And remember, flies carry disease, so keep yours closed
Without any further to do, enjoy!
----------------------------------
(Thousand of Years Ago)
(?'s POV)
The air on Thriller Bark was thick with the stench of decay and despair. Shadows, ripped from their owners, shambled mindlessly.
The Straw Hat crew was scattered, drained, their strengths literally stolen from them. Luffy, in a fit of rage and desperation, had made his last stand, allowing all of his remaining energy to be throw into Gecko Moria, the inflated the Warlord that was a monstruous shape, bulging with black-tendrils all over his body.
The attack failed, and Luffy fell into his child-form, his power depleted completely
"SHISHISHISHI!" Moria's gargantuan form loomed over the broken landscape, his voice a seismic rumble. "This is the end! Your captain is nothing but a waste of space now! You're all finished!"
On the ground, Nami, Usopp, and Chopper could only watch in horror, their bodies weakened, their spirits broken.
Zoro was down, Sanji was struggling. Hope was a distant memory.
It was then that a calm, steady voice cut through the cacophony of Moria's glee and the moans of the shadows.
"That form is unsustainable."
Everyone turned. Akira, the man they'd pulled half-drowned from a floating wreck weeks ago, was standing atop a crumbled wall.
His platinum hair was dirty, his clothes torn from the earlier skirmishes, but his crimson eyes were sharp, focused, analysing the colossal form of Nightmare Moria like a complex equation.
"Akira, what are you talking about?" Nami cried, her voice trembling.
Akira didn't take his eyes off the monster. "Moria's body isn't built to contain that much power. It's a simple matter of physics. He's like an overinflated balloon. The seams are already straining. Look at the tremors in his legs. Observe the inconsistent density of the shadow mass around his torso trying to get away"
They looked. And now that he pointed it out, they could see it. The gigantic form wasn't a solid, powerful entity; it was an unstable, shuddering construct. Tiny fissures of darkness sporadically appeared and vanished in the dark mass.
"But Luffy's in no good" Chopper cried. "We can't just pop him! No one has the strength to do it"
"I do, I haven't used much of my strength through this whole ordeal" Akira said, his voice low but carrying a newfound intensity. This wasn't the quiet, observational man they knew. This was a strategist shifting into a higher gear. "We're going to force a system crash. Force the dam to break. We introduce a fatal error."
"How?!" Nami demanded, a spark of hope igniting in her chest.
"Sanji," Akira's head snapped towards the struggling cook. "Your Diable Jambe. Can you use it again"
"Y-yeah? What of it?" Sanji grunted, forcing himself to his feet.
"Zoro," Akira's gaze found the swordsman, who was pushing himself up with a grunt of pain. "Your three-sword style. Can you use another one of your moves?"
"Tch. Obviously," Zoro spat, wiping blood from his mouth, a fierce grin forming. He saw where this was going.
"Franky," Akira's eyes found the cyborg, who was trying to reattach a loose piston in his arm. "Your Coup de Vent. Maximum air pressure. Target a single point, a bit above his centre. We need to overwhelm the structural integrity. Make him fall backwards"
"SUUUPER! Can do!" Franky roared, slamming his metal fists together.
"Robin. I need you to create a limb. A large one. Or as many limbs as you can, directly in his face. Obscure his vision completely. And then pull him down"
Robin, who had been observing with her usual calm, gave a slight, intrigued smile. "Of course."
"Brook," Akira said, and the skeleton, who was trying to hold his own head on, snapped to attention. "Your music. Something piercing, dissonant. Target his ears. Overload his senses. Distract him from the rest of the plan"
"Understood! A little concert just for him! Though I have no ears to hear it with! Yohohoho!"
"Usopp, the moment before Robin and Brook act, I need a flashbang. Something bright. Nami, the moment he's distracted, fog bank around his lower half. Obscure his vision of the ground. Chopper, Walk Point, go fetch Luffy before he gets involved in the wreckage, he is too weak to move. Now, move!"
The orders were issued with a speed and clarity that brooked no argument. It was the voice of a born tactician, and in their desperation, the crew obeyed without question.
"Usopp Special: Flash Ball!" A brilliant light exploded in front of the disoriented giant. Moria instanly tried to soothe his eyes, bit before he could, he instantly received a new pain
"Lullaby Screech!" Brook's violin screeched a note so high and awful it made the very air vibrate. Moria Instantly was stopped, his eyes hurt by the flash, his eyes pained by the screech of Brook's violin.
