in confusion.
"Of course not."
Sukuna scoffed, gesturing to his bare torso with one of his uncrossed arms. Inked markings stark against tanned muscle as a zephyr of creek-chilled wind parted his haori.
"These alone would be enough to set off alarm bells for these bumpkins."
He flicked his hand vaguely toward the town.
"If I walk in there, they will panic and scatter like roaches. And make noise."
An acerbic smirk on his face.
"Which has an unfortunate tendency to make itself known to the wrong ears."
Uraume hummed sagely.
"Gojo's."
"He keeps running once I get close."
Sukuna drawled lazily.
"It's starting to feel personal. Rude, even."
With a bow, Uraume turned and approached the town.
URAUME POV
The wall loomed.
It's much taller up close.
They stood in front of the ramshackle gate. A single eye looked through the spaces between materials. Even with a limited view, Uraume could tell it was a woman. Older and tired.
"What you want?"
The woman asked, voice rasped from a lifetime of tobacco use.
"I am looking for my brother."
Uraume responded flatly, not letting their thoughts translate on their face.
"Tall. White hair. Blue eyes."
Her eyes darted over Uraume's attire.
"Any weapons in that dress there?"
"It's a robe."
They answered, bristling internally, patting themselves down and shaking their sleeves out for the woman.
"And no."
The gate slowly creaked open. She stashed her pistol away before they could get a good look at it.
"White haired man came through here. Have to talk t' the barkeep for more."
She nodded her head toward an area with what looked like an open-air bar. A fire pit burning at the center for warmth.
With a stiff nod to the woman, they slid through the gate.
The town fell into a diminuendo. Eyes lifted and watched from the broken windows of homes as Uraume made their way toward the bar.
Some curious, others sharp. But most were guarded.
No one spoke. Just following Uraume's path silently with their eyes.
Behind the makeshift bar stood a man. His thick, bushy hair streaked with gray and a beard that said even if razors were available, he wouldn't use them.
His rough, cracked hand grabbed a glass and placed it on the bar top in front of Uraume.
"Get ya somthin'?"
"I'm looking for help."
Uraume said, pointedly ignoring the glass.
I don't want to find out what passes for acceptable drink in this backwater hovel.
"Were ya now?"
He pulled the glass off the counter and stashed it under the bar. His hand lingering there, out of sight.
"What kinda help?"
"I'm looking for my brother. Tall with white hair and blue eyes. He may have passed through here some time ago."
A small murmur wound through the other patrons.
The man gave a sharp, quick flick of the eyes to his customers. The murmurs died down to silence. Gazes averted to suddenly very interesting cups.
"People pass through all the time."
The barkeep sighed.
"No they don't."
Uraume's statement sat heavy in the air.
The graying man studied them a moment before snorting.
"Fair enough."
His arms folded in front of him as he leaned on the bar and into Uraume's space.
"Yeah. He came through. Been a good long while now tho'."
"Do you have any idea where he was heading?"
He popped the 'p' with a condescending quality.
"Didn't say. Showed up and left a few days later. Roland left wit' him."
"Roland?"
Uraume questioned.
Is this the sorcerer Ijichi mentioned?
The man nodded.
"Yep. Didn't say but two words to no one. Just up and disappeared wit' him."
"Is there anyone Roland might have told where he was going?"
The bar's silence thickened. Something flashed in the bartender's eyes, sharp and angry, then smoothed in the blink of an eye.
"No. "
Changing tactics Uraume quietly added.
"I understand. We were separated. I'm only trying to find them and make sure he's okay."
The man's posture softened, a fraction.
"World's a tough place."
He stepped back.
"Wish ya luck finding him, but he ain't here no more."
A chair scuffed across the floor behind Uraume. The sound of hard, unhurried boots walking away from the shared space and down the street toward the gate filled the silence.
Inclining their head, Uraume stepped back from the bar.
"Thank you for your… assistance."
The bartender nodded quickly and turned his back, wiping a glass down.
As they made their way back to the gate, they saw the woman from before had been relieved by a weathered man. Mid-forties, lean, only slightly taller than Uraume. A home-rolled cigarette hanging loose between his cracked lips.
"You familiar with the area?"
He said low under his breath.
Uraume gave a small shake of their head in response.
His eyes flicked to the gate and back to Uraume. A single crooked finger beckoned.
"C'mon. Not here."
He opened the gate and stepped through.
The gate shuddered closed behind them.
"The white haired man. He your brother?"
