Eleven years ago
The living room is a mess of strewn-about plushies and picture books. Her little girl has read them all, played every possibility out of every toy. Hatsuko watches with pride as her daughter sets down a panda (who was once a doctor). Yuriko runs into her waiting embrace and for four perfect seconds, all is right with the world.
"Vectors!"
Hatsuko's hand stills against the small back. Her darling, her snowy little blessing with the sunset in her eyes goes unnaturally rigid in her arms. There is a pause, and the only sound is the wood that crackles in the hearth.
"Bug?"
"Vectors!" She says again, twisting until mother and child can see eye to eye. "Directions go vroom, vroom, and I make the numbers brr."
To illustrate, her little fingers splay every which way. The ever-smiling child fingerpaints the workings of her mind into the air. All the mother can think, which her tongue betrays is:
"Shit."
"Hatsuko!" Mayuri rips Yuriko from her arms. "Language!"
She barely hears him with her heart in her ears. It's happening. It's happening, and there's nothing she can do. She wants to run, but her legs are jelly. She bites her tongue, but the vow glows like thermite in the pit of her stomach.
Instead, her traitorous feet lead her to the kitchen. And her treacherous hands are finding the landline. The call connects before it has the time to ring.
"Hellooo?" asks the voice dripping with expectant smarm.
"Kaori. We need to talk."
***
3 days before Gojo vs Suzushina, POV: Kenjaku.
Sunlight bled against the frosty windows; the day was surely winding to a close. If all was going to plan, the first finger had been force fed to the boy—the second shortly after. If all went according to plan, his best piece would have displaced an eyesore from the board.
Yet as his jaws clenched and the knot in his throat became Gordian, Kenjaku was hoping against hope that his plan had failed.
"Ah..." he swallowed. "Shit."
"Indeed."
A staticky silence followed; he still couldn't see her, but that didn't matter when the air was rife with her violence. Animosity boiled in the frigid cabin as the curse's power expressed itself. The unnatural shadows? Her metallic grains casting the light askew. The cold? A product of the energy she had shorn from the environment. Energy that was being stockpiled within the bindings of her power like the weapons of a nation that never conceded no-first use.
Kenjaku's shoulders dropped.
"Long time no see, Hatsuko-chan."
"Don't you 'chan' me," the curse 'spat.'
"Right... So, uh... come around here often?"
"Repeat what you just said."
"The part where I said Jogo is worth six Sukuna fingers?"
"The part where you orchestrated the 'death' of my daughter."
"Ah, that. Yeah, I did that."
Metal groaned.
Bearings snapped.
And in a fleeting blur they—the boy, the sleazy salary man, Kenjaku, Mahito, Jogo, the stewardess all who had been unlucky enough to share a train cabin with an ancient sorcerer and three special grade curses—could see the sun dipping from the sky without the assistance of windows.
Up, and up, went the carriage. Then gravity wanted.
Jogo grunted; Mahito cooed. Then the screams; then the rushing wind.
The fall was a masterstroke of death. A metal box, a flying coffin, streaked toward the ground like a brush against canvas. The portrait was of ordinary men and women—those who had reacted fast enough—holding onto their seats and handlebars like they would absolve them of their weakness. Lines of motion more than there was colour. It would be an indiscriminate death. A beautiful death.
Kenjaku had not lived so long to die a death at all.
Kaori's technique caught them as he, the curses and the hunk of metal that had once been a train compartment, smashed through a complex of flats. Glass, wood—decades of memorabilia and sentiment deformed around them as they tumbled and rolled, before coming to an unnatural stop in the street.
The evening winced, then all around them were shrieking alarms. The streets were instantly awash with blood and panic. Blood from the train, blood that was walking its way home from work. Blood that had been a dog and the shaky hands still holding what had been its collar.
Kenjaku's eyes scanned the wreckage—not a drop of blood from the child. The boy who had been seated next to them lay perfectly unharmed in a cot of rubble.
Boring. He sighed. Vengeful curses, as ever, remained one-note vendettas.
"What was that?!" Jogo finally shouted, his arm bubbling slowly at the stump.
"Settle down," Kenjaku responded, scanning still. "We won't get out of this by losing our heads."
"Losing our heads?!" The curse smouldered.
"Jogo, don't—"
The disaster curse spread his arms apart as the temperature rose. "What's there to think about?! Maximum Meteor!" Another sun ignited in the sky. "The second she shows her face, I'll—"
Just as quickly as it arrived, the light was smothered. His fire, gone. Mid-sentence, before the declaration could land, Jogo froze. Figuratively at first. His jaw locked. His eye stopped spinning in its socket. Then the ice bloomed in earnest. In moments, what had been Jogo now looked like it belonged in the refrigerated section of an art gallery.
The metal had been inside him since his hand was stolen. There was no time, and there was nothing to dodge to begin with.
Kenjaku sighed as he inspected the damage. Strangely, the curse's energy reserves had fallen alongside his core temperature, but neither had hit zero just yet. A hostage?
"Rude," he finally said.
At the edge of his field of view, Mahito was gesturing at himself as if to say 'me?'