Now, he was in a complete sense depravation.
"Cyclone Tempo!" Nami shouted, and a thick, impenetrable mist erupted around the giant's legs.
"Diable Jambe: Concasse!" Sanji became a blur of blue fire, his leg spinning like a drill.
"Three-Sword Style: Three Thousand Worlds!" Zoro's whirlwind slash pulled at the legs of the Warlord
Both the small legs of the disfigured Warlord were hit by an amount of power comparable to a mountain.
The equilibrium was shattered, and like a piece of domino, it start tumbling back and forth, his eyes and ears hurting from the depravation.
"Mil Fleur: Gigantesco Mano!" A forest of arms sprouted from the giant's face, clawing and obscuring its vision. Adding to his disorientation and imbalance
"COUP DE VENT!" Franky unleashed a colossal blast of compressed air directly into the giant's chest.
The force was the final straw. The titan of shadows, blinded, deafened, and off-balance, began to topple. Not forward, but backwards, just as Akira had planned, while Chopper ran away from the vulnerable, shrunken form of their captain that he picked while the attacks were being throw
With a sound like a mountain tearing in half, Moria's gigantic ankles buckled. Shadows exploded outwards, leaving hir form. The titan roared in agony and surprise, toppling backwards
The impact shook the entire island. And as he fell, the thousands of shadows he had absorbed were violently expelled, shrieking as they streamed out of him and back towards their original owners. But it wasn't enough.
Then, Akira jumped, his form holding back his right hand with his left one, like holding back a coiled spring
Then, punched forward, his first releasing a pressurised cannon of air going straight into the Warlord's centre.
"Daytime Tiger" Akira called the name of his attack. The air pressure morphed into the face of a tiger, hitting true into the body of the Shadow-user, and finally, releasing every shadow that he tried to contain inside of him.
The crew watched in stunned silence as the monstrous form deflated, revealing the panting, exhausted form of their captain, and the defeated, groaning heap that was Gecko Moria.
The battle was over.
As the adrenaline faded, they all turned to look at Akira. He fell right beside them. He was breathing heavily, a sheen of sweat on his brow, his fists slowly unclenching and releasing blood from the amount of force used. The intense focus that had hardened his features was melting away, leaving behind a profound fatigue, but also the faint, warm echo of the connection he'd felt in the heat of the fight.
Luffy, slowly returning to his normal size and energy, blinked up at him. A huge, wobbly grin spread across his face. "Akira... that was... shishishi... awesome."
The rest of the crew gathered around, a wave of relief and exhilaration washing over them.
"SUUUPER tactics, bro!" Franky boomed, tears streaming down his face. "That was some primo targeting! We did it!"
"The coordination was… impeccable" Robin added, her smile knowing. "You utilized everyone's abilities to their maximum potential. A true conductor of chaos."
"Yohohoho! A symphony of destruction! I shall compose a piece in its honor!"
Sanji lighted a cigarette and turned towards the newcomer of the crew, nodding with respect.
"IT WAS ALL THANKS TO THE GREAT CAPTAIN USOPP'S OPENING!" Usopp yelled, before adding in a whisper, "...and your plan was pretty good too."
"SO COOL!" Chopper bounced, his eyes shining with tears of joy.
Nami smiled, a real, relieved smile, and something else "You saved him. You saved all of us, Akira. Thank you."
Zoro clapped a heavy hand on Akira's shoulder, making him stagger. "You don't just point out flaws. You exploit them. Not bad for a newbie."
In that moment, surrounded by their noise, their gratitude, their sheer, vibrant aliveness, Akira felt the last of his walls crumble. He looked at their faces
Luffy's blinding grin, Zoro's smirk, Sanji's approval, Usopp's bravado, Chopper's adoration, Nami's warmth, Franky's enthusiasm, Robin's quiet respect, Brook's musical joy.
A feeling, foreign and warm, spread through his chest. It wasn't just satisfaction. It was belonging.
He wasn't just their strategist.
He was their nakama.
And for the first time, Akira felt not like a passenger in his own life, but like he was exactly where he was meant to be.
-------------------------------
(Present)
(?'s POV)
The mission report glowed on the large monitor in the dimly lit mission control room at Kyoto Jujutsu Tech.
The air was stale, recycled, and thick with the tension of incomprehension. Her brow was furrowed, her fingers steepled under her chin as if in prayer to a god that offered no answers.
