The iron gates of the West Tokyo Juvenile Detention Center were streaked with rust. Weeds pushed through the gaps between the bars. The paint along the perimeter walls had faded to barely half its original color.
Parked outside was an ordinary black sedan. Standing beside it was Ijichi, his brow pinched tight in a troubled knot.
Ijichi was a slight, bespectacled man somewhere in middle age, his hair combed to immaculate precision, dressed in a plain dark suit — entirely unremarkable, the kind of figure you'd pass a hundred times on the street without registering, indistinguishable from any ordinary office worker.
There wasn't a flicker of Cursed Energy on him. No trace of any Technique. He looked exactly like what he was: a bureaucrat.
Which, for the record, was exactly what he was.
He was an Assistant Supervisor.
The Assistant Supervisor's domain was logistics — laying down barriers, relaying intelligence, issuing assignments, coordinating resources. Fighting at the front line was neither his role nor anywhere within his ability range. That didn't make him unimportant, though — quite the opposite. On a mission like this, the difference between having someone outside holding the barrier and keeping watch versus not having that support was the difference between night and day for the people going in.
Right now, all three of them were about to enter the detention center.
Ijichi was the only adult present.
The three going in were all first-year students.
Fushiguro walked at the front — a pretty girl with long black hair——
...wait.
Wasn't that Fushiguro? I was pretty sure Fushiguro was a boy.
The girl glanced back at Ijichi. "Ijichi-san, how many survivors are inside?"
"Ah — um —" Ijichi flipped through the folder in his hands. "Intel indicates five people are trapped within the facility. But... whether they're still alive, we cannot confirm at this stage."
"So they might already be dead?" Nobara Kugisaki spoke up from beside him, direct and blunt.
"We can't rule it out." Ijichi adjusted his glasses. "The primary objective of this mission is to enter, assess, and gather information — rescuing any survivors would of course be ideal, but..."
"But?"
Ijichi raised his head and looked each of them over in turn, his tone going serious. "Most importantly — your lives. You need to come back out alive. If you encounter the Special Grade Cursed Spirit, you do not engage. Retreat immediately. Do you understand? Immediately."
Yuji Itadori and Nobara Kugisaki exchanged a glance.
"A Special Grade Cursed Spirit..." Yuji scratched the back of his head. "How strong are we actually talking?"
"Special Grade Cursed Spirits vary," Ijichi said, cutting him off. "Based on current estimates, the one present here is most likely a freshly-hatched Special Grade — among the weakest of its class. But even the weakest Special Grade is something that Grade 1 sorcerers have to approach with extreme caution. The three of you combined would stand absolutely no chance against it."
"...That strong, huh." Yuji looked genuinely surprised — then something seemed to occur to him, and he turned toward the black-haired girl. "Oh, right — speaking of which, Megumi, remember that time you got attacked? After it happened, didn't they send a Grade 1 sorcerer to analyze the Cursed Energy residue at the scene? I think they said the cursed spirit that attacked you was also probably Special Grade?"
The black-haired girl's eyes shifted slightly.
She narrowed them a fraction, gave a small nod, and let out a quiet sigh.
"Yes."
That was correct.
After the incident where she'd been attacked, a Grade 1 sorcerer had gone to the scene and analyzed the Cursed Energy residue left behind. The conclusion hadn't been a comfortable one — the nature of the traces was unlike anything an ordinary Grade 2 or Grade 1 cursed spirit could have produced.
The manner of the modification done to her body, the attack itself — it was more consistent with the work of a Special Grade. And the method of that body modification — the one that even Reverse Cursed Technique could not undo — was something only a Special Grade could have achieved.
At the time, she had given chase to that cursed spirit — and had been reversed on completely, outmaneuvered without a single opening to fight back. She'd assumed at the time that her attacker was a Grade 1 cursed spirit. But thinking back on it now, if her attacker had in fact been Special Grade, that would make perfect sense.
Which only made the whole thing more of a headache.
Which only made the entire affair more baffling than before.
Because she had come to realize that her opponent had been fully capable of killing her — and had chosen not to.
With wounds that Reverse Cursed Technique couldn't heal, if it had wanted her dead, it could have done so at any moment without effort.
But the end result was this: her body had been transformed, completely and thoroughly, into the form of a girl — and yet she was still alive. Unharmed. Not a scratch beyond what had been done to reshape her.
Honestly, even now, she still couldn't work out what that cursed spirit had been thinking.
"...Well. Either way." She gave her head a small shake, pressing all of it down — all the things she couldn't figure out — and brought her gaze back to the detention center gates. "Let's keep our focus on what's in front of us."
Time waited for no one.
Just then, a voice called out from behind them.