The man looked at Uraume, taking a drag of his cigarette. The glow from the ember briefly lighting up his face in the darkening space around them.
"Yes. Do you know where he went?"
The man exhaled up into the air above their bowed head.
"Reckon I know sumone who might."
He dug through his filthy coat and produced an old folded county map. Creased so many times it had gone cloth-soft, with places rubbed bare of ink. He passed the map into Uraume's waiting hands, tapping it with a knuckle.
"Box E-47."
Uraume unfolded the map, finding the box.
"And where are we on here?"
The man ashed his cigarette before pointing to an area.
"Right there. And I ain't got no writin' utensils right now."
Taking another long inhale.
"So you best be rememberin' that. Or you ain't never gettin' outta these woods."
The man exhaled up into the air.
"Why are you telling me this?"
Uraume looked up from the map.
"It seemed as though the barman does not want to speak on the matter."
"Ain't many visitors nowadays."
The man shrugged, ashing again.
"An' I assume folks who go lookin' for someone this far out usually ain't gonna give up anytime soon."
He paused a moment, cigarette half to his mouth.
"Just a word to the wise."
His voice dropping.
"That one. They don't like visitors. But… they's gonna be your best bet."
"Who?"
The man brought the cigarette to his mouth, taking a drag in what seemed like an attempt to pick his words.
"Ain't safe."
He said, releasing the breath, ignoring Uraume's question.
"Not for nobody."
Dropping the remainder of the cigarette to the ground, crushing it under his boot. The snow making it sizzle quietly.
"Some folks lose themselves out there. These woods are old. Got a way of gettin' in your head. Can make anyone a monster."
He stepped back toward the gate, pausing just a moment.
"They wasn't always bad people."
He added quietly, half hidden under his breath.
"Good luck."
He said the way that people do when they really mean 'I don't think you're making it back.'
Slipping back into the town.
Uraume watched him disappear before turning back and returning to where Sukuna had been standing in the treeline, unnoticed and listening.
"A monster in the woods, huh?"
He chuckled to himself.
"Where have I heard that one before?"
Sukuna's grin returned, feral and wide, fangs bared full as he uncrossed his arms.
"E-47, eh?"
SUKUNA POV
"So they didn't want to talk about them?"
Sukuna said, already striding ahead among the trees. The town disappearing behind them as the trees thickened, blocking out the weak aureole of the bar's firelight.
"No. They seemed extremely reluctant to speak with me."
Uraume answered, doing their best to keep up with him, never complaining.
"The residents were suspicious immediately. If that man had not said anything I doubt I would have uncovered anything."
The little color remaining in the sky faded from orange to purple. Then to black dusted with stars.
The stars as visible as Sukuna remembered them being over a thousand years ago.
The forest coldly sealed around them.
Sukuna yawned into a grin, sharp teeth glinting in the moonlight.
"If nothing was found there."
He added idly.
"Then at least they would have made a decent meal."
Time stretched as they moved. The forest becoming repetitive.
Trunk after trunk.
The crunch of snow under their feet. Sukuna's breath misting and vanishing into the dark.
Frost dusted his haori's shoulders, melting as it hit his hot skin.
The cosmos above moving slowly across the sky.
The duo stopped in a low clearing. Not a true break in the forest, but a thinning of it. Roots knotted upward, warped and thick, locking the eroded dirt into a ridged pattern with snow built up in the deepest of them.
The smell of wet wood and traces of something that had decayed long ago mixed with the petrichor scent that filled Sukuna's nostrils.
"We'll stop here till dawn."
Sukuna dropped himself to the ground against a large tree's base as Uraume moved to clear the space. Shifting debris aside and gathering branches and twigs before starting a fire with practiced ease.
"I will go find you a meal, Master Sukuna."
Slipping into the shadows, Uraume vanished from sight.
Sukuna lingered, inhaling deeply. The mingled scents of fauna, frost, and decay painting a map in his mind.
This place holds no thrills like that worm, Ijichi.
And no distractions from the plague's mindless hunger.
Ugh. Lame.
Snap.
Sukuna's eyes zeroed in on the sound. Lips curling into a predatory smirk as the faint crunch of multiple footsteps echoed through the underbrush. Not only Uraume's familiar tread, but the clumsy shuffle of at least four others.
Humans. Reeking of desperation and unwashed filth.
Muscles rippling like coiled serpents, he moved with the silence of a tiger stalking its prey. The cold bit against his bare chest as he positioned himself just beyond the treeline. Crimson eyes gleaming as he observed.
