POV: Mr Tanaka (Mr Stupid; no, he doesn't get a first name)
Failure. Failure. Failure.
Mr Tanaka sat under trace smells of desiccated bubble gum. He held a knife, liberated from the kitchen, but the cold steel of the santoku was even colder comfort. He was just a 'monkey' after all. He had a knife too, when they attacked his home. It hadn't helped then, either. Failure.
Mr Tanaka had failed as an educator. The boys; his slacker students replete with potential they were content to idle away. They had a 'going home' club; they would talk of karaoke evenings when exams were just around the corner. It was only recently that they had started taking their studies seriously. By God was he proud of Itadori when he marked his assignments—after ruling any foul play out of course. He knew he couldn't take credit for it. The achievement belonged solely to his students, Itadori and a certain—he shivers—anti-social girl no doubt. But progress was progress and all he had to do was his job. His only role in their lives was to do his damn job. Providing a safe environment—the erasers were the soft kind—that was conducive to learning.
And then he had knowingly put the boys in danger.
Mr Tanaka had failed as a man. As an adult. This was his mess, and yet, it had been them. The boys were the ones who had taken charge in that situation. Who had saved him. Itadori-kun with his ridiculous athleticism. Iguchi-kun with his quick thinking. There was a drop of pride in the ocean of his shame. They had saved him, and he, as the responsible adult, as the man in the situation, had taken the very first opportunity... to hide.
And he would continue to hide, continue to live, yellow-bellied, even as the cacophony of violence outside reached its crescendo. Even as children fought for their lives. Because he was all she had left.
Because above all else, Mr. Tanaka had failed as a father. Maybe there wasn't a thing he could have done for her, except obey. Maybe the knife had proven ineffective, but the fact remained that his darling girl, the reason he worked at all, hell, the reason he got out of bed most days. Kaida, his little dragon.... he had failed her. Watched her as she was taken from the one place she should have been safest, in front of the one person in the entire world who was willing—if unable—to move mountains for her.
He could still hear her screams, and for the whole day, they had been the loudest sound ringing in his ears. Her voice had drowned out his concern for Itadori, even when Iguchi had advocated for him, and put the 'plan' at risk. It was her screams that saw him hiding under a table in the cafeteria, waiting, instead of helping. Until he heard his daughter's next words, the scream would drown out anything else... or so he thought.
But then he heard something else. An impact. He heard it; by God, he heard it. A force smashed together against another force. Several impacts. Metal crashing into metal. Fracturing so loud he could hear them reverberate his bones.
And feeling it was so much worse. A primal unease skittered down his spine. Mr Tanaka felt his organs rub against each other, felt his eyeballs become jelly in their sockets before snapping back into place. The air was drier. His throat almost burned.
Then, light. Sound. A ringing in his ears. A gale force tore him from his cover, slamming his shoulder against a counter. Linoleum peeled from the ground. His ears were ringing, like a bomb had gone off.
Then there was silence. And a hole. Two holes, an entry and an exit wound in the institute of learning. Over the ringing, he couldn't hear Kaida's voice in his head. Shock took from him the sensation of his dislocated shoulder. But his eyes were working. He wished they weren't.
Eerie, adjective: a feeling of quiet apprehension.
His childhood home was eerie. Something about how its walls wore the silence in the wake of the divorce never sat right with him. An empty library was eerie. Escape rooms too, the scant few times he'd budgeted well enough to indulge Kaida on her interests.
Suzushina Yuriko was eerie. From the first day she took a seat in his class. Eerie in a way that had nothing to do with her appearance; nothing to do with her apparent intellect. He remembered her sitting there, as she would go on to do, taking in the environment like it had nothing to do with her. Like she was watching the world behind a screen and found its characters lacking in some way. He had heard of her 'gifts' from the other faulty members. Her interests. He tried to meet her down the middle. Ask her questions she would actually care about. And when he had spoken, something prickled against his skin when her eyes fell upon him.