All three turned.
A woman was calling out someone's name, her voice thick with tears, pressing urgently against a security guard who was holding her back, asking in a choked rush about the situation inside.
Ijichi recognized her and offered a quiet explanation. "That's the mother of one of the boys trapped inside. We told the public there's been a gas leak — she's been standing out here the entire time..."
Yuji Itadori said nothing. He glanced over at the woman, and something in his expression pulled tight.
He quietly clenched his fist.
"Let's go," Fushiguro Maki said, her voice low.
The three of them went in.
The gate swung shut behind them with a heavy clang, and the atmosphere changed in an instant.
All three of them froze.
What lay before them was not the interior of a juvenile detention center.
It was a three-dimensional labyrinth of concrete and metal.
"...?" Yuji stared. "Where are we?"
Fushiguro Maki's pupils snapped narrow. Then, as if something hit her all at once, she spun around hard, looking back the way they'd come.
"Is the gate still there?!"
The gate was gone.
The corridor stretched in both directions. The walls were seamless and unbroken — no gap, no seam, no trace of any opening. The gate they had just walked through had vanished without a trace, as though it had never existed at all.
"..."
Fushiguro Maki went silent for two full seconds. She closed her eyes and drew a slow, controlled breath.
"This is..." Yuji's brow furrowed.
"A Domain," the black-haired girl said, her voice dropping to a murmur, each word deliberate and measured. "The embryonic form of a Domain."
A Domain was the fusion of barrier techniques and cursed techniques — one of the most advanced and profound arts in all of jujutsu.
Unlike humans, who had to invest enormous effort to develop a Domain of their own, certain cursed spirits — comparable to earthbound spirits — were born with a Domain already innate to them. The warped, enclosed space they had just walked into was precisely that: a Domain in its embryonic stage.
This was bad. This was genuinely, seriously bad.
Yuji and Nobara both turned to look at her at the same time.
The black-haired girl bit down on her teeth, a thin sheen of cold sweat forming at her brow.
A Domain meant the Cursed Womb was no longer just a "Cursed Womb" — not anymore. With an embryonic Domain at this level of development, the probability was overwhelming that the Special Grade Cursed Spirit had already fully matured.
This wasn't a scouting mission.
This was a trap.
And they had already stepped right into it.
"Change of plan," she said, turning to face the other two, her voice fighting to stay steady against the tremor she was forcing down. "We're abandoning the mission. Our only objective right now is to get out — by any means we have."
——————
Outside the gates, Ijichi leaned back against the car, the folder tucked under his arm, and tilted his head back to look at the sky.
Overcast.
Grim weather.
He let out a sigh, gathered his thoughts back in, and refocused his attention on the Curtain stretched around the perimeter.
The "Curtain" was a barrier technique.
The one he'd deployed was a basic Curtain — nothing complex in its function, simply sealing the area off, rendering the space imperceptible to ordinary civilians in the surrounding neighborhood so that no unnecessary crowds would gather.
His thoughts kept drifting back to the three students who had gone in. This mission should never have been assigned to them in the first place.
It had just been a terrible run of timing.
Gojo wasn't available.
Every other Grade 1 sorcerer was occupied with their own assignments, and none of them could make it out here in time.
At this exact moment, a Cursed Womb housing a Special Grade Cursed Spirit had appeared inside the detention center — and with apparently no other option available, the decision had been made to send in three first-year students to do the reconnaissance.
"...Haah."
The furrow in Ijichi's brow hadn't eased for a single second.
He knew this was beyond his control. He knew that in his position, there was very little he could actually do. He knew that the only thing he could do right now was stay out here, hold the barrier, and wait for the people inside to come back out —
He knew all of that. And yet the weight sitting in his chest wouldn't settle.
...He hoped they'd make it out.
That thought sat quietly in him. He let out a slow, soundless sigh.
And then — all at once —
He felt something.
Nothing strong. Just a brief flicker — faint, like something grazing the very outermost edge of his Curtain, brushing against it for just a moment, stirring the faintest ripple before vanishing entirely. If Ijichi hadn't been maintaining a constant, attentive awareness of the barrier's state the whole time, he would have missed it completely.
He startled — and immediately snapped his head around toward the direction the disturbance had come from.
Beside the gate stood a low, dense thicket of shrubs, their branches and leaves swaying lightly in the breeze. At a glance: nothing. Perfectly unremarkable. Not a thing out of place.
Ijichi stared at the shrubs for two full seconds.
Had he imagined it?
He blinked, made that call internally, and brought his gaze back.
What he didn't know was that in the very instant he looked away, a flash of blue hair had vanished into the deepest shadow of the shrubs.
____
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