"Play it again," she said, her voice tight, the words clipped. "From the very beginning. And turn up the gain on the spiritual energy sensors to maximum. I want to see the void"
On screen, a grainy, wire-frame visualization of a quiet suburban side street flickered to life. It was a cold, digital reconstruction based on the minuscule residual data they'd managed to scrape from the area, Thanks to the barriers around Japan that detected much of what happened around them.
A standard post-mortem for any event that triggered a Grade 1 or higher alert. This one, however, had triggered something far stranger, a new category the Sorcerers with technicians techniques were already calling a null alert.
The playback began. A standard, low-level Cursed Spirit, designated Grade 4, a pathetic, wailing thing born of commuter frustration, manifested on the grid. Its energy signature was a familiar, ugly smear of negative emotions on the graph at the bottom of the screen, a chaotic, pulsing wave of misery. The visualization showed it shambling forward, a predictable pattern of malevolent intent.
Then, nothing.
The spirit's signature didn't spike in a final, defiant surge. It didn't fight. It didn't unravel or dissipate. It didn't do anything that fell within the known laws of jujutsu.
It vanished.
The graph didn't show a release of energy. It showed a perfect, clean, mathematically impossible vertical line plunging to absolute zero. The visualization on screen didn't show an exorcism.
It showed a hole. A perfect, spirit-shaped patch of nothing where data, where reality itself, was supposed to be. It was a negative image, a scar in the fabric of existence that wasn't a scar at all, but an erasure.
"There's no technique residue" A senior technician said, his voice hushed and baffled, breaking the heavy silence. He'd been at this for thirty years. He'd seen everything. Until now. "No cursed energy signature, no elemental affinity, no genetic marker. It's not like it was destroyed. It's like it was… deleted. The command for its existence was simply… retconned."
"That's impossible," She murmured, leaning forward until her face was inches from the cold glow of the screen. Her own reflection, pale and worried, was superimposed over the terrifying emptiness of the data. "Even Gojo's Hollow Purple, for all its 'imaginary mass' nonsense, leaves a residual trace. A wound in reality that screams its presence for days. A scar. This is… pristine. This is…" She struggled for the word. "...editorial"
"The only other anomaly we registered," the technician added, highlighting a single, blinking coordinate on the map with a trembling finger, "Was a minute, localized atmospheric pressure change consistent with a single individual standing at this exact location for approximately 1.7 seconds. A displacement of air. But we have no thermal signature, no spiritual signature, no visual from any nearby traffic or security cameras that wasn't inexplicably corrupted. They're a ghost. A non-entity that briefly occupied space and then ceased to do so"
The door to the control room slammed open with a force that made everyone jump. Gojo Satoru leaned against the frame, a garishly coloured bag of sweets in one hand, his blindfold tilted up to show one brilliantly blue, amused eye that scanned the tense room.
"Getting all worked up over my new friend, Utahime?" he sing-songed, his voice a jarring contrast to the funereal atmosphere. He casually tossed a candy into his mouth. "I could feel you stressing out all the way from the vending machine. Wrinkles, you know."
"Gojo" She snapped, irritation immediately spiking, a welcome relief from the cold dread. She gestured violently at the screen, at the blasphemous void in their data. "This isn't a joke. What was that?"
"A magic trick!" He declared, pushing off the doorframe and sauntering into the room. He peered at the monitor, his expression one of genuine delight, as if looking at a beautiful painting. "The best kind. The one where even I can't find the wires, the trapdoors, or the mirrors. It's just… poof" He made a little gesture with his fingers. "Clean. I respect it"
"This is a serious security threat," Utahime insisted, her voice rising. She grabbed a tablet and thrust it toward him, though she knew he didn't need it. "An unknown with an unknown technique that operates outside every law of jujutsu we understand! They could be anywhere, do anything! They could walk into the Prime Minister's office or this very school and we wouldn't know until after they'd decided to… to unmake something with that technique!"
"Yep!" Gojo agreed cheerfully, utterly unfazed. He snatched the tablet from her hand, glanced at it for a nanosecond, and tossed it onto a console. "Isn't it exciting? Really spices things up around here. Gets the blood pumping. We were all getting a little bored with the old 'Special Grade curse manifests, we punch it' routine, weren't we?"
"This isn't exciting, it's terrifying!" she nearly shouted, her composure cracking. "We have to find them. We have to contain them, understand them, before—"
"We have to do nothing"
Gojo interrupted, his tone losing its playful edge for a fraction of a second. The room seemed to grow colder. The simple, flat finality in his voice was enough to make Utahime's protest die in her throat. He wasn't joking anymore.