Something was prickling against his skin as they fell on him now. And sensation returned. The dull ache of his arm against the counter. The smell of his own haemoglobin.
'Papa!'
Fear stood, like the hairs on his neck. Like his own father had when he had walked out on them. Her foot crossed the threshold of hole, and when she landed it made the softest sound. She didn't acknowledge him beyond the glance, not a word. Not a breath of effort.
When Suzushina had first entered his classroom, she didn't seem to know what it was about her that unsettled people. She had even tried to talk to some of the others, briefly, before accepting the silence; she was used to it. Observant, she may have been, self-aware she was not. Now though?
Now Suzushina Yuriko wore 'eerie' well.
***
When she entered the gymnasium, it was to the consistent rhythm of a basketball smacking the floor. As with the rest of Sugisawa Municipal, the gymnasium was largely unremarkable. Spacious and standard in a way that screamed, 'state funded!' Its windows were too high to reach; its doors could probably withstand nuclear fire. There were steel-frame basketball hoops on either end.
The lights were on, and Sukuna wasn't hiding, in fact—
Swoosh.
Yuriko rolled her eyes as he caught the ball again. One bounce. Two bounces. On the third, he took a stance, knees bent, and swoosh. Nothing but net. There were three basketballs at his feet. The lock to the gym cupboard had been severed.
"This body. It's strong, responsive." He picked up another ball and made another basket. "It'll do."
"It doesn't belong to you."
"And does it belong to you?" Sukuna scoffed. "Sentiment is weakness. Unbecoming for a sorcerer." Another basket from the three-point line. Sukuna watched her from the corners of his eyes, "I find you amusing." The word hit her like the winter wind: frigid, dry. "So, I'm giving you a chance." Colder still were his eyes when he turned to face her. "Run."
'In a completed domain, the imbued technique is guaranteed to hit.'
According to Satoru, a domain expansion represented the pinnacle of 'sorcery.' Sukuna could regenerate—reverse cursed technique. He could dodge her attacks despite the fact that her movement speed eclipsed his own—too fast and she risked killing Yuji.
But more than that, even from their short interaction, and hopefully shorter acquaintance... Sukuna's self-confidence; Sukuna's ego... It wasn't the same, but he reminded her of Satoru. If Sukuna had a domain, and he definitely did, he could kill her. Then he would kill compassionate Sasaki, thoughtful Iguchi. And Megumi. If she walked away, she could get them to another city before her timer ran out. Doom Yuji and save the others?
What would Yuji do?
It was a classic trolley problem. Months ago, she would have pulled the lever that guaranteed her own safety, morality be damned. Months ago, she would have watched the train devour whoever it might have, as she had left old Hokaze-san behind with a clumsily staunched wound. Because months ago, Yuriko was only herself in her entirety. No one looked out for her, so she looked out no one. No one photoshopped memories onto memories to make her feel whole.
Today, Yuriko thought of snowball fights. Of dishes and bad impressions. Of overly saccharine popcorn, and clothes that didn't fit so well, but made her feel warm regardless. Today, Yuriko said, "Hell no," before the thought even occurred to her.
Today, she would be saving her friends, and herself. All four of them... and Megumi.
Sukuna let out an irritated sigh, "Your funeral."
"I'll be bringing flowers to yours."
The ball bounced back to him, punctuating the silence. Without looking, Sukuna snatched it from the air, and it sliced to ribbons on contact. It was an even cut, unnervingly close to an exemplar on differential geometry. She could calculate the normal vector on every plane. Was the accuracya product of Sukuna's technique, or of Sukuna himself? A simple display of inhuman precision.
"I remember you," he diverted, tapping a claw against his skull. "You played this game with my vessel."
Nothing about him is yours. Her jaw clenched.
"He noticed, you know. That you were cheating."
Her eyes sharpened. Pick your moment.
"You rely on your technique too much."
