The silence that followed Satoru and Geto's departure was a heavy, suffocating blanket. Shoko nudged my shoulder gently. "Come on, pipsqueak. Let's get some food. Nothing to be done now."
But I couldn't move. My feet were rooted to the spot, my gaze fixed on the empty path where my two "brothers" had disappeared. The System, usually a silent, passive observer in my mind, flashed with an insistent, blood-red notification.
[Canon Event Initiated: The Star Plasma Vessel Escort]
[Primary Objective: Survive the next 72 hours.]
[Secondary Objective: Ensure the survival of Riko Amanai.]
[Tertiary Objective: ???]
[WARNING: Interference with canonical events carries an extreme risk of unknown consequences.]
My heart hammered against my ribs. A secondary objective to save her? The System had never given me such a direct, fate-altering goal before. And the third, unknown objective filled me with a sense of profound dread. It was a blank check for disaster. The warning was stark, but the objective was clear. The universe, or whatever entity the System represented, was giving me a choice. It was giving me permission to try.
That was all I needed. My paralysis broke. I turned and ran, not towards the school buildings, but back down the path Satoru and Geto had taken.
"Aki! What are you doing?!" Shoko yelled after me, but I didn't stop.
I found them near the main gate, finalizing their route on a map. I didn't hesitate. I ran straight to Geto and threw my arms around his leg, burying my face in the fabric of his uniform pants. Then, I let the tears come.
It wasn't entirely an act. The fear, the desperation, the crushing weight of my foreknowledge—it was all real. I just channeled it into the kind of raw, unrestrained emotional outburst only a six-year-old could get away with.
"Don't leave me!" I wailed, my voice muffled. "Please! I'm scared! The bad dream felt too real! Don't go without me!"
Geto froze, completely wrong-footed. He awkwardly patted my head. "Aki, we talked about this. It's a mission. It's dangerous. You have to stay here where it's safe."
"No! It's not safe!" I sobbed, looking up at him, my crimson eyes wide and brimming with genuine terror. "The dream said… the bad man comes when you're not looking! He's quiet! You won't hear him!"
Satoru, who had been watching with an amused smirk, let out a loud laugh. "See? She's terrified. We can't just leave her here to worry herself sick. It's cruel." He was twisting my fear to suit his own agenda.
"And your solution is to bring a hysterical child into the field?" Geto shot back, his voice tight with frustration. "Satoru, be serious for one minute! There's a bounty on this girl's head from a whole group of curse users!"
"And who are they going to have to get through to collect it?" Satoru asked, pointing two thumbs at his own chest. "Me! And you! We're the strongest. I'm telling you, Suguru, she's safer with us than she is anywhere else on the planet. Besides," he added, a wicked grin spreading across his face, "this is the perfect final exam for her training. A little real-world experience."
"She is six years old! This is not an exam, it is a life-or-death situation!" Geto argued, his composure finally cracking.
I just kept crying, clinging to his leg like a limpet. It was my trump card. My adult mind knew this was emotional manipulation of the highest order, but my desperation overrode any guilt.
Geto looked from Satoru's unshakeable, arrogant confidence to my tear-streaked, terrified face. He remembered my specific, bizarre warning from two days prior. 'Don't underestimate a monkey.' It was nonsense, but it had been delivered with this same chilling sincerity. He was trapped between logic and a deeply unsettling intuition. He let out a long, defeated sigh, the sound of a losing battle.
"Fine," he conceded, pinching the bridge of his nose. "Fine! She comes. But she does not leave my side. Not for a second. And you, Satoru," he said, pointing a finger at his friend, "owe me. For the rest of our natural lives."
Satoru just beamed. "Deal! See, Aki-chan? All better. Now let's go meet our VIP."
Our destination was a prestigious, and clearly very expensive, all-girls Catholic school in the heart of Tokyo. The sight of two tall, handsome teenagers in dark, imposing uniforms—one with a little girl with black hair and striking red eyes clutching his hand—drew more than a few stares from the students milling about the pristine campus. Satoru reveled in it. Geto looked like he wanted the ground to swallow him whole.
We were led to a music room by a woman with a severe expression and her hair in a tight bun. Misato Kuroi, Riko's caretaker. Her eyes swept over us, her disapproval clear. "You're just children," she stated flatly.
"We're the strongest," Satoru replied with a lazy grin, completely unbothered.
From within the room, we heard the sound of a piano and a bright, clear voice singing. Then, applause. The door slid open and a group of girls came out, chattering happily. And then I saw her.
Riko Amanai.
She stood in the center of the room, her school uniform crisp, her smile radiant and full of life. She was bowing dramatically to her friends, soaking in their praise. My heart twisted. There she was. The girl whose death would change the world. And she was laughing. She was just a girl. Not a vessel, not a sacrifice. A living, breathing girl who loved her friends and playing the piano. The weight of what I was there to do—to try and save her—settled on me with crushing force.
"Are you the jujutsu sorcerers?" Riko asked, her tone more defiant than afraid. She placed her hands on her hips, looking Satoru up and down. "You're not what I expected."