"Whoever they are," he continued, his single visible eye holding hers with an unnerving intensity, "They're not making noise. They're not drawing attention. They're not building a cult or summoning world-ending deities. They're… cleaning up. Taking out the trash. Neatly. Efficiently. If we go poking around, waving our fancy sensors and our territorial instincts in their face, we might not like what decides to poke back. Some things are best left unprovoked"
He pushed off the console he was leaning on and turned to leave, the moment of seriousness vanishing as if it had never been.
"But by all means," he tossed over his shoulder, his cheerful mask firmly back in place "Keep looking. Run your little scans. Knock yourselves out. I'm dying to know who can make something disappear so completely that not even these," he tapped a finger just below his Six Eyes "Can see how it's done. It's… refreshing"
The door swung shut behind him, leaving Utahime and the technicians alone in the sudden, crushing silence. The only sound was the low hum of the servers and the terrifying, empty data still glowing on the main screen.
A ghost that erased other ghosts. A null value with the power of a god.
And the strongest sorcerer in the world, their one unshakeable pillar, wasn't concerned.
He was intrigued.
And that, Utahime Iori thought with a cold shiver that reached down to her very soul, was the most frightening part of all.
Because if Gojo Satoru was intrigued, it meant they were all already part of his game, whether they liked it or not.
-----------------------
(?'s POV)
The study was a sanctum of power, a chamber where the fate of nations could be, and had been, decided with a quiet word and a signature.
Silence reigned, deep and absolute, save for two sounds: the whisper of fine, cream-laid paper between Gan'an's fingers and the distant, meticulously curated hum of Tokyo, twenty stories below.
From this vantage point, the city was not a chaotic organism but an intricate clockwork of light and motion, much of which his own hand helped to wind. The scent of aged cedar and polished brass filled the air, a smell synonymous with control.
Shinomiya Gan'an, the patriarch of an empire built on centuries of calculated influence and ruthless strategy, did not frown. Frowning was an inefficiency, a public display of internal discord that served no purpose. Instead, his face was a mask of impassive granite, but his mind was a vortex of cold, calculating fury.
He stared, unblinking, at a single sheet of data resting on the vast, empty expanse of his nineteenth-century French oak desk. It was an anomaly.
A single, discordant note in the otherwise perfectly ordered symphony of his financial world. It offended him.
For months, a name had been appearing with the infuriating persistence of a ghost in the peripheral vision of his conglomerate's most advanced analytics division.
Not in the major reports, not in the quarterly forecasts that shaped economic policy. No. It was in the footnotes, the appendices, the correlation analyses that most men would dismiss as statistical noise. Yoshioka Holdings.
It was not a zaibatsu.
It held no ancestral lands, wielded no overt political influence through decades of carefully arranged marriages and boardroom coups. It was not a venture capital firm with a famous, braggadocious name splashed across magazine covers.
It was a spectre. A financial phantom.
Its investments were… astute.
Uncannily so.
It was a pattern that defied the very concept of market logic, which was built on a foundation of risk, speculation, and imperfect information.
His eyes, sharp and miss-nothing, scanned the brief again.
Last month: the acquisition of a dilapidated warehouse district in Chiba, a site written off by every major developer as a money pit. Three weeks later, the government's long-rumored, but never confirmed, plans for a new maglev terminal are announced, its centrepiece landing directly on that worthless parcel. The value multiplied by a factor of eight thousand.
Two weeks ago: a controlling stake purchased in "Komorebi Bio," a failing startup deep in debt, its lead researcher on the verge of suicide from the pressure. Days later, the researcher publishes a paper on a novel mRNA delivery system. The patent is approved in record time. The company's value doesn't just spike; it achieves escape velocity, leaving every competitor, ncluding two Shinomiya subsidiaries, in the dust.
Just yesterday: a series of complex, high-velocity short positions placed against "Fujikawa Heavy Industries," a stalwart of Japanese manufacturing, rock-solid and reliable. Hours later, a whistleblower portal erupts with evidence of systematic accounting fraud and safety cover-ups spanning a decade. The stock is in freefall. Yoshioka Holdings profits in the hundreds of billions of yen.
The returns were not merely profitable.
They were geometrically perfect.
There was no frenzy, no high-stakes gamble, no dramatic leverage.
It was a sequence of moves executed with the serene, inevitable certainty of a chess grandmaster checkmating a novice in four moves.