Sukuna let the 'basketball' fall. Yuriko made a pointed stare at its at its rubbery carcass. Sukuna shrugged, bending over to pick up another. It bounced. Once. Twice, then he—
"!"
—Hurled it at her. No cursed energy, just 100% pure, organic low-fat Itadori strength. Yuriko didn't scream, not that anyone else would be close enough to hear, but if she did then it was a heroic sounding scream à la dragon ball. She also didn't—despite being able to subconsciously reflect pretty much anything—instinctively shield her face with her hands like a moron. That would be dumb.
"What the fuck?"
Sukuna chortled.
"..."
Then the humour bled from his face.
"Your thumb was on the inside of your fist," he noted. Sukuna stretched his arms until his spine popped. "Have...you never thrown a punched someone before? You're either an idiot, or..."
She didn't respond, but that in and of itself was a response. Sukuna tapped his head again.
"No," he muttered. "A complete novice, then. Strong as a wolf, graceful as a disembowelled kitten."
Yuriko tuned him out, scanning his body for flaws. Arm, healed. Cursed energy? Only a pipette of it was gone. She had more than four times his current reserves and it wouldn't matter. She would gas out long before he did. An opening. She needed an opening. Hard, and fast before her defences failed on their own accord.
"I've been killing curses for nearly four months. You're more talkative than most."
That seemed to unbalance him. An expression that was almost Yuji-like stunned her in its sincerity. "Four months...that would mean—" Sukuna closed his eyes. Yuriko's cursed energy flared, priming the vectors around her, until she realised the bottom pair of Sukuna's eyes were still watching her intently. Noted. "That spirit, the one with the incomplete domain. That was your first kill?"
"My fourth," she corrected, ever the pedant. Sukuna said he remembered her. It made sense with how casually modern his Japanese was that he would have access to to her friend's memories. Sukuna seen Yuriko through Yuji's eyes. What was something that Yuji, and Sukuna by proxy wouldn't expect her to do? "But really, who's counting?"
"And you received no instruction until that 'Gojo' brat discovered you later?" Again, she didn't respond, but that was enough to brighten Sukuna's eyes by around a lumen. Her stomach turned.
"An uncut gem," he concluded. "Ready to receive refinement?"
Power surged around her, she was ready to close the distance again, but then a number exploded. A momentum so massive, that her eyes almost failed to track him. Sukuna had moved first.
"Lesson one," he said, rematerialising in front of her. "Don't be stingy with it."
Taken aback, she stepped back. The overhead lights turned Sukuna's eyes into bloody jewels.
"More," he said. His middle finger flexed stopping behind the thumb. The digit ignited with malice. The spike of cursed energy galvanised her response. He was making it easy for her. Too easy. Yuriko had already evaluated Ryoumen Sukuna as a competent and rational opponent. Under normal circumstances, that in and of itself would have raised her caution against his change in approach. But she was so sure it wouldn't, that he couldn't, and she was so desperate after only making direct contact twice that she reached out. Her fingers lagging just a hair behind Sukuna's gesture.
THWACK!
A familiar ceiling. Yuriko remembered staring at the A/C unit during the mandatory physical education lessons. The boring, state-funded polyvinyl chloride, gypsum, girders and plaster of Paris stared her right back just as they had when she was waiting on the sidelines for a team to 'pick' her. Yuriko blinked, then she blurred into motion.
"The next time you strike me, put more curse into it."
A vector. It was a vector. Not even remotely complicated. From her frame of reference, nothing about it was exotic. In her world there was no way such a simple vector should have come in contact with her without her permission. But her power, her world... Her world had died where his finger met her forehead. She wondered if Accelerator had felt that violated when Touma struck him for the first time in the light novel.
Imagine breaker?! No, it couldn't be, she could still sense his cursed energy.