"Oh good heavens!"
A wiry man yelped, his voice cracking with brittle hope as he clutched the straps of his dirty rucksack.
Uraume paused mid-step back into the clearing, turning sharply toward the intrusion. Pale hands holding a few dead snowshoe hares.
"We haven't seen any other survivors in weeks!"
The woman beside him sobbed, her face crinkling in relief. Ragged coat flapping open to reveal stark ribs.
"Thank god! We must be near a—"
Schliiing.
The sound was obscene, like a butcher's cleaver hacking through a boneless cut.
Sukuna's cursed energy manifested as a razor-sharp slash that cleaved clean through the woman's skull just above the jawline.
The top half of her head sheared off in a spray of gore. Brain matter erupting in chunky clumps, flecked with bone shards, flew through the air and across her companions.
Her eyes, wide in frozen shock, stared blankly from the severed crown as it tumbled end over end. Smacking wetly against a snow-dusted tree root. One pupil dilating in the dirt.
The ragged remains of her head gushed hot blood in rhythmic spurts that painted the wiry man's face and chest in a visceral mask. Her lower head collapsing backward with a meaty thud. Tongue lolling slack in the lower half of her jaw frozen mid-word.
A beat of stunned silence hung.
Broken only by the gurgle of blood bubbling from her exposed trachea.
Then screams tore through the space from the group's throats as they scattered into the woods like panicked rats. Boots pounding through brittle snow and snapping twigs.
Sukuna laughed. A deep, rumbling bellow.
His next strike lashed out at the wiry man, who had stumbled back, eyes bulging in horror. The slash severing the man's right leg at mid-thigh in a horizontal guillotine swipe.
The femur cracked audibly with a sharp snap before the limb flopped free. Still twitching as severed arteries erupted in a high-pressure geyser of dark red ropes. Splattering the snow in steaming pools.
Tendons dangled like frayed strings from the ragged stump. Muscle fibers twitching spasmodically as the man collapsed, clutching the oozing wound with both hands.
"F-FUCK!"
Blood welled between his fingers, soaking what remained of his pant leg and pooling beneath. His screams devolved into wet howls.
The other two—a scrawny youth and a burly scavenger—bolted deeper into the trees. Their panic fueling desperate sprints.
Sukuna pursued with leisurely malice.
The youth lasted seconds. Sukuna's claw-tipped hand plunged through his back mid-stride. Ribs splintering like dry twigs under the force, puncturing lungs with a suctioning wheeze.
He yanked upward, tearing the spine free in a cascade of viscera. Spinal cord dangling, stringy, as the boy's torso split open from navel to sternum.
Intestines uncoiled in slippery ropes that slapped heavily against the ground. Guts sloshing out in a steaming pile. Perforated bowels releasing the foul scent of shit and bile.
The heart stuttered one final, feeble pump before bursting under Sukuna's grip, spraying across his gleeful face.
The burly one fared no better. He swung a rusted machete wildly.
Sukuna batted it aside. Fingers wrapping around the man's throat and lifting him off the ground.
With a casual twist, he broke the neck in a grind of bone and cartilage.
Not done with his fun, he hurled the paralyzed body down. Stomping one foot through the pelvis in a crunch of shattering pubic bone and hip sockets.
The man's eyes rolled back. Froth bubbling from his lips as he drowned in his own fluids. Gurgling pleas reduced to a bloody froth.
Sukuna sauntered back to the wiry man, who writhed in a puddle of his own excrement. Stump pumping slower now, skin paling as hypovolemic shock clawed at him.
The man's gaze locked on the curse's four-eyed visage. Recognition dawning through pain-glazed terror.
"S-skinwalker."
He rasped, a wet rattle. Blood flecking his beard.
"Y-you're a fuckin' skinwalker..."
Sukuna tilted his head. Black markings on his cheek twitching.
Skinwalker? What the fuck is a skinwalker?
He mused silently, savoring the irony as the man's life ebbed.
Uraume stepped forward then, expression serene amid the carnage. Frost curling from their fingertips.
"Master."
They murmured.
Tendrils of rime snaked through the air toward what remained of the group. The wiry man's writhing form first. Flash-freezing the blood oozing from his thigh, locking his limbs in place.
Flesh crackled as ice infiltrated his veins. Turning his blood to slush. Skin blistering white then splitting from frostbite.
His screams peaked into a shrill keen before his lungs seized as icy crystals ruptured alveoli from within. Exhaling one final plume of vaporizing breath.