Only certainty. It was an intellect that did not play the market; it seemed to know its future state.
A low, soft sound escaped him, not a sigh, but the controlled release of pressurized air. He keyed the intercom. "Send in Masato"
The door opened silently. Masato, his personal secretary and confidant, entered and bowed deeply. His face was grim. He had been expecting the summons.
"The report is on your desk, Shinomiya-sama" Masato said, his voice a gravelly whisper suited for this room.
"It is," Gan'an stated, not looking up. "It is inadequate. 'No findings.' Explain this term. It does not exist in my vocabulary."
Masato remained bowed. "We have exhausted every channel, sir. 'Yoshioka Holdings' is a shell within a shell, registered in a labyrinth of offshore trusts that lead to dead ends. There is no board of directors. No corporate headquarters. No secretary, no receptionist. The financial transactions are executed through algorithms so complex and so secure that our best hackers hit digital walls that shouldn't theoretically exist. Tracing the money is like trying to grab smoke."
Gan'an finally looked up, his gaze pinning Masato to the spot. "The man. Yoshioka Akira."
Masato's discomfort was palpable. "The trail is… hollow, sir. Impeccably so. It is either the most perfect forgery of an identity I have ever seen or that is just his records. Birth records, education transcripts, tax filings—they are all there. They pass every automated check. He holds a teaching license and is currently employed at Soubu High School. He appears to teach English literature. Our operative who went to the school reported he is… unnervingly proficient."
"A ghost," Gan'an murmured, turning his chair to look out at his city. "A man with this level of foresight, this level of capital, and this level of obscurity does not simply exist. He is not self-made. He is created, backed, and empowered. The question is not 'who is he?'. The question is, 'who owns him?'"
The possibilities unspooled in his mind, each more troubling than the last.
A covert operations branch of the Chinese government, planting a financial WMD deep in the heart of Japan's economy?
A breakaway American tech oligarch, testing new predictive A.I. on the global market?
A rival Japanese family, the Momobami or perhaps the Tsuibami, making a move so subtle and so profound that it reeked of a long-game decades in the making?
This Yoshioka was either the greatest undiscovered asset in Japan, a weapon to be captured and pointed at his enemies…
Or the most dangerous loose variable to appear in his lifetime. A black swan that could unravel everything.
One did not confront a ghost. To send men to drag him from his classroom would be brutish, amateurish, and would reveal his own hand too early. It would be acknowledging the ghost had power over him. No
One invited the ghost into the light. One forced it to wear a shape, to interact, to cast a shadow. Then, and only then, could you discern its true nature.
An idea, cold and precise, formed in his mind. It was not a gamble; it was a calculated experiment.
His daughter Kaguya's upcoming gala birthday celebration was more than a party; it was a nexus of power. The guest list was a who's-who of Japanese industry, politics, and old money.
It was a perfectly controlled environment, a laboratory. Every attendee was a known quantity, their motivations and weaknesses already mapped in the Shinomiya databases. Introducing a single unknown variable into this controlled setting would be illuminating.
The ghost would be flattered. The ghost would be curious. The ghost would, perhaps, become arrogant and make a mistake. Or, it would reveal the hand of its master through its behaviour.
He turned back to Masato "Draft an invitation. The highest quality vellum. The most formal calligraphy. Have it delivered by hand to the Soubu High School faculty office. Addressed to Yoshioka Akira. Extend the compliments of the Shinomiya family and request the pleasure of his company at my daughter's birthday celebration."
Masato's eyes widened a fraction, the only sign of his shock. "Sir? To invite an unknown element into such a… sensitive gathering?"
"Precisely because it is sensitive," Gan'an said, his voice dropping to a near whisper. "I want to see him surrounded by the true measure of power. I want to see if he is impressed, intimidated, or avaricious. I want to see who, if anyone, he speaks to. I want to see the shadow he casts. Now, go"
Masato bowed again, deeper this time, and retreated from the room, leaving Gan'an alone once more with the silent hum of Tokyo and the single sheet of paper.
He picked it up again, the name Yoshioka Akira seeming to bleed through the page.
The game had just become infinitely more interesting. He had just released a viper into his own garden to see what it would poison first. It was a dangerous move.
But Shinomiya Gan'an had built his empire on the belief that the most dangerous moves yielded the greatest rewards.
He would meet this ghost. And he would determine if it was a weapon to be seized, or a pest to be exterminated