During my time in the nothingness that predated my arrival, I had lost some memories... No, lost was not a very accurate term. It was closer to suppressed. Yes, I had memories that had been outrightly suppressed due to their uselessness in retaining and keeping hold of the tatters that remained of my original identity.
The suppression of those memories has finally come to bite me in the ass.
Yoruzu, a powerful sorcerer from the Heian Era. I had almost forgotten about her, which, considering how important she was, was a lapse I was not going to make anytime soon. The past few days had been a rush, and it seemed like some fate could not just be avoided. Yoruzu was one such example.
One of the things, in fact, the major thing that had sunk Megumi's soul into total despair had been Tsumiki's death by his hand and his cursed technique. The fact that Sukuna had been the one in control of his body, and Yoruzu had been in control of Tsumiki's, did not matter to a boy who had lost his will to live.
Prior to that, Megumi had fought back. In fact, he had fought back so much that Sukuna had found his output drastically lowered when he attempted to fight Itadori Yuji. It had taken the bath ritual and the death of Tsumiki to finally deprive Megumi of the will to fight, the will to live.
Yoruzu, that was the Incarnated sorcerer wearing his sister like a meat suit. Not that Megumi was aware of it. Of the truth of the Culling Games. I needed to get him to Tengen as soon as possible. All Megumi knew was that his sister was alive once again.
Those were the thoughts racing through my head as I sat with my arms crossed, my wings folded in, and my tail swishing languidly behind me. I was on top of a speeding car, and Megumi was inside. We were heading to one of the few places in Tokyo heavily protected from the release of curses that had plagued Tokyo since the Shibuya Incident. We were on our way to the Tokyo Metropolitan Hospital.
I went back to brooding.
If Yoruzu was awake, it meant Kenjaku truly managed to kick off the Culling Games. The question of how was irrelevant. I had originally hoped that the whole act had been derailed from the moment Itadori was rescued early, alongside Nanami's survival. Which meant Itadori had not pushed Mahito to evolve as they fought. Yet, somehow, Kenjaku had gotten the ritual started anyway.
Annoying, if not particularly surprising. Kenjaku was too much of a schemer and planner not to have contingencies or alternate plans to make his twisted dream come to fruition. All of this left me wondering about the next step as the car sped by deserted roads and curses both.
Despite the attraction that was a moving vehicle with humans inside, my presence meant that no curse was stupid enough to come even close, and to the ones that did... My wings twitched, and I spotted the flying irritant that had been trailing after us for a while.
It was vaguely familiar, and it took a full second for me to reconcile the image of a vaguely bird-like curse with a single giant hand as a tail, humongous wings that bloated the sky, a long head with jagged and humongous teeth, and a red eye that only revealed itself when the curse opened its humongous beak to screech.
It was the same curse that Yuta killed while trying to hunt down Yuji.
My lips twitched, and I relaxed my body and let myself fall back as the forward momentum of the vehicle and the crashing wind finally found enough purchase to throw me off. I spun into a backflip midair to land on my feet. Megumi sensed something because he glanced back at me through the window, but I didn't bother with an explanation. Instead, I turned to face the curse, calculated the force needed, as well as the trajectory, before shifting into a crouch.
The next second, I launched myself upward, with enough force that the road beneath me was forced to collapse inwardly, but that was a problem for the government to deal with. I sent myself sailing at a parabolic arc, with such speed that by the time the curse realized I was headed for it, it took everything it had in it to juke to the side to avoid the Sword of Extermination coated in Positive Energy.
So I changed tactics.
My left hand snapped out, and I caught the flying curse midair by its tail-hand, arresting its forward momentum with a jerk that broke the bones in its tail-hand in four different places. The cursed spirit only had a moment to let out a shriek of fear, pain, and surprise before I twisted midair, contorting my body, curling muscles and tendons, and then I flung the curse into the side of a building in a picture-perfect javelin throw.
The force of the throw detonated through the skyscraper in a tremendous impact, obliterating its upper half in an explosion of concrete, steel, and shattered glass. The thunderous boom rolled across Tokyo like a bomb blast, loud enough to be heard on the far side of the city, but it was still not enough. Throwing such a creature midair displaced my own position and flung me back, but unlike the curse, I was prepared for it.
I landed on the side of a skyscraper in a crouch, dispersing the force of my own momentum, and leaving it intact long enough to launch myself forward and after my curse.
The curse had already recovered, partially at least. One of its wings looked battered, the bones in the appendage broken into fragments. Half of its chest was caved in, and it had a long crack across its beak, but say what you want about cursed spirits, what could not be spoken down on was their resilience.