The process spread to the others. The decapitated woman's brain solidifying into fractured pink ice. The eviscerated youth's gut-pile hardening into a sculpture of frozen entrails. The burly man's mangled pelvis gleaming like shattered ruby quartz under a sheath of permafrost.
Uraume's power hummed, the air dropping to bone-numbing cold.
Bodies stiffened into macabre statues. Eyes frosted over in eternal rictus. The rabbits forgotten in a stiff clump nearby.
"Looks like dinner found us."
He rumbled, turning back toward the clearing. Dragging two of the bodies and carrying the third.
The campfire crackled steadily, casting warm flickers across the clearing. Sukuna dropped the three he carried near the heat's reach before settling back against the trunk of a tree. Posture relaxed as Uraume pulled the last body into the space and set to work.
The rendering fat and char scent mingled with the pine smoke. Uraume tended to the woman's midsection, slicing sections of the bodies away. Heart and liver portioned neatly next to the thighs, torso, and arms. Setting them to roast over the embers.
Sukuna claimed the first bites. Jaw working steadily through the seasoned flesh's familiar, gamey flavor.
"Lucky these idiots found us."
Sukuna remarked through a mouthful, his voice a casual rumble as he picked a strip of stray gristle from between his teeth before tossing the bones into his maw. "Fresh meat's been scarce these days."
Uraume nodded serene, portioning the burly man's bicep.
His red eyes tracked Uraume's precise motions, while the crunching grind of bones rumbled from his stomach.
"Save those nearby. We'll come back for them once we're done with this place."
He ripped another bite free from bone.
As the sky began to lighten to a bruised gray, they set out again.
Distant moans rode on the freezing breeze as they walked toward the answers Sukuna had traveled across the world for.
The scourge's spawn crashed through brush along their path. Even this remote area crawling with the gray-skinned dead.
The first few were thin. Ribs visible beneath stretched, papery skin.
Inhuman screeches sliced through the early morning, echoing off the trees as they darted out from between them.
"This is becoming tedious."
Slashes, rending air with a whistle, carved through torsos and limbs. Rotting bodies collapsed to the wet earth, limbs twitching as black blood glugged from the stumps. A final dismantle cut the brain stem at the base. Gray matter falling in slushy masses.
More followed, drawn in by the reek and ruckus.
Then fewer.
Then none.
He inhaled deep, nostrils flaring to pull in the gangrenous sweetness undercut by old bile. Clicking his tongue in irritation.
Barely more pathetic than the live ones. But just as brainless.
Uraume glanced down at the map held in their hands.
"I believe we've arrived, Master."
The lower left eye embedded in his mask drifted down to the map. Looking at the twenty-five square-mile block of box E-47.
"Yes. It appears the rest of the search will be blind."
He looked at the landscape before him. Uneven ground, buckled with roots. Dense growth choked with ferns. The black sky paling just enough to outline the trees against the pallor.
Not ideal but not an issue.
Light snow dusted the dirt. Pristine.
No tracks from human—or previously human—feet marring the surface.
Sukuna distantly noted this before noting something much more prevalent.
It was silent.
Not in the way a forest typically was. The space was a vacuum. No buzz of bugs. No trill from birds. No distant call of animals.
He could see them. Birds perched above, wings tucked tight to their bodies, heads on a swivel. Insects and moths, sluggish from hibernation, clinging motionless to the bark and ferns. A herd of deer in the distance moving with hooves mute on the ground. No snort or bleat breaking the hush.
The forest was not empty. Simply silent.
There had been no beat of noise like when they touched down.
Mmh. This is not abandonment. The diseased don't linger without stimuli and this area offers none. That only leaves one explanation for this level of quiet.
They are hiding just well enough to survive for now.
Tch.
That makes sense. Between myself and the walking rot encircling, silence is the smart move.
Then a sound finally pierced the hush.
One.
The low, building creak of a bowstring being drawn.
Sukuna halted mid-stride. Roughly fifty yards out, a living human's breath. His eyes narrowing toward the sound of controlled rasps only barely audible.
The string released with a sharp twang. The arrow singing high and piercing through the frozen air before it lodged deep into its target with a thwunk.
Hrrrk–ahhrrr!
The straggler of the herd cried its shrill death-knell. Its hindquarters failing suddenly, forcing it to crumple into the snow while it thrashed its head wildly.
A cold smirk twitched at the corner of Sukuna's lips. His right eyes glanced back to Uraume.