Yuriko landed high up on a wall, and stuck. She stared down at him, feeling like every bit the thrashing cat, he had joked that she was. "How did you—"
"Is this lesson two?" he mocked, cutting her off. "Remember well. Jujutsu is fairer than the weak will ever understand. There's no such thing as an invincible sorcerer. Least of all a fool with something to protect."
Yuriko hissed, partly because the flick still hurt.
"What's wrong, brat. I thought you said this wouldn't take long." Sukuna threw her earlier words back in her face with a mocking guffaw. "Who taught you your history, girl? The same fool who's teaching you sorcery, no doubt."
Then he did something she didn't expect. He was in front of her. In the air. Sukuna punched—he tried to. For whatever reason, her 'technique' held firm this time. The now-familiar set of aberrant physics reversed the motion—force, counter force—and his fingers came away mangled and bloodied?
Little pings registered against her reflection. Miniature 'dismantles.'
Why even... Her eyes sharpened as she analysed the slash patterns. Is he...?
Sukuna tumbled through space. A chance, she thought, and the wall behind her crumbled. Yuriko traced the trajectory of his reflection, sweeping her fingers at him as she overtook the body. Sukuna twisted, and Yuriko slowed down just enough to catch a limb. The vector was shorter than it should have been.
Sukuna stuck again, one leg lighter. This time with an open palm, fingers levied at her mid-air like an accusation. He stopped just as his middle finger almost brushed the threshold of her barrier. Yuriko didn't feel the cursed energy until—" Dismantle," his skin tore open.
They landed at the same time. Her on two legs. Him on one and a recovering stump.
No. No way he was already trying that. They hadn't been fighting for long; it had barely been five minutes. He even had a way to hit her without it. Why would he even think of trying that?
Logically, she knew his chance at success was approaching zero. He was guessing. Trying to reverse engineer millimetre precision from data extracted through pain, and her subconscious mind would throw up variables that would thwart him regardless. A fool's errand. But there was a difference between knowing he would fail and being on the other end of his experiment. If Sukuna succeeded, she died—everyone else died too.
Her barrier was based on Accelerator's. And Accelerator had an exploitable flaw embedded within. One Yuriko had done her best to iron out but couldn't practically triage explicitly because of how difficult it would be to execute in the first place.
The Kihara counter. The slightest prickle of unease ran through her.
Sukuna must have felt it in her cursed energy because he smirked again.
Then, with that same non-warning, he splayed his fingers and chanted, "Dismantle."
But it wasn't another attempt at the counter.
She could already read its trajectory.
Somehow, he still knew, even after she had moved the fight. Somehow, Sukuna could tell which angles his attack needed to meet her field to send his dismantles careering in the direction of her friends, and Megumi.
Then it hit her, the attack—not really—and the reminder that he could at any time have sent his dismantles at them himself. Yuriko redirected it skyward. They were to her right, if you ignored the manifold walls that acted as a barricade.
If Sukuna had been aiming for them, there would be a strategy to it. He'd be forcing her to play goalkeeper, running down her clock as she'd be forced to intercept. That was something she could respect. But this fucker. This sick, unwashed thing from the Heian era, baring its chest to her like a gorilla. It wanted them to die to collateral. It wanted to use her to butcher her people. And Megumi.
Her unease evaporated.
One big attack. Even if it took her remaining minutes of invulnerability to do so. The fight needed to end, now, before his cruelty extracted a consequence that would make her take a cruel decision in return. A blow to the head, or the nervous system. A distraction he wouldn't anticipate like her opening move in their fight.
Then it occurred to her.
The one thing he knew she wouldn't do—'least of all a fool with something to protect.'
If Sukuna had the leeway to keep track of her friends as he was fighting her, then he couldn't blame her for taking advantage of that.
She couldn't hear him speaking, and maybe she would process what he was saying later, but in the moment her mind was running probability trees, angles and calculating the blast radius. There wasn't a direct path for her to send a message to the outdoor trio, so it would have to be a gamble. But if there was one thing she trusted about her power after a few months of having it, it was its precision.