My wings flared as I sensed its cursed energy better. It was a proto special grade. Not strong enough to be born a special grade like Jogo, Hanami, or Mahito, instead, it had been slowly evolving. Unfortunately for its continued growth, it crossed paths with me.
Its tail-hand launched out of the dust cloud it had been using as cover, with such speed that it would've blindsided anybody else, but I was prepared for it. I had seen it launch the attack before it even crested the dust cloud. I spun midair, twisting Mahoraga's bulk in an acrobatic display I had copied from Sukuna, and the arm missed me by an inch.
I didn't miss it.
The Sword of Extermination shot out and buried itself in the outstretched arm, carving a jagged and furious line down the limb. The viciousness of the attack sent purple blood spraying as the curse let out a cry that was so pitiful I almost felt sad for it, till I ended my spin at last and crashed into the curse feet first.
One foot shot into its mouth, silencing the cry. The talons on my feet dug in, ripping into its huge ringed eyes, and it lashed out with its sole surviving wing instinctively in response, much like a death rattle, but its movement came to a shuddering stop the moment I buried my blade deep into its skull. The positive energy in the blade flooded the curse, and a second later, like a chemical reaction, it exploded into an ocean of purple blood that ran down the sides of the skyscraper, flooding the street below, while a purple haze of superheated blood formed a small mushroom cloud in the sky.
I stood there, head tilted up, wings flared out, basking in the blood, cursed energy, and guts that surrounded me. Mahoraga was an engine of violence and slaughter that still surprised even me sometimes. A body perfectly made for the brutality humans were known to be adept at.
A steaming breath escaped my lips. The fight had been brief, and as interesting as it was to hunt down, it was too weak to prove a challenge. More importantly, with the cursed spirit's death, I was reminded once again that it had been a simple distraction, and I was once more left to find a solution to the Yoruzu and Tsumiki problem.
I needed to find a way to separate the two souls without killing the body. Could I adapt and create such an attack? Yes, I probably could. Unfortunately, I would either need to be in a fight where that was required in the first place, which would mean a fight to the death with Yoruzu, a fight that Tsumiki might not survive. It was a fight that I might not even survive if she just popped out her Domain Expansion early enough, and before I could adapt the counter to save Tsumiki.
That was the major factor at hand, I realized, as the sound of multiple curses climbing the skyscraper with speed to partake in the violence they perceived happening above rang out. I had to hold back and sandbag long enough to adapt an offensive counter to Yoruzu's presence in Tsumiki's body, the same way Canon Mahoraga had adapted to create an offensive counter to Infinity. The fight would boil down to who wanted to win the most, and if I could guide my adaptation fast.
It would be easier to surprise attack Yoruzu with her guard down. Kill her before she could ramp up and activate her insect armour or Domain Expansion, but doing that meant straightforwardly killing Tsumiki as well, and while I was not very invested in her as a character, Megumi would not take her death well... Megumi.
I smiled as a thought came to life in my head. Perhaps there was something that could work; another harebrained scheme that could only be created with someone with an out-of-context view of this world slowly blossomed in my head. I was not in a hurry, and neither was Megumi. I had a few days at minimum till Yoruzu revealed her deception. A few weeks at most to better refine a counter plan, until then... I turned back to the dozens of curses that immediately froze in surprise the moment they got to the top of the tower and came face to face with me.
My wide grin was all the warning they got, as they jerked back, falling over themselves in a bid to run away, but I was faster. I dug my feet into the floor, hard enough to crack the stone and plaster, then I swung the Blade of Execution outward in a devastating slash. The shrieks and screams of pain, as well as the rain of blood that followed after, were a haunting cry that echoed through the entirety of Tokyo.
__
Megumi
Ijichi's voice came from the driver's seat, thin and climbing.
"Is that... your Shikigami?"
Megumi glanced back through the rear window. The top three floors of a skyscraper behind them were simply gone. A purple haze hung where they used to be, catching the afternoon light in a way that would have been almost pretty under different circumstances. The street below was flooded shin-deep in something that was not water, and the sounds still echoing from the upper floors of the building were growing less frequent by the second.
"For a given definition of mine," Megumi said, and turned back around. "Sure. He's my Shikigami, I guess."
Ijichi made a croaking sound and gripped the wheel tighter as he murmured, "Gojo-sensei wasn't joking."
Megumi acted like he didn't hear the older man. Instead, he looked out the window at the passing city. The roads were emptier than they should have been for the time of day, which was the new normal, and the new normal had been in place long enough that he had stopped remarking on it internally. Curses moved in the middle distance, drawn to the chaos behind them the way they were always drawn to chaos, which was away from the car and toward the building, which suited him fine.