A curt nod of his head in the direction of the cry.
They dipped their chin, silently gliding forward like a ghost.
Sukuna veered parallel to Uraume's path weaving between the trees to maintain his visual and auditory lock on them as they approached the person.
Uraume looked toward his veiled form hidden among the dense trees. But Sukuna's eyes were trained on what lay in front of him.
A hunter, working over the weakly bleating deer.
Dressed in bulky camouflaged clothing that framed hunched shoulders. A hood cinched tight against the cold.
The knife resisted for a breath before sinking into the skull's base with a firm pop. The hilt settled flush against bone. The deer's legs kicked, desperately. Hooves drumming against the frozen ground, a frantic cadence that slowed, faltered, then seized. One last shudder rippled through the flank before the body went limp.
Sukuna finally met Uraume's eye and gestured to the person.
"Excuse me."
The figure went rigid as Uraume closed the distance, voice pitched with neutral calm.
"The people of Tiona claimed you might be of assistance."
The hunter craned their head over one shoulder. Hood pulled low over a balaclava with a black bandana covering everything but just below their eyes. Green-brown paint smeared across their upper face, shadowing the rest.
Pfft. This is the "monster" in the woods?
Their eyes silently pinned Uraume's pink stare.
"I'm looking for my brother. White hair with blue eyes."
The hunter stayed silent as they grabbed hold of the carbon arrow's shaft. Their gaze never leaving Uraume's eyes as they wrenched it free with a schk-rrk.
"Look, if you just tell me where he went, I'll be on my way."
The hunter held the stare for one beat heavier than needed before they turned back to the carcass.
A pinch on the left side of the jaw and slightly flared nostrils forced their way to life on Uraume's face before they composed themselves.
"All I need is t—"
Uraume began.
Without returning their gaze to the sorcerer behind them, the hunter raised a finger. Signaling to wait.
Oh, wonderful.
All four eyes rolling up toward the canopy in unison, lashes hooded with scorn while irritation rose behind them.
I've come all this way for a mime act. Keh.
These insects always try to pull this shit when they think it'll buy them time.
Uraume stood in the clearing. Their arm held loosely in front of them but their fingertips laced tight together. Pink eyes drilling into the hooded back with eroding patience.
Sukuna crossed his arms and leaned against a tree, watching as the hunter continued to ignore Uraume. They slung a rope around the deer's antlers—low and tight, the excess fed back through in practiced loops, fibers creaking as they pass over each other.
Their gloved hands pulled once, cinching the knot with a soft thump, before grabbing the rope with both hands and heaving it over their shoulder.
Mm. Shorter than I expected a "monster" to be.
The hunter jerked their head once in the opposite direction while assessing Uraume. Without checking to see if the message had been received, they started dragging the carcass away.
Their boots gouging deeper into the muddy earth. Breath puffing harder from the bandana's rim. The deer's bulk catching on bent up roots.
The effort straining their body. But the struggle didn't seem to faze them.
Pitiful.
Sukuna sneered.
So human to pretend it isn't humiliating to struggle this much.
The sounds of dragging filled the air. Normally far beneath his notice, but in this pressurized silence it grated at Sukuna's senses.
Uraume piped up.
"Do you require assistance with that?"
The hunter stopped dead and turned, fixing them with an icy glare that bored deep into their soul.
Eyes flint hard under the grease paint before whipping their head back and resumed their pulling.
Uraume fell silent again at their blatant refusal of help. Lips pressing thin as they continued following.
Sukuna felt it as the trees started to thin.
A residue flirted with his senses. Not a barrier, nothing to push them back. Old cursed energy clinging to the space like a ghost, weak and dissipating.
Anyone lesser than him would have missed the familiar feeling.
Gojo.
That white-haired fucker's signature is unmistakable. But with how faded it is…
His irritation grew watching the hunter lead Uraume past the treeline.
It's barely even here anymore. What a waste of time. And wasted on this mute. He hasn't been here in years at this point.
With a growl, he followed after them. Intent on putting an end to the hunter's silence.
Then—
The smell barreled into him full force.
A heavy, greasy pall surrounded him, thick enough to feel in his throat. Souring oil rancid with overcooked fats. The sharp, metallic bite of burnout machinery.
Sukuna squashed his reflex to snarl at the offensive odor. Tongue scraping at his palate as he opted to breathe through his maw.
I have walked through corpse-littered battlefields that smelled better than whatever festering alchemy this is.