Not that he cared one way or another if volcano-head went extinct. But if she was taking hostages, it meant that she was thinking. And if she was thinking, she was being rational. Rational enough to be reasoned with? Was there a point in reasoning with a vengeful spirit? This spirit in particular? Probably not.
He tried anyway. It would be a waste to exorcise her now.
"What exactly are you hoping to accomplish?"
Kenjaku hadn't raised his voice. Not one bit. It didn't matter. His level tone wasn't lost to the raw panic that was tearing itself from civilian lungs, nor to the distant sirens that were sounding already. It didn't even matter that she couldn't be perceived. Hatsuko was perceiving.
"Do you have to ask?" came the voice that came from nowhere.
"Guess not."
A chill stumbled down his spine. A sudden reflection slammed into the corner of his vision, and Kenjaku was moving. Uncountable years of experience threw his body aside before his thoughts could form the word. Danger. Kenjaku dived to the right as danger whistled past him.
"You were supposed to stay away," Hatsuko whispered as Mahito who—had no experience to speak of—now found himself pinned through the arm and through his stomach against a brick wall.
Kenjaku felt the sparks of cursed energy. He also felt them fizzle out as the curse failed to activate his cursed technique. A befuddled whimper followed shortly.
"And you—" he retorted, "were supposed to give me something in exchange. Something you assured me I could get from your daughter if I couldn't get it from you."
Silence.
He took that moment to read the surroundings again. The object that had skewered Mahito had been a streetlamp. The rubble that had caught the boy was now shuffling underneath him and carrying him away. Windows along buildings tremored and glittered just a little more than they were supposed to.
"Alas, when I came to collect, I found a 'beast' instead of the bridge I was promised. Really, it's always the people you expect the most who go back on their word."
Kenjaku jumped over a car that suddenly came careering from behind. As it passed under him, its hood crumpled into a volley of arrowheads. For the second time that evening, Kaori's cursed technique saved his life.
He landed beside next to Jogo, "How did you even 'turn off' her sorcery anyway? The same thing you're doing to Mahito now? Isn't that barbaric?"
The city block shimmered in response. In response? It was just a passing thought, but upon examination...
Ah. I understand.
The car stopped.
If he looked for his opponent in the street, he wouldn't see her, but if he looked at the whole street, he would see his opponent.
The streetlamps, the windows, the cursed energy, and probably the air. His eyes flittered to a woman who had tripped in the ensuing bedlam—'this-is-the-skin-of-a-murderer,' her glittering face seemed to say, before she shattered against the floor.
Hatsuko had already 'infected' the surrounding space, and the infection was spreading. If he let things continue as they had, the only thing that lived would be metal.
Her power was propagating. It was feasting on the matter and the energy around itself in a self-sustaining explosion of silver. From his cursory guesstimations, the only difference between assimilating a city block, a city, and the country itself was time.
A curse exceeding the level of Orimoto Rika and the three great vengeful spirits that had come before her.
Maybe even the world would fall if she put her mind to it.
Okay, less boring.
Kenjaku smiled at his creation. But he needed the world. The world was where he kept his plans.
So, his fingers interlocked. Cursed energy surged, flowing as surely as a river did from source to mouth.
Kenjaku had worn a myriad fingers, and those myriad had woven a myriad seals in turn. The practice remained the same, no matter the technique, no matter the circumstance. Whether his purpose was to pluck the wings off a gnat or topple an empire: ego would become the world.
You're the environment? He challenged. So, I'll strike the environment itself.
It would be loud; it would demand attention that he couldn't afford, and yet it was the best choice available.
"Domain Expansion—"
The barrier fell at his feet. The barrier swept across the residential battleground, ensnaring all in its grasp. Buildings groaned as their weights fluctuated arbitrarily; more bodies hit the floor. Most importantly, Kenjaku felt those eyes that had been watching him from nowhere, blink for the very first time.
Innocuous objects fell apart around him: the wall Mahito was on crumbled, the car that drove past sublimated, and a levitating manhole cover was ground to dust. Jogo dropped to his knees, gasping—an ice sculpture no more—and Mahito slumped to the floor, dazed and unmoving. It was as if something fundamental that had bound each entity together had come undone, leaving everything else a husk of its former self.
"W-what was that?!" Jogo shouted, shivering more from rage, as his swelter returned."A sorcerer?"
As if. "She certainly was."
The volcano curse went ramrod-straight. "You..." Jogo, being ever on the periphery of the uptake, put two and two together. "A curse... Stop."
"Huh?" slurred Mahito.
"She's one of us—" Jogo raised a feeble arm in a threatening gesture. "And you're killing her."
And Kenjaku, for whom the uptake was his holiday home, ignored Mt. Fuji and redoubled his efforts. "Vengeful curses are inflexible creatures, Jogo." Every scrap of cursed energy demanded focused targeting. "Your ideals are chaff to her."
He couldn't let a grain escape, lest the grain become a sandstorm that could devour them all. He had to eliminate Hatsuko entirely. And so he was, and so he thought, until the voice that came from nowhere resounded again in his ear. A feminine silhouette was biting at the edge of his vision.
He saw her fingers before he saw her face—her fingers that were interlocking as she rasped.
"Domain, huh? I like that word."