Yuriko put hands in her non-existent pockets. Yuriko met Sukuna's detached smile with one of her own, channelling as much Ryoumen Sukuna as she could. The red eyed girl casually circled the King of Curses. No reinforcement. No spike in her output until his back was in the direction she could sense Sasaki's cursed energy.
Centre-mass. Aim for a body part that Yuji, and Sukuna by extension, couldn't afford to sever. She'd been slowing down. Ever since she'd thrown them into the classroom. Killing Yuji wasn't even on the table for her, so she'd been holding back. As a matter of fact, every time she used her powers she was holding back.
There were things she knew she could do in theory. Trans-infinite dimensions, vectors that described the interplays between fundamental fields. There were spaces she wouldn't even dare to touch, for fear of the consequences. As Sukuna stood, with his back to the people she was looking out for, Yuriko decided to hold back a little less.
"What are you...?"
Yuriko's smile turned vicious.
Air would be plasma. The gymnasium would fall. But Sendai could take it. It wasn't like the damage would extend beyond the school, anyway. Hopefully Sukuna could too. Her cursed energy swelled.
So, what was the one thing Suzushina Yuriko wouldn't do?
Endanger her friends of course.
***
He did well to protect himself, all things considered, Yuriko should have expected as much. Was there nothing Ryoumen Sukuna could not do?
As soon as she had moved, or more realistically before she had moved, the ancient sorcerer had guarded his chest. She felt it. The weight of most of his cursed energy converging on the spot.
That much, if nothing else about him was worthy of respect. His adaptability. Sukuna lay on the dirt of the pitch. Just before she had struck, he'd deployed whatever technique it was that had let him hit her. On impact all his vectors were dead to her touch. So, cleanly knocking him out had been off the table. But momentum didn't care about Sukuna's tricks. It needed to be conserved.
Thus, the projectile known as Suzushina Yuriko had collided with the King of Curses at supersonic speeds. This too with none of the safeguards she had enacted that would have ensured that the worst that could happen to him was a bout of unconsciousness.
Clavicle, radius, sternum, ribs. Almost every bone in his upper body had to be broken. She watched as muscles stitched together and bones mended. There wasn't much blood. The wounds had been cauterised as they formed. Really, she wanted to thank Sukuna for how well he was able to put Yuji back together again. Bite it down. It didn't even look like he would scar.
It was a shame that the reverse cursed technique was so taxing to use. Especially when a significant portion of his reserves was spent on weathering the initial hit.
"Damn, Su-kun," Yuriko managed as she swallowed a greedy lungful of air. "You're looking pretty rough, huh?"
She had shot forward, faster than she had taken to the sky. Trees ashed in their wake. If there was any glass remaining around the premises, it became silicate debris in the wind. Where there was sand, was now glass. A fire quietly smouldered away at the remaining trees of Sugisawa.
The four outside had hit the ground. Bowing into the dirt as deeply as instinct had demanded. A little late, considering they had done so only after Yuriko had turned the fence to slag, but whatever. Fushiguro had one fist crossed over the other as he watched them with eyes that had clearly seen better days.
"Fu-fucking brat," replied the King of Sprawled-Against-the-Floor. Sukuna rasped as what Yuriko identified as 'positive' energy washed over his throat.
But then he laughed. It wasn't a sound she'd been expecting. Maybe a blustering rant from his bruised ego and windpipe. Maybe another curse like he had let out just before. When Sukuna laughed, the cackle was replete with approval.
"Marvelous," he said, springing to his feet so suddenly it could only have hurt. "Lesson number three."
Sukuna gestured at Iguchi, and she was there: a bulwark in the trajectory of the forecast attack. But nothing happened. Yuriko looked up at the sorcerer's face and saw just the slightest flicker of disappointment. His hands clasped together; the middle and ring fingers of each hand met.
Yuriko placed her hand on a rock. He stared at her contemptuously.
"Domain Expansion."