Uraume coughed once. Clamping their sleeve over their mouth and nose to muffle the hack. Their eyes watering slightly as they passed by the shed producing the miasma.
The hunter paused and glanced back over their shoulder. One eyebrow lifted over half-lidded eyes as they clocked Uraume's reaction.
Then a quiet, dismissive scoff, as if the smell were nothing, before returning to their laborious drag.
A quiet chuff burst from his maw.
Must be as nose-blind as they are stubborn.
At the other end of the property, as far from the hellacious odor-spewing shed as the treeline allowed, sat a house. Single-story, brown weathered wood with lichen growing along the edges, raised about three feet from the ground on a cinderblock foundation. A wide covered porch spanning the full length with splintering rails.
But it was the roof that snagged Sukuna's eye.
Atop the usual shingles sat flat, dark, glass-like panels. Arranged in a precise grid and clearly not decorative since the rest of the place was so run-down.
He narrowed his eyes at the anomaly.
They have a purpose… but for what?
Cables ran from the array to another shed.
Perhaps this is a power alternative they have come up with.
Around the main house were several smaller buildings. He ignored them to focus back on the impromptu group consisting of his servant, a stranger, and a dead animal making its way to one shed close to the house.
Sukuna circled the property, keeping to the treeline near the house. Maintaining his sightlines as the hunter lifted the bar on the door.
The doors swung outward with a groan. Latches clicked to hold them still.
Old blood stains littered the wooden floor in different shades of darkening brown. The person hauled the deer inside with a muffled grunt before squatting down to the deer. They untied the rope from its antlers.
They secured the deer's hind legs to a metal bar. Then grabbed a hooked chain hanging from the wall that dully clinked against itself as they attached the chain to the bar.
Perhaps realizing their own limitations, their gaze dropped to the bulk of the easily ten-point buck as they finally registered the glaring problem.
A single irritated huff as they crooked a finger at Uraume.
Keh. Took them long enough. Pathetic.
The hunter pointed to a spot on the far side of the shed, and then upward to a grooved beam. Before throwing the chain over in a smooth arc.
Uraume caught the weight without comment.
The hunter circled around to Uraume, they gripped the end and dragged the deer into the air inch by inch before linking the chain to a larger hook embedded in the floor. The carcass swinging slightly as it fully suspended.
Snapping the hunter pointed out of the shed, and with a curt nod, Uraume stepped out.
Then they set to work.
The still masked hunter walked back to the far wall. Grabbing a plain, drop-point knife off a shelf before picking up a bucket.
As they went to turn, they paused and grabbed a different one. Holding up the knife and inspecting the blade.
Heading back to the center of the shed, they placed the bucket under the strung-up animal before dropping to their haunches.
Then gripping the animal's jaw, they slid the blade into the neck where the muscles thinned and the vessels ran unprotected.
The blood hit the bucket immediately with a thick, heavy glugging. Pouring fast at first, steaming slightly in the chilled morning air.
The hunter wiped the blood from the knife onto their sleeve before standing and stabbing it into the workbench. Peeling off their bloodied gloves.
Short and tiny hands. Kukuku.
The hunter exhaled sharply through their nose. Looking at Uraume, cold annoyance filling their greasepaint covered eyes, as they stepped into the doorway of the shed.
Now with a full visual on the person, Sukuna narrowed his eyes at the figure as they pulled down the open-faced balaclava around their neck. Revealing two braids close to the scalp that vanished beneath the collar of their padded coat.
Wait—
Then they reached up. Fingers snagging on their bandana, ripping it down around their neck.
Sukuna's eyebrow lifted a fraction of an inch.
Oh.
So it is a woman.
Tch. The silence fits now.
You jerked a thumb over your shoulder at the bleeding deer.
"You got 'til that's done drying to spit out why you're actually on property."
Your eyes slid past Uraume into the treeline.
Burning right into Sukuna's.
His grin curled slow up his face.
An observant little pest.
Then your glare cut back, sharply, to a rigid Uraume.
"And why you've had one of your friends skulkin' around back there."
AN: Chapter 2 ended up being the bane of my existence 🥲 I'm still not thrilled with the formatting but figured I should just put it out anyways. I’ve obviously taken a few liberties with this story like Sukuna being called a skinwalker since he looks nothing them but I thought it was kinda funny 🤷🏻♀️
Dividers-
@cafekitsune
@bhavihelps
Photos:
Background - myself
Don’t go in the woods - I can’t reliably figure out who to credit it too but the oldest is a movie Bloodsprayer