He was too busy thinking about Tsumiki to bother with them.
It was strange, the realization that hit him somewhere around the third empty intersection. For the past week, Mahoraga had occupied a fixed point in his awareness, a large uncontrollable sense of danger that always rested at the edge of his attention, always requiring some portion of his brain's processing power. The ritual was still pending. The question of what the Shikigami wanted, what it was capable of, what it was planning, those thoughts had always been present.
Right now, and for the first time since he summoned the scary Shikigami, he was not thinking about any of that.
He was thinking about the phone call. About the nurse's voice, the word "awake," and the way his stomach had flipped, his chest had collapsed in on itself, and the way his heart had frozen. Hours later, and he had still not fully processed the news both because there had not been time to process it, and also because he was Fushiguro Megumi and processing things openly was not a mechanism he had developed to any useful degree.
Tsumiki was awake.
That was the whole of it. The sum total of his new focus. His sister was finally awake once again.
Ijichi pulled up to the hospital entrance without being asked. He had been quiet for the last twenty minutes, which Megumi appreciated, and he stayed quiet as Megumi got out of the car. Megumi did not look back at the purple haze still visible above the skyline to the east.
He simply took a deep, shuddering breath, then he went inside.
The ward was on the fourth floor. He knew the route without checking. He had walked it enough times in the weeks before Shibuya that his feet remembered it independently of his attention, which was currently occupied by various injured men and women, with sorcerers interspersed around. That was one of the reasons the hospital had not been overrun by curses. Select places of critical importance had been allocated delegations of grade one and grade two sorcerers for protection.
He went past them all, then he got to the door, his hand closed over the door handle, and stalled for a second, two, five before he finally pushed it open.
Tsumiki was seated up.
It was such a simple thing. She was sitting up in the hospital bed with the late afternoon light coming through the window behind her, her hair was down, and she was looking out the window, then she slowly turned to the opened door, and the expression on her face when she saw him was the expression he had been carrying in the back of his memory for the entire length of her coma, the one he had been afraid he had misremembered over the long wait.
"Megumi," she said with a soft smile. "You look skinnier, have you not been eating?"
He crossed the room in a second and launched himself at her.
He slammed into her in a hug, and she flinched instinctively. If he had been more aware, he would've noted that there was something slightly off. He caught it, of course, at the edge of awareness. It was in the way she was sitting, something in the quality of her stillness, but he catalogued it and pushed it aside, without examining it, because his sister was awake and sitting up and saying his name, and every other thing could be explained away by her long coma.
She slowly put her arms around him, returning the hug, which was another thing that he should've spotted. Tsumiki had never hesitated in showering him with affection or returning a hug, but he did not care, not right now, as long as she hugged him back, all was right in the world for Megumi Fushiguro.
Then Tsumiki went very still in his arms.
He could feel her tense in his arms in a way she never had before. Muscles tightening in anticipation. Megumi pulled back and looked at her, but she wasn't looking at him; she was looking over his shoulder and behind him, and there was something in her eyes. Calling it fear would've been wrong. Her eyes were narrowed, her body tense, she was alert, like she was ready for a fight, a small part of his brain alerted him.
But that couldn't be. Tsumiki was not a combative person. She had never gotten into a fight before. She flinched at loud noises. She apologized to the furniture she walked into and scolded him whenever he beat up bullies.
So he turned around to see what had startled her so thoroughly. He should not have been surprised.
Mahoraga was standing in the corner of the room.
He had not heard him come in. He did not know how something that size moved without sound, but Mahoraga had managed it, and he was standing in the corner of the hospital room with its head cocked slightly to the side and the Sword of Extermination out, the blade catching the light, and the purple blood of multiple cursed spirits that had coated him was flaking off in slow and lazy pieces to reveal pale skin beneath.
The wheel above the shinigami's head was vibrating, its dull gold hue reflecting the light in the room. Megumi turned from Mahoraga to Tsumiki and back to Mahoraga, and was about to make an introduction when he realized why the tension was so high. His eyes went to Mahoraga's right arm.
The Sword of Extermination was still out.
He looked at Mahoraga's face. The head was still cocked, but that was the sum total of the emotion shown. He was not giving off his usual grin; he was simply still. Not even his wings were fluttering, nor was the tail behind his head swinging lazily as it usually did. The last time Mahoraga had acted like this, Sukuna had just walked up to them at the hospital.
And for the first time, a seed of doubt was planted in Megumi's heart.