"Likewise," Satoru said bluntly. "Yo. We're your guards until the merger. I'm Gojo Satoru."
"Geto Suguru," Geto added with a polite, diplomatic bow, trying to smooth over his friend's complete lack of tact. "And this is our associate, Aki."
Riko's eyes fell on me. Her defiant expression softened with curiosity. "An associate? She's a baby."
"She's tougher than she looks," Satoru chirped.
The tension was thick. Riko was proud and refused to be treated like a package. Misato was fiercely protective. Satoru was Satoru. It was Geto who managed to de-escalate, explaining the situation with a calm respect that Riko seemed to appreciate. They agreed to let her finish her school day, to give her a few last hours of normalcy. Satoru and Geto, using his Cursed Spirits, would maintain a perimeter around the school.
It was a mistake. A calculated risk that played right into our enemies' hands.
We were walking down an airy, sunlit corridor when it happened. I felt it first—a faint, almost imperceptible distortion in the air to our right. My Stygian Eyes, even in their passive state, picked up on the faint lines of a Cursed Technique coalescing behind a classroom door. It was subtle, masked, designed to be a perfect ambush.
"Suguru-nii!" I yelled, pointing a trembling finger. "There!"
At the same instant, a massive, grotesque curse with far too many limbs crashed through the windows at the far end of the hallway. A clear and obvious distraction.
Satoru was already moving, a blur of motion as he intercepted the larger curse. "I got the big ugly! You guys handle the small fry!"
But the real threat was the one I had sensed. The classroom door burst open, and a man in a dark suit lunged out, a Cursed Tool gleaming in his hand, aimed directly at a shocked Riko Amanai. He was a member of Curse User Group Q.
Geto reacted instantly to my warning. He spun around, a powerful serpentine curse emerging from his shadow to block the man's path. But the attacker was prepared. He tossed a handful of small objects onto the floor which erupted into a smokescreen of Cursed Energy designed to disrupt Cursed Spirit control.
"An anti-Curse Spirit veil!" Geto grunted, his serpent curse wavering.
The attacker used the moment of hesitation to bypass Geto's defense, his eyes locked on Riko. Misato screamed, pulling Riko behind her, but they were too slow.
Time seemed to slow down. My heart hammered in my chest. This was it. Not a training dummy. Not a construct. A real threat. I saw the line of death on the attacker's blade. I saw the point of death on the veil he had deployed. But I was too far away to act on them directly. I needed to do something else.
I focused on the space directly in front of Riko and Misato. I didn't try to erase the man or his weapon. I tried to apply a property of my technique. I tried to create a defense.
My mind latched onto the concept of a wall, but made of Nothing. A rejection of passage. It was a crude, desperate application of an idea I hadn't even fully formed yet.
[New application of Innate Technique [Emptiness] attempted: Conceptual Barrier...]
[Proficiency: 0.01%. High chance of failure.]
The attacker's blade swung towards them. But just before it made contact, the air in front of Riko shimmered, warping like heat haze. For a split second, a perfect, three-foot square of absolute blackness, a patch of void, materialized in the air. The attacker's Cursed Tool passed into it and the front half of the blade simply... vanished. Erased.
The man stared in shock at his now-useless weapon. That single moment was all Geto needed. His control reasserted, his serpent curse lashed out, slamming the man into the far wall with enough force to crack the plaster. He was knocked unconscious instantly.
At the other end of the hall, Satoru appeared, dusting off his hands. The large curse was gone without a trace. "See? All taken care of." Then he saw the stunned faces of Riko and Misato, the unconscious curse user, Geto's grim expression, and me, panting on the floor, my nose bleeding from the sheer exertion of manifesting a solid piece of Nothingness for the first time.
His eyes widened behind his sunglasses. "Whoa. What did I miss?"
Later, after the cleanup, the five of us were gathered in an empty classroom. The initial shock had worn off, replaced by a tense silence. Riko kept stealing glances at me, her eyes a mixture of fear and awe. Misato, for the first time, looked at me like I was a sorcerer, not a child.
Satoru was, of course, insufferably smug. He had me sitting on his lap, feeding me candy as a "reward." "See? What did I tell you? She's not just a cute face. She's our secret weapon! My training is paying off!"
Geto ignored him, his expression grim. "That was too close. They knew our objective and they knew Riko-san's routine. The school is no longer safe." He looked at Riko. "I'm sorry, but your time here is over. We need to move."
Riko, her earlier defiance now tempered by the reality of the attack, simply nodded. "Where are we going?"
"Somewhere sunny," Satoru grinned. "A place with lots of beaches and good food. We're going on vacation!"
Geto sighed, but didn't contradict him. A change of scenery, somewhere unpredictable and far from Tokyo, was the logical next step.
As they discussed the logistics of getting to Okinawa, I leaned back against Satoru, the adrenaline leaving my body and being replaced with a bone-deep exhaustion. I had done it. I had helped. I had made a difference, however small. I had saved Riko from the first attack. But as I looked at her, now quiet and subdued, a cold dread washed over me.
This was only the beginning. And I knew the man who was coming next wouldn't be defeated so easily.