***
Presently (skip italicised section if you remember the start of the 'Ryoumen Sukuna' chapter).
The birds stopped singing. The winds stopped roaring. Even the ubiquitous, ever-present numbers seemed to stutter at his utterance.
"Malevolent Shrine."
The air tasted like blood, like raw meat, as a building moulded from teeth rose up behind the thing that wasn't Itadori Yuji. Skulls formed a perimeter of death around the demon.
Yuriko felt it, like a… Her eyes widened. She felt it. Any figurative abstraction to describe what she was feeling fell away. She wasn't supposed to feel anything in the state she was in. Her field was designed to keep the world out—the parts of it that were out to get her. She wasn't supposed to feel anything unless it had her permission to be felt.
Panic rushed into her mind as the numbers did. Their surroundings distorted. Sugisawa Municipal, already in near disrepair trembled as the evening quaked. A force was working its way into the space, stretching under her feet, around Sasaki, 'Megumi', the damn louse of a curse user and Iguchi, helpless, limbless, Iguchi who couldn't have followed her order to run under his own strength. Everything was steeped and mired in pernicious intention.
Yuriko abandoned the attack she had planned. The priority was always—her hand snatched Sasaki whose arms cradled Iguchi's torso, and not a moment too soon. Slashes pinged off her barrier. Her calculation fired at fully capacity, and yet she didn't understand. Not fully. Vectors pressed against her reflection; they were getting closer than they had any right to! And then it strained. Her barrier. Her filter. The construct that stood between her, and hardship, and she never even knew that it could.
A unidirectional undeniable tick of force—a line—manifested across her neck, and—
***
"How are you... suppressing me?"
"Dude, it's my body." His words were light, the finality within them was not.
Shallow, and deep cuts impressed themselves on the the surroundings. What remained of the pitch outside looked like the aftermath of a warzone. In comparison, everyone around her was faring much better: there were marks on Sasaki's skin, and a slash had split her glasses in twain. Iguchi was mostly spared, though 'sparing' was a moot sentiment given what had happened to his arms earlier. There were some cuts on Megumi, too and she could have sworn she heard him mumbling about treasures. She wondered if the shock was getting to him.
They reached me. The vectors had reached her. And unlike the flick from earlier, her world had still been present. It had just been subsumed by Sukuna's world. So was that what a true domain looked like? Was that the pinnacle of sorcery? Then why did it already feel like she could...
"Yuji...?" Sasaki's voice slapped her train train of the tracks of thought.
"Iguchi!" Yuji shouted. "We need to get him to a hospital."
Yuriko bit her tongue. It seemed like all she needed to do was stall. Sukuna submerged under the warmth of Yuji's presence, like an oceanic plate subducting to a continental. Maybe some other variable was at play, but it tickled her to imagine that his will was just that much greater than the King of Curses.
"If Fushiguro did his job correctly—" And from a cursory glance at the tourniquets, he had. "There should be an ambulance on the way. He'll be...fine."
"I'm sorry," Yuji said. "Dammit, I'm so sorry."
Again, so sincere in his admission of fault. It was enough that an arc of irritation lanced through her relief. "Stop it, that was Sukuna. If anyone should be blamed, then it should be me for responding too slowly."
Yuji's nose wrinkled at her assertion. His tongue clipped a syllable before she saw his head tilt, and an eyebrow raise. "What's that on your neck?"
"What's what on my what?" But then she felt it. Not in the way she felt cursed energy, not even through her vector manipulation. Yuriko felt the object on her neck the boring way—through touch. It was cold, concave. Form-fitting.
Yuriko peeled the object away from her neck and saw, "Metal?" Right where the final slash would have landed. The metal seemed to resonate softly.
"Stay right where you are—" Huh? "You're no longer human. Itadori Yuji, u-under Jujutsu regulations, I will now exorcise you as a cur—."
"Excuse me," said Yuriko in the politest, sweetest tone she could manage. "Run that shit